mouse Summary and Overview

Heb. 'akhbar, "swift digger"), properly the dormouse, the field-mouse (1 Sam. 6:4). In Lev. 11:29, Isa. 66:17 this word is used generically, and includes the jerboa (Mus jaculus), rat, hamster (Cricetus), which, though declared to be unclean animals, were eaten by the Arabs, and are still eaten by the Bedouins. It is said that no fewer than twenty-three species of this group ('akhbar=Arab. ferah) of animals inhabit Israel. God "laid waste" the people of Ashdod by the terrible visitation of field-mice, which are like locusts in their destructive effects (1 Sam. 6:4, 11, 18). Herodotus, the Greek historian, accounts for the destruction of the army of Sennacherib (2 Kings 19:35) by saying that in the night thousands of mice invaded the camp and gnawed through the bow-strings, quivers, and shields, and thus left the Assyrians helpless. (See SENNACHERIB T0003273.)

(the corn-eater). The name of this animal occurs in #Le 11:29; 1Sa 6:4,5; Isa 66:17| The Hebrew word is in all probability generic, and is not intended to denote any particular species of mouse. The original word denotes a field-ravager, and may therefore comprehend any destructive rodent. Tristram found twenty-three species of mice in Israel. It is probable that in #1Sa 6:5| the expression "the mice that mar the land" includes and more particularly refers to the short-tailed field-mice (Arvicola agrestis, Flem.), which cause great destruction to the corn-lands of Syria.

MOUSE (the corn-eater). Tristram found twenty-three species of mice in Palestine. In Lev 11:29, and Isa 66:17 this word is doubtless used generically, including as unclean even the larger rat, jerboa, dormouse, and sandrat. Mice are often in the East nearly as destructive to the crops as locusts. They made great havoc in the fields of the Philistines after that people had taken the ark of the Lord. 1 Sam 6:4-5. In the twelfth century they destroyed the young sprouts of grain in some parts of Syria for four successive years and came near to producing a general famine, and they abound in those regions at the present day. A modern traveller, in speaking of Hamath, says: "The western part of its territory is the granary of Northern Syria, though the harvest never yields more than ten for one, chiefly in consequence of the immense numbers of mice, which sometimes wholly destroy the crops." MOWING means reaping with a sickle, for the heat dries up' the grass before it is high enough for the scythe. Ps 129:7.

'akbar. The "jumping mouse," Dipus jaculus Egyptius (Gesenius); or as the Arabic farah, any small rodent (Tristram); the field mouse or vole, with larger head, shorter ears and tail, and stouter form, than the house mouse; and the long-tailed field mouse, Mus sylvaticus. The ravages of these rodents among grain, etc., made the Philistines propitiate with "golden mice" (five answering to their five political divisions and lords) the God whose instrument of "marring the land" they were (1 Samuel 6). The scourges on them were humiliating to their pride, the tiny mouse and hemorrhoids in the back, where for a warrior to be smitten is a shame (Psalm 78:66). So Sminthian Apollo was worshipped in Crete and the Troad; derived from smintha, Cretan for "mouse"; Apollo was represented with one foot upon a mouse. The Egyptian account of Sennacherib's discomfiture was that the gods sent mice which gnawed his archers' bowstrings, in his expedition to Egypt. The mouse was legally unclean (Isaiah 66:67).