"The three cucurbits mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, the qishu’im, the avattihim, and the paqqu’ot sade, as well as several other cucurbits, are the subject of rabbinical commentary in the Mishna and the Tosefta. The citations from the Mishna and Tosefta below will be given according to the name of the massekhet (tractate), chapter number and statement number. Most significant is that the first four cucurbits described below were mentioned along with edible fruits of various other plant families on the subject

of tithing (Mishna, Ma’asrot 1:4) and therefore must have been food sources growing in Israel in the 2nd century.

 

The qishu’im were known to the Children of Israel from Egypt, who longed for them during their wanderings in the Sinai Desert (Numbers 11:5). No later than by the time of the first temple in Jerusalem, their cultivation in Judea

 

1446 Janick et al. — The Cucurbits of Mediterranean Antiquity must have been common, as there was a special word in Hebrew for a field of them, miqsha (Isaiah 1:8). Moreover, these qishu’im or qishu’in, or in the singular form, qishut, are the most frequently mentioned cucurbit in the Jewish commentary, reflecting their relative importance and widespread culture in the Israel of Roman times

 

Vesling (1640), in his supplement to Alpini’s De plantis Aegypti liber, presented an illustration, labelled Chate, which was clearly based on a plant of Cucumis melo having rather elongate, nearly rhomboidal fruits. The epithet ‘chate’, a blundered rendition of qatta (Loret, 1892), is used at present to designate a cultivar-group of C. melo that is distinguished by fruits having a length-to-broadest-width ratio of around 2 : 1 or 3 : 1 and that are not sweet, but are used when young, like cucumbers, raw, pickled or cooked (Pitrat et al., 2000). Feliks (1967, 1968) and Zohary (1982) concurred that the qishu’im of Biblical times were chate melons."

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