Albert Barnes Commentary Job 30:4

"They pluck salt-wort by the bushes; And the roots of the broom are their food." — Job 30:4 (ASV)

Who cut up mallows - For the purpose of eating. Mallows are common medicinal plants, famous for their emollient or softening properties, and the size and brilliancy of their flowers. It is not probable, however, that Job referred to what we commonly understand by the word mallows. It has been commonly supposed that he meant a species of plant, called by the Greeks Hallimus (a type of sea-purslane or “saltwort”), which commonly grows in deserts and poor land and is eaten as a salad. The Vulgate renders it simply “herbas;” the Septuagint, ἄλιμα alima. The Hebrew word, according to Umbreit, means a common salad with a salty taste, whose young leaves, when cooked, served as food for the poorer classes. The Hebrew word מלוח mallûach is from מלח mâlach—meaning “salt”—and properly refers to a marine plant or vegetable.

By the bushes - Or among the bushes; that is, what grew among the bushes of the desert. They wandered about in the desert so that they might obtain this very humble fare.

And juniper-roots - The word translated here as “juniper,” רתם rethem, occurs only in this passage and in 1 Kings 19:4–5 and Psalm 120:4. In each place, it is translated as “juniper.” In 1 Kings, it is mentioned as the tree under which Elijah sat down when he fled into the wilderness for his life. In Psalm 120:4, it is mentioned as a material for making coals: Sharp arrows of the mighty, with coals of juniper.

It is translated as “juniper” by Jerome and by the rabbis. The verb (רתם râqab) occurs in Micah 1:13, where it is translated “bind,” and means to bind on, to make fast. Probably the plant referred to here received its name in some way from the idea of “binding”—perhaps because its long, flexible, and slender twigs were used for binding or for “withes.”

There is no evidence, however, that “juniper” is intended in any case. It denotes a species of “broom”—Spartium junceum of Linnaeus—which grows abundantly in the deserts of Arabia. It is the “Genista raetam” of Forsskål (Flora Aegyptiaco-Arabica, p. 214).

This plant has small, variegated blossoms and grows in the watercourses of the wadis. Dr. Robinson (Biblical Researches, 1:299) says, “The Retem is the largest and most conspicuous shrub of these deserts, growing thickly in the watercourses and valleys. Our Arabs always selected the place of encampment (if possible) where it grew, to be sheltered by it at night from the wind. During the day, when they often went on ahead of the camels, we not infrequently found them sitting or sleeping under a bush of Retem to protect them from the sun.

It was in this very desert, a day’s journey from Beersheba, that the prophet Elijah lay down and slept beneath the same shrub. The roots are very bitter and are regarded by the Arabs as yielding the best charcoal. The Hebrew name רתם rethem—is the same as the present Arabic name.”

Burckhardt remarks that he found several Bedouins in the Wady Genne collecting brushwood, which they burned into charcoal for the Egyptian market. He adds that they preferred the thick roots of the shrub Retem for this purpose, which grew there in abundance (Travels in Syria, p. 483).

Only those reduced to extreme poverty and want could have used the roots of this shrub for food, and this is undoubtedly the idea Job intends to convey. It is said to have been occasionally used for food by the poor (see Gesenius, Lexicon; Umbreit, in loc.; and Schultens).

A description of the condition of the poor, remarkably similar to this, occurs in Lucan, Book 7:

Cernit miserabile vulgus
In pecudum cecidisse cibos, et carpere dumos
Et morsu spoliare nemus.

Biddulph (in the collection of Voyages from the Library of the Earl of Oxford, p. 807) says he had seen many poor people in Syria gather mallows and clover. When he asked them what they intended to do with it, they answered that it was for food.

They cooked and ate them. Herodotus (Book 8, section 115) says that the army of Xerxes, after their defeat and when they had consumed all the grain of the inhabitants in Thessaly, “fed on the natural produce of the earth, stripping wild and cultivated trees alike of their bark and leaves, to such an extremity of famine were they come.”