Zawan and tares in the Bible

Farmers in Jordan and Syria refer to two weeds in wheat fields as zawan in Arabic. These are Cephalaria syriaca (L.) Schrad. (Dipsacaceae) and Lolium temulentum L (Poaceae). The Greek word zizanion in the parable in Matthew 13 is translated variously as tares, darnel, and weed. According to the biblical text, tares must have a life cycle like wheat and easily contaminate wheat seed. To better understand which plant is zawan, field and threshing sites in Jordan and Syria were surveyed. Four grain fields and four threshing sites had Cephalaria, one field and one threshing site had Lolium. Early botanical explorers noted C. syriaca as a weed in wheat in Syria. There are few records of C. syriaca as contaminants of grain caches at archeological sites while L. temulentum is common.     

Dysmorphology and mental retardation: molecular cytogenetic studies in dysmorphic mentally retarded patients

In an institutionalised population of 471 mentally retarded adult residents (436 males and 35 females), 18 patients (16 males and 2 females) with dysmorphic features were selected to perform FISH studies by using subtelomeric probes to discover cryptic terminal deletions or duplications, undetectable with standard banding techniques. In the 13 investigated patients, no abnormalities were found with a selected battery of subtelomeric probes. The results of cryptic chromosomal rearrangement studies are variable but the frequency of positive diagnostic findings seems to be lower than previously expected.     

The economic plants of the Bible

Biblical peoples of the Holy Land and adjacent parts of the Old World were as dependent upon plants for food, spices, cosmetics, drugs, medicines, textiles and other products as is modern man, and more than 125 such plants are recognizably referred to in the Scriptures.     

Dysmorphology report: on the association of microcephaly and preaxial polydactyly. Another example of Howard-Young syndrome.

We present a 5-year-old boy with developmental delay, severe microcephaly and preaxial polydactyly. These features are very similar to those previously described by Howard and Young (1) in their princeps report.     

Myth and History: A General Model and Its Application to the Bible

This paper focuses upon the prevalent complementary definitions of myth and history and questions their analytic utility with reference to literary documents that bespeak the transition between mythic and historic cognition. In the style of ethnosemantic analysis, these definitions are treated as a semantic domain and subjected to formal analysis. The components elicited constitute a new definition—more precisely, a two-dimensional model of the relationship between myth and history. Subsequently, the model is applied to a series of books from the Bible with the conclusion that men and women are structurally equal since, in their roles as social actors, both represent different components of myth as well as history.