This word occurs several times in our translation of the Bible, but with various authorities from the original. 1. הברקנים, Judges viii, 7, 16, is a particular kind of thorn. 2. חדק, Prov. xv, 19; Micah vii, 4. It seems hardly possible to determine what kind of plant this is. Some kind of tangling prickly shrub is undoubtedly meant. In the former passage there is a beautiful opposition, which is lost in our rendering: “The _narrow way_ of the slothful is like a perplexed path among briers; whereas the _broad road_” (elsewhere rendered _causeway_) “of the righteous is a high bank;” that is, free from obstructions, direct, conspicuous, and open. The common course of life of these two characters answers to this comparison. Their manner of going about business, or of transacting it, answers to this. An idle man always takes the most intricate, the most oblique, and eventually the most thorny, measures to accomplish his purpose; the honest and diligent man prefers the most open and direct. In Micah, the unjust judge, taking bribes, is a brier, holding every thing that comes within his reach, hooking all that he can catch. 3. סרבים, Ezek. ii, 6. This word is translated by the Septuagint, παροιϛρήσουσιν, _stung by the œstrus_, or _gadfly_; and they use the like word in Hosea iv, 16, where, what in our version is “a backsliding heifer,” they render “a heifer stung by the œstrus.” These coincident renderings lead to the belief that both places may be understood of some venomous insect. The word סרר may lead us to _sarran_, by which the Arabs thus describe “a great bluish fly, having greenish eyes, its tail armed with a piercer, by which it pesters almost all horned cattle, settling on their heads, &c. Often it creeps up the ...