Wild fruits, cucumbers
Archimandrite Nikifor’s Biblical Encyclopedia
(Slavonic: “wild apples”) (2 Kings 4:39) — of the gourd family; their leaves and vines resemble the vines of true cucumbers and trail along the ground. Their fruits, having the appearance and size of an egg, are very bitter to the taste, harmful to health, and can even be dangerous to life, as we see from the incident in the days of the prophet Elisha (2 Kings 4:40). In Egypt, wild cucumbers of certain kinds still grow to this day. The shape of the wild cucumber served, among other things, as a model for the ornamental decorations of Solomon’s Temple and the bronze sea (1 Kings 6:18; 7:24).