And there was a great famine in Samaria: and, behold, they besieged it, until an ass's head was sold for fourscore pieces of silver, and the fourth part of a cab of dove's dung for five pieces of silver.
An ass' head was sold for fourscore pieces of silver. Though the donkey was deemed unclean food, necessity might warrant their violation of a positive law when mothers, in their extremity, were found violating the laws of nature. The head was the worst part of the animal. Eighty pieces of silver, equal to œ5, 5s.
The fourth part of a cab. A cab was the smallest dry measure. The proportion here stated was nearly half a pint for 12 shillings, 6d. "Dove's dung" is thought by Bochart to be a kind of pulse or pea, common in Judaea, and still kept in the storehouses of Cairo and Damascus, and other places, for the use of it by pilgrim caravans. By Linnoeus and other botanists it is said to be the root or white bulb of the plant Orithogalum umbellatum, Star of Bethlehem. The sacred historian does not say that the articles here named were not regularly sold at the rates described, but only that instances were known of such high prices being given.