A garden vegetable of the gourd family. Numbers 11:5 mentions it as one of the foods desired by the wandering Israelites when they remembered the foods they ate in Egypt.
The cucumber is an annual climbing or trailing vine. No one knows for certain where cucumbers originally came from. People have grown cucumbers in all the warm countries of the Europe, Asia, and Africa since prehistoric times.
Cucumbers are usually eaten raw. A cucumber and a barley cake or some other kind of bread often make up a simple meal. The reference to "a shack in a cucumber field" (Isaiah 1:8) refers to the roughly built small house or shelter often set up in Palestinian cucumber fields and vineyards. These shelters protected the farmers or watchmen who guarded the crops.