2 Samuel 16:1

And an hundred of summer-fruits— These summer-fruits the LXX suppose were dates; but the more common opinion is, that they were figs; which, it seems, was that also of the Chaldee paraphrast. Grotius, however, supposes, that the original word קיצ kaiits, signifies the fruit of trees in general. The author of the Observations seems to shew, that they could not have been any of these. "But when I find," says he, "that water-melons grow spontaneously in these hot countries, are made use of by the Arabs of the Holy Land in summer, instead of water, to quench their thirst, and are purchased as of the greatest use to travellers in thirsty desarts; and that cucumbers are very much used still in that country, to mitigate the heat: I am strongly inclined to believe, that these summer-fruits were not the produce of trees, but of this class of herbs, which creep along the ground, and produce fruits of a cooling moisture, and very large in proportion to the size of the plant." Cucumbers were eaten in Galilee the latter end of May by Dr. Pococke, he having stopped at an Arab tent, where, he tells us, they prepared him eggs and sour milk, cutting into it raw cucumbers, as a cooling diet in that season, which he found very hot. Cucumbers continue at Aleppo till the end of July, and are brought again to market in September and October, and are contemporaries with grapes and olives, as well as with beans and lentiles. See Jeremiah 10:12. Dr. Russell also tells us, that the squash comes in towards the end of September, and continues all the year; but that the orange-shaped pumpion is more common in the summer months. Of one or other of these kinds of fruit, I should think the sacred writer designed to be here understood to speak: they are all, more or less, of considerable size, and fit for persons who have to travel through a dry wilderness in the latter part of the spring, when the weather grows hot, as Bishop Pococke found it. If this be allowed, it will appear that they were called summer-fruits from their being eaten to allay the summer-heats, and not from their being dried in the summer, as Vatablus imagines; see Observations, p. 205.