Millet

(Heb. dohan; only in Ezek. 4:9), a small grain, the produce of the Panicum miliaceum of botanists. It is universally cultivated in the East as one of the smaller corn-grasses. This seed is the cenchros of the Greeks. It is called in India warree, and by the Arabs dukhan, and is extensively used for food, being often mixed with other grain. In this country it is only used for feeding birds.

דחן, Ezek. iv, 9, a kind of plant so called from its thrusting forth such a quantity of grains. Thus in Latin it is called _millium_, as if one stalk bore a thousand seeds. It has been supposed that the _dochan_ means what is now called in the east _durra_; which, according to Niebuhr, is a sort of millet, and when made into bad bread with camel’s milk, oil, butter, or grease, is almost the only food which is eaten by the common people in Arabia Felix. I found it so disagreeable,” says he, that I should willingly have preferred plain barley bread to it.” This illustrates the appointment of it to the Prophet Ezekiel as a part of his hard fare. _Durra_ is also used in Palestine and Syria, and it is generally agreed that it yields much more than any other kind of grain. Hiller and Celsius insist that the _dochan_ is the _panic_; but Forskal has expressly mentioned the _dokn_, _holcus dochna_, as a kind of maize, of considerable use in food; and Brown, in his Travels, describes the mode of cultivating it.