Interlinear
fighting with serpents; as Subst., a kind of locust, and the ichneumon [wasp].
These you may eat: the arbeh after its kind, and the sela'am after its kind, and the chargol after its kind, and the chagav after its kind.
The Torah lists four types of kosher grasshoppers (and adds according to its kind after each, which the Talmud explains to include four further kinds). It's difficult to definitively translate the four names which appear here. But consider the following. Although there are over ten thousand species of grasshoppers, only a few dozen are locusts – i.e., grasshoppers that form swarms. And of the few dozen species of locusts, only four occur in Biblical lands! And of these four, by far the most common swarming locust is the desert locust, Schistocercia gregaria, which occasionally appears in swarms in Egypt and Israel even today... Second place is taken by the migratory locust, Locusta migratoria, while the Egyptian locust and Moroccan locust come in a distant third and fourth place.
according to its kind
Of these you may eat the following: locusts of every variety; all varieties of bald locust; crickets of every variety; and all varieties of grasshopper.
From this [locust] category, you may eat the following: The red locust after its species, the yellow locust after its species, the spotted gray locus after its species and the white locust after its species.
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