Isaiah 1:8
Why Cucumbers?
The Levant has the perfect conditions for cucumbers! They want it hot, dry air, and tons of sunlight. They're extremely prolific under those conditions. I live in a valley in the high desert, not dissimilar to what Jerusalem is like, and cucumbers are extremely easy to grow. If you keep them watered and fertilized, they will go absolutely nuts. There are cucumbers to pick all day, multiple times a day because of how fast they grow. You can have people picking cucumbers constantly. By the time they finish the field, they can start over and there will be more to pick.
If you've ever grown zucchini and heard people talk about how abundant they are, to the point where you have cartoonish numbers of zucchini all the time, cucumbers are like that. And sometimes they're worse. If you don't pick zucchini in time, they get oversized and may get a little tough. If you don't pick cucumbers in time, they get bitter to the point where you can't eat them. So they're not like pumpkins or squash where you let them grow all season, then pick them. You're picking them all day, every day once you have a whole field full of them. A cucumber you saw this morning that wasn't ready to pick can be overripe by the evening. They had to hire someone to watch the fields and protect the field at night. That's how many there are and how easy they would be to steal.
Jerusalem on a spiritual level used to be fruitful like a field full of cucumber plants. There were so many blessings, so much abundance in what the Lord was doing for them. They were spiritually fruitful like cucumbers in summer, with so many blessings they didn't know what to do with them all. And having grown cucumbers and zucchini like that, I'll tell you what we all end up doing. We give them away because there's simply no way for us to eat them all! Generosity is what you do naturally when you have so much on hand. That's why at certain parts of the summer, there are free zucchini and cucumbers and tomatoes being given away at church. The people who grow them can't eat it all, and better to give it away than to have it go to waste. That's what God expects us to do when we have abundance. It's not for hoarding. It's for sharing.
All of that abundance is gone now because of the hypocrisy of the people in Jerusalem.
This analogy compares Jerusalem to one of the most prolific sections of the garden after the harvest. Everyone is gone in that eerie, sad way because you're used to seeing tons of people around. Everything that was once so fruitful and good is dead. There's nothing worth protecting anymore.
That's why the watchtower in the cucumber field is empty.
