Kol

Ko'l (Heb. id. קוֹע, Sept. ῾Υχουέ v. r. Κούθ, Κουδέ, Λούδ; Vulg. principes), a word that occurs but once, in the prophetic denunciations of punishment to the Jewish people from the various nations whose idolatries they had adopted: " The Babylonians and all the Chaldaeans, Pekod, and Shoa, and Koa, and all the Assyrians with them: all of them desirable young men, captains and rulers, great lords and renowned, all of them riding upon horses" (Eze 23:23). The Sept., Symmachus, Theodotion, Targums, Peshito, and Engl. Vers., followed by many interpreters, regard it as a proper name of some province or place in the Babylonian empire; but none such has been found, and the evident paronomasia with the preceding term in the same verse suggests a symbolical signification as an appellative, which appears to be furnished by the kindred Arabic kua, the designation of a he-camel or stallion for breeding (a figure in keeping with the allusions in the context to gross lewdness, as a type of idolatry), and hence tropically a prince or noble. This is the sense defended by J. D. Michaelis (Suppl. 2175), after Jerome and the Heb. interpreters, and adopted by Gesenius (Thesaur. Heb. p. 1207). SEE SHOA; SEE PEKOD.