Camel Hair and Locusts
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καὶ ἦν ὁ Ἰωάνης ἐνδεδυμένος τρίχας καμήλου καὶ ζώνην δερματίνην περὶ τὴν ὀσφὺν αὐτοῦ, καὶ ἔσθων ἀκρίδας καὶ μέλι ἄγριον.
And John was dressed in camel hair with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey.
A deliberate costume. Anyone who knew the Greek scriptures would recognise it.
<p>The description matches 2 Kings 1:8 in the Greek Old Testament, where Elijah is "a hairy man with a leather belt around his waist." The costume is a citation. Readers formed on the Septuagint would have identified the figure before Mark named him.</p><p><span class="gk">ἀκρίς</span> is the insect — the locust — in all the standard lexica. A minority tradition, visible in some later commentators, took it as the pod of the carob tree; the Greek word does not support it, and no witness in our stack translates it that way.</p>
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