Job's tears (Coix lacryma-jobi), also known as adlay or adlay millet, is a tall grain-bearing perennial tropical plant of the family Poaceae (grass family). It is native to Southeast Asia and introduced to Northern China and India in remote antiquity, and elsewhere cultivated in gardens as an annual. It has been naturalized in the southern United States and the New World tropics. In its native environment it is grown at higher elevation areas where rice and corn do not grow well. Job's tears are also commonly sold as Chinese pearl barley, though true barley belongs to a completely different genus.
There are two main varieties of the species, one wild and one cultivated. The wild variety, Coix lacryma-jobi var. lacryma-jobi, has hard-shelled pseudocarps—very hard, pearly white, oval structures used as beads for making prayer beads or rosaries, necklaces, and other objects. The cultivated variety Coix lacryma-jobi var. ma-yuen is harvested as a cereal crop, has a soft shell, and is used in traditional medicine in parts of Asia.
Nomenclature Job's tears may also be referred to under different spellings (Job's-tears, Jobs-tears). The crop is also known by other common names in English, such as adlay or adlay millet. Other common names in English include coix seed, gromwell grass, and tear grass.
The seeds are known in Hindi as Vaijanti (वैजंती),Patel, Bhavna & Patel, Gopi & Shah, Samir & Parmar, Shraddha. (2017). A Review: Coix lacryma jobi L.. Research Journal of Pharmacognosy and Phytochemistry. 9. 248. 10.5958/0975-4385.2017.00046.2. Baijanti (बैजंती) or Vaijayanti (वैजयंती), in Chinese as yìyǐ rén (), where rén means "kernel", and also described in Latin as semen coicis or semen coicis lachryma-jobi in pharmacopoeic literature.
Taxonomy The species, native to Southeast Asia, was named by Carl Linnaeus in 1753 with the epithet as a Latin translation of the metaphorical tear of Job. , four varieties are accepted by the World Checklist of Selected Plant Families:
Coix lacryma-jobi var. lacryma-jobi Widely distributed throughout the Indian subcontinent to peninsular Malaysia and Taiwan; naturalized elsewhere. The involucres are ovoid, bony and glossy. It has hard shells and is used as beads in crafts. Coix lacryma-jobi var. ma-yuen South China to peninsular Malaysia and the Philippines. The varietal name is eponymous after General Ma Yuen or Ma Yuan () who according to legend learned of the plant's use when he was posted in Cochin China (or Tonkin, in what is now Vietnam), and brought the seeds back to China to be cultivated. The involucres are elliptical, striate and soft. Coix lacryma-jobi var. puellarum Assam to Yunnan (China) and Indochina. It is the smallest among the Indian species, with only 4mm in diameter of the seeds. It is used for ornament as well. Coix lacryma-jobi var. stenocarpa Eastern Himalayas to Indochina.
Job's tearsalong with Coix in was formerly placed in the Maydeae, now known to be polyphyletic.p.331, "Maize and Tripsacum were previously grouped with a number of other grasses that have monoecious flowering patterns the most widely known being Job's tears (Coix lacryma-jobi) into the Maydeae (74); however, molecular data revealed that this grouping was polyphyletic (61)." It has cylindrical, longer than broad involucres. It is widely used as beads for ornaments.
Morphology
Job's tear is a monoecious grass which is broad-leaved, loose-growing, branched and robust. It can reach a height between 1.20 m to 1.80 m. Like all members of the genus, their inflorescences develop from a leaf sheath at the end of the stem and consist partly of hard, globular or oval, hollow, bead-like structures. Job's tear seeds differ in color, with the more soft-shelled seeds being light brown and the hard-shelled forms having a dark red pericarp.
The hardened "shells" covering the seeds are technically the fruit-case or involucre (hardened bract), with the bract also referred to as "capsule-spathe" or "sheathing bract" by some past botanical works.
These shells cover the bases of the flowers (inflorescences) which are male and female racemes/panicles; the male racemes project upright and consist of overlapping scale-like spikelets, with yellow stamens that pop out in-between, and there are one or two yarn-like stigmas drooping from the base.
Proteins Job's tears – as with Coix in general – produces its own variety of α-zein prolamins. These prolamins have undergone unusually rapid evolutionary divergence from closely related grasses, by way of copy-number changes.p.335, "Clusters of locally duplicated genes can also expand and contract rapidly, as shown by investigation of the 22-kDa α zein gene families in maize, sorghum, and coix, which appear to have experienced independent copy-number amplifications since the divergence of these three species (107)."
History Job's tears is native to Southeast Asian countries, namely India, Myanmar, China, and Malaysia. Residue on pottery from a Neolithic (late Yangshao Culture) site in north-central China shows that Job's tears, together with non-native barley and other plants were used to brew beer as early as ca. 3000 BC.
Job's tears were already introduced to Japan (and probably cultivated alongside rice) in the Early Jōmon Period, corroborated by finds in Western Japan (Chūgoku region), e.g., from studies of phytoliths in the (ca. 4000 BC) in Okayama Prefecture. And further east in Japan, the plant has been found at the Toro site, Shizuoka Prefecture dating to the Yayoi Period.
Remains of Job's tears have been found in archaeological sites in northeastern India, dating to around 1000 BC. It was introduced to the subtropical area in India from the east Himalayan belt. A number of scholars support the view it has been in cultivation in India in the 2000–1000 BC period. The wild varieties have hard-coated seeds. Job's tear was one of the earliest domesticated crops. Domestication makes the seed coat become softer and easier to cook.
In China, the current cultivation of Job's tears mainly occurs in Fujian, Jiangsu, Hebei, and Liaoning provinces. The cultivation of Job's tears spreads out to temperate areas in North and Northeast China. The shelled grains exported from China were erroneously declared through customs as "pearl barley", and "Chinese pearl barley" remains an alternate common name so that the grains are sold under such label in Asian supermarkets, even though C. lacryma-jobi is not closely related to barley (Hordeum vulgare).
The name "Job's tears" is a calque of Arabic (dumūʿ ʾAyyūb), the name used by Arab merchants who introduced the plant to Europe in the Middle Ages. They used the pseudocarps for misbaha (prayer beads) and associated them with the account of the suffering of Job (Ayyub) in the Quran, which is derived from the portrayal of Job in the Hebrew Bible's Book of Job.Wiart, C. (2006:668). Medicinal Plants Of The Asia-pacific: Drugs For The Future?. Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Company.
Uses Crafts
The hard, white grains of Job's tears have historically been used as beads to make necklaces and other objects. The seeds are naturally bored with holes without the need to artificially puncture them.
Strands of Job's tears are used as Buddhist prayer beads in parts of India, Myanmar, Laos, Taiwan, and Korea according to Japanese researcher Yukino Ochiai who has specialized on the ethnobotanic usage of the plant. They are also made into rosaries in countries such as the Philippines and Bolivia.
East Asia Japan In Japan, the grains growing wild are called ), and children have made playthings out of them by stringing them into necklaces. However, juzu-dama was a corruption of zuzu-dama according to folklorist Kunio Yanagita. A type of Buddhist rosary called irataka no juzu, which were hand-made by the yamabushi ascetics practicing shugendō training, purportedly used a large-grain type known as . Although this was published as a separate variety, C. lacryma jobi var. maxima , it is now regarded as synonymous to C. lacryma jobi var. lacryma-jobi according to taxonomical databases (World Checklist of Selected Plant Families).
It was contended by Edo Period scholar Ono Ranzan that the soft-shelled edible type called shikoku-mugi was not introduced into Japan until the Kyōho era (1716–1736), as opposed to a hard-shelled edible type called chōsen-mugi (lit. ‘Korean wheat’) which needed to be beaten in order to crack and thresh them. This type has been published as a separate species, C. agrestis in the past, but this is now recognized also as a synonym of C. lacryma jobi var. lacryma-jobi. Thus Japanese consumption of the crop attested in pre-Kyōho literature presumably used this hard-shelled type in the recipe.
Yanagita contended that the use of the beads predated the introduction of Buddhism into Japan (552/538 CE). And the plant has not only been found at sites dating to approximately this period at the Kuroimine Site,, citing Ishii & Umezawa (1994) . but in Jomon period sites dating to several millennia BC.
Ocean Road hypothesis Yanagita in his Ocean Road hypothesis argues that the pearly glistening seeds were regarded as simulating or substituting for cowrie shells, which were used as ornaments and currency throughout Southern China and Southeast Asia in antiquity, and he argued both items to be part of cultural transmission into Japan from these areas. §2
Later scholars have pursued the validity of the thesis. Yanagita had reproduced a distribution map of the usage of ornamental cowries throughout Asia (compiled by J. Wilfrid Jackson), §3. Map taken from Jackson (1917) Shells as Evidence of the Migrations of Early Culture. and Japanese ethnologist alluded to a need for a distribution map of ornamental Job's tears, for making comparison therewith.Cf. , visual map of necklaces, and references to Yanagita elsewhere in the Newsletter.
Mainland Southeast Asia
Thailand and Myanmar The Akha people and the Karen people who live in the mountainous regions around the Thai-Myanmar border grow several varieties of the plant and use the beads to ornament various handicraft.; The beads are used strictly only on women's apparel among the Akha, sewn onto headwear, jackets, handbags, etc.; also, a variety of shapes of beads are used. The beads are used only on the jackets of married women among the Karen, and the oblong seeds are exclusively selected, some example has been shown from the Karen in Chiang Rai Province of Thailand.
Strands of job's tears necklaces have also been collected from Chiang Rai Province, Thailand and it is known the Karen people string the beads into necklaces, such necklaces in use also in the former Karenni States (current Kayah State of Burma), with the crop being known by the name cheik (var. kyeik, kayeik, kyeit) in Burmese. Job's tears necklace has been collected also from Yunnan Province, China, which has a population of Akha-Hani people and other minorities, but the Wa people of Yunnan also used the plant seeds (tɛ kao; lit. ‘fruit-Coix’) sewn onto fabrics and bags, etc.
The Wa people and other minorities like the Taungyo ethnic group use the beads in apparel in Shan State, Myanmar.
Insular Southeast Asia Borneo Various indigenous Bornean tribes such as the Kelabit people of Sarawak state (and North Kalimantan, Indonesia), the Kadazandusun people and Murut people of Sabah state all use the plant beads as ornament. In the Kadazandusun language, the plant is called dalai. The Kayan of Borneo also use job's tears to decorate clothing and war dress.
Philippines Job's tears () are otherwise known by many local names in the Philippines (e.g. in Visaya Islands). The beads strung together have sometimes been used as rosaries, or made into bead curtains (e.g. the Tboli people on Mindanao), or woven into baskets and other vessels.
Americas