"The Lord shall smite thee with a consumption, and with a fever, and with an inflammation, and with an extreme burning, and with the sword, and with BLASTING, and with mildew; and they shall pursue thee until thou perish." Deuteronomy 28:22 (Capitalization added)
Pity the poor sinner on the receiving end of that damnation. When the scribe invoked blasting, though, he had crop failure in mind rather than explosions. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a blast in the biblical sense is "a sudden infection destructive to vegetable or animal life," as in "a blasted bud or blossom." Webster's New American Dictionary defines the verb blast as "to damage or destroy by or as by a blight; to wither, shrivel, ruin." Pretty scary imagery, even for today's farmers.
But that's just about what happens to rice infected with blast, a disease caused by the fungal pathogen, Magnaporthe grisea. The blight ...
