Rachel, Jacob's second wife, the sister of Leah, is desirous of the mandrakes and she barters with her sister for them. In Genesis 30, Reuben, the eldest son of Jacob and Leah finds mandrakes in the field. The plant grows natively in southern and central Europe and in lands around the Mediterranean Sea, as well as on Corsica.

All parts of the mandrake plant are poisonous. There spring from the neck a number of one-flowered nodding peduncles, bearing whitish-green flowers, nearly 2 inches broad, which produce globular, succulent, orange to red berries, resembling small tomatoes, which ripen in late spring. This root gives off at the surface of the ground a rosette of ovate-oblong to ovate, wrinkled, crisp, sinuate-dentate to entire leaves, 6 to 16 inches long, somewhat resembling those of the tobacco-plant. The parsley-shaped root is often branched.

The mandrake, Mandragora officinarum, is a plant called by the Arabs luffâh, or beid el-jinn (' djinn's eggs'). (It is alleged that magicians would form this root into a crude resemblance to the human figure, by pinching a constriction a little below the top, so as to make a kind of head and neck, and twisting off the upper branches except two, which they leave as arms, and the lower, except two, which they leave as legs.) Because their curious bifurcations cause them to have a semblance to the human figure (male and female), their roots have long been used in magic rituals, today also in neopagan religions such as Wicca and Germanic revivalism religions such as Odinism. Mandrake is the common name for members of the plant genus Mandragora belonging to the nightshades family (Solanaceae).

Mandrake scream