GALL, bile — and by extension anything bitter or poisonous. ⚠ At Matthew 27:34 he is offered wine mixed with cholē and will not drink it, and the phrase is built out of Psalm 69:21, where the Greek Old Testament uses this very word for the rosh, the bitter or poisonous thing put in the sufferer's food. The psalm has TWO items in one verse — something bitter to eat and vinegar for the thirst — and Matthew separates them: gall at the start (v34) and oxos, sour wine, at the end (v48). ⚠ The Byzantine tradition reads oxos in both places, collapsing the two into one drink and producing the KJV's ‘vinegar mingled with gall’; the older text's two-drink shape matches the psalm better and is followed here. The other New Testament use is Acts 8:23, ‘the gall of bitterness’. → first discussed at Matt 27:34