Plants of the Bible

The cedar of Lebanon is a huge evergreen tree that grows high on the mountains north of Israel. Its branches spread out in wide flat layers, and its wood is reddish, sweet-smelling, and very hard to rot. Insects leave it alone. For these reasons it was the finest building timber of the ancient world.

Solomon arranged with Hiram king of Tyre to cut cedars in Lebanon. The logs were dragged down to the sea, tied into rafts, floated down the coast, and hauled up to Jerusalem (1 Kings 5:8–9). The temple was lined inside with cedar, and Solomon’s great hall was called the House of the Forest of Lebanon because of its rows of cedar pillars. When the temple was rebuilt after the exile, cedar was again brought from Lebanon by sea to Joppa.

The cedar became the Bible’s picture of greatness and strength. Cedar wood was also used, with hyssop and scarlet thread, in the cleansing of a person healed of a skin disease (Leviticus 14:4).

The acacia is the tree of the desert. It has a flat, umbrella-shaped top, small leaves, and long sharp thorns, and it grows in dry stream beds where water runs only after rain. Its roots go very deep to reach water far below the ground.

Its wood is hard, heavy and close-grained, and it lasts a long time. In the Sinai desert there was little other timber, so the tabernacle was built of acacia: the ark of the covenant, the table for the bread, the two altars, the poles for carrying them, and the upright frames of the tent. The older English Bibles call it “shittim wood,” from the Hebrew plural shittim.

Israel’s last camp before crossing the Jordan was at a place called Shittim, “the acacias” (Numbers 25:1). See the Tabernacle page for how the wood was used.

The almond is the first tree in Israel to blossom. Its white and pale pink flowers open in late January or February, while the other trees are still bare and the nights are cold. The nuts ripen in early summer inside a soft green husk.

Its Hebrew name, shaqed, comes from a root meaning “to watch” or “to stay awake”: the almond is the tree that wakes first. God used this in a play on words with Jeremiah. Jeremiah saw a branch of shaqed, the almond, and God said “I watch” (shoqed) over my word to perform it.

When Aaron’s right to the priesthood was challenged, his staff was laid in the tent overnight and in the morning it had budded, blossomed and borne ripe almonds. The cups of the golden lampstand in the tabernacle were shaped like almond blossoms.

Two large trees of the hill country share a family of Hebrew names. The terebinth is a big spreading tree of the pistachio family, with a sharp resin smell, that loses its leaves in winter. The oak of Israel is mostly an evergreen oak with small, prickly leaves. Both grow old and huge, and both were used as landmarks and meeting places.

The Hebrew words elah, elon and allon are used for these trees, and the English Bibles translate them in different ways: oak, terebinth, sometimes plain. The ASV usually says “oak,” but in Isaiah 6:13 it names both trees side by side.

Abraham lived by the great trees of Mamre near Hebron, and there God appeared to him. Jacob buried the idols of his household under the oak near Shechem (Genesis 35:4). Absalom’s long hair caught in the branches of one as he rode under it (2 Samuel 18:9). The valley where David fought Goliath is the Valley of Elah, the valley of the terebinth.

The sycamore of the Bible is not the sycamore or plane tree of Europe and America. It is a kind of fig tree with a wide crown, a thick pale trunk, and small figs that grow in clusters straight out of the trunk and the big branches. It is easy to climb, which is why Zacchaeus, a short man, could climb one to see Jesus pass by in Jericho.

Sycamore figs were the cheap fruit of ordinary people. To make them ripen sweet, each young fig was cut or pierced. Amos says he was a “dresser of sycomore-trees”: the Hebrew word is understood to mean this gashing of the fruit. It was seasonal work for poor men.

The tree grows only in warm lowlands; frost kills it (Psalm 78:47). Its wood is light and lasts a long time. In Egypt it was used for coffins and boxes.

The tamarisk is a desert tree with tiny scale-like leaves on thin, drooping, feathery branches. It looks grey-green and soft from a distance. It can grow in salty and very dry ground, sending its roots deep, and it gives real shade in places where almost nothing else grows.

Abraham planted a tamarisk at Beersheba, in the dry south, after making a covenant over a well, and called there on the name of God. Planting a tree that would live a long time marked the place. King Saul held court under a tamarisk at Gibeah, spear in hand. After Saul died in battle, the men of Jabesh buried his bones and his sons’ bones under the tamarisk in their town.

Its Hebrew name is eshel. The word appears only in these three places.

The white broom is a large desert bush with long, thin, nearly leafless green twigs. In late winter it is covered in small white flowers with a sweet smell. Its shade is thin, but in the open desert it is often the only shade there is.

When the prophet Elijah ran from Queen Jezebel, he went a day’s journey into the desert south of Beersheba, sat down under one of these bushes, and asked to die. There an angel woke him and gave him food. The ASV prints “juniper-tree” in 1 Kings 19, but the Hebrew word is rotem, the broom; the ASV itself prints “broom” for the same Hebrew word in Job 30:4.

Broom roots burn slowly and very hot, and were made into charcoal. That is the picture in Psalm 120:4, where lying words are like sharp arrows and burning coals of rotem.

Flax is a slender plant with narrow leaves and pale blue flowers. It is grown for the strong fibres inside its stem, which are made into linen, and for its oily seeds.

Making linen took many steps. The plants were pulled up whole and the stalks dried. Then they were soaked in water until the outer stem rotted away, dried again, beaten, and combed to separate the long fibres. The fibres were spun into thread and woven into cloth. When the spies came to Jericho, Rahab hid them under stalks of flax she had laid out to dry on her flat roof.

Linen was cool to wear in a hot land. The priests in the tabernacle wore linen, and the curtains of the tabernacle courtyard were fine twined linen. An old Hebrew farm calendar found at Gezer, from about the 10th century B.C., names a month for cutting flax.

Black mustard is a fast-growing field plant with yellow flowers. Its seed is tiny, about a millimetre across, yet in one season the plant can grow taller than a man, with branches strong enough for small birds to sit on. Its seeds were ground for seasoning and oil.

Jesus used the mustard seed twice. The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed: the smallest of the seeds a farmer sowed, that grows into the largest of the garden plants, so that birds come and rest in its branches. And faith as small as a grain of mustard seed can move a mountain.

The Greek word is sinapi. Most scholars take it to be the black mustard that still grows wild around the Sea of Galilee.

The “tares” of Jesus’ parable are almost certainly darnel, a weedy grass that looks just like wheat while it is young. Only when the heads form can a farmer tell them apart: darnel heads are thin and its grains are small and dark.

Darnel is dangerous. Its seeds are often infected with a fungus that makes them poisonous, and bread made with them causes dizziness, sickness and worse. Its Latin name, temulentum, means “drunken.” Because the roots of wheat and darnel tangle together, pulling the weeds early tears up the wheat too.

That is exactly the parable: an enemy sows tares in a man’s wheat field at night. When they appear, his servants want to pull them up, but he tells them to wait until harvest, then gather the tares first to burn and bring the wheat into the barn.

Israel has dozens of kinds of thorny bushes and thistles. They spread quickly over fields left unworked, choke young grain, and tear at clothing and skin. The Hebrew Bible has more than a dozen different words for them, and it is often impossible to say which plant each word means.

Two common ones are thorny burnet, a low, dense, spiny bush that covers the hillsides and was cut for fuel and for fences, and the tall milk thistle with its purple flower heads and white-veined leaves. Dry thorns burn fast and hot; Ecclesiastes 7:6 compares the laughter of a fool to the crackling of thorns under a pot.

Thorns appear at both ends of the Bible story of sin: after Adam disobeyed, the ground would bring forth thorns and thistles; at the end of Jesus’ life, soldiers pressed a crown of thorns on his head. In the parable of the sower, the seed that fell among thorns was choked.

Papyrus is a giant reed that grows in shallow water at the edges of rivers and marshes. Its stem is three-sided and thick as a wrist, and it ends in a ball of thin green threads. It grew all along the Nile in Egypt, and in the Hula marshes in the north of Israel.

It was one of the most useful plants of the ancient world. Bundles of stems tied together made light boats. The stems were made into rope, mats, baskets and sandals. And thin strips of the inner stem, laid side by side and crosswise and pressed, made sheets of papyrus, the writing material of Egypt, Greece and Rome. The English word “paper” comes from “papyrus.” (See Reading and Writing in Scripture.)

When Moses’ mother could no longer hide him, she made a little basket of papyrus, sealed it with tar and pitch, and set it among the reeds at the river’s edge. The ASV calls it an ark of bulrushes.

The lentil is a small, low plant of the pea family. Its short, flat pods hold one or two round, flat seeds. Dried lentils keep for a long time and cook into a thick, filling stew. Some kinds turn a reddish-brown when cooked.

Lentils were cheap, common food. Jacob was cooking a red lentil stew when his brother Esau came in from the field faint with hunger. Esau sold his birthright for a bowl of it, and was given the nickname Edom, “red.”

One of David’s mighty men, Shammah, stood alone in a field of lentils and defended it against the Philistines when everyone else fled. Lentils were among the food brought to David when he fled from Absalom, and they were in the mixed bread God told Ezekiel to bake.

The mandrake is a low plant with a rosette of large, wrinkled leaves lying flat on the ground, purple flowers in winter, and round yellow-orange fruit in spring, about the size of a plum. The fruit has a strong, sweet smell. The root is thick and often forked, and can look a little like a human body.

All parts of the plant contain strong drugs and are poisonous in large amounts. In the ancient world the mandrake was widely believed to help a woman have children. Genesis does not say why Rachel wanted the mandrakes Reuben found, but she had no children at the time and longed for them (Genesis 30:1).

The Hebrew word, duda’im, is close to the word for love, and in the Song of Songs the smell of mandrakes belongs to the springtime of love.

Wormwood is a low, grey, strongly scented bush of the dry country. Every part of it is extremely bitter. In the Bible it is never eaten; it stands for bitterness, sorrow and poison.

Moses warned against anyone who turned away from God to other gods as “a root that beareth gall and wormwood.” Proverbs says the end of adultery is bitter as wormwood. Amos accuses those who turn justice into wormwood. Lamentations names it among the miseries of a city that has fallen.

In Revelation a great star called Wormwood falls on a third of the rivers and springs, and the waters become bitter.

After Jonah preached in Nineveh, he sat outside the city to see what would happen to it. God made a plant grow up over him to shade his head, and Jonah was very glad of it. The next dawn God sent a worm that attacked the plant, and it withered; then came a scorching east wind. God used the plant to teach Jonah about his own mercy toward the people of Nineveh.

The Hebrew word is qiqayon. The ASV translates it “gourd.” Many scholars think it is the castor plant, because the oil of the castor bean was called kiki in Egypt, a very similar word. The castor plant grows extremely fast in heat, has huge hand-shaped leaves that give good shade, and wilts quickly when its stem is damaged.

Its seeds give castor oil, which was burned in lamps. The raw seeds are very poisonous.