Science: Botany of the Bible

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.

—Matthew 6:28

These lines, say Botanists Harold Moldenke and his wife Alma, do not refer to lilies, which are rare in the Holy Land. They probably mean the Palestine anemone (Anemone coronaria), which still brightens the field with scarlet and gold.

The Moldenkes’ new book, Plants of the Bible (Chronica Botanica Co.; $7.50), tries to identify every plant mentioned in the Bible, even to the humble bacterium (Pasteurella pestis) that smote the Israelites with emerods. The job is a tough one, for neither the early writers nor the later translators of the Bible were botanists. They often used the same word for different plants, and different words for the same plant. The botanically innocent scholars who produced the King James Version turned aspens into mulberries and dill into anise. The sycomore that Zacchaeus climbed to catch a glimpse of Jesus was undoubtedly a fig tree.* The bulrushes that sheltered the infant Moses were almost certainly papyrus. Many plants that appear in the King James Version never grew in Palestine. Rye, for instance, is a cold-climate crop. The “rie” of the Bible is probably spelt, a primitive relative of wheat.

The worst confused plant of the Bible is probably the rose. The flower mentioned in Isaiah 35:1 (“and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose”) must have been a bulbous plant, probably a narcissus; the original Hebrew word for it means “bulb.” Other “roses” were oleanders, anemones, tumbleweeds or crocuses. The biblical “Rose of Sharon” was not the modern rose of Sharon (a kind of hibiscus introduced from China), but probably a tulip.

The “apples” of the Bible were certainly not the modern fruit, which was developed in postbiblical times from a small, sour, woody fruit native to the Caucasus. Solomon comforted his loved one with apricots, not with apples.†

The confusion about the “apple” with which the snake tempted Eve, and Eve caused the downfall of Adam, is not the fault of the Bible or its translators. Genesis does not name the guilty fruit at all; it is merely “the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.” It was turned into an apple by imaginative European artists who needed a fruit-bearing tree to put in their pictures.

The Moldenkes give up guessing about some of the plants of the Bible. The “hyssop that groweth out of the wall” might be any one of many wall-growing plants. The manna that fed the Children of Israel has been variously explained as a gum that forms on desert trees, as algae that grow overnight on dew-covered ground, as a lichen that blows around the desert, even as migrating quail. The Moldenkes have confidence in none of these theories. They think that manna was a legendary product with no botanical origin. The Children of Israel had no theory about it except that it came from the Lord. Their word for the mysterious stuff can be roughly translated as “whatzis.”

*In the New England Primer: “Zacchaeus he/ Did climb the tree,/Our Lord to see.” † †Song of Solomon 2:5.