a terebinth: a large, broad shade tree of the hills and the dry country, and in most places one particular tree that people knew and could walk to
This word names a kind of tree, and English Bibles usually render it either "oak" or "terebinth." Most scholars settle on the terebinth, a relative of the pistachio that grows a wide, low, dome-shaped crown, throws deep shade, and can stand for centuries in dry country where little else gets that large. It is not the general word for a tree or for timber, which is עֵץ, and it is not the oak, which Hebrew calls אַלּוֹן. Two prophets name the two trees side by side in a single line (Isaiah 6:13; Hosea 4:13), which settles that they are not the same tree.
What stands out is how the Bible uses the word. Nine of its thirteen appearances point not to a kind of tree but to one specific trunk, the tree everyone in that place meant when they said "the terebinth":
- Jacob buried his household's foreign gods under the terebinth by Shechem (Genesis 35:4).
- The messenger who commissioned Gideon sat down under the terebinth at Ophrah (Judges 6:11).
- The men of Jabesh buried Saul's bones under the terebinth in their own town (1 Chronicles 10:12).
- Absalom rode under the branches of a great terebinth and was left hanging there by the head (2 Samuel 18:9).
The prophets use the word differently, and there the shade is the point. Worshippers climbed the hills and sacrificed under whatever leafy tree stood there, terebinths among them (Ezekiel 6:13; Hosea 4:13). That is part of why Isaiah could reach for the same tree to describe the nation itself: first a terebinth whose leaves dry up and drop, then a tree cut down whose stump is still alive in the ground (Isaiah 1:30; Isaiah 6:13).
Nuances
Disputed
Which tree the noun names. The question runs from Celsius in 1745 and Rosenmueller in 1830 down to the present, and turns on the ecology of the Palestinian hill country, on the vocabulary the ancient versions chose, and on how much weight the Masoretic vowel points can bear, since the three related tree nouns of this family are distinguished in writing only by those points.
- majorityThe noun names the terebinth, Pistacia atlantica and its relatives, a tree both ecologically and lexically distinct from the oak; the pairing of the two nouns within a single line at Isaiah 6:13 and Hosea 4:13 shows that Hebrew kept them apart.; HALOT vol. 1, s.v. אֵלָה; Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament, ed. Harris, Archer, Waltke (Moody, 1980), #45g; Michael Zohary, Plants of the Bible (Cambridge University Press, 1982), 108-111; Yehuda Feliks, Olam ha-Tsomeach ha-Miqra'i, 2nd ed. (Ramat-Gan, 1968), 104-106
- minorityNo species can be fixed on lexical grounds. The nouns of this family share a Semitic root for a large or prominent tree, and the word's work in the Bible is to mark a place and a cult site rather than to classify a plant, so the neutral gloss "great tree" is to be preferred.; David J. A. Clines (ed.), The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, vol. I (Sheffield, 1993), s.v. אֵלָה; Gesenius, Hebraeisches und Aramaeisches Handwoerterbuch ueber das Alte Testament, 18th ed. (Donner and Renz; Berlin: Springer, 2013); Kirsten Nielsen, There Is Hope for a Tree: The Tree as Metaphor in Isaiah, JSOTSup 65 (Sheffield, 1989)