a great tree known by name: one particular landmark tree, and in most cases a holy place where God was met or an oracle sought
This word almost never means simply a tree. Every time it appears it names one particular tree that anyone in Israel could have found: the tree Abraham reached when he first crossed into Canaan, the grove at Hebron where God appeared to him, the tree the fortune tellers used outside Shechem, the tree beside which the men of Shechem crowned a king. A tree like that was a landmark, and in the Bible it is almost always a holy place as well.
Hebrew has three closely related words for these big trees, and in a text written without vowels two of them look identical. The ordinary word for an oak (אַלּוֹן) and the ordinary word for a terebinth (אֵלָה) can each describe any tree of their kind. This word works differently: it always arrives with a name attached, the tree of Moreh, the trees of Mamre, the tree of the fortune tellers. Older translations picked a species and printed "oak" or "terebinth"; the newest lexicons decline to choose, because the word's job is to point at a place rather than to identify a plant.
What happens at these trees falls into a pattern:
- God appears to Abraham, who then builds an altar of his own
- a king is crowned beside the tree and the sacred stone next to it
- people come to have their future read at the tree
- travelers give directions by it, the way we might name a bridge
That last use is the plainest, and two of the nine occurrences are only that: a great tree fixing a spot on the map. Everywhere else the tree carries the weight of what happened there.
The mixture is the point. Israel's oldest holy places were not buildings but trees, springs, and stones, and the writers kept the trees in the story even while insisting that the God met there was the LORD and no other. Where Abraham reaches such a tree he does not take up the local rites; he builds his own altar beside it. The generic word for a tree (עֵץ) would have said none of this.
Nuances
What the second element in the name of the tree at Shechem is. The consonants can be pointed as a noun meaning something set up or as a term for a garrison or post, which is how the Septuagint took it; the Vulgate reads quercus quae stabat, the oak that stood; some Hebrew manuscripts substitute the feminine noun for a terebinth. The modern discussion turns on whether the received text already yields the tree beside a standing stone or must be corrected to do so.
- majorityThe received text means the tree of the pillar, a great tree beside a sacred standing stone, the same tree and stone complex attested at Joshua 24:26 and identified by excavators with the massebah before the fortress temple at Tell Balata; Barry G. Webb, The Book of Judges (New International Commentary on the Old Testament, 2012), ad loc.; Robert G. Boling, Judges (Anchor Bible 6A, 1975), 171-172; Daniel I. Block, Judges, Ruth (New American Commentary, 1999), 310-312
- minorityThe text should be emended to the noun for a standing stone or pillar; George Foot Moore, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Judges (International Critical Commentary, 1895), ad loc.; Trent C. Butler, Judges (Word Biblical Commentary 8, 2009), ad loc.
Whether the tree at Zaanannim was a Kenite cult site or simply a border landmark near Kedesh. The narrative gives no cultic detail, but the tree stands at a tribal boundary, and named trees elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible regularly mark sanctuaries, so the argument runs from analogy rather than from the verse itself.
- majorityA border landmark in Naphtali, with possible but unproven sacral associations; Robert G. Boling, Judges (Anchor Bible 6A, 1975), 96-97; Trent C. Butler, Judges (Word Biblical Commentary 8, 2009), ad loc.
- minorityA Kenite cult site; Baruch Halpern, The First Historians: The Hebrew Bible and History (Harper and Row, 1988)
Disputed
Which tree the word names. The question runs from Celsius in 1745 and Rosenmueller in 1830 down to the present, and turns on the ecology of the hill country, on the vocabulary the ancient versions chose, and on how much weight the Masoretic vowels can bear. Recent lexicography has largely abandoned a botanical answer, holding that the semantic weight of the noun lies in the tree's prominence and cultic role rather than in its species.
- majorityNo species can be determined; the noun means a large or great tree, and its force is cultic and topographic rather than botanical; Koehler and Baumgartner, HALOT, vol. 1 (Brill, 1994), 54; David J. A. Clines (ed.), The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, vol. 1 (Sheffield, 1993), s.v.; Gesenius, Hebraeisches und Aramaeisches Handwoerterbuch ueber das Alte Testament, 18th ed., ed. Donner and Renz (Springer, 2013); Kirsten Nielsen, There Is Hope for a Tree: The Tree as Metaphor in Isaiah (JSOTSup 65, 1989)
- minorityQuercus, the oak, with the terebinth carried by a different Hebrew noun; the argument is ecological, since oaks dominate the Judean hill country and terebinths the drier steppe margins; Michael Zohary, Plants of the Bible (Cambridge University Press, 1982), 108-111; Nogah Hareuveni, Tree and Shrub in Our Biblical Heritage (Neot Kedumim, 1984); Yehuda Feliks, Olam ha-Tsomeah ha-Miqra'i, 2nd ed. (Ramat-Gan, 1968), 104-106
- minorityPistacia, the terebinth; BDB, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford, 1906), 18, s.v.; Harris, Archer, and Waltke (eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (Moody, 1980), entry 45h; E. A. Speiser, Genesis (Anchor Bible 1, 1964), 86-87