StrongerBible

allon

אַלּוֹן

HebrewH0437“oak”

Appears 8 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Gen 35:8Isa 2:13Isa 6:13Isa 44:14Ezk 27:6Hos 4:13Amo 2:9Zec 11:2
Names & words formed with this
Word studyResearch-gradeal-LOANnoun

What allon means

the oak: the broad, hard, long lived tree of the hills, named as a kind of tree rather than as one famous landmark

TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintyStrong

This is the plain Hebrew word for an oak. When the Bible names a big hardwood tree by its kind rather than by its fame, this is the word it reaches for, and twice it sets the oak right beside the terebinth (אֵלָה) in the same line, which is how we know the writers heard two different trees and not one vague large one.

Across its eight appearances the oak turns up doing four different jobs:

  • it marks a grave, since Rebekah's nurse is buried under the oak below Bethel and the spot is afterwards named for the tree
  • it gives shade for worship on the hilltops, standing there beside the poplar and the terebinth
  • it supplies timber, chosen by a craftsman for a carved image and by the shipwrights of Tyre for their oars
  • it serves as the picture of strength in poetry, where the oaks of Bashan stand next to the cedars (אֶרֶז) of Lebanon and are cut down along with them

Half of the appearances are plural, and three of those are the same phrase, the oaks of Bashan: the wooded highland east of the Jordan whose great trees were proverbial. In the prophets those trees are almost always on the point of falling, which makes them a standing image of anything tall and proud that God means to bring low. Isaiah turns the image around once: when the oak is felled the stump is still alive, and that surviving stump is Israel.

One difficulty belongs to the word itself. In a Hebrew text written without vowel marks it looks identical to another word that names one single famous tree, the kind Abraham camped beside (אֵלוֹן), and only the vowels added by later scribes keep the two apart. Scholars also differ over how tightly the tree can be identified: most reference works say "oak," while a serious minority holds that the word is a looser term for any big, strong tree.

Gen 35:8Isa 2:13Isa 6:13Isa 44:14Ezk 27:6Hos 4:13Amo 2:9Zec 11:2

What scholars say about allon

The lexica treat this noun as the standard Hebrew word for the oak, distinguished from the neighboring arboreal nouns by the dagesh forte in the lamed: BDB 18 s.v. gives "oak"; HALOT 1:54 handles the family together and glosses the geminated form as the oak; TWOT entry 45c retains the older species differentiation, assigning the oak here and the terebinth to the feminine and the ṣere-ḥolem forms; DCH vol. 1 and the 18th edition of Gesenius (Donner and Renz, 2013) harmonize the family under a neutral "large tree" and treat the oak versus terebinth question as unresolvable on lexical grounds; TDOT and Kirsten Nielsen conclude that the four nouns share a Semitic root for a prominent tree and should not be pressed botanically. The decisive internal argument for the lexical independence of this noun is its parallelism with the feminine terebinth noun at Isaiah 6:13 and its coordination with that noun and with the poplar at Hosea 4:13. Comparative evidence supports the arboreal sense and separates it from the divine name: Ugaritic ʾaln "oak, oak grove" (KTU 1.12 i 20; syllabic al-la-nu, RS 15.122:9) corresponds to the geminated Hebrew form and is lemmatized apart from ʾiln "deity" in del Olmo Lete and Sanmartin; Akkadian allanu "oak, acorn" (CAD A/1 354b-355b) is itself a Sumerian loanword, so West Semitic ʾallan- may have spread with the tree; Aramaic and Syriac ʾilana broadened to "tree" generally; Phoenician-Punic attests only the "god" branch of ʾln (Krahmalkov, s.v.), and Arabic has no productive cognate. Cross already doubted deriving Proto-Semitic ʾil- "god" from a verb of strength, and recent comparative work (Suchard, JSOT 2025; SED) keeps the two etymological files apart, so the popular "divine tree" derivation has no standing. The Septuagint's use of βάλανος at Genesis 35:8, against δρῦς for the ṣere-ḥolem noun, is a principal argument for the antiquity of the vocalic distinction (so Zohary). On ecological grounds the Israeli botanical school (Zohary, Hareuveni, Feliks) identifies the tree as Quercus, chiefly the Kermes and Tabor oaks that dominate the hill country. For the setting of the individual passages: Bloch-Smith documents burial beneath a named tree as a genuine Iron Age Judahite practice behind Genesis 35:8; Ackerman and Keel supply the cultic-tree background to the polemic of Hosea 4:13; Nielsen treats the felled trunk with a living stump at Isaiah 6:13 within the wider tree metaphor of Isaiah.

Where scholars disagree about allon

Whether this noun designates the oak (Quercus) specifically or is a looser term for a large, prominent tree whose species cannot be fixed. The internal evidence secures its lexical independence from the neighboring terebinth noun, since the two stand in parallel at Isaiah 6:13 and are coordinated at Hosea 4:13, and the comparative Semitic data (Ugaritic aln, Akkadian allanu "oak, acorn") points to the oak. The counter-argument is lexicographic: recent dictionaries treat the whole family of arboreal nouns as vocalic variants of one root for a mighty tree and hold that the biblical usage cannot bear a botanical determination.

  • majorityThe oak, Quercus, chiefly the Kermes and Tabor oaks of the hill country, distinguished from the terebinth carried by the feminine noun; the argument runs from the parallelism at Isaiah 6:13, from Ugaritic and Akkadian cognates for the oak, from the Septuagint's use of the acorn word at Genesis 35:8, and from the ecology of the Palestinian highlands; BDB, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford, 1906), 18, s.v.; Koehler and Baumgartner, HALOT, vol. 1 (Brill, 1994), 54; Harris, Archer, and Waltke (eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (Moody, 1980), entry 45c; Michael Zohary, Plants of the Bible (Cambridge University Press, 1982), 108-111; Yehuda Feliks, Olam ha-Tsomeah ha-Miqra'i, 2nd ed. (Ramat-Gan, 1968), 104-106
  • minorityNo species can be determined; the noun belongs to a family of vocalic variants meaning a large or mighty tree, and its force in the text is its prominence rather than its botany; Gesenius, Hebraeisches und Aramaeisches Handwoerterbuch ueber das Alte Testament, 18th ed., ed. Donner and Renz (Springer, 2013); Botterweck, Ringgren, and Fabry (eds.), Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament (Eerdmans), vol. 1, on the arboreal nouns; Kirsten Nielsen, There Is Hope for a Tree: The Tree as Metaphor in Isaiah (JSOTSup 65, 1989)
In-depth research

This is a research paper, so it may be hard to read without scholarly background. It is useful if you want to dig even deeper into this word.

Sources

  • BDB, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford, 1906), 18, s.v.lexicon
  • Koehler and Baumgartner, HALOT, vol. 1 (Brill, 1994), 54lexicon
  • David J. A. Clines (ed.), The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, vol. 1 (Sheffield, 1993), s.v.lexicon
  • Gesenius, Hebraeisches und Aramaeisches Handwoerterbuch ueber das Alte Testament, 18th ed., ed. Donner and Renz (Springer, 2013)lexicon
  • Harris, Archer, and Waltke (eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (Moody, 1980), entry 45ctheological-dictionary
  • Botterweck, Ringgren, and Fabry (eds.), Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament (Eerdmans), vol. 1, on the arboreal nounstheological-dictionary
  • Kirsten Nielsen, There Is Hope for a Tree: The Tree as Metaphor in Isaiah (JSOTSup 65, 1989)monograph
  • Michael Zohary, Plants of the Bible (Cambridge University Press, 1982), 108-111monograph
  • Nogah Hareuveni, Tree and Shrub in Our Biblical Heritage (Neot Kedumim, 1984)monograph
  • Yehuda Feliks, Olam ha-Tsomeah ha-Miqra'i, 2nd ed. (Ramat-Gan, 1968), 104-106monograph
  • Gregorio del Olmo Lete and Joaquin Sanmartin, A Dictionary of the Ugaritic Language in the Alphabetic Tradition (Brill, 2003), 58-59lexicon
  • John Huehnergard, Ugaritic Vocabulary in Syllabic Transcription (Harvard Semitic Studies, 1987), 107monograph
  • Wilfred G. E. Watson, A Botanical Snapshot of Ugarit, Aula Orientalis 22 (2004): 107-155article
  • Chicago Assyrian Dictionary A/1 (1964), 354b-355b, s.v. allanulexicon
  • Charles Krahmalkov, Phoenician-Punic Dictionary (OLA 90, Leuven, 2000), s.v.lexicon
  • Michael Sokoloff, A Syriac Lexicon (Eisenbrauns and Gorgias, 2009), s.v.lexicon
  • Frank Moore Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic (Harvard, 1973), 13-15monograph
  • Benjamin Suchard, Semitic ilah- and Hebrew elohim, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 49/4 (2025): 460-474article
  • Elizabeth Bloch-Smith, Judahite Burial Practices and Beliefs about the Dead (JSOTSup 123, 1992), 111-120monograph
  • Susan Ackerman, Under Every Green Tree: Popular Religion in Sixth-Century Judah (HSM 46, 1992)monograph
  • Othmar Keel, Goddesses and Trees, New Moon and Yahweh (JSOTSup 261, 1998)monograph
  • Nahum M. Sarna, Genesis (JPS Torah Commentary, 1989), 240-241commentary
  • Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 16-50 (Word Biblical Commentary 2, 1994), 324commentary

AI-generated word study · claude-opus-4-8

All attested forms of אַלּוֹן

m s absolute

אַלּוֹן

Gen 35:8, Isa 6:13, Isa 44:14, Hos 4:13

m p absolute

אַלּוֹנִים

Ezk 27:6, Amo 2:9

m p construct

אַלּוֹנֵי

Isa 2:13, Zec 11:2