allon

This is the ordinary Hebrew word for an oak, and in the one place it works as a common noun it names a single tree that everybody in the area could find. The surveyor listing the northern tribe of Naphtali's border gives directions by it: the line runs from Heleph, from the oak at Zaanannim, and on past Adami Nekeb and Jabneel. A tree that size did the job a bridge or a water tower does for us. The same tree shows up again in Judges 4:11, where Heber the Kenite pitches his tent beside it shortly before Jael kills Sisera.

Which Hebrew word actually stands here is genuinely uncertain, and it is worth knowing why English Bibles look so different at this verse. Hebrew had a small cluster of words for these big trees, and in a text written without vowel marks two of them are identical on the page: the plain word for an oak (אַלּוֹן) and the word reserved for a great tree known by name (אֵלוֹן). Printed editions and lexicons split over which one Joshua 19:33 has. Older English versions took a third route and read the two words as a place name, "Allon to Zaanannim", as though a town were meant, and that is how this verse came to be filed under the same number as the man named Allon.

Nothing in the verse itself says anything religious about the tree. Elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible a tree known by name is very often a holy place as well, and the Kenites who camped at this one were outsiders with their own traditions, so scholars have wondered whether the spot had that kind of standing. The verse gives no hint either way. It is drawing a line on a map, and the tree is the fixed point it uses.

In one verse the word is simply somebody's name. A list of Simeonite family heads traces one leader's line back five generations, and Allon sits in the middle of it: Ziza son of Shiphi, son of Allon, son of Jedaiah, son of Shimri, son of Shemaiah. Nothing else in the Bible is said about him. He is there to carry the line.

The name means "Oak", and Hebrew names taken from plants and trees were completely ordinary. Tamar means "date palm" and Rimmon means "pomegranate". The standard studies of biblical names, from Noth onward, file this one among those and not among names built on a word for God, and the point is worth making because the word opens with the same two letters as the Hebrew word for "god". Popular writing sometimes turns the name into "divine tree" on that basis. The neighboring languages keep the tree word and the word for a god apart, and in any case a man called Oak was no more a tree worshipper than a woman called Tamar was a devotee of palms.