bdellium: a prized, semi-clear substance listed among a distant land's treasures, most likely a fragrant gum tapped from a desert tree
This word names one particular luxury good, and it turns up only twice in the Hebrew Bible. Both times the writer puts "the" in front of it, the way you name something every reader has seen: the gold of that land is good, and "the" bdellium is there; the wilderness bread looked like "the" bdellium. What the first audience recognized at a glance, later readers no longer did, and the substance behind the word has been argued over ever since.
The strongest evidence points to bdellium in the old sense of that word: a fragrant gum that seeps from a thorny desert tree and hardens into yellowish, semi-clear drops. Assyrian records list an aromatic gum of almost exactly the same name among goods brought as tribute, and Greek and Latin writers borrowed that same name for the resin, describing it as transparent like wax, bitter to the taste, and smelling of myrrh (מֹר), which it was often used to stretch. Josephus and Jerome's Latin Bible both read the Hebrew word this way, and the standard modern lexicons follow them.
Three identifications have competed for two thousand years, and they are worth seeing side by side:
- a fragrant gum resin, which the comparative evidence and the older Latin and Jewish Greek versions support;
- a pearl, argued from placing that distant land near the pearl beds of the Persian Gulf and from reading the wilderness bread as round and white;
- rock crystal or some other precious stone, the reading of Rashi and of the older Greek translation of Numbers, and the one that survived into modern Hebrew, where the word now simply means "crystal."
Neither verse settles the question. Genesis 2:12 lists the substance between gold and a gemstone (שֹׁהַם), which sounds mineral, though ancient lists of treasure mix metals, gems, and perfumes freely, and the text pointedly calls the other item a "stone" and this one not. Numbers 11:7 says only that the manna looked like it, and even that helps less than it seems: the Hebrew word for what is being compared can mean either color or texture, and the comparison may be reaching back to the garden's treasures for effect rather than handing the reader a description.
Whether עֵין in Numbers 11:7 describes the manna's color or its texture, and how far the simile constrains the identification of בְּדֹלַח.
- majorityעֵין denotes appearance or color, so the verse says the manna looked like bdellium; on the pearl and crystal identifications this is then taken to imply something white or translucent.; A Handbook on Numbers (UBS Handbook Series; New York: United Bible Societies, 1998); New Revised Standard Version, Numbers 11:7
- minorityעֵין denotes texture rather than color, which removes the inference that the substance was white or round and leaves the simile compatible with a gum resin.; Baruch A. Levine, Numbers 1-20 (Anchor Bible 4; New York: Doubleday, 1993), at Numbers 11:7