olive: the olive tree and its fruit, one of the staple cultivated plants of the biblical world
TranslatabilityDirectCertaintySettled
A single Hebrew word covers the whole olive. It names the long-lived, evergreen tree, the fruit that tree bears, and by extension both the orchards of such trees and the harvest they yield. So the same term can point to one tree, a whole grove, or a basket of olives, and the reader has to let the surrounding words say which is meant.
In everyday life the olive stood for settled prosperity. A land dotted with olive groves was a land at peace and under blessing, and to lose the olive crop was a sign of judgment. Because the tree is slow to grow, long to live, and green in every season, writers reach for it as a picture of a person whose life lasts and flourishes.
The same plain word also names a place. The ridge just east of Jerusalem was called the mountain of the olives after the trees on its slopes, and English Bibles keep this as the Mount of Olives.
Nuances
1athe olive tree: the cultivated evergreen, along with its wood, branches, and leaves, often held up as a picture of lasting life and flourishing
names the ridge east of Jerusalem, the Mount of Olives, a place people climb and where the Lord's feet are said to stand.2Sa 15:30Zec 14:4
marks the olive as a staple crop of the promised land, an inheritance of trees the people did not plant themselves.Deu 6:11Deu 8:8Jos 24:13
supplies the beaten oil that keeps the sanctuary lamp burning.Exo 27:20Lev 24:2
pictures a flourishing person as a green olive tree growing in the house of God, a sign of settled and lasting well-being.Psa 52:8Psa 128:3
is the leaf a dove carries back to the ark, the sign that the flood has drained and life has returned to the land.Gen 8:11
Both
both name the same olive tree, the cultivated fruit tree of the ancient world; the Greek word is the direct counterpart the New Testament uses where the Old Testament says the Hebrew word.Rom 11:17Jdg 9:8Jdg 9:9
both appear in the vision of two olive trees standing before the Lord, the image Zechariah gives beside the lampstand and that Revelation takes up for its two witnesses.Rev 11:4Zec 4:3Zec 4:11
names the olive tree as a picture of God's covenant people, a cultivated tree whose broken branches let wild branches be grafted in to share its root and richness.Rom 11:17Rom 11:24
stands for the fixed kind of fruit a plant yields, in the argument that no source produces what does not belong to it, so a fig tree cannot bear olives.Jas 3:12
Names the living tree and its fruit as an ordinary crop: groves that were planted, inherited, and eaten from.Deu 6:11Jos 24:13Neh 9:25
Stands behind the oil. The clear, crushed oil burned in the lamp of the sanctuary is named for this tree, and the land itself is praised as a land of olive oil.Exo 27:20Lev 24:2Deu 8:8
Carries the whole picture of harvest: beating the branches to bring the fruit down, and the two or three berries left at the top afterward.Deu 24:20Isa 17:6Isa 24:13
Works as an image for a flourishing life or a flourishing nation: a person is a green olive tree, children are olive shoots around the table, and Israel is a leafy olive God once named as his own.Psa 52:8Psa 128:3Jer 11:16
A failed olive crop is a standard sign of judgment and wasted labor: you will tread the olives and still have no oil to rub on your skin.Deu 28:40Mic 6:15Hab 3:17
Small enough to be held in a beak or carried in an armful: a single leaf brought back to the ark, branches gathered off the hills to build shelters.Gen 8:11Neh 8:15
Both
Both stand behind the name of the same ridge east of Jerusalem. The Hebrew word supplies the phrase for it in the Old Testament, the slope David climbs and the hill the LORD is said to stand on, and the Greek word is what the Gospels use for that identical hill.2Sa 15:30Zec 14:4Mat 21:1Luk 19:37
In each language the name works only because real olive trees covered that slope, so the place is called after a crop rather than after a person or a battle.Zec 14:4Luk 19:29
Both mark the hill as the road a rejected king takes out of the city in sorrow: David goes up it weeping with his head covered, and Jesus goes out to it on the night he is handed over.2Sa 15:30Mrk 14:26Luk 22:39
In the New Testament this word never names a plant. Every single use points to one hill east of Jerusalem, the slope travelers cross between the city and the villages behind it.Mat 21:1Mrk 11:1Jhn 8:1
It has hardened into a proper place name, "Olivet", used the way a town name is used: Luke calls the hill by that name outright, and Acts even measures the walking distance from it back to Jerusalem.Luk 19:29Luk 21:37Act 1:12
It fixes the setting for the final week before the crucifixion: the entry into Jerusalem is staged from there, the long teaching about the end is given sitting on its slope, and the nights are spent there.Mat 24:3Mrk 13:3Luk 21:37
What scholars say about zayit
The standard lexica are unanimous that זַיִת denotes the cultivated olive (Olea europaea) and, by metonymy, its fruit and the toponym הַר הַזֵּיתִים; HALOT, BDB, and DCH catalog the tree, the berry, and the place name as facets of one lexeme rather than as homonyms. The word reflects a common Semitic stock, with cognates across the family, and its agricultural and symbolic weight is treated in the standard surveys of biblical flora. Scholarly discussion turns not on the meaning, which is secure, but on realia: cultivation, the technology of pressing, and the economic and covenantal significance of the olive in an agrarian society.
Sources
HALOT, s.v. זַיִתlexicon
BDB, s.v. זַיִתlexicon
DCH, s.v. זַיִתlexicon
Michael Zohary, Plants of the Bible (Cambridge University Press, 1982)monograph