levonah

This word comes from the Hebrew root for the color white, and it names the pale, milky resin that oozes from cuts made in Boswellia trees before hardening into amber colored tears. The trees themselves grew only in southern Arabia and parts of the Horn of Africa, so every bit of it that reached Israel had traveled a long caravan route through Sheba, which is why the Bible so often pairs frankincense with gold as the height of imported luxury.

In Israel's worship law, frankincense marks an offering as joyful rather than solemn. It is laid on top of the regular grain offering and burned along with a handful of flour and oil as a token portion given entirely to God, and it sits on the loaves of the Bread of the Presence each week before the loaves are eaten. It is also one ingredient, alongside three others, in the fragrant incense (קְטֹרֶת) burned inside the sanctuary. Yet the law pointedly withholds it from a sin offering brought by someone too poor to afford an animal, and from the unusual offering brought when a wife is suspected of unfaithfulness. Scholars are not agreed on exactly why it is left out in each case, but its absence is never an oversight: leaving out frankincense tells a worshiper what kind of occasion this is before anything else in the ritual does.

The prophets use the word both to accuse and to promise. Isaiah and Jeremiah complain that Israel brought frankincense from far away while ignoring justice and loyalty to God, as though an expensive gift could substitute for obedience. Yet Isaiah also pictures a future when the nations stream to Jerusalem bringing gold and frankincense as tribute, and after Jerusalem fell, Jeremiah describes pilgrims still carrying grain and frankincense to worship at the ruined temple site, showing how deeply the practice had taken root even without a standing altar.

The Song of Songs borrows all of this costly, priestly vocabulary and turns it toward love. There the beloved's body is pictured as a mountain of myrrh (מֹר) and a hill of frankincense, and a garden full of frankincense trees, using the resin's reputation for expense and fragrance to praise a person rather than an offering. Whether the poet means to evoke the temple on purpose or is simply using the standard luxury language of ancient love poetry is itself debated, but either way the shift shows how far a single word for a fragrant, foreign resin could travel, from the altar to a love song.