Every major lexicon flags נֵרְדְּ as a loanword of foreign origin. BDB glosses it "nard, an odorific plant from India (via Persia)," derives it from Sanskrit naladá (with Persian nârdîn and Sabean and Arabic cognates), and holds that Greek νάρδος arrived through Semitic intermediaries, a line of argument reaching back to Lewy's Die semitischen Fremdwörter im Griechischen and Löw's botanical studies. Noonan's Non-Semitic Loanwords in the Hebrew Bible (2019), the current standard treatment, assigns it to his Old Indic donor category, one of a small cluster of trade-goods terms. Klein preserves the live question of direction, deriving Hebrew נרד together with Aramaic נרדא and Akkadian lardu from an Indo-Iranian narda while recording Mayrhofer's counter-view that the Semitic forms themselves come from Old Indic naladam. The mismatch between Hebrew n- and Akkadian l-, measured against Mankowski's strict phonetic criteria (Akkadian Loanwords in Biblical Hebrew, 2000) and Kaufman's Akkadian Influences on Aramaic (1974), favours parallel borrowing of a culture-word over a direct Akkadian route into Hebrew; CAD glosses lardu as an aromatic grass or reed, botanically distinct from the Himalayan Nardostachys. On identification, Zohary (Plants of the Bible, 1982) and Musselman take both the Old and New Testament nard as Nardostachys jatamansi, a valerian-group plant of the Himalayan alpine zone whose oil is distilled from root and rhizome, and Zohary lists it among plants never grown in the land but imported as drug or spice; Hepper (Baker Encyclopedia of Bible Plants, 1992) proposes Cymbopogon schoenanthus, camel grass of the Arabian and North African deserts, citing the Assyrian lardu, while conceding that a late date for the Song leaves the Indian identification entirely possible. Dioscorides distinguishes three nards (Syrian, Celtic, mountain) and Pliny (Natural History 12.26) twelve varieties including adulterants, which is part of why the identification stays open. On the Song's spice catalogue, Rabin argued that Song 4:13 and 4:14 read like a South Arabian caravan merchant's bill of goods and attest first-millennium trade in Indian goods; Pope (Anchor Bible) and Fox read the garden and its spices as an extended figure for the woman's body, with the nard of 1:12 standing for the lover himself, and the older commentary tradition treats the garden as wholly ideal. The morphology of Song 4:13 is itself discussed: the plural נְרָדִים beside the plural of כֹּפֶר (henna) is read as "nard plants" in the UBS Translation Handbook and standard lexical apparatus, against a generic or variety reading of the plural. On price and trade, Pliny puts nard spikes at 100 denarii a pound, and Casson's edition of the Periplus Maris Erythraei documents Gangetic nard shipped from the mouth of the Ganges and Kashmiri nard moving through Barygaza, Muziris and Nelkynda into Roman Egypt. The Septuagint renders the word νάρδος throughout the Song, and Mark 14:3 with John 12:3 read μύρου νάρδου πιστικῆς πολυτίμου, where πιστικῆς remains a crux surveyed without consensus by Marcus (Anchor Yale Bible), Brown (Anchor Bible) and BDAG, the proposals running from "genuine, unadulterated" through "drinkable," a place name or local term, a derivation from Pistacia, and a brand name. In reception, the Targum to the Song and Song of Songs Rabbah read 1:12 of Sinai and the golden calf, Rabbi Meir taking nard's scent as foul and Rabbi Yehuda as fine, while Origen and Gregory of Nyssa read the fragrance allegorically as the soul's devotion and the emanations of virtue.