ets

Hebrew uses one word for the whole world of trees, and lets the surrounding words do the narrowing: the tree of the field, the tree of the forest, a leafy tree, a tree that bears fruit. Where English reaches for a separate name (orchard, timberland, sapling), Hebrew keeps the same general word and adds a describing phrase. Names for particular kinds do exist, such as the cedar (אֶרֶז) and the terebinth, and a stand of trees has its own word (יַעַר), but the ordinary word for a growing tree covers all of them.

Because a tree is the largest and longest lived thing growing in the landscape, it becomes the Bible's readiest picture of a human life and of a nation's fortunes. The same word turns up in four settings that recur again and again:

• the ordinary tree a traveler shelters under, or the orchard a wartime law protects
• the tree at a hilltop shrine, where the word carries the sting of worship gone wrong
• the tree a person or a kingdom is compared to, flourishing beside water or standing dried out
• the two named trees in the middle of the garden, the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil

The shrine tree deserves a word of its own. A recurring phrase condemns Israel for worshiping "under every green tree," and a related law forbids planting a worship pole (אֲשֵׁרָה) of any kind of tree beside God's altar. The word itself is neutral; it is the setting that makes these trees a target of the prophets.

Hebrew has no separate word for cut wood. The living cedar on the mountain and the beam sawn from it are called the same thing, and only the sentence around the word tells a reader which is meant. Greek splits the two: one word for the growing tree (δένδρον) and another for timber, a beam, a stick (ξύλον). Translators of the Old Testament into Greek mostly used the second, so even the trees of the garden come out as "wood" there. Aramaic, in the parts of Ezra written in that language, uses a related word (אָע) that names only the timber.

There is a rough tendency for the singular to lean toward the living tree and the plural toward wood or sticks, but it is only a tendency and plenty of verses run the other way. The safer guide is the setting: wood is carried, bought, split, stacked, burned, carved, and paid for by weight, while a tree is planted, grows, bears, and is felled.

One use of "wood" is deliberately insulting. When the prophets want to strip a foreign god of its dignity they refuse to call the image a god or even a carved figure (פֶּסֶל), and call it what it is made of: wood, alongside stone. The craftsman who fells a cedar, burns half of it for warmth, and bows down to the other half is the sharpest version of that argument.

In Israelite law and narrative this is not a method of killing but a way of publishing a death. The person is executed first, then the corpse is hung up on a pole for everyone to see. A law in Deuteronomy limits the practice: the body must come down before sunset, because a man hung up this way is under God's curse and would defile the land. Joshua takes down the bodies of defeated kings at sunset for exactly that reason.

In the book of Esther the picture shifts. The setting is the Persian court, the structure is unusually tall, and the sentence is death itself rather than the display of a body already dead. English Bibles reach for "gallows" here, which is the sense the older lexicons record as a late one.

This is the meaning with the longest afterlife. The Greek Old Testament rendered the word with its ordinary word for cut wood (ξύλον), and the New Testament writers used that same word, quoting the Deuteronomy law, to speak of the cross. The line from a pole of public shame to the cross runs through this word, and a reader meeting "tree" in a passage about crucifixion is meeting the end of that chain, not the Hebrew word's own reference.