pomegranate: the round, leathery-skinned fruit packed with red seeds and the tree that bears it, and the pomegranate-shaped ornaments modeled on it
This is the ordinary Hebrew word for the pomegranate, one of the fruits the Bible names to picture a rich and settled land. It covers both the tree and its fruit, and it turns up in lists of what a good country grows, in love poetry that admires the fruit's color and sweetness, and in warnings where a failed pomegranate crop signals hard times.
The same word also names the decorative pomegranates that adorned sacred objects. Small woven or golden pomegranates ringed the hem of the high priest's robe, alternating with bells, and rows of cast pomegranates decorated the tops of the two great pillars at the front of Solomon's temple. These are the fruit's likeness rather than the fruit itself, but Hebrew uses the one word for both, the way English lets a carved rose still be called a rose.
The reason the pomegranate was worth carving and embroidering is bound up with what it suggested to ancient readers: abundance, fertility, and life, from a fruit crowded with seeds. That association is never spelled out in a definition, but it is why the fruit shows up on holy garments and temple pillars and in the imagery of desire and delight.