the date palm: the tall tree of springs and hot valleys, prized for its fruit, its fronds, and its straight upright growth
This is the ordinary Hebrew word for the date palm, the tree that grows where there is water in an otherwise dry land. It appears only eight times, but always in a setting where the tree matters. Because a stand of palms means a spring, the word marks a place worth stopping at: the Israelites camp at Elim, where twelve springs and seventy palms are counted together (Exodus 15:27, Numbers 33:9). In Joel it stands in a list of the orchard trees that dry up when the land fails (Joel 1:12).
The same tree turns up in three settings, and the word does not change meaning as it moves between them:
- a living tree in the landscape, counted at a spring or dying in a ruined orchard
- the tree whose fronds are cut and carried when Israel keeps the Festival of Booths (Leviticus 23:40, Nehemiah 8:15)
- a picture of a person who stands tall and keeps bearing fruit (Psalm 92:12, Song of Songs 7:7)
The figure of speech works because of what the tree is like. A date palm has a single straight trunk with no branches down its length, a crown of long fronds at the top, and it goes on producing fruit for decades. So the psalm can promise that the righteous still bear fruit in old age, and the love poem can compare a woman's stature to a palm and then speak of climbing it to reach its clustered fruit (Song of Songs 7:8).
Two close relatives are worth keeping apart from it. There is a second, rarer Hebrew word for a palm or a palm post (תֹּמֶר), and a word for the carved palm figure worked into the walls and doors of the temple (תִּמֹרָה), which never names a living tree. The name Tamar, carried by several people and places in the Bible, is this same word used as a name.