Trees bring life. Trees bring a curse. Trees provide protection and cleansing. Trees are where you meet with God. All of this is picked up in the New Testament assertion that Jesus died on a tree (Galatians 3).

The Bible is dominated by stories and symbols. Those symbols are embedded in story, they don’t exist on their own, but they gain their meaning through the procession of the narrative of the cosmos. We read their meaning into them because of story.

As an aside, I wonder if this means that an eschatological ontology trumps a sacramental one, but that will need some thinking about.

Three of the Bible’s biggest symbols are the tree, the table, and the sea. In this post I’m attempting to chart some of the features of the story of the tree. Since there are lots of ways to do that, I’ve restricted myself to first considering the Hebrew word ets, meaning tree, or wood. This is the easiest story to trace because you can get there through word study—for all this misses the use of particular trees to mean particular things, especially in the prophets.

We first meet the tree in Genesis 1, planted in the ground and yielding fruit. We notice that they have seed. We then notice that humans are described in tree-like terms. Then the trees are given to Adam and Eve to eat from.

In Genesis 2 there are suddenly two trees in the middle of the garden. They form temple architecture, the holy-of-holies is the space between two trees rather than two cherubim. One is the tree of life, the other the tree of the knowledge of good and bad (or ‘wisdom’). The second is not for food but all the others are.

The drama continues into the next chapter, with the fall intertwined with these two trees and their fruit.

We next meet trees when Noah cuts them down to build an ark from them, which is the first hint we’ve had that things can be made from trees, they don’t just grow fruit. There’s something here of the maturing world, perhaps, especially when we think of the way Noah acts like a maturer Adam after the flood. Even if that’s overreading, we see that the life of the tree can be used to make a way through the waters of death. The connection between the cross and baptism is already being sketched in story even if it doesn’t come to fruition until many years later.

The next trees we meet have Abraham meeting God under them at Mamre. It’s like Eden again, with God under the trees leading to rest and the consuming of much bread. Then the trees that Abraham cuts, that Isaac carries, and that are built into a bonfire for a sacrifice: the trees that are used to kill the ram with the thorny crown. It writes itself: the cross that Jesus carries, that the lamb of God is killed on. That’s the second time trees are used to make something. Baptism, then the cross.

Read More