Divinity Atlas
Botany Is Named by Three Open Questions, All Guesses About the Same Kind of Word
Three open questions in this atlas name Botany as the discipline that could resolve them: which plant the Hebrew Bible's hyssop actually names, which flower the Sermon on the Mount's lily of the field means, and which Commiphora species supplied the myrrh of antiquity. None of the three shares a text or a tradition. All three share the same shape of problem: an ancient word for a plant, either a poor botanical match or not a botanical name at all, with no ancient description precise enough to settle which species is meant.
A Named Plant That Does Not Fit Its Own Name
The Hebrew ezov is rendered hyssop by long translation convention, but Hyssopus officinalis is not native to the southern Levant and does not match the plant's described uses. Origanum syriacum, Syrian oregano, fits the ecology and the ritual use better and is the leading candidate, but the identification rests on inference rather than on any ancient description precise enough to settle it. What would resolve it is a botanical description in an ancient source specific enough to exclude the alternatives, or archaeobotanical remains from a ritual context identifiable to species.
A General Word Standing In for No Particular Flower
The Greek krinon is a general word for a showy flower rather than a botanical name. Anemone coronaria is the most commonly proposed candidate on grounds of local abundance in Galilean fields, but Lilium candidum and several others remain in the running, and the text gives no distinguishing detail. Nothing in the text itself can settle it; the question would move only on evidence about which flowers were locally called krinon in first-century Galilean usage, evidence philology would have to supply rather than botany alone. The myrrh question is the same problem from the trade side rather than the text side: the genus Commiphora has several resin-producing species and the ancient sources do not distinguish them, and a genetic study of the modern commercial trade found only a small proportion of samples matching the pharmacopoeia species, so even today's trade is not one thing. What would resolve it is species-level identification of resin residues from a securely dated archaeological context, ideally from more than one trade period, the same kind of physical evidence the hyssop question is also waiting on.