The acacia is a thorny, drought-hardy tree of dry country, and in the Hebrew Bible it is the shittim wood from which the most sacred furniture of Israel is made: the Ark of the Covenant, the Tabernacle's frames and the altar are all built of acacia and overlaid with gold, the one good timber available in the wilderness of the Exodus. Its hardness and resistance to decay, the same qualities that recommend cedar, made it fit to hold what was holiest. In Egypt the acacia was a tree of life associated with birth and with Osiris, and gum arabic, the exudate of certain acacias, was an important material of ink, medicine and ritual.
The exact acacia of the Exodus narrative is most often identified today as Vachellia tortilis, the umbrella thorn, or a close relative, common across the Sinai and the wider Near Eastern desert, though the identification rests on habitat and availability rather than any surviving specimen. The genus name itself became the subject of real botanical controversy in the early twenty-first century, when international taxonomists voted to reserve the name Acacia for the Australian wattles, reclassifying most African and Asian species, including the biblical shittim tree, under the older name Vachellia, a technical reshuffling still disputed and not universally followed even now.