The Incorruptible Wood

The cedar of Lebanon is Cedrus libani, a great aromatic conifer whose timber is fragrant, straight-grained and strongly resistant to rot and insects, the practical facts behind its sacred standing. Those qualities made it the prestige building material of the ancient Near East: Solomon's Temple and palace were built of Lebanese cedar floated down the coast, as the books of Kings describe in detail, and the cedar recurs in the Hebrew Bible as an image of strength, height and righteousness, the righteous flourishing like the cedar of Lebanon in Psalm 92. In the Epic of Gilgamesh the hero's great transgression is the felling of the guarded Cedar Forest and the killing of its guardian Humbaba.

The cedar forests that supplied Solomon and the ancient Near East have been reduced by millennia of logging to a small fraction of their original extent, and the best-known surviving stand, the Cedars of God in the Kadisha Valley of Lebanon, is now a UNESCO World Heritage site and a nature reserve, protecting some of the last old-growth trees of a species that once covered whole mountainsides, a modern conservation postscript to a tree that supplied empires. Several of the reserve's oldest cedars are themselves reckoned many centuries old, living relics of the forest that furnished the Phoenician ships and Solomon's Temple alike.