Zacchaeus's Tree, and the Shade of the Dead

The Egyptian sycamore fig marked the boundary between the living and the dead: pairs of them were said to stand at the eastern gate of heaven through which the sun-god passed, and coffins were made of its wood so that the dead might return to the body of the tree-goddess who had nourished them in life. In the Gospel of Luke the sycamore is the tree that the short tax-collector Zacchaeus climbs to see Jesus over the crowd, most likely the sycamore fig of the region. The tree of the sky-goddess, of the nourished dead and of Zacchaeus's sight, the sycamore fig carries a rich Egyptian and biblical symbolism quite distinct from the ornamental maples and planes that share its English name.

A specific sycamore fig said to have sheltered the Holy Family during the flight into Egypt is still shown to pilgrims at Matariyya, now a district of Cairo, its site marked by a church and, in some tellings, by a much younger tree grown from a cutting of an older one that died, a living devotional tradition rather than a claim of unbroken botanical continuity across two thousand years. The sycamore fig remains a common and long-lived tree across modern Egypt, Israel and the wider eastern Mediterranean, its shade and edible, if modest, fruit still valued much as they were in antiquity, an ordinary working tree that happens also to carry an extraordinary weight of story.