Galbanum

Exodus 30 gives a formula: stacte, onycha, galbanum and pure frankincense, in equal parts, beaten small, salted, and burned before the ark. The rabbinic tradition adds that the temple compound ran to eleven ingredients rather than four, and the Talmud preserves both the list and the family who held the recipe.

Galbanum is the awkward one. It is the gum resin of Ferula species from Persia and Central Asia, and by itself it smells green, bitter and slightly rank, which nobody disputes. The tradition does not treat this as a defect to be explained away. A well known homiletic reading takes the presence of a foul-smelling ingredient in the incense of the sanctuary to mean that a fast of the community which does not include its sinners is not a fast of the community, and the point is made from the incense rather than illustrated by it.

That is an unusual thing for a ritual recipe to be doing, and it is why galbanum keeps appearing in commentary far out of proportion to its importance as a material.

In perfumery the same quality is an asset. Galbanum is a classic green top note, sharp and vegetal, and it is the opening of several twentieth century perfumes that were built to be bracing rather than sweet. Perfumers describe it in almost the same words the Talmud does.

Galbanum comes from Ferula gummosa and its relatives, tall umbellifers of the Iranian plateau and Central Asia, tapped by cutting the stem near the root and collecting the milky exudate as it hardens. The same genus produces asafoetida, which is the reason the smell is familiar to anyone who cooks Indian food, and silphium, the Roman contraceptive and seasoning that was harvested to extinction and is the ancient world's clearest case of a plant used up.

The temple incense is the other reason the genus matters here. The Talmud names the house of Avtinas as the family who compounded the ketoret, records that they refused to teach the method to anyone else, and reports that they were criticised for it and defended themselves on the ground that the secret would be misused. The tractate also preserves the detail that no bride of the family ever wore perfume, so that no one could say they took the temple's incense home.

Whether the eleven-ingredient recipe as transmitted can be reconstructed is doubtful, since onycha is unidentified and several other names are contested, and the question is a live one for anyone attempting it.

Ferula resins are still collected across Iran, Afghanistan and Central Asia by essentially the ancient method, and the trade is small, seasonal and largely unrecorded.