Hyssop

Hyssop is the plant named in the English Bible as an agent of ritual purification, though the exact species intended by the Hebrew ezov is uncertain and may have been a marjoram or savory rather than the garden hyssop, Hyssopus officinalis, later given the name. Its biblical role is unmistakable: at the first Passover the Israelites are told to take a bunch of hyssop and strike the blood on the doorposts, and the fiftieth Psalm prays, purge me with hyssop and I shall be clean. It is thus, above all, the herb of cleansing from sin and of the sparing of the firstborn.

Modern scholarship has largely resolved, though not unanimously, the old puzzle of which plant the Hebrew ezov names: since true hyssop, Hyssopus officinalis, does not grow wild in the Holy Land and is native instead to southern Europe, most botanists and biblical scholars now favour Syrian oregano, Origanum syriacum, the aromatic herb still gathered across the Levant today as za'atar, whose soft, liquid-holding leaves and rocky habitat fit every ceremonial use the text describes. Medieval Jewish commentators including Maimonides and Saadia Gaon had already identified ezov with this same herb centuries before modern botany took up the question, so the garden hyssop that later gave the plant its English name may be, strictly, a case of a translation choosing the wrong familiar plant for an unfamiliar one.

Hyssop returns at the death of Jesus: in John's Gospel the sponge of sour wine is raised to his lips on a stalk of hyssop, tying the herb of the Passover to the Passion. In Christian tradition hyssop accordingly became an emblem of penitence, humility and purification, and sprigs of it were used to sprinkle holy water in the rite of aspersion. The garden hyssop is a warm, camphor-scented shrublet of the mint family, a bee-plant and a strewing herb; Culpeper placed it under Jupiter. Its meanings, across Jewish and Christian usage alike, gather around one idea, the washing away of defilement and the making clean of what was stained.

The Latin rite of aspersion took its very words from the Psalm: the priest, sprinkling the congregation with holy water, traditionally sang Asperges me hyssopo et mundabor, purge me with hyssop and I shall be cleansed, tying the Hebrew Passover herb directly into Catholic liturgical practice that continues in some parishes today, a rare case of the same word and the same plant crossing more than three thousand years and two religious traditions without a break. The essential oil of garden hyssop, genuinely rich in pinocamphone, is regarded by modern aromatherapists as one of the more potent and, in overuse, potentially irritating essential oils, a chemical footnote quite separate from the biblical plant's ceremonial history but worth noting as a plain caution for anyone using the modern herb rather than its ancient, probably different, namesake.