Acacia

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.

The acacia carries a distinct symbolic life in Freemasonry, where a sprig of acacia figures in the legend of Hiram Abiff, the builder of Solomon's Temple, as a marker of his grave and, by extension, as an emblem of the immortality of the soul, the evergreen or reviving branch standing for life beyond death. This Masonic meaning, developed in the eighteenth century, draws on the older Near Eastern and biblical resonance of the tree without being continuous with it. The thread running through all these uses, desert survival, sacred construction, the tree of life, the emblem of immortality, is the acacia's toughness: a tree that endures where little else does became, unsurprisingly, a sign of what endures.

Gum arabic remains a genuinely important modern industrial material, used today as a stabiliser and emulsifier in the soft drinks industry, in printing inks and in pharmaceuticals, so that the same exudate once prized in ancient Egyptian ink and medicine now quietly performs a very similar chemical role, holding pigments or flavour oils in suspension, inside products as ordinary as a canned soda. The great majority of the world's gum arabic still comes from Sudan and the wider Sahel region, a modern trade route running along much the same belt of dry acacia country the tree has always favoured.