Pomegranate
Plants and Trees in the Bible
The pomegranate is a small tree, growing to about 3–5 meters (10–17 feet) tall, with narrow, dark green leaves and many thorny branches. It has a lovely red flower. The fruit is a bit smaller than an orange and has a hard skin, which must be cut open to get at the tightly-packed pockets of seeds inside, each seed enclosed in a little bag of juicy pulp. The end of the fruit has a distinctive flower-like shape. The hard skin, which turns from green to red as it ripens, is used as a tanning agent, for medicine, and for ink. The seeds were sometimes made into wine. Pomegranate trees live up to two hundred years.
Pictures
In the Bible
The Hebrew and Greek words for it, and every verse where each is used
רִמּוֹן rimmon · 25 verses
ροΐσκος roiskos · 1 verse
What it stands for
The pomegranate was one of the seven “special” foods mentioned in that the Israelites would find in Canaan. The fruit was one of several brought back to the camp of the Israelites by the men who scouted out Canaan (). In it is a place name. In the bride of the king is said to have cheeks like halves of a pomegranate, a reference, probably, to their red color. The flower-shaped end of the pomegranate fruit made it an attractive decoration, for example on the fringe of the priests’ robes ( ) and on the columns and furniture of the Temple (). One of the earliest artifacts we have of the Temple in Jerusalem is a pomegranate-shaped carving considered to be the head of a staff. The prophet Joel mentions the pomegranate as one of five species that were dying because of a drought and a locust plague ().
In Jewish tradition the pomegranate stands for righteousness, because it is said to have 613 seeds, corresponding to the 613 commands of the Torah. For this reason and others many Jews eat pomegranates on the Jewish New Year Festival (Rosh Hashanah). Jewish tradition also holds that the pointed calyx of the pomegranate is the original “design” for a royal crown.
The Babylonians believed chewing pomegranate seeds before battle made them invincible. The Qur’an mentions pomegranates three times, twice as examples of the good things God creates, once as a fruit found in the Garden of Paradise.
More about it
The Pomegranate Punica granatum has been grown from ancient times across the Middle East over to Iran and into northern India. It is widely cultivated throughout India and the drier parts of Southeast Asia, Malaya, the East Indies, and tropical Africa. Pomegranates are now found throughout the warm parts of southern Europe and across North Africa and Asia all the way to Nepal. Images of pomegranate fruits have been found in Pharaoh’s temple in Karnak, Egypt, dating from around 1480 B.C. In classical Latin the species name was malum punium (apple of Puni) or malum granatum (seedy apple). This has influenced the common name for pomegranate in many languages (for example, German Granatapfel, “seeded apple”). The English word “pomegranate” itself comes from Latin pomum (fruit, apple) via Old French; (compare pomme in French). The Arabic rummân passed into some other languages, including Portuguese romã.
Also in Domestic trees and shrubs
Sources
Plants and Trees in the Bible, Animals in the Bible and Human-made Things in the Bible © United Bible Societies, 2025 (adapted from Each According to its Kind: Plants and Trees in the Bible by Robert Koops, All Creatures Great and Small: Living Things in the Bible by Edward R. Hope, and The Works of Their Hands: Man-made Things in the Bible by Ray Pritz), CC BY-SA 4.0; adapted for eRhema