Mulberry
Plants and Trees in the Bible
The black mulberry is a large, broad tree (6 meters [20 feet] high) that produces flowers and leaves in spring and loses its leaves every year in winter. The crown is broad and low. The trunk gets twisted as it grows old and may rot away, only to be replaced by another one from the same root. People pile stones up in order to support the low branches of old trees. The leaves are stiff, rough, and hairy. The flowers are pollinated by the wind, and the fruit is a rather tart, black berry about the size of a large cashew nut. In Europe and North America, people use mulberries mostly to make pies and wine. A different species, the white mulberry, has a whitish fruit.
The black mulberry tree is similar in size and shape to the sycomore fig (see 2.11 Sycomore fig). In fact, the translators of the Septuagint introduced considerable confusion by translating the Hebrew word shiqmah as sucaminos (; ; ; ; ; ; ). The confusion has been perpetuated in languages like German that refer to the sycomore fig as the “mulberry fig.”
Pictures
In the Bible
The Hebrew and Greek words for it, and every verse where each is used
מְסֻכָּן mesukan · 1 verse
μόρον moron · 1 verse
συκάμινος sukaminos · 1 verse
What it stands for
The New Testament reference to the mulberry in occurs in Jesus’ parable about faith. “If you had faith like a mustard seed,” he said, “you could say to this mulberry tree (sucaminos), ‘Get up and throw yourself into the sea,’ and it would do so.”
tells us that soldiers showed the bright red juice of the mulberry to their elephants in order to provoke them to fight.
In China the main use of the mulberry tree (a white subspecies) is to feed the leaves to a certain type of caterpillar that produces silk threads. These threads are woven into cloth. There is evidence that in the early centuries of the Christian era the Mediterranean island of Cos and the Phoenician city of Sidon had industries that used a local type of silk moth, which fed on black mulberry leaves. Hepper (page 169) surmises that the silk referred to in may have come from the precursors of these local industries.
More about it
The references to mulberry in the Scriptures are all controversial. However, Zohary, on the basis of cognate words in Sumerian (messikanu, sukannu) confidently associates the Hebrew word mesukan in with the mulberry tree, as did Thompson before him. Further, they take the Greek word sucaminos in as also cognate with Sumerian sukannu. Like the apple, the pomegranate, the fig and the pistachio, the Black Mulberry Morus nigra may have been introduced into the Holy Land from one of the neighboring countries like Persia (now Iran).
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