Beans
Plants and Trees in the Bible
The broad bean is an erect plant, not a vine, reaching to 1 meter (3 feet) in height. The stem branches only in the upper part. It has no tendrils like many types of bean have today. The flowers are white, and when they ripen, they form pods containing 3–6 large flat beans of a cream or tan color.
Pictures
In the Bible
The Hebrew and Greek words for it, and every verse where each is used
פּוֹל pol · 2 verses
What it stands for
In people bring food, including beans, to King David as he flees from his son Absalom. In Ezekiel is instructed to publicly make “bread” out of wheat, barley, beans, and lentils—whatever he could find—the point probably being that good quality bread will soon be scarce in Jerusalem.
More about it
Commentators and translators are unanimous in identifying the Hebrew word pol as the Broad Bean Vicia faba or Faba vulgaris. Beans were cultivated in the Middle East for millennia, and they probably originated there. No wild species are now known, and it is quite possible that the ancestors of the bean are extinct. Samples of beans have been found in excavations at Jericho dating to 7,000–8,000 years ago.
Also in Pulses
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