Hammada (Salsola, Salicornia)
Plants and Trees in the Bible
There are two types of hammada. The white hammada is a leafless shrub that often grows near acacia trees. It is less than a meter (3 feet) in height and has a jointed green stem. Its tiny flowers appear around December and form small fruits with one seed having a kind of wing that catches the wind and scatters the seed. The black hammada is similar, but darker, and favors a lighter type of soil. Its distribution includes North Africa.
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In the Bible
The Hebrew and Greek words for it, and every verse where each is used
בֹּר bor · 2 verses
בֹּרִית borith · 2 verses
What it stands for
speaks of being washed by a fuller (launderer). This refers to the process by which natural oil was washed from woolen cloth before it could be dyed. The fuller took ashes from certain plants and mixed them with olive oil, forming what we would call lye or soda. He would then wash the clothes and dry them in the sun in the fuller’s field (see ). The lye used was much stronger than our soap—more like the bleach of today—and it is this “fuller’s soap” that is used in Malachi to represent the powerful cleansing God performs on his people.
More about it
The Jews of Jeremiah’s time did not have soap as we know it, since soap was invented many centuries later. However, they did prepare something like it by mixing the ashes of certain plants with olive oil. One of the plants was Hammada Hammada salicornica, commonly found in the desert and called rimth in Arabic. Hepper says any kind of household ashes would have sufficed, but bushes of the goosefoot family (Salsola and Salicornia species, saltworts, and glassworts) would have been especially effective. This is supported by Moldenke, who adds that Arabs call saltwort kali or elkali, which is where we get our chemical term alkali.
Also in Other useful plants
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