272 SCRIPTURE NATURAL HISTORY. 



THE OLIVE TREE. 



THE Apostle Paul distinguishes olive trees as of two kinds (Rom 

 xi. 24 ;) the wild or natural, and those under care and culture. The 

 cultivated olive tree is of a moderate height, its trunk knotty, its 

 bark smooth and ash-colored, and its wood solid and of a yellowish 

 color. The leaves are oblong, almost like those of the willow, of a 

 green color, dark on the upper side, and white beneath. In the 

 month of June it puts out white flowers that grow in bunches. 

 Each flower is of one piece, widening upwards, and dividing into 

 four parts. The fruit is oblong and plurnp ; first green, then pale, 

 and when quite ripe, black. The wild olive is smaller in all its 

 parts. 



It does not appear that Egypt was ever remarkable for the culti- 

 vation of this tree. They abounded, however, in Syria, and are of 

 better quality there than in any part of the Levant. 



The scripture references to the olive tree are frequent. The roy- 

 al Psalmist and some of the sacred writers speak with rapture of the 

 green olive tree. 



So, in the fifty-second Psalm, David describes a wicked man, as 

 soon to wither away and disappear; while he himself should belike 

 a young vigorous olive tree, which had long to live and to flourish. 

 The beauty of the olive tree, is alluded to in other passages of scrip- 

 ture, and consisted in the spread of its branches, and not in its col- 

 or: 'His branches shall spread, and his beauty shall be as the olive 

 tree,' Hos. xiv. 6. When the Psalmist says, ' I shall be anointed 

 with green (Eng. tr. fresh] oil' (Ps. xcii. 10), where there is the same 

 word in the original, we cannot suppose that he means oil of a green 

 color. The word rather means precious, fragrant oil, such as that 

 used by princes in times of prosperity : fragrant as a field, which the 

 Lord has blessed, a flowery field, in all its verdure, to the smell of 

 which Isaac compared the smell of the perfumed clothes Jacob had 

 on when his father blessed him, Gen. xxvii. 27. It is natural to sup- 

 pose that most, if not all, the oil that was used for the purpose of 



