The noun φοινιξ (phoinix) refers to the palm-tree, and either the whole tree or a branch of one (perhaps comparable to how in Hebrew the word זית, zayit, means olive, both the tree and the fruit). This word φοινιξ (phoinix) occurs in the New Testament in John 12:13 and Revelation 7:9 only, both times in scenes in which people wave or hold palm branches. The meaning of this is not explained by the authors, which suggests that waving or holding palm branches was a perfectly normal and even expected thing to do under certain circumstances. Evidently everybody was in on it and nobody took to waving branches from some other tree, even other objects like curtains or clothing or banners and weaponry. There was something very specific and established about the palm, and we moderns have no idea what that might have been.

But the palm is actually not a tree but a kind of grass, which puts it on a literary par with Egypt's papyrus: the plant among whose leaves the infant Moses was found (and see our articles on βιβλος, biblos, paper, and Pergamum, for more on that). There are many kinds and varieties of palms but in general the palm is most recognizably signified by its evergreen crown of fronds (a frond is a large, divided leaf) that sits exuberantly atop a straight trunk that has no branches and does not get any wider (trees get wider but grasses don't).

Trees are hugely important in the Scriptures, from the unique Tree of Life to Abraham's formidable terebinths, the lowly sycamore trees of Amos and Zaccheus (compare Amos 7:14 to 1 Kings 10:27), and the majestic Lebanese cedars from which Solomon and Hiram constructed the Temple of YHWH. The Hebrew word for tree is עץ ('es), whereas the word for bone is עצם ('esem), which is also the word for noun, which helps to explain Ezekiel's valley of dry bones. One of a few words for oak or terebinth is the feminine noun אלה ('elah), which is identical to the masculine one meaning God (or Eloah), and note that Paul makes a direct link between the cross of Christ and a tree (Galatians 3:13 via Deuteronomy 21:22-23). In such a broad arena of meaning, a tree with many branches that is home to a variety of animals like squirrels and birds may represent a language basin with many dialects or a culture with its host of fashions and specifications and specializations. In that same sense, the palm tree may represent the principle of tradition: a crown of rituals that is carried through time without variation by succeeding generations.

Our noun φοινιξ (phoinix) most specifically denotes the date palm, whose energy-dense fruits could be stored for a very long time without them going bad. This allowed merchants to embark on long distance travel, and that in turn greatly helped the formation of the modern world (hence Abraham, the proverbial father of many nations, is also the father of international trade). Tradition, or repeating rituals and formal prayers at set times, is what preserves the sanity and civility of travelers through the wilderness (ερημος, eremos), and a wilderness not merely describes any stretch of barren sand but also the absence of any formative lawfulness (and that includes language and science) within a primitive human society.

As we discuss in our article on the name Phoenicia, in Job 29:18, the protagonist Job considers to "die in my nest" and multiply days as the dot-dot-dot. What the dot-dot-dot is supposed to point at is not immediately clear, and Job 29:18 varies significantly across translations. The Hebrew for dot-dot-dot is a mystery noun derived from the common verb חול (hul). This verb may mean to whirl or swirl, and yields nouns that describe the sand of a sand storm, or dancers in a dance, or anything semi-wild but cohesively whirling. A second and identical verb (that's perhaps the same verb but slightly differently applied) means to be strong or stiff, or perhaps cohesive or seemingly solid (in the case of whirling sand or dancers). From this second version comes the very common noun חיל (hayil), which means might or mighty (as in the proverbial term "mighty-man"). Translations of Job 29:18 fall into three groups:

• The KJV, NAS, NIV and many other modern English translations read "I shall die in my nest, and I shall multiply [my] days as the sand."
• The Septuagint, Vulgate and several Catholic translations read "I shall die in my nest, and as a palm tree shall multiply my days".
• Most Hebrew commentators, the JSP and some English translations like the NAB and NRSV have "I shall die with my nest, and I shall multiply my days as the phoenix."

Perhaps non-Hebrew scholars and commentators shied away from references to the phoenix on account of it being suspiciously mythological, but that doesn't seem fair. The Bible also speaks of creatures like Lilith the night witch, Rahab the chaos monster and Leviathan the primeval serpent, not to mention Christ's resurrection from the dead (which is what the phoenix was famous for), and the rather unnaturally green (χλωρος, chloros) horse of the apocalypse (Revelation 6:8).

The Hebrew word for wilderness is מדבר (midbar), which derives from the root דבר (dabar), meaning "word" or science, of which the Greek equivalent is the familiar term Logos. The gospel of Luke tells that Jesus had twelve disciples and sent out seventy apostles, which obviously hails back to the oasis called Elim, which contained twelve springs and seventy date palms — the seventy in turn ties into the world's proverbial seventy nations; see our article on εβδομηκοντα (hebdomekonta), seventy.

The Hebrew word for the palm tree and its fruits is the masculine noun תמר (tamar), which became the decidedly feminine name Tamar. This name belonged to (1) the woman who pretended to be a prostitute and ended up becoming the arch-mother of the tribe Judah, and (2) one daughter and one niece of king David. Another ostensibly feminine link to the palm tree occurs in the description of the seat of Deborah, the female judge who was seated beneath a palm tree and whose general Barak ultimately defeated the armies of the Canaanite king Jabin. The latter's general, Sisera, was killed by Jael, also a woman.

In Hebrew, masculinity tends to refer to individuality and the legislation of a central "fatherly" government and hence formal schools of thought, whereas femininity tends to refer to communality and "motherly" society and thus decentralized people movements and informal fashions of thought, rumors and legends. To anyone fluent in Hebrew, the word תמר (tamar), palm, looks very much like a small number of nouns and verbal inflexions of the verb מרר (marar), to be strong or bitter, hence also names like Mara (that's Naomi), Miriam and Mary: all belonging to women who played crucial roles in the perpetuity of Israel but always as cradle or vehicle of some law-enforcing man who held all the practical power (Boaz, Moses, Jesus).

The origin of our noun φοινιξ (phoinix), palm, is a mystery. It managed to morph into the name Phoenicia (and the Phoenix bird), which in turn are closely associated with the Phoenicians' famous red and purple dyes, which were considered the colors of regalness all over the classic world (hence also the red feathers of Fawkes the Phoenix and the red outfits of Catholic cardinals). This agrees with the strong Biblical association between palms and governance, or at least the sort of feminine (i.e. popular or societal) governance in which the male center-of-power was contained (hence the white of the pope). But these Phoenician dyes came from a creature called Murex, not from a palm tree. And so the mystery abides.

Our word φοινιξ (phoinix), palm, has long been noted to be rather similar to the adjective φοινος (phoinos), meaning blood-red (Iliad.16.159) in the sense of looking deadly or murderous. This word in turn has been long associated with the noun φονος (phonos), meaning a murder or a slaying — although technically these words may actually come from different origins and have converged only by merit of the poetic tastes of Greek speakers. But that would link our word for palm with the verb φενω (pheno), to slay. And this word, peculiarly, is rather similar to the verb φαινω (phaino), to emit light.

Still, it's unknown what came first: our word for palm, or the word for murderous red things, or the Egyptian word fnhw that may have denoted the Phoenicians specifically, or any far-away land, or any carpenters or wood-cutters (explains Andrea Ercolani in her delightfully complete Phoinikes: the history of an ethnonym, 2023). The color red is of course of great importance in the Bible: see our articles on names like Adam, Red Sea, Rhodes, but how the decidedly green palm tree became embroiled in all this remains unclear. And ultimately also where the word φοινιξ (phoinix) came from.

Here at Abarim Publications we don't know either, of course, but our default position is that the vast majority of Greek words of unclear origin were imported into Greek from the Semitic basin along with the alphabet and by the Phoenicians, with whom the pre-Greeks and Greeks lavishly traded (see our article on the many Hebrew roots of the Greek language). And speaking of murderous things: there is only one reference to writing in Homer, as he speaks of "fatal tokens; many murderous signs incised in a folded tablet" (Il.6.169). Why Homer thought that writing was a series of murderous signs has never been properly explained (but see our article on πιναξ, pinax, tablet). Perhaps Homer lamented the demise of dialectal diversity that any kind of standardization inevitably must bring about. Others (particularly the Bible writers) argued that the opposite is true: that anyone's willful submission to general rules rather brings about freedom: see this further discussed in our article on the word ελευθερια (eleutheria), meaning freedom-by-law.

The national deity of the Greeks was Apollo, and one would think that tradition had ascribed him a birthplace of comparable greatness. But no. Apollo and his twin sister Artemis were reportedly born on the entirely insignificant island of Delos. But that island's name is also the adjective δηλος (delos), which means conspicuous, obvious, manifest, evident or clearly visible. And when mother Leto gave birth, she did so beneath a palm tree.

Apollo was the god of many things, including poetry. But his name may mean Destroyer, which connects him to anything murderous. The actual Greek god of writing, however, was a Phoenician prince who had given the Greeks the alphabet: Cadmus who was the brother of Phoenix and princess Europa.

Writing is learned by constant repetition. Indeed, when the Phoenicians taught the world writing, their devotion to information technology competed with the world's religious cults and could scarcely be told apart. Their demands upon students was indistinguishable from the religious rituals prescribed by any other priests, and the promises of a glorious world as the result of their information technology sounded just like the gold mountains promised by the peddlers of religion (Exodus 19:6).

We have already seen that palm trees may have symbolized the principle of tradition, and dates may have symbolized the repeated rituals and prayers that sustained exiles and travelers on their journeys away from home. It was probably also noted that wandering humans would create permanent settlements precisely where spontaneous clusters of palm trees marked wet and fertile patches in the wilderness. That all suggests that in the Semitic mind, our tree may have been associated to the verb פנה (pana), meaning to turn. This would rather marvelously match the idea of the verb we previously encountered, namely חול (hul), to swirl. The "-ix" suffix is a familiar pre-Greek element that could quite comfortably explain the further formation of our noun φοινιξ (phoinix). It essentially means "turner" or even "converter".