Judaism
How a Lemon (a Citron) Links Persia with Judaism
Abstract
How Darius I Invented Judaism
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, 29 February 2012
Citrus Fruits in Ancient History
A citron is not actually a lemon, although it looks like one. The citron (Citrus medica) was the first citrus fruit to come to the notice of Europeans and was for many years the only one known. It is a fragrant citrus fruit, unlike now more common citrus varieties—lemons, oranges, tangerines, limes, and grapefruit, which have been hybridized to yield pulpy and juicy segments. The citron’s pulp is dry, with little juice or none.
Although it has medical uses, the word medica does not refer to them. Linnaeus designated it medica because Theophrastus (371-287 BC)—who wrote after the conquests of Alexander had greatly extended the knowledge of the Greeks about the region of Media and Persia—gave “a very truthful and exact” description, the earliest in the west, about 310 BC, calling it the “Median” or “Persian apple”. So, knowledge of it in the west was evidently associated with the Medes and Persians who made themselves obvious with the conquests of Cyrus, c 550 BC). Later, the sour orange, the lemon, and the sweet orange, in that order but possibly centuries apart, came to the west, the latter not known in Europe until about 1400 AD, some seventeen centuries after the citron.
The oldest existing book on the orange is from the far east—Chü lu, written in 1178 AD by Han Yen-chih. It shows that oranges were discussed in Chinese literature at the time of Ch’u Yuan, who in his first poem, “Li Sao” or “Falling into Trouble”, cited many plants, trees, and fruits of around 314 BC, roughly the same time as Theophrastus described citrus fruits in Europe.
The bible, in which figs, grapes, olives, and such plants are often mentioned, does not refer directly to any citrus fruit. The nearest word to citron in the bible is “Kitron” mentioned in Judges as the name of a village. Alexander had settled Macedonians in Palestine, so it is not impossible that the reference could have been to a Greek village where citrons were being cultivated. It would require that Judges was written in the Greek period as the Greek name “Talmai” (Ptolemy) also suggests. If Kitron refers to the Citrus medica, the text is dated to after the fourth century when these citrus fruits were very likely introduced from Persia (whence the qualifier “Medica” or Media). They had been taken there from India.
Jewish Usage of Citrons
Despite its apparent absence from the scriptures, Jews use the citron for religious ritual, so it is considered as a Jewish symbol, and is found engraved on ancient Jewish and Samaritan relics. The historian of the citrus family of plants, Tolkowsky (Hesperides. A History of the Culture and Use of Citrus Fruits, 1938), said:
The very earliest documentary evidence of the citron in Jewish sources is found in the representation of this fruit on coins struck by Simon the Maccabee in the fourth year of the “Redemption of Zion”, that is in 136 BC.
The Torah or Pentateuch (Leviticus 23:40) only speaks of peri ets hadar, rendered as the fruit of “ornamental” or “majestic” trees, as required for ritual use during the Feast of Tabernacles—Succoth—the Jewish autumnal New Year festival, which, counting inclusively, begins seven days before 21 September, the autumnal equinox. The reference is considered to have been to the etrog, one of the four plants required for use at Succoth, which Nahmanides (1194-c 1270 AD) believed was the original Hebrew name for the citron, as it was traditionally used in the ritual. As Leviticus is part of the law of Moses, believers, accepting the biblical chronology, think it was written between about 1400 BC and 1200 BC, and so the fruit of the citron was being prescribed in a religious ritual as early as the second millennium BC.
As Moses was responsible, in the Jewish mythology, for the exodus from Egypt, believers assume Moses brought the ritual usage of the citron with them from Pharaonic Egypt, and the French Egyptologist, Victor Loret (La flore pharaonique, 1887), thought he could discern such a plant on the walls of the botanical garden at the Karnak Temple, which was built in the time of Thutmosis III, according to conventional dating. It is, though, an astonishingly well preserved temple for that age, and a few have defied conventional Egyptologists to argue that it is actually much later, having been built according to traditional models only in the fourth century BC. That was in the Persian period.
Another specimen in the Louvre museum purported to show such a plant from a twelfth century BC Pharaonic tomb, and some argue that the coptic word for a sour fruit, Gitri, was taken from Egyptian hieroglyphs that depicted a citron. Tolkowsky, was not convinced by these identifications. He showed that Loret had admitted the wall paintings at Karnak were not clear, and Alfred C Andrews (“Acclimatization of citrus fruits in the Mediterranean region”, Agricultural History, 35, 1961) agrees that evidence for early establishment of the citron in Egypt is inadequate.
Tolkowsky goes further. He discounts as inconclusive the evidence of those who argue for the great antiquity of citrus fruits in Mesopotamia and Palestine, as well as Egypt. He sees no reason to deny the truth of the observations of the Greek botanists Alexander the Great took with him on his expedition into Persia, who reported that the citron was grown only in Persia and Media.
The stoutest defences of the early cultivation of citrons in the west are nowadays those Jews who think it vital that they defend, and preferably prove as true history, the validity of the Jewish scriptural myths. Thus the early introduction of the citron into Mesopotamia and even Palestine has been defended by Erich Isaac (“The citron in the Mediterranean: a study in religious influences”, Economic Geography, 35, 1959).
He says that the Greeks considered the Persian kingdom to embrace the entire Fertile Crescent, and so by citing Media and Persia they could have encompassed Babylonia too. Indeed they could have, but Greeks were not so fond of the Persians as to discount the long civilization and history of Babylon in favour of the Persian upstarts. They even persisted in distinguishing the Medes and the Persians long after they had been united. In fact, Isaacs thinks the citron spread from southern Arabia to the coastal plains of the Levant as early as the time of the first kings of the divided kingdoms, an hypothesis that has the advantage of taking the citron sufficiently far back for it to have been written into Leviticus at an early date, even if it was not so early as the exodus.
However, he had as a fall back position the much more acceptable idea that Jews exiled in Babylonia became familiar with the citron in the sixth century BC. The story of the exile and return is, of course, itself a myth to explain that the people who were resettled in Judah by the Persians were actually people who had left it earlier. In the main, they were not. Isaac’s theories simply uphold his prior convictions, but his evidence is weak.
The Citron and Persia
The credible evidence converges on the introduction of the citron to the west with the Persians, and, in particular, their introduction to Palestine in the fifth century when the Jewish temple state was established. Recent findings in a ruined palace and garden in Israel tends to confirm this idea. Ramat Rahel, located on a hilltop above modern Jerusalem, is the site of a palace dating to the Persian period in Judah. Archaeological excavators discovered there a luxurious ancient garden with an advanced irrigation system. Persians, living partly on an arid plateau, had developed skills in irrigation systems to make the most out of the scarce supply of water they had!
By separating fossilized pollen from the layers of plaster found in the garden’s waterways, researchers, Professor Oded Lipschits, Dr Yuval Gadot, and Dr Dafna Langgut from Tel Aviv University, have identified what grew in these ancient royal gardens, and so have reconstructed them. As expected, they featured some local vegetation, such as common fig and grapevine, but they also had exotic plants like Persian walnut trees and citrons!
Attempts to obtain pollen grains from the site’s soil to determine the botanical components of the garden failed at first because the pollen had oxidized. But the irrigation system had allowed rainwater to be efficiently collected and distributed throughout the garden via pools, underground channels, tunnels, and gutters, which had been coated with plaster to waterproof them. Maintenance meant the plaster had to be periodically re-rendered. The researchers then realized that pollen could have stuck to the wet plaster, trapped in it, and then dried in it, whenever the plaster had been renovated with the garden was in bloom. It proved to be so.
While some plaster layers included only typical native vegetation, one of the layers, dated to the Persian period (the 400s BC), also included local fruit trees, ornamentals, and imported trees from far off lands. Dr Langgut, a pollen expert, explained:
Among the unusual vegetation are willow and poplar, which required irrigation to grow in the garden, ornamentals such as myrtle and water lilies, native fruit trees including the grape vine, the common fig, and the olive, and imported birch trees, Persian walnut, cedar of Lebanon, and citron. These exotics must have been imported by the ruling Persian authorities from remote parts of the Persian empire to flaunt the power of their imperial administration.
Migrating human beings took different plants and animals with them on their travels. At Ramat Rahel, some noble designed the garden to impress visitors and locals with their wealth and worldliness, and the importation of exotic trees has, Prof Lipschits affirmed, had a lasting impact on the region, and on Judaism. The citron tree, long ago absorbed into Jewish tradition, has made its first unequivocal appearance in Israel in this Persian period garden. It suggests a link between the setting up of the temple state by the Persian authorities, and a fruit used in jewish ritual that came into europe from Persia probably via Judah.
The citron was established in Persia before the first half of the first millennium BC, possibly by the armies of Cyrus, but more probably by normal trading relations between Persia and India to the east and south. When Alexander’s army swept over the Persian empire Hellenizing it, his botanists found the citron or “Median apple” extensively cultivated. Many Greeks had settled in Persia, having served in the Persian military or as administrators and merchants, and these Persian Greeks affirmed that the citron tree had been grown by the Medes, the rulers of Persia from the ninth century BC to the time of Cyrus.
The Citron in the West
It is quite possible that citrons had appeared in the markets of the important Greek cities like Athens decades before Theophrastus reported on them, sent there as exotic fruits by merchants, or brought back by visiting Greeks from Persia. Antiphanes testifies to the presence in the shops of Athens, about half a century earlier, of citrons from Persia. Indeed, Theophrastes’s explanation of the uses of the plant, yet without a description of the fruit, suggests his readers must have known it, but leaves the impression that he had himself not seen the actually growing tree, only its produce. And his repetition at the end of his passage of what he had said earlier, that:
…this tree grows in Persia and Media
emphasizes that it did not, around 300 BC, grow anywhere closer—not in Mesopotamia, and definitely not anywhere further west.
Theophrastes, just before his description of the “Median apple” tree, describes how Alexander’s botanists had tried to grow in Mesopotamia a variety of ivy brought from India:
When Harpalus took great pains over and over again to plant it [the ivy] in the gardens of Babylon, and made a special point of it, he failed, since it could not live like the other things introduced from Hellas.
Evidently pains were being taken to establish purely decorative plants in Babylon from Greece and from India. It stands to reason effort would have been made to grow the citron tree, evidently a “goodly” or “majestic” tree, according to Leviticus, greatly admired for its beauty, and with a fruit valuable as a drug, a perfume, and a means of keeping moths or other insects from damaging expensive clothes.
Tolkowsky says Romans grew both the lemon and orange trees. A good representation of an orange in a Pompeian mosaic, according to Tolkowsky, shows the orange tree was known in Italy before Pompeii was destroyed in about 70 AD. A tile floor mosaic found in a Roman villa near Tusculum (modern Frascati) confirms that lemons and limes were known in Italy not long after the destruction of Pompeii in 79 AD. Another mosaic tile floor found in a Roman villa at Carthage, probably of the second century AD, shows recognizable branches of citron, and fruit bearing lemon trees. But were they being grown, or were these imported specimens?
Tolkowsky maintains “unassailable proof of the fact that, in fourth century Italy, oranges and lemons were actually grown” and bore fruit is is a Christian mosaic on a vaulted ceiling in the mausoleum in Rome built by Constantine the Great (274-337 AD) to accommodate the remains of his favorite child, Lady Constantia, who died about 330 AD. Citrons, lemons, and oranges, all attached to freshly cut branches with green leaves, are illustrated in the mosaic. He adds that, by the second century AD, the price of citrons in the eastern Mediterranean was similar to that of the fig, so they could no longer have been a rarity. Isaac, often critical of Tolkowsky, concedes he has sufficient evidence to conclude that “the orange and lemon were known in the early Christian centuries”.
Succoth and “Peri Ets Hadar”
Despite Theophrastes’s testimony that in his days the citron was not grown in countries west of Media and Persia, the belief mentioned above has persisted—that the citron was first met with by the Jews in Mesopotamia during their captivity there and that they took the fruit with them on their return and introduced its culture into Palestine. As we have seen this opinion stems from the use of the citron in their Succoth festival, their Autumnal or ingathering festival.
Leviticus describes as an element of it, a peri ets hadar, “fruit of a goodly (or majestic) tree”. Yet, of this there is no trace either in the Book of Ezra (about 417 BC) or in Nehemiah’s account of the Feast of Tabernacles at which he was present shortly after his first return to Jerusalem around 440 BC—probably the first such celebration. Though these officials were the ones responsible for setting up the Jewish temple state, details of this ceremony are absent. Harvest festivals are common in many human societies, for obvious reasons, so the ingathering of fruit, oil, and wine—like the festival of unleavened bread at the vernal barley harvest—was likely to be very ancient, and both unquestionably traditions of the Pagan Canaanite religion.
It is idle for any would be reformer to waste time trying to stop such well established traditions. What is needed is to maintain them, but with new interpretations and new rituals to accompany them. It seems that at least some aspects of the ritual laws of Leviticus 23:40, were introduced later than the original establishment of the temple state. Indeed, much of the Priestly law of Leviticus was probably intoduced after the end of the Persian empire, when the temple priesthood were free to do as they wished, and made themselves rich in the process, and this may have been one such law.
The only existing mention of peri ets hadar in Leviticus must have been introduced into the Pentateuch subsequent to the sanctification of the temple by Ezra, prompted by the need to recognize a custom adopted in the meantime under Persian influence. It may have been that the custom was taken up after the ordination of the temple but before the end of Persia at the hands of the Macedonians at Gaugamela in 331 BC. In that case the citrons might at first have been imported from Media and Persia as a lucrative monopoly, and only with the end of Persia did the priesthood break the monopoly and grow their own.
If initially, the citron was not the plant used in the ceremony because it was not readily available, what plant was it? Tolkowsky showed that the syllable “ha” in hadar is the Hebrew article, so that peri ets hadar means “the fruit of the dar tree”. Dar is the Sanskrit for “tree”, which occurs in the name of the Indian holy tree, Cedrus deodara, the devadaru in Sanskrit or the Tree of God. It is the giant cedar of the Himalayas. The Aryans (Iranians) were worshipers of trees, and the Persians were related to other Aryans who went further on into India, so tree worship remained popular in Persia and Media, and India, in early times.
However, the Persians in changing to Zoroastrianism, did the same as the Christians in denigrating the old gods by demonizing them, so the original Iranian name for a god, daeva, deva or diva came to denote a devil in Iran, but remained a god in India. So, the Iranian name for the tree of God, the divdar, was a holy tree for non-Zoroastrians, the worshippers of the divas, devils or jinns. The gods of other peoples were the devils or jinns to the Persians, their own good gods having been newly named ahura, really meaning “Lord”. The aim of the Persians in promoting Judaism as a religion fior the diva worshipers was to wean them off the pagan practices that Persians abhored and into obedient, truthful living, meaning righteousness, truth or honesty being absolutely essential to Zoroastrian Persians.
The word hadar is therefore a Jewish word of mixed etymology, literally “the” (Hebrew, ha) and “tree” (Iranian, dar), implying that its origins are in some interaction between Semitic speakers and Aryan speakers, perfectly matching the situation of Persian colonists in Yehud. But the dar is apparently the “cedar”, the holy tree of the divas, the fruit of which is the cone. Assyrian bas reliefs show that cones were used in rituals to do with a water libation, and cuneiform texts of hymns confirm its being venerated in Assyria.
The conception of the cedar as “the tree of God” for the Jews of the time is confirmed by Psalms 80:10 (“cedars of God”, usually rendered as “mighty cedars” or “goodly cedars”!) and 104:16 (atsei Yehovah, arzei Levanon, where “the trees of Yehouah”, are coupled in Semitic poetic dualism with “cedars” albeit here of Lebanon). It seems the the Jews at first were introduced to the use of cedar branches and cones in the ritual, but such diva rituals were not acceptable to the Persians themselves, and, as the point of Judaism was to train previously diva peoples to aspire to be Zoroastrians, they did, and took to the citron instead when its cultivation in Palestine was successful.
So, the Mishna, the second century code of Jewish oral tradition, interprets the peri ets hadar as a citron (“etrog”). Josephus also confirms that the “Persian apple” was used by the Jews during the Feast of Tabernacles. Another story told both by himself and in the Talmud, of how Alexander Jannaeus (104-78 BC), prince and high priest, was pelted with citrons by the congregation assembled in the Temple during the Feast of Tabernacles, because he deliberately spilt the libation water meant for the altar to show what little regard he had for tradition.
In contradiction, Isaac and Andrews persist that the hadar of the Bible was always the citron and was known to the Jews from the mythical ages of the bible. Both find little to show the Greeks had propagated citron trees, but think Jews had carried citron culture across the Mediterranean. Isaac points out that internal evidence from the text of Leviticus argues against Tolkowsky’s theory that the citron was a late substitute for the cedar cone in Jewish ritual, and asserts that nowhere else in the Old Testament, which abounds in botanical references, is the dar tree mentioned. Andrews (1961) also denies Tolkowsky on the grounds that the Jews were religiously very conservative, so the shift from a cedar cone to a citron cannot be accepted without exceptional evidence.
We saw that Isaac thought the citron could have bypassed Mesopotamia and reached Palestine at an early date by a different route, perhaps through Arabia, and Andrews believed that the Assyrian word adaru, cognate with hadar, also meant a citron, and showed there were citrons in Mesopotamia whence it could have been carried to Palestine. It could equally, or more probably, mean some cone bearing “dar” considered sacred, and therefore matching Tolkowsky’s notion.
Because these critics believe the scriptural accounts are both chronological and true, they cannot allow for explanations that reject these assumptions. The conservative nature of Judaism only carries weight if it is thought to have started millennia BC, and that the law and customs initiated by Moses in or around 1200 BC was faithfully adhered to ever since by Jews in general. Even the bible denies that, the Deuteronomic history being a catalogue of deviations of Jews from their own norms as set by Moses. According to much of the Old Testament, Israelites and Jews were far from “very conservative”, they were all too ready to syncretize with other religions, and were repeatedly punished for it.
In fact, of course, that is all mythology designed by the Persian chancellery to imbue the Jews with a deep sense of guilt that they were not living up to their expected standards of obedience to God’s ordinances—otherwise, the laws set out by Persian officialdom.
The recent work on the Persian palace garden strengthens the notion that Judaism was founded by Darius II in the fifth century BC.
