What is algum wood in the Bible?

Algum is a type of wood that’s referenced in the Old Testament. It was one of the main types of wood used by Solomon in the construction of Solomon’s Temple. Almug and algum are both variants of the same word, originally written in Hebrew as אַלְמֻגִּים and אַלְגּוּמִּים, respectively, and written in Latin as almuggīm and algūmmīm. The variation in the words is slight, and probably just a spelling difference, which was much more common in a world with regional pronunciation differences and no standardized spelling of any kind.

Algum definition: what kind of wood was it?

It’s often hard to identify specific plants or animals in ancient texts like the Bible because of how species names for any kind of organisms weren’t standardized across cultures, or even across human history in general. Only in very recent times, and only among a small group of specialists, are exact names used for plant and animal species. Most people today, as throughout history, have all sorts of different names for plants and animals.

A good modern example is “June bug”. When you read this phrase, you probably have a specific image come into your mind. You may even think that this is a very specific name for one specific type of creature. However, this is a general name, one that is used by all kinds of different people, from all different regions of the world, to refer to any one of hundreds of different species of beetles! By “June bug” some people mean a small, reddish-brown beetle, some people mean a larger green beetle, and others might mean or anything else for that matter.

If this happens even in the modern world, where we actually do have standardized names for plants and animals, no time period is immune. The problem is especially bad in ancient texts. The Bible refers to all sorts of plants and animals by using the common names for its time, but we really have no certain way to verify what they were talking about.

A good example is the famous story of Jonah and the whale. It’s very common for people think of the big sea creature in the story as a “whale”, and it’s also very common for other people to correct them and say that the Bible doesn’t actually use the word, “whale”, it says, “fish”. If it was a fish, you might be tempted to conclude that it was a large non-mammal creature that swallowed Jonah. But the reality is that both “whale” and “fish” are modern English translations of an ancient Hebrew or Greek word that may or may not have referred to a whale. Since ancient peoples didn’t have the same kind of classifications for animals that we have now, it’s a mistake to think that they meant the same thing we do with the words they were using.

To add more confusion (and irony) to the problem, the Greek word for “great fish” actually influenced how we now talk about whales today. The most prominent version of the Bible used in the ancient world, and the one from which Jesus and the apostles quote in the New Testament – was the Septuagint. The Septuagint was a Greek translation of the Old Testament made by Israelites living in a predominantly Greek-speaking world. It was considered the authoritative translation by the early Christian church (which is why you see the New Testament authors quoting out of it).

What does this have to do with whales? The Greek phrase used in the Book of Jonah is κήτει μεγάλῳ (ketos megalos), which means “great fish”. You might see that and think, “See, it says fish.” But it turns out that ketos – over time – eventually became synonymous with the word “whale”, so much so that the study of whales became known as cetology (from ketos + ology). So what was the author of the book of Jonah really talking about? It’s hard to say, because the words we use now for things like whales were influenced by the ancient Greek word for “fish”. So it’s a mistake to take ketos as a technical term; it was a general term for a large sea-dwelling creature.

The same thing happens when we try to figure out what type of wood algum was. As you might expect, there’s no real consensus, but several theories have been proposed. One is that the wood was juniper, on the basis that juniper was native to the Middle East: there is Greek Juniper, Phoenician Juniper, and Syrian Juniper – in other words, these types of juniper are all named for these respective regions.

Another theory is that the wood was red sandalwood. The reason for this has to do with the identity of the city of Ophir, the place from which Solomon imported the wood. From archeological evidence, we know that Ophir was a historic city, but scholars are still uncertain as to its exact location. Some have speculated that it was a city in India, possibly Sri Lanka, which would make it more likely that the wood was red sandalwood.

Algum and Solomon’s temple

Reading the account of Solomon’s temple is an interesting reminder to modern readers about things we don’t always think about. In our world of globalization, it’s easy to forget that ancient people couldn’t just walk into Home Depot and buy whatever kind of wood they wanted, conveniently cut down to the exact dimensions they needed. It wasn’t until the last hundred years or so that this was really possible. In the ancient world, people were limited to the things that were available in their own region: the wood you had access to depended on the types of literal trees that were growing in your region, just as much as your diet was dependent on the types of plants that grew in your area or the animals that lived there.

These inherent limitations are what created the demand for trade between nations. One nation might have a great deal of – let’s say – juniper wood, while another nation had access to certain kinds of minerals. What was common to one was rare to another, and so trade routes were an important way that different cultures were able to interact with one another. While certain modern people make a fuss over “cultural appropriation”, in the ancient world, culture was often a product of the available resources of your region, and neighboring cultures were eager to trade the things they had in abundance for things that – to them – only came from other cultures.

This should give you some context for why Solomon would see a gift of several small cities as equivalent to the amount of wood and gold that were donated by the king of Ophir. Trees of a particular variety, that only grew in a certain place (and without the aid of large-scale industrial farming) could have been exceedingly valuable. Not the mention the time and energy it would take to transport that much of it to a distant country.

The next time you go to a lumber store – or even to the spice section of a grocery store – take a minute to appreciate the fact that in the ancient world, this kind of selection would only have been available to the very richest people, would have taken months of travel to obtain, and still would have been very expensive. In those days, something like cinnamon would have been at least as expensive (and about as coveted) as cocaine is today.