NB: this article is the second part of a two-part series, and continues from the previous article without preamble.

2. Cinnamon as the Adulteress’ Sensuous Enticement (Pr. 7:17)

As with all the Creator’s good gifts, even spices could be used in holiness as well as sin. Staging a scenario of moral self-endangerment, the sage warns the aimless youth about the ‘foreign woman’ whose behaviour is not formed by covenant loyalty to the Lord as the youth’s ought to be. To make her proposition exciting, the temptress sprinkles her bed with fragrant spices:

I have decked my couch with coverings, coloured spreads of Egyptian linen;

I have perfumed my bed with myrrh, aloes and cinnamon.

Come, let us take our fill of love until morning;

let us delight ourselves with love. (Pr. 7:16-18)

The exoticism of imported luxuries (soft and colourful Egyptian linen, aromatics from Arabia and India) heighten the sense-appeal of sight, smell, and touch. The love nest is ‘spiced up’ to make the youth feel lucky to be favoured with such an exquisite experience. But as Robert O’Connell suggests, bodies in linen and spices signal a more macabre turn.¹ He refers to Jesus’ entombment, “wrapped…with the spices in linen cloths” which the evangelist tells us was “according to the burial custom of the Jews” (Jn. 19:40). Closer to the compilation of the Proverbs was the burial of King Asa (c. 869 BC), which also involved the body wrapped in spices in an open bier (2 Chr. 16:14). O’Connell points to the dark turn in the temptress’s seduction of the youth. “Right away he follows her like an ox to the slaughter… a stag towards the trap… a bird rushing into a snare, not knowing that it will cost him his life” (vv. 22-23). From a promise of pleasure the spice and linen turn into emblems of death. The seductress’ invitation leads to the young man’s destruction. “Her house is the way of Sheol, going down to the chambers of death” (v. 27).

The use of cinnamon and other spices that began as enticements to illicit sensuality quickly descends, in the warning of the sage, to the same spices as embalming substances for the dead.

3. Cinnamon as Delight of True Love (Song of Songs 4:14)

The three aromatics mentioned in the text above are included in a slightly longer list in the third biblical reference to cinnamon. Here too they signify sensuousness but of a kind that is not condemned but celebrated. In lush horticultural imagery, the Lover extols the Beloved's nubile graces:

A garden locked is my sister, my bride,

a garden locked, a fountain sealed.

Your channel is an orchard of pomegranates with all choice fruits,

henna with nard,

nard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon,

with all trees of frankincense, myrrh and aloes, with all chief spices-

a garden fountain, a well of living water,

and flowing streams from Lebanon. (Sg. 4:12-15)

The Beloved is compared to “a garden locked up,” using the Persian loanword pardēs, a private pleasure garden. In it grows fruit and spice trees, including cinnamon (4:13-14) along with henna, nard, saffron, calamus, myrrh, and aloes collectively described as “all the finest spices” (raši-beshamim, similar to beśāmīm rō'š in Ex. 30:23 above).

Chaim Rabin proposed that stylistic and thematic elements in the Song bear resemblances to Tamil language love poetry from India.² He also observed that the spices named in the Song have Tamil and Sanskrit etymologies. Both these features, Rabin concludes, indicate trade-based cultural contact between Israel and South India, via South Arabia. He supposed that the genre’s distinctive “female yearning” may have arisen due to the long absences of the menfolk who ventured on distant spice trading voyages from India through South Arabia to the Levant. He further conjectured that Song 3:6 is a reference to the lover’s caravan, the lover himself being a spice merchant:

Who is this coming up from the desert like a column of smoke,

perfumed with myrrh and incense

made from all the spices of the merchant?

Rabin’s identification is unconvincing. The “who (feminine pronoun) … coming out of the desert” (v. 6) is explicitly identified as "Solomon's carriage (feminine noun) escorted by sixty warriors" (v. 7); and is compared to a column of perfumed smoke. It does not refer to the lover’s caravan as Rabin claims.³ As curious as the thematic affinities may be, the chronological disparity makes any cultural transference unlikely. Historians of Tamil literature date this collection of Sangam period love poetry to 200 BC – 200 AD,⁴ too late to have influenced the composition of the Song.

Rabin is right, however, to notice the Song’s awareness of the spice trade. Increase in international trade during the reign of Solomon expanded Israelite familiarity with imported spices. Kenneth Kitchen proposes that since Sheba is known to have functioned as the main Arabian transshipment point for Indian and African goods passing into Levantine and Mediterranean markets, the Sabaean royal delegation to Solomon’s court must have prioritized securing permission for the passage of its merchandise through Israelite territory.⁵ According to the chroniclers, the Queen of Sheba presented Solomon with such “a great quantity of spices” that “never again did spices come in such quantity” (1 Ki. 10:10; 2 Chr. 9:9). Although the types of spices are not specifically listed, Solomon’s tributes and revenues were reportedly enlarged (1 Ki. 10:14-15, 25).

As for the Song’s literary allusions, the Edenic “walled garden” (gan in Ge. 2:8) did not go unnoticed by post-biblical Jewish writers. Cinnamon is named as one of the trees of Paradise in rabbinic literature.⁶ After the dispersion from Palestine following the abortive Bar Kokhba Revolt (132-136 AD), Jewish writers reminisced about a lost homeland where “goats fed on the cinnamon tree”⁷ and “the (fuel) logs of Jerusalem were of cinnamon trees, and when lit their fragrance pervaded the whole of Erez Israel.”⁸ The Pseudepigrapha also refer to Eden as the source of cinnamon. In the Apocalypse of Moses, Adam pleads with the angels to be allowed back into the garden to “take away fragrant herbs from paradise, so that I may offer an offering to God after I have gone out of paradise that he hear me.”⁹ With God's permission “he took four kinds: crocus and nard and calamus and cinnamon and the other seeds for his food… .” In the Life of Adam and Eve, Eve and Seth return to the environs of Paradise to beg the archangel Michael for “oil from the tree of mercy” to relieve the mortal pain of Adam.¹⁰ The archangel refuses yet does not send Eve and Seth away empty-handed. They are given the next best thing from Eden, “herbs of fragrance, i.e. nard and crocus and calamus and cinnamon,” perhaps as ingredients for as near a substitute to the Paradisaical oil of mercy itself.

4. Cinnamon as a Luxury Consumed by Rome (Revelation 18:13)

Cinnamon is listed in a long inventory of valuable cargoes regularly imported into the metropolis 'Babylon the Great,' a thinly disguised cryptonym for imperial Rome (cf. Rev. 17:18). The context of the inventory is a dramatic declaration of judgement and destruction upon the city by the Heavenly Christ (18.4-20).¹¹

The merchants of the earth will weep and mourn over her because no one buys their cargoes any more—cargoes of gold, silver, precious stones and pearls; fine linen, purple, silk and scarlet cloth; every sort of citron wood, and articles of every kind made of ivory, costly wood, bronze, iron and marble; cargoes of cinnamon and spice, of incense, myrrh and frankincense, of wine and olive oil, of fine flour and wheat; cattle and sheep; horses and carriages; and bodies and souls of men [i.e. enslaved people]. (Rev. 18:11-13)

John models the judgement over Rome on Ezekiel’s lament over Tyre (Ezek. 27:1-28.19) to which also, in an earlier ‘world order,’ foreign merchants had supplied “the chief of all spices” (v. 22). Each of the 28 named commodities and categories are well attested in first century Roman commerce.¹² Richard Bauckham notes that the list accounts for 18 of the 29 most indulgent Roman luxury imports listed by Pliny,¹³ making it a “very representative of Rome's more expensive imports.”¹⁴ Cinnamon stands at the head of the sub-list of aromatics: “cargoes of cinnamon and spice, of incense, myrrh and frankincense” (v. 13). The point that these cargoes are imported from other nations is a matter of theological importance in the text. The author alludes to international trade by several references to “the merchants of the earth" (v. 3, 11, 15). Furthermore, long-distance maritime trade is clearly in view as those who participate in it at different levels are all implicated: “Every sea captain, and all who travel by ship, the sailors, and all who earn their living from the sea…[will cry,] ‘Woe! Woe, O great city, where all who had ships on the sea became rich through her wealth!’” (v. 19).

As Bauckham and others have commented, Rev. 18 is a prophetic denunciation of the rampant consumerism of the Roman elite and the system of international trade that is dependent upon it.¹⁵ Roman imperial propaganda made much of their dominance over the resources of subjugated nations. Pliny gloried in the advantages of his empire’s trade network, “Who would not suppose that when the world had been unified by the greatness of the Roman empire that life improved because of traffic of goods and the fellowship of a celebratory peace, and everything that had previously been hidden put forward for all to know?”¹⁶ Aristides went further, making no pretense about Rome’s right acquire by power whatever it wanted from other nations. “It is possible to see so many cargoes from India and even Arabia Felix, if you wish, that one imagines that for the future the trees are left bare for the people there and that they must come here to beg for their own produce if they need anything.”¹⁷

Contrary to the economic triumphalism of Roman propaganda, John condemns the Empire’s consumption of the ancient world’s wealth (including exotic spices of which cinnamon was foremost) as ill-gotten gains acquired by greed and violence. All products of human labour, including its harvests of valuable botanical commodities, ultimately belonged not in any corrupt human metropolis but only in the New Jerusalem. Here, Christ will rightfully receive all these in tributary worship of his redemptive lordship. At one time, “the kings of the earth committed adultery with [‘Babylon’], and the merchants of the earth grew rich from her excessive luxuries” (18:3). But now, it is to the New Jerusalem that “the kings of the earth will bring their splendour” (21:24) and “the glory and honour of the nations” (v. 26). John is recasting the same prophetic vision revealed to Isaiah (chs. 2 and 60) where each nation offers to the Lord the best of their economic and cultural wealth in service of God’s people; and Ezekiel (47:1-12), where the healing trees of Paradise will again be accessible to a transformed humanity.

Conclusion

References to cinnamon in the Bible are rich with theological meaning. The holy anointing oil, in which the commodity is an ingredient, functions as an olfactory symbol of God's holiness and beauty (Ex. 30:23). It exemplifies the moral ambiguity with which God's good gifts are often misused as by the extravagant seductress (Pr. 7:17). In the imagination of the Lover it is a symbol of his Beloved’s delightfulness (Sg. 4:14). And in the vision of humanity's final judgement, it is one of many earthy treasures that the appreciative Creator receives, not merely as a commodity of lucrative trade (Rev. 18:13), but as acceptable tribute for worship.

The presence of cinnamon (and other exotic commodities) in the Hebrew Scriptures testify to God’s desire to have his far-flung creation represented in His tabernacle, which was itself symbolic of the created universe. Missiologically, the inclusion of long-distance trade goods such as cinnamon in the biblical narrative may also underline the connection between the creaturely epicenter of God’s salvation drama and the nations who have spread out over the Earth who await its climactic blessings. The ‘world of the Bible’ is therefore much wider than the so-called Ancient Near East or the Mediterranean basin. Many more peoples, cultures, and lands are represented in the biblical story by their products of trade than are ethnographically identified by name.¹⁸