Chestnut Tree

The tree given in older English Bibles as the chestnut is rendered in UPDV as the plane-tree. It appears twice — once as one of the rod-types Jacob peels at Laban's watering-troughs, and once in the Eden-comparison oracle of Ezekiel 31, where it stands among the great trees that even the garden of God could not match against the cedar of Assyria.

Rods at the watering-troughs

In the breeding-stratagem Jacob devises against Laban, the plane-tree is one of three named woods cut for striped rods: "And Jacob took for himself rods of fresh poplar, and of the almond and of the plane-tree. And peeled white streaks in them, and made the white appear which was in the rods" (Genesis 30:37). The rods are paired with poplar and almond, all freshly cut, and Jacob exposes the inner white of each to produce the streaked staves laid before the flock at the troughs.

In the garden of God

The tree reappears in Ezekiel's lament-oracle over Assyria, drawn there as a measure no other forest tree could match: "The cedars in the garden of God could not hide it; the fir-trees were not like its boughs, and the plane-trees were not as its branches; nor was any tree in the garden of God like it in its beauty" (Ezekiel 31:8). The plane-tree is named alongside the fir and the cedar of the divine garden, and in this register it functions as one of the great trees set up only to be exceeded — a benchmark against which even Assyria's height is measured before its fall.