Juniper

The juniper is a wilderness shrub that turns up at three very different moments — under it a fugitive prophet collapses, around its roots desert outcasts forage, and from its wood the warrior's coals burn. The same plant frames a place of exhaustion, a starvation food, and a fierce judicial fire.

Elijah Under the Juniper-Tree

After Jezebel's threat, Elijah flees south and finally stops in the wilderness. The tree marks the place of his collapse: "But he himself went a day's journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a juniper-tree: and he requested for his soul to die, and said, It is enough; now, O Yahweh, take away my soul; for I am not better than my fathers" (1Ki 19:4). The same tree shelters him while he sleeps and is the spot where the angel finds him: "And he lay down and slept under a juniper-tree; and, look, an angel touched him, and said to him, Arise and eat" (1Ki 19:5).

Roots as Famine Food

Job's lament places the same wilderness plant in the diet of the destitute. UPDV renders the shrub here as "broom" — the same plant Elijah sat under, named by its other English equivalent: "They pluck salt-wort by the bushes; And the roots of the broom are their food" (Job 30:4). The image is of people driven to dig up bitter roots when nothing else will feed them.

Coals of Juniper

The juniper's wood burns hot and long, and that quality supplies the closing image of Psalm 120's complaint against a lying tongue: "Sharp arrows of the mighty, With coals of juniper" (Ps 120:4). The pairing — warrior's arrows alongside fierce, slow-burning coals — is offered as the fitting punishment for deceitful speech.