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On a hill rising gradually from beyond the harbor stood the royal palace of Antipas, its polished marble gleaming through the tops of palms and the lace-like green of shittah trees. Against this background of pillared stone and shining marble and living green was the shipping in the harbor. Hugged against the dock near by was a load of silver from Tarshish.
ACACIA, SPRIG OF. No symbol is more interesting to the masonic student than the sprig of acacia. It is the mimosa nilotica of Linnæus, the shittah of the Hebrew writers, and grows abundantly in Palestine. It is preeminently the symbol of the immortality of the soul. It was for this reason planted by the Jews at the head of a grave.
It grew abundantly in the vicinity of Jerusalem, where it is still to be found, and is familiar to us all, in its modern uses at least, as the tree from which the gum arabic of commerce is obtained. The acacia, which, in Scripture, is always called shittah and in the plural shittim, was esteemed a sacred wood among the Hebrews.
It is thought that the shittah and shittim wood of the Bible, of which Moses made the greater part of the tables, altars and planks of the tabernacle, was the same as the black acacia found in the deserts of Arabia and about Mount Sinai and the mountains which border on the Red Sea, and is so hard and solid as to be almost incorruptible.
I will plant in the wilderness the cedar, the shittah tree, and the myrtle, and the oil tree; I will set in the desert the fir tree, and the pine, and the box tree together: That they may see, and know, and consider, and understand together, that the hand of the LORD hath done this, and the Holy One of Israel hath created it.
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