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Summary
- Bananas are not in the Bible in any translation working from the original languages. The banana is a plant of tropical Asia and had not reached the eastern Mediterranean.
- Scripture’s fruit belongs to a small, specific landscape: fig, olive, grape, pomegranate, date, almond, sycamore fig.
- “Plantain” in older English Bibles and herbals means a low broadleaf weed, not the cooking banana. The similarity is an accident of English.
- The absence is a reminder that Scripture was given into one small country with a particular list of trees, to people who worked them.
- The fig is the tree Scripture keeps returning to: it cannot be hurried, so sitting under one’s own vine and fig tree became the Bible’s shorthand for peace.
Bibliography (Click to show)
Sources: Scripture allusions from the NIV via BibleGateway (Micah 4:4; 1 Kings 4:25; Matthew 24:32; Galatians 5:22-23; John 1:14). Banana cultivation history: the crop originates in tropical Asia and reached the Mediterranean world after the biblical period.
