Pomegranates in the Bible: What They Mean and Where They Appear

In the Bible the pomegranate stands for the good land God gives, for a lover’s beauty, and for holiness in worship. It grew in the promised land, it hung from the high priest’s robe, and it circled the bronze pillars of Solomon’s Temple. The King James Old Testament names it in 25 verses, and the New Testament never names it at all.

If we follow it through those verses, the fruit tells a small story of its own. The spies carry it out of Canaan to show that the land is good, and the priest carries it on his hem into the holy place. Babylon breaks it off the Temple and melts it down. Then, on the day the Temple is begun again, God names the pomegranate tree that has not yet fruited and says, “from this day will I bless you” (Haggai 2:19). Scripture never explains what the fruit means, and Jesus never mentions it. Two things people often say about it are not in the Bible at all: that every pomegranate holds 613 seeds, and that it was the forbidden fruit. Later, Christian painters gave it meanings of their own, chiefly the Passion and the Resurrection of Christ.

Here are all 25 verses, in the order of the books. In the King James Version the Song of Songs is called the Song of Solomon.

Passage	What happens	What it shows
Exodus 28:33–34; 39:24–26	Pomegranates and golden bells alternate on the hem of the high priest’s robe	Worship
Numbers 13:23	The spies bring pomegranates and figs back from Canaan	The good land
Numbers 20:5	Israel complains that the desert has no figs, vines or pomegranates	The desert’s lack
Deuteronomy 8:8	Pomegranates are among the crops of the land God is giving	The good land
1 Samuel 14:2	Saul waits under a pomegranate tree at Migron	A landmark
1 Kings 7:18, 20, 42; 2 Chronicles 3:16; 4:13	Rows of bronze pomegranates on the Temple pillars	Worship
2 Kings 25:17; Jeremiah 52:22–23	The same pillars, described as Babylon breaks them up	Worship lost
Song of Songs 4:3; 6:7	The beloved’s face is likened to a piece of pomegranate	Beauty
Song of Songs 4:13; 6:11; 7:12; 8:2	An orchard, budding trees, pomegranate wine	Love
Joel 1:12	The pomegranate tree withers with the rest of the land	Judgment
Haggai 2:19	The pomegranate has not yet borne fruit, and God promises a blessing	Restoration

When the twelve spies went into Canaan, they brought its fruit home to show what the land was like. Along with the great cluster of grapes carried on a staff, “they brought of the pomegranates, and of the figs” (Numbers 13:23). Moses describes the land ahead in the same words, “A land of wheat, and barley, and vines, and fig trees, and pomegranates; a land of oil olive, and honey” (Deuteronomy 8:8). Jewish tradition calls these the Seven Species, the crops for which the land of Israel is praised.

The people felt it when the fruit was missing, and in the wilderness they complained that they had been brought to “no place of seed, or of figs, or of vines, or of pomegranates” (Numbers 20:5). Centuries later Joel mourned a ruined land in the same terms: “the pomegranate tree” withers with “all the trees of the field”, and the fruit and the gladness fail together, “because joy is withered away from the sons of men” (Joel 1:12). The vine grows beside the pomegranate in almost every one of these verses, and its own story is told in grapes in the Bible.

God told Moses to make the high priest’s robe “all of blue” (Exodus 28:31), and to hang its hem with “pomegranates of blue, and of purple, and of scarlet, round about the hem thereof; and bells of gold between them” (Exodus 28:33). He spelled out the pattern, one after the other all the way round: “A golden bell and a pomegranate, a golden bell and a pomegranate, upon the hem of the robe round about” (Exodus 28:34).

Scripture tells us why the bells were there, but it gives no reason for the pomegranates. Aaron was to wear the robe so that “his sound shall be heard when he goeth in unto the holy place before the LORD, and when he cometh out, that he die not” (Exodus 28:35). For the fruit we can only look at what it meant elsewhere, and the Jewish Encyclopedia tells us that “Throughout the East the pomegranate is the symbol of luxuriant fertility and of life.” If that is what it meant on the robe, then the fruit of the promised land went in with the priest before God, though Exodus itself never says so. The robe was made for the worship of the tabernacle.

1 Kings counts four hundred of them. Solomon set two bronze pillars at the porch of the Temple and named them Jachin and Boaz (1 Kings 7:21), and each capital was wrapped in a bronze network hung with “two hundred in rows round about” (1 Kings 7:20). When the writer lists all the bronze work, he gives the total: “four hundred pomegranates for the two networks, even two rows of pomegranates for one network” (1 Kings 7:42).

The last time we see them, the Temple is falling. The Chaldeans, the Babylonian army, broke “the pillars of brass that were in the house of the LORD” in pieces “and carried the brass of them to Babylon” (2 Kings 25:13). In the middle of the ruin the writer stops to remember “the wreathen work, and pomegranates upon the chapiter round about, all of brass” (2 Kings 25:17), the way someone remembers a house that has burned.

Haggai brings the fruit back on the day the foundation of the Temple is laid again (Haggai 2:18). The trees are still bare when God makes his promise, and there is no harvest yet to show for it: “Is the seed yet in the barn? yea, as yet the vine, and the fig tree, and the pomegranate, and the olive tree, hath not brought forth: from this day will I bless you” (Haggai 2:19).

In the Song the pomegranate belongs to the language of love. The lover tells his beloved, “thy temples are like a piece of a pomegranate within thy locks” (Song of Songs 4:3), and he says it again in 6:7. To him her face, half hidden by her hair, is like a cut pomegranate. Her “plants are an orchard of pomegranates, with pleasant fruits” (Song of Songs 4:13).

When the pomegranates bud, the lovers know their season has come. One of them goes down to the garden “to see whether the vine flourished and the pomegranates budded” (Song of Songs 6:11), and later the beloved asks him to come and look with her: “let us see if the vine flourish, whether the tender grape appear, and the pomegranates bud forth: there will I give thee my loves” (Song of Songs 7:12). She promises him “spiced wine of the juice of my pomegranate” (Song of Songs 8:2).

A pomegranate has no fixed number of seeds. A 2024 study of varieties grown on the Adriatic coast estimated the average number of seeds per fruit, variety by variety, and found that it “varied between 336 and 692 in the different cultivars.” In 2008 Jewish Action, the magazine of the Orthodox Union, reported an informal count by a graduate student who had opened 206 pomegranates and found an average of 613, with single fruits holding anywhere from 165 to 1,370 seeds. He had counted hundreds more since then, and he expected the average to change.

The number itself comes from Judaism, which counts 613 commandments in the Torah, and ReformJudaism.org says, “The seeds of the pomegranate symbolize the 613 mitzvot”. Yet the rabbis of the Talmud “never stated that a pomegranate has 613 seeds”, as Ari Zivotofsky concludes in Jewish Action, and he calls the 613 seeds a misconception. He names the Rosh Hashanah prayer over the pomegranate as “another well-known source for the misconception”. Its main root, he says, is a passage in the Talmud’s tractate Berakhot that plays on the Song of Songs and concludes that even “the empty ones among the Jews are full of mitzvot like a pomegranate”. The number 613 he finds tied to the fruit in two nineteenth-century rabbis, the Chatam Sofer and the Malbim. So the seeds are a picture of the commandments rather than a count of them: a life as full of good deeds as the fruit is full of seeds, and the Talmud says that even the empty ones are that full.

The best-known custom belongs to Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, when families eat symbolic foods and say a short prayer over each. Over the pomegranate they ask, in Jewish Action’s translation, “may our merits increase as the seeds of a pomegranate.” The custom is not in the Talmud, and Zivotofsky finds it first in Rabbi Hai Gaon, in tenth-century Babylonia.

The fruit crowns the Torah scroll as well. The ornaments at the top of many Ashkenazi Torah scrolls are often shaped like pomegranates, and they are called rimonim, which My Jewish Learning explains is “the Hebrew word for pomegranate.” Jewish Action adds that the pomegranate appeared on Jewish coins from the Great Revolt against Rome.

Genesis never says what the fruit was. It speaks only of “the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden” (Genesis 3:3), so the pomegranate is a guess people made later. The question is taken up in its own article, what the forbidden fruit was.

The two words are the same in Hebrew, but scholars doubt that the god was named after the fruit. The Hebrew for pomegranate is rimmon, and when the Syrian general Naaman asks forgiveness in advance for the day “when my master goeth into the house of Rimmon to worship there” (2 Kings 5:18), the god’s name is that same word. The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia identifies the god with Rammanu, “the Assyrian god of wind, rain and storm”, calls the meaning of the name “dubious”, and tentatively links it to a word meaning “to thunder”.

The word never appears in the New Testament, so the Gospels record nothing Jesus said about the fruit, and any lesson drawn from his silence is only a guess.

In Christian art the pomegranate stands above all for the Passion of Christ, and also for the Resurrection and for the Church. Those meanings came from the painters rather than from Scripture. In Florence the Uffizi Gallery holds three paintings by Sandro Botticelli in which the fruit is given to the Child Jesus or held by him:

• Madonna of the Pomegranate (about 1487). Mary hands Jesus the fruit, which the museum describes as “a symbol of Christ’s passion, whose red kernels symbolize the blood shed by Jesus Christ for the salvation of humanity.”
• Madonna of the Magnificat (about 1483). The Child touches a pomegranate, “whose red seeds recall the blood shed by Jesus to save humankind.”
• Madonna of the Rose Garden (about 1470). Mary offers him the fruit, and the museum notes that it “represents, among various meanings, the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus.”

Filippo Lippi, Fra Angelico and Carlo Crivelli painted the Virgin with a pomegranate too, and in these paintings a baby holds the sign of his own death. The meaning of the Church comes from the fruit’s shape, which the Italian art magazine Finestre sull’Arte describes as “a single shell enclosing a multitude of seeds that are distinct yet united.” Christians saw in it the Church, “a community of the faithful and diverse peoples held together by a single bond.” So the fruit the priest once carried on his hem into the holy place became a picture of the people gathered there, many seeds in one skin.

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• Adam and Eve and the forbidden fruit
• How grapes are symbolic in the Bible
• Wine in the Bible: what it represents
• What the tabernacle was
• What the Holy of Holies was
• Roses in the Bible and in Christian art