All the Trees and Woody Plants of the Bible

This is a delightful and intelligent book, copiously illustrated with black and white photos of trees, and written with a conservative Christian audience in mind. The author is trained in forestry and has co-authored at least one other book, Forests and Forestry. Anderson includes most, if not all, the trees mentioned in the Bible, and brings his botanical and ecological expertise to the creation of a well-rounded, though simple, study of the climate and trees of the Ancient Near East, as well as their change over time. He also draws on archaeology and ancient period texts-clearly cited--and handles their interface with biblical material with tact and reverence. He includes fascinating nuggets of information--like the existence of salt-encrusted skeletons of ancient standing trees sometimes visible beneath the surface of the Dead Sea, or the presence of beech trees in the long-vanished forests of the Tigris and Euphrates Valleys, their leaves still engraved in the crown of a Sumerian queen of 5000 BCE.