Talk:Balm of Gilead

Stub
I'm not sure what the author put in the Template: Bible-stub in for, so I'm just leaving it for now until I know more about templates. Salanth 01:44, 19 November 2005 (UTC)

Brand
Just as a point of discussion, does "Balm of Gilead" seem to others, as it seems to me, to be a kind of "brand"? According to the article, it was widely recognized (internationally?). Jackbox1971 02:58, 10 June 2006 (UTC)


 * At the website of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (http://www.uspto.gov), I did a trademark search for "Balm of Gilead" just now and found that the "3 Arches USA" corporation filed for a trademark of "Balm of Gilead" on July 5, 2005. Wideangle 23:59, 13 July 2006 (UTC)


 * It's certainly a term in genuine medical/scientific use, historicaly (look at any old herbal or pharmacopea). I don't know why the USPTO would allow a trademark on it, but the trademark is for a line of lotions and such, not the resin documented in the article.  In parts of North America (New England especially) the term refers principally to the Balsam Poplar (Populus candicans sive balsamifera).  However, I am not aware of it being used to refer to Canada Balsam (derived from the Balsam Fir), as the article presently states.  Does anyone else think that may be a mistake?  -GSwift 22:07, 23 July 2006 (UTC) [edited for clarity -GSwift 05:08, 24 July 2006 (UTC)]

"Negro spiritual" vs. "African-American spiritual"
I changed "African-American spiritual" back to "Negro spiritual" again. Here are my arguments for doing so:

(1) Negro spirituals have been known by that name for a long time. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiritual_%28music%29 for the history. And note that the phrase "Negro spiritual" occurs three times in that webpage, whereas "African-American spiritual" occurs only once.

(2) "Negro spiritual" is the preponderant choice in actual usage -- Googling "Negro spiritual" yields 233,000 hits, while "African-American spiritual" yields only 75,400 hits.

(3) Note that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negro says: "In current English language usage, 'Negro' generally is considered acceptable in a historical context or in the name of older organisations, as in the United Negro College Fund ..."

Although "African-American" is the preferred designation for persons formerly known as "Negroes", "Negro spiritual" is appropriate due to its historical context.

192.35.35.34 00:55, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
 * Ack, absolutely. Maikel (talk) 18:58, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

C&P
I have moved this segment here from the article proper:
 * "Balm of Gilead", often otherwise known as "Mecca Myrrh" is by priority from an historical and botanical point of view, Commiphora gileadensis (L. - most common synonymous:Commiphora opobalsamum Engl. (BURSERACEAE). The species is not native to the West Bank area of modern day Israel, where Gilead is understood to have been located, but owes its specific epithet (“Gilead”) to the importance of the trade of the resin - one of the chief treasures of Palestine in Roman times according to the contemporary historian Josephus (SEPASAL ). 
 * English, also: Balsam of Gilead, Opobalsamum, Mecca balsam. The dried fruit of this species formerly went by the name “carpobalsamum”; the dried branchlets “xylobalsamum”; and the exudation, as “opobalsamum” (Felter and Lloyd, 1898). 

... as it needs to be edited in. Maikel (talk) 18:47, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

Realignment
I've made some efforts to try to reorganize this set of articles. My issue is just that when we go to look up Balm of Gilead, we should find information about the thing itself (from Gilead, or is it?) first and foremost. We should make it clear that this is likely Balsam of Mecca, but so far as I know nobody is giving a money back guarantee on that, and we haven't merged the articles outright, so I've taken all (or most) of the Balm of Gilead stuff from that article and put it here. And the poplar tree from Canada is now in a new spot Balm-Of-Gilead, with new info added, though that name may admittedly need to change... somehow, major or minor. It is clear from the rearrangement that there are huge gaps that were concealed by bad organization - for example, we have virtually nothing about Balsam of Mecca as it is now encountered, no information about when Balm of Gilead was traded actively or archaeology, etc. I hope this rearrangement will make it easier for people to add what they can find out. Wnt (talk) 00:42, 4 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks for this. It should clear things up. I agree with not merging with Balsam of Mecca; biblical plants/plant products are noteworthy in their own right, and often can not be definitively associated with a species native to the Levant. Additionally, biblical plant names have been applied to plants native to Europe and North America, which are clearly not the same plants mentioned in the bible, as was the case here with the Canadian polar (see Ezov/Hyssop for another example). Plantdrew (talk) 01:02, 4 January 2014 (UTC)
 * I have an article cooking in a sandbox that refers to BofG as miracle cure around 1800, that may take this article in a different direction. Who knows? -- Clem Rutter (talk) 17:16, 4 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Do you know what plant it was made from? Wnt (talk) 04:57, 5 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Experts agree that it is made from Commiphora gileadensis. Sminthopsis84 (talk) 23:12, 7 June 2014 (UTC)

Copyright problem removed
Prior content in this article duplicated one or more previously published sources. The material was copied from: http://books.google.ca/books?id=jblYAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA95&lpg=PA95&dq=Encyclopaedia+Judaica+balsam&source=bl&ots=qOTzTUR5oF&sig=JM7wX9t6Q8o2T1RyEISBjBRp21s&hl=en&sa=X&ei=U_EeVIi-FIqmyASfpYHgCA&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=balsam&f=false. Copied or closely paraphrased material has been rewritten or removed and must not be restored, unless it is duly released under a compatible license. (For more information, please see "using copyrighted works from others" if you are not the copyright holder of this material, or "donating copyrighted materials" if you are.) For legal reasons, we cannot accept copyrighted text or images borrowed from other web sites or published material; such additions will be deleted. Contributors may use copyrighted publications as a source of information, and according to fair use may copy sentences and phrases, provided they are included in quotation marks and referenced properly. The material may also be rewritten, but only if it does not infringe on the copyright of the original or plagiarize from that source. Therefore such paraphrased portions must provide their source. Please see our guideline on non-free text for how to properly implement limited quotations of copyrighted text. Wikipedia takes copyright violations very seriously, and persistent violators will be blocked from editing. While we appreciate contributions, we must require all contributors to understand and comply with these policies. Thank you. Sminthopsis84 (talk) 15:46, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

Undue history
The History section is moving rapidly in the direction of WP:UNDUE with increasingly doubtful and tangential claims. The sources need to be used carefully: while Pliny, for instance, is a good source for what people had written in Roman times, he is known to be an uncritical collector of unreliable claims about natural history, and he must not be assumed to be telling the truth about botanical topics. As for the supposed historical impact of Balsam on Masada, one might have supposed that the storming of that fortress had something to do with the Jewish revolt; Rome had an enormous military and political problem in the region. Perhaps the article needs to focus more on the material itself, its uses and effects, rather than on doubtful historical claims. Perhaps also too much is being made out of small dictionary entries and other encyclopedias, which are not necessarily unopinionated and not necessarily reliable sources themselves. Chiswick Chap (talk) 04:31, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

Material moved from article:

"Pliny (Historia Naturalis, 12:25), in describing the Jewish struggle against the Romans, notes that the Jews strove desperately to destroy the balsam orchards and prevent them from falling into the hands of the enemy. The Romans, however, captured them and, in his triumphal march in Rome, Titus displayed balsam trees brought from Judea. The orchards in Jericho and En-Gedi henceforth provided the Romans with an important source of revenue. It seems that the highly profitable balsam trade drove the Romans to storm Masada, the Jewish rebels' last hideout near En-Gedi. According to Pliny, within five years of the suppression of the revolt, a staggering sum of 800,000 sesterces was obtained from the perfume trade in Judea. "

Better sources are needed, if indeed this sort of thing is appropriate here. Chiswick Chap (talk) 04:35, 13 October 2014 (UTC)-


 * Yes, there's a very serious problem here of confusion among several pages, and we probably need to go back to versions of early March 2014, and build from there with the most recent, most thorough published studies. Balsam trees don't belong here except as peripheral mentions or contrasts. This book: Frankincense and Myrrh: A Study of the Arabian Incense Trade, by Nigel Groom, 1981 would be a good beginning to sorting this out. It says (page 126): "The Arabian balsam tree, Balsam of Makkah, more correctly a shrub, is now classified botanically as Commiphora gileadensis. Uncertainties in the past have given it other botanical names, all of which are now equated (i.e. Commiphora opobalsamum; Balsamodendron gileadensis; Balsamodendron ehrenbergianum; and Balsamea meccanensis). 'Its botanical name derives from confusion in the past with "Balm of Gilead" mentioned in Genesis 37. 25; that was almost certainly a totally different product, possibly resin from the terebinth. [some discussion in footnotes that Balm of Gilead may have been Pistacia lentiscus'']."
 * (page 29): "The incense of Retjenu could be the Balm of Gilead which Pliny mentions as growing in that area and which on some authority is the resin of the terebinth tree, but the quantity quoted seems rather too great for a product which, on Pliny's evidence, was exceedingly rare. We have no clear idea of what was meant by 'dry myrrh', but any variety of genuine myrrh would have needed to be imported into the Palestine/Syria area. Possibly a trickle of myrrh was traded from hand to hand northwards from south Arabia until it came within reach of the early Phoenicians of Retenu, although there is no firm evidence for such trade at so early a date. ..."
 * (page 233): "The Arabian balsam tree Commiphora gileadensis (not to be confused with the 'balm of Gilead' of Genesis, which probably came from a terebinth tree) is found widely but appears to be a different plant to the 'balsam of Judaea' described by Pliny; in classical times its product was probably counted as a myrrh."
 * There is a lot of material in that book that would inform several articles. A later article, will also be a useful source. Sminthopsis84 (talk) 18:05, 14 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Totally agree, the article has gone from being vaguely useful to unusable. Any chance you could work up new draft in a sandbox incorporating the new references- and when agreed, collectively we can introduce that version under admin protection. I have neither the knowledge or library to do that myself- originally stumbling here to find the etymology of a house name. -- Clem Rutter (talk) 08:28, 15 October 2014 (UTC)

Start over
Feel free to work in User:Sminthopsis84/sandbox/Balm of Gilead, which starts as a copy of the version from early March of this year and need general work that doesn't all require a library. I'd be glad to see a chemist involved, if anyone knows someone with suitable interests, because I've been feeling the lack of a page about gum resins to link to. Quite a bit of the confusion has to do with the volatile and non-volatile components, of what are balsams and myrrhs (which I think are respectively liquid and solid), and has quite a lot to do with gums, resins, and gum-resins. Sminthopsis84 (talk) 15:25, 15 October 2014 (UTC)
 * We clearly have a majority view that the history has gone way out of bounds. This is a confusing and difficult area that has led people astray for centuries, and merely joining in the confusion is not helpful. The article needs to guide the reader accurately and to say where uncertainties exist. Chiswick Chap (talk) 05:48, 18 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Yes- I put in a section heading. It will be really valuable to work up User:Sminthopsis84/sandbox/Balm of Gilead- while this is taking place I will attempt to move a few bits that shouldn't in the lead WP:LEAD and place some of the unsupported text into a note. Please read the instructions before disagreeing.-- Clem Rutter (talk) 22:06, 19 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Further section commented out- not a lot left. We need to look at Balsam as it has some confusing back references -- Clem Rutter (talk) 21:22, 30 October 2014 (UTC)

Long version
 balm = ["tsori", "balm of gilead"] balsam = ["bosem", "besham", "balsamon", "balsamum", "balm of mecca"] balm == balsam	# True on Gesenius, Rosenmüller, Linnaeus, Christensen, # Feliks, the AV and Hebrew commentators; # False on Septuagint, Lee, Luther, Celsius (and Groom); # None on Brown and Löw.  --El Cazangero (talk) 08:08, 20 November 2014 (UTC)
 * It explains all relevant POVs and is well-sourced
 * Groom (if quoted correctly) is unnecessary, his sayings are explained in earlier and more accessible works
 * A short version should look like Sagapenum, listing the alternatives and their sources, but supplying the arguments as well; simply omitting or even deleting them is moot
 * Any sort of splitting the text into separate articles should occur like this:

Wikipedia articles- being positive
November 16 version remains the definitive version. Pistacia lentiscus remains the the best identification for the shrub that produced it . as Groom, N. (1981) discusses. He reviews and dismisses earlier work, pointing out the lack of rigour in the scholarship. There has been much work put into this article so it is worth spending some time commenting on other issues.

A word about binomials
The term gileadensis merely means that the plant was found or was most common in Gilead- that is the nature of the -ensis words. If I found a new blue poppy near Gilead I might call it  Meconopsis gileadensis  is the same manner we have Meconopsis napaulensis- this doesn't make it a candidate to be the source of the Balm of Gilead- though there is a fair chance it would produce some interesting chemicals!

Formating
There is an interesting but rarely used wikipedia markup for definition lists. This avoids unnecessary section heads in the ToCTry you markup this way using the semicolon and colon. You are limited to using one For example: Besides the tseri, another Hebrew word, nataph (נׇטׇפ), mentioned in Ex. 30:34, as an ingredient of the holy incense, is taken by Hebrew commentators for opobalsamum; this, however, is perhaps rather stacte.
 * Nataf:

Another Hebrew word, bosem (בֹּשֶׂם), Aramaic busema (‫ܒܣܡܐ), Arabic besham (‫بشام), appears in various forms throughout the Hebrew Bible. It is usually translated as "spice, perfume, sweet odour, balsam, balsam-tree".
 * Bosem:

The Greek βάλςαμον can be interpreted as a combination of the Hebrew words baal (בַּעַל) "lord; master; the Phoenician god Baal" and shemen (שֶׁמֶן) "oil", thus "Lord of Oils" (or "Oil of Baal"). Greek authors use the words βάλσαμον (Theophrastus, Aristotle) for the balsam plant and its resin, while Galen, Nicander and the Geoponica consider it an aromatic herb, like mint. The word is probably Semitic. ὁπο-βάλσᾰμον (Theophrastus) is the juice of the balsam tree. βαλσαμίνη (Dioscorides) is the balsam plant.
 * Balsamon:

Palladius names it βάλσαμος and also has βαλσαμουργός, a preparer of balsam. Related are ξῠλο-βάλσᾰμον (Dioscorides, Strabo) "balsam-wood", and καρπο-βάλσᾰμον (Galen) "the fruit of the balsam".

Referencing
This is far too wordy.

In cases like this we use short references. Have a look at Chimney sweeps' carcinoma, we list the major sources in a Bibliography section, then in the text you  . It is cleaner, and easier to code. Caveat if you use a cite template to form the bibliography you need to manually add.  ref=harv| 

History section
The one sentence sub sections are illogical- quite honestly this is just a list of how various people have added layers to the confusion. Interpretation would be a better title, then prune into paragraphs, and copy edit. This needs to be moved to just before the ''See also '' see WP:MOS

Lead
Nice addition The expression stems from William Tyndale's language in the King James Bible of 1611, and has come to signify a universal cure in figurative speech that will stay, it can be supported by a literary paperchase in its own section but using the weasel words commonly identified as to assert a unsupported factoid is against WP:MOS. The lead should be devoid of references- just summarising the text below !!

Talk page
It is alway better to use the talk page to establish concensus that be pugalistic on the article page- I hope this is helpful [ User:ClemRutter, 10:57, 8 December 2014 ]

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Definition (lead) and content don't fully match; little is clear in the end

 * What is "Balm of Gilead"? Does such an expression ever literally occur in the Hebrew Bible (HB)? It seems not. The article quotes Jeremiah: "Is there no balm in Gilead?" (Jer. 8:22). Is this the only HB passage associating one of the many HB words for 'balm' in general, with Gilead in particular? If so, then it's a very, VERY shaky base indeed and our topic, "Balm of Gilead", is no more than the poetic creation of Tyndale, so a generic English term from one specific HB translation, and NOT a truly biblical term or concept; that should be stated more clearly. This is especially true since Tyndale never translated Jeremiah ["balm IN Gilead"] and didn't use "Balm OF Gilead" in Gen. 37:25 ["a companye of Ismaelites from Gilead and their camels lade with spicery baulme and myrre and were goynge doune in to Egipte."]. If this assumption is wrong, than this should be explained with good sources.


 * Several different biblical balms? The Hebrew Bible apparently has several words for balm(s). I would think that it's unlikely for all of them to refer to the same product. Either way, this matter should be clarified.


 * One plant? Many plants? Why these? What does RECENT scholarship say? The article deals with a whole bunch of saps. I see from the discussion here that there is no consensus in recent scholarship in identifying Commiphora gileadensis as the biblical plant (if indeed there was one, as opposed to a whole set of balms, each of them gained from one or more plants). wrote here that Groom (1981) opposes this view, advocating for the Terebinth (Pistacia terebinthus) or its relative, Pistacia lentiscus, with which it hybridises easily. Or is there a larger consensus by now? I have now found via the Commiphora gileadensis page a 2010 paper by Iluz & al. identifying the HB bal(sa)m with c. gil. and offering a lot of history and modern science on it. Iluz however doesn't speak much of archaeological identification of vegetal remains in the known and quite restricted areas of ancient cultivation. He only has a fleeting mention, "also reported in the archeological literature (Amar, 2002; Hepper and Taylor, 2004)." Looking at the quoted titles, they're not dig reports, but only historical treatises, so quite unconvincing. Nowadays identifying plants during digs is a common procedure (wet sifting, followed by identification based on even very small findings), so it missing from the paper might mean something. Even if we have to give up on positively identifying comm. gil. as THE ONE plant for THE ONE biblical "Balm of Gilead", the article should first clarify which other candidates have been proposed, and THEN deal with them individually. As of now, I'm left with the feeling that it diverges in a dozen different directions, dealing with everything that is a balm/plant used for similar products in the wider Middle East.


 * Many old sources. The sources should be placed in their historical context, as a whole lot of them are too old to be taken seriously. Feliks is a recent specialist who worked quite a bit on the topic, also in practical terms, not just theoretically, and that isn't mentioned. Theoretical work of the last 50 years by Groom, Hanuš & al., Becke and so on has another value than what was written 100 years ago. I don't know if the botanic-related articles of the Encyclopaedia Judaica have been thoroughly updated for the 2nd edition (2007) vs the 1st (1970s ff), which itself might have been recycled older material.

As a result of this all, what the user gets here is a material very nicely organised on the page, but very chaotic and quite unhelpful in its content. I still don't know what a) the definition is, and b) what current science says about biblical balms, "of Gilead" or otherwise. And that means: the whole effort was in vane. If I know already a lot and I'm only looking for specific details, I might find them here among the pile of info; but that's never the purpose of an encyclopedia. Maybe one more push can solve this, as many (most?) of the puzzle pieces are here already.

What I'd love to find is a logical structure going step by step:
 * What is the term at hand (Tyndale's poetic sense or more?)
 * What does science believe stood behind it: one plant, one balm? Many throughout biblical history? We're talking many centuries.
 * More detail on the main candidates, probably c. gil. and Terebinth/Pistacia lentiscus (see Iluz: the history of cultivation of c. gil. in Roman-period Land of Israel, then medieval Egypt).

I'm not a specialist, so don't say "fine, then you go ahead and do it" :) Cheers, Arminden (talk) 18:25, 21 October 2021 (UTC)

There is no "Balm of Gilead"
I propose we deal with the many issues in this article (as raised by Arminden), beginning with the fact that the Bible never mentions "Balm of Gilead." The first usage in English may be 1652 ''The Balm of Gilead: Or, Comforts for the Distressed; Both Morall & divine. Most fit for these woeful times'' By Joseph Hall.

It's highly confusing to say "The expression stems from William Tyndale's language in the King James Bible of 1611." Tyndale's Bible was published in 1525, and while it was indeed the starting point of the KJV, that's the only sense in which it's Tyndale's language (he died in 1536). And since Tyndale didn't translate Jeremiah, he never even used the phrase "balm in Gilead," which gave rise to the spiritual/poetic sense of the article's title.

This article may require more than Wikipedia allows--original research--to sort out the topics it appears to address: 1) origins and use of the phrase "Balm of Gilead" and 2) balm/balsam candidates with claim to Biblical stature (The Quest of the Historical Balsam). But it feels to me that the article as it currently stands is attempting just that--research.

Can we find some energy to work on this? As it stands now, the conclusion of the article seems to be: There is no "Balm of Gilead." JFLohr (talk) 18:56, 19 October 2023 (UTC)