Christian Pure

Are Tomatoes in the Bible? No, They Came From the Americas

Christian Pure Team

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Summary

  • Tomatoes are not in the Bible, because the tomato comes from the Americas and reached Europe only in the sixteenth century.
  • The first European description of a tomato, written by Pietro Andrea Matthioli in 1544, sits in his chapter on the mandrake.
  • The mandrake of Genesis 30 is a cousin of the tomato in the nightshade family, with a tomato-like fruit that is too poisonous to eat.
  • Rachel’s mandrakes did not give her a child; Genesis says that “God remembered Rachel” and opened her womb.
  • The Bible does name everyday vegetables, among them cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions, garlic, lentils, beans and bitter herbs.
  • Scripture gives no meaning for dreaming about tomatoes, and it asks us to test every dream by God’s word.
  • The red-for-blood meanings given to tomatoes are modern, and the psalm praises God for every herb that brings “food out of the earth”.

No, tomatoes are not in the Bible. The tomato comes from the Americas. Its wild relatives grow along the coast from Ecuador to northern Chile, and a Spanish friar recorded about 1577 that the Aztecs of Mexico grew many kinds. It reached Europe only in the sixteenth century, long after the last book of Scripture was written. Still, the first European to describe a tomato reached for a plant the Bible knows well. In 1544 the Italian physician Pietro Andrea…

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Bibliography (Click to show)
  • King James Version (public domain), quoted from BibleGateway: Genesis 1:29; 25:34; 30:1, 14–15, 22; 40:8; 41:16; Exodus 12:8; Numbers 11:5; Deuteronomy 13:1–3; 2 Samuel 17:28; Psalm 104:14; Proverbs 15:17; Ecclesiastes 5:3, 7; Song of Solomon 7:13; Jeremiah 23:28; Daniel 1:12; 1 Thessalonians 5:21.
  • Tinde van Andel, Rutger Vos, Ewout Michels and Anastasia Stefanaki, “Sixteenth-century tomatoes in Europe: who saw them, what did they look like, and where did they come from?”, preprint 2021, published in PeerJ 10 (2022), Wageningen University eDepot.
  • E. W. G. Masterman, “Mandrakes”, International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (1915), Bible Hub.
  • Strong’s Hebrew 1736, duday, with the Brown-Driver-Briggs entry, Bible Hub.

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