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Japanese Yes. The King James Bible says “diamond” four times, though the breastplate stone it calls a diamond was probably something else. Twice the word names that stone, once a jewel of Tyre’s king, and once the engraving point in Jeremiah 17:1, which may well have been a diamond. Modern Bibles translate these words in different ways.
The verse to hold on to is Jeremiah’s, and it has nothing to do with jewelry. “The sin of Judah is written with a pen of iron, and with the point of a diamond: it is graven upon the table of their heart, and upon the horns of your altars” (Jeremiah 17:1). Here the diamond is a tool for cutting letters into something hard, and what it writes is meant to last. The good news of the prophets is that God has a pen of his own, and he means to write on the same heart.
Which Bible verses mention diamonds?
In the King James Version, “diamond” appears in four verses, and the plural “diamonds” never appears. Two are the breastplate, in God’s instructions and again when it is made: “the second row shall be an emerald, a sapphire, and a diamond” (Exodus 28:18; 39:11). One is Ezekiel’s lament over the king of Tyre, whose covering in Eden included “the sardius, topaz, and the diamond” (Ezekiel 28:13). The fourth is Jeremiah’s “point of a diamond” (Jeremiah 17:1).
Two more verses use the same Hebrew word as Jeremiah, and the King James Version calls it “adamant,” the old English name for the hardest stone. God tells Ezekiel, “As an adamant harder than flint have I made thy forehead” (Ezekiel 3:9), and Zechariah says the people “made their hearts as an adamant stone, lest they should hear the law” (Zechariah 7:12). These counts are whole words in the King James Version. Other Bibles say “diamond” in other places or not at all.
Was the diamond on the high priest’s breastplate a real diamond?
Probably not. The Hebrew word in Exodus and Ezekiel 28 is yahalom, which the Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon connects with a verb meaning to strike or hammer, “owing to its hardness.” The lexicon suggests jasper, which is how it reads the ancient Greek and Latin translations, or onyx; the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia thinks the Septuagint’s word order too uncertain to tell. In Brenton’s English translation of the Greek Septuagint, the second row reads “a carbuncle, a sapphire, and a jasper.”
There is a practical reason too. Every stone on the breastplate carried a tribe’s name, cut “like the engravings of a signet” (Exodus 28:21). The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia puts it bluntly: the translation “diamond” is “certainly wrong, for the stone had a name engraved on it and the method of engraving a diamond was not invented till 2,000 or 3,000 years after the breastplate was made.”
So modern Bibles disagree. The English Standard Version and the New American Standard Bible keep “a diamond” in Exodus 28:18. The New International Version has “emerald” in that place, and the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition has “a moonstone.” The NIV adds a footnote that is true of the whole list: “The precise identification of some of these precious stones is uncertain.” If you have read that the emerald and the diamond trade places between Bibles, this is why; the emerald in the Bible has the same puzzle from the other side.
What is the “point of a diamond” in Jeremiah 17:1?
It is the cutting tip of an engraver’s tool. Jeremiah’s word is shamir, which can also mean a thorn. The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia says it “evidently refers to a hard stone” and may be emery, a granular form of corundum “well known to the ancients and used by them for polishing and engraving precious stones.” The English Standard Version keeps “with a point of diamond”; the New International Version says “inscribed with a flint point.”
Whatever the stone, the picture is clear, and a Roman writer of the apostles’ century shows us the tool. Pliny the Elder, writing about AD 77, says that when the stone he called adamas breaks into tiny fragments, “these particles are held in great request by engravers, who enclose them in iron, and are enabled thereby, with the greatest facility, to cut the very hardest substances known.” A pen of iron with a point of diamond. Jeremiah’s hearers knew that what such a pen cuts into stone does not wash off.
And that is the weight of the verse. Judah’s sin is not chalked on the surface. It is “graven upon the table of their heart.” We know the feeling. Some of our own wrongs seem cut too deep to remove.
What do diamonds symbolize in the Bible?
Hardness. Every time the Bible reaches for this stone as a picture, it is because nothing is harder, and it uses that hardness two ways.
Turned against God, it is the hard heart. In Zechariah the people “refused to hearken, and pulled away the shoulder, and stopped their ears,” and “made their hearts as an adamant stone” (Zechariah 7:11–12). Given by God, it is courage. When Ezekiel was sent to people who would not listen, God said, “Behold, I have made thy face strong against their faces,” and “as an adamant harder than flint have I made thy forehead: fear them not” (Ezekiel 3:8–9). The same stone stands for a heart closed against God and a face set firm for him. The Bible never makes the diamond a symbol of purity or eternal love. Those meanings come from modern jewelry.
Can God replace a heart that is hard as diamond?
This is the promise the prophets hold out against Jeremiah 17:1. The same prophet who saw sin cut into the heart with a diamond heard God say what he would write there instead: “I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people” (Jeremiah 31:33). Ezekiel heard the same promise in plainer words: “A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh” (Ezekiel 36:26).
Brothers and sisters, a heart that cannot be engraved over can still be replaced. God takes the stone out and gives flesh in its place. Paul saw that promise kept in the believers at Corinth, and he called them a letter from Christ.
Does the Bible say diamonds are made under pressure?
No. The picture of faith formed like a diamond under heat and pressure is a modern sermon image, drawn from what geology later learned. It can be a helpful one, but it is not in Scripture. When the Bible describes how trials shape us, it uses a different craft, the refiner’s fire. Peter writes of “the trial of your faith, being much more precious than of gold that perisheth, though it be tried with fire” (1 Peter 1:7), and Malachi says the Lord “shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver” (Malachi 3:3). A refiner sits close to the fire and watches the metal. That is the Bible’s picture of what God does with us in hard days. The meaning of gold in the Bible follows the refiner’s image further.
Were diamonds valuable in Bible times?
The Bible never says. The jewel it uses as its measure of worth is the one the King James Version calls rubies, the Hebrew peninim, which the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia thinks may have been red coral: wisdom “is more precious than rubies” (Proverbs 3:15), and “the price of wisdom is above rubies” (Job 28:18). By the first century, though, the Romans prized the hard stone they called adamas above everything. Pliny calls it “the substance that possesses the greatest value, not only among the precious stones, but of all human possessions,” and adds that for a long time it “was known to kings only, and to very few of them.” His translators note that whether he means the diamond at all is “doubtful.” For the high priest’s breastplate, centuries earlier, a large engraved diamond would have been out of reach of any craftsman, which is one more reason to think yahalom was another stone.
So the Bible’s diamond is the hardest point a craftsman could hold, and it shows us how deep sin goes. Then God takes up his own pen. “Ye are manifestly declared to be the epistle of Christ ministered by us, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of the heart” (2 Corinthians 3:3).
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