Jazmine Is Not in the Bible — It Is a Persian Flower

Jazmine is not in the Bible. It is a flower name — from the Persian yasamin, through Arabic and then French, arriving in English as jasmine.

Flowers do not fare especially well in Scripture, which is honest about what they are. And then our Lord uses one to say something that has kept people going for two thousand years.

What does the name Jazmine mean?

The jasmine flower. Jazmine, Jasmine, Yasmin and Yasmine are the same name, and the Persian original travelled west with the plant itself.

It is a young name in English — nineteenth century onward — and it belongs to a family of flower names that includes Daisy, Lily, Rose and Heather.

Is Jazmine in the Bible?

No — in no language and no spelling. Jasmine is not among the plants of Scripture, which are the plants of the eastern Mediterranean: the fig, the olive, the vine, the almond, the date palm.

There is no Hebrew form of the name, whatever we may be told.

What Scripture says about flowers

The first thing it says is blunt.

All people are like grass, Isaiah says, and all their faithfulness is like the flowers of the field. The grass withers and the flowers fall — and then the sentence turns: but the word of our God endures forever.

Peter quotes it. James says the rich will fade away like a wild flower even while they go about their business.

This is not cruelty. It is the Bible declining to flatter us about how long we last. A flower is the shortest-lived beautiful thing most people see, and Scripture uses it as a mirror.

And then Jesus picks one up

Here is where it turns, and the turn is one of the loveliest moments in the Gospels.

He is talking to people who are genuinely anxious about clothing and food — not an abstract worry, in that economy — and he points at the hillside.

And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these.

The same flowers Isaiah called fleeting. Jesus does not contradict him. He goes further: they are here for a day, they will be thrown into the fire tomorrow, and God dresses them better than the richest king who ever lived.

The argument is not that we will last. It is that God lavishes care on things that do not.

What that means for a short life

Let us take it where he takes it.

If God bothers to make something that beautiful for a single afternoon on a hillside where nobody is looking, then beauty is not wasted on the temporary, and neither is care.

Most of what we do is temporary. The meals, the tidying, the conversations, the small repairs to a life. None of it lasts. Jesus’ argument is that this does not make it worthless — it makes it exactly like the lilies, which God went to considerable trouble over.

A blessing for Jazmine

May we be as unhurried as the flowers, which do not labour or spin.

May we not despise what is short-lived, since God plainly does not.

And when we feel like grass, may we remember the rest of the verse — that the word of our God endures, and we have been given it to hold.

Related reading

• Daisy Is Not in the Bible: The “Day’s Eye” and Morning in Scripture
• Heather Is Not in the Bible: An English Plant Name and the Flowers of the Field
• Is Your Name in the Bible? A Directory of 231 Names