What Do the Olive Tree and Olive Oil Mean in the Bible?

The olive tree in the Bible stands for a life rooted in God and bearing fruit, and for God’s people. Its oil stands for God’s gifts: it fed families, lit the sanctuary lamp and went into the offerings, and it set priests and kings apart for God. Paul pictures the Gentiles grafted into that tree (Romans 11).

A psalm says it in one line: “But I am like a green olive tree in the house of God: I trust in the mercy of God for ever and ever” (Psalm 52:8). The olive is an evergreen, and some living olive trees are hundreds of years old, so it made a natural picture of faith that lasts. When the Bible speaks of oil, it nearly always means the oil of this tree.

The King James Version names the olive tree 25 times, and says olive or olives 53 times in all. The prophets use it for Israel. Jeremiah reminded Judah of the name God had given it: “The Lord called thy name, A green olive tree, fair, and of goodly fruit: with the noise of a great tumult he hath kindled fire upon it, and the branches of it are broken” (Jeremiah 11:16). The verse begins with a loving name and ends in fire, because Jeremiah was warning a people who were “offering incense unto Baal” (Jeremiah 11:17). Hosea, near the end of his book, calls Israel to “return unto the Lord thy God” (Hosea 14:1) and promises what will follow: “His branches shall spread, and his beauty shall be as the olive tree, and his smell as Lebanon” (Hosea 14:6). The tree can burn, and the tree can grow again.

The same tree pictures a blessed home. “Thy wife shall be as a fruitful vine by the sides of thine house: thy children like olive plants round about thy table” (Psalm 128:3). Olive branches were also gathered for the Feast of Tabernacles, when the people were told to “fetch olive branches, and pine branches, and myrtle branches, and palm branches” to build their booths (Nehemiah 8:15).

In the fable Jotham tells in Judges, the olive is the tree that will not be king. When the trees went looking for a ruler, “they said unto the olive tree, Reign thou over us. But the olive tree said unto them, Should I leave my fatness, wherewith by me they honour God and man, and go to be promoted over the trees?” (Judges 9:8–9). Jotham called it out from Mount Gerizim to the men of Shechem, who had made Abimelech king after he killed seventy of his brothers. The olive’s refusal shows what the tree was loved for. It had better work to do than rule: oil that honoured God and people.

For Paul the olive tree is the people of God, rooted in Israel’s faith. Writing to the Christians of Rome, “I speak to you Gentiles” (Romans 11:13), he says some natural branches were broken off “because of unbelief” (Romans 11:20) and Gentiles were grafted in among them:

And if some of the branches be broken off, and thou, being a wild olive tree, wert grafted in among them, and with them partakest of the root and fatness of the olive tree; Boast not against the branches. But if thou boast, thou bearest not the root, but the root thee. (Romans 11:17–18)

Olive growers did graft, but the other way round: a cultivated branch went onto a wild stock. Paul’s picture runs against the grower’s practice, and he says so himself, calling it grafting “contrary to nature into a good olive tree” (Romans 11:24). What he wants from the Gentile believers is humility. They live from a root they did not plant. They stand “by faith” (Romans 11:20). And the broken branches are not lost for good, “for God is able to graft them in again” (Romans 11:23). The tree is God’s, and so is the grafting.

The harvest came in October and November. Families picked the fruit by hand or knocked it from the branches, and the Law kept part of the crop for the poor: “When thou beatest thine olive tree, thou shalt not go over the boughs again: it shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow” (Deuteronomy 24:20). Isaiah knew how little a beaten tree had left, “two or three berries in the top of the uppermost bough” (Isaiah 17:6). Even the harvest had mercy built into it.

The finest oil came from olives crushed gently in a vessel, without heavy pressing, and that oil went to the sanctuary. God told Moses that Israel must bring “pure oil olive beaten for the light, to cause the lamp to burn always” (Exodus 27:20). Ordinary oil was made in presses cut into the rock of the orchards, where the fruit was crushed and trodden with the feet as grapes were. Micah’s warning to a dishonest people turns on that work: “thou shalt tread the olives, but thou shalt not anoint thee with oil” (Micah 6:15). Later presses used a great hollowed stone, two metres or more across, with an upright millstone rolled round it to crush the olives before pressing. Whatever the method, the olive had to be crushed before it gave its oil.

A failed olive crop meant real want. Habakkuk names it among the losses he could face and still praise God: “the labour of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat”, and yet “I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation” (Habakkuk 3:17–18).

Olive oil was food, fuel, medicine, an offering and a trade good. Here are the uses Scripture names, with a verse to read for each:

Use	What happens	Where to read it
Food	A widow’s last meal and the oil that did not run out	1 Kings 17:12–16
Light	The lamp in the tabernacle kept burning	Exodus 27:20; Leviticus 24:2
Offerings	Fine flour with oil, and oil with the daily lamb	Leviticus 2:1–7; Exodus 29:40
Wounds	Oil and wine poured on a stranger’s injuries	Luke 10:34
Gladness	Oil to make the face shine	Psalm 104:15
Trade	Pure oil paid each year to King Hiram	1 Kings 5:11
Anointing	Priests and kings set apart for God	1 Samuel 16:13

At Zarephath, in a drought, a widow had only flour and a little oil left for herself and her son. She fed the prophet Elijah first, and “the barrel of meal wasted not, neither did the cruse of oil fail, according to the word of the Lord, which he spake by Elijah” (1 Kings 17:16). The grain offering, which the King James Version calls the “meat offering”, was flour with oil: “his offering shall be of fine flour; and he shall pour oil upon it, and put frankincense thereon” (Leviticus 2:1). On the road to Jericho the Samaritan “bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine” (Luke 10:34), the ordinary first aid of the day. Psalm 104 thanks God for “wine that maketh glad the heart of man, and oil to make his face to shine” (Psalm 104:15). And Solomon paid Hiram of Tyre “twenty measures of pure oil” a year (1 Kings 5:11) for the cedar and fir that built the Temple.

The tree’s wood went into the Temple as well. Solomon made the two cherubim of the inner sanctuary “of olive tree, each ten cubits high” (1 Kings 6:23), and its doors were olive wood carved with cherubim, palm trees and open flowers and overlaid with gold (1 Kings 6:31–32). The green olive tree “in the house of God” was there in more than a figure.

Oil poured in worship marked something as God’s. Jacob, after his dream at Bethel, set up the stone he had slept on “and poured oil upon the top of it” (Genesis 28:18). When Samuel anointed David, “the Spirit of the Lord came upon David from that day forward” (1 Samuel 16:13). Anointing, and why Christians link oil with the Holy Spirit, are explained in what oil represents in the Bible.

It told Noah the flood was over. Noah sent a dove out of the ark, “and the dove came in to him in the evening; and, lo, in her mouth was an olive leaf pluckt off: so Noah knew that the waters were abated from off the earth” (Genesis 8:11). A freshly picked leaf meant trees were growing above the water again. Genesis speaks of a leaf, and draws no more from it than that.

By about the year 200 the olive branch was already a sign of peace, and Christians gave it a meaning of their own. Tertullian, writing on baptism, said the dove “returned with the olive-branch, a sign which even among the nations is the fore-token of peace”. He saw baptism in it. As the dove came back over the flood, so the dove of the Holy Spirit comes to the newly baptized, “bringing us the peace of God”.

The Mount of Olives is the hill that stands “before Jerusalem on the east” (Zechariah 14:4), named for the olives that grew on it. The King James Version names it 13 times as the mount of Olives and twice as Olivet. King David fled over it when his son Absalom rose against him. He “went up by the ascent of mount Olivet, and wept as he went up” (2 Samuel 15:30).

For Jesus it was a place he went to often. In his last days, “in the day time he was teaching in the temple; and at night he went out, and abode in the mount that is called the mount of Olives” (Luke 21:37). The crowd began to praise God on the road “at the descent of the mount of Olives” as he rode into Jerusalem (Luke 19:37). He sat on it when the disciples asked him about his coming and the end of the world (Matthew 24:3). And on the night of his arrest “he came out, and went, as he was wont, to the mount of Olives” (Luke 22:39).

He left from there too. After he was taken up into heaven, the apostles came back to Jerusalem “from the mount called Olivet, which is from Jerusalem a sabbath day’s journey” (Acts 1:12), with the angels’ promise that he “shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven” (Acts 1:11). Zechariah had foreseen a day when the Lord’s “feet shall stand in that day upon the mount of Olives” (Zechariah 14:4), and many Christians read the two passages together.

Gethsemane is usually explained as “oil press”, from the Hebrew and Aramaic words for a press and for oil. It was a place at the foot of the Mount of Olives, beyond the Kidron brook. Matthew writes, “Then cometh Jesus with them unto a place called Gethsemane, and saith unto the disciples, Sit ye here, while I go and pray yonder” (Matthew 26:36), and Mark calls it “a place which was named Gethsemane” (Mark 14:32). John calls it a garden “over the brook Cedron” (John 18:1).

There, in the place named for crushing olives, Jesus prayed, “Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done” (Luke 22:42). And “being in an agony he prayed more earnestly: and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground” (Luke 22:44). The Gospels do not comment on the name. They simply tell us where he knelt.

Eight old olive trees stand in the garden today. In 2012 a study by Italy’s National Research Council dated wood from three of them to the years 1092, 1166 and 1198. The other five were too hollow to test, and the roots may be older than the trunks. All eight share one genotype, which suggests they were grown from cuttings of a single parent tree. The study did not show that they stood there in Jesus’ time.

The prophet Zechariah saw a golden lampstand with seven lamps and “two olive trees by it, one upon the right side of the bowl, and the other upon the left side thereof” (Zechariah 4:3). The trees fed the lamps through “two golden pipes” that “empty the golden oil out of themselves” (Zechariah 4:12). When Zechariah asked what they were, the angel answered, “These are the two anointed ones, that stand by the Lord of the whole earth” (Zechariah 4:14). The Hebrew says, literally, sons of fresh oil.

The vision came to encourage the rebuilding of the Temple under Zerubbabel the governor, whose hands “have laid the foundation of this house” (Zechariah 4:9). Joshua the high priest also stands in Zechariah’s visions (Zechariah 3:1; 6:11), and many readers take the two anointed ones to be those two men. In the middle of the vision stands its best-known line, and it says where the oil really comes from: “Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the Lord of hosts” (Zechariah 4:6).

Revelation takes up the picture for “my two witnesses”, who prophesy for 1,260 days: “These are the two olive trees, and the two candlesticks standing before the God of the earth” (Revelation 11:4). Their powers recall Elijah and Moses. They “have power to shut heaven, that it rain not”, as Elijah did (1 Kings 17:1), and “power over waters to turn them to blood” (Revelation 11:6), as Moses did in Egypt (Exodus 7:20). Revelation does not name them, and Christians have long disagreed about who they are.

No. Scripture counts olive oil among God’s good gifts, from “a land of oil olive, and honey” (Deuteronomy 8:8) to the oil that makes a face shine, but it never gives the oil a power of its own. Where the New Testament joins oil to healing, the healing comes from God through prayer. James tells the sick to call the elders, who pray “anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord”, and he says what does the work: “the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up” (James 5:14–15).

Churches that anoint the sick do it with prayer, as James describes. For Catholics and the Orthodox the anointing of the sick is a sacrament. The Catechism counts it “among the seven sacraments” (Catechism 1511), and the Orthodox Church in America calls it “the Church’s specific prayer for healing”. In Catholic teaching the blessing of oil is a sacramental: the Catechism lists “the blessing of holy oils” among them (Catechism 1672) and says sacramentals “do not confer the grace of the Holy Spirit in the way that the sacraments do, but by the Church’s prayer, they prepare us to receive grace” (Catechism 1670). It also warns that “to attribute the efficacy of prayers or of sacramental signs to their mere external performance, apart from the interior dispositions that they demand, is to fall into superstition” (Catechism 2111).

Pentecostals say the same in plainer words. Thomas Trask, then General Superintendent of the Assemblies of God, wrote of the elders’ anointing in James 5: “We are instructed to lay hands on the sick, anoint them with oil, and pray the prayer of faith. I do not heal; you do not heal.” What oil means in a believer’s life, and how each church anoints, is explained in what oil represents in the Bible, and words for blessing oil are in prayers to bless anointing oil.

The oil is a gift, and the trust goes to the giver. The psalmist put both in one breath: “I am like a green olive tree in the house of God: I trust in the mercy of God for ever and ever.”

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• What Does Oil Represent in the Bible? Anointing, the Holy Spirit, Healing and Joy
• Bible Questions: What Does It Mean to Be Anointed?
• Prayers to Bless Anointing Oil, and What to Say When You Anoint
• What Does the Dove Represent in the Bible? The Holy Spirit Dove and the Christian Dove
• Bible Study: What Fruit Trees Are Found in the Bible?
• Bible Mysteries: What do Mountains Symbolize in the Bible?