Roses in the Bible: What They Mean, From the Rose of Sharon to the White Rose

The rose has no set meaning in the Bible, which mentions it only in passing. The King James Version names it twice, but the Hebrew flower in both verses was probably a crocus or a narcissus. Its Christian meanings came later: red roses for the martyrs, white for purity and joy, and the “Mystical rose” as a title of Mary.

Where is the rose mentioned in the Bible?

In the King James Version the rose appears in two lines of Hebrew poetry. In the Song of Solomon the beloved says, “I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys” (Song of Solomon 2:1). In Isaiah the prophet looks ahead to the day God’s people come home, when “the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose” (Isaiah 35:1); the chapter ends with “the ransomed of the LORD” returning “to Zion with songs and everlasting joy upon their heads” (Isaiah 35:10). In the Song the flower pictures the beloved’s beauty, and in Isaiah a desert coming to life. Neither verse makes the rose stand for anything beyond the comparison.

Catholic Bibles hold a few more roses, in books that Protestants call the Apocrypha and leave out of their canon. Their Greek text has rhodon, the ordinary Greek word for a rose, and here it probably means a real one: the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia sees “no reason why the rose, of which several varieties are common in Palestine, should not be meant”, though it notes that Tristram favored the rhododendron. In the Douay-Rheims translation, Wisdom, who “shall praise her own self” (Ecclesiasticus 24:1), says, “I was exalted like a palm tree in Cades, and as a rose plant in Jericho” (24:18; 24:14 in Bibles that follow the Greek numbering). The same book urges its hearers to “bud forth as the rose planted by the brooks of waters” (39:17; 39:13 in the Greek numbering) and praises the high priest Simon “as the flower of roses in the days of the spring” (50:8). In the Book of Wisdom the roses belong to the wicked, who, “reasoning with themselves, but not right”, say, “Let us crown ourselves with roses, before they be withered” (Wisdom 2:1, 8).

Is the rose of Sharon really a rose?

Probably not. The Hebrew word, ḥăḇaṣṣeleṯ, appears only in those two verses, and no one knows for certain which flower it named. The Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew lexicon gives “meadow-saffron or crocus”. The Targum, an ancient Jewish paraphrase of the Song in Aramaic, reads it as the narcissus. The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia of 1915 put it plainly: “All authorities agree that the so-called ‘rose’ was some kind of bulbed plant.” Sharon was the fertile coastal plain between Mount Carmel and Jaffa, and the note in the Catholic New American Bible says the flower was probably the narcissus that grows there.

The oldest translation did not say rose either. The Greek Septuagint has a flower in the Song and a lily in Isaiah, and the Douay-Rheims has no rose in either verse. Most modern English versions keep the rose in the Song but put a crocus in Isaiah.

Translators who keep the rose often hedge it in a footnote. The ESV’s note reads, “Probably a bulb, such as a crocus, asphodel, or narcissus”; the NIV’s, “Probably a member of the crocus family.”

Bibles in Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and French are divided too. Some keep the rose in both verses; the Italian bishops’ translation and the French Segond Bibles have the narcissus; and two give a plain flower, a tulip or a lily.

Who is the rose of Sharon?

Modern Bibles such as the NIV give the line to the beloved woman, with a note that the speaker may be “He”. The Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon calls the flower “figurative of Shulamite”, the name the Song gives her. Jewish and Christian readers have long heard more in it. The Aramaic Targum gives the words to the whole people of Israel. It begins, “The Assembly of Israel said”, and has her say that while God’s Presence dwells among them, “I am like the narcissus fresh from the Garden of Eden”. Where the verse has a lily, the Targum puts a real rose: “my actions are beautiful like the rose in the valley of the Pleasure-Garden of Eden”.

Many Christians have heard Christ speaking. The commentator Matthew Henry, writing in the early 1700s, read the verse as Christ’s description of himself and drew a lesson from the open plain: “He is not a rose locked up in a garden, but all may come and receive benefit by him and comfort in him.” Later Catholic devotion gave the rose to Mary as well.

When did the rose become a Christian symbol?

Long after the Bible was written, and slowly, between the third century and the sixteenth.

The earliest is a metaphor in a letter. Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, who was put to death for his faith in 258, wrote to fellow Christians held in prison that the Church “was white before in the works of the brethren; now she has become purple in the blood of the martyrs. Among her flowers are wanting neither roses nor lilies.” He promised them crowns “either white, as of labours, or of purple, as of suffering.”

In the next century Ambrose of Milan explained where the thorns came from. As Laura Lieber of Duke University summarizes his teaching, the first roses grew in Eden “entirely without thorns”, and only after Adam and Eve were sent out of the garden did the blossoms acquire “their prickly defenses”. Genesis names the thorns in God’s word to Adam: “Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee” (Genesis 3:18).

What does a red rose mean in the Bible?

The Bible never mentions a red rose. In Christian use it has long stood for the martyrs, whose blood Cyprian set beside the Church’s roses; Lieber notes that in Christian art “red roses specifically symbolized martyrs.” In devotion to Mary the colors take other meanings, and one Catholic columnist, writing in 2025 in the Georgia Bulletin, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Atlanta, puts them this way: “White roses speak of her purity, red roses tell of her charity, and thorns symbolize her sorrows.”

What does a white rose mean in the Bible?

The Bible does not mention a white rose either, but it gives white a steady meaning: cleansing, purity and the glory of heaven. “Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow” (Isaiah 1:18), and the saints in Revelation “have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb” (Revelation 7:14). Christian writers carried that meaning into the white rose; in the Georgia Bulletin column it stands for Mary’s purity. At the close of Dante’s Paradiso the whole company of the redeemed appears in the shape of a rose: “In fashion then as of a snow-white rose / Displayed itself to me the saintly host” (Longfellow’s translation).

The Luther rose

The best-known white rose in Protestant churches is on Martin Luther’s seal, which the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod calls “the most enduring symbol of the Lutheran Reformation.” The seal was on the title pages of his books by the early 1520s, and he explained it in a letter to Lazarus Spengler on 8 July 1530. At the center is a black cross in a heart, and “The heart should stand in the middle of a white rose. This is to show that faith gives joy, comfort, and peace.” He chose the color on purpose: “This is why the rose must be white, not red. White is the color of the spirits and angels.” The translation published by the Missouri Synod points here to the angel at the empty tomb, whose “raiment” was “white as snow” (Matthew 28:3), and to the “two angels in white” whom Mary Magdalene saw there (John 20:12). The rose stands on a sky-blue field for the heavenly joy that “begins now, but is grasped in hope”, and a golden ring circles it because “blessedness in heaven lasts forever and has no end.”

Do yellow and pink roses mean anything in the Bible?

No. Scripture gives no meaning to yellow, pink or any other color of rose. Two Catholic customs come closest. At Lourdes on 11 February 1858 Bernadette Soubirous described the Lady she saw with “a yellow rose on each foot, the same colour as the beads of her rosary”. In Catholic worship the General Instruction of the Roman Missal allows rose-colored vestments, which “may be used, where it is the practice, on Gaudete Sunday (Third Sunday of Advent) and on Laetare Sunday (Fourth Sunday of Lent)”. That rose is a color, not a flower, and pink itself never appears in the Bible.

Why is Mary called the Mystical Rose?

“Mystical rose” is one of the titles of Mary in the Litany of Loreto, a Catholic prayer in which the people answer each title with “pray for us”. The Vatican Museums explain that the litany grew from earlier Marian litanies and was approved by Pope Sixtus V in 1587, and that the title belongs among its “biblical and poetic images”, beside “Seat of Wisdom” and “Morning Star”. The image was already old. In Dante’s Paradiso, written before the poet’s death in 1321, the pilgrim is shown Mary in heaven with the words “There is the Rose in which the Word Divine Became incarnate”.

Why is the rosary called a rosary?

The name comes from the Latin rosarium. The Catholic Encyclopedia, which also gives the form rosarius, says the word “means a garland or bouquet of roses”, and that it was often used for “an anthology or collection of extracts”. A medieval legend, known in a German verse version from the thirteenth century, gave the prayer its picture: Mary was seen “to take rosebuds from the lips of a young monk when he was reciting Hail Marys and to weave them into a garland which she placed upon her head.” Each Hail Mary, on that picture, is a rose offered to her. How the prayer itself is said is set out in how to pray the Catholic rosary.

Does the Bible mention the smell of roses?

No. Scripture never gives the rose a scent. Its sweet smells belong mostly to sacrifice and prayer. After the flood, when Noah offered burnt offerings, “the LORD smelled a sweet savour” (Genesis 8:21), and Paul tells the Corinthians, “we are unto God a sweet savour of Christ, in them that are saved, and in them that perish” (2 Corinthians 2:15). In Revelation the smoke of incense rises before God “with the prayers of the saints” (Revelation 8:4). The nearest the rose comes to a fragrance is in Ecclesiasticus, where “bud forth as the rose” is followed by “Give ye a sweet odour as frankincense” and by flowers that “yield a smell” (39:17–19); there the scent is compared with frankincense and the lily, not the rose.

Is Rose a name in the Bible?

No one in the Bible is called Rose. The nearest is Rhoda, a servant girl in the house of Mary the mother of John Mark, “where many were gathered together praying” (Acts 12:12). When Peter knocked at the gate, “a damsel came to hearken, named Rhoda” (Acts 12:13). Easton’s Bible Dictionary gives the meaning of her name as “a rose”, which makes Rhoda the closest the Bible comes to the name Rose.

Related reading

• Bible verses about roses
• Is Lily in the Bible? No, but the Flower Is
• What does the color white mean in Scripture?
• What does the color red mean in the Bible?
• Smelling incense when none is burning
• The symbols of Protestantism, including the Luther rose