The Scent of Home

The Israelites’ determination to return to the Land of Promise (Deuteronomy 6:3) is a memorable motivation for the Exodus in the Hebrew Bible. But it’s not the sole motivation. There’s also the push factor of escaping slavery and Pharaoh’s murderous decree to drown all of the Israelites’ sons at birth (Exodus 1:22). (This, by the way, is a proposition that I find utterly implausible. How long would it take for ancient Egypt, a civilization that if anything tended to think in the extreme long-term, to run out of laborers if it carried out a policy like that for more than a matter of months? So in my historical novel retelling the Exodus myth, I’ve ratcheted the universal male infanticide mandate down to a specific punishment for the vague, and probably capriciously enforced, crime of disloyalty to Pharaoh. It remains horrific, and would have easily been considered an existential emergency by any people subjected to it, but at least it’s not ridiculously short-sighted.)

Still, the pull of the homeland is the most salient feature of the Jewish origin story, an urge that arguably has not loosened its grip on my culture for thousands of years . . . up to the present misery- and anger-filled day. So I could not ignore that powerful spur in my retelling.

I recently came to a scene towards the end of this draft of my novel that gave me an opportunity to incorporate it. My twin protagonists, nonbiblical characters named Tal and Aram, are camping under the Mountain of God and sitting around the cookfire with their family. Their father, in a hopeful mood, confesses his dream of what will happen when the Israelite tribes reach Canaan: “I will walk until I smell the hadass tree,” he tells them. “There I will stop and build my house.”

The hadass is a myrtle tree, or more properly a large bush. It took me a few hours to find the appropriate plant to place in that sentence. There were four qualifications: 1) I wanted it to be a medicinal tree; 2) it had to grow in Israel but not in Egypt; 3) I preferred trees mentioned in the Hebrew Bible; and 4) in order for my character’s idea to work, the blossoms needed a strong scent.

Myrtle berries and the oil derived from its leaves have “good to excellent antimicrobial activities” against such banes of modern existence as E. coli, staph infections and candida, according to the June 2006 issue of Phytochemistry. WebMD says it has traditionally been used for everything from canker sores to heavy menstrual bleeding to heartburn, but cautions against taking myrtle oil undiluted by mouth as it can cause “serious breathing problems.” It classifies the undiluted oil as “likely unsafe.”

Since the ancient Egyptians had the most advanced medical practices of the time, one would expect such a powerful herbal preparation such as myrtle oil to be mentioned in the oldest extant guide to the healing arts, the Edwin Smith Medical Papyrus (named for the American Egyptologist who purchased it in 1862). Fortunately for me, myrtle does not appear in the index of a translation available on the internet. (Another ancient medical papyrus, bought from Smith by another Egypt enthusiast by the name of Georg Ebers, does not seem to have an index — at least, I couldn’t find one in any Internet Archive copies.)

I know the myrtle’s scent from experience: A myrtle branch is part of the ritual I used to perform with my Sunday School classes for the fall holiday of Sukkot, when each celebrant takes four different branches in their hand as well as a citron fruit and waves the conglomeration in all cardinal directions while reciting a blessing. In fact, the myrtle is remarkably fragrant — so much so that there is a rabbinic debate about whether the branches themselves or the oil made from the leaves is a greater blessing. (It’s the oil, because “we are privileged to enjoy its fragrance and we are privileged to anoint ourselves with it,” while we can’t anoint ourselves with branches.)

In the end, myrtle seemed to be the perfect tree to symbolize a homecoming after long and arduous trials. I was hoping it would be carob, because I have fond memories of chewing on the pods right off the tree when I lived on a kibbutz in Israel. Unfortunately, carob was known to the ancient Egyptians, so it was no good for my purposes.

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In another scene I worked on this month, I wanted to know what traveling entertainers might do to make themselves stand out or be more attractive in the ancient world. I came across an article on dentistry in ancient Egypt that describes how they crushed oyster shells into powder and rubbed it directly onto their teeth as a whitening agent. Egyptians apparently also had a recipe for toothpaste that included mint, salt, pepper and dried iris flower. According to the article, iris flower actually does help prevent gum disease — making it, like myrtle, an element of ancient pharmacology.

But despite the modern-tasting mint toothpaste of Egypt, I’m sure no one ever longed for its redolence of home as they might a distinctive flowering tree.