Bible Garden (Hamburg)

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100-year-old olive tree in the Bible garden
Etrog in the Hamburg Bible Garden. The lemon is part of the festive bouquet at the Jewish Feast of Tabernacles
A wooden cross and under it plants from the passion story

The Bible Garden in Hamburg has a special position among the German Bible gardens in two respects.

Firstly, it was the first Bible garden in Germany, namely laid out in 1979; secondly, it is the only Bible garden that was designed by botanists. It is part of the Loki Schmidt Garden in the Hamburg district of Klein Flottbek . As a themed garden, the Bible Garden is part of the “Plant and Man” area, in which cultural and historical aspects of plants are presented.

Bible plants 1979

The reasons for compiling Bible plants as part of the permanent exhibition of Mediterranean plants in the Hamburg Botanical Garden are not known. 53 plants were presented in pots or small beds in the Bible Garden in 1979, along with their German and Latin names, the genus and the distribution area.

Geographical concept in the late 1980s

The first redesign took place at the end of the 1980s through a cooperation with the Jerusalem Botanical Garden : Hamburg received a delivery of plants from Israel with which the geography of the country could be reproduced. In the subtropical-Mediterranean climate of Palestine, floral elements of the oriental steppes, the Arabian deserts and the African tropics meet with the flora of the eastern Mediterranean.

Because of botanical addiction, it did not seem expedient to identify Biblical Hebrew plant names. An example of this are thorns and thistles, for which the Bible contains around twenty vocabulary, but which in the flora of Palestine are compared to around seventy thorn plants. (Identification is usually attempted via the Arabic plant names, since Arabic and Hebrew are related languages.)

There were the following groups of plants:

  • Fruit trees in Judea ,
  • Field crops of the Sharon plain ,
  • Lebanon plants,
  • Aquatic plants,
  • Desert plants.

Biblical-literary concept since 1997

In 1997 the Bible Garden was redesigned based on the model of the Neot Kedumim Biblical Landscape Park in Israel. For the Year of the Bible 2003 it was expanded and is now divided into the following subject areas:

The previous geographical arrangement of the plants has been canceled in favor of thematic presentation. Cultivated plants are arranged in rows, wild plants “in a random design in order to underline the landscape character of the complex.” The keyword “Path of Moses” includes plants that are mentioned in the Five Books of Moses and therefore a special one in the Jewish tradition Have meaning; One example of this is the group of aromatic plants under a 100-year-old olive tree: the fragrances are said to be reminiscent of the incense offerings in the Jerusalem temple , the olive tree of the menorah . The seven-armed chandelier is interpreted by some exegetes as a stylized tree. In any case, the olive tree was the supplier for the oil that was used in the cult, among other things for operating the chandelier.

With the new, "biblical-literary" concept, the Bible Garden reached a larger audience. Five out of 26 Bible gardens in Germany were inspired by the Hamburg concept.

Web links

literature

  • Katrin Stückrath: Bible Gardens. Origin, shape, meaning, function and interdisciplinary perspectives . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2012, ISBN 978-3-525-62419-7 .
  • Frank Nigel Hepper: Flora of the Bible. An illustrated encyclopedia . Stuttgart 1992, ISBN 3-438-04478-1 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Frank Nigel Hepper: Plant world of the Bible . 1992, p. 121 .
  2. ↑ a b Katrin Stückrath: Bible gardens . 2012, p. 31 .
  3. ↑ a b c d Bible garden. (PDF) Retrieved April 18, 2018 .
  4. ↑ a b Frank Nigel Hepper: Plant world of the Bible . 1992, p. 35 .
  5. ↑ Katrin Stückrath: Bible Gardens . 2012, p. 32 .
  6. ↑ Katrin Stückrath: Bible Gardens . 2012, p. 39 .

Coordinates: 53 ° 33 ′ 38.6 "  N , 9 ° 51 ′ 42.9"  E