From Genesis to Revelation, writers of the Old and New Testaments saw the tree as a metaphor for life, for wholeness, wisdom, spiritual energy, blessings, renewal—for an understanding of God.
And it's worth noting that the significance of the tree as a symbol of spiritual values extends well beyond the boundaries of the Judeo-Christian culture of the Bible. Primitive peoples of wide-ranging cultures endowed few aspects of the natural world with more reverence.
In the ancient Middle East, trees (and mountains) were the towering, lofty structures that dotted an otherwise undifferentiated, horizontal landscape, and they were honored, through humanity's earliest religious impulses, as a microcosm of the universe. They were, literally and figuratively, the lifeline to the infinite.
