Sycomore Tree
Plants & TreesThe broad, low-branched fig tree of the lowlands — humble fruit, and the tree a tax collector climbed.
The sycomore (the King James spelling) was not the modern sycamore but a kind of fig with a sturdy short trunk and wide, low branches, easy to climb. Its figs were a poor man’s food, and the tree was common enough in the lowlands to be a measure of ordinary abundance — Solomon made cedars “to be as the sycomore trees… for abundance.”
The prophet Amos described himself as no professional prophet but “an herdman, and a gatherer of sycomore fruit” — a humble labourer called by God. The tree thus carried associations of the lowly and the everyday.
Its most famous moment is in Jericho, where the short tax collector Zacchaeus, unable to see over the crowd, “climbed up into a sycomore tree” to glimpse Jesus passing by. From that undignified perch he was singled out by name and welcomed Jesus to his house — the lowly tree becoming the unlikely place where a lost man was found.