Wormwood

Wormwood was a low shrub famous for its extreme bitterness. Though not poisonous in itself, its taste was so harsh that it became the standard image for anything bitter, painful, or corrupting — often paired with “gall.”

Moses warned against any heart that turned from God and so became “a root that beareth gall and wormwood.” The bitterness of sin’s consequences is wormwood; Lamentations cries that God “hath filled me with bitterness, he hath made me drunken with wormwood,” and Proverbs warns that the end of forbidden pleasure “is bitter as wormwood.”

Revelation gives the word a final, cosmic form: a great star named Wormwood falls and turns a third of the waters bitter, and many die of the waters “because they were made bitter.” From a desert herb to a falling star, wormwood names the bitterness that sin and judgment bring — and the sweetness of God’s mercy by contrast.