ACACIA. - A tree of the mimosa family, Linnaeus’s mimosa nilotica or acacia arabica; it is the spina aegyptiaca of the ancients. Very widespread in Egypt and in the Sinaitic peninsula, it is rare in Palestine, where it is found only near the Jordan. It yields gum arabic. Its wood (used by the Egyptians in the construction of sacred ships) is extremely hard, very light, and almost imperishable. Yellowish in colour, with time it becomes black like ebony.
In Hebrew the name is used in the plural, šīṭṭim (šīṭṭāh only in Is. 41, 19); from the Egyptian šudt, later sonte, probably “thorn.” The ancient translators did not know its precise meaning: the Septuagint has ξῶλον ἄσσητον, “imperishable wood”; the Vulgate, ligna setim.
The boards and columns of the Tabernacle, Ark (v.) of the Covenant, the altars, the table of the shewbread, and the poles for carrying these sacred objects were made of acacia (Ex. 25-38; Deut. 10). The fact that Moses used for the furnishings of worship not the noble cedar, but the only suitable wood available to him in the desert of Sinai, and one almost unknown in Palestine, confirms the historicity of the sacred books of the Pentateuch and excludes the possibility that the Tabernacle was an idealization of the Solomonic Temple.
BIBLI: Th. Hasseus, De ligno Sittim, in R. Ugolini, Thesaurus Antiquitatum Sacrarum, VIII, Venezia 1747, cols. 351-68; E. Naville, The shittim wood, in Proceedings of the Soc. of bibl. Archaeology, 34 (1912), pp. 180-90. Francesco Spadafora