Palm tree. — This is the only place where the palm appears as an emblem of moral rectitude and beauty of character, yet its aptness for such comparison has often been noticed. (See Tristram’s Natural History of the Bible, p. 384; and comp. Thomson’s The Land and the Book, p. 49.)
A moral use was more often made of the cedar. Emblem of kingly might, it also became the type of the imperial grandeur of virtuous souls. (See Bible Educator, iii. 379.)
The contrast of the palm’s perennial verdure, and the cedar’s venerable age, an age measured not by years, but by centuries, with the fleeting moments of the brief day of the grass, to which the wicked are compared (Psalms 92:7), is very striking, as striking as that in Psalms 1 between the empty husk and the flourishing fruit-tree.