What do gold, frankincense and myrrh symbolize?

What Matthew says, and doesn’t

The gifts get half a verse. The magi find the child in a house in Bethlehem, fall down before him, open their treasures and offer “gold, frankincense, and myrrh” (Matthew 2:11). Matthew explains nothing. But his first readers would have heard an echo of Isaiah’s vision of the nations streaming to Jerusalem, with the caravans of Sheba in the lead. Who the magi were is a story of its own.

A multitude of camels will cover you, the dromedaries of Midian and Ephah. All from Sheba will come. They will bring gold and frankincense, and will proclaim the praises of Yahweh.

Frankincense, the white resin

Frankincense is the dried sap of Boswellia trees, small, tough trees of dry hillsides in southern Arabia, today’s Oman and Yemen, and across the sea in Somalia and Ethiopia. Harvesters cut the bark, and a milky resin oozes out and hardens into pale lumps called tears. Burned, it gives a sweet, resinous smoke. Hebrew calls it levonah, “the white one”; the English name comes from Old French franc encens, fine incense. In the Temple it went into the holy incense (Exodus 30:34) and was laid on the grain offerings (Leviticus 2:1). Churches that use incense still burn it.

Myrrh, the bitter perfume

Myrrh is the resin of Commiphora, thorny shrubs of the same regions. Its Hebrew name, mor, is linked to the word for bitter. It was perfume, medicine and burial spice at once. Myrrh oil went into Israel’s holy anointing oil (Exodus 30:23), and the young women brought to King Ahasuerus, Esther among them, spent six months being treated with it (Esther 2:12). Egyptian embalmers packed bodies with it, Herodotus says (Histories 2.86). In the Gospels it returns twice, both times at Jesus’s death: soldiers offer him wine mixed with myrrh on the cross, which he refuses (Mark 15:23), and a council member brings it for his burial.

Nicodemus, who at first came to Jesus by night, also came bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about a hundred Roman pounds.

Worth a king’s ransom

Both resins traveled north on the Incense Road, a chain of camel caravans and oasis towns from southern Arabia to Gaza and the Mediterranean. Pliny the Elder, writing in the 70s AD, counts 65 camel stages between the frankincense country and Gaza, with tolls and fees reaching 688 denarii per camel before the load reached the coast (Natural History 12.63–65). He grumbles that India, China and Arabia drain the empire of 100 million sesterces a year, and that Nero burned more incense in one day, at his wife Poppaea’s funeral, than Arabia produces in a year (12.83–84). These were the luxury goods of the age, the kind of gifts one ruler sent another.

The traditional meanings

Christian writers soon gave each gift a meaning, and the classic reading has hardly changed since:

• Gold, for a king. Around AD 180 Irenaeus wrote that gold was offered because the child was a king whose kingdom has no end (Against Heresies 3.9.2).
• Frankincense, for God. Incense was burned in worship, so the gift was read as homage to the child as God.
• Myrrh, for a death. A burial spice, it pointed to a man who would die and be buried. Origen gives the same three in the third century (Against Celsus 1.60).

In an Epiphany sermon, Pope Gregory the Great added a second reading for the worshiper: gold is wisdom, frankincense is prayer, myrrh is self-denial (Homilies on the Gospels 10). The carol “We Three Kings,” written in 1857, gives a verse to each gift, myrrh with its “bitter perfume.” And the custom lives on: every January 6, at the Chapel Royal in London, gold, frankincense and myrrh are offered on behalf of the British sovereign.