What is a carbuncle?

Symbolism can easily fall into the current philosophy of subjective truth; what is true for one person is not so for another. The symbolism of the Bible can be rich for those who seek it, and seem silly for others who take a more objective approach to interpreting Scripture.

I’m a bit mixed about today’s reading. The verse is God’s promise to His people while they are struggling and in bondage. He says, “I will make your pinnacles of rubies, your gates of crystal, and all your walls of precious stones” (Isaiah 54:12).

The New King James Bible translates a word from this verse as crystal. The old King James says it is a carbuncle. I can understand why the translators changed it. The word carbuncle immediately brings to my mind a severe abscess or boil in the skin, not exactly a positive image. When I ‘Googled’ it, the resulting images were awful.

However, my Oxford dictionary gives a second meaning: a bright red gem, in particular a polished garnet. My search did turn up a handful of dark red jewels. However, the dictionary adds that the origin of this word is from the Latin carbunculus or small coal. The first is a gem, but a small coal is not a particularly positive image either.

The writer of my devotional takes carbuncle and the image of a red gem and extrapolates the possibility that this gate God will give His people is made out of a red precious stone and that stone refers to the blood of Jesus Christ. He says (slightly edited for clarity):

The Lord speaks of Zion’s gates and “thy gates of carbuncles.” The carbuncle is of a blood red color. Why should the Lord have chosen that Zion’s gates should be of this peculiar hue? May we not, without wresting the figure too closely, believe that there is some mystic allusion here to the blood of the Lamb? As scarlet wool was taken by Moses, when he sprinkled the people, and as Rahab’s house was marked by a scarlet thread, may there not be something here significant in the color of the gates? Gates or doors not only give an exit, but admission. How does God hear prayer, and answer it too? Only through the “gate of carbuncle.” Prayer ascends through Jesus, and answers descend through Jesus; groans through Jesus enter the ears of the God of Sabaoth, and through the same bleeding gate of mercy do answers drop into the soul. Our poor self-righteous hearts can hardly comprehend this. . . . Through “gates of carbuncle,” the open wounds of the Lamb (the first image), every prayer ascends. Through these, every answer comes down. If we set up anything else, or make a gate of human merit, we do despite to the Spirit of God, and pour contempt upon the grace and blood of the Lamb.

Everything he says about prayer is true, but the color of the stones didn’t seem too important to many modern Bible translators. Perhaps they stumbled over the word carbuncle like I did, or maybe they were not tuned in to see Jesus everywhere in the Bible like this devotional writer does.

How is this practical for me? I’m thinking that if I want to see Jesus, I will see Him in every place I go, everything that happens. He is here, and there, and everywhere. That is a reality. Seeing Him will not stretch my imagination; it will merely shut out every other vision and thought. Also, instead of thinking as everyone else, I might see each word of Scripture as having great significance, not because of the word itself, but because He spoke it.