The Temple Incense of Exodus: Stacte, Onycha, Galbanum and Frankincense

The Temple incense of Exodus 30:34–38, the ketoret, was a compound of four ingredients burned daily on the golden altar of the Israelite Tabernacle and later the Jerusalem Temple: stacte (Hebrew nataph), onycha (shecheleth), galbanum (chelbenah) and frankincense (levonah), mixed in equal parts and salted before burning. Of the four, frankincense and galbanum are botanically secure. Frankincense is the gum resin of Boswellia trees native to southern Arabia and the Horn of Africa, and galbanum is the resin of Ferula species from Iran and Central Asia. Stacte and onycha are far less certain: ancient sources point to a fragrant exudate, possibly myrrh or storax, for stacte, and either a resin or the dried operculum of a marine mollusk for onycha. No recipe beyond “equal parts” survives, so any modern reconstruction of the blend is necessarily interpretive.

The four ingredients of the ketoret

Exodus assigns the recipe to Moses at Sinai and restricts it to Tabernacle use: anyone who compounded incense “like it” for personal use was to be cut off from the people (Exodus 30:37–38). Rabbinic tradition, recorded much later in the Mishnah (tractate Keritot), expands the formula to eleven spices burned together, of which the four named in Exodus are the base. That later list adds materials such as costus, cassia and cinnamon, but the biblical text itself specifies only stacte, onycha, galbanum and frankincense, in equal weight, without further quantities or preparation instructions.

This scarcity of detail is the reason the identity of stacte and onycha has been argued over for two millennia, while frankincense and galbanum have never seriously been in doubt.

Frankincense: the most secure identification

Levonah, rendered “frankincense” in English translations, is the one ingredient every ancient source agrees on. The word shares a root with the Hebrew for “white,” describing the pale color of the dried tears. Botanically it is frankincense (olibanum), the resin tapped from Boswellia sacra and related species growing in Yemen, Oman and the Horn of Africa, and moved north along the incense routes that connected southern Arabia to Israel and the Levant. Its resin acids, principally boswellic acids, and its balsamic, lemon-tinged terpene fraction gave it a scent that Near Eastern cultures from Egypt to Judea treated as the standard of purity and sanctity, which is presumably why it stands last in the Exodus list and appears again, unmixed, elsewhere in the Torah as an accompaniment to grain offerings.

Galbanum: the green resin that balances the blend

Chelbenah is almost as secure an identification. It is galbanum, the oleo-gum-resin of umbellifers in the genus Ferula, chiefly Ferula gummosa, harvested from the roots and lower stems of plants growing on the Iranian plateau and in neighboring parts of Central Asia. Galbanum is sharply green, bitter and slightly sulfurous raw, closer to crushed stems and cut vegetables than to a sweet resin. Exodus specifies it explicitly by name, which many commentators read as significant: an unpleasant note deliberately included in an otherwise sweet blend, sometimes explained homiletically as a symbol that the incense-worthy community includes even its less appealing members.

What was stacte? A resin lost in translation

Stacte is the Greek stakte, “that which drips” or “oozes,” used by the Septuagint translators to render nataph, a Hebrew word built on the same idea of dripping. In the earliest Greek usage stacte denoted a rare, naturally exuded form of myrrh, softer and more liquid than the lump myrrh scraped from wounded Commiphora bark, prized precisely because it required no cutting of the tree. By the Roman period, writers including Pliny the Elder use “stacte” more loosely, and some ancient pharmacological texts apply the term to the balsam of storax, from Styrax officinalis, a small tree native to the eastern Mediterranean and well attested in the region in antiquity. Modern scholarship has not settled between these two candidates, and it is possible that “stacte” covered more than one material across different periods and authors, which is part of why a single confident botanical answer keeps eluding translators.

What is onycha, and why is it the most disputed ingredient?

Onycha renders shecheleth, and it is the ingredient with the least consensus behind it. The Greek onycha means “nail” or “claw,” and one long-standing identification, going back to classical and medieval sources, holds that it refers to the operculum, the horny trapdoor that seals the shell opening, of certain sea snails such as species in the genus Strombus. Burned, the operculum produces a musky, faintly marine odor that would have added an animalic depth to the blend, a role otherwise unfilled by the three plant resins. The competing view treats onycha as a botanical resin, sometimes linked to labdanum from Cistus shrubs, on the grounds that a temple offering built from animal by-products sits uneasily with other purity concerns in Levitical law. Neither reading can be confirmed from the text itself, and both have serious defenders; this article does not resolve the question because the primary sources do not.

What did the Temple incense smell like?

No formula for combining the four beyond “equal parts” survives, and no burning instructions beyond daily use on the altar are given, so any answer is a reconstruction rather than a report. Working from the securely identified materials, frankincense would have supplied a resinous, slightly citrus backbone; galbanum a sharp green top note, unusual among sacred incenses of the period for being included as itself rather than diluted into invisibility; and, depending on which reading of stacte and onycha is preferred, either a soft, vanillic-balsamic warmth paired with a musky animal note, or a fully botanical blend of resins with no animal component at all. The rabbinic elaboration to eleven spices, compiled centuries after the Temple’s destruction, suggests later tradition remembered the base blend as more complex in practice than the four named ingredients alone, though how much of that expansion reflects Second Temple period practice versus later reconstruction is itself debated among historians.

How does this compare to other ancient compound incenses?

The Exodus ketoret belongs to a broader ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean pattern of ritual incenses built from several resins and aromatics rather than a single material, a pattern also visible in Egyptian kyphi, which likewise combined resins, wine, honey and other ingredients into a compound burned for religious and, according to later classical writers, medicinal use. Both traditions restricted the recipe to priestly or temple contexts and treated the compounding itself as a specialized, controlled craft rather than an open one.

Comparing the four ingredients

What survives of this tradition today

The Temple altar of incense went out of use with the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, and with it the last living context in which the exact ketoret was compounded and burned. What remains are the biblical text, the later rabbinic elaboration, and the botanical and zoological record of the individual materials, which is where most modern reconstruction work has to start. For the two secure ingredients, that record is detailed enough to work with directly: frankincense and galbanum are both still traded, described and studied today largely as they would have been in antiquity. For stacte and onycha, reconstruction means choosing among plausible ancient candidates rather than confirming a single settled answer, and any burned version of the “Temple incense” sold or described today reflects one such choice, not a recovered original formula.

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