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“coal” or “coals” in the Bible
The combustible mineral coal is rare in the Middle East. We find no evidence that coal was mined underground in this area in ancient times in any significant way. Any coal mining would likely have been limited to visible surface seams, outcrops, drift mining, or shallow bell pits. Systematic deep underground coal mining developed much later in history (primarily in medieval and early modern Europe). Even where coal was used in the ancient Mediterranean, it came from visible seams rather than deep shafts.
In Syria, Lebanon and Canaan, the geology is primarly sedimentary carbonate rocks—limestone, dolomite, chalk, and marl, plus some sandstone and basalt. A large part of Syria is mainly volcanic basalt. Only thin, low-grade lignite (brown coal) seams are found in some sandstone beds (e.g., in the Lebanon mountains).
We are not aware of archaeological or textual evidence of ancient underground coal mining for fuel in these areas.
Late Bronze Age Greece has biomarker evidence of lignite use for metalworking and pottery, mined from local outcrops.
Where is lignite (brown coal) primarily found in the ancient Middle East?
Significant lignite deposits in the Middle East are concentrated almost entirely in what is now Turkey. Elsewhere in the region (especially the Levant and Arab countries), lignite is limited to thin, low-grade seams with little importance.
When the Bible mentions “coal,” what is it referring to?
Biblical “coals” refer to charcoal or burning wood/embers, not mineral coal. The region little if any workable mineral coal, so the fuels were wood, wood charcoal, brush, thorns, and dried dung from animals.
Two different words are found in Hebrew to denote “coal,” both occurring in Proverbs 26:21, “As coal [Hebrew: peham; i.e., ‘black coal’] is to burning coal [Hebrew: gehalim].” The latter of these words is used in Job 41:21; Proverbs 6:28; Isaiah 44:19.
The words “live coal” in Isaiah 6:6 KJV are more correctly “glowing stone.”
In Lam. 4:8 KJV the expression “blacker than a coal” is literally rendered in the margin of the Revised King James Version “darker than blackness.”
“Coals of fire” (2 Samuel 22:9, 13; Psalm 18:8, 12-13, etc.) is an expression used metaphorically for lightning proceeding from God.
A lying tongue is compared to “coals of juniper” (Psalm 120:4; James 3:6).
“Heaping coals of fire on the head” symbolizes overcoming evil with good. The words of Paul (Romans 12:20) are equivalent to saying, “By charity and kindness thou shalt soften down his enmity as surely as heaping coals on the fire fuses the metal in the crucible.”
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Answers about mines and mining in the Bible