John 4:35-38 Say not you, There are yet four months, and then comes harvest? behold, I say to you, Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields… In Palestine neither all the sowing nor all the reaping of the fields is done at one and the same season. As soon as one crop is out of the ground another is prepared for. Ploughing and sowing follow close upon reaping and gleaning. Different crops require different lengths of time for their maturing; and, as a consequence, the planting for one crop will sometimes be going on while another crop near it is not yet ready for the harvest. As soon as the fields are cleared, in the midsummer or in the early autumn, the ground is ploughed, and the winter wheat or some other grain is sowed, in advance of the rainy season. Again, between the early and the latter rains of the springtime, there will be ploughing, and the sowing of barley or oats or lentils for a later crop. In the second week in April I saw on the Plain of the Cornfields, not far from Jacob's well, the grain already well ripened toward the harvest, while just southward of that region, and again, two days later, just northward of it, I saw ploughing and planting going on; so that I might have been in doubt, from my own observations, whether that were the time of seed-sowing or of harvest; and so it is likely to have been in the days of Jesus. Whether this were the springtime or the early winter, whether it were at noonday or at eventide, are points which have been much discussed in connection with the gospel narration of the visit of Jesus. It would seem most natural, from the story as it stands, to suppose that the season was the springtime, and that the hour was noonday; but, however that may be, it is obvious that there were within the eye-sweep of Jesus and His disciples the signs of seed-sowing on the one hand and of ripening harvest on the other; and that it was by calling attention to these two processes of nature in so close proximity of time and space that Jesus taught the lesson His disciples were shown that even while seed-sowing for one crop was going on in the natural world there might be also a making ready for an ingathering of former crops; so that sowing and reaping should go on together. Then came our Lord's application of this fact in nature's sphere. (H. C. Trumbull, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: Say not ye, There are yet four months, and then cometh harvest? behold, I say unto you, Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest. |
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