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Plants of the Bible
Wheat and barley
Hebrew chittah (wheat), se’orah (barley) · the two staple grains
Wheat and barley were the two main grains of Israel and Egypt. Barley grows on poorer soil, stands drought better and ripens weeks earlier — so the hail in Egypt ruined the barley, already ripe, but not the wheat (Exodus 9:31–32). Barley was cheaper: horses were fed on it, and barley bread was the food of the poor, like the five barley loaves of the boy in John 6:9. Fine wheat flour was a luxury. Pharaoh’s dream of seven heads of grain on one stalk may picture a branched kind of wheat still grown in Egypt.
Seed was sown when the autumn rains began, and the harvest came in spring: barley first, then wheat, over about seven weeks. Reapers cut the stalks with sickles and tied them in sheaves. On a threshing floor on high ground, oxen or a weighted sledge broke up the stalks, and the grain was winnowed — thrown into the air so the wind carried off the chaff. Ruth gleaned through the barley and wheat harvests.
Key verses
but he fell back asleep and dreamed a second time: Seven heads of grain, plump and ripe, came up on one stalk.(Now the flax and barley were destroyed, since the barley was ripe and the flax was in bloom; but the wheat and spelt were not destroyed, because they are late crops.)So Ruth stayed close to the servant girls of Boaz to glean grain until the barley and wheat harvests were finished. And she lived with her mother-in-law.Now is not Boaz, with whose servant girls you have been working, a relative of ours? In fact, tonight he is winnowing barley on the threshing floor.Then Elisha said, “Hear the word of the LORD! This is what the LORD says: ‘About this time tomorrow at the gate of Samaria, a seah of fine flour will sell for a shekel, and two seahs of barley will sell for a shekel.’”“Here is a boy with five barley loaves and two small fish. But what difference will these make among so many?”Sources
Adapted and shortened from the Tyndale Open Bible Dictionary · CC BY-SA 4.0
Tyndale Open Bible Dictionary © 2023 Tyndale House Publishers · CC BY-SA 4.0 — Plants: Wheat (Triticum aestivum, T. compositum); Plants: Barley (Hordeum distichon); Agriculture*: Field Cropping; Agriculture*: Harvesting
Adapted from Tyndale Open Bible Dictionary: articles chosen, shortened and retold in our own words (history, nature and daily life only) and, in languages other than English, machine-translated. The original work by Tyndale House Publishers is available for free at tyndaleopenresources.com.
