Does Farming Foreshadow Resurrection?
The resurrection of the dead was among the most fundamental tents of early Judaism, including the Jesus movement. Jews of the ancient world were convinced that people worldwide would be raised from the dead upon the arrival of the World to Come. But what would this widespread resurrection look like? What would possible precedent could there be for individuals entering the grave in death and rising therefrom? Many Jews in the first centuries CE looked to the natural world and the act of agriculture to explain the resurrection process, which grounded what might seem a fantastical eschatological idea in the realm of everyday agrarian reality.
Speaking of his upcoming death and resurrection, Jesus says, “Amen, amen, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat (σῖτος; sītos) falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24). With this agricultural allegory, Yeshua suggests that his own death will not be the end; instead, like a grain of wheat, he will be raised from the seedbed of Sheol with a renewed resurrection body. Similarly, after Paul asks the rhetorical question, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?” (1 Corinthians 15:35), he responds, “What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And what you sow is not the body that is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat (σῖτος; sītos) or of some other grain” (15:36-37). Like Jesus, Paul draws on the framework of farming to illustrate the logic of eternal life. He continues, “So is it with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable…. It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body” (15:42-44). For Paul and Jesus, the sensibility of resurrection is reflected in a routine as commonplace as cultivation.
The later rabbis echo the exact same scenario in their discussions of resurrection. According to the Babylonian Talmud (a rabbinic collection of legal and narrative discourse circa 600 CE), “In the future [resurrection] the righteous will stand [from lying down in their graves] in their clothes. This can be deduced by inference from wheat: Just as wheat (חטה; hitah), which is buried naked, comes out [of the ground] with clothes [i.e., straw and chaff], how much more so [will it be with] the righteous who are buried with their clothes” (b. Ketubot 111b; cf. b. Sanhedrin 90b). The rabbinic logic is that if the natural world can produce a stalk of wheat from a bare seed, God can produce a renewed human body from the grave. While bodily resurrection is certainly miraculous, it follows from something mundane. As surely as farming produces agricultural harvest, the God who established the seasons can enact the resurrection of the dead.
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