Keluaran 22:29

22:29 “Do not hold back offerings from your granaries or your vats. ¹  You must give me the firstborn of your sons.

Keluaran 34:22

34:22 “You must observe ²  the Feast of Weeks – the firstfruits of the harvest of wheat – and the Feast of Ingathering at the end ³  of the year.

Roma 11:16

11:16 If the first portion ⁴  of the dough offered is holy, then the whole batch is holy, and if the root is holy, so too are the branches. ⁵ 

[22:29]  ¹ tn The expressions are unusual. U. Cassuto renders them: “from the fullness of your harvest and from the outflow of your presses” (Exodus, 294). He adds the Hittite parallel material to show that the people were to bring the offerings on time and not let them overlap, because the firstfruits had to be eaten first by the priest.

[34:22]  ² tn The imperfect tense means “you will do”; it is followed by the preposition with a suffix to express the ethical dative to stress the subject.

[34:22]  ³ tn The expression is “the turn of the year,” which is parallel to “the going out of the year,” and means the end of the agricultural season.

[11:16]  ⁴ tn Grk “firstfruits,” a term for the first part of something that has been set aside and offered to God before the remainder can be used.

[11:16]  ⁵ sn Most interpreters see Paul as making use of a long-standing metaphor of the olive tree (the root…the branches) as a symbol for Israel. See, in this regard, Jer 11:16, 19. A. T. Hanson, Studies in Paul’s Technique and Theology, 121-24, cites rabbinic use of the figure of the olive tree, and goes so far as to argue that Rom 11:17-24 is a midrash on Jer 11:16-19.