Keluaran 34:22

34:22 “You must observe ¹  the Feast of Weeks – the firstfruits of the harvest of wheat – and the Feast of Ingathering at the end ²  of the year.

Hakim-hakim 15:1

Samson Versus the Philistines

15:1 Sometime later, during the wheat harvest, ³  Samson took a young goat as a gift and went to visit his bride. ⁴  He said to her father, ⁵  “I want to have sex with my bride in her bedroom!” ⁶  But her father would not let him enter.

Rut 2:23

2:23 So Ruth ⁷  worked beside ⁸  Boaz’s female servants, gathering grain until the end of the barley harvest as well as the wheat harvest. ⁹  After that she stayed home with her mother-in-law. ¹⁰ 

Rut 2:1

Ruth Works in the Field of Boaz

2:1 Now Naomi ¹¹  had a relative ¹²  on her husband’s side of the family named Boaz. He was a wealthy, prominent man from the clan of Elimelech. ¹³ 

1 Samuel 6:13

6:13 Now the residents of Beth Shemesh were harvesting wheat in the valley. When they looked up and saw the ark, they were pleased at the sight.

[34:22]  ¹ 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]  ² 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.

[15:1]  ³ sn The wheat harvest took place during the month of May. See O. Borowski, Agriculture in Iron Age Israel, 37, 88.

[15:1]  ⁴ tn Heb “Samson visited his wife with a young goat.”

[15:1]  ⁵ tn The words “to her father” are supplied in the translation (see the end of the verse).

[15:1]  ⁶ tn Heb “I will go to my wife in the bedroom.” The Hebrew idiom בּוֹא אֶל (bo’ ’el, “to go to”) often has sexual connotations. The cohortative form used by Samson can be translated as indicating resolve (“I want to go”) or request (“let me go”).

[2:23]  ⁷ tn Heb “she”; the referent (Ruth) has been specified in the translation for clarity.

[2:23]  ⁸ tn Heb “and she stayed close with”; NIV, NRSV, CEV “stayed close to”; NCV “continued working closely with.”

[2:23]  ⁹ sn Barley was harvested from late March through late April, wheat from late April to late May (O. Borowski, Agriculture in Ancient Israel, 88, 91).

[2:23]  ¹⁰ tn Heb “and she lived with her mother-in-law” (so NASB). Some interpret this to mean that she lived with her mother-in-law while working in the harvest. In other words, she worked by day and then came home to Naomi each evening. Others understand this to mean that following the harvest she stayed at home each day with Naomi and no longer went out looking for work (see F. W. Bush, Ruth, Esther [WBC], 140). Others even propose that she lived away from home during this period, but this seems unlikely. A few Hebrew mss (so also Latin Vulgate) support this view by reading, “and she returned to her mother-in-law.”

[2:1]  ¹¹ tn The disjunctive clause (note the vav [ו] + prepositional phrase structure) provides background information essential to the following narrative.

[2:1]  ¹² tc The marginal reading (Qere) is מוֹדַע (moda’, “relative”), while the consonantal text (Kethib) has מְיֻדָּע (miyudda’, “friend”). The textual variant was probably caused by orthographic confusion between consonantal מְיֻדָּע and מוֹדַע. Virtually all English versions follow the marginal reading (Qere), e.g., KJV, NAB, NASB, NRSV “kinsman”; NIV, NCV, NLT “relative.”

[2:1]  ¹³ tn Heb “and [there was] to Naomi a relative, to her husband, a man mighty in substance, from the clan of Elimelech, and his name [was] Boaz.”