Matthew 13:24-30 gives us the parable of the weeds (or of the tares or the wheat and the tares).
While the meaning and application of the parable are pretty clear, I’ve always wondered what the big deal was with distinguishing weeds and wheat? Here’s what I know of weeds:
- They’re radically different plants, wheat being taller and weeds being a shorter grass, but are easy to tell apart.
- You need to remove weeds at the root, or else they just grow back.
- They just grow naturally and will and can pop-up anywhere.
- They must be removed because weeds will rob resources (nutrients, soil, water, light) from whatever plants it grows next to, basically killing other plants.
The last one is the biggest question for me regarding the parable: since weeds are so harmful to a farmer and rather easy to spot, why not remove them right away? Surely it’d be easy to distinguish and remove weeds from amongst your crops. Despite not having experience in a wheat farm, I can easily spot the weeds in my lawn and have pulled more than a few weeds from plots in my youth.
So, surely there has to more to the ‘weeds’ referred to in this parable than the common types I’ve encountered in my lifetime.
The weeds referred to in the parable all use the greek word zizanion, which is a spurious wheat, a darnel. Strong’s (in the biblehub reference just linked to) explains that it is a false grain, …
a plant that grows in Palestine which resembles wheat in many ways but is worthless.
Not much of an explanation and it doesn’t shed any new light on the parable. Thayer’s Greek Lexicon (also referenced in the biblehub link) says that it is…
a kind of darnel, bastard wheat, resembling wheat except that the grains are black
So the weeds have worthless, black grains. So what? Digging further with Google, I found the wikipedia page for lolium temulentum, the scientific name of the weed in question. Just reading it gave me so many answers.
So, darnel, the weed:
- grows in the same areas that wheat grows in
- have so many similarities to wheat and so greatly resembles it, it’s called “false wheat”
- The similarities end when the plant’s ears appear – ears being their fruit or their seed, like the ears of corn.
- When ripe (after the fruit appear), darnel appear black while wheat are brown.
Wow!!! They are not at all like the “weeds” I have experience with. Furthermore, they have to grow together with the wheat. The weeds can’t be removed before harvest because they’re virtually indistinguishable. It’s only by their ears, when ripe for harvest, that you can really, surely, tell them apart. Like Jesus says in Matthew 7:16:
By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles?