Soul Enterprise
The Biblical story begins and ends in a garden. In Genesis 2 verse 15, we are told that God put Adam in the Garden of Eden to work and take care of the garden. Revelation 22 verse two tells of a tree of life on both sides of a river “bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month.” During the spring, farmers in the Northern Hemisphere are entering one of their busiest seasons. They are ramping up to grow the grains, vegetables, fruits and animals that feed and sustain us throughout the year.
The Marketplace May June 2021
Mike Strathdee photo
ing on how frequently agriculture is referred to throughout both the Old Testament and New Testaments of the Bible. There are a multitude of references, both literal and metaphorical, in prose and poetry. For ancient Palestine, the year was divided into six seasons related to agricultural production: sowing time, which began around the autumnal equinox; unripe time; the cold season; harvest time; summer (with a total absence of rain); and the sultry season, with the attendant ingathering of fruits. Put more simply, half the year was occupied with tasks related to cultivation, the other half with harvest. In the agrarian society of Biblical times, blessings were often expressed in terms of successful crops. Genesis 27 verse 28 reads: “May God give you heaven’s dew and earth’s richness — an abundance of grain and new wine.” As Deuteronomy 8:10 says, this blessing comes with a reminder to remember the source of the good that comes from the earth: “When
praise the Lord your God for the good land that he has given you.” Bounty is named as a reward for obedience in Deuteronomy 28. But hard work and obedience do not guarantee successful results, as any farmer can tell you. Jesus used agricultural metaphors to teach spiritual principles about God’s Kingdom in his stories, such as the parables of the sower, weeds, and mustard seed in Matthew 13 and discussion of the vine in John 15. Jesus used those images as he knew they were part of his audience’s day-to-day life, unlike the
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majority of people in the Global North today. Subsistence agriculture is something that is not part of the life experience of most readers of this magazine. Yet in the Global South, that precarious existence is still all too common for many. As business ventures go, farming is among the riskiest of entrepreneurial endeavors. In much of the world, the industry has come a long way from the practice thousands of years ago of tilling the ground and raising cattle without aid of mechanization, soil samples or hybrid varieties to combat pests. Still, even with modern equip-
