to graft in: to set a cutting into a living tree so that it grows as part of that tree and draws life from its root
Grafting is ordinary farm work. A grower cuts a shoot from one plant, opens a slit in the trunk or the stump of a branch on another, fits the shoot into it, and binds the two together. If the join takes, the shoot is no longer a cutting resting against bark. It is part of that tree, fed by roots it never grew. This verb names that operation, and the word carries "in" inside it: the shoot does not simply get tied on, it goes into the host and becomes one plant with it.
Paul uses the word six times, all inside one stretch of Romans 11, and it appears nowhere else in the Bible. His picture is an olive tree, a familiar image for Israel. Some branches have been broken off (ἐκκλάω) or cut away (ἐκκόπτω), and a shoot from a wild olive has been fitted into the gap. That shoot stands for the non-Jewish believer, and the direction of the flow is Paul's whole point: the graft does not feed the tree, the root feeds the graft.
Two features of the picture carry the argument. The action is always done to the branch rather than by it, and God is the one doing it. And it can happen a second time: Paul says the branches that were removed can be grafted back into their own tree, and that this would be less surprising than the first grafting, not more.
Disputed
Whether grafting a wild olive shoot into a cultivated olive tree reflects a real ancient farming practice or an operation Paul knowingly presents as unnatural.
- majorityPaul describes a procedure growers would not normally perform, and admits as much when he calls it contrary to nature in Romans 11:24; the oddity of the image is deliberate and carries the argument.; A. G. Baxter and J. A. Ziesler, "Paul and Arboriculture: Romans 11:17-24," Journal for the Study of the New Testament 24 (1985); C. E. B. Cranfield, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, ICC, vol. 2 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1979); James D. G. Dunn, Romans 9-16, Word Biblical Commentary 38B (Dallas: Word, 1988)
- minorityRoman writers on agriculture describe grafting a wild shoot into a tired cultivated olive in order to reinvigorate it, so Paul's image reflects a technique available to him.; W. M. Ramsay, "The Olive-Tree and the Wild Olive," in Pauline and Other Studies in Early Christian History (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1906); Columella, De Re Rustica 5.9.16