summer: the hot, rainless half of the year, the season of gathering and storing food
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In the Bible "summer" is not the warm vacation season a modern reader pictures. It is the dry half of the year, the months without rain, set against the wet, cold season (חֹרֶף) that follows it. Paired with winter, the two together stand for the whole year and its unbroken rhythm: "while the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter" (Genesis 8:22; compare Psalm 74:17 and Zechariah 14:8).
Summer is the time to gather and store. The wise ant "prepares her food in summer" (Proverbs 6:8; 10:5; 30:25), and the close of summer means the close of the year's food-gathering, a moment Jeremiah turns into dread: "The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved" (Jeremiah 8:20). Those who could afford it built a separate "summer house" for the heat (Amos 3:15). Because it is the dry season, summer is also a picture of drought and of things out of place, like "snow in summer" (Proverbs 26:1) or the strength that dries up "in the drought of summer" (Psalm 32:4).
summer fruit: the fruit that ripens and is gathered at the end of summer, chiefly figs
TranslatabilityPartialCertaintySettled
The same word names the produce of the season as well as the season itself. "Summer fruit" is the crop, above all figs, that ripens as the dry months end and is picked to be eaten fresh or stored. When Ziba meets David he brings "a hundred bunches of raisins and a hundred of summer fruit" as food (2 Samuel 16:1 to 2), and the people around Jeremiah gather "wine and summer fruit and oil" in abundance (Jeremiah 40:10, 40:12). It sits naturally beside the grape harvest (בָּצִיר): Micah mourns that there is nothing left to eat, "like the gatherings of summer fruit" after the vintage is stripped bare (Micah 7:1; compare Isaiah 16:9 and Jeremiah 48:32, where a foe falls on "your summer fruit").
The prophet Amos builds a warning on the sound of the word. God shows him "a basket of summer fruit" (qayits) and says, "The end (qets) has come upon my people Israel" (Amos 8:1 to 2). The two words sound almost the same, and the picture drives the point home: ripe fruit is fruit at the very end of its season, ready to be eaten, just as Israel is ripe for judgment.
points to the specific late crop, chiefly figs, that ripens as summer ends and is gathered to eat or storeAmo 8:1
Both
both name fruit gathered and eaten in the warm season2Sa 16:1
Only summer fruit
the English phrase can suggest berries, melons, or a mixed spread of warm-weather produce, rather than the figs and late tree fruit the Hebrew has in view
“ripe fruit”
Comparison data is not available for this English gloss yet.
How qayits differs from similar Hebrew words
קָצִירThe grain harvest and its season, the reaping of standing grain, whereas summer fruit is the tree fruit (figs) gathered at the end of the dry season; the two are the year's great ingatherings and are often paired.
Names summer, the hot dry season of the year, and is paired with winter to span the whole calendar.Psa 74:17Zec 14:8
Covers the late-season ingathering of summer fruit, the figs and other soft produce picked when the grain is long in.2Sa 16:1Jer 40:10Mic 7:1
Stands for a basket of that ripe summer fruit, which Amos turns into a warning that the nation is ripe for its end.Amo 8:1Amo 8:2
Both
Both mark fixed stages in the produce year, so Scripture sets them side by side to cover the full round of gathering food.Gen 8:22
Both name the season of ingathering as the time to be diligent, so a person who sleeps through either loses the food that would have been stored.Pro 10:5
Both stand for the crops in danger when God threatens the land, and their loss together signals that the harvest hope has failed.Isa 16:9Jer 8:20
Names the hot, rainless half of the year, the months for gathering and storing food, so its close means the year's chance to lay in supplies is gone.Pro 6:8Pro 10:5Pro 30:25Jer 8:20
Also names the produce of that season, the ripe fruit (chiefly figs) picked as the dry months end, a sense the rainy-season word never carries.2Sa 16:1Jer 40:10Amo 8:1Mic 7:1
Because it is the season without rain, it also pictures dryness and things out of place: strength that dries up in the heat, and snow falling in summer.Psa 32:4Pro 26:1
Both
Paired as the two halves of the year, the rainy season and the dry season together standing for the whole unbroken cycle of time, whether in God's promise after the flood, in praise of the God who made them both, or in water that never fails in either one.Gen 8:22Psa 74:17Zec 14:8
Paired to name matching dwellings, the winter house and the summer house that a wealthy owner kept for each half of the year, both of which God says he will strike down.Amo 3:15
Names the cool, rainy half of the year, and for a farmer that makes it the working season rather than a dead one: the first rains soften ground the dry months baked hard, so this is when plowing and sowing happen, which is why the sluggard who will not plow then has nothing to find at harvest.Pro 20:4
Names the wet, chilly weather people shelter from, the stretch of the year when a king sits in "the winter house" with a fire burning in front of him.Jer 36:22
Once stands for a stretch of a person's life, the ripe and strongest years Job looks back on when his children were still gathered around him, a figurative use the summer word never carries.Job 29:4
בָּצִירThe grape harvest, the gathering of the vintage for wine, set beside the gathering of summer fruit (figs); Micah pairs the two failed harvests as a picture of desolation.
Names a season, the hot rainless half of the year, and set beside the wet season it stands for the whole year turning without a break.Gen 8:22Psa 74:17Zec 14:8
Names fruit at the eating stage: carried in a basket, handed over as provisions for hungry men, stored away alongside wine and oil.2Sa 16:12Sa 16:2Jer 40:10Amo 8:1
Marks the window in which food has to be gathered and put by, so a person's good sense is measured by what is stored while it lasts.Pro 6:8Pro 10:5Pro 30:25
Its ending is a loss: when the gathering is over and nothing has been laid up, the word carries dread and mourning.Jer 8:20Mic 7:1Isa 16:9
Both
Both belong to the fig grower's year and pin fruit to one particular stage of it, so the word itself tells a reader how far the season has run.Sng 2:13Mic 7:1
In both, the state of the fruit is read as an announcement that a moment has come: young figs on the branch say the winter is over, and ripe gathered fruit says the season has run out.Sng 2:13Amo 8:2
Names fruit that is not yet food: the small hard figs that have only just formed on the branch and are still months away from being fit to eat.Sng 2:13
Belongs to the turn out of winter into spring, so the fruit is a signal that the season has changed rather than a crop anyone is about to pick.Sng 2:13
qayits in the other biblical languages
θέροςGreek“summer”The Greek word for the season "summer," as in Jesus' fig-tree parable; it covers the season sense but not the "summer fruit" sense this word also carries.
The Hebrew word also names the ripe produce gathered at summer's end (the figs and fruit themselves), not only the season. The Greek word never means the fruit, only the time of year.2Sa 16:1Amo 8:1Jer 40:10
Both
Both name the hot, dry season of summer, set against winter and marking the turn of the year.Gen 8:22Mrk 13:28
The standard lexica (HALOT, BDB, DCH) treat קַיִץ as a single word with two closely linked senses joined by metonymy: the summer season (the dry half of the agricultural year, contrasted with חֹרֶף) and, by extension, the summer fruit harvested at that season, principally figs. The noun derives from the root קיץ related to the ingathering of ripe fruit; the harvest term is attested outside the Bible in the tenth-century Gezer calendar (ירח קץ, "month of summer fruit"). Commentators uniformly note the paronomasia in Amos 8:1 to 2 between קַיִץ ("summer fruit") and קֵץ ("end"), a deliberate sound-play that structures the vision.
Sources
HALOT, s.v. קַיִץlexicon
BDB, s.v. קַיִץlexicon
DCH, s.v. קַיִץlexicon
Shalom M. Paul, Amos (Hermeneia), on Amos 8:1-2commentary