harvest: the reaping of a ripened crop, the season when it happens, or the crop itself
TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintySettled
This is the ordinary word for harvest, and it stretches across the whole event of bringing in a ripe crop. It can name the work of cutting the grain, the time of year when that work falls, or the standing crop and gathered grain that the work produces. The same word covers all three because in farming life they are one thing seen from three angles: you reap (the labor) during harvest (the season) to bring in the harvest (the crop).
Because grain harvest was the high point of the farming year, the word also carries weight beyond the field. Writers reach for it to fix a moment in time (so many months until harvest, or after the harvest is past), to mark reliability (rain falling at harvest is a thing out of season and unwelcome), and to picture reward or reckoning. When the prophets call a coming judgment a harvest, they mean a time of ripeness when what has grown is finally cut down.
The shades blend into one another, and many verses could be read under more than one of them, so only the clearest cases are sorted into a sense here; the rest are left for later sorting.
a green shoot or branch: the new growth a plant or tree sends out
TranslatabilityDirectCertaintySettled
A handful of verses use a separate word that looks the same on the page but means the fresh growth of a plant, its young shoots or boughs. It belongs with the idea of cutting in a different way from harvest: these are the tender branches that get lopped off or that spread out, the part of a tree you can prune.
The picture is always living growth. A cut-down stump that smells water and puts out shoots again, a tree whose branch is cut off, roots that send up new growth like a young plant, a vine whose boughs reach to the sea. Standard lexicons treat this as a distinct word from harvest, related to it only through the shared root idea of cutting.
names the whole farming event at once, so it can mean the reaping, the season, or the crop, and the same word does duty for all threeGen 8:22Lev 19:9Job 5:5
Both
both center on bringing in a ripened crop and serve as a natural figure for a time of reckoning or rewardJer 8:20Jol 3:13
Only harvest
in modern English "harvest" leans toward the gathered crop or the autumn season, and rarely calls to mind the hard physical labor of cutting grain by hand
“branch”
Comparison data is not available for this English gloss yet.
“shoots”
Comparison data is not available for this English gloss yet.
How qatsir differs from similar Hebrew words
אָסִיףthe ingathering at year's end when crops are gathered into storage, naming the storing-up rather than the reaping in the field
Centers on the reaping itself, the cutting of standing grain, and so marks the early-summer grain season and the crop as it stands ready in the field.Gen 8:22Lev 19:9Rut 1:22
Reaches far beyond farming into vivid imagery: a people ripe for judgment to be cut down, or the fruit of a way of life come due. The ingathering word stays literal and never carries this figurative load.Jer 51:33Jol 3:13Hos 6:11
Both
Both name a season of bringing in the year's crop, and both anchor the festival calendar: the same two verses set the grain reaping and the produce ingathering side by side as the year's farming rhythm.Exo 34:22
Names the autumn gathering-in of ripe produce at the close of the farming year, the moment fruit and vintage are brought home. It is tied to the festival held when the year turns, not to any one crop being cut.Exo 23:16Exo 34:22
Belongs to the grain field: it is the cutting of barley and wheat, and narrative dates its events by which of those two crops was being cut.Rut 1:221Sa 6:13Gen 30:14
Carries a second, unrelated meaning with no gathering in view at all: the branches or boughs a plant sends out.Job 14:9Psa 80:11Job 18:16Isa 27:11
Is the harvest that law and proverb legislate and moralize about: what a landowner must leave in the field for the poor, and the season a lazy man sleeps through.Lev 19:9Deu 24:19Pro 10:5
Names a fixed festival season in Israel's calendar, one of the appointed times the nation was to keep.Exo 23:16Gen 8:22
Both
Both name the ingathering of a ripe crop, the season's work of bringing in what a field or a vineyard has produced.Lev 26:5Gen 8:22
Both work as markers on the farming year, so a writer can place an event or a promise in time simply by naming one of them.Lev 26:5Rut 1:22
Both become pictures of judgment in the prophets, where the gathering either fails or arrives as the moment a nation is cut down.Isa 32:10Jol 3:13Jer 51:33
Belongs to the vineyard: it is the gathering of grapes, and the scenes around it are clusters, vines and the pickers who strip them.Jdg 8:2Mic 7:1Jer 48:32
Repeatedly paired with the few grapes left behind, so the word calls up what the pickers missed rather than the crop they carried off.Isa 24:13Mic 7:1Jdg 8:2
This word names a thing, not only a time: the standing grain a reaper gathers by the armful, the crop ripe enough that the sickle goes in, the food an invading army eats up.Isa 17:5Jol 3:13Jer 5:17
It also names the work of cutting the grain, and paired with plowing it stands for the labor a household owes its fields or a king takes from his subjects. Even in plowing and reaping the seventh day is kept, and a king will conscript sons to plow his ground and reap his grain.Exo 34:211Sa 8:12
It is regularly named by the crop being cut, which lets a narrator date an event closely: the beginning of the barley reaping, the days of the wheat reaping.Rut 1:22Gen 30:141Sa 12:17
It carries a whole body of worship and social law with it. There is a festival named for it, the first sheaf of it is carried to the priest, and the field's edges and dropped stalks are left in it for the poor.Exo 23:16Lev 23:10Lev 19:9
It works as the moment of reckoning that shows whether a year came out well or badly. Sleeping through it disgraces a son, rain arriving in it is as out of place as snow in summer, and "harvest is past, summer is over, and we are not saved" is the sound of a chance gone for good.Pro 10:5Pro 26:1Jer 8:20
Stretched to plants themselves, it means the growth a plant sends out, its own crop of shoots. A cut stump that smells water puts out branches like a fresh planting, a doomed man's branches wither above while his roots dry below, and Job pictures dew resting all night on his boughs.Job 14:9Job 18:16Job 29:19
Both
Both are fixed stations in the farming year, and the promise after the flood names them in one breath: sowing and reaping, cold and heat, summer and the cool rainy months will not cease again. Each word marks a point the year reliably comes back to.Gen 8:22
Both measure the same round of farm work from opposite ends of it, so one is the test of the other. The lazy man will not plow in the wet months, and when the reaping comes he looks for a crop and finds nothing.Pro 20:4
This word names one of the two halves the whole year divides into, set opposite summer as part of the settled order of the world. A psalm puts it beside the earth's fixed boundaries as something God formed, and a prophet promises water flowing from Jerusalem "in summer and in winter", meaning at every point of the year.Psa 74:17Zec 14:8
It is about weather and shelter. The cold decides where a person sits and what he builds: the king is in "the winter house" in the ninth month with a fire burning in front of him, and judgment falls on the winter house together with the summer house.Jer 36:22Amo 3:15
It can be lifted off the calendar and used of a stretch in a person's own life, the ripe and settled years he looks back on. Job remembers "the days of" his best season, when God's friendship was over his tent.Job 29:4
Names the reaping itself, the human work of cutting a sown crop, which the law then regulates so that the poor and the foreigner can glean what the reapers leave.Lev 19:9Lev 23:22Deu 24:19
Names a fixed season on the calendar, a point in the year people count by and work around.Gen 8:22Exo 34:21Pro 10:5Jer 8:20
Carries a standard picture of judgment: God cuts nations and peoples down the way a ripe field is mown, with the sickle put in because the time has come.Isa 17:5Jer 51:33Hos 6:11Jol 3:13
Reaches past grain altogether to the shoots and branches a tree or vine sends out, so the same word can be rendered "boughs" rather than "harvest".Job 14:9Job 18:16Psa 80:11
Both
Both name real food standing in a field, grain a household could go out and gather to eat.Lev 25:52Ki 19:29Lev 19:9
Both are suspended together by the sabbath year: in the seventh year the sown crop is left uncut and the growth that comes up on its own is left ungathered, so the land rests from either kind of gathering.Lev 25:5Lev 25:11
Names grain that nobody planted: it comes up on its own from seed dropped in an earlier season, so it grows with no sowing and no tending behind it.Lev 25:11
Stands for food that arrives when normal farming has stopped, a sign that the land will still feed people through a crisis: Hezekiah is told the nation will live on what grows by itself for two years before anyone sows again.2Ki 19:29Isa 37:30
Never names the cutting of a crop or a season in the farming year. Its one use outside the land laws sits in a picture of water wearing the ground away, far from any field being brought in.Job 14:19
Names the grain harvest, the reaping of standing wheat and barley, and is dated by which grain is being cut.Rut 1:22Jdg 15:1Exo 34:21
Means the standing crop itself, the grain in the field that is cut, gleaned, and left at the edges for the poor.Lev 19:9Lev 23:10Deu 24:19
Extends to the leafy boughs a plant throws out, using the image of a reaped crop for branches that sprout and are cut down.Job 14:9Job 18:16Psa 80:11
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
It names a season on the farming calendar, a stretch of the year that other events can be dated by, such as the days of the wheat cutting or the opening of the barley season.Gen 30:14Rut 1:221Sa 12:17Amo 4:7Pro 26:1
It covers the work of reaping itself and the laws and festivals built around that work: leaving the edges of a field for the poor, resting even in the busiest weeks, and keeping a feast when the gathering is done.Lev 19:9Deu 24:19Exo 34:21Exo 23:16
It can mean the yield itself, the gathered produce that others may eat up, carry off, or count as income.Jer 5:17Job 5:5Isa 23:3
It reaches past grain altogether to what a living plant sends out, the fresh shoots of a stump and the spreading boughs of a tree or a vine.Job 14:9Job 18:16Psa 80:11Job 29:19
Both
Both belong to grain farming and meet at the moment the crop comes down. Isaiah 17:5 sets them side by side, describing the reaping as the gathering in of grain that was standing in the field.Isa 17:5
Both can serve a picture of judgment, where a nation is spoken of as a field cut down in one sweep of the reaper's arm.Isa 17:5
It names the crop while it is still standing uncut in the field, close enough to touch: something a runaway fire can sweep through, a torch can set alight, a passerby can pluck heads from by hand, or a sickle can first be set against.Exo 22:6Jdg 15:5Deu 23:25Deu 16:9
Because it is grain still on the stalk, it can be spoken of as failing before anything is ever gathered: scorched while it is still young, or shooting up with no heads on it so that it yields no flour.2Ki 19:26Isa 37:27Hos 8:7
It is first of all the literal grain harvest of farm life, named alongside sowing and the turning seasons as part of the ordinary agricultural year.Gen 8:22Exo 34:21
It can mean the harvest season as a fixed point on the calendar, the time of year when reaping happens.Gen 30:14Jos 3:15
It also names the standing crop itself, the grain in the field that is cut, gleaned, or left to the poor.Lev 19:9Isa 17:5
Both
Both name the harvest as the moment of reckoning at the end, when God gathers and judges what has come to its fullness; the Greek term that pictures final judgment is the same idea Hebrew prophets put to work.Jol 3:13Mrk 4:29
Both can stand for the literal ripe grain ready to be cut and brought in.Jer 51:33Mat 13:30
In the New Testament this word is used almost entirely as a picture: the gathering of people at the end of the age, when what has grown is finally separated and brought in.Mat 13:39Rev 14:15
It names the mission field as a crop ready to be reaped, with too few workers to bring it in, turning the harvest into a call for laborers.Mat 9:37Luk 10:2Jhn 4:35
What scholars say about qatsir
BDB and HALOT list two distinct lexemes under this spelling: קָצִיר I "harvest, harvesting, what is reaped" (a derivative of קצר "to reap"), and קָצִיר II "bough, branch, shoots" (Job 14:9; 18:16; 29:19; Ps 80:11;Isa 27:11). DCH treats them likewise. For harvest, the standard works distinguish three contextual nuances that are not separate lexemes: the process of reaping (e.g. Exod 34:21;Lev 19:9), the season (e.g. Gen 8:22;Josh 3:15;Amos 4:7), and the crop reaped (e.g. Gen 30:14;Isa 16:9;Job 5:5). The eschatological harvest image (Joel 3:13) draws on this word and is taken up in the New Testament by therismos. The morphological tagging in the STEPBible source assigns קָצִיר II to exactly the five branch/shoot verses above.