Radishes in the Bible

Topical Study or Word Study or...

Since I've wondered about my current topic, "Radishes in the Bible," ever since I heard an allusion to it somewhere at whatever time that was, I decided it's high time I posted something regarding Radishes in the Bible on Desert Spirits Fire, my theology place. So here goes!

Charlotte and the White Horse,© 1955, @copy; renewed 1983 by Ruth Krauss with Maurice Sendak's exquisite illustrations (published by HarperCollins), long has been one of my favorite books, the kind of book you read over and over again. As it describes the end of the rainy season, the poetic narrative says:

the wind and the rains are gone
the grass is coming out of the ground
the leaves are coming out of the trees
the people are coming out of doors
they are coming out of windows
they are coming out and planting radishes
the worms are coming out of the old apples—the time of my singing is come.

Unlike my usual approach, I searched for "Radishes in the Bible" and radishes Bible – which yielded 66 hits, like the number of books in the Bible! But none of those was truly biblical, so it looks like I'm on my own (as usual). To begin, the root of radishes means root, meaning it's both a root veggie (that we already know from how it grows) and it must be very basic or fundamental, as in the mathematical concept of "radical," and in the sense a person, behavior, idea or action can be radical. So far quite good. Then, the seeds germinate very fast, yielding greenery in only a few days. I remember buying one of those cool kits kids like and that contained radish seeds and appropriately radish-y soil, a very fun thing since the sower (me – we're talking about "biblical," not?) could see results really fast. So how biblical is that? According to a couple of my recent posts and in-person discussions, being fast, doing things fast and things that are fast or act fast aren't particularly biblical at all, since I've been observing how our God tends to act slowly – at least when we humans want God to be a fast God – and since a thousand years is to God as a nanosecond is to us...insights I gleaned, BTW, from the online discussion of Water Buffalo Theology I participated in a while ago. Isn't "gleaned" an agricultural word?

From Beliefnet I get a daily Torah reading along with Jewish Wisdom, and for September 15^th they called the Wisdom, "To be rooted," and the quote from Simone Weil says, "To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul." (from The Need for Roots found in A Treasury of Jewish Quotations, edited by Joseph L. Baron, Jason Aronson Inc.)

Enough for this time about Radishes in the Bible...