Binding Sheaves of Wheat

The Bible often uses simple daily tasks familiar to the people as object lessons in spiritual truths. The binding of sheaves of wheat played a prominent role in the account of Joseph and the animosity his brothers felt toward him when he related a dream in which he and his brothers were in the fields harvesting wheat. They would gather an armful of stalks of wheat and bind them into a bundle and stand them up in the field to be gathered up and brought to the threshing floor. In Jacob's dream, his brother's sheaves of wheat bowed down his sheaf. This dream was prophetic of the future when Jacob would rise to be the 2nd most powerful man in Egypt and through revelation given by God would save Egypt from a famine that struck the region, including Canaan. And so it was that his brothers came to Egypt seeking to purchase grain only to discover that the brother they had been so jealous of and had sold into slavery was now the ruler of the mighty Egyptian empire.