“It is like a grain of mustard seed, which, when it is sown in the earth, is less than all the seeds that be in the earth:”
It is like a mustard seed, which is the smallest of all seeds on earth — the mustard seed's size is proverbial in ancient Jewish discourse: to say something is as small as a mustard seed is to say it is as small as possible. The mustard seed is not literally the smallest seed in existence (orchid seeds are smaller), but it was the smallest seed regularly used in Palestinian agriculture. The choice of the smallest seed as the kingdom's image is deliberately counterintuitive: the kingdom does not begin as an obvious, impressive, undeniable force. It begins hidden, tiny, apparently insignificant — sown in a Galilean carpenter's ministry, in an occupied province of a vast empire.
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