Put in the sickle; for the harvest is ripe. Come, tread, for the wine press is full, the vats overflow, for their wickedness is great.”
⛓ Read Joel 3 forward — the whole chapter and its afterlife →Where this passage surfaces again, sorted by the strength of the link. Each kind of reuse — formal quotation, deliberate allusion, faint echo, figural pattern — carries its own mark. Follow any reference to read it in place.
Allusion6
A deliberate verbal borrowing without a citation formula.
The harvest climax 'he puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come' (4:29) closely echoes Joel's 'Put in the sickle; for the harvest is ripe.' The verbal overlap of sickle-and-ripe-harvest is distinctive (high volume) and coheres with Mark's eschatological framing of the kingdom's arrival as a reaping, making this the pericope's strongest link.
High confidence'Put in the sickle, for the harvest is ripe' — directly behind 'send your sickle... the harvest of the earth is ripe.' Verbal parallel (LXX Joel 4:13 'exaposteilate drepana, hoti paresteken trygetos'). Joel governs both this grain harvest and the following vintage.
High confidence'The wine press is full, the vats overflow, for their wickedness is great' (continuing 'put in the sickle') — directly behind 'gather the clusters... threw it into the great wine press.' Joel pairs sickle-harvest and overflowing winepress exactly as Rev does (LXX Joel 4:13).
High confidence'Put in the sickle... the winepress is full, the vats overflow, for their wickedness is great' (LXX 4:13) - the eschatological winepress-of-judgment image fused with Isa 63 in 'treads the wine press of... wrath' (Rev 19:15; cf. 14:19-20). Verbal + thematic.
High confidenceThe plentiful harvest needing laborers draws on the prophetic harvest as eschatological ingathering and judgment, where the sickle is put in because the harvest is ripe. The agrarian-eschatological coherence with the kingdom drawing near and the Sodom verdict supports the echo.
Medium confidence'Put in the sickle, for the harvest is ripe' — harvest as the set time of eschatological judgment and separation, directly behind 'at the harvest time I will tell the reapers' (v.30).
Medium confidenceEcho2
A fainter, low-volume reuse, carried by recurrence or thematic coherence.
'Put in the sickle, for the harvest is ripe.' Jesus' 'the harvest is plentiful' picks up the prophetic harvest image; where Joel's harvest is judgment, Matthew turns it toward ingathering, asking for laborers from the Lord of the harvest.
Medium confidenceHarvest = judgment reaffirmed: 'the harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are angels' (v.39) interprets the harvest motif drawn from Joel.
Low confidence◇ Figural1
A typological pattern re-read in a later text — no verbal quotation, high figural coherence.
'Put in the sickle, for the harvest is ripe' supplies the ripe/ready harvest call behind v35. Coherence is good, though Joel's harvest is judgment, making the transfer to mission-harvest somewhat contested.
Medium confidence