The Weeds Among the Wheat: Wait for the Harvest

Short answer: In Matthew 13:24–30, a man sows good seed in his field. While everyone sleeps, an enemy comes and sows weeds among the wheat, then leaves. When both come up together, the servants want to go pull the weeds out immediately. The householder says no — pulling them now risks uprooting the wheat along with them, since the roots have grown tangled together. Let both grow until the harvest, he says, and the reapers will separate them then. Jesus later explains the parable privately to his disciples in detail (13:36–43), one of only two parables in the Gospels — the other is the Sower — that he interprets point by point.

Weeds that look like wheat

The weed in question — "tares" in the King James Version, Greek zizanion — is almost certainly what is known today as darnel (Lolium temulentum), a grass that was a well-documented contaminant of wheat fields across the ancient Mediterranean and Near East. The detail that matters for the parable is not just that it's a nuisance: young darnel is very difficult to tell apart from young wheat, and the two become reliably distinguishable only once the grain heads form, late in the growing season — close to harvest. The householder's instruction to wait is not simply a statement about patience in the abstract. It also describes an actual agricultural problem: pulling now means guessing, and guessing wrong means losing wheat.

Jesus's own explanation

Where most parables are left for the audience to work out, Jesus gives this one a direct, itemized key when his disciples ask him privately: the sower is the Son of Man, the field is the world, the good seed are "the children of the kingdom," the tares are "the children of the wicked one," the enemy who sowed them is the devil, the harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are angels (13:37–39). It is an unusually explicit allegorical reading straight from Jesus, which is part of why this parable is quoted with more confidence about its "meaning" than most others in the Gospels.

What "let both grow together" has been used to argue

The instruction not to separate the wheat from the weeds before harvest has had a long afterlife well beyond first-century farming. Augustine invoked this parable explicitly against the Donatists, a North African Christian movement that wanted to purge the church of members judged to have compromised their faith under persecution — Augustine's argument was that the church, like the field, is a mixed body that only God is positioned to sort, and that premature separation is exactly the harm the householder warns against.

That application raises the same question in every era it's been reapplied to since: is the parable a general statement about patience with evil in the world at large, or a narrower statement about how a religious community should treat its own uncertain members? The parable's own explanation (the field is "the world," not "the church") leans toward the broader reading, but its use in church history has consistently run the other direction.

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Scripture quotations are from the King James Version (public domain). Verse references are given so you can read any translation alongside.

Sources and further reading

• On the botanical identification and agricultural behaviour of Lolium temulentum (darnel) as the "tares" of the parable: standard reference botanical and agricultural literature on ancient Near Eastern wheat-field weeds.
• Klyne Snodgrass, Stories with Intent: A Comprehensive Guide to the Parables of Jesus (Eerdmans, 2008) — on the parable's explicit allegorical key and its use in the Donatist controversy.