What is a Winnowing Fork?

The word "winnowing fork" or "במִּזְרֶֽה" is used twice in the Bible, specifically in Jeremiah 15:7 and Isaiah 30:24. The only difference is the usage in Isaiah possesses the prefix "וּ" or "vav" which means "and".

“I will winnow them with a winnowing fork At the gates of the land; I will bereave them of children, I will destroy My people; They did not repent of their ways," (Jeremiah 15:7 NASB1995).

"Also the oxen and the donkeys which work the ground will eat salted fodder, which has been winnowed with shovel and fork," (Isaiah 30:24 NASB1995).

"The Arabic word midhra, corresponding to the Heb. mizreh here and in Isaiah 30:24, is “in use in modern Syria, and denotes a wooden fork almost six feet in length, with five or six prongs, bound together by fresh hide, which, on shrinking, forms a tight band.… The wooden shovel of Isaiah 30:24 was used with it. The mixture of corn, chaff, and broken straw, produced by threshing, was shaken about with these two implements," (Cambridge).

The winnowing fork was used to separate the grain from either pests or chaff (i.e. husks). Farmers put the grain on top of the fork and then throw it up allowing the heavy grain to fall back down while the light chaff blows away from a fan or the wind.

References:

The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse