Bushel

The bushel — a household measure of about a peck — appears in the Gospels not as a topic of weights and measures but as an image. A lamp is lit to be seen, and the bushel is what would hide it. The figure works only because the household object is so ordinary: every hearer knows the upturned grain-vessel, knows the lampstand, and knows that to put the lamp under the one rather than on the other is to defeat the lamp's whole purpose.

The Lamp and the Bushel

Mark frames the saying as a question. "And he said to them, Is the lamp brought to be put under the bushel, or under the bed, [and] not to be put on the lampstand?" (Mark 4:21). The answer is rhetorical. A lamp is brought into a room for the lampstand, and any other place — under a bushel, under a bed — denies its function.

Luke makes the same image positive and applies it to the disciple's life: "No man, when he has lit a lamp, puts it in a cellar, neither under the bushel, but on the lampstand, that those which enter in may see the light" (Luke 11:33). The lamp here is a way of life that has been lit and is meant to throw light to those entering the house. To smother it under the bushel would be to act against the reason it was lit.

In both passages the bushel is the negative term. It stands for any small enclosure into which a light, once kindled, might be tucked away — and the saying refuses that tucking-away as a contradiction in terms.