Chaff

Chaff is the threshing-floor by-product — the light husk and broken straw separated from the heavy grain by the winnower's fan and carried off by the wind. Across the UPDV, the figure runs in one direction: chaff is what the wicked become under judgment. The grain stays; the chaff scatters or burns.

The Winnowing Figure

The basic picture is the threshing-floor and the wind. Yahweh asks through Jeremiah, "What is the straw to the wheat?" (Jer 23:28), drawing the contrast between worthless dream-talk and faithful prophecy as bluntly as the contrast between chaff and grain. The Psalmist opens the Psalter with the same image fixed on persons: "Not so are the wicked: but rather they are like chaff, which is blown away by the wind" (Ps 1:4). Job presses the same point in the form of a question — "That they are as stubble before the wind, And as chaff that the storm carries away?" (Job 21:18). Hosea fills the picture out: the wicked will be "as the morning cloud, and as the dew that passes early away, as the chaff that is driven with the whirlwind out of the threshing-floor, and as the smoke out of the chimney" (Hos 13:3). In every case the figure depends on the same two facts — chaff is light and wind moves it.

A Prayer for Scattering

The figure can be turned into petition. In Ps 35:5 the speaker asks for the enemies to share the chaff's fate, with an active divine agent: "Let them be as chaff before the wind, And the angel of Yahweh driving [them] on" (Ps 35:5). The scattering is not impersonal weather; the angel of Yahweh is the one driving.

The Nations as Chaff

The figure scales from individuals to nations. Isaiah hears the rushing of many waters — the nations gathered against Yahweh — and answers with the chaff image: "he will rebuke them, and they will flee far off, and will be chased as the chaff of the mountains before the wind, and like the whirling dust before the storm" (Isa 17:13). Daniel's vision pushes the same figure to world-historical scale: the iron, clay, bronze, silver, and gold of the great image are broken together and "became like the chaff of the summer threshing-floors; and the wind carried them away, so that no place was found for them" (Dan 2:35). Whole empires, on this picture, are chaff once the stone strikes.

Stubble and Fire

Where the wind-figure carries chaff away, the stubble-figure burns it up. The two run in parallel — light, dry, fit only for fire. "Therefore as the tongue of fire devours the stubble, and as the dry grass sinks down in the flame, so their root will be as rottenness, and their blossom will go up as dust; because they have rejected the law of Yahweh of hosts, and despised the [Speech] of the Holy One of Israel" (Isa 5:24). Of Babylon's astrologers Isaiah says, "Look, they will be as stubble; the fire will burn them; they will not deliver their soul from the power of the flame" (Isa 47:14). The prayer in Ps 83:13 fuses the two figures: "O my God, make them like the whirling dust; As stubble before the wind." Joel's locust army moves "like the noise of a flame of fire that devours the stubble" (Joel 2:5). Nahum says of Nineveh's defenders that "entangled like thorns, and drunk as with their drink, they are consumed completely as dry stubble" (Nah 1:10). Malachi gives the figure its sharpest eschatological edge: "the day comes, it burns as a furnace; and all the proud, and all who work wickedness, will be stubble; and the day that comes will burn them up, says Yahweh of hosts, that it will leave them neither root nor branch" (Mal 4:1).

The Threshing-Floor of John's Preaching

John the Baptist takes the whole figure — fan, threshing-floor, wheat, chaff, fire — and applies it to the coming one: "whose fan is in his hand, thoroughly to cleanse his threshing-floor, and to gather the wheat into his garner; but the chaff he will burn up with unquenchable fire" (Luke 3:17). Wheat in, chaff out; storage for one, unquenchable fire for the other. The figure that began as Job's storm and the Psalter's wind ends as the messianic winnower's hand, doing the same separation with the same outcome.