Fitch

The fitch appears in the UPDV scriptures only in Isaiah's farming parable, where it stands beside cumin, wheat, barley, and spelt as one of the small seed-crops worked by the wise farmer's hand. The plant is named twice in three verses, and both times what is at stake is not the seed itself but the farmer's instructed care for it.

The Farmer's Instructed Hand

Isaiah lays out the seed-list in order — fitches and cumin first, then the cereal grains. "When he has leveled its face, does he not cast abroad the fitches, and scatter the cumin, and put in the wheat in rows, and the barley in the appointed place, and the spelt in its border?" (Isa 28:25). The arrangement is deliberate: small seeds broadcast over the leveled ground, larger grains placed in their assigned plots. The next verse names the source of the order: "For his God instructs him aright, [and] teaches him" (Isa 28:26).

A Threshing Suited to the Crop

The same chapter then presses the point with the threshing-floor. Threshing-instruments are matched to what they thresh; the heavy sledge that crushes wheat would crush the fitches to dust. "For the fitches are not threshed with a sharp [threshing] instrument, neither is a cart wheel turned about on the cumin; but the fitches are beaten out with a staff, and the cumin with a rod" (Isa 28:27). The fitch — light, fragile, easily lost — gets a staff, not a wheel. The image is the same as the sowing image: a farmer who knows his seeds, taught by God to give each one the handling it can bear.