Husbandman

Husbandman is an older English word for a farmer — one who tills, plants, and tends the ground — and in older translations it usually renders the Greek word for a vinedresser or tenant farmer, with a related noun used for a cultivated field. It names an occupation, not a person, and modern translations such as the World English Bible simply say "farmers."

In the parable Jesus tells in Matthew 21:33–44 and Mark 12:1–12, a landowner plants a vineyard, builds a hedge, a winepress, and a tower, and leases it to such farmers. When he sends servants to collect the fruit at harvest, the tenants beat one, kill another, and stone another (Matthew 21:35); when he finally sends his son, they kill him to seize the inheritance (Matthew 21:38). The text itself supplies part of the interpretation: Jesus asks what the owner will do, the hearers answer that he will lease the vineyard to other farmers who will give him the fruit in its season (Matthew 21:41), and Jesus says the kingdom will be taken from "you" and given to a nation producing its fruit (Matthew 21:43). The same word is used in two further ways in Scripture. In John 15:1 Jesus says, "I am the true vine, and my Father is the farmer," applying the image of the vinedresser directly to God. In 1 Corinthians 3:9 Paul writes, "You are God's farming, God's building," using the related noun to describe the community itself as land under cultivation.

What the parables do not do is label the tenants explicitly, and this is where Christian readings part company. Historically, the most common Protestant reading has taken the farmers to be the leaders of Israel in Jesus' day and the "nation" of Matthew 21:43 to be the church, a reading often called supersessionist and contested on the grounds that it treats the church as replacing Israel; other interpreters, particularly in dispensational traditions, read the parable as judgment on unfaithful stewards with a continuing future for national Israel. Roman Catholic and Orthodox readers have typically stressed continuity — the vineyard passing to faithful stewards within God's one people rather than to a separate body — and many modern exegetes of several traditions read the parable primarily as a warning to religious leadership in any age.

One textual point is a matter of established fact rather than interpretation: Matthew 21:44 appears in some ancient manuscripts and not others, so translations differ on whether to include it. John 15:1 and 1 Corinthians 3:9 raise no such difficulty and are read across traditions as images of God's personal care for and claim upon his people.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.