The Parable of the Fig Tree in Matthew 24

The parable is four lines long and does something very simple. A fig tree in winter is bare and hard. When the branch softens and the leaves come, you do not need a calendar to tell you summer is close.

That is the whole comparison, and its plain sense is about recognising a season rather than calculating a date. The argument that has grown up around it is a different matter, because a large body of end times teaching has taken the fig tree to be a coded reference to the nation of Israel and read its budding as the founding of the modern state in 1948. That reading produced a specific expectation for 1988, and it is worth setting out carefully, along with the objections, because sincere people hold it and one of its consequences is a matter of public record.

The passage

Now learn a parable of the fig tree; When his branch is yet tender, and putteth forth leaves, ye know that summer is nigh: So likewise ye, when ye shall see all these things, know that it is near, even at the doors. Matthew 24:32-33

Two halves. The fig tree is the picture. "So likewise ye, when ye shall see all these things" is the application, and "all these things" points back to the signs Jesus has just listed in the preceding verses.

The logic is a proportion. Leaves are to summer as those signs are to the event. Nothing in it identifies the tree with anything, and nothing in it supplies a number.

The detail in Luke that changes the argument

Luke tells the same parable and adds three words.

Behold the fig tree, and all the trees; When they now shoot forth, ye see and know of your own selves that summer is now nigh at hand. Luke 21:29-30

"And all the trees." If Jesus intended the fig tree as a symbol of one nation, Luke has recorded him widening it immediately to every tree in sight, which would dissolve the symbol. The far more natural reading of Luke's wording is that Jesus reached for a fig tree because there was one nearby and because everyone in an agricultural society knows what budding means, and then generalised so no one would fixate on the species.

This is the single most important piece of evidence in the whole discussion, and it is usually left out.

The 1948 reading

The identification of the fig tree with national Israel is old, but it reached a mass audience through Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth in 1970, the bestselling non-fiction book of the decade in the United States. Lindsey argued that the restoration of the Jewish people to the land was the most important sign in Matthew 24, that the fig tree had historically served as a figure for national Israel, and that when Israel became a state on 14 May 1948 the fig tree put out its first leaves.

He then joined that to Matthew 24:34, "This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled", and took a biblical generation as forty years. Lindsey did not present this as a certainty and hedged it in the book, but the arithmetic was plain to every reader: 1948 plus forty is 1988.

An enormous amount of expectation was built on that sum through the 1970s and 1980s. Its most visible expression was Edgar Whisenant's 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988, which narrowed the window to 11 to 13 September 1988. Whisenant, a former NASA engineer, mailed roughly 300,000 free copies to ministers across America, and around 4.5 million copies went out in total.

The dates passed. Whisenant published revised predictions for 1989, 1993 and 1994. Most teachers who had used the forty year calculation revised the length of a generation, moved the starting point, or abandoned the calculation. The 1948 fig tree reading itself continued in circulation, detached from the arithmetic that had made it famous.

That is not a reason to sneer at anyone. It is a reason to notice what happens whenever an illustration is converted into a formula.

The objections

Four are usually raised, and they vary in strength.

Luke's wording. Covered above, and the hardest of the four to answer.

Scripture does not use the fig tree consistently. It is used for Israel, but not as a stable emblem, and not always favourably. Hosea 9:10 has God finding Israel like the first ripe fruit on a fig tree, which is affectionate. Jeremiah 24 has two baskets of figs, one very good and one so bad it cannot be eaten, both representing groups within Judah. Joel 1:7 has an enemy stripping the fig tree bare as an image of devastation. Israel is elsewhere the vine, the olive and the vineyard. A symbol that appears in this many roles cannot carry a date on its own.

Jesus had recently cursed a fig tree. In Matthew 21:18-20, three chapters before this discourse and two before it in Mark, Jesus finds a fig tree in leaf with no fruit and it withers. That episode is almost universally read as an enacted judgement on the temple establishment, and it is framed by the cleansing of the temple. If the fig tree in Matthew 24 is a national symbol, the most recent fig tree in the same gospel is a symbol of judgement rather than of restoration. That is awkward for a reading in which its budding is good news.

Some dispensationalists reject it too. This is the one that surprises people. Thomas Ice, of the Pre-Trib Research Center, holds that Israel's founding in 1948 is prophetically significant. He nonetheless rejects the fig tree parable as support for it, on the grounds that the argument takes an illustration by Jesus and converts it into a prediction. So the objection is not simply preterists against futurists. It runs inside the futurist camp.

Defenders of the 1948 reading answer that the temple discourse is saturated with Israel, that the disciples' original question concerned the temple, and that a first century Jewish audience would hear national resonance in a fig tree whether or not the parable is technically an allegory. That is a fair point about atmosphere. It is a weaker point about arithmetic.

The four readings

The preterist reading is the tidiest fit with what follows, because verse 34 says that generation would not pass before all these things were fulfilled, and Jerusalem was destroyed within forty years of the discourse. On that reading the parable told the disciples themselves what to watch for, and they saw it.

Futurists answer that the signs described are too large for the first century and that "this generation" means the generation that sees them. That whole argument turns on one word, and it is set out on its own terms in what "this generation" means.

What the parable actually claims

Notice its limits. The fig tree tells you the season. It does not tell you the date, and Jesus makes that explicit three verses later when he says that no one knows the day or the hour.

A parable that says "you will know summer is coming" and is immediately followed by "but no man knows the day" is not a tool for calculation. It is a warning against being surprised, given to people who were about to live through something and needed to recognise it when it arrived.

The harder work is deciding which signs the parable is pointing back to, since "all these things" is doing the load-bearing. That is a question about the three things Jesus said the world would see, in the order he gave them, and about how four different traditions have traced each one.