The Hebrew noun ikkar (אִכָּר) means "farmer, plowman, husbandman" — one who works the soil with a plow. It comes from a root related to digging and cultivation. The word appears in prophetic literature and in Joel, describing those who work the agricultural lands.
The ikkar — the farmer — occupies a central place in biblical economics and theology. In the agrarian world of ancient Israel, farmers were the backbone of society; their faithfulness to the land determined the community's survival. In Joel 1:11, the farmers are summoned to lament because the harvest has failed — divine judgment expressed through agricultural catastrophe. Isaiah 61:5 speaks of foreigners tending Israel's flocks and fields in the restoration age. Yet most powerfully, Jesus drew on the image of the farmer in His parables: the sower who scatters seed, the vineyard workers, the harvest at the end of the age — all rooted in this earthy, dignified vocation.