Jacob 5

So in the allegory, the tame olive tree represents the House of Israel, and the wild olive trees represent the gentiles, or everybody else. But in the story, the only tree that produces good fruit is the tame tree, either by grafting its branches onto wild trees temporarily and harvesting from those branches of the wild trees, or by harvesting from its own branches on itself, or by grafting in branches from the wild trees and giving credit to the roots of the tame tree. What's wrong with the other trees? Why is it so hard for them to produce a good olive?

I'm also curious about this idea that grafting in wild branches will heal the tree. I wonder if it is something that actually happens. Can you heal a tree that is not growing well by cutting off its branches and grafting in branches from a wild tree, the way you might breed a sick purebred animal with a wild animal to combat the inbreeding its probably been subjected to in order to become purebred?

Well, it turns out there are some reasons you might choose to graft a tree, but most of them don't actually seem to deal with healing a tree that is decaying. However, the process is very interesting and worth exploring.

In a typical grafting process, you have a scion (twig or bud from the wild tree) and a rootstock (trunk and roots from the parent tree) and arborists will typically cut off any branches of the original tree that are growing above the placed scion, thus ensuring that the nutrients from the rootstock will all flow to the new branches, strengthening them much faster than they would otherwise. A scion is chosen for the good characteristics it can give an existing rootstock, (e.g. flowers, fruit, or form). A rootstock also adds unique strengths. The right rootstock can be more than just roots. The right variety of rootstock can be adapted to a type of soil that the scion alone would fail in, such as clay-soil adapted apple rootstocks. Some pear rootstocks make the plant bear fruit and ripen earlier (“precociousness”). Some grape rootstocks are chosen for resistance to parasitic soil nematodes.

In the allegory, the pruning of the tame tree prior to grafting in the wild branches is consistent with sending the strength for growth from the roots, which were adapted to the Old Testament scriptures and knowledge of God to the new converts, and grafting the branches from the tame tree elsewhere, rather than planting tame trees, allowed them to exist in conditions where they may not have survived on their own.