1 Corinthians 15:20 → Leviticus 23:10-11

This is one of the cleanest typological allusions in the Pauline corpus, and the vault's own shelves carry the evidence on three separate axes. Lexeme: Paul calls the risen Christ ἀπαρχή, "firstfruits" (G536); the Septuagint of Leviticus 23:10 uses the same word, ἀπαρχή, for the sheaf brought to the priest. Acceptance formula: Leviticus 23:11 has the priest wave the sheaf "so that it may be accepted on your behalf" — LXX δεκτός (G1184), the technical term for an offering God receives; the acceptance of the first portion is the acceptance of the crop it represents. Date: the sheaf is waved "on the day after the Sabbath," LXX τῇ ἐπαύριον τῆς πρώτης (G1887) — which is to say, on the morning Christ came out of the tomb. Paul is not decorating a doctrine with agricultural imagery; he is naming the feast's own structure. The typology holds on all five tests. It is historical (an annual rite, actually performed), analogically exact (a first portion that is both part of the harvest and pledge of it), escalated (barley to a raised human body), retrospectively interpreted by an apostle who names Christ the ἀπαρχή outright, and forward-pointing within the OT's own frame, since Israel's harvest calendar was already eschatologically loaded in the prophets. And the logic of the sheaf is the entire argument of 1 Corinthians 15. A firstfruits offering is not a sample; it is a guarantee, and the reason a farmer could bring it before the field was in was that the ripening of the first grain settled the question of the rest. Paul draws exactly that inference: "each in his own turn: Christ the firstfruits; then at His coming, those who belong to Him" (15:23). Which means the resurrection of the dead is not a hope Christians hold about the future; it is a conclusion they draw from something that has already happened in the past, on a specific Sunday. Chapter 15 ends where the sheaf ends — not in speculation but in a body, and in labor of which Paul says "your labor in the Lord is not in vain" (15:58), because the field the Sheaf guarantees includes the people you are burying.