Bible Verses About Autumn gather Scripture’s teaching on the season of ingathering, falling leaves and shortening days. In Israel this was the time of the final harvest and the joyful Feast of Tabernacles, and the Bible also uses fading leaves to speak honestly about the shortness of life. These passages hold both gratitude and wisdom for the season.
While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.
Genesis 8:22 (KJV)
God’s promise that seedtime and harvest will not cease includes the gathering time of autumn.
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
Ecclesiastes 3:1-2 (KJV)
Solomon notes a time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted, the work of the autumn months.
He appointed the moon for seasons: the sun knoweth his going down.
Psalms 104:19 (KJV)
God appointed the moon for seasons, and Israel’s autumn feasts were set by that calendar.
And he changeth the times and the seasons: he removeth kings, and setteth up kings: he giveth wisdom unto the wise, and knowledge to them that know understanding:
Daniel 2:21 (KJV)
Daniel praises God as the one who changes times and seasons, including the turn from summer to autumn.
Nevertheless he left not himself without witness, in that he did good, and gave us rain from heaven, and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness.
Acts 14:17 (KJV)
Paul says God showed his goodness through rain from heaven and fruitful seasons that fill hearts with food and gladness.
Neither say they in their heart, Let us now fear the Lord our God, that giveth rain, both the former and the latter, in his season: he reserveth unto us the appointed weeks of the harvest.
Jeremiah 5:24 (KJV)
The prophet says people should fear the Lord who gives the former and latter rain and keeps the weeks of harvest.
And the feast of harvest, the firstfruits of thy labours, which thou hast sown in the field: and the feast of ingathering, which is in the end of the year, when thou hast gathered in thy labours out of the field.
Exodus 23:16 (KJV)
God commanded a feast of ingathering at the end of the year, when the fruit of the field was gathered.
Also in the fifteenth day of the seventh month, when ye have gathered in the fruit of the land, ye shall keep a feast unto the Lord seven days: on the first day shall be a sabbath, and on the eighth day shall be a sabbath.
Leviticus 23:39 (KJV)
The Feast of Tabernacles began in the seventh month, the autumn, after the fruit of the land was gathered.
Thou shalt observe the feast of tabernacles seven days, after that thou hast gathered in thy corn and thy wine: And thou shalt rejoice in thy feast, thou, and thy son, and thy daughter, and thy manservant, and thy maidservant, and the Levite, the stranger, and the fatherless, and the widow, that are within thy gates. Seven days shalt thou keep a solemn feast unto the Lord thy God in the place which the Lord shall choose: because the Lord thy God shall bless thee in all thine increase, and in all the works of thine hands, therefore thou shalt surely rejoice.
Deuteronomy 16:13-15 (KJV)
Israel was to keep this autumn feast for seven days and rejoice because God had blessed their increase.
But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away.
Isaiah 64:6 (KJV)
We all fade as a leaf, Isaiah confesses, an honest autumn image of human weakness and sin.
The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: because the spirit of the Lord bloweth upon it: surely the people is grass. The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.
Isaiah 40:7-8 (KJV)
Grass withers and flowers fade, but the word of our God stands for ever.
Thou carriest them away as with a flood; they are as a sleep: in the morning they are like grass which groweth up. In the morning it flourisheth, and groweth up; in the evening it is cut down, and withereth.
Psalms 90:5-6 (KJV)
Human life is compared to grass that flourishes in the morning and withers by evening.
So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.
Psalms 90:12 (KJV)
Moses asks God to teach us to number our days so we gain a heart of wisdom.
And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.
Psalms 1:3 (KJV)
Unlike fading leaves, the one who delights in God’s law is a tree whose leaf does not wither.
For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day.
2 Corinthians 4:16 (KJV)
Though our outward self is perishing, Paul says, the inward self is renewed day by day.
These are spots in your feasts of charity, when they feast with you, feeding themselves without fear: clouds they are without water, carried about of winds; trees whose fruit withereth, without fruit, twice dead, plucked up by the roots;
Jude 1:12 (KJV)
Jude warns of false teachers who are like trees whose fruit withers, fruitless and plucked up by the roots.
For ancient Israel, autumn was the season of ingathering. Grapes, olives and the last fruits were brought in, and God commanded a week-long celebration called the Feast of Tabernacles or Feast of Ingathering (Exodus 23:16; Leviticus 23:39). The people lived in booths to remember how God had cared for them in the wilderness, and they were told to rejoice because the Lord had blessed their work (Deuteronomy 16:15). Autumn in Scripture is therefore closely linked with thankfulness.
The Bible also uses the images of autumn to teach humility. Isaiah says we all fade as a leaf (Isaiah 64:6), and Psalm 90 compares human life to grass that withers by evening. These are not gloomy words but honest ones. They lead Moses to pray, teach us to number our days (Psalms 90:12), and they lead Isaiah to point to what lasts: the word of our God stands for ever (Isaiah 40:8).
Paul adds hope to that picture. Though the outward self is wasting away, the inward self is being renewed day by day (2 Corinthians 4:16). Autumn, then, invites believers to give thanks for God’s provision and to fix their hope on what does not fade.
Galatians states that whatever a person sows, that shall he also reap, agricultural language that autumn makes especially vivid.
Exodus 23:16 and Leviticus 23:39 both place a major harvest festival at the point in the year when the fruits of the field had been gathered in, and Deuteronomy 16:13-15 extends that same festival into a full week of rejoicing. These are not passing references; the calendar of ancient Israel was built in part around the ingathering this stretch of the year represented.
That festival context changes how the harvest language in the rest of this page should be read. The gathering described in these verses was communal and celebratory, not a solitary or purely agricultural event. Families, servants, and strangers living among the people were all specifically included in the instructions for how the festival was to be kept.
Psalms 90:5-6’s grass that grows up in the morning and withers by evening, Isaiah 40:7-8’s grass that withers and flower that fades, and Jude 1:12’s trees whose fruit withers all use the same image of decline that becomes visible in this later part of the year. None of these verses treat that decline as a problem to be solved; each uses it as a contrast.
Isaiah 40:7-8 makes the contrast explicit: the grass withers, but the word of God stands forever. 2 Corinthians 4:16’s outward man perishing while the inward man is renewed day by day extends the same contrast from plant life to a person’s own life, suggesting that visible decline and genuine renewal are not actually opposites in Scripture’s own framing, but can happen at the same time.
Psalms 90:12’s request to be taught to number our days belongs naturally alongside the withering imagery above it. The request is not for more days, but for the wisdom to use the days already given well, a request that lands differently once read after a string of verses about things fading and passing.
Daniel 2:21 and Acts 14:17’s descriptions of God determining seasons and giving fruitful provision close this collection on a steadier note. Whatever is fading in the verses above, these two passages frame the larger pattern of seasons themselves as something intentionally set in place, not left to chance.
Isaiah is blunt in one line that fits October better than any other month: “But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away” (Isaiah 64:6). The prophet is praying on behalf of a nation that knew it had failed. A leaf does not choose to let go, and neither could they, apart from God’s mercy. Wind carries off what has already dried out. That is the sober side of bible verses about autumn.
Now flip to Psalm 1:3, where the person rooted in God’s law is a tree whose “leaf also shall not wither.” The two pictures look contradictory until you notice the difference is the roots, not the calendar. Among the Bible Verses About Autumn, these two give you a choice of image to stand in. A slow walk under a red maple with one honest question, what is my life rooted in, can do more than an hour of vague resolve. Dry seasons come for everyone. What matters is whether anything is feeding the tree underground.
Paul had been beaten, shipwrecked and run out of cities when he wrote, “For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day” (2 Corinthians 4:16). He was not pretending the body was fine. Anyone who has watched a parent slow down, or felt their own knees complain on the stairs, knows how real the outward wearing-down is. Autumn is the season that says so out loud.
What Paul adds is that something else is moving in the other direction. Day by day, not all at once, and not always in ways anyone else can see. A grandfather who can no longer mend the fence but prays for every grandchild by name is a living example. Of the bible verses about autumn collected here, this is the one I would hand to someone caring for an aging parent. It lets you grieve what is slipping away without calling that the whole story. If the losses are piling up heavy, talk with a doctor or counselor as well. Faith and good care are not rivals.
Jeremiah 5:24 is a complaint. God says his people never said in their hearts, “Let us now fear the LORD our God, that giveth rain, both the former and the latter, in his season: he reserveth unto us the appointed weeks of the harvest.” The rain and the harvest kept coming, and nobody connected them to a giver. It is easy to read that and shake your head at ancient Israel, then eat a full dinner without a thought. Plenty of bible verses about autumn push toward thankfulness for that reason.
Paul and Barnabas made the same point to a crowd at Lystra when they said God “left not himself without witness, in that he did good, and gave us rain from heaven, and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness” (Acts 14:17). Notice they did not point to a miracle. They pointed to ordinary things. A bin of apples, a pot of soup, the first cold morning when you reach for a sweater you were glad to own. The habit here is simply noticing, and saying thanks before the plate is empty rather than after.
Some seasons are not on the calendar. A layoff, a diagnosis, a child leaving for college, a church you loved closing its doors. Daniel 2:21 says of God, “he changeth the times and the seasons: he removeth kings, and setteth up kings.” Daniel said it while living in a foreign empire, far from home, with his life on the line. His confidence did not come from things being stable. It came from knowing who held the changes.
Ecclesiastes 3:1-2 sits comfortably beside that: “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted.” Psalm 104:19 adds that God “appointed the moon for seasons.” Read slowly, the bible verses about autumn on this page do not promise that every change will be welcome. They say someone is paying attention to the timing, and that you are not the one who has to keep the whole year turning.
In Israel the farming year did not start in January. It started when the first autumn rains soaked ground that had baked hard through a long dry summer. Farmers called those the former rains, and the spring showers the latter rains, and Jeremiah 5:24 names both: God is the one who gives rain in its season and keeps the appointed weeks of the harvest for his people. Read that with a farmer’s eyes. No October rain, no plowing. No plowing, no barley come spring. Nobody in that world could treat the weather as scenery, and that is why so many Bible verses about autumn sound urgent. A late rain could mean a thin winter.
Jeremiah was speaking to people who had stopped noticing. They enjoyed the gifts and ignored the Giver, and his complaint was not that the rain failed. It was that nobody connected it to God. Most of us buy groceries without a thought for the forecast, so the verse works as a small correction. When the first cold front comes through and the air smells different, say thanks out loud. Not because the weather is magic, but because the pattern behind it was promised after the flood, and Genesis 8:22 says seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, will not stop while the earth remains. A kitchen window and ten quiet seconds are enough.
Here is something that surprises people who go hunting for the word. English has four seasons with four names, but the Hebrew Scriptures mostly talk about seedtime and harvest, summer and winter, the early rain and the late rain. Fall as a separate season is our category, not theirs. That does not make the topic thin. It means the Bible’s autumn is found in the work of the land: the last figs, the olive beating, the grape treading, the plowing that followed. When we read Bible verses about autumn we are often reading about a task and a feeling rather than a calendar page.
Paul understood this when he spoke to a crowd of pagans at Lystra. He did not quote the prophets to them. He pointed at what they already knew, that God had never left himself without witness, because he did good, gave rain from heaven and fruitful seasons, and filled their hearts with food and gladness (Acts 14:17). Daniel says the same thing from another angle, that God changes the times and the seasons (Daniel 2:21). Neither writer needs the English word. Both are saying that a cooling October evening and a full pantry are not accidents of nature, and a person does not have to be religious to have noticed.
The harvest laws in Leviticus have an odd detail tucked in right after the instructions for the feasts. When the people reaped their land, they were not to cut the field to the very edge, and they were not to go back over it for every dropped stalk. The corners and the leftovers belonged to the poor and the foreigner (Leviticus 23:22; compare Leviticus 19:9-10). God put generosity into the farming schedule itself. It was not left to the mood of the landowner.
The book of Ruth shows how that worked in a real field. A widow from Moab, with no land and no husband, walked behind the reapers and gathered what they left. She was able to eat because somebody had obeyed a rule about corners. That is a good question for any family sitting down to a big autumn meal. What is the corner of our field? It might be a food drive, a neighbor who lives alone, a coworker far from home who has nowhere to go on the holiday. Nobody is shamed into it here. The law simply assumes that a good harvest has edges, and that the edges are for other people.
Jesus told a short story that fits the end of the harvest almost too well (Luke 12:16-21). A rich man’s land produced so much that he had no place to store it. His solution was reasonable on paper. Tear down the barns, build bigger ones, and tell himself to relax, eat and be merry. God’s word to him was blunt. This night your soul is required, and whose will all these things be?
It is easy to read this as a rule against saving, and that is not what Jesus says. Joseph stored grain in Egypt and saved lives. Proverbs praises the ant that gathers its food in summer. The trouble in this man’s story is the conversation he has only with himself. He says my crops, my barns, my goods, my soul, and never once mentions God or a neighbor. A fall season of full storehouses is a fair time to ask whether our plans have any room in them for anyone else. Check the retirement account if you like, and also check whether the people who depend on you have heard from you lately. Saving is wise. Having nothing to say to God about it is the warning.
Jude has a hard sentence that rarely makes it onto a decorative card. He describes certain people who had slipped into the churches as trees in late autumn whose fruit withers, trees without fruit, twice dead, pulled up by the roots (Jude 1:12). In context he is warning about teachers who used the gatherings for their own benefit and had no real life underneath. The picture is meant to be uncomfortable.
Anyone who has walked an orchard knows why it works. In October a tree that was supposed to be loaded has either given its fruit or it hasn’t, and no amount of leafy green in July can hide it. Fruit is the test. Jesus himself said that a tree is known by what it bears. That is not a call to panic over your own spiritual output, since the Psalms speak of the person who delights in God’s law as a tree planted by rivers of water that brings forth fruit in its season (Psalms 1:3). Notice the words in his season. Some years are leaner than others. The caution is for the tree that has no connection to the water at all. If your life looks leafy and feels hollow, the answer is more time at the river, and a pastor or an honest friend can help you find it.
Psalm 65:11 says, “Thou crownest the year with thy goodness; and thy paths drop fatness.” It reads easily when the barns are full. But some Octobers arrive after a layoff, a failed crop, a diagnosis or a funeral, and the psalm can sound like it belongs to somebody else. Habakkuk knew that feeling. He wrote that though the fig tree would not blossom and the fields would yield no food, he would still rejoice in the Lord (Habakkuk 3:17-18). He does not pretend the shelves are full. He simply refuses to let the empty shelves have the last word about who God is.
If this has been a thin year for you, there is no need to manufacture a thankful feeling. You can say so plainly. Something like this is honest enough: Lord, this season did not turn out the way I asked, and I am tired, but I know you have held me through it, so please keep holding me into the cold months. Then name one small thing that was real, a meal, a phone call, a morning that went right. If the heaviness does not lift, it is a good time to talk with a counselor or a pastor as well. Gratitude and sorrow can sit at the same table in the same week.
Readers interested in autumn often continue with Bible Verses About Business, Bible Verses About Obedience, Bible Verses About Prayer in Difficult Times, Bible Verses For Children, Bible Verses About God's Timing, Bible Verses For Faith Over Fear, Bible Verses For Grace, Bible Verses About Protection from Enemies, Bible Verses About Worship, Bible Verses For Wives and Bible Verses About Peace in Difficult Times.
For deeper study, Blue Letter Bible, Bible Gateway and Bible Hub are all free to use.
For ancient Israel, autumn was the season of ingathering. Grapes, olives and the last fruits were brought in, and God commanded a week-long celebration called the Feast of Tabernacles or Feast of Ingathering (Exodus 23:16; Leviticus 23:39).
This page brings together 7 King James Version references about autumn, drawn from 6 different books of the Bible.
These autumn verses are drawn from books including Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Isaiah, Psalms, among others.
Yes. The verses about autumn gathered here include passages from both the Old Testament and the New Testament, such as Exodus 23:16 and 2 Corinthians 4:16.
Exodus 23:16 is one of the verses about autumn referenced in this collection, alongside Leviticus 23:39.
