Deuteronomy 26 choreographs the bringing of first fruits down to the script. The farmer takes the first of all the fruit of the ground, puts it in a basket, goes to the place the Lord chooses, and says to the priest a fixed declaration, one of the very few liturgical texts the Torah itself prescribes word for word. The declaration is a compressed national autobiography: a wandering Aramean was my father; he went down into Egypt few in number; the Egyptians afflicted us; the Lord brought us out with a mighty hand; and he brought us to this land flowing with milk and honey; and now, behold, I have brought the first of the fruit of the ground which thou, O Lord, hast given me. The theology is all in the pronouns and the verbs.
The gift of produce is embedded in a history of gift: the land itself was given, so the first of its yield returns to the giver, and the individual farmer speaks the nation's story in the first person, his basket the latest clause in it. The rabbis heard the text's weight and built on it; the same wandering Aramean passage became the expository heart of the Passover Haggadah, recited by every Jew at the seder to this day, so that a liturgy composed for a Temple procession outlived the Temple inside another festival entirely. First fruits thus carry a doctrine larger than agriculture: possession is receipt, prosperity is loan, and gratitude is not a feeling but a recitation with a basket in hand.