What Does Deuteronomy 28:39 Mean in the King James?
Thou shalt plant vineyards, and dress them, but shalt neither drink of the wine, nor gather the grapes; for the worms shall eat them.
The analysis reads the King James wording.
King James Version The King James Version, first published in 1611. Selah Verse shows the standard text.
THE KEY
The wound is not an empty vineyard but a fruitful one whose yield is consumed before the worker can receive it.
THE MEANING
Your work can bring a vineyard to fruit, yet you still cannot gather the grapes or drink its wine; the worm consumes what your service brings forth. The verse holds the painful gap between tending and receiving without disguising the loss.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that work alone guarantees a person will receive what that work produces.
THE ROOT
וְעָבַדְתָּ
ve’avadtā
GROWS FROM
עבד
ʿ-b-d
Work, serve.
English “dress” can sound like a secondary task, but this verb comes from עבד (ʿavad), “to work, to serve”: the vineyard is something you serve. The same root names both service and a servant, exposing the painful asymmetry of labor that cultivates abundance without letting that abundance reach the worker.
ALSO GROWS
ʿeved: Servant.
עֶבֶד
The servant and the act of serving share the root heard in the vineyard’s tending, bringing the human cost of this labor into view.
ʿavodah: Work, service.
עֲבֹדָה
This noun makes the tending explicit as work and service: the vineyard receives care, while its grapes and wine remain beyond the worker’s reach.
THE PATTERN
Cultivation does not guarantee possession: a yield can be brought forth and still be lost before its worker can partake of it.
Forasmuch therefore as your treading is upon the poor, and ye take from him burdens of wheat: ye have built houses of hewn stone, but ye shall not dwell in them; ye have planted pleasant vineyards, but ye shall not drink wine of them.A man to whom God hath given riches, wealth, and honour, so that he wanteth nothing for his soul of all that he desireth, yet God giveth him not power to eat thereof, but a stranger eateth it: this is vanity, and it is an evil disease.But God said unto him, Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided?THE THREAD
And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.The verb behind “dress” here comes from עבד (ʿavad), “to work, to serve,” the same root used for tending the vineyard in Deuteronomy. In Genesis, that service belongs to a garden the human tends; Deuteronomy shows the same service stripped of its fruit, making the withheld wine feel like a severed return.
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