What Does Genesis 30:29 Mean in the King James?
And he said unto him, Thou knowest how I have served thee, and how thy cattle was with me.
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
“You know” is the hinge: his service is not a fresh claim but something the listener already knows through experience.
THE MEANING
The verse lets a person name service that another already knows from lived experience. The speaker places his work and the listener’s cattle being with him side by side as parts of a shared reality.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The false belief that work done in another’s service becomes invisible because its results belong to them loosens here: the listener already knows what happened under the speaker’s care.
THE ROOT
יָדַעְתָּ
yādaʿtā
GROWS FROM
ידע
To know, recognize, or perceive.
“knowest” in this verse is yādaʿtā. The form yādaʿtā addresses someone whose knowing is already established. Here, “you know” presents the service as lived experience between the two, not as a new claim that needs explaining.
ALSO GROWS
yada: To know or recognize.
יָדַע
This verb names the recognition the speaker appeals to: the listener already knows his service.
daʿat: Knowledge or understanding.
דַּעַת
This related noun shows the same root naming knowledge itself, which the verse treats as already shared.
עֲבַדְתִּיךָ
ʿavadtiḵa
GROWS FROM
עבד
To work or serve.
“served” in this verse is ʿavadtiḵa. The root עבד holds working and serving together, so the verse’s service is active labor for another. The same root names both the worker and the work, linking the speaker’s role to what he has done.
ALSO GROWS
ʿeved: Servant or worker.
עֶבֶד
This branch names the person in the role of service, connecting the speaker’s position to his labor.
ʿavodah: Work or service.
עֲבוֹדָה
This branch names the labor itself, showing that “served” carries the sense of work performed for another.
THE PATTERN
Care and labor leave a knowable trace in what is tended and in the work itself.
Be thou diligent to know the state of thy flocks, and look well to thy herds.For God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labour of love, which ye have shewed toward his name, in that ye have ministered to the saints, and do minister.Now he that planteth and he that watereth are one: and every man shall receive his own reward according to his own labour.THE THREAD
And ye know that with all my power I have served your father.This verse repeats the root עבד (ʿavad, “work or serve”) in “I have served your father,” and again appeals to what the listener knows. It makes explicit the shared knowledge already present in the current verse: the service is a known history between worker and recipient.
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