What Does Matthew 20:2 Mean in the King James?
And when he had agreed with the labourers for a penny a day, he sent them into his vineyard.
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 agreed wage is followed by a sending: the workers move from a promise into the place where fruit is cultivated.
THE MEANING
A day’s measure is named before the workers enter the vineyard. The agreement becomes a dispatch, joining what is promised to the place where you labor now. The verse holds the wage and the work together.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that a promise is only a number agreed upon: here, the penny is followed by a real sending into the vineyard.
THE ROOT
ἀπέστειλεν
apésteilen
GROWS FROM
στέλλω
stellō
To send or dispatch; here, the form means “he sent.”
“sent” in this verse is apésteilen. The verb is ἀποστέλλω (apostellō), “to send forth” or “dispatch.” Its word family carries the sense of a sending that places someone into a task, so the workers’ agreement leads directly into their vineyard labor.
ALSO GROWS
apóstolos: A sent one; a messenger.
ἀπόστολος
The shared word family shows how sending can define the role of the person who is sent.
apostolē: A sending; a commission.
ἀποστολή
This branch names the dispatch itself, bringing out the movement from agreed terms to assigned work.
THE PATTERN
Cultivation joins prepared ground, assigned labor, and the expectation of fruit.
And he fenced it, and gathered out the stones thereof, and planted it with the choicest vine, and built a tower in the midst of it, and also made a winepress therein: and he looked that it should bring forth grapes, and it brought forth wild grapes.Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth labourers into his harvest.For we are labourers together with God: ye are God’s husbandry, ye are God’s building.THE THREAD
Then said Jesus to them again, Peace be unto you: as my Father hath sent me, even so send I you.Matthew’s “sent” and John’s “hath sent me” use the same Greek verb, ἀποστέλλω (apostellō), meaning “send forth” or “dispatch.” John then echoes the sending with a second verb: the one sent also sends, widening the vineyard’s dispatch into a chain.
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