Agra is a payroll word before it is anything else: wages, reward, pay: what is earned for work, what is owed and given in return for labor or service. It is the envelope of coins at the end of a day in the vineyard, the sum a hired hand counts on. Earnings due, whether earthly hire or heavenly reward: the same plain word covers both.
That plainness is the teaching. When Yeshua says the public performers "already have their reward in full," he is talking like a bookkeeper: they worked for an audience, the audience paid them in praise, and the account is closed. Nothing is still owed. Agra asks one blunt question of every act: who are you working for, and where do you expect to collect?
| Form | Pattern | Transliteration | Script | Standard | Qala rendering |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| agra | noun, emphatic | agrā | אגרא ܐܓܪܐ | wage, reward | wages · reward · pay (16 occurrences) |
| agira | noun, qṭilā pattern | agirā | אגירא ܐܓܝܪܐ | hireling | hired hand (John 10:12–13) |
| egar | Peal verb | egar | אגר ܐܓܪ | to hire | to hire (the landowner of Matthew 20:1) |
| Stem | Form | Sense |
|---|---|---|
| Peal | egar | to hire: the Peshitta's verb when the landowner goes out to hire workers (Matthew 20:1) |
| Ethpeel | — | not attested in this corpus |
| Pael / Ethpaal | — | not attested in this corpus |
| Aphel / Ettaphal | — | not attested in this corpus; the nouns agra and agira carry most of the family's weight |
At the end of today, notice the ledger instinct in you: the quiet tally of who saw what you did, who owes you thanks, where credit went missing. Don't fight it; just watch it work. Then recall the vineyard at evening: pay called out from the last to the first, by a master whose accounting is generosity. Let one unthanked thing you did today stay hidden, and feel what it is like to leave it on the Father's books instead.
This is one of the old working words of the Near East: Akkadian agāru, "to hire," is its oldest attested cousin, and Arabic ʾajr, "wage, recompense," carries the same root today. It belongs to the vocabulary of day labor, which is exactly why the vineyard parable needs it alongside P-ʿ-L, the worker (root 53): the paʿla is the one who earns the agra. The harvest imagery of Ḥ-Ṣ-D (root 52) works the same field.
Take two or three minutes and explain agra to a friend as a payroll word. Start with the vineyard: workers hired at dawn, pay handed out at evening. Then explain why "they already have their reward in full" is bookkeeping language (the performers were paid by their audience, account closed) and what it means that the reward of hidden giving is still open on the books.