pay owed for service rendered: the wages, hire, fare, or reward due for work done or loyalty shown
This is the everyday Hebrew word for what a worker is owed. It covers:
- a shepherd's contracted pay
- a nurse's fee
- a day-laborer's daily wage
- the price to rent an animal
- the fare for a boat
At its core it names one thing: recompense that is owed for a service, and it always carries the flavor of a real agreement between an employer and a worker.
What makes the word remarkable is that biblical Hebrew uses this same wage-word for the reward God gives. When God tells Abram his reward will be very great, when God promises weeping Rachel that there is a reward for her labor, or when children are called a reward, the language is drawn straight from the labor contract. The Hebrew Bible does not keep a separate, more spiritual word for divine reward. It pictures God as the ultimate employer who pays what he has promised, so the weight of the theological reward rests on the concreteness of an ordinary wage.
The range runs from the fully secular to the fully theological without a break. Deuteronomy commands that a hired man be paid before sundown, and Isaiah announces that God returns with his reward in hand, using the very same noun. Even the wisdom writers hold the word to earth: for the Preacher, the reward of toil is the good it yields in this life, and the dead have no reward left to them.
Because the same word does all of this work, English translations have to rotate among wages, hire, fare, and reward depending on the verse, and no single English word can carry the whole range at once.