Deuteronomy 28:12

28:12 The Lord will open for you his good treasure house, the heavens, to give you rain for the land in its season and to bless all you do; ¹  you will lend to many nations but you will not borrow from any.

Deuteronomy 28:43-44

28:43 The foreigners ²  who reside among you will become higher and higher over you and you will become lower and lower. 28:44 They will lend to you but you will not lend to them; they will become the head and you will become the tail!

Deuteronomy 28:2

28:2 All these blessings will come to you in abundance ³  if you obey the Lord your God:

Deuteronomy 4:1-5

The Privileges of the Covenant

4:1 Now, Israel, pay attention to the statutes and ordinances ⁴  I am about to teach you, so that you might live and go on to enter and take possession of the land that the Lord, the God of your ancestors, ⁵  is giving you. 4:2 Do not add a thing to what I command you nor subtract from it, so that you may keep the commandments of the Lord your God that I am delivering to ⁶  you. 4:3 You have witnessed what the Lord did at Baal Peor, ⁷  how he ⁸  eradicated from your midst everyone who followed Baal Peor. ⁹  4:4 But you who remained faithful to the Lord your God are still alive to this very day, every one of you. 4:5 Look! I have taught you statutes and ordinances just as the Lord my God told me to do, so that you might carry them out in ¹⁰  the land you are about to enter and possess.

Nehemiah 5:1-5

Nehemiah Intervenes on behalf of the Oppressed

5:1 Then there was a great outcry from the people and their wives against their fellow Jews. ¹¹  5:2 There were those who said, “With our sons and daughters, we are many. We must obtain ¹²  grain in order to eat and stay alive.” 5:3 There were others who said, “We are putting up our fields, our vineyards, and our houses as collateral in order to obtain grain during the famine.” 5:4 Then there were those who said, “We have borrowed money to pay our taxes to the king ¹³  on our fields and our vineyards. 5:5 And now, though we share the same flesh and blood as our fellow countrymen, ¹⁴  and our children are just like their children, ¹⁵  still we have found it necessary to subject our sons and daughters to slavery. ¹⁶  Some of our daughters have been subjected to slavery, while we are powerless to help, ¹⁷  since our fields and vineyards now belong to other people.” ¹⁸ 

Proverbs 22:7

22:7 The rich rule over ¹⁹  the poor,

and the borrower is servant ²⁰  to the lender.

[28:12]  ¹ tn Heb “all the work of your hands.”

[28:43]  ² tn Heb “the foreigner.” This is a collective singular and has therefore been translated as plural; this includes the pronouns in the following verse, which are also singular in the Hebrew text.

[28:2]  ³ tn Heb “come upon you and overtake you” (so NASB, NRSV); NIV “come upon you and accompany you.”

[4:1]  ⁴ tn These technical Hebrew terms (חֻקִּים [khuqqim] and מִשְׁפָּטִים [mishpatim]) occur repeatedly throughout the Book of Deuteronomy to describe the covenant stipulations to which Israel had been called to subscribe (see, in this chapter alone, vv. 1, 5, 6, 8). The word חֻקִּים derives from the verb חֹק (khoq, “to inscribe; to carve”) and מִשְׁפָּטִים (mishpatim) from שָׁפַט (shafat, “to judge”). They are virtually synonymous and are used interchangeably in Deuteronomy.

[4:1]  ⁵ tn Heb “fathers” (also in vv. 31, 37).

[4:2]  ⁶ tn Heb “commanding.”

[4:3]  ⁷ tc The LXX and Syriac read “to Baal Peor,” that is, the god worshiped at that place; see note on the name “Beth Peor” in Deut 3:29.

[4:3]  ⁸ tn Heb “the Lord your God.” The pronoun has been used in the translation for stylistic reasons to avoid redundancy.

[4:3]  ⁹ tn Or “followed the Baal of Peor” (so NAB, NIV, NRSV), referring to the pagan god Baal.

[4:5]  ¹⁰ tn Heb “in the midst of” (so ASV).

[5:1]  ¹¹ tn Heb “their brothers the Jews.”

[5:2]  ¹² tn Heb “take” (so also in v. 3).

[5:4]  ¹³ tn Heb “for the tax of the king.”

[5:5]  ¹⁴ tn Heb “according to the flesh of our brothers is our flesh.”

[5:5]  ¹⁵ tn Heb “like their children, our children.”

[5:5]  ¹⁶ tn Heb “to become slaves” (also later in this verse).

[5:5]  ¹⁷ tn Heb “there is not power for our hand.” The Hebrew expression used here is rather difficult.

[5:5]  ¹⁸ sn The poor among the returned exiles were being exploited by their rich countrymen. Moneylenders were loaning large amounts of money, and not only collecting interest on loans which was illegal (Lev 25:36-37; Deut 23:19-20), but also seizing pledges as collateral (Neh 5:3) which was allowed (Deut 24:10). When the debtors missed a payment, the moneylenders would seize their collateral: their fields, vineyards and homes. With no other means of income, the debtors were forced to sell their children into slavery, a common practice at this time (Neh 5:5). Nehemiah himself was one of the moneylenders (Neh 5:10), but he insisted that seizure of collateral from fellow Jewish countrymen was ethically wrong (Neh 5:9).

[22:7]  ¹⁹ sn The proverb is making an observation on life. The synonymous parallelism matches “rule over” with “servant” to show how poverty makes people dependent on, or obligated to, others.

[22:7]  ²⁰ tn Or “slave” (so NAB, NASB, NRSV, TEV, CEV). This may refer to the practice in Israel of people selling themselves into slavery to pay off debts (Exod 21:2-7).