Micah 3:9

3:9 Listen to this, you leaders of the family ¹  of Jacob,

you rulers of the nation ²  of Israel!

You ³  hate justice

and pervert all that is right.

Exodus 22:21-24

22:21 “You must not wrong ⁴  a foreigner ⁵  nor oppress him, for you were foreigners in the land of Egypt.

22:22 “You must not afflict ⁶  any widow or orphan. 22:23 If you afflict them ⁷  in any way ⁸  and they cry to me, I will surely hear ⁹  their cry, 22:24 and my anger will burn and I will kill you with the sword, and your wives will be widows and your children will be fatherless. ¹⁰ 

Exodus 22:2

22:2 “If a thief is caught ¹¹  breaking in ¹²  and is struck so that he dies, there will be no blood guilt for him. ¹³ 

Exodus 9:26

9:26 Only in the land of Goshen, where the Israelites lived, was there no hail.

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. ¹⁴  5:2 There were those who said, “With our sons and daughters, we are many. We must obtain ¹⁵  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 ¹⁶  on our fields and our vineyards. 5:5 And now, though we share the same flesh and blood as our fellow countrymen, ¹⁷  and our children are just like their children, ¹⁸  still we have found it necessary to subject our sons and daughters to slavery. ¹⁹  Some of our daughters have been subjected to slavery, while we are powerless to help, ²⁰  since our fields and vineyards now belong to other people.” ²¹ 

Job 24:2-12

24:2 Men ²²  move boundary stones;

they seize the flock and pasture them. ²³ 

24:3 They drive away the orphan’s donkey;

they take the widow’s ox as a pledge.

24:4 They turn the needy from the pathway,

and the poor of the land hide themselves together. ²⁴ 

24:5 Like ²⁵  wild donkeys in the desert

they ²⁶  go out to their labor, ²⁷ 

seeking diligently for food;

the wasteland provides ²⁸  food for them

and for their children.

24:6 They reap fodder ²⁹  in the field,

and glean ³⁰  in the vineyard of the wicked.

24:7 They spend the night naked because they lack clothing;

they have no covering against the cold.

24:8 They are soaked by mountain rains

and huddle ³¹  in the rocks because they lack shelter.

24:9 The fatherless child is snatched ³²  from the breast, ³³ 

the infant of the poor is taken as a pledge. ³⁴ 

24:10 They go about naked, without clothing,

and go hungry while they carry the sheaves. ³⁵ 

24:11 They press out the olive oil between the rows of olive trees; ³⁶ 

they tread the winepresses while they are thirsty. ³⁷ 

24:12 From the city the dying ³⁸  groan,

and the wounded ³⁹  cry out for help,

but God charges no one with wrongdoing. ⁴⁰ 

Ezekiel 18:12

18:12 oppresses the poor and the needy, ⁴¹  commits robbery, does not give back what was given in pledge, prays to ⁴²  idols, performs abominable acts,

Ezekiel 22:12

22:12 They take bribes within you to shed blood. You engage in usury and charge interest; ⁴³  you extort money from your neighbors. You have forgotten me, ⁴⁴  declares the sovereign Lord. ⁴⁵ 

Amos 8:4

8:4 Listen to this, you who trample ⁴⁶  the needy,

and do away with ⁴⁷  the destitute in the land.

Malachi 3:5

3:5 “I ⁴⁸  will come to you in judgment. I will be quick to testify against those who practice divination, those who commit adultery, those who break promises, ⁴⁹  and those who exploit workers, widows, and orphans, ⁵⁰  who refuse to help ⁵¹  the immigrant ⁵²  and in this way show they do not fear me,” says the Lord who rules over all.

Matthew 23:14

23:14 [[EMPTY]] ⁵³ 

[3:9]  ¹ tn Heb “house.”

[3:9]  ² tn Heb “house.”

[3:9]  ³ tn Heb “who.” A new sentence was begun here in the translation for stylistic reasons (also at the beginning of v. 10).

[22:21]  ⁴ tn Or “oppress.”

[22:21]  ⁵ tn Or “alien,” both here and in 23:9. This individual is a resident foreigner; he lives in the land but, aside from provisions such as this, might easily be without legal rights.

[22:22]  ⁶ tn The verb “afflict” is a Piel imperfect from עָנָה (’anah); it has a wide range of meanings: “afflict, oppress, humiliate, rape.” These victims are at the mercy of the judges, businessmen, or villains. The righteous king and the righteous people will not mistreat them (see Isa 1:17; Job 31:16, 17, 21).

[22:23]  ⁷ tn The accusative here is the masculine singular pronoun, which leads S. R. Driver to conclude that this line is out of place, even though the masculine singular can be used in places like this (Exodus, 232). U. Cassuto says its use is to refer to certain classes (Exodus, 292).

[22:23]  ⁸ tn Here again and with “cry” the infinitive absolute functions with a diminished emphasis (GKC 342-43 §113.o).

[22:23]  ⁹ tn Here is the normal use of the infinitive absolute with the imperfect tense to emphasize the verb: “I will surely hear,” implying, “I will surely respond.”

[22:24]  ¹⁰ sn The punishment will follow the form of talionic justice, an eye for an eye, in which the punishment matches the crime. God will use invading armies (“sword” is a metonymy of adjunct here) to destroy them, making their wives widows and their children orphans.

[22:2]  ¹¹ tn Heb “found” (so KJV, ASV, NRSV).

[22:2]  ¹² tn The word בַּמַּחְתֶּרֶת (bammakhteret) means “digging through” the walls of a house (usually made of mud bricks). The verb is used only a few times and has the meaning of dig in (as into houses) or row hard (as in Jonah 1:13).

[22:2]  ¹³ tn The text has “there is not to him bloods.” When the word “blood” is put in the plural, it refers to bloodshed, or the price of blood that is shed, i.e., blood guiltiness.

[5:1]  ¹⁴ tn Heb “their brothers the Jews.”

[5:2]  ¹⁵ tn Heb “take” (so also in v. 3).

[5:4]  ¹⁶ tn Heb “for the tax of the king.”

[5:5]  ¹⁷ tn Heb “according to the flesh of our brothers is our flesh.”

[5:5]  ¹⁸ tn Heb “like their children, our children.”

[5:5]  ¹⁹ tn Heb “to become slaves” (also later in this verse).

[5:5]  ²⁰ tn Heb “there is not power for our hand.” The Hebrew expression used here is rather difficult.

[5:5]  ²¹ 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).

[24:2]  ²² tn The line is short: “they move boundary stones.” So some commentators have supplied a subject, such as “wicked men.” The reason for its being wicked men is that to move the boundary stone was to encroach dishonestly on the lands of others (Deut 19:14; 27:17).

[24:2]  ²³ tc The LXX reads “and their shepherd.” Many commentators accept this reading. But the MT says that they graze the flocks that they have stolen. The difficulty with the MT reading is that there is no suffix on the final verb – but that is not an insurmountable difference.

[24:4]  ²⁴ sn Because of the violence and oppression of the wicked, the poor and needy, the widows and orphans, all are deprived of their rights and forced out of the ways and into hiding just to survive.

[24:5]  ²⁵ tc The verse begins with הֵן (hen); but the LXX, Vulgate, and Syriac all have “like.” R. Gordis (Job, 265) takes הֵן (hen) as a pronoun “they” and supplies the comparative. The sense of the verse is clear in either case.

[24:5]  ²⁶ tn That is, “the poor.”

[24:5]  ²⁷ tc The MT has “in the working/labor of them,” or “when they labor.” Some commentators simply omit these words. Dhorme retains them and moves them to go with עֲרָבָה (’aravah), which he takes to mean “evening”; this gives a clause, “although they work until the evening.” Then, with many others, he takes לוֹ (lo) to be a negative and finishes the verse with “no food for the children.” Others make fewer changes in the text, and as a result do not come out with such a hopeless picture – there is some food found. The point is that they spend their time foraging for food, and they find just enough to survive, but it is a day-long activity. For Job, this shows how unrighteous the administration of the world actually is.

[24:5]  ²⁸ tn The verb is not included in the Hebrew text but is supplied in the translation.

[24:6]  ²⁹ tc The word בְּלִילוֹ (bÿlilo) means “his fodder.” It is unclear to what this refers. If the suffix is taken as a collective, then it can be translated “they gather/reap their fodder.” The early versions all have “they reap in a field which is not his” (taking it as בְּלִי לוֹ, bÿli lo). A conjectural emendation would change the word to בַּלַּיְלָה (ballaylah, “in the night”). But there is no reason for this.

[24:6]  ³⁰ tn The verbs in this verse are uncertain. In the first line “reap” is used, and that would be the work of a hired man (and certainly not done at night). The meaning of this second verb is uncertain; it has been taken to mean “glean,” which would be the task of the poor.

[24:8]  ³¹ tn Heb “embrace” or “hug.”

[24:9]  ³² tn The verb with no expressed subject is here again taken in the passive: “they snatch” becomes “[child] is snatched.”

[24:9]  ³³ tn This word is usually defined as “violence; ruin.” But elsewhere it does mean “breast” (Isa 60:16; 66:11), and that is certainly what it means here.

[24:9]  ³⁴ tc The MT has a very brief and strange reading: “they take as a pledge upon the poor.” This could be taken as “they take a pledge against the poor” (ESV). Kamphausen suggested that instead of עַל (’al, “against”) one should read עוּל (’ul, “suckling”). This is supported by the parallelism. “They take as pledge” is also made passive here.

[24:10]  ³⁵ sn The point should not be missed – amidst abundant harvests, carrying sheaves about, they are still going hungry.

[24:11]  ³⁶ tc The Hebrew term is שׁוּרֹתָם (shurotam), which may be translated “terraces” or “olive rows.” But that would not be the proper place to have a press to press the olives and make oil. E. Dhorme (Job, 360-61) proposes on the analogy of an Arabic word that this should be read as “millstones” (which he would also write in the dual). But the argument does not come from a clean cognate, but from a possible development of words. The meaning of “olive rows” works well enough.

[24:11]  ³⁷ tn The final verb, a preterite with the ו (vav) consecutive, is here interpreted as a circumstantial clause.

[24:12]  ³⁸ tc The MT as pointed reads “from the city of men they groan.” Most commentators change one vowel in מְתִים (mÿtim) to get מֵתִים (metim) to get the active participle, “the dying.” This certainly fits the parallelism better, although sense could be made out of the MT.

[24:12]  ³⁹ tn Heb “the souls of the wounded,” which here refers to the wounded themselves.

[24:12]  ⁴⁰ tc The MT has the noun תִּפְלָה (tiflah) which means “folly; tastelessness” (cf. 1:22). The verb, which normally means “to place; to put,” would then be rendered “to impute; to charge.” This is certainly a workable translation in the context. Many commentators have emended the text, changing the noun to תְּפִלָּה (tÿfillah, “prayer”), and so then also the verb יָשִׂים (yasim, here “charges”) to יִשְׁמַע (yishma’, “hears”). It reads: “But God does not hear the prayer” – referring to the groans.

[18:12]  ⁴¹ sn The poor and needy are often mentioned together in the OT (Deut 24:14; Jer 22:16; Ezek 14:69; Ps 12:6; 35:10; 37:14).

[18:12]  ⁴² tn Heb “lifts up his eyes.”

[22:12]  ⁴³ tn Heb “usury and interest you take.” See 18:13, 17. This kind of economic exploitation violated the law given in Lev 25:36.

[22:12]  ⁴⁴ sn Forgetting the Lord is also addressed in Deut 6:12; 8:11, 14; Jer 3:21; 13:25; Ezek 23:35; Hos 2:15; 8:14; 13:6.

[22:12]  ⁴⁵ tn The second person verb forms are feminine singular in Hebrew, indicating that the personified city is addressed here as representing its citizens.

[8:4]  ⁴⁶ tn See the note on the word “trample” in 2:7.

[8:4]  ⁴⁷ tn Or “put an end to”; or “exterminate.”

[3:5]  ⁴⁸ tn The first person pronoun (a reference to the Lord) indicates that the Lord himself now speaks (see also v. 1). The prophet speaks in vv. 2-4 (see also 2:17).

[3:5]  ⁴⁹ tn Heb “those who swear [oaths] falsely.” Cf. NIV “perjurers”; TEV “those who give false testimony”; NLT “liars.”

[3:5]  ⁵⁰ tn Heb “and against the oppressors of the worker for a wage, [the] widow and orphan.”

[3:5]  ⁵¹ tn Heb “those who turn aside.”

[3:5]  ⁵² tn Or “resident foreigner”; NIV “aliens”; NRSV “the alien.”

[23:14]  ⁵³ tc The most important mss (א B D L Z Θ Ë¹ 33 892* pc and several versional witnesses) do not have 23:14 “Woe to you experts in the law and you Pharisees, hypocrites! You devour widows’ property, and as a show you pray long prayers! Therefore you will receive a more severe punishment.” Part or all of the verse is contained (either after v. 12 or after v. 13) in W 0102 0107 ˹³ Ï and several versions, but it is almost certainly not original. The present translation follows NA²⁷ in omitting the verse number as well, a procedure also followed by a number of other modern translations. Note also that Mark 12:40 and Luke 20:47 are very similar in wording and are not disputed textually.