Yesaya 5:7

5:7 Indeed ¹  Israel ²  is the vineyard of the Lord who commands armies,

the people ³  of Judah are the cultivated place in which he took delight.

He waited for justice, but look what he got – disobedience! ⁴ 

He waited for fairness, but look what he got – cries for help! ⁵ 

Ayub 24:2-7

24:2 Men ⁶  move boundary stones;

they seize the flock and pasture them. ⁷ 

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. ⁸ 

24:5 Like ⁹  wild donkeys in the desert

they ¹⁰  go out to their labor, ¹¹ 

seeking diligently for food;

the wasteland provides ¹²  food for them

and for their children.

24:6 They reap fodder ¹³  in the field,

and glean ¹⁴  in the vineyard of the wicked.

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

they have no covering against the cold.

Yeremia 5:27

5:27 Like a cage filled with the birds that have been caught, ¹⁵ 

their houses are filled with the gains of their fraud and deceit. ¹⁶ 

That is how they have gotten so rich and powerful. ¹⁷ 

Amos 4:1

4:1 Listen to this message, you cows of Bashan ¹⁸  who live on Mount Samaria!

You ¹⁹  oppress the poor;

you crush the needy.

You say to your ²⁰  husbands,

“Bring us more to drink!” ²¹ 

Mikha 2:2

2:2 They confiscate the fields they desire,

and seize the houses they want. ²² 

They defraud people of their homes, ²³ 

and deprive people of the land they have inherited. ²⁴ 

Mikha 6:10

6:10 “I will not overlook, ²⁵  O sinful house, the dishonest gain you have hoarded away, ²⁶ 

or the smaller-than-standard measure I hate so much. ²⁷ 

Matius 21:33

The Parable of the Tenants

21:33 “Listen to another parable: There was a landowner ²⁸  who planted a vineyard. ²⁹  He put a fence around it, dug a pit for its winepress, and built a watchtower. Then ³⁰  he leased it to tenant farmers ³¹  and went on a journey.

[5:7]  ¹ tn Or “For” (KJV, ASV, NASB, NRSV).

[5:7]  ² tn Heb “the house of Israel” (so NASB, NIV, NRSV).

[5:7]  ³ tn Heb “men,” but in a generic sense.

[5:7]  ⁴ tn Heb “but, look, disobedience.” The precise meaning of מִשְׂפָּח (mishpakh), which occurs only here in the OT, is uncertain. Some have suggested a meaning “bloodshed.” The term is obviously chosen for its wordplay value; it sounds very much like מִשְׁפָּט (mishpat, “justice”). The sound play draws attention to the point being made; the people have not met the Lord’s expectations.

[5:7]  ⁵ tn Heb “but, look, a cry for help.” The verb (“he waited”) does double duty in the parallelism. צְעָקָה (tsa’qah) refers to the cries for help made by the oppressed. It sounds very much like צְדָקָה (tsÿdaqah, “fairness”). The sound play draws attention to the point being made; the people have not met the Lord’s expectations.

[24:2]  ⁶ 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]  ⁷ 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]  ⁸ 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]  ⁹ 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]  ¹⁰ tn That is, “the poor.”

[24:5]  ¹¹ 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]  ¹² tn The verb is not included in the Hebrew text but is supplied in the translation.

[24:6]  ¹³ 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]  ¹⁴ 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.

[5:27]  ¹⁵ tn The words, “that have been caught” are not in the text but are implicit in the comparison.

[5:27]  ¹⁶ tn Heb “are filled with deceit.” The translation assumes a figure of speech of cause for effect (metonymy). Compare the same word in the same figure in Zeph 1:9.

[5:27]  ¹⁷ tn Heb “therefore they have gotten great and rich.”

[4:1]  ¹⁸ sn The expression cows of Bashan is used by the prophet to address the wealthy women of Samaria, who demand that their husbands satisfy their cravings. The derogatory language perhaps suggests that they, like the livestock of Bashan, were well fed, ironically in preparation for the coming slaughter. This phrase is sometimes cited to critique the book’s view of women.

[4:1]  ¹⁹ tn Heb “the ones who” (three times in this verse).

[4:1]  ²⁰ tn Heb “their.”

[4:1]  ²¹ sn Some commentators relate this scene to the description of the marzeah feast of 6:3-6, in which drinking played a prominent part (see the note at 6:6).

[2:2]  ²² tn Heb “they desire fields and rob [them], and houses and take [them] away.”

[2:2]  ²³ tn Heb “and they oppress a man and his home.”

[2:2]  ²⁴ tn Heb “and a man and his inheritance.” The verb עָשַׁק (’ashaq, “to oppress”; “to wrong”) does double duty in the parallel structure and is understood by ellipsis in the second line.

[6:10]  ²⁵ tn The meaning of the first Hebrew word in the line is unclear. Possibly it is a combination of the interrogative particle and אִשׁ (’ish), an alternate form of יֵשׁ (yesh, “there is/are”). One could then translate literally, “Are there treasures of sin [in] the house of the sinful?” The translation assumes an emendation to הַאֶשֶּׁה (ha’esheh, from נָשָׁא, nasha’, “to forget”), “Will I forget?” The rhetorical question expects an answer, “No, I will not forget.”

[6:10]  ²⁶ tn Heb “the treasures of sin”; NASB “treasures of wickedness”; NIV “ill-gotten treasures.”

[6:10]  ²⁷ tn Heb “the accursed scant measure.”

[6:10]  sn Merchants would use a smaller than standard measure so they could give the customer less than he thought he was paying for.

[21:33]  ²⁸ tn The term here refers to the owner and manager of a household.

[21:33]  ²⁹ sn The vineyard is a figure for Israel in the OT (Isa 5:1-7). The nation and its leaders are the tenants, so the vineyard here may well refer to the promise that resides within the nation. The imagery is like that in Rom 11:11-24.

[21:33]  ³⁰ tn Here καί (kai) has been translated as “then” to indicate the implied sequence of events within the narrative.

[21:33]  ³¹ sn The leasing of land to tenant farmers was common in this period.