What Does Deuteronomy 24:14 Mean?
You shall not press a hired hand who is bowed down and needy, whether he is of your brothers or of your sojourners who are in your land within your gates.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
Thou shalt not oppress an hired servant that is poor and needy, whether he be of thy brethren, or of thy strangers that are in thy land within thy gates:THE KEY
The Hebrew verb for “oppress” also means to wrong or defraud, so exploiting a hired worker is named as oppression whether that worker is kin or a stranger.
THE MEANING
This command speaks to you now: a worker’s poverty does not make their labor easier to exploit. Kinship does not set the boundary of protection; the resident stranger within your gates is included too. The worker’s need and foreignness do not reduce their claim to fair treatment.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that justice is owed only to your own people.
THE ROOT
תַּעֲשֹׁק
taʿăšōq
GROWS FROM
עָשַׁק
ʿ-š-q
To wrong, defraud, or oppress.
“press” in this verse is taʿăšōq. English can make oppression sound like overt force, but this Hebrew verb also names defrauding or wronging someone. Applied to a hired worker, it brings exploitation within the verse’s meaning of oppression.
ALSO GROWS
ʿōshēq: One who wrongs or exploits another.
עֹשֵׁק
The verse names the person who exploits a worker with the same root that names the act of oppression.
ʿāshûq: Someone who is wronged or exploited.
עָשׁוּק
The branch names the worker’s position in the relationship: the person acted upon by another’s exploitation.
שָׂכִיר
śākîr
GROWS FROM
שָׂכַר
ś-k-r
To hire or pay for labor; wages or hire.
“hired hand” in this verse is śākîr. The word for a hired worker belongs to the same root family as the word for wages. Hebrew keeps the worker’s hired status and compensation in one word-family, making the economic relationship part of the verse’s language.
ALSO GROWS
śākhār: Payment or reward for work.
שָׂכָר
This branch makes visible the compensation bound up with the word for the hired worker.
śākhar: To hire someone or pay for labor.
שָׂכַר
The worker’s identity in the verse is tied to the act of hiring and payment.
THE PATTERN
Scripture treats exploiting a vulnerable worker as a wrong that reaches beyond private business into God’s concern.
You shall not press your neighbor, nor tear from him; the wage of the hired hand shall not lodge with you all night until the morning.The one who presses the emptied one taunts his Maker, but the one who gives him weight favors the poor.Look, the wages of the workers who mowed your fields, stripped away by your fraud, cry out, and the cries of those who reaped have gone into the ears of the LORD of hosts.THE THREAD
You shall not press your neighbor, nor tear from him; the wage of the hired hand shall not lodge with you all night until the morning.Leviticus uses the same root, עָשַׁק (ʿāshaq, to wrong or defraud), that appears in Deuteronomy’s command not to oppress the hired worker. Here that root stands beside the worker’s wages, revealing how withholding what is due can become the very exploitation Deuteronomy names.
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