What Does Jeremiah 7:6 Mean?
If you do not press the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow, and do not pour out clean blood in this place, nor walk after other gods to your own harm.
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
If ye oppress not the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow, and shed not innocent blood in this place, neither walk after other gods to your hurt:THE KEY
Oppression, innocent bloodshed, and rival worship form one path, and its harm circles back onto the one who walks it.
THE MEANING
Your worship and your dealings with vulnerable people belong to one reality: the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow cannot be exploited, and innocent blood cannot be shed. The pursuit of other gods leads to harm for the one who walks that path.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
This undoes the belief that worship can remain private or harmless while vulnerable people are exploited: devotion and treatment of the exposed stand together, and rival allegiance carries harm back to the one who follows it.
THE ROOT
תַעֲשֹׁקוּ
taʿashoqū
GROWS FROM
ע־ש־ק
ʿ-š-q
To oppress, exploit, or defraud.
“press” in this verse is taʿashoqū. The verb shares its root with words for oppression and for people who are oppressed. Hebrew holds the exploitation and the exposed person under it in the same word-family, making the stranger, fatherless, and widow impossible to separate from the act being forbidden.
ALSO GROWS
ʿosheq: Oppression, extortion
עֹשֶׁק
This noun shows that the verb names a pattern of exploitation, not merely a single discourteous act.
ʿashuqim: Oppressed people
עֲשׁוּקִים
This form names those left under the exploitation, bringing their vulnerability into the same root as the act done to them.
THE PATTERN
Allegiance is exposed by whether vulnerable people are protected from exploitation and human life from violence.
You shall not press down on the sojourner, nor squeeze him; for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.Learn to do good. Seek justice, straighten the crushed, judge the fatherless, contend for the widow.Clean and unstained service before God and Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widowed in their being pressed, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.THE THREAD
And do not press the widow, nor the fatherless, the stranger, nor the bowed ones, and let none of you plan evil against his brother in your heart.Zechariah repeats עָשַׁק (ʿāshaq, to oppress or exploit) around the same exposed groups named in Jeremiah. The shared root makes the link plain: the path of allegiance is revealed in whether exploitation reaches the stranger, fatherless, and widow.
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