What Does Proverbs 28:3 Mean in the King James?
A poor man that oppresseth the poor is like a sweeping rain which leaveth no food.
The analysis reads the King James wording.
King James Version The King James Version, first published in 1611. Selah Verse shows the standard text.
THE KEY
The rain that should nourish instead sweeps away the bread: poverty does not prevent someone from becoming the force that deepens scarcity.
THE MEANING
A poor person can still turn scarcity into power over people who are also poor. When that person takes from them, the harm reaches the food that should sustain them, like a storm that leaves the ground bare.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that being poor by itself makes a person incapable of harming the poor.
THE ROOT
עֹשֵׁק
ʿosheq
GROWS FROM
עשק
ʿ-š-q
To oppress or defraud by taking or withholding from another.
“oppresseth” in this verse is ʿosheq. The root ties the act of taking to the condition of being oppressed: actor and victim belong to one word family. The verse makes clear that the poor man’s own lack does not prevent him from becoming the taker.
ALSO GROWS
ʿosheq: Oppression or extortion.
עֹשֶׁק
This names the act as deprivation, giving the verse’s accusation a concrete material edge.
ʿashuqim: People who are oppressed or defrauded.
עֲשׁוּקִים
The passive form names those who bear the result of the taking, linking the oppressor and the oppressed through one root.
דַּלִּים
dallim
GROWS FROM
דלל
d-l-l
To become low, weak, or reduced.
The subject called poor is רָשׁ (rāsh, poor or needy), while the people he oppresses are דַּלִּים (dallim, poor, weak, or lowly). The verse’s two descriptions expose how an already reduced condition can be made more precarious when provision is taken away.
ALSO GROWS
dal: Poor, weak, or lowly.
דַּל
The singular form carries the same sense of diminished standing as the people named in the verse.
dalal: To become low, weak, or reduced.
דָּלַל
The verb shows the movement toward diminished strength that the verse’s loss of food intensifies.
THE PATTERN
Taking what the poor need turns individual oppression into the destruction of shared provision.
He that oppresseth the poor to increase his riches, and he that giveth to the rich, shall surely come to want.Forasmuch therefore as your treading is upon the poor, and ye take from him burdens of wheat: ye have built houses of hewn stone, but ye shall not dwell in them; ye have planted pleasant vineyards, but ye shall not drink wine of them.Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth.THE THREAD
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 verb “oppress” there shares the root עָשַׁק (ʿāshaq, to oppress or defraud) with “oppresseth” here. It names deprivation of a poor laborer’s due, making the image of food swept away a picture of provision withheld.
This reading is from Selah Verse.
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