What Does Zechariah 7:10 Mean?
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.
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
And oppress not the widow, nor the fatherless, the stranger, nor the poor; and let none of you imagine evil against his brother in your heart.THE KEY
The verse puts exploitation of the exposed and harm calculated in the heart on the same line of injustice.
THE MEANING
The widow, fatherless child, stranger, and poor person are lives the verse sees as vulnerable to exploitation in the reader’s present world. It reaches beneath visible acts to the heart where harm against a brother is first planned.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that private intent is harmless until it becomes action: the verse names plotting in the heart alongside oppression of exposed people.
THE ROOT
תַּעֲשֹׁקוּ
taʿashoqū
GROWS FROM
עשק
ʿ-sh-q
to oppress, defraud, or exploit by withholding what is due
“press” in this verse is taʿashoqū. The root names harm that takes advantage of another and withholds what is due. Set beside the widow, fatherless child, stranger, and poor, oppression becomes a narrowing of lives already made vulnerable.
ALSO GROWS
ʿōsheq: oppression, extortion
עֹשֶׁק
This noun names the coercive taking at the center of the verse’s prohibition.
ʿāshūq: one who is oppressed or defrauded
עָשׁוּק
This form puts the focus on the person whose due is withheld, the exposed people named in the verse.
תַּחְשְׁבוּ
taḥshevū
GROWS FROM
חשב
ḥ-sh-b
to think, reckon, or devise
The verb translated “imagine” can carry the sense of calculating or forming a plan. The verse therefore locates injustice not only in treatment others can see, but also in the heart’s deliberate design against a brother.
ALSO GROWS
maḥashavah: thought, plan
מַחֲשָׁבָה
This branch makes clear that the root can name a formed intention, not merely a passing image.
ḥeshbon: account, reckoning
חֶשְׁבּוֹן
The accounting sense shows the root’s connection to weighing and calculating; here that inward calculation is turned toward harm.
THE PATTERN
In scripture, justice protects the exposed from exploitation and reaches inward to the heart’s designs against another.
You shall not press on any widow or fatherless child.Who plan harms in the heart, and every day they gather for war.Whoever has the world's means of living, and gazes upon his brother in need, and shuts his inner parts away from him, how does the love of God remain in him?THE THREAD
Who plan harms in the heart, and every day they gather for war.Psalm 140:2 uses חָשַׁב (ḥāshav, think or devise) for the same inward act Zechariah names as “imagine.” Its next clause joins that heart-level design to a gathering for war, showing how what is calculated within can take outward form.
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