One of the texts that reminds me of that you pointed out, and I hadn’t noticed before, at least I hadn’t noticed the Hebrew dynamics in, is Exodus 22, where you… It’s funny because for those Hebrew nerds out there, I was in my Hebrew class just teaching on the infinitive absolute, which is used to create emphatic clauses in Hebrew.
So you put an infinitive absolute next to an imperfect, and it creates this emphatic clause.
Like bold, underlined…
Yeah, exactly. Like in Genesis 3, if you eat from the tree, it’s: “in the middle of the garden, dying, you will die.” So it uses the same verb twice.
And in that verse [Exodus 22], as you note, the focus is on the widow and the orphan and God’s extreme response if the people oppress the widow or the orphan. And it uses the emphatic three times.
Yeah, so we’ve got three infinitive absolutes in a row, which I don’t know if there are any other verses in the Bible that have three in a row. You’d know that.
I don’t know of any.
So yeah, Exodus 22:21 begins with reminding them of their story. Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt. You should know better. You have lived this story. You know what it’s like to be an outsider, to not know the language, to not have the resources, to be the object of everyone’s suspicion.
So don’t take advantage of people who are foreigners among you. And then verse 22: Do not take advantage of the widow or the fatherless. So this is members of a household where the patriarch, the father figure has died and they lack representation. Maybe at the city gate, they don’t have somebody to fight for them or protect them.
And it says in verse 23, if you do — and this is the first infinitive absolute — if you do do this, like you actually oppress someone and they cry, cry out to me — crying they cry out to me — then I will certainly hear their cry — so: hearing, I will hear their cry.
And again, I don’t know of another verse that has three in a row of these. This is God yelling. […]
This is a message we need. People talk about the angry God of the Old Testament. And I want to say, let’s pay attention to what makes God really angry. When you are brutal toward someone who is vulnerable — whether that person is a foreigner, whether they have been widowed or they have been orphaned — you are putting yourself in the crosshairs of God’s most strident judgment.