Later text
Nehemiah 5:1BSB
About that time there was a great outcry from the people and their wives against their fellow Jews.
Intertextuality Pair
Allusion
Later text
Nehemiah 5:1BSB
About that time there was a great outcry from the people and their wives against their fellow Jews.
Earlier text
If you lend money to one of My people among you who is poor, you must not act as a creditor to him; you are not to charge him interest. If you take your neighbor's cloak as collateral, return it to him by sunset, because his cloak is the only covering he has for his body. What else will he sleep in? And if he cries out to Me, I will hear, for I am compassionate.
The "great outcry" (צְעָקָה גְדוֹלָה, tse'aqah gedolah) of Nehemiah 5:1 arises from the very practice Exodus 22:25 prohibits: charging interest (נֶשֶׁךְ, neshekh) to poor fellow Israelites. Exodus commands "If you lend money to one of My people among you who is poor, you must not act as a creditor to him; you are not to charge him interest." The people's complaint that they are mortgaging fields and selling children into slavery demonstrates the social devastation that results when this foundational lending law is violated. Nehemiah's economic crisis reveals that even in the post-exilic community, the covenant community failed to practice the economic solidarity toward the poor that the Sinai legislation demanded. The people's outcry (צְעָקָה, tse'aqah) even echoes Israel's cry under Egyptian bondage (Exodus 2:23), an ironic reversal in which the redeemed covenant community recreates the very oppression from which God had once delivered it.