Job Chapter 24 verse 3 Holy Bible
They drive away the ass of the fatherless; They take the widow's ox for a pledge.
read chapter 24 in ASV
They send away the ass of him who has no father, they take the widow's ox for debt.
read chapter 24 in BBE
They drive away the ass of the fatherless, they take the widow's ox for a pledge;
read chapter 24 in DARBY
They drive away the ass of the fatherless, they take the widow's ox for a pledge.
read chapter 24 in KJV
They drive away the ass of the fatherless, they take the widow's ox for a pledge.
read chapter 24 in WBT
They drive away the donkey of the fatherless, And they take the widow's ox for a pledge.
read chapter 24 in WEB
The ass of the fatherless they lead away, They take in pledge the ox of the widow,
read chapter 24 in YLT
Pulpit Commentary
Pulpit CommentaryVerse 3 - They drive away the ass of the fatherless. This was another form of oppression. "Whose ox have I taken? or whose ass have I taken? or whom have I defrauded? whom have I oppressed?" says Samuel, on laying down his judgeship (1 Samuel 12:3). The "fatherless" were particularly liable to such ill treatment, seeing that they had lost their natural protector. They take the widow's ox for a pledge. It may be true that this was nowhere a legal offence, not even among the Hebrews (Lee); but it was a real act of oppression, and forms a fitting counterpart to the injury done to the orphan. (On the natural tendency of selfish men to bear hard on these two classes, see Exodus 22:22; Deuteronomy 24:17; Deuteronomy 27:19; Psalm 94:6; Isaiah 1:23; Isaiah 10:2; Jeremiah 5:28; Zechariah 7:10.)
Ellicott's Commentary
Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers(3) They drive away the ass.--The ass and the ox, the fatherless and the widow presumably having no more than one. He first describes the oppression of the country, and then that of the city (Job 24:12). We seem here to catch a glimpse of the sufferings of some oppressed and subject aboriginal race, such as the Canaanites may have been to the Jews, though there is probably no allusion to them. But, at all events, the writer and the speaker seem to have been familiar with some such abject and servile race, who haunted the desert and suffered at the hands of the more powerful tribes. Man's inhumanity to man is, unhappily, a crime of very long standing.
