22:9 you sent widows away empty-handed,
and the arms 1 of the orphans you crushed. 2
24:3 They drive away the orphan’s donkey;
they take the widow’s ox as a pledge.
31:17 If I ate my morsel of bread myself,
and did not share any of it with orphans 3 –
1 tn The “arms of the orphans” are their helps or rights on which they depended for support.
2 tn The verb in the text is Pual: יְדֻכָּא (yÿdukka’, “was [were] crushed”). GKC 388 §121.b would explain “arms” as the complement of a passive imperfect. But if that is too difficult, then a change to Piel imperfect, second person, will solve the difficulty. In its favor is the parallelism, the use of the second person all throughout the section, and the reading in all the versions. The versions may have simply assumed the easier reading, however.
3 tn Heb “and an orphan did not eat from it.”