Job24chapter 24

Job answers Eliphaz's invented charges with real ones, drawn from the world around them. He starts with boundary stones: 'some remove the landmarks'. Fields were marked by inscribed stones, and moving one stole land silently. Mesopotamian boundary markers were carved with elaborate curses against anyone who shifted them, and every legal tradition of the region treated it as a serious crime.

Then the debt system in operation. They drive away the donkey of the fatherless and take the widow's ox for a pledge — seizing the one animal a poor household needed to plough or carry. They pluck the fatherless from the breast and take a pledge of the poor. The needy are turned out of the way and the poor of the earth hide themselves together.

The picture of the working poor is the sharpest social writing in the Old Testament. They go out to their labour like wild donkeys in the desert, rising early for prey; they reap in a field that is not theirs and gather the vintage of the wicked. They are wet with the showers of the mountains and embrace the rock for want of a shelter. They carry the sheaves and remain hungry; they make oil inside the walls of the rich and tread the winepresses, and suffer thirst.

The last section moves to night crimes, when there were no lamps in the street and no watch outside the gate: the murderer rising with the light to kill the poor, the adulterer waiting for the twilight and disguising his face, thieves digging through the mud-brick walls of houses they had marked in daylight. Morning to them, Job says, is as the shadow of death — their working day runs the other way round.