Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Deuteronomy · About this commentary
The Pledge and the Gleaning
Deuteronomy 24:10-22
10 When you lend your neighbor any kind of loan, you shall not go into his house to get his pledge. · WEB
A lender may not enter the house to take his security, wages must be paid the same day, and what the harvesters miss belongs to somebody else.
The rules about lending are about dignity, and each one costs the lender something.
He may not go inside to collect the security: you shall stand outside, and the man to whom you lend shall bring the pledge outside to you Deuteronomy 24:10–11.
The borrower chooses what to hand over and the lender does not see the inside of his house. A poor man's home is not opened for inspection because he owes money, and the humiliation of having a creditor walk through it is removed.
If the pledge is a garment, it goes back at sunset — that he may sleep in his garment and bless you Deuteronomy 24:13. A cloak was a poor man's bedding. The security may be held all day and must be returned every night, which makes it nearly useless as security and entirely effective as a reminder of what the transaction is.
And the return is called righteousness to you before Yahweh your God.
Wages come next, and the rule is one day. In his day you shall give him his wages, neither shall the sun go down on it, for he is poor and sets his heart on it Deuteronomy 24:15.
The reason given is not fairness in the abstract but the man's expectation. A day laborer has been thinking about that payment since morning, and his family eats tonight or not. Delay is treated as oppression, and it applies to one of the foreigners as much as to a brother Deuteronomy 24:14.
Verse 16 is a principle the prophets later build on: the fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers. Every man shall be put to death for his own sin Deuteronomy 24:16. It is the ground on which a king spares his father's assassins' children 2 Chronicles 25:4, and the rule Ezekiel restates when the exiles blame their parents Ezekiel 18:20.
The gleaning laws close the chapter, and their mechanism is forgetting. When you reap your harvest in your field, and have forgotten a sheaf in the field, you shall not go again to get it Deuteronomy 24:19.
A sheaf left by accident becomes somebody else's property the moment it is left. Olives are beaten once and not gone over again; a vineyard is not picked twice Deuteronomy 24:20–21. The inefficiency is the point — a harvest is not to be maximized, and the margin belongs to the foreigner, the fatherless and the widow.
Twice in four verses the reason is the same: you were a slave in the land of Egypt Deuteronomy 24:18 Deuteronomy 24:22.
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