No man shall take the nether or the upper millstone to pledge: for he taketh a man’s life to pledge.
Deuteronomy 24:6 stands within the repetition of various laws in Deuteronomy 23-25 dealing with duties between person and person and between person and God. The Hebrew word nephesh, usually rendered soul, is here rendered life. Neither the upper nor the lower millstone may be taken as a pledge, because the millstone is essential to livelihood, so that to take away the means by which a person lives is like taking life itself. In this way a means or cause is called by the life or death that results from it.
To be caught between the nether and the upper millstone is to be caught between pressures from above and below and ground down until made distressingly poor. In one figurative application it pictures a community squeezed by cowardice and inaction both among the powerful above and among the people below them.
Deuteronomy 24:6 stands within the repetition of various laws in Deuteronomy 23-25 dealing with duties between person and person and between person and God. The Hebrew word nephesh, usually rendered soul, is here rendered life. Neither the upper nor the lower millstone may be taken as a pledge, because the millstone is essential to livelihood, so that to take away the means by which a person lives is like taking life itself. In this way a means or cause is called by the life or death that results from it.
To be caught between the nether and the upper millstone is to be caught between pressures from above and below and ground down until made distressingly poor. In one figurative application it pictures a community squeezed by cowardice and inaction both among the powerful above and among the people below them.