A BRIBE — specifically the payment that buys a verdict, not a gift or a fee. The Torah bans it outright on a stated ground: it BLINDS the eyes of the wise and twists the words of the righteous (Exodus 23:8; Deuteronomy 16:19, neither yet on these pages). ⭐ Deuteronomy 10:17 is the verse that turns it upward: the clause lo yiqqach shochad, ‘he does not take a bribe’, stands once in the whole Hebrew Bible, and its subject is God, described in the same breath as one who does not lift a face in court. ⚠ The King James can no longer say this sentence. KJV, ASV and Geneva all render it ‘reward’, which in 1611 covered exactly a bribe; four centuries later the word has reversed, so a modern reader meets ‘God…taketh no reward’ and hears a God who works for free — a fine thought, and the opposite of the point. The Douay-Rheims and NIV say bribes; both Reina-Valeras use «cohecho», the Spanish legal term for judicial bribery specifically, which is the tightest word any witness on either shelf brings to it. → first discussed at Deut 10:17