TO WRONG, oppress, maltreat — a verb for the abuse of someone weaker, most often in a transaction, and in the Torah almost a term of art for what may not be done to the ger. In the Torah it stands in five verses: Exodus 22:21 and Leviticus 19:33, both of the stranger; Leviticus 25:14 and 25:17, of an Israelite selling to or buying from his fellow; and Deuteronomy 23:17, where the person protected is a slave who has fled his master. ⭐ That is the only one of the five about a fugitive, and it puts him under the stranger's own sentence: you shall not wrong him. ⚠ The prophets keep the word for the powerful: Jeremiah 22:3 forbids it toward the stranger, the orphan and the widow together, Ezekiel 45:8 says the princes shall no more oppress my people, and Zephaniah 3:1 is usually read as naming Jerusalem the oppressing city with its participle (none yet on these pages). Not the same verb as lachats, to press or squeeze, which Exodus 22:21 sets beside it. → first discussed at Deut 23:17