The Worker's Wages

What the Bible says about poverty is too specific to possibly be compatible with just passively watching the poor suffer across one's entire lifetime and too limited for it to be Biblically obligatory to personally help every individual poor person one might come across randomly.  In this way, the Biblical reaction to poverty defies the preferences of what many modern conservative and liberal theologians might pretend it actually teaches.  Among the parts of the Bible that address poverty beyond affirming the humanity of the rich and poor alike, though, is Deuteronomy 24:14-15, a set of verses that explicitly says to pay poor workers their wages before night falls each day.  This is a very particular demand that seems to be rarely adhered to even by those who supposedly support the Biblical stances on how to treat the poor.

Serving as yet another obvious example where the Bible forbids discriminatory treatment of locals and foreigners, this applies, as would all human rights and moral obligations, to all people according to the text, irrespective of whether they are a fellow citizen or foreigner.  While there might be some manual labor that is still paid on a daily basis in contemporary America, such a command would contradict the tradition of paying generally poor workers every two weeks or so.  The instruction is to pay workers each day so that they are able to survive in their otherwise financially bleak situation.  At a minimum, these verses would refer to physical labor since this is the kind of work so prominent at this time and place in the historical record.  The Bible in actuality condemns so much as delaying the payment of laborers!

In the New Testament, one can find a relevant passage that personifies the wages certain rich people failed to pay their poor workers as if the money is itself crying out at the injustice.  There is a clear similarity between Deuteronomy 24:14-15's condemnation of delaying the payment of the poor and James 5:1-6's description of the neglected wages crying out.  In fact, Deuteronomy 24:15 speaks as if the workers will cry out to God in their destitution, whereas James 5 mentions the pay itself doing this as if it was its own conscious being.  The similarities and contrast strongly suggest that the latter verses were written with the former ones in mind.  In either case, the delay of giving worker's their daily wages is presented as a grave sin worthy of direct, intense condemnation.

Mosaic Law, notorious for being severely misunderstood by theological conservatives and liberals alike, is of course the only part of the Bible where one would find much specificity on the subject, however.  Even James 5 is branching off of the Old Testament instead of it being the other way around.  What James 5 says about poverty is still less clear than Deuteronomy 24:14-15, which specifies the timeframe within which payments to laborers for a day's work are to be given out.  It is of course unlikely that even many Christians who believe that they obey Biblical commands and think that they care about the poor would truly be willing to do this.  It would be thought of as too much within too rigid a timetable, when even the New Testament that evangelicals pretend could supercede Mosaic Law acknowledges this obligation.