>In all probability the first unit takes aim at the practice of manipulating the legal system by those in a position to do so, namely, royal officialdom, in order to facilitate the sequestration of property and the enclosure of peasant holdings. From the prophetic perspective legality is not the same as justice, and the legal transfer of property can be tantamount to robbery (cf. 3:14 where the same verbal stem *gzl* (גזל), "rob," occurs). It is therefore no surprise that tension existed between law scribes in the service of the state and prophets (cf. Jer 2:8, 8:8-9). Prophetic protest in the eighth century was on behalf of the poor (דל, עני, אביון *dal, 'onî, 'ebyôn* cf. Amos 2:7; 4:1; 5:11; 8:6), not the destitute so much as members of peasant households eking out a precarious subsistence on the ancestral plot of land. In a society organized along patrilineal lines the lot of any woman or child deprived of male protection could be hard, and in Israel the situation was not improved by the relative absence of legal protection for these charter members of the disadvantaged. In the Deuteronomic law widows were commended in public charity and the "social security system" of the triennial tithe precisely because of the absence of provisions in law for them to inherit the property of the deceased husband (Deut 14:29; 26:12-13). The outcome of this officially and legally sanctioned robbery of the poor is described by means of a series of rhetorical questions, doubtless with reference to an imminent Assyrian invasion, the "disaster that comes from afar" (the term *šo'a*, adopted for the Holocaust, occurs here, perhaps for the first time). Rather than representing a proto-apocalyptic strand from the time of Nehemiah (Kaiser 1972, 104, 108), this muted allusion prepares for the resumption of the Assyrian pericope that follows. (Blenkinsopp, *Isaiah 1-39*, pg. 212