apostereō

Built from ἀπό and στερέω ("to deprive"), the verb carries a legal and commercial core across Greek usage: to withhold or take away by illegitimate means what rightfully belongs to another, especially to refuse to return a deposit or to withhold wages or a debt. BDAG glosses it "to cause someone to suffer loss by taking away through illicit means, rob, steal, despoil, defraud"; LSJ adds the forensic senses "refuse payment of a debt" and "refuse to give up" a deposit. In the Attic orators and the documentary papyri it is standard vocabulary for defrauding in inheritance, deposit, and debt disputes. The Septuagint uses it for oppressing the poor and withholding a laborer's wages, rendering גָּרַע at Exodus 21:10 (a wife's marital dues), עָשַׁק at Deuteronomy 24:14 (the hired worker's wages), and appearing at Malachi 3:5 and repeatedly in Sirach. Paul pairs it with ἀδικέω at 1 Corinthians 6:8 as the money-specific form of injustice, extends it to conjugal obligation at 7:5 (behind which stands the Exodus 21:10 rendering), and it is used figuratively of being robbed of the truth at 1 Timothy 6:5. Mark 10:19 inserts μὴ ἀποστερήσῃς into a Decalogue list where it matches no single commandment; recent work (Hicks 2013; Peppard 2015) reads it as an allusion to the wage-withholding laws of Deuteronomy 24:14 and Malachi 3:5, while an older tradition equated it with the prohibition of coveting, a reading Meyer already contested. Two textual variants bear on the word: many witnesses omit the Mark 10:19 clause (best explained as later harmonizing of the list to the Ten Commandments), and James 5:4 reads either ἀπεστερημένος or the near-synonymous ἀφυστερημένος, with little effect on the sense.