ashaq

This verb names a very particular kind of harm: not a fair fight between equals, but the strong bearing down on the weak and taking what belongs to them. The wrong is done by someone who holds the advantage, an employer, a landowner, a creditor, a ruler, a merchant, over someone who has little power to resist, and it almost always has a price tag: withheld wages, seized land, a cheated neighbor, a stripped poor man.

English Bibles split it between two words because it sits right where two ideas meet. On one side it means to oppress, to grind down the powerless, and its favorite targets are the very people the law told Israel to protect: the poor, the widow, the orphan, the foreign resident, the hired worker. On the other side it means to defraud or extort, to take by cheating or force what is not yours, which is why it stands beside robbery and false weights in the same breath. The two are not really separate; the oppression works by taking, and the taking is what makes it oppression.

Because of this, the word carries strong moral weight throughout the Hebrew Bible. The prophets use it to indict a whole society, and the Law bans it outright, ranking it among the sins that require both repayment and a guilt offering. A single unusual line in the book of Job (40:23) applies the same verb to a river that surges and presses forward without stopping; scholars debate whether this is a stretched use of the ordinary meaning or a rare separate sense, so it is flagged below rather than forced into the social meaning.