Deuteronomy 25:4 · World English Bible
Deuteronomy 25:4 Meaning You Shall Not Muzzle the Ox When
You shall not muzzle the ox when he treads out the grain.
What does Deuteronomy 25:4 mean?
A small and strange instruction carries an enormous principle. The animal doing the labor is not to be denied the grain it walks upon.
From the Clinical Psychology reading below.
Deuteronomy 25:4 through 1 lens
The same verse, read by one tradition.
Clinical Psychology
CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY
Clinical Psychology
A small and strange instruction carries an enormous principle. The animal doing the labor is not to be denied the grain it walks upon. Something works for you, and you owe it a portion of what it produces. That is the ethic of stewardship rendered almost absurdly concrete, at the level of a beast and a threshing floor.
Dominion was never permission to extract everything and return nothing. To subdue is to put each thing in its proper place, and the ox in its proper place is fed by its own work. A master who takes the full yield and starves the creature that made it trains himself in cruelty. That cruelty will not stay confined to oxen. Care for what serves. The privilege of using an animal comes bundled with the duty of sustaining it.
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Live Deuteronomy 25:4 today
- Look at the things that quietly carry your life: your body, your car, your phone, your kitchen. Give one of them what it needs today instead of using it up and walking away.
- Someone helped you this week and you have not said anything. Thank them specifically, or hand back a share of what their help produced: credit in the meeting, a cut of the result, time when they need yours.
- When you are rushed and someone is serving you, the driver, the cashier, the person on support, do not take the service and skip the human. One real word, a tip, a decent rating, whatever actually costs you something.
What keeps giving to me that I have never given anything back to?
The same truth in other traditions
Tao Te Ching
The way nourishes all things and claims nothing from them. To take everything and give nothing back is to work against the grain of how things actually hold together.
Buddhism · the first precept
Do no harm to any living thing, down to the smallest creature in your care. Compassion that stops at the useful animal is not yet compassion.
Judaism · Talmud
Feed your animals before you sit down to your own meal. The one who works for you eats first.
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