Except "ptochoi," like "hapiru," meant destitute; wiped out; those with nothing.

RMJ made this excellent point on the last post:

Luke called them "ptochoi," as in "Makarioi oi ptochoi," rendered in my favorite translation of it as "Congratulations you poor!" Except "ptochoi," like "hapiru," meant destitute; wiped out; those with nothing.

It's a pretty consistent strain from Moses to Jesus, there.

Living in the times and places we do, it's hard for us to understand that the large majority of those who are addressed in the Scriptures were far poorer than middle-class and even most working class Americans, Canadians, Brits. Though many of the working poor must live something like the desperation felt by the working poor of Biblical times, the middle-class would have a somewhat harder time imagining themselves into those contexts being anxious mostly for the things they have, not their very lives, in most cases.

Most of the people who are considered our working poor were the typical residents in virtually the entire Mediterranean basin where all of the Scriptures take place. They along with the enormous class of the absolutely and nearly destitute. Other than the really rich, the people who are being told these things to were poor and in the Sermon on the Mount, their relative but still resourced poverty was contrasted to the absolutely destitute, those who lived on the point of starvation and who had every expectation of dying of starvation, of exposure to the elements, despised for the appearance, their disconnectedness, their otherness, of being outcasts in even the society of the poor. In the Scriptures, often for being ethnically the other. Being separate from the ambient population.

It is a radial message given to the same class of people who Republicans and before them the slave owners, before but especially after the end of legal slavery pitted against the lot of those they wanted to exploit as free and dirt cheap labor, both Black and Poor White. It is the equivalent of those who are being used by rich gangsters during the Republican convention, this week, to scare White working class and middle-class Americans into giving the gangsters four more years to cement the fascist dictatorship they have been working towards since 1960 with the help of the "liberal" Warren Court at the behest of "civil liberties" lawyers and legal theorists and, lest it be forgotten, the "free press" that has been an integral part of this progress into fascism.

That pitting of the poor against the outcast, the destitute, People of Color, those without fixed addresses, those whose labor could be bought or taken at lower levels than that of even very poor white people and, otherwise, could be used to scare an effective margin of poor white people with few prospects or with middle-class prosperity into working against their own interests which would be better served by raising the lot of the destitute is one of the most important things that there is for us to understand and to work with in defeating the gangsters. 

 

But unless you are willing to take the Scripture seriously and read it for what it says and what it means, our history proves merely "social action" doesn't start to get us there. In the case of where the ACLU's style of "social action" meets its service to the media and such speech as practiced by the porn industry, it is in every way counterproductive. In my favorite image, such secular "social action" such "civil liberties" people are like the little boy who sticks his finger in the hole in the dyke as he drills many more holes in it with his other hand. Such is the erudite, college-credentialed thinking of secular thought.

And that's been going on for among those who are pretty much uniformly literate and credentialed, for more than sixty years, at this point. And with the opposite of awareness due to their indoctrination into modern, secular, industrial rationalism.  Those "suburban" voters Trump may well scare into voting for him.