More careful students than I tell me that there are more than 2,000 references in more than four hundred different passages of Scripture that speak of God’s passion for the poor. My own studies reveal to me that, in the Hebrew alone, biblical writers use more than forty different words to describe conditions of poverty. These roughly sort into four primary categories, indicating destitution or dispossession, oppression, affliction (suffering, depression, helplessness), and sickness (diminished strength,