ladder with kindness and equity. Even passages in the prophetic books that defend the poor and the widow speak of those people in the third person. The literature of the Bible was the literature of the wealthy, which is no surprise, since only the wealthy could have read it.7 Much later, during Hellenistic and Roman times, an effort was made to disseminate the teaching of the texts to the commoners. Even then, however, religious custom was based on, primarily, what was heard in a synagogue, which