There is a moment when a poor person walks up to a wealthier neighbor and asks for a loan. The wealthier neighbor has a choice. He can treat the moment as a market opportunity. Or he can treat it as a covenantal obligation.
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus (Exodus 22:24) closes the first option entirely: If thou lend money to one of My people, to one of the humble of My people, thou shalt not be to him as an usurer, neither lay it upon him that there shall be witnesses against him, or that he give pledges, or equivalents, or usury.
The Dignity That Lending Must Protect
The Targum layers the prohibition. No interest. No witnesses arranged for intimidation. No pledges demanded. No equivalent collateral pressed from his hand. The full apparatus of commercial lending — the signatures, the guarantors, the surcharges — is stripped away when the borrower is poor.
Why? Because the poor man is already exposed. Every demand for security is a reminder that he has no standing, no buffer, no margin. The Torah forbids the lender from compounding poverty with humiliation.
God Calls Him “My People”
Twice in one verse, God refers to the borrower as My people. Poverty is not a disqualification from belonging. The humble of Israel are not peripheral to the covenant — they are, in the Torah's language, at its center. To mistreat them is to mistreat the body God calls His own.
The Takeaway
Lending in the Torah is not a transaction — it is an act of solidarity. The moment the loan becomes predatory, it has ceased to be lending and become something God calls oppression.