²⁵ “If you lend money to one of my people among you who is needy, do not treat it like a business deal; charge no interest.^{(A) 26} If you take your neighbor’s cloak as a pledge,^(B) return it by sunset, ²⁷ because that cloak is the only covering your neighbor has. What else can they sleep in?^(C) When they cry out to me, I will hear, for I am compassionate.^(D)

⁶ Do not take a pair of millstones—not even the upper one—as security for a debt, because that would be taking a person’s livelihood as security.^(A)

¹⁰ When you make a loan of any kind to your neighbor, do not go into their house to get what is offered to you as a pledge.^{(A) 11} Stay outside and let the neighbor to whom you are making the loan bring the pledge out to you. ¹² If the neighbor is poor, do not go to sleep with their pledge^(B) in your possession. ¹³ Return their cloak by sunset^(C) so that your neighbor may sleep in it.^(D) Then they will thank you, and it will be regarded as a righteous act in the sight of the Lord your God.^(E)

³ Others were saying, “We are mortgaging our fields,^(A) our vineyards and our homes to get grain during the famine.”^(B)

⁴ Still others were saying, “We have had to borrow money to pay the king’s tax^(A) on our fields and vineyards.