Proverbs 31:8

³“Defend the weak, the poor, and the fatherless. Maintain the rights of the poor and oppressed. ⁴Rescue the weak and needy. Deliver them out of the hand of the wicked.”

¹¹Rescue those who are being led away to death! Indeed, hold back those who are staggering to the slaughter! ¹²If you say, “Behold, we didn’t know this,” doesn’t he who weighs the hearts consider it? He who keeps your soul, doesn’t he know it? Shall he not give to every man according to his work?

¹²because I delivered the poor who cried, and the fatherless also, who had no one to help him, ¹³the blessing of him who was ready to perish came on me, and I caused the widow’s heart to sing for joy. ¹⁴I put on righteousness, and it clothed me. My justice was as a robe and a diadem. ¹⁵I was eyes to the blind, and feet to the lame. ¹⁶I was a father to the needy. I researched the cause of him whom I didn’t know. ¹⁷I broke the jaws of the unrighteous and plucked the prey out of his teeth.

¹³Then Mordecai asked them to return this answer to Esther: “Don’t think to yourself that you will escape in the king’s house any more than all the Jews. ¹⁴For if you remain silent now, then relief and deliverance will come to the Jews from another place, but you and your father’s house will perish. Who knows if you haven’t come to the kingdom for such a time as this?”

¹⁵Then Esther asked them to answer Mordecai, ¹⁶“Go, gather together all the Jews who are present in Susa, and fast for me, and neither eat nor drink three days, night or day. I and my maidens will also fast the same way. Then I will go in to the king, which is against the law; and if I perish, I perish.”

²⁴But the hand of Ahikam the son of Shaphan was with Jeremiah, so that they didn’t give him into the hand of the people to put him to death.

⁷Now when Ebedmelech the Ethiopian, a eunuch, who was in the king’s house, heard that they had put Jeremiah in the dungeon (the king was then sitting in Benjamin’s gate), ⁸Ebedmelech went out of the king’s house, and spoke to the king, saying, ⁹“My lord the king, these men have done evil in all that they have done to Jeremiah the prophet, whom they have cast into the dungeon. He is likely to die in the place where he is, because of the famine; for there is no more bread in the city.”

¹⁰Then the king commanded Ebedmelech the Ethiopian, saying, “Take from here thirty men with you, and take up Jeremiah the prophet out of the dungeon, before he dies.”

¹¹Let the sighing of the prisoner come before you. According to the greatness of your power, preserve those who are sentenced to death.

¹⁶Then the princes and all the people said to the priests and to the prophets: “This man is not worthy of death; for he has spoken to us in the name of the LORD our God.”

¹⁷Then certain of the elders of the land rose up, and spoke to all the assembly of the people, saying, ¹⁸“Micah the Morashtite prophesied in the days of Hezekiah king of Judah; and he spoke to all the people of Judah, saying, ‘The LORD of Armies says: “‘Zion will be plowed as a field, and Jerusalem will become heaps, and the mountain of the house as the high places of a forest.’

¹⁹Did Hezekiah king of Judah and all Judah put him to death? Didn’t he fear the LORD, and entreat the favor of the LORD, and the LORD relented of the disaster which he had pronounced against them? We would commit great evil against our own souls that way!”

⁵¹“Does our law judge a man unless it first hears from him personally and knows what he does?”

³²Jonathan answered Saul his father, and said to him, “Why should he be put to death? What has he done?”