What Rights Get Wrong about Justice for Orphans: An Old Testament Challenge to a Modern Ideology:
This article challenges Nicholas Wolterstorff's rights based reading of Old Testament orphans by arguing that the prophetic demand for their cause not only assumes a right order ethos championed in the Torah, but in doing so exposes the shortcomings in how justice is defined for orphaned children within current rights ideology, whether theistic or not. I present the orphan's historical trajectory towards becoming socially vulnerable as the final stage in the transition from the kinship redeemer justice of Israelite village clans to the chesed justice of the patronage economy in emerging urban conditions. In light of these conditions, I show how the orphan laws in Deuteronomy are, counter to Wolterstorff's claims of corruption, attempting to re create in legal terms the kinship bond and chesed benevolence that defines the orphan's justice as the return to a family. I argue that the prophet does not blame inherently corrupt laws, but rather blames patrons and elders who have ignored good laws and ignored ri.