Verses 6 and 7 describe a situation flowing from the chaos of the land. The lack of leadership prompts the desire for some kind of leadership, and the point of these verses is to show both the lack of leadership, and the lack of leadership capability that will come.
“That the man mentioned here should ”lay hold of his brother in his father’s house“ indicates, first of all, that the father has disappeared and left the family in upheaval, for the son (by custom, the eldest) refuses to fulfill the duty that is his by lineage. The cloak, or simlah, which is the brother’s so-called claim to power, is not a rich robe but is itself a sign of extreme poverty. In other words, the petitioner is saying, ”You have at least some sort of cloak and the provisions necessary for physical sustenance, food and clothing.“ Without either physical or social ”stays,“ it is no wonder that the brother declines a position for which he might otherwise be ambitious.” (Ludlow, p. 103-4).
The familial organization here stands for the community. The expected leadership comes from the traditional, and therefore the expectation of leadership in the family has its traditional order. That tradition includes the maintenance of the family, and the indication of these verses is that the familial order will also be disrupted to the point where the poverty will be of sufficient extreme that each will need to concentrate on his own immediate family rather than the extended family. Thus the breakdown becomes total. It effects not only the community at large, but even the built in organizational structures of the family. All will be torn apart.