In episode 127 of the Enter the Bible podcast, co-hosts Kathryn Schifferdecker and Katie Langston discuss the question of lending money with interest in the time of the Old Testament with guest, Professor Jonathan Paradise.
Dr. Jonathan Paradise received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania where he specialized in Ancient Near Eastern Studies and Biblical Studies. His doctoral research dealt with family law documents, written on clay tablets in the cuneiform script.
Jonathan established the program in Hebrew studies at the University of Minnesota where he taught courses on the Bible in the context of the Ancient Near East, Hebrew language and literature, and occasionally courses on Judaism. He retired from the University of Minnesota in 2003.
From 1989 to 2014 Jonathan travelled once a week to the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire to serve as the L.E. Phillips visiting professor of Jewish Studies in the Philosophy & Religion Department, teaching courses on the Holocaust, the Bible, and Judaism.
During his retirement he spends his time doing voluntary teaching, translating Hebrew poetry, and writing software to support his Hebrew textbook, The Key to Modern Hebrew.
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Hello and welcome to another episode of the Enter the Bible podcast, where you can get answers, or at least reflections on everything you wanted to know about the Bible but were afraid to ask. I'm Katie Langston,
and I'm Kathryn Schifferdecker, and today we have as our special guest, Professor Jonathan Paradise, who is professor emeritus of Hebrew Studies at the University of Minnesota. And he's a, I said before, an old friend of mine, and then he joked about his age. So I'll just say a long time friend of mine. Uh, thank you for being here again, Jonathan. Good to have you with us.
Pleasure to be here, Kathryn.
Uh, so our question today is from a listener. Again, if you have a question, uh, you can you can go to Enter the Bible org website and send us the question. Here's the question for today: "Is it a sin in the Old Testament to lend money with interest?" So, uh, Jonathan, we'll hand it over to you.
Thank you. I can answer this one very quickly, Kathryn.
All right.
Yes, yes and no.
Okay.
Why doesn't that surprise me?
And and sometimes.
Oh, that's that's good.
Certainly. Uh, you can find a negative attitude towards lending money on interest. For example, the prophet Ezekiel, uh, considers it one of the worst sins. An abomination, he calls it. In Christian tradition, up to a certain point, it was also considered a terrible thing. If I remember correctly, in Dante's Divine Comedy, the money lender goes to the seventh circle of hell. It's worse than being a murderer. So, yes. Uh, here's an example of a passage: "If you lend money to my people, to the poor among you, do not act toward them as a creditor. Exact no interest from them."
Where is that, Jonathan?
That's in Exodus chapter 22. Uh, verse 25. Uh, similarly, it isn't just lending silver. The Hebrew word is kesef silver. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But also if you take your your neighbor's garment in pledge, that's the collateral.
Yeah.
Uh, then you have to give it back, uh, before the sun sets.
Yeah.
Uh, in Leviticus, if your, if your kin being in straits come under your authority and are held by you as though resident aliens, let them live by your side. Do not exact advance or accrued interest, but fear your God, lest your kin live by your side as such. There's two words there. There's, uh, advance interest and accrued interest. There's two different terms for interest in the Bible. The first one, the Hebrew word is neshek, means to take a bite out of the money. So let's say I lend you $1,000, but I only give you 800.
Mhm, mhm.
So that's, that's, that's the bite out of it. The other one is accrued interest where I give you $1,000 but you have to pay me back let's say 1200. Mhm. And both of them in this case are, are forbidden. And, in Deuteronomy, just to give you one more example, Deuteronomy 23 verses 19 and 20, "you shall not deduct interest from loans to your fellow Israelites, whether in money or food or anything else that can be deducted can be deducted as interest." Now, if you're paying close attention, you saw that these passages talk about lending money to your fellow Israelite, right?
Mmm Hmm.
It didn't say anything about lending money to an alien.
Sure.
Well, that's not; that's a loophole.
Yeah, yeah.
That means that that you could lend on interest to a non fellow, Israelite. I have to answer the question a little bit more elaborate way, though.
okay
Because it's important for us to know that the laws of the Torah are not the same thing as the laws that the Jews actually follow. The, uh, the Jews have a a belief or a doctrine that when Moses got the Torah at Mount Sinai, he didn't actually get one Torah. He got two. The one is the written one, which we have in our Bibles, the oral one. God just spoke to him, and Moses memorized it. And then when he came off the Mount Sinai, he communicated it to the to the the elders of Israel. What's in the oral Torah? The oral Torah is the interpretation that rabbinic authorities have given to the written Torah. And it's the. It's all the interpretations that rabbis have given or will give to all time. And the the effect of this, uh, this teaching of the oral Torah is to allow for adaptation. It gives them flexibility. And that's a problem you have with any written constitution. In the case of our American Constitution, we can, with difficulty, change it. In the case of, but in the case of the Bible, we can't edit it.
Yeah.
We're stuck. We're stuck with it. Right. Right. So what do you do when you have a sacred text given by God? I was going to say himself, but that's we don't talk about God. The Jews, the Jews no more, no longer refer to God in the male gender. Uh, anyway, except in Hebrew. Uh uh. So what do you do when you have a text that you can't change? You have to interpret it in such a way that it is something that you can, uh, agree with the values that it, that it legislates.
So what? So what happened with these, uh, how how did this develop historically then? These laws about interest or not? Not charging interest.
What they did was create legal fictions that are essentially ways to evade, uh, the, the prohibition. So that, for example, the, the lender and the borrower become partners in a business. It's a fictitious business. Or, um, you lend the money to a third person who is not Jewish, and then that person lends it to the other person, uh, things like that.
Yeah.
That avoid the literal, prohibition and allow you to get away with it.
Sure.
What's interesting is, is how, uh, elaborate, though the rabbinical definition of a loan is with interest. So, for example, if I lend you money and when you give me back the amount of money that I lent you, you also give me a gift, that's forbidden, because that's considered interest.
Oh, okay.
So you wouldn't be allowed to give me that gift. In other words, they interpret the prohibition against interests quite strictly. Let's say that I actually don't lend you money and you don't pay me back the money. But we decide that we will barter. And I say how about roof or how about Katie, if you put a, if you actually do the work of putting a roof on my house, and you take five days to put the new roof on my house, and in exchange for that, I will teach you how to play the guitar for an equal number of hours. That's forbidden. The rabbis forbid that because it's harder work to go up on my roof than it is for me to teach you to play the guitar.
So much harder.
And indeed, in other words, that would be considered then a form of interest. Because you gave me. You gave me back more than I got. So there's rather elaborate discussions in the, uh, Jewish legal discussions about what constitutes interests.
So it's interesting because those, those that strictness right about it's not just interest. Uh, well, what you just said, right, that those the prohibition on charging interest is, is strict and it includes things like gifts or bartering, uh, labor. And at the same time, there are these kind of, uh, arrangements made so that, uh, so that loans can be made without breaking, without breaking that law.
Yes. Let me give you some two practical, really important, uh, situations. The Torah says that just as human beings have to celebrate a Sabbath every seven days and refrain from labor, so the earth has to have a Sabbath. So the seventh, so the seventh year is part of a cycle. And, uh, during that seventh year, you're not allowed to cultivate your crops. And you're also. Uh, any loan that was made is cancelled in the seventh year. So that year is called the shmita year. So if you're a lender and a person comes to you, a poor person or any person comes to you and in the fifth year and says, would you lend me some money? The lender will say, well, no, I'm not, because you've because you've got two years to pay it back. And if it's the seventh year and you haven't paid it back, the loan is cancelled and I'll never get my money back because the entire loan is cancelled. And then there's the Jubilee. Seven times seven. Proclaim liberty throughout the land, we have on our Liberty Bell. That that is actually a release from slavery and a release from debts. The Hebrew word draw means a release, a proclamation of release. So there too, uh. What do you do with, uh. Let me put it this way. You have two goals. One goal is to prevent poor people from falling into perpetual debt, never getting out of poverty. And the other the other interest that a loan a legal system would have is a making sure that the lender is protected also, so that the lender is willing to lend money.
Right.
So how do so how do you satisfy those, those two, those two goals? So in the case of the, uh, the seven year cycle, this is one of the earliest examples, by the way, of how the oral law, Katie, changes the written Torah, the famous Jewish scholar Hillel. Uh, you may know that there are Hillel houses on university campuses. They're all named for this famous scholar, Hillel the, called Hillel the Elder, or also called Hillel the Babylonian, because he was originally born in Babylonia. So he, uh, created a mechanism with the Greek name Prozbul. Which is a way of making sure that the loan is still in force. The loan is created through the through the mechanism of the courts. So you're not really lending another person. You're it's done through the court and therefore the law doesn't apply. And then the creditor can get his money back. That was a very controversial thing. The Babylonian Talmud is astonished that Hillel had the daring to actually rule something that was in opposition to the literal teaching of the Torah. But he did it. So it set an important precedent for, for basically modifying, uh, the literal teaching of the, of the Torah. Well, that's he lived at the end of the first century BCE and the first century CE. So it's quite early.
So in. Am I right in saying that, uh, then in medieval times, uh, Jews were often the, the money lenders because Christians.
were following the Torah
Right? Okay. Is that right? I thought that was true. So they said, well, you can lend money to the Jews, right? You you are the moneylenders because you can, uh, you can lend money to non-Jews with. Or you can charge interest to non-Jews.
That's right. Exactly, exactly. Okay. Uh, in that sense, it was very convenient to have a Jew.
Yeah, right. Sure.
Uh, I actually know of a case where, uh, a particular, I don't know if it was a priest or even the pope, but anyway, was interested in converting, uh, a lot of Jews. And the king actually said, well, you've gained a Christian, but I've lost the Jew. And and the reason is that, uh, the interest rates on those loans that, that the Jews charged was very high, but they but they didn't get to keep it because they were they were the property of the, of the overlords and ultimately of the king. So the so the Jew got part of the money, and the rest of the money actually went to the, to the feudal overlord of that Jew. Uh, but to pick up on your question, yes, the Jews were the moneylenders, uh, when when it was still forbidden for Christians to charge, uh, money on a loan. The Jews were. There's two things to say here. The Jews were not allowed to be members of the guilds that were, uh, the crafts guilds. Uh, they weren't allowed to be to be carpenters or, uh, things like. Or shoemakers, things like that. Whatever it is, they weren't allowed to, but they could lend money. And so they were the money lenders, uh, and, uh, I'm sure hated for it as well.
Well, I was gonna say that's not a not an, uh, not an occupation to endear you to the general population.
Right.
The thrust of the, of the biblical legislation is to try to help the poor and and the needy.
Yeah.
Uh, they're worried about the poor and the needy, and they in many places in the in the Pentateuch, the five books of Moses, uh, that what the Bible says is you have to be kind to the stranger. You have to be kind to the poor. You have to be kind to the widow. And then they always tag on. Remember that you were slaves in the land of Egypt. You know what it means. You know what it's like to be in that kind of a inferior position. So therefore behave accordingly. Uh, and so, for reasons like that, you're not allowed to completely harvest your vineyard. You're not you're not allowed to completely harvest your field. You have to leave your, your vineyards and the corners of your fields unharvested so that the poor people can come and glean.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Uh, if you remember the book of Ruth.
Right,
a wonderful woman woman's story. Yeah. Uh, it's also a story about poor people.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's true. That is, I think about I mean, this is still relevant, honestly, if you think about payday lenders, right?
Yeah.
Who charge exorbitant interest, where do you find them? Well, you find them in the poorest neighborhoods, right? You find them in the neighborhoods where people are living paycheck to paycheck. Or even worse than that, right, where paycheck isn't stretching far enough. And so they have to take out a loan in order to, to meet their needs. Uh, that's the you can see why why Scripture, uh, forbids the the charging of interest in that.
I actually looked it up. Yeah. The the the the credit card, uh, indebtedness in the United States is in the trillions. It's just staggering. And the, uh, the average, uh, rate Of interest is very high. And I learned I didn't know this, uh, before I prepared for this podcast. Uh, the rate of interest is highest in credit on credit cards that are in store only credit cards. In other words, if you if you if you had a credit card that's only good in that store.
Yeah.
Then the interest rate is really high.
Wow. Yeah.
When my family moved from Milwaukee, Wisconsin to, uh, Minneapolis, my dad wanted to start a business. And the Jewish communities all over the United States and probably all over the world. And this has been something that is true historically amongst Jewish communities, have free loan societies. And my and they're interest free loans. Uh, and my dad had to find a guarantor, uh, for his loan, but otherwise, uh, uh, he, he got the money, uh, for, for no interest at all, and he had to pay it back. But, uh, and those, uh, free loan societies still exist. There is a, uh, a Jewish free loan association in the United States. It's a national one that helps people of not just of Jews, but of all races and religions. And they collect zero interests for the loan that can be used for emergencies like your medical bills or your dental bills or small business loans or other, uh, good purposes. There's no collateral required at all. Uh, the only thing you have to have is a qualified guarantor.
Wow.
That's fascinating. I did not know. That's really cool. I didn't know that. That's wonderful. More of those.
More of those.
Well, so that that spirit of the. Yeah. Of taking care of the poor, of of not charging interest continues. That's beautiful.
Well thank you. Um, this has been just a rich and fascinating and, um, illuminating conversation. Um, Jonathan, appreciate you so much being on the being on the podcast today. Um, and thank you to our listeners and viewers on YouTube. Remember, you can go to Enter the Bible org and you can get more awesome content like this. Um, we've got podcasts, videos, courses, commentaries, articles, reflections, all kinds of cool stuff. And of course, if you have enjoyed this episode of the podcast, please be sure to review us on Apple. Um, five stars are great. Like us on YouTube. Uh, and of course, share the podcast with a friend. Until next time.