Usury

Israelites were forbidden to charge interest on loans made to other Israelites but allowed to charge interest on transactions with non-Israelites, as the latter were often amongst the Israelites for conducting business anyway; but in general, it was seen as advantageous to avoid getting into debt at all, to avoid being bound to someone else. Debt was to be avoided and not used to finance consumption, but only taken on when in need; however, the laws against usury were among many laws which the prophets condemn the people for breaking.

The Torah treats lending as philanthropy in a poor community whose aim was collective survival, but which is not obliged to be charitable towards outsiders.

A great deal of Jewish legal scholarship in the Dark and the Middle Ages was devoted to making business dealings fair, honest and efficient.

Usury (in the original sense of any interest) was at times denounced by a number of religious leaders and philosophers in the ancient world, including Moses, Plato, Aristotle, Gautama Buddha, Cicero, Seneca, Aquinas, Muhammad, Philo and Cato who expressed this oppressive action by stating, ‘And what do you think of usury?"—"What do you think of murder?’

As the Jews were ostracized from most professions by local rulers, the Western churches and the guilds, they were pushed into marginal occupations considered socially inferior, such as tax and rent collecting and moneylending. Natural tensions between creditors and debtors were added to social, political, religious, and economic strains.

Financial oppression of Jews tended to occur in areas where they were most disliked, and if Jews reacted by concentrating on moneylending to non-Jews, the unpopularity—and so, of course, the pressure—would increase. Thus, the Jews became an element in a vicious circle. The Christians, on the basis of the Biblical rulings, condemned interest-taking absolutely, and from 1179 those who practiced it were excommunicated. Catholic autocrats frequently imposed the harshest financial burdens on the Jews. The Jews reacted by engaging in the one business where Christian laws discriminated in their favor and became identified with the hated trade of moneylending.

Today we are going to see this abomination in action as the Jews including Nehemiah were violating God’s rules in oppressing their fellow Israelites.

Nehemiah is now revealed, not only as a great leader, but as a man of compassion. Like many rich men he had probably not considered the effect on the poorer Jews of the concentration of their men as laborer’s on the building of the walls, no doubt without payment. For many poor families, struggling to survive even before this happened, losing their adult males for nearly two months was turning out to be a catastrophe. There would be three types of people involved:

1). The landless Jews who depended on a daily wage for the existence of themselves and their families at a very low level, eking out a living from day to day. In consequence they were having to sell their children into debt slavery or worse, in order even to obtain food.