2.6. The Connection Between Laws on Debts and Laws on Property. The Theocratic Character of These Laws. The Causes of Debt Obligations in the Mosaic State. The Law on Interest and Its Distinction Between Israelite and Foreigner. Explanation of This Law. Laws on Pledges. The Year of Remission. Its Various Interpretations and True Meaning. The Question of the Remission of Debt in the Jubilee Year

The laws on debts—which represent one of the forms of disposition of property—in Mosaic legislation are closely connected with the general legislation on property and permeated by the same exalted theocratic spirit that distinguishes all of Mosaic legislation on property. This theocratic spirit is expressed here in an institution that, if not identical in name, is identical in essence with the institution of the sabbatical year. This is the institution of the so-called “year of remission.” “At the end of every seven years you shall grant a remission” (Deut. 15:1)—the law declares. The law does not define which seventh year this is: whether it coincided with the seventh sabbatical year, or constituted a separate septennial system. But in view of the fact that the character of this year fully corresponds to the character of the sabbatical year, and that the law does not define the moment from which to begin counting the seventh years of remission—which would be necessary if it represented a new system independent of the sabbatical one—it may with sufficient reason be identified with the sabbatical year. This is the view of the majority of investigators. In that case the year of remission loses its independent significance and appears merely as one aspect of the sabbatical year; but this does not diminish its great significance; on the contrary, the sabbatical year gives it even greater force by incorporating it into the grandiose system—the sabbatical system—which encompasses the entire circle of the social-civic life of the people. But before indicating the significance of the sabbatical year in the area of laws on debts, let us first examine the characteristic features of debt relations among the members of the Mosaic state.

The members of the Mosaic state, founded exclusively on agriculture and in part on livestock farming, were foreign to the spirit of speculation maintained and developed in a people by commerce and similar pursuits. Therefore they were also unfamiliar with the kind of credit—that source of debt obligations between people—which constitutes a necessary attribute of our speculative-industrial times, when a vast number of people live not by the direct extraction of produce from the earth but by the artificial enhancement of the value of these products, for which purpose immense combinations and enterprises are required that demand large expenditures, possible only through the broad development of credit. In the Mosaic state, debt obligations were prompted only by necessity: when, thanks to the developing inequality, some who had grown poor were compelled, in order to improve their material circumstances, to turn to others who had grown wealthy with a request for a loan. “If among you, one of your brothers should become poor, in any of your towns within your land that the Lord your God is giving you, you shall not harden your heart or shut your hand against your poor brother, but you shall open wide your hand to him and lend him sufficient for his need, whatever it may be” (Deut. 15:7–8). Debt obligations in such a case—serving not as a means of speculation but as a means of alleviating the inevitable social evil of inequality of estates, a means for escaping need—were to receive legislative regulation in accordance with their purpose. In themselves, debt obligations, as expressions of economic inequality, have a tendency to further reinforce this inequality, since they place the debtor—who hopes by means of a loan to improve his difficult circumstances—in a dependent position relative to the creditor, who by virtue of the debt obligation gains a certain right over the actions and property of the debtor, and in a certain sense over his person. This dependence is increased by the conditions that accompany the debt obligation, conditions which moreover are in most cases set by the creditor. The burden of the debt obligation is felt still more acutely when the loan does not produce the hoped-for relief from life’s difficulties but, thanks to some misfortune, merely lays a new burden upon the head of the unfortunate poor man. Then debt obligations, having as their aim the alleviation of the burden of a social evil, themselves become that evil—and the search for a way to eliminate it from social life constitutes as great a social problem as the very question of eliminating social inequality in general. Mosaic legislation presents the following way of resolving this problem.

Since debt obligations in the Mosaic state were prompted by oppressive need, the legislation endeavors by every means to alleviate these obligations. Thus it forbids the charging of interest or usury customary with these obligations, and any self-seeking aims in general. “If your brother becomes poor and cannot maintain himself with you, you shall support him as though he were a stranger and a sojourner, and he shall live with you. Take no interest from him or profit, but fear your God, that your brother may live beside you. You shall not lend him your money at interest, nor give him your food for profit” (Lev. 25:35–37). Much controversy has arisen over the justice and expediency of such a provision. Interest, in the view of political-economic science, is the soul of debt obligations: it is solely by interest and by profit in general that the lending of a certain part of one’s wealth or money to another for use is motivated. Without prospects of gain, debt obligations are inconceivable. The justice of charging interest is determined by three conditions: 1) the danger of losing the sum lent, requiring compensation for risk; 2) the benefit the debtor extracts from the borrowed sum—and consequently the creditor’s participation in enabling this benefit; and 3) compensation for the benefit the creditor himself could have extracted from the sum lent out. These conditions for the justice of charging interest on lent capital appear as though contradicting Moses’s legal provision, which categorically forbids all “interest” and “profit.” But this is only in appearance. In reality, all these conditions—seemingly inevitable in debt obligations—lose their force in the area of the social relations of the members of the Mosaic state. Thus the danger of losing the lent sum was removed by the reliable security of the land plot possessed by every Israelite—and consequently by every debtor—and moreover, the loan was secured by the widely developed, as we shall see below, system of pledges. The second condition for the justice of charging interest—namely, the benefit extracted by the borrower from the borrowed sum—appears just only where acquisitiveness is the prevailing passion. “There is very little justice,” Michaelis rightly says, “in the fact that I should seize a little portion of the profit that another receives without any loss to me, though by means of my money.”

For I do not demand compensation from another for the candle he lights from my candle, even though he earns money by the light he has taken from me. In the same position is the one who, without any labor or risk on his part, lends to another money that is lying unused with him—quasi lumen de suo lumine accendere facit. This consideration gains even greater force in the Mosaic state, where, as was said above, a loan was taken not for speculation but in view of oppressive need and poverty. Such a view was, of course, most naturally and most vividly possible in a theocratic state, in a kingdom of humanity and the highest justice.

Some difficulty in justifying Mosaic legislation apparently presents the third condition for the justice of charging interest—namely, the necessity of compensation for the benefit the owner himself would have extracted through the money lent or his property in general. But this difficulty too is removed by the peculiarities of the social-economic organization of the Mosaic state. Capital brings great benefit only where there is the possibility of its rapid turnover, namely under conditions of considerable development of trade and the spirit of speculative enterprise. Such conditions did not exist in the agricultural Mosaic state. Therefore capital—partly in the form of silver and partly, and for the most part, in the form of raw products such as grain, fruits, and the like—had to lie with its owner unused, exposed to rust, rot, and destruction by mice, worms, and other harmful insects. Under such a state of affairs it was naturally more advantageous for the capitalist to lend his capital to another under reliable security than to keep it with himself, since the debtor—obligated to return the debt in the same quantity and quality as he received it—would serve as a guardian of the capital from all spoilage. Thus, under the conditions of the social-economic organization of the Mosaic state, the third condition for the justice of charging interest—inevitable under our modern European arrangements—loses its force entirely, since the capitalist, in lending out his unused capital, loses nothing but on the contrary gains, by preserving it thereby from significant spoilage.

Such are the law on debt obligations and the conditions of its execution in relation to the Israelite, within the framework of the social-economic arrangements of the Mosaic state. A different character the law assumes in relation to the foreigner. Immediately after the prohibition on lending capital at interest to an Israelite, the law adds: “You may charge a foreigner interest, but you may not charge your brother interest” (Deut. 23:20). At first glance at such a distinction in the law with respect to the Israelite and the foreigner—a distinction that tends in favor of the former and at the expense of the latter—one might discern in this a narrow national exclusivism that excludes every non-Israelite from enjoyment of the benefits of the national Israelite institution. But such a view is not entirely well-founded. True, the exclusivism in the law cannot be entirely denied: it necessarily arises already from the fact that Jehovah established his kingdom, with its special principles, only among and for the sons of Israel; but in the given case the distinction in the law on debts made by the lawgiver with respect to the foreigner is not prompted by national self-love—which prevailed among all the peoples of the ancient world—but by the natural peculiarities of the conditions in which debt obligations are placed with respect to a foreigner. Here debt obligations exit the sphere of the social-economic order of the Mosaic state, which gave them the characteristic peculiarity we have examined, and enter the sphere of ordinary economic conditions; and as a consequence, those conditions for the justice of charging interest again regain legal force—conditions that had lost it thanks to the peculiarities of the social-economic order in the Mosaic state. Thus, in lending his capital to a foreigner—for example, a wealthy merchant from Tyre or Sidon (for in most cases only such could travel abroad for a loan)—the lender exposed its integrity to considerable danger, in any case far more considerable than if he lent it within the country under reliable security. Hence justice requires compensation for risk. In this case the second condition for charging interest also comes into force. If a wealthy speculator from Sidon, with ten talents of silver borrowed from an Israelite, through a clever transaction gained as much again, then for such acquisition he is obligated to no one other than the Israelite, since without his assistance all the cleverness and resourcefulness of the speculator would have been in vain. Would it be unjust if he compensated the Israelite for his service? Of course not. Its customary significance is finally also recovered by the third condition for the justice of charging interest in relation to the foreigner. True, the capital, remaining with the owner, might not bring him personal benefit, as was shown above; but in this case the public and state interest takes on special significance. Even if the capital did not find advantageous personal use for its owner, it could in any case always find advantageous use for society or the state in the form of loans to poor members of society for the improvement of their material circumstances. And apart from this, a reserve capital in the state is always useful, since it could always serve as a guarantee against public calamities—famine and the like. Therefore the export of capital abroad constitutes for the state, if not a direct, then an indirect loss, for which it has the right to receive compensation—in the given case in the form of interest for the personal benefit of the capital’s owner. We are assuming the case where the capital did not find advantageous use in the country personally for its owner; if it did find such use, then the justice of charging the foreigner interest is beyond dispute.

The distinction in the law on debt obligations with respect to the Israelite and the foreigner is sufficiently justified also by the difference in motives and purposes of debt obligations between the one and the other. While the foreigner—a wealthy merchant from Tyre or Sidon—borrowed capital for commercial purposes, with a view to bold speculation and perhaps easy profit, to the accumulation of new wealth upon wealth, the Israelite borrowed only out of need, with a view to improving his poor economic circumstances, as the law presupposes by always calling the debtor a “poor brother,” a “needy brother,” a “poor man from the people,” and so on (Exod. 22:25; Deut. 15:7 and elsewhere). Hence the moral-social motive requiring the difference in the law is clear. If for the former the loan was a matter of the desire for gain, and for the latter a matter of necessity, then the charging of interest is not burdensome for the former, whereas for the latter it would be an unbearable burden. That the lawgiver had in mind this difference in the position of those taking the loan is evident from the fact that the same foreigner, but one living in Palestine—and consequently within the sphere of the social-economic conditions of the theocratic state—enjoys in the law on debts the same advantages over the genuine foreigner (that is, a visitor occasionally passing through the country) as those granted to Israelites. “If your brother becomes poor and cannot maintain himself with you, you shall support him as though he were a stranger and a sojourner, that he may live with you. Take no interest from him or profit” (Lev. 25:35–36). By virtue of the same difference in the position of borrowers, the lawgiver—while leaving the conclusion of a loan by a foreigner to the free, voluntary agreement of the latter with the lender—considers it necessary in the matter of a loan by a poor Israelite or sojourner to add a special moral exhortation to the wealthy, so that they should not refuse a request for a loan. “Do not harden your heart”—the lawgiver addresses the wealthy—“and do not close your hand against your poor brother; but open wide your hand to him and lend him sufficient for his need, whatever it may be” (Deut. 15:7–8).

A loan was secured by a pledge. The system of pledges in Mosaic legislation is broadly developed, though its origins are owed to the legal customs of the people. The lawgiver merely regulates the system of pledges established by custom, removing from it those abnormalities that weighed as a heavy burden on the debtor and encouraged the greed of the creditor. These abnormalities could consist in the fact that an avaricious lender, taking advantage of the desperate position of the poor man asking him for a loan, might seize as a pledge either valuable items (if there were any) greatly exceeding the debt in value—with the aim of taking advantage of them in the event of the debtor’s default—or items of primary necessity, the deprivation of which renders the poor man’s life still more cheerless. Therefore the lawgiver prescribes certain restrictions regarding the taking of pledges. Thus the creditor has no right to enter the house himself to take the pledge, but was to wait outside until the borrower himself brought the pledge out. “When you make your neighbor a loan of any sort, you shall not go into his house to collect his pledge. You shall stand outside, and the man to whom you make the loan shall bring the pledge out to you” (Deut. 24:10–11). The practical importance of this provision consists in the fact that it protected the debtor from the brazen greed of the lender, who, entering the house and taking advantage of the desperate position of the debtor, could seize the best item that caught his eye in the house and take it instead of the agreed-upon pledge, or even take it along with the pledge as a gratuity for his service, without meeting strong protest from the poor man constrained by circumstances. “If ever you take your neighbor’s cloak in pledge, you shall return it to him before the sun goes down, for that is his only covering, and it is his cloak for his body; in what else shall he sleep?” (Exod. 22:26–27). Here the right to take items of primary necessity from the poor man as a pledge is clearly restricted—in this case the outer garment, as is evident from another version of this law in (Deut. 24:12–13). To understand the significance of this law, “one must take into account,” says Saalschütz, “that clothing (the outer garment) in the East even today often consists of a simple, rectangular piece of cloth, which also serves as a blanket at night, protecting a person sleeping in the open air from the nightly, very significant cold and from the sudden cold gusts of wind from Lebanon that come unexpectedly, easily causing fatal chills.” This garment was not worn during the day, since because of its considerable weight and the inconvenience of its cut, it was difficult to walk in, let alone work; therefore the debtor could easily give it as a pledge for the day but could not do without it at night. Even more restricted is the right to take a pledge from a widow. “You shall not take a widow’s garment in pledge” (Deut. 24:17)—the law declares categorically, absolutely forbidding the taking of clothing as a pledge from a helpless widow. The same absolute prohibition extends to items of primary necessity. For example, it is forbidden to take a hand mill in pledge—which in antiquity, when large mechanical mills were unknown, was a necessary implement of every household, meeting the need for preparing daily food. “No one shall take a mill or an upper millstone in pledge, for that would be taking a life in pledge” (Deut. 24:6), adds the lawgiver, thereby indicating the severity of the deprivation for the debtor of an item of primary necessity in the household and in life. Michaelis rightly supposes that this provision, concretely expressed by the example of the hand mill, extends also to other items of primary necessity in the household—such as agricultural implements, working animals, and the like—though the lawgiver does not speak directly of this (cf. Job 24:3).

In the event of the debtor’s default and the insufficiency of the pledge taken to cover the loan, the creditor has security in all the property of the debtor—movable and immovable. The lawgiver does not say this directly, but it is clearly presupposed by the legalized conditions of the alienation of property. If impoverishment is presented as the principal condition of this social phenomenon (Lev. 25:25; 25:30), then by ordinary logic the condition for it could also be default on debt obligations, as one of the forms of “poverty.”

The system of pledges, as presented above, could have developed from debt obligations the social evil that would bear down with all its weight on the poor members of the state. But it could not become so thanks to the wise law by which the lawgiver limited the domain of debt relations. In the area of debt relations as well he introduced a theocratic institution that was called periodically to restore the normal relation among the members of the theocratic state—a relation disrupted by natural-economic conditions. This is the institution of the year of remission already mentioned above. “At the end of every seven years you shall grant a remission,” says the law (Deut. 15:1). It was already stated above that this “seventh year” coincides with the sabbatical year. Let us now turn to the examination of the specific provisions of this law and to the indication of its theocratic and social-economic significance.

Having laconically announced the institution of the year of remission, the lawgiver immediately explains the essence of this institution. “And this is the manner of the remission,” the law says: “every creditor shall release what he has lent to his neighbor; he shall not exact it of his neighbor, his brother (or—in Hebrew—and his brother), because the Lord’s release has been proclaimed.” Such is the text of this famous Mosaic law on the remission of debts, unparalleled in the history of legislation. The direct meaning of the law, as it appears at first glance in the quoted (Synodal) text, is evidently that in the seventh year there was to be a complete remission of debts—an absolute termination of the creditor’s right to demand from the debtor the sum lent to him—in a word, a full abolition of all debt relations between them. But so understood, this law is so exalted and so inconsistent with our contemporary mercantile sense of justice that it remains entirely incomprehensible to the majority of recent investigators of Mosaic law, who therefore attempt to give it a different meaning—namely that the remission consisted not in the absolute termination of the creditor’s right to demand from the debtor the sum lent to him, but only in the suspension of this right during the seventh year, after which the creditor again recovered his rights and could again demand from the debtor the sum borrowed by him. Such is the interpretation given to this law by Michaelis, Saalschütz, Ehler, Pastoret, Winer, Smith, and others. The basis for such an understanding is usually provided by the reasoning of Michaelis, according to whom “a complete remission of debts in the seventh year, on the one hand, would have made poverty an easy trade and would have been too much an encouragement of laziness and idleness, and on the other hand—for one who could lend—would in any case have served as a sufficient and just ground for refusing those who asked for a loan.” “What a terrible despotism,” exclaims Michaelis, “not of a single tyrant but of many thousands—of everyone who wears a tattered coat—would weigh upon the wealthy man. Of justice I won’t even speak: everyone will understand it for himself if placed in the position of one who must see all debt obligations annulled tomorrow, while today a poor man has come to him asking for a loan, to refuse whom the law forbids under pain of being considered miserly and unmerciful. I ask only: what state could survive under such a law? Who would desire to acquire wealth and be rich, if every seven years he had to submit to a levy on the part of every poor man. The wealthy man would inevitably be compelled either to leave (and the sooner the better) the country where such unjust laws exist, or to pretend to be poor, as happens in despotic states, where the greedy despot under every possible pretext tries to appropriate the property of wealthy people.” On the basis of such reasoning they arrive at the interpretation of the law indicated. But, as is easy to see, these arguments proceed from an incorrect point of view on the subject. All the named investigators view the law under examination from a contemporary point of view, apply to it the standard of our ordinary social relations, and overlook the sharp peculiarities of the social structure of the Mosaic state. Hence arises the apparent impossibility of the direct understanding of the law, its apparent injustice—the same phenomenon that was already noted by us in the examination of Moses’s law on non-charging of interest.

In order to judge the possibility or impossibility of the direct understanding of the law under examination, one must take into account the peculiarities of the moral condition and the social-economic structure of Israelite society. The abnormal phenomena depicted by Michaelis in dark colors—supposedly capable of arising from the law on the remission of debts—presuppose such an extreme demoralization as cannot by any means be admitted in a young people that had just passed through the difficult, regenerating educational school of forty years’ wandering in the desert. Furthermore, they presuppose such a social division of the poor from the rich, such a hostile opposition between them, as again is not characteristic of the social-economic structure of the Mosaic state. True, Mosaic legislation positively affirms the inevitable existence of the poor, but the social laws directed toward the possible prevention of the development of poverty, and the conditional expression of the law concerning the possible nonexistence of the poor (Deut. 15:4), provide sufficient grounds for concluding that poverty was an exceptional phenomenon in the Mosaic state, while well-being prevailed. In that case there is already no basis for Michaelis’s supposition about thousands of unscrupulous, greedy ragamuffins descending upon the unfortunate rich man. If one further takes into account the communal character of self-government and social structure, under which the individual is always under more or less strong control of society—which can with approximate accuracy determine the moral and economic condition of the individual—then the brazenness of an idler counting on supporting himself by loans from the wealthy without repayment cannot find a place: it would always be properly assessed by society and receive appropriate limitations. Thus, from this side, the law on the absolute remission of debts does not appear impossible in the social sense.

On the other side, the philological explanation given to the text of this law—with the aim of confirming the indirect understanding of the law on debt remission that we are examining—is likewise not irrefutable. “In the very name of this year: Schemittah,” says Saalschütz, “there is no concept of a complete remission of debts, but only of leaving them. Particularly noteworthy in this respect is the fact that the verb shamat—to leave—relates not to the debt but to the hand demanding it.” In support of the first thought, the investigator points out that schemittah in the sense of leaving is used also with respect to leaving the land without cultivation in the seventh year, though this leaving took place only for that one year and not permanently (Exod. 23:11). But such a comparison lacks important scholarly merit: one and the same word, placed in different syntactical or logical relations, receives a completely different meaning. In the law on leaving the land without cultivation, the verb shamat receives a characteristic nuance from the provision accompanying it: “leave it in rest” (literally: release it and leave it in rest), which—in connection with the context: “six years shall you sow your land, but in the seventh leave it in rest”—serves as a precise indication of the true meaning of the law on leaving the land only for the seventh year. The law on leaving debts could only be compared with the law on leaving the land if the text of the law were to read: “in the seventh year leave the debtor in peace.” Saalschütz points in support of his thought to the further circumstance that shamat—“to leave”—relates not to the debt, as appears in the quoted text, but to the hand demanding the debt (in the Hebrew text). But even this circumstance does not give the right to understand it in accordance with the investigators indicated. The text would mean only (speaking descriptively): let your hand release its claim on your neighbor and not demand—that is, even in such a case the text would contain the concept of a complete remission of the debt, a complete release of the claim on the neighbor, and not a simple cessation of demands, a postponement of them for a year—since otherwise the text would contain a tautology. It would read thus: and the remission consists in the fact that every creditor who has lent to his neighbor shall release his hand (shall not demand) and shall not demand from his neighbor. Meanwhile such an incongruity will not occur under the direct understanding of the law: “that the creditor shall remit the debt and shall not exact it”—where the words “shall not exact it” would here be the logical conclusion and explanation of the fact of remission.

By such considerations the grounds for the interpretation accepted by the investigators named above—of Moses’s law on the remission of debts—are removed or at least weakened.

If one now turns to a positive examination of the law on the remission of debts, many details of it afford grounds for its direct understanding. First of all—the forceful, laconically solemn tone of the law makes it immediately clear that what is at issue here is not some ordinary law (indeed such it would be if understood in the sense of a postponement of payments for a year on account of the uncultivated and unsown fields), but an extraordinary law bearing on it the vivid imprint of theocracy. “At the end of every seven years you shall grant a remission”… This presupposed extraordinariness of the law—inconsistent with the self-interested inclinations of property owners—provided the lawgiver with sufficient motive to address them with a special exhortation not to refuse those who ask for a loan. “If among you, one of your brothers should become poor, do not harden your heart and do not close your hand against your poor brother; but open wide your hand to him and lend him sufficient for his need, whatever it may be” (Deut. 15:7–8). But in view of the differences in the understanding of the law under examination, the following passage of the law is particularly remarkable: “Take care lest there be an unworthy thought in your heart and you say, ‘The seventh year, the year of remission, is near,’ and your eye look grudgingly on your poor brother, and you give him nothing, and he cry to the Lord against you, and you be guilty of sin” (Deut. 15:9). This insistent persuasion from the lawgiver to men of means not to refuse the poor man in the requested loan in view of the approaching seventh year points as clearly as possible to the true meaning of the law on the absolute remission of debts. Indeed, what sufficient grounds would the lawgiver have had for addressing creditors with a special, insistent exhortation not to refuse a requested loan, if the remission of debts consisted in a simple postponement of their demand for the seventh year? What sufficient motive would the expression of the law have: “and your heart shall not be grieved when you give to him” (Deut. 15:10)? If the law on remission consisted in a simple postponement of demand for the seventh year, the creditor would have had no reason to fear the seventh year, since during the seventh sabbatical year the capital would in any case have had to remain unused, in view of the legalized rest of the land, and therefore no sufficient motive could even arise for demanding it from the debtor. Hence all fear and grief would be incomprehensible and purposeless. Thus fear and grief could only be aroused by the complete remission of debts in the seventh year. But even in such a case these fears and grief could arise not because of the dire, Michaelis-depicted situation of the rich man into which he was placed by this law, but because of vicious covetousness, by which he was burdened by a law serving the public good and representing the legal expression of benevolence and charity toward suffering and dispossessed brothers. To fully understand the meaning of these exhortations and the civic justice of their demands, one must take into account the essence of the view of Mosaic legislation on debt. A debt, according to this legislation, was motivated exclusively by poverty, and a loan was regarded as one of the forms of charity, or even as almsgiving, for which corresponding recompense was promised. “For this the Lord your God will bless you,” says the lawgiver, “in all your work and in all that you undertake” (Deut. 15:10). The meaning of the exhortations in that case would be: not to refuse the needy person in charity, even though it might remain, thanks to the institution of the year of remission, uncompensated by the recipient. True, the form of a loan in which this charity is clothed gives it a somewhat different character, presupposing apparently recompense, return, the giving back of what was received, and therefore—in view of the approaching year of remission—apparently justifying the grief and fear of the lender who lends without hope of recovering the lent sum. But in essence even this justification has insufficient grounds. If the creditor lent far in advance of the year of remission, then of course the loan assumed the legal form of a debt obligation, granting the creditor the right to demand from the debtor the borrowed sum during five or six years; and consequently, depending on the condition regarding the repayment term, the lender—in the event of the debtor’s default or deliberate evasion of payment—could achieve satisfaction through legal proceedings. But the loan assumed the form of charity when it was contracted shortly before the year of remission and—given the economic condition of the borrower—offered no guarantee of repayment. In such a case, of course, the lender too could directly view the loan as a form of charity and proportion its amount to his goodwill and means. Nothing however prevented the debtor, should he have improved his circumstances through the loan, from compensating the lender or repaying the loan even after the year of remission.

Thus, in the civic-social respect there are no obstacles to the direct understanding of the law on the remission of debts. There are even fewer obstacles for such an understanding of the law in the theocratic respect. On the contrary, in this respect the law receives its greatest confirmation and highest meaning. The essence of the theocratic principle in the social-economic respect consisted in counteracting the natural-economic principle of development—which has a constant tendency toward the violation of social-economic equality—and consequently in maintaining this equality, and in the event of its violation, in restoring it. Debt obligations are a product of social-economic inequality, a product of natural-economic development, and for that very reason stand in contradiction to the theocratic principle. The action of the theocratic principle in the given case must also be expressed, as always, in striving for the restoration of equality—and consequently for the elimination of inequality and all its consequences, among which stand also debt obligations. A debt, thus, as a phenomenon abnormal from the standpoint of theocracy, was—at the moment of the full rule of theocracy (in the year of remission), if it had not been settled before—to undergo complete settlement or remission.

The operation of the year of remission of course extended to all types of debt obligations. Consequently, debts in the proper sense were forgiven, and pledges taken as security for the loan were returned. But most likely remission did not extend to such items as were in the hands of the creditor not merely as a pledge but had already passed to him as payment of the debt—and had consequently legally become, as it were, his property. This includes, among other things, land plots that had already legally passed as payment of a debt. Such a conclusion logically follows from the proposition that a paid debt was no longer subject to the operation of the year of remission—otherwise one would have to admit the incongruous thought that in the year of remission the creditor was obligated to forgive a debt already paid and consequently to return to the debtor the sum received from him in settlement of the loan. Land plots taken as payment of debts were subject to special specific laws, by which the plots reverted to the first owner in the jubilee year.

The operation of the law on the remission of debts does not extend, as was already said above, to foreigners—as being outside the sphere of the social-economic order of the Mosaic state and the influence of the theocratic principle. “Of a foreigner you may exact it, but whatever of yours is with your brother your hand shall release” (Deut. 15:3).

In conclusion it remains for us to touch upon the disputed question of whether the remission of debts was carried out in the jubilee year. The law nowhere speaks of this, and the very question arose only thanks to the testimony of Josephus Flavius, who directly states: “The fiftieth year among the Jews is called the jubilee year: in this year debtors are released from their debts.” In view of such clear testimony of the authoritative expert and investigator of Jewish antiquities, it is difficult to doubt the truth of this testimony, although the silence of the positive law on this point remains puzzling. It can perhaps be explained by the fact that the lawgiver, having prescribed remission in the seventh, sabbatical year, found it superfluous to repeat this provision for the jubilee year—since this latter year, as the sabbath of sabbatical years, by itself implied all those theocratic actions that are contained in the simple sabbatical year. In any case, the jubilee year—even apart from these considerations—by virtue of its great theocratic significance, encompassing all spheres of the social-economic life of the people of Israel, necessarily implies also the remission of debts, and remission without any restrictions. Thus, among other things, this includes the complete return of land plots taken for debts. In a word, this year was a period of complete regeneration of the state, abolishing all abnormalities and all forms of social inequality that had arisen during the fifty-year period of development.