TURMEL: David Graeber's DEBT: The First 5,000 Years Chap04
ISBN: 978-1-61219-129-4
https://www.amazon.com/Debt-Updated-Expanded-First-Years/dp/1612194192/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8
All reports at http://SmartestManOnEarth.Ca/debt5000
Chapter Four
CRUELTY AND REDEMPTION
We will buy the poor for silver, the needy for a pair of
sandals. - Amos 2:6
DG: THE READER MAY have noticed that there is an unresolved
debate between those who see money as a commodity and those
who see it as an IOU. So which one is it? By now, the answer
should be obvious: it's both. Keith Hart, probably the best-
known current anthropological authority on the subject,
pointed this out many years ago.
JCT: I've known Keith for years.
DG: There are, he famously observed, two sides to any coin:
Look at a coin from your pocket. On one side is "heads" - the
symbol of the political authority which minted the coin; on
the other side is "tails" - the precise specification of the
amount the coin is worth as payment in exchange. One side
reminds us that states underwrite currencies and the money is
originally a relation between persons in society, a token
perhaps. The other reveals the coin as a thing, capable of
entering into definite relations with other things.1
Clearly, money was not invented to overcome the inconveniences
of barter between neighbors - since neighbors would have no
reason to engage in barter in the first place. Still, a system
of pure credit money would have serious inconveniences as
well. Credit money is based on trust, and in competitive
markets, trust itself becomes a scarce commodity.
This is particularly true of dealings between strangers.
Within the Roman empire, a silver coin stamped with the image
of Tiberius might have circulated at a value considerably
higher than the value of the silver it contained. Ancient
coins invariably circulated at a value higher than their metal
content.2
2. The technical term for this is "fiduciarity," the degree to
which its value is based not on metal content but public
trust.
JCT: I think it's also called "Seigniorage!" Google
Definition: profit made by a government by issuing currency,
especially the difference between the face value of coins and
their production costs.
DG: For a good discussion of the fiduciarity of ancient
currencies, see Seaford 2004:139-146. Almost all metal coins
were overvalued. If the government set the value below that of
the metal, of course, people would simply melt them down; if
it's set at exactly the metal value, the results are usually
deflationary. As Bruno Theret (2008:826-27) points out,
although Locke's reforms, which set the value of the British
sovereign at exactly its weight in silver, were ideologically
motivated, they had disastrous economic effects. Obviously, if
coinage is debased or the value otherwise set too high in
relation to the metal content, this can produce inflation. But
the traditional view, where, say, the Roman currency was
ultimately destroyed by debasement, is clearly false, since it
took centuries for inflation to occur (Ingham 2004:102-3).
This was largely because Tiberius's government was willing to
accept them at face value. However, the Persian government
probably wasn't, and the Mauryan and Chinese governments
certainly weren't. Very large numbers of Roman gold and silver
coins did end up in India and even China; this is presumably
the main reason that they were made of gold and silver to
begin with.
P74: What's true for a vast empire like Rome or China is
obviously all the more true for a Sumerian or Greek city-
state, let alone for the kind of broken checkerboard of
kingdoms, towns, and tiny principalities that prevailed in
most of Medieval Europe or India. As I've pointed out, often
what was inside and what was outside were not especially
clear. Within a community - a town, a city, a guild or
religious society - pretty much anything could function as
money, provided everyone knew there was someone willing to
accept it to cancel out a debt.
To offer one particularly striking example, in certain cities
in nineteenth-century Siam, small change consisted entirely of
porcelain Chinese gaming counters - basically, the equivalent
of poker chips-issued by local casinos.
JCT: In 1980, I offered the Joe Clark Government the interest-
free use of $100 billion of my Casino Turmel chips as long as
they were issued in direct exchange for work so they would
maintain the trustworthiness they now have. They wrote back
they found it interesting.
DG: If one of these casinos went out of business or lost its
license, its owners would have to send a crier through the
streets banging a gong and announcing that anyone holding such
chits had three days to redeem them.3
3. Einzig 1949:104; similar gambling chits, in this case made
of bamboo, were used in Chinese towns in the Gobi desert
(ibid: 108). For major transactions, of course, currency that
was also acceptable outside the community (usually silver or
gold again) was ordinarily employed.
JCT: No reason the collateral couldn't sit in the cage a
little longer than 3 days. After all, there was enough to
cover all the chips. Why should they profit from a recall?
DG: In a similar way, English shops, for many centuries, would
issue their own wood or lead or leather token money. The
practice was often technically illegal, but it continued until
relatively recent times.
JCT: Much like Canada's "Bank Act" prohibits any other token
being used as money. Making Canadian Tire money illegal all
along!!
DG: Here is an example from the seventeenth century, by a
certain Henry, who had a store at Stony Stratford,
Buckinghamshire:
This is clearly a case of the same principle: Henry would
provide small change in the form of IOUs redeemable at his own
store. As such, they might circulate broadly, at least among
anyone who did regular business at that shop. But they were
unlikely to travel very far from Stony Stratford - most
tokens, in fact, never circulated more than a few blocks in
any direction. For larger transactions, everyone, including
Henry, expected money in a form that would be acceptable
anywhere, including in Italy or France.4
P75: Throughout most of history, even where we do find
elaborate markets, we also find a complex jumble of different
sorts of currency. Some of these may have originally emerged
from barter between foreigners: the cacao money of Mesoamerica
or salt money of Ethiopia are frequently cited examples.5
5. Both Karl Marx and Max Weber were of the opinion that money
had emerged from barter between societies, not within them.
Karl Bucher (1904), and arguably Karl Polanyi (1968), held
something close to this position, at least insofar as they
insisted that modern money emerged from external exchange.
Inevitably there must have been some sort of mutually
reinforcing process between currencies of trade and the local
accounting system. Insofar as we can talk about the
"invention" of money in its modern sense, presumably this
would be the place to look, though in places like Mesopotamia
this must have happened long before the use of writing, and
hence the history is effectively lost to us.
DG: Others arose from credit systems, or from arguments over
what sort of goods should be acceptable to pay taxes or other
debts...
JCT: It sure does solve the interest on money problem if they
can pay back the principal in cash with chickens for the
interest too.
DG: For instance: in much the same way that colonial Virginia
planters managed to pass a law obliging shopkeepers to accept
their tobacco as currency, medieval Pomeranian peasants appear
to have at certain points convinced their rulers to make
taxes, fees, and customs duties, which were registered in
Roman currency, actually payable in wine, cheese, peppers,
chickens, eggs, and even herring - much to the annoyance of
traveling merchants, who therefore had to either carry such
things around in order to pay the tolls or buy them locally at
prices that would have been more advantageous to their
suppliers for that very reason.6 This was in an area with a
free peasantry, rather than serfs. They were in a relatively
strong political position. In other times and places, the
interests of lords and merchants prevailed instead.
JCT: Bet the era had few financial woes...
P79: Peter Freuchen's Book of the Eskimo.. tells how one day,
after coming home hungry from an unsuccessful walrus - hunting
expedition, he found one of the successful hunters dropping
off several hundred pounds of meat. He thanked him profusely.
The man objected indignantly:
"Up in our country we are human!" said the hunter. "And since
we are human we help each other. We don't like to hear anybody
say thanks for that. What I get today you may get tomorrow. Up
here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one
makes dogs."13
The last line is something of an anthropological classic, and
similar statements about the refusal to calculate credits and
debits can be found throughout the anthropological literature
on egalitarian hunting societies. Rather than seeing himself
as human because he could make economic calculations, the
hunter insisted that being truly human meant refusing to make
such calculations, refusing to measure or remember who had
given what to whom, for the precise reason that doing so would
inevitably create a world where we began "comparing power with
power, measuring, calculating" and reducing each other to
slaves or dogs through debt.
JCT: Yes, refusing to keep track of who gave what to whom is
sweet. I often if an unknown-balance credit card is what's
promised by the "white stone" in Revelations. But I still want
to keep track of who produced what even if I don't care whom
we gave it to. Nothing wrong with a fair scoring mechanism so
the guy who gets the most walruses or cuts the most trees has
the highest energy-owed score. Let him afford the most
expensive house moreso than a lesser who always gets a nice
one first.
P80: Why, for instance, do we refer to Christ as the
"redeemer"? The primary meaning of "redemption" is to buy
something back, or to recover something that had been given up
in security for a loan; to acquire something by paying off a
debt. It is rather striking to think that the very core of the
Christian message, salvation itself, the sacrifice of God's
own son to rescue humanity from eternal damnation, should be
framed in the language of a financial transaction.
JCT: I don't find it striking to think that it fits perfectly
the man who developed the "Congregation of The Poor" Treasury
(Give your money to The Poor Treasurer and join our commune!)
to buy people out of slavery! His Christian Commune really was
an anti-slavery machine so why shouldn't he be called the
Great Redeemer.
DG: Nietzsche might have been starting from the same assumptions
as Adam Smith, but clearly the early Christians weren't. The
roots of this thinking lie deeper than Smith's with his nation
of shopkeepers. The authors of the Brahmanas were not alone in
borrowing the language of the marketplace as a way of thinking
about the human condition. Indeed, to one degree or another,
all the major world religions did.
JCT: Because the mort-gage death-gamble debt slavery trap kept
arising.
DG: The reason is that all of them - from Zoroastrianism to
Islam - arose amidst intense arguments about the role of money
and the market in human life, and particularly about what
these institutions meant for fundamental questions of what
human beings owed to one another.
The question of debt, and arguments about debt, ran through
every aspect of the political life of the time. These
arguments were set amidst revolts, petitions, and reformist
movements. Some such movements gained allies in the temples
and palaces. Others were brutally suppressed. Most of the
terms, slogans, and specific issues being debated, though,
have been lost to history. We just don't know what a political
debate in a Syrian tavern in 750 BC was likely to be about.
JCT: Probably the same as now except foreclosure meant you and
family were sold with the house.
DG: To return to the notion of redemption: the Hebrew words
padah and goal, both translated as "redemption," could be used
for buying back anything one had sold to someone else,
particularly the recovery of ancestral land, or to recovering
some object held by creditors in way of a pledge.15
P81: The example foremost in the minds of prophets and
theologians seems to have been the last: the redemption of
pledges and especially, of family members held as debtpawns.
It would seem that the economy of the Hebrew kingdoms, by the
time of the prophets, was already beginning to develop the
same kind of debt crises that had long been common in
Mesopotamia: especially in years of bad harvests, as the poor
became indebted to rich neighbors or to wealthy moneylenders
in the towns, they would begin to lose title to their fields
and to become tenants on what had been their own land, and
their sons and daughters would be removed to serve as servants
in their creditors' households, or even sold abroad as
slaves.16
16. Here too, in the case of complete insolvency, the debtor
might lose his own freedom as well.
The earlier prophets contain allusions to such crises, but the
book of Nehemiah, written in Persian times, is the most
explicit:17
JCT: The great Pastor Sheldon Emry's tape on money reform
first informed me of the Nehemiah story that got me interested
in the Bible to further my scientific proof death-gambles were
evil.
DG: Some also there were that said, "We have mortgaged our
lands, vineyards, and houses, that we might buy corn, because
of the dearth."
There were also those that said, "We have borrowed money for
the king's tribute, and that upon our lands and vineyards.
"Yet now our flesh is as the flesh of our brethren, our
children as their children: and, lo, we bring into bondage our
sons and our daughters to be servants, and some of our
daughters are brought unto bondage already: neither is it in
our power to redeem them; for other men have our lands and
vineyards." And I was very angry when I heard their cry and
these words.
Then I consulted with myself, and I rebuked the nobles, and
the rulers, and said unto them, "Ye exact usury, every one of
his brother." And I set a great assembly against them.18
Nehemiah was a Jew born in Babylon, a former cup-bearer to the
Persian emperor. In 444 BC, he managed to talk the Great King
into appointing him governor of his native Judaea. He also
received permission to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem that
had been destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar more than two centuries
earlier. In the course of rebuilding, sacred texts were
recovered and restored; in a sense, this was the moment of the
creation of what we now consider Judaism. The problem was that
Nehemiah quickly found himself confronted with a social
crisis. All around him, impoverished peasants were unable to
pay their taxes; creditors were carrying off the children of
the poor. His first response was to issue a classic
Babylonian-style "clean slate" edict - having himself been
born in Babylon, he was clearly familiar with the general
principle. All non-commercial debts were to be forgiven.
Maximum interest rates were set.
JCT: The actual text after ""Ye exact usury" continued: "Let
the exacting of usury stop and return their stuff." So I don't
know about "stop" having any maximum.
DG: At the same time, though, Nehemiah managed to locate,
revise, and reissue much older Jewish laws, now preserved in
Exodus, Deuteronomy, and Leviticus, which in certain ways went
even further, by institutionalizing the principle.19
19. There continues to be intense scholarly debate about
whether these laws were in fact invented by Nehemiah and his
priestly allies (especially Ezra), and whether they were ever
actually enforced in any period.. At first there were similar
debates about whether Mesopotamian "clean states" were
actually enforced, until overwhelming evidence was produced
that they were. The bulk of the evidence now indicates that
the laws in Deuteronomy were enforced as well, though we can
never know for certain how effectively.
P82: The most famous of these is the Law of Jubilee: a law
that stipulated that all debts would be automatically canceled
"in the Sabbath year" (that is, after seven years had passed),
and that all who languished in bondage owing to such debts
would be released.20
20. "Every seventh year you shall make a cancellation. The
cancellation shall be as follows: every creditor is to release
the debts that he has owing to him by his neighbor"
(Deuteronomy 15:1-3). Those held in debt bondage were also
freed. Every 49 (or in some readings 50) years came the
Jubilee, when all family land was to be returned to its
original owners, and even family members who had been sold as
slaves set free (Leviticus 25:9).
In the Bible, as in Mesopotamia, "freedom," came to refer
above all to release from the effects of debt. If so,
"redemption" is no longer about buying something back. It's
really more a matter of destroying the entire system of
accounting.
JCT: No, redemption includes reprogramming the accounting so
there's no growth of debt as sufficient without crashing it
all.
DG: In many Middle Eastern cities, this was literally true:
one of the common acts during debt cancellation was the
ceremonial destruction of the tablets on which financial
records had been kept, an act to be repeated, much less
officially, in just about every major peasant revolt in
history.22
22. Hudson notes in Babylonian, clean slates were "called
hubullum (debt) masa'um (to wash), literally 'a washing away
of the debt [records],' that is, a dissolving of the clay
tablets on which financial obligations were inscribed"
(1993:19).
This leads to another problem: What is possible in the
meantime, before that final redemption comes?
JCT: Before discussing "odious" debt where pension funds are
not included, let's at least start by turning off the positive
feedback. As I tell the kids protesting for Debt Forgiveness
at Jubilee 2000, you dig them out from under the mountain of
debt while the conveyor belt of interest dumps more on top all
the time, The Engineer is going after the conveyor belt
switch. Don't abolish Debt, abolish Feedback on debt. Jubilee
2000 on debt failed in reducing the mountain while Jubilee on
Feedback fight goes on.
http://SmartestManOnEarth.Ca/j2k01.gif
DG: In one of his more disturbing parables, the Parable of the
Unforgiving Servant, Jesus seemed to be explicitly playing
with the problem:
This should be fun given our breaking the code of the
differential equations in Jesus' parables:
Therefore, the kingdom of heaven is like
JCT: Notice it starts the same as the Parable of the Talents
and Minas, the Kingdom of Heaven is just like the upcoming
description of Hell where the loanshark rules!
a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants.
JCT: Same as the Talents and Minas. Master leaves his estate
and lends out Talents and Minas and when he comes back,
demands its return plus the interest! So if the Master is
Jesus, interest is okay!!! say those who miss the trick.
As he began the settlement, a man who owed him ten thousand
talents was brought to him. Since he was not able to pay, the
master ordered that he and his wife and his children and all
that he had be sold to repay the debt. The servant fell on his
knees before him. "Be patient with me," he begged, "and I will
pay back everything."
JCT: Unlike the servants with the Talents and Minas who call
the master a thief "who reaps where you do not sow" and
return only the original principal to be rebuked for "not
putting in the bank so I'd receive my interest."
The servant's master took pity on him, canceled the debt, and
let him go.
Unlike the Master missing his Talents and Minas who ruled:
"Throw him into the alley where men weep and gnash their
teeth." (Did you expect Heaven to have alleys where men weep
and gnash their teeth?) Or In the Minas: "Slay him in front of
me!" because not paying your death-gamble got you morted.
But when that servant went out, he found one of his fellow
servants who owed him a hundred denarii. He grabbed him and
began to choke him. "Pay back what you owe me!" he demanded.
His fellow servant fell to his knees and begged him, "Be
patient with me, and I will pay you back." But he refused.
Instead, he went off and had the man thrown into prison until
he could pay the debt. When the other servants saw what had
happened, they were greatly distressed and went and told their
master everything that had happened.
Then the master called the servant in. "You wicked servant,"
he said, "I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged
me to. Shouldn't you have had mercy on your fellow servant
just as I had on you?" In anger his master turned him over to
the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he
owed.23
JCT: First time I ever heard of "uncancelling" a debt. I've
never added this parable to my
http://SmartestManOnEarth.Ca/poembibl page because 1) I did
feel I needed it and 2) wasn't sure how it fit with the
others. If the message is "Do unto your debtors as you have
them do unto you," sure. I've always paraphrased Jesus's "Dol
unto others as you would have them do unto you" as really
being "Lend unto others as you would have them lend unto you."
But his other parables had a much more important sub-context.
DG: This is quite an extraordinary text. On one level it's a
joke; in others, could hardly be more serious. We begin with
the king wishing to "settle accounts" with his servants. The
premise is absurd. Kings, like gods, can't really enter into
relations of exchange with their subjects, since no parity is
possible. And this is a king who clearly is God. Certainly
there can be no final settling of accounts. So at best we are
dealing with an act of whimsy on the king's part.
JCT: The Master wasn't God in the other parables, but a ruler
who did call his servants to account for their mort-gages upon
his return and did punish the one who didn't put it in the
bank to "at least" I get the interest. Let's call him the
Master rather than the King. But I'd have to bet that most
kings loansharked any gold they had they had to pay loansharks
to get themselves.
Another interesting point I just noticed, it would presume
that the one servant who gained 5 Talents more gained more
than what he'd have gained "at least" putting it in the bank
so that means the Master took all the profit for himself, the
servants were really only fund managers who should at least
come up with what they can get at the bank.
DG: The absurdity of the premise is hammered home by the sum
the first man brought before him is said to owe. In ancient
Judaea, to say someone owes a creditor "ten thousand talents"
would be like now saying someone owes "a hundred billion
dollars." The number is a joke, too; it simply stands in for
"a sum no human being could ever conceivably repay."24
24. To give a sense of the figures involved, ten thousand
talents in gold is roughly equivalent to the entire Roman tax
receipts from their provinces in what's now the Middle East. A
hundred denarii is 1/60 of one talent, and therefore worth
600,000 times less.
JCT: Yes, 10,000 Talents, 160 Tons, is an almost ridiculous
number but King Solomon had more than that just in decorative
shields. My computations suggest he had around 30,000 to
40,000 Talents of gold (and who knows how much fractional
reserve credit out on loan) and he was banking his whole world
with it as "reserve." But in an era right after the King of
Mittani was begging Pharaoh to send 20 Talents to buy stuff
like his father had, we get just how much 30,000 Talents is
and how rich King Solomon really had been, just as much as the
Rothschild family compared to the rest of today's world.
Imagine the tons of gold credit he was owed.
DG: Faced with infinite, existential debt, the servant can
only tell obvious lies: "A hundred billion? Sure, I'm good for
it! Just give me a little more time." Then, suddenly,
apparently just as arbitrarily, the Lord forgives him.
JCT: Not quite. The parable of the Talents says all he has to
do with the hundred billion is "leave it with the bankers and
bring me what is mine with interest." Of course, if it's gone,
it's really really tough to get back.
DG: Yet, it turns out, the amnesty has a condition he is not
aware of. It is incumbent on his being willing to act in an
analogous way to other humans - in this particular case,
another servant who owes him (to translate again into
contemporary terms), maybe a thousand bucks.
JCT: Conditions you're not aware of isn't right. If it was
known: Do the same or the cancel is off," I'd bet he wouldn't
have sinned. Jesus could, like in the Talents Parable, really
be painting the Master as the bad guy here again.
DG: Failing the test, the human is cast into hell for all
eternity, or "until he should pay back all he owed," which in
this case comes down to the same thing.
JCT: Well, we know this ruler has torturers... Or just another
definition of slavery is to lose freedom until your impossible
debt is paid.
P84: The parable has long been a challenge to theologians.
It's normally interpreted as a comment on the endless bounty
of God's grace and how little He demands of us in comparison -
and thus, by implication, as a way of suggesting that
torturing us in hell for all eternity is not as unreasonable
as it might seem. Certainly, the unforgiving servant is a
genuinely odious character. Still, what is even more striking
to me is the tacit suggestion that forgiveness, in this world,
is ultimately impossible. Christians practically say as much
every time they recite the Lord's Prayer and ask God to
"forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors."25
JCT: Only in good Bibles. Bad ones mis-translate to
"trespasses' and having a "debt" is not having a "sin."
25. OpheileEma in the Greek original, which meant "that which
is owed," "financial debts," and by extension, "sin." This was
apparently used to translate the Aramaic hoyween, which also
meant both "debt" and, by extension, "sin." The English here
(as in all later Bible citations) follows the King James
version, which in this case is itself based on a 1381
translation of the Lord's prayer by John Wycliffe. Most
readers will probably be more familiar with 1559 Book of
Common Prayer version that substitutes "And forgive us our
trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us."
However, the original is quite explicitly "debts."
JCT: So the 1559 Book of Common Prayer did the distortion of
Jesus' real prayer on debts.
DG: It repeats the story of the parable almost exactly, and
the implications are similarly dire. After all, most
Christians reciting the prayer are aware that they do not
generally forgive their debtors. Why then should God forgive
them their sins?26
JCT: The sins interpretation is silly because Ezekiel 18 said:
"God says: Repent, atone and go straight and all your sins are
forgotten!" So why would Jesus urge people to pray for
something that's an already laid-out algorithm. He was talking
about forgiveness of debts since sins had already been
promised.
DG: What's more, there is the lingering suggestion that we
really couldn't live up to those standards even if we tried.
One of the things that makes the Jesus of the New Testament
such a tantalizing character is that it's never clear what
he's telling us. Everything can be read two ways.
JCT: The only reason the Parable of the Talents got past the
censors is it could be taken two ways. They took it as an
approbation of usury since the Master leaving the estate must
be Jesus so his demanding usury is okay. They missed how the
servant called him a thief who "gathers where you do not sow"
in stiffing him for the extra while paying back what he got,
the Principal. Just as all the "Stiff the Bank" foreclosure
victims I helped in the 1980s using the servant's rationale to
offer the Principal but stiff the Interest!
DG: When he calls on his followers to forgive all debts,
refuse to cast the first stone, turn the other cheek, love
their enemies, to hand over their possessions to the poor - is
he really expecting them to do this?
JCT: Handing over their possessions to the Treasure of The
Poor," sure. The Treasurer could then buy other slaves out of
debt with it. Jesus' commune was an anti-debt-slavery system.
Anti-debt slavery anyway and it's at the base. How could he
have been relevant to humankind otherwise without tackling the
yoke of oppression on human necks.
DG: What I think even these few examples reveal, though, is
how much is being papered over in the conventional accounts of
the origins and history of money. There is something almost
touchingly naive in the stories about neighbors swapping
potatoes for an extra pair of shoes. When the ancients thought
about money, friendly swaps were hardly the first thing that
came to mind.
P85: "Some of our daughters are brought unto bondage already:
neither is it in our power to redeem them." One can only
imagine what those words meant, emotionally, to a father in a
patriarchal society in which a man's ability to protect the
honor of his family was everything. Yet this is what money
meant to the majority of people for most of human history: the
terrifying prospect of one's sons and daughters being carried
off to the homes of repulsive strangers to clean their pots
and provide the occasional sexual services, to be subject to
every conceivable form of violence and abuse, possibly for
years, conceivably forever, as their parents waited, helpless,
avoiding eye contact with their neighbors, who knew exactly
what was happening to those they were supposed to have been
able to protect.27
27. The prospect of sexual abuse in these situations clearly
weighed heavily on the popular imagination. "Some of our
daughters are brought unto bondage already" protested the
Israelites to Nehemiah. Technically, daughters taken in debt
bondage were not, if virgins, expected to be sexually
available to creditors who did not wish to marry them or marry
them to their sons (Exodus 21:7-9; Wright 2009:130-33) though
chattel slaves were sexually available (see Hezser 2003), and
often the roles blurred in practice; even where laws
theoretically protected them, fathers must often have had
little means to protect them or cause those laws to be
enforced. The Roman historian Livy's account of the abolition
of debt bondage in Rome in 326 BC, for instance, featured a
handsome young man named Caius Publilius placed in bondage for
a debt he'd inherited from his father, and who was savagely
beaten for refusing the sexual advances of his creditor (Livy
8.28). When he appeared on the streets and announced what had
happened to him, crowds gathered and marched on the Senate to
demand that they abolish the institution.
Clearly, this was the worst thing that could happen to anyone
- which is why, in the parable, it could be treated as
interchangeable with being "turned over to the jailors to be
tortured" for life.
JCT: Yes, turned over to the jailers until you pay your debt
does say slavery.
DG: And that's just from the perspective of the father. One
can only imagine how it might have felt to be the daughter.
Yet, over the course of human history, untold millions of
daughters have known (and in fact many still know) exactly
what it's like.
Some things just happen. This has been the most common
attitude of peasants to such phenomena throughout human
history. What's striking about the historical record is that
in the case of debt crises, this was not how many reacted.
Many actually did become indignant. So many, in fact, that
most of our contemporary language of social justice, our way
of speaking of human bondage and emancipation, continues to
echo ancient arguments about debt.
P86: We can add that, in the ancient world, when people who
actually were more or less social equals loaned money to one
another, the terms appear to have normally been quite
generous. Often no interest was charged, or if it was, it was
very low. "And don't charge me interest," wrote one wealthy
Canaanite to another, in a tablet dated around 1200 BC, "after
all, we are both gentlemen."30
JCT: So we're sure there was loansharking in Canaan in early
times.
30. Oppenheim 1964:88. Oppenheim suggests that interest-free
loans were more common in the Levant, and that in Mesopotamia
social equals were more likely to charge each other interest
but on easier terms, citing an Old Assyrian merchant who
speaks of "the rate one brother charges another" (op cit). In
ancient Greece, friendly loans between social equals were
known as eranos loans, usually of sums raised by an impromptu
mutual-aid society and not involving the payment of interest
Aristocrats often made such loans to one another, but so did
groups of slaves trying to pool money to buy back their
freedom (Harrill 1998:167).
JCT: That's Jesus Commune of the Poor did. The Treasurer
pooled the money and bought people out of bondage to join the
commune. Pretty smart, eh?
DG: This tendency, for mutual aid to be most marked at the
very top and very bottom of the social scale is a consistent
pattern to this day. Between close kin, many "loans" were
probably, then as now, just gifts that no one seriously
expected to recover. Loans between rich and poor were
something else again.
P87: one had failed to honor the bargain. Psychologically,
this can only have made the indignity of the debtor's
condition all the more painful, since it made it possible to
say that it was his own turpitude that sealed his daughter's
fate. But that just made the motive all the more compelling to
throw back the moral aspersions: "Our flesh is as the flesh of
our brethren, our children as their children." We are all the
same people. We have a responsibility to take account of one
another's needs and interests. How then could my brother do
this to me?
JCT: In a death-gamble, you'd have done it to me. One of us
gets enslaved. That's how I've been compelled to do it to you,
brother...
DG: Was it right, when they had all been given this promised
land to share, for some to take that land away from others?
Was it right for a population of liberated slaves to go about
enslaving one another's children?31 But analogous arguments
were being made in similar situations almost everywhere in the
ancient world: in Athens, in Rome, and for that matter, in
China - where legend had it that coinage itself was first
invented by an ancient emperor to redeem the children of
families who had been forced to sell them after a series of
devastating floods. Throughout most of history, when overt
political conflict between classes did appear, it took the
form of pleas for debt cancellation - the freeing of those in
bondage and, usually, a more just reallocation of the land.
What we see in the Bible and other religious traditions are
traces of the moral arguments by which such claims were
justified, usually subject to all sorts of imaginative twists
and turns, but inevitably, to some degree, incorporating the
language of the marketplace itself.
JCT: And at the root of the constant distress is the
proverbial Yoke of Oppression! Usury on sterile money creating
the death-gamble. Remember, no death-gamble if the Principal
is like cows and has babies though it could be "excessive
interest." See Ezekiel who again notes the distinction when he
says: The wicked is he who exacts usury or excessive
interest!" Think he accepted usury as "too high" interest?
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