Guillaume - Land, Credit and Crisis Agrarian Finance in the Hebrew Bible

This volume seeks to render biblical exegetes more familiar with ancient farming and its techniques by integrating some of the growing body of knowledge derived from economic studies of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt. As a body of literature written by scribes who grew most of the food they ate, the Hebrew Bible presupposes a world that is beyond the immediate reach of academics who live in affluent post-industrial urban settings where hunger is absent and the relation between work and food is entirely mediated through money.

For the last few decades, social-scientist exegetes have led the way in reaching behind the biblical text and the results are impressive. Combining insights from archaeology, sociology and anthropology has greatly sharpened our figuration of actual conditions in ancient Canaan and provided a wider perspective against which the biblical texts can be read. Yet, social-scientific exegesis seems to me bogged down by the repetition of a number of slogans. Ingrained ideological reflexes elevate untested assumptions to the rank of evidence. Particularly problematic is land ownership, often considered as the prerequisite to freedom, freedom as the prerequisite to abundance, abundance as the proof that the rich are oppressing the poor, and loans as the first step towards slavery (see 4.5 for other slogans). The present study challenges some slogans in the hope to give a new impulse to the study of farming in ancient Palestine. Read in light of what we know about ancient land tenure and credit systems, famous stories such as Ahabs grab of Nabals vineyard, Ruths securing of Elimelechs field, Jobs dealings with his business partners and the practical measures imposed by Nehemiah take on quite another meaning. Unfortunately, it was too late to benefit from the input of Michael Jursa (ed.), Aspects of the Economic History of Babylonia in the First Millennium BC (Mnster: Ugarit Verlag, 2010).

Having land without the farmers to work it is useless. Holding the right to raise tribute without the army to enforce it is fictitious (Briant 1978: 7). As long as there is no massive introduction of machinery in agriculture, manpower is more important than land (Boserup 1970). Upon the ability to mobilize manpower (men, women and children) hung the survival of the elite as much as that of the rank and file. The troop was the prerequisite for ruling but the ability to rule also required an army of farmers to feed the troops. In many ways, the Bible deals more with farmers than with soldiers, thus reflecting the fundament of any economy: the means of production. Hence, biblical exegetes correctly infer that arable land constituted the primary means of production in ancient Israel, but they tend to take manpower for granted.

Land was plentiful, especially in the province of Yehud which had lost over half of the population it had in previous centuries. It is farmers that were in scarce supply since there were no machines to replace manpower. Hence, power did not derive from land ownership but from the ability to mobilize farmers and to extract agricultural surplus. To this aim, credit was and still is crucial as a means of financing investment to raise production levels as well as consumption smoothing to keep the farmers alive in times of famine. In the Bible, however, credit is encountered mostly in prophetic accusations of the merchants false scales and of his rapacity. Usury is considered the source of economic evils, with disastrous consequences for the understanding of many biblical texts.

The notion of crisis is popular among exegetes who find it hard to resist the prophetic tone of many biblical texts relative to economic relations. Biblical texts are often understood as written in reaction to particular crises. The mother of all crises is the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE, a crisis that would have spurred the first version of the so-called Deuteronomistic History. Paradoxically, the rise of a new elite is seen as a crisis as much as its deportation. The consolidation of the monarchy in the eighth century BCE is viewed as a critical development that set off prophetic reactions denouncing the abuses of the elite, especially in Samaria. A similar process is postulated in the Persian period when Nehemiah is presented as dealing with a major economic crisis. Hence, a central tenet of social-scientific exegesis is that the rise of the Israelite and Judean kingdoms and their replacement by the Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian empires imposed an unbearable burden of taxes, corve and loans against high interest that led to debt slavery and the consolidation of latifundia. In turn, the economic hardship would have fed a literary reaction in the form of calls for justice. This volume challenges the use of the concept of crisis in biblical exegesis.