Economics and the Bible

This week’s reading was very interesting to me. It really made me consider a lot of different things. One thought I had while reading it was about how all of this was commanding the Israelites to not charge interest while lending money, but yet, we had discussed earlier in the class about how anti-Semitic views are rooted in how Jews were able to lend money and charge interest in medieval Europe. This was very confusing to me, and I was left wondering how they could be so hypocritical to their own teachings. Later in our in class discussion this was cleared up though, the commandments in the Hebrew bible only commanded the Israelites to not charge interest to members of THEIR tribe. Although this cleared up my confusion on why they charged interest, it did not change my stance on the hypocrisy of what they were doing. To be clear, I think charging interest is completely and totally fine in the modern world, but I cannot understand why someone would find it morally wrong to charge interest to their own people and turn around and do it to others. The hypocrisy behind this school of thought in the Hebrew bible is still confusing to me, and I do not understand why they would do something to God’s other people if they are not willing to do it to their own people.

                In class we had a discussion about the different biblical passages about debt forgiveness and if they were applicable to the real world today. We had said that if they were applied today they would be revolutionary and completely change the economic system. I agree that they would change the economic system, but I do not agree that it would be a good change. I think that if we were to set a timetable until peoples debts were forgiven that it would cause people to become lazy when it comes to paying their debts. I think if we put in a system like what the biblical verses suggest that people would just make their bare minimum payments until they were able to get their debts forgiven. This would be absolutely awful for the economic system and would completely destroy anyone’s willingness to lend money at all. Although the biblical verses are nice in theory and give out a good message about helping your neighbors and forgiveness, actually completely forgiving debts in the real world would destroy the economic system and not make anyone willing to lend money for anything.