We Have Got to Talk About Usury (Part II): The Old Testament
The following post is the second in a series on usury by the Rev. Vincent Shemwell. Rev. Shemwell serves as pastor of Bethlehem Lutheran Church in Johnson City, Tennessee. He graduated from Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne with the M.Div. in 2022, and received his STM from CTSFW in 2024, writing his thesis on Johann Georg Hamann. The previous post can be found here.
Exodus 22:25: “If you lend money to any of My people who are poor among you, you shall not be like a moneylender (usurer) to him; you shall not charge him interest.”
Leviticus 25:35-37: “If one of your brethren becomes poor, and falls into poverty among you, then you shall help him, like a stranger or a sojourner, that he may live with you. Take no usury or interest from him; but fear your God, that your brother may live with you. You shall not lend him your money for usury, nor lend him your food at a profit.”
Deuteronomy 23:19-20: “You shall not charge interest to your brother—interest on money or food or anything that is lent out at interest. To a foreigner you may charge interest, but to your brother you shall not charge interest, that the Lord your God may bless you in all to which you set your hand in the land which you are entering to possess.”
Nehemiah 5:6-7, 9-11: “And I became very angry when I heard the great outcry of the people and these words. After serious thought, I rebuked the nobles and rulers, and said to them, ‘Each of you is exacting usury from his brother.’ So I called a great assembly against them…. Then I said, ‘What you are doing is not good. Should you not walk in the fear of our God? … Please, let us stop this usury! Restore now to them, even this day, their lands, their vineyards, their olive groves, and their houses, also a hundredth of the money and the grain, the new wine and the oil, that you have charged them.’”
Psalm 15: 1, 5: “Lord, who may abide in Your tabernacle? Who may dwell in Your holy hill? … He who does not put out his money at usury. He shall never be moved.”
Ezekiel 18:4-5, 8-9, 13: “‘The soul who sins shall die. But if a man is just … if he has not exacted usury nor taken any interest … he shall surely live!’ Says the Lord God…. ‘But if he has exacted usury or taken increase—shall he then live? He shall not live! If he has done this abomination, he shall surely die; his blood shall be upon him.’”
Ezekiel 22:12: “‘You take usury and increase; you have made profit from your neighbors by extortion, and have forgotten Me,’ says the Lord God.”
These are the texts which explicitly deal with usury in the Old Testament.
Let us begin with some comments on the language (with an honest heads up: I would never presume to call myself a real exegete). In all these passages, except for Nehemiah, the Hebrew noun which is translated as “usury” is neshek (נֶשֶׁךְ), which derives from the verb nashak (נָשַׁךְ), meaning “to bite,” like the biting of a serpent. In Nehemiah 5:7, “exacting usury” is a translation of the verb nasha (נָשָׁא), which can mean “to lend at interest” or “to beguile,” like the serpent beguiling Eve in the garden. This imagery of beguilement and violence inflicted upon a victim is fitting. In the Old Testament, particularly in Nehemiah and Ezekiel, usury is depicted as a deceptive and venomous practice that slowly but surely destroys its victim, too often the poor and helpless.
In Leviticus and Ezekiel, the noun translated as “interest” is tarbit (תַּרְבִּית). This word refers to a multiplication or increase, and in these contexts, it means something along the lines of “unjust gain.”
In the Septuagint, we usually find the Greek tokos (τόκος), which means “offspring” or “something brought forth.” In the case of lending, the idea is that interest (usury) is something which springs forth in response to the lending of the principal, or rather, something which the lender demands be generated in response to the lending of the principal.
Nowhere in the Old Testament is a distinction made between interest and excessive interest. In every passage quoted above, usury is understood as anything more than what is initially lent. The English word “usury” derives from the Latin usura, meaning “interest” or “interest-taking” (or literally: “that which comes from use”). So, in English, usury can either mean the interest itself or the practice of charging interest. I have yet to discover an ancient precedent that defines usury exclusively as exorbitant interest. In antiquity, usury may not always have been viewed negatively, but it was always understood as any amount of interest on a loan. Distinctions may have been made between permitted and prohibited, just and unjust rates of interest, but it was all classified as usury. Until fairly recently, usury simply meant interest, or the charging of interest.
In both Hebrew and Greek, there does not seem to be any question about what these words and verses mean. Neshek and tokos refer to any interest charged on a loan. These words refer to whatever a lender demands that is over and above the amount that is lent. The additional use of tarbit in several passages emphasizes that usury should be understood as any increase whatsoever, anything beyond the principal.
The real question is this: in what situations is usury prohibited or permitted? Several of these Old Testament passages specifically forbid lending at interest to the poor, in the case of money, food, goods, etc. However, in other passages, the prohibition is much more general, extending to any “brother,” i.e., to any of God’s people. Throughout the witness of the Old Testament, it is undeniable that lending at interest was disallowed within the ancient Israelite community. Exacting usury from one’s brother is presented as an “abomination” (toebah; תּוֹעֵבַה) which separates the sinner from God’s presence and therefore from the source of life.
But in Deuteronomy 23, God does allow for usury in the case of the foreigner. Why is this so?
Furthermore, if usury was only prohibited in the case of a fellow Israelite, does that mean that the prohibition against usury was only a matter of civil law rather than moral law? Which is to say, according to the Old Testament, is usury inherently sinful? Does the prohibition still apply today? Is it binding on the Christian?
For many of the church fathers, as well as for Aquinas, Luther, and Walther, there were, more or less, two ways of making sense of Deuteronomy 23. Unlike some other theologians in the centuries following Luther, these men all considered the prohibition against usury to be a matter of moral law, which makes perfect sense, especially considering the prohibition in Ezekiel 18, where usury is situated directly between condemnations of idolatry, murder, adultery, and theft, clear matters of moral law. (We will address those who evidently differed on this, or who saw it as more of a civil than a moral prohibition, later in the series.) For these theologians there were only two possible reasons for why someone might lend at interest in the case of the foreigner. Either God tolerated this because of the hardness of the Israelites’ hearts, like with the certificate of divorce (this was the opinion of Aquinas, Luther, Chemnitz, and Walther, for instance), or this was allowed only in the immediate context of the passage, where the foreigner was understood as an enemy who was destined for destruction anyway (this was the opinion of Ambrose).
In his Summa Theologiae (II-II, q. 78, a. 1, ad. 2), Aquinas infers from Psalm 15 and Ezekiel 18 a general prohibition against usury, interpreting it as a moral law like those dealing with idolatry, murder, adultery, theft, etc. He then concludes that the usury permitted in Deuteronomy 23 was on account of the hardness of heart on the part of the Israelites and that this was allowed only in order to prevent the greater sin of oppressing one of their own, a worshipper of the true God. Luther and Walther appear to agree (see the latter’s third thesis in his “Thesen über den Wucher,” Lehre und Wehre XII, 325-26). They interpret the allowance of usury in the case of the foreigner as a concession of sorts—if such a term is fitting—not as evidence of God’s approval.
On the other hand, in his De Tobia, Ambrose writes (§51): “Upon him whom you rightly desire to harm, against whom weapons are lawfully wielded, usury is lawfully imposed. From him whom you cannot easily conquer in war, you can swiftly take vengeance with interest. Exact usury from him whom it would be no crime to kill. He fights without a sword who demands usury; he avenges himself upon an enemy without a blade who becomes a usurious exactor of his foe. Therefore, where there is the right of war, there is also the right of usury.”
For Ambrose, usury is invariably harmful, but it was once allowed for the Israelites, given their unique circumstances and the responsibilities they bore in handling their enemies. The land, possessions, and money of their enemies were theirs to take, granted to them by God. It was allowed not in the case of every single foreigner, but solely in the case of the enemy foreigner. The “stranger” or “sojourner,” however, one who dwelt in the midst of the Israelites and who had bound himself to their faith and way of life, could not be oppressed (Ex. 22:21), even through usury. In this reading, the prohibition against charging interest from one’s brother extended beyond the flesh; anyone who was not an enemy of God’s people, i.e., not a threat already destined for destruction, was to be treated justly and lent money without the charging of interest.
We will get more into the church fathers, as well as Luther and Walther, in subsequent parts of this series. For now, I merely want to show how Deuteronomy 23 has been read in the past. In either of these readings—as far as I can tell—usury is understood as a very deleterious thing, only allowed in specific circumstances for specific reasons.
We might, then, ask ourselves: why was it forbidden in the OT in the first place, at least within the Israelite community? Well, if we take into consideration the etymology of neshek, and how it is spoken about in these passages, I think we can conclude that usury was forbidden precisely because it entails profiting from another’s harm, misfortune, or loss. It is a kind of extortion and means of destruction, the antithesis of “help” (Lev. 25:35). Usury is like a serpent’s bite; a bite taken right out of the borrower. Through usury, the borrower becomes a “slave” (ebed; עֶבֶד) to the lender (Proverbs 22:7). In short, with usury, the borrower is treated by the lender as either a victim or an enemy.
This seems to be the basic biblical principle: usury is prohibited because it is extremely harmful, materially and spiritually, for both borrower and lender (for the lender’s risk of material harm, see Proverbs 28:8). As we go forward in this series, we will want to keep this principle in mind. Economics has become extraordinarily complicated over the past half millennium or so. But has this basic principle changed? Moreover, we will want to keep this in mind as we consider areas of nuance, where lending at interest may or may not be strictly speaking usurious, since it may not always involve profiting off another’s harm, misfortune, or loss, or since it may involve a more equitable distribution of the risk of loss or opportunity for profit on the part of both lender and borrower.
To wrap things up here: Lending at interest is forbidden in the Old Testament, and this prohibition was understood as a moral law by the predominance of church history. There are two ways this may be understood. 1) Lending at interest is prohibited with regard to one’s brother, especially the poor. Or 2) lending at interest is prohibited with regard to anyone, but a concession was once made for the Israelites in the case of the foreigner, either on account of the hardness of their hearts or as a means of combatting their enemies, whom God had granted them permission to conquer and destroy.
In future parts of this series, we will see just how seriously theologians and pastors took this prohibition. Some counted usury among the very worst of sins. Walther considered it a “mortal sin” (Todsünde; see the second thesis in his “Thesen über den Wucher”). Some of the church fathers grounded their opposition to usury in this repeated Old Testament prohibition. Yet Luther, and Walther after him, criticized lending at interest foremost from a New Testament perspective, relying chiefly on Matthew 5 and Luke 6. For them, it was not a coincidence that our Lord’s command to lend expecting nothing in return is given in the context of His broader command to love one’s enemies. Even if usury was previously allowed for dealing with one’s enemies, it is no longer. And even if usury was previously allowed on account of the hardness of hearts, as a concession to human weakness, our Lord expects more. But we will get into all that next time.
Stay tuned.