Table of Contents
The Rise and Fall of Jubilee Debt Cancellations and Clean Slates
Social purpose of Debt Jubilees
How well did Debt Jubilees succeed?
Why did debt Jubilees fall into disuse?
Archaic Economies versus Modern Preconceptions
Widespread misinterpretation of Neolithic and Bronze Age society
The International Scholars Conference on Ancient Near Eastern Economies (ISCANEE)
What makes Western civilization “Western”?
A legacy of financial instability
1. Babylonian Perspective on Liberty and Economic Order
2. Jesus’s First Sermon and the Tradition of Debt Amnesty 32-57
The meaning of Biblical deror (and hence “the Year of Our Lord”)
The Dead Sea Scroll 11QMelchizedek
Debt in the Biblical laws, historical narratives and parables
3. Credit, Debt and Money: Their Social and Private Contexts
From chieftain households to temples
Anachronistic views of the Mesopotamian takeoff and its enterprise
Growing scale of the temple and palace economy leads to monetization
Creating markets for commodities, and as a fiscal vehicle for tax debts
What Sumerian commercial enterprise bequeathed to antiquity
Classical antiquity privatizes credit and stops cancelling agrarian debts
How the modern financial and legal system emerged from antiquity’s debt crisis
A Chronology of Clean Slates and Debt Revolts in Antiquity
Mesopotamian Debt Cancellations, 2400–1600 BC
Allusions to Debt Cancellations in Canaan/Israel/Judah and Egypt 1400–131 BC
Debt Crises in Classical Antiquity: Greece and Rome 650 BC–425 AD
Part II: Social Origins of Debt
4. The Anthropology of Debt, from Gift Exchange to Wergild Fines
Fine-debts for personal injury catalyze special-purpose proto-money
Cattle as a denominator of debts, but not of commercial exchange or interest
Debt collection procedures originally preserved economic viability
5. Creditors as Predators: The Anthropology of Usury
Failure of physical productivity or risk levels to explain early interest rates
Most personal loans are for consumption, not to make a profit
Paying interest out of the surplus provided by the debtor’s own collateral
The polarizing dynamics of agrarian usury, contrasted with productive credit
6. Origins of Mercantile Interest in Sumer’s Palaces and Temples
How the social values of tribal communities discourage enterprise
Temples of enterprise
The need for merchants and other commercial agents to manage trade
The primary role of the large institutions in setting interest rates
Nullification of commercial silver debts when accidents prevented payment
7. Rural Usury as a Lever to Privatize Land
How debt bondage interfered with royal claims for corvée labor
Fictive “adoptions” to circumvent sanctions against alienating land to outsiders
Royal proclamations to save rural debtors from disenfranchisement
Part III: The Bronze Age Invents Usury, But Counters Its Adverse Effects
8. War, Debt and amar-gi in Sumer, 2400 BC
Lagash’s water wars with Umma, and the ensuing tribute debts
Enmetena’s proclamation of amar-gi, economic freedom from debt
9. Urukagina Proclaims amar-gi: 2350 BC
Sumerian amar-gi as an ideological Rorschach test for translators
10. Sargon’s Akkadian Empire and Its Collapse, 2300–2100 BC
Descent of the Gutians into Mesopotamia, and the First Interregnum
11. Lagash’s Revival Under Gudea, and his Debt Cancellation, 2130 BC
12. Trade, Enterprise and Debt in Ur III: 2111–2004 BC
13. Isin Rulers replace Ur III and Proclaim níg-si-sá: 2017–1861 BC
14. Diffusion of Trade and Finance Via Assyrian Merchants, 2000–1790 BC
The archaeological context for Assur’s andurārum inscriptions
15. Privatizing Mesopotamia’s Intermediate Period: 2000–1600 BC
Tensions between local headmen and the palace
16. Hammurabi’s Laws and mı-šarum Edicts: 1792–1750 BC
Retaining the loyalty of Babylonia’s cultivators by proclaiming mı-šarum
Growing palace power over the temples and landed communities
17. Freeing the Land and its Cultivators from Predatory Creditors
Laws saving citizens from debt bondage
Hammurabi’s philosophy of deterrence regarding creditor abuses
18. Samsuiluna’s and Ammisaduqa’s mı-šarum Edicts: 1749 and 1646 BC
19. Social Cosmology of Babylonia’s Debt Cancellations
Military conflict and land pressure make mīšarum proclamations more frequent
20. Usury and Privatization in the Periphery, 1600–1200 BC
The Hurrian-Hittite “Song of Release” extends the application of andurārum
21. From the Dawn of the Iron Age to the Rosetta Stone
Debt amnesties in the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian empires
The Inscriptions of Sargon II (722 to 705) and his grandson Esarhaddon (681 to 669)
22. Judges, Kings and Usury: 8th and 7th Centuries BC
23. Biblical Laws Call for Periodic Debt Cancellation
The Priestly Code of Deuteronomy
Jeremiah depicts the Babylonian captivity as divine retaliation for violating the Covenant
24. The Babylonian Impact on Judaic Debt Laws
Ezekiel’s apocalyptic message in the face of Judah’s defeat by Babylonia
Recasting Babylonian andurārum proclamations in a Yahwist context
25. From Religious Covenant to Hillel
How Hillel’s prosbul yielded power to creditors and land appropriators
26. Christianity Spiritualizes the Jubilee Year as the Day of Judgment
The Novels of Basil and Romanus protecting smallholders from the dynatoi
Romanos’ Novel of 934 barring dynatoi from acquiring village land
28. Zenith and Decline of Byzantium: 945–1204
29. Western Civilization is Rooted in the Bronze Age Near East
How creditor appropriation turned land into “private property”
Bronze Age money as a means of palatial production and trade accounting
The inherent inability of personal and agrarian debts to be paid over the long run