Deuteronomy 15 - Introduction

The Year of Remission: (1) of Debts

Every seventh year Israel shall make Remission or Release (1). Creditors shall cancel their loans to fellow-Israelites it is the Lord's Remission but not those to foreigners (2 f.). But there shall be no need for this law if Israel keep God's commandments, for then (under His blessing) there shall be no poor; and Israel shall lend to and not borrow from other peoples (4 6). Israel must not allow the approach of the year of Remission to operate as a motive for refusing loans to the poor, who shall never cease out of the land (7 11). In the Sg. address throughout. The law proper (Deuteronomy 15:3, see note) apparently cites an earlier law; Deuteronomy 15:4 are by some (e.g. Steuern., Berth.) regarded as being, or containing, editorial additions, partly because Deuteronomy 15:4, there shall be no poor, contradicts Deuteronomy 15:11, the poor shall never cease out of the land. But (apart altogether from the Oriental love of paradox) the two statements might naturally be made by the same writer, loyal on the one side to D's governing ideal that Israel's obedience will ensure their prosperity, and on the other to D's intense philanthropy as applied to the actual needs of the present. Both in the analysis of the text of Deut. and (as we shall immediately see) in its interpretation we must keep in mind that the legislation is governed at once by religious ideals more or less impracticable and by an equally religious passion to provide in a practical way for the immediate interests of the people, especially the poor and friendless. There is therefore no cause to doubt the unity of the passage; except that the parenthesis in Deuteronomy 15:4 bmay be a later expansion, as it is superfluous before Deuteronomy 15:6.

The other codes contain no exact counterpart to this law of D. But E, Exodus 23:10 f., commands that every seventh year the ground shall lie fallow thou shalt remitor release itand so too the vineyards and oliveyards that the poor of thy people may eat; and H, Leviticus 25:1-7, enjoins that in the seventh year the land shall not be sown nor the fruit-trees pruned, it shall be a year of Sabbathor solemn rest. The law, of which these are successive editions, was apparently based on the original rights of the whole community to the land (cp. for other nations Sir Henry Maine's Village Communities East and West, 77 ff., 107 ff.; Fenton, Early Heb. Life, 24 ff., 29 ff., 64 ff.). The connections between this law and D's remission of debt are obscure. Is D's law meant as an addition to E's, or as a substitute for it in different economic conditions? The latter alternative is unlikely; though D (Deuteronomy 15:3) alone speaks of loans to foreigners, which implies commerce, his directions as to loans to Israelites are not practicable in a commercial community and imply as purely an agricultural one as E's law does; but D has no law for the land lying fallow. Dillmann holding that a complete cancelling of debts every seventh year was impracticable, argues that D takes E's law for granted and has framed his own to meet the consequences of E's. If the land lay fallow for the seventh year the poor cultivators could not repay loans made to them by their richer neighbours, and therefore the repayment was suspended for that year only (cp. Driver, Deut.177 f.). This is plausible; but there is much to contradict it. To begin with, it is very doubtful whether E's seventh year in which the ground was to lie fallow was to be the same year for the whole land 1 [136]; whereas D's seventh year of remission was (as we see from Deuteronomy 15:4) the same everywhere and for everybody. Again, the verb from which the Heb. noun for Remission comes means not suspension but total remission (Jeremiah 17:4). Again, if the law had intended merely a suspension of the loan there would hardly have been need for the warning in Deuteronomy 15:9, not to use the approach of the seventh year as a pretext for refusing a loan. This view is confirmed by the fact that the loans to which D's law refers were not business, but charitable loans, made for the relief of the poor, Deuteronomy 15:6, and without any charge for interest, Deuteronomy 23:19 (20). It was no more impracticable to command their total remission in the seventh year, when after several harvests the debtor's inability to pay had been fully proved, than to command the initial granting of the loan itself. D's law was not for the regulation of commerce, but for the inculcation of liberality to poor neighbours. This line of argument also precludes the view held by some that D's law does not refer to the repayment of the principal of the loan, but commands only the suspension for one year of the interest. As we have seen this class of loans bore no interest. And indeed Deuteronomy 15:2 f. are explicit that it is the whole loan which is to be remitted: whatsoever of thine is with thy brother. Nehemiah (ch. 5) found among the returned exiles the practice of exacting both principal and interest from poor debtors, and he abolished these exactions. The later Jewish law clearly understood the remission to be that of the capital sum, and because this was impracticable in the case of commercial loans, provided legal means of evading it in the seventh year. (Mishna, -Shebi-îth, Deuteronomy 10:3-7; Schürer, Hist. of the Jewish People, E. T. ii. i. 362 f.)

[136] In H it may be the same year for the whole land (Driver), but even this is not certain.

The above view, that the law intends a total remission of the loan, is held by Philo (De Septenario, § 8), the Mishna(-shebi-îth, Deuteronomy 10:1), Jewish lawyers, Matt. Henry, Gesenius, Wellh., Nowack, Benzinger, Steuern., Berth., H. W. Robinson; that a mere suspension of payment is intended is held by Knobel, Keil, Dillm., Riehm, Oehler, and von Orelli. Driver thinks it -has all a prioriconsiderations in its favour, but we are not perhaps sufficiently acquainted with the circumstances … to be able to feel perfectly confident that it is correct." Again: -while as a law regulating commercial loans generally it can have been a practicable one only upon the modern interpretation [i.e. mere suspension of repayment], it is possible that in its original intention its application was so limited by circumstances that the ancient interpretation [i.e. total remission] may be the correct one." W. R. Smith, E.B., art. -Sabbatical Year," gives the alternatives, either no interest is to be exacted, or no proceedings are to be taken against the debtor, in the 7th year.