Note 191 — Chapter XI · SOLONIAN LAWS AND CONSTITUTION.

Levitic. 25: 35-36; Deuteron. 23: 20. This enactment seems sufficiently intelligible; yet M. Salvador (Histoire des Institutions de Moïse, liv. iii, ch. 6) puzzles himself much to assign to it some far-sighted commercial purpose. “Unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon usury, but unto a stranger thou mayst lend upon usury:”—it is of more importance to remark that the word here translated usury really means any interest for money, great or small;—see the opinion of the Sanhedrim of seventy Jewish doctors, assembled at Paris in 1807, cited in M. Salvador’s work, l. c.

The Mosaic law, therefore, (as between Jew and Jew, or even as between Jew and the μέτοικος, or resident stranger, distinguished from the foreigner,) went as far as the Koran in prohibiting all taking of interest. That its enactments were not much observed, any more than those of the Koran, we have one proof at least in the proceeding of Nehemiah at the building of the second temple,—which presents so curious a parallel in many respects to the Solonian seisachtheia, that I transcribe the account of it from Prideaux, Connection of Sacred and Profane History, part i, b. 6, p. 290:—

“The burden which the people underwent in the earning on of this work, and the incessant labor which they were enforced to undergo to bring it to so speedy a conclusion, being very great, ... care was taken to relieve them from a much greater burden, the oppression of usurers; which they then in great misery lay under, and had much greater reason to complain of. For the rich, taking advantage of the necessities of the meaner sort, had exacted heavy usury of them, making them pay the centesima for all moneys lent them; that is, 1 per cent. for every month, which amounted to 12 per cent. for the whole year; so that they were forced to mortgage their lands, and sell their children into servitude, to have wherewith to buy bread for the support of themselves and their families; which being a manifest breach of the law of God, given them by Moses (for that forbids all the race of Israel to take usury of any of their brethren), Nehemiah, on his hearing hereof, resolved forthwith to remove so great an iniquity; in order whereto he called a general assembly of all the people, where having set forth unto them the nature of the offence, how great a breach it was of the divine law, and how heavy an oppression upon their brethren, and how much it might provoke the wrath of God against them, he caused it to be enacted by the general suffrage of that whole assembly, that all should return to their brethren whatsoever had been exacted of them upon usury, and also release all the lands, vineyards, olive-yards, and houses, which had been taken of them upon mortgage on the account hereof.”

The measure of Nehemiah appears thus to have been not merely a seisachtheia such as that of Solon, but also a παλιντοκία, or refunding of interest paid by the debtor in past time,—analogous to the proceeding of the Megarians on emancipating themselves from their oligarchy, as recounted above, chapter ix, p. 44.