¹ The Jewish exiles in Babylon lived in communities that supported themselves according to the counsel that the prophet Jeremiah gave them: “Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their product. Take wives and sons and daughters… Seek the peace of the city… because in its peace lies your peace” (29, 5ff.). The task of the prophets in Babylon was to organize the social structure of the Jewish communities according to the prescriptions of the Torah and to prevent assimilation to the Babylonian way of life.

² The German sociologist and ethnologist Christian Sigrist uses this expression to characterize civilizations without a central authority. See Christian Sigrist, Regulierte Anarchie (Frankfurt/Main: Syndikat, 1979).

³ The Torah comprises the Pentateuch or Five Books of Moses, and includes the main historical narrative and laws of the Jewish people.

⁴ There are essentially three sets of laws in the Torah, each derived from various sources and practices. The one in Deuteronomy is apparently an adaptation of the so-called Book of the Covenant, Exodus 21, 1-23, 19, which may have its origins in the political (prophetical) opposition movement under the last kings of Judea, late seventh century bc. All dating of Old Testament texts however is highly hypothetical. See Frank Crüsemann, Die Tora: Theologie und Sozialgeschichte des alttestamentlichen Gesetzes (München: Chr Kaiser, 1992).

⁵ See the basic analysis of Hans G. Kippenberg, Religion und Klassenbildung im antiken Judäa (Göttingen: Walter De Gruyter, 1978).

⁶ The meaning of the Hebrew root makak was originally “falling down, ” that is, being ruined.

⁷ Married women belonged to their husbands; they could only be sold with the husband and his family. Girls, on the other hand, had apparently less working power and less value for the beth av and were the first to be sold in case of indebtedness.

⁸ The other main source was war; prisoners of war ended almost always as serfs.

⁹ The Bible is not an idyllic book. The Torah prescriptions limited the rights of slaves only to slaves from the Judean people. Other slaves were treated like private property (achuzzah) (Leviticus 25, 45). Moreover, there was an additional stipulation on freeing Jewish slaves. If a slave did not want to be set free in the Jubilee year “for he loves you and your household and is happy with you… then he shall become your slave in perpetuity” (Deuterotomy 15, 16–17). On the other hand, a slave who was set free without giving him land could end up in a worse situation. Being a Hebrew slave (ebed) offered security that a hired worker (shakir) never had.

¹⁰ In fact, the rule of setting free all Hebrew slaves every seventh year existed at least since the social reform of King Josiah (640–608 bc).

¹¹ Jeremiah reports that because the freed slaves were taken back by their former masters, against God's will, Judah would be destroyed: “I hereby give the command—declares the Lord—by which I will bring [the Babylonians] back against this city. They will attack it and capture it, and burn it down. I will make the towns of Judah a desolation, without inhabitant” (Jeremiah 34, 22).

¹² The Mishna, a summary of discussions among the great rabbis of the first century ad and written down in the first half of the third century ad, has some detailed prescriptions on redeeming of fields in the Year of Jubilee (e.g. Mishna Ararkhin 7 and 9). Since the Israelites lived all over the ancient world, a universal land reform could not be carried out, but the detailed legislation by the rabbis indicate that Ge´ulah (redemption), in one way or another, did function, even in the Jewish communities after the second destruction of Jerusalem.

¹³ Aristotle, Politica, ed. David Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957), p. 19. Interest (tokos), “makes something more (auto poiei pleon), ” and was regarded by Aristotle as something “against nature” (para physin).

¹⁴ Between 58–56 bc Brutus “lent the city of Salamis a considerable sum at 48% interest” (M.I. Finley, The Ancient Economy, London: Chatto and Windus, 1973), p. 54. This is an example of sovereign debt, the “private sector”—Brutus—being the creditor. In Roman times, public authorities issued bonds that were bought by wealthy individuals. Those debts could only be paid back by extorting tribute from conquered provinces.

¹⁵ An example is the different treatment of real estate in townships and in the countryside. A house in a village was always a farmhouse; losing it meant losing life, and so had to be redeemed. In contrast, the law on the redemption of houses and land in townships could be deregulated, Leviticus 25, 29–34, and a kind of real estate market was admitted.

¹⁶ The regime of the Hasmonean family turned out to be just another Jewish form of Hellenist rule. See Elias Bickerman, From Ezra to the Last of the Maccabees (New York: Schocken Books, 1962), esp. pp. 153–65.

¹⁷ First Book of Maccabees, 11, 34f.

¹⁸ S. K. Eddy, The King Is Dead: Studies in the Near Eastern Resistance to Hellenism, 334–31 bc (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1961).

¹⁹ The Gospel of St. John has no place for “ethics”; it knows “love” (agape), but that means solidarity among the members of the sectarian group for which the Gospel was written. Also the doctrine of St. Paul of the justification not by works but by faith alone has a connotation of a nonpolitical, nonethical life. In his early epistles, St. Paul expected the quick arrival of the Messiah. Later he had to define some rules of conduct, the beginning of “Christian ethics.”

²⁰ Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York: Charles Sribner's Sons, 1960 [1932]), p. xi.

²¹ Recently, in particular, Pope Benedict XVI called for the Catholic Church to continue to be directly involved in “charity, ” while ruling out its direct involvement in bringing about “justice, ” which necessarily involves the “world of politics, ” albeit seeing a Church role in helping “the lay faithful” clarify their thinking as they take part in public life. See Deus Caritas Est, Encyclical Letter, The Vatican, December 25, 2005, pp. 26–29.

²² Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, p. xxiii.

²³ Rogate R. Mshana, ed., “The Debt Problem for Poor Countries: Where Are We? A Report on Illegitimate Debt and Arbitration” (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 2004), p. 141.

²⁴ Admittedly, as noted earlier, bankers would say it differently, that their ethical obligation is first and foremost to their depositors (and shareholders).

²⁵ World Council of Churches, “Alternative Globalization Addressing Peoples and Earth (AGAPE): A Background Document” (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 2005); available at http:\\www.oikoumene.org/fileadmin/files/wcc-main/documents/p3/agape-new.pdf.

²⁶ Mshana, ed., “The Debt Problem for Poor Countries, ” pp. 1–45.

²⁷ Ibid., pp. 92–104.

²⁸ See Hartmut Elsenhans, “Strategien aus der Entwicklungskrise, ” Zeitschrift für internationale Kulturaustausch 41, no. 1 (1991), pp. 483–99; Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Guk-Yueng Yi, Staat und Kapitalakkumulation in ostasiatischen Ländern: Ein Vergleich zwischen Korea und Taiwan (Saarbrücken: Verlag Breitenbach Publischers, 1988).