Deuteronomy

The Protection of the Helpless

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Lesson: 81-110

Genre: Talk

Track: 081

Dictation Name: RR187AS81

Location/Venue:

Year: 1993

Let us worship God. Give unto the Lord oh ye kindreds of the people, give unto the Lord glory and strength. Give unto the Lord the glory due unto His name, bring an offering and come into His courts. Oh worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness, fear before Him all the earth.

Almighty God our Heavenly Father we come into Thy presence again. We know oh Lord that the clouds of evil surround the earth and the ungodly nations take council together against Thee and against Thy anointed. We thank Thee that Thou art on the throne and that Thou dost hold them in derision and Thou shalt ordain all things in terms of son and Thy kingdom. Teach us therefore our Father to walk in this confidence, in this knowledge, knowing that in all these things that it is Thy will that shall be done and that the kingdoms of this world shall become kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ, in His name we pray, Amen.

Our scripture is Deuteronomy 24:6. Our subject: The Protection of the Helpless. Deuteronomy 24:6.

“No man shall take the nether or the upper millstone to pledge: for he taketh a man's life to pledge.”

This is a very important law. It is in a sense related to Deuteronomy 20:19-20 which forbids destroying an enemy’s fruit trees because whatever is a man’s life, whatever is basic to his continuing existence must be spared. Beyond a certain limit one cannot wage war against an enemy. In this text the reference is to millstones used by people to prepare their flour for the family’s daily bread. These millstones were two, the bottom one was stationary and the top one moved over it to grind the grain. The bread made was whole grain, highly nutritious and a basic part of a man’s diet. The Lord’s Prayer speaks of our daily bread and refers to this whole grained bread. To take away the millstone on pledges on a loan was comparable to taking away his life. His mainstay in surviving would be gone. Loans made to the poor could not require that the essentials of eating and working be taken from him. This law is an absolute prohibition on loans that would require pledges or ponds that would prevent a man from eating or working. The terms of a loan must not degrade a man nor cripple him. If character is an insufficient security than nothing else is morally valid. To degrade the needy is strictly forbidden. If it is a charitable loan than no interest can be charged. In Exodus 22:25-27 the law reads:

“ If thou lend money to any of my people that is poor by thee, thou shalt not be to him as an usurer, neither shalt thou lay upon him usury.

26 If thou at all take thy neighbour's raiment to pledge, thou shalt deliver it unto him by that the sun goeth down:

27 For that is his covering only, it is his raiment for his skin: wherein shall he sleep? and it shall come to pass, when he crieth unto me, that I will hear; for I am gracious.”

The covering was the robe men wore which they also used if they were poor as a cover when they slept. This law in Exodus speaks of the Hebrew poor, the covenant people, but the law in Deuteronomy which we just read makes no such restriction. It can be a loan to a foreigner but all the same there can be no demand for a pledge or a pawn that endangers his life, health or security. Very commonly over the centuries the money lender has not only specified what he will hold as pawn but has entered the poor man’s house to pick and choose what he will take. God outlaws this practice. In Nehemiah 5:3-5 we read that some Jews who became money lenders seized not only their client’s lands, houses and children but also exhibited thereby that they had learned the Babylonian money lending practices very ably. The whole grain was ground daily and bread made and eaten immediately. Among the poor it was a routine thing that the bread beside being the main stay of the diet was used to wrap the cheese, olives and other ingredients of the meal. It was in effect the plate and the food, this still continues in many, many parts of the world as in some parts of Mexico. This is a law against oppression. The legitimacy of lending money is not denied but the necessity of morality in so doing is stressed. Poverty is a form of weakness and no man has a right to exploit or to abuse the weak. Here again we have a law of kindness. God’s law rejects the concept of a hard legal indifference to compassion and mercy. This law is at the same time an aspect of family law. The millstones in a house were used by women, usually two, as they prepared the grain for food. The millstones were a basic part of a family’s equipment and life.

There are references to violations of this law in various texts of the Bible. In Job 22:6 one of the false friends of Job accuses him of violating this law apparently without any grounds for doing so. Amos 2:6-8 describes the evil Israelites and their contemptuous violation of this law. There are references to this law so in Proverbs 20:16, 22:27, and 27:13. But they deal basically with the foolish lender. The demand for a collateral that is unjust is a violation of justice and God’s law requires that justice and mercy prevail in every sphere of life including the economic realm. We have enjoyed some of the consequences of such laws in the past and now we are losing them. It is worth noting that the Greeks and the Romans had similar laws during one stage of their histories. In Second Thessalonians 3:10 it is very bluntly stated that if a man will not work nether should he be fed. Biblical law militates both against a parasitical attempt to exploit charity and any heartless attempt to exploit the poor. The borrower’s feelings and needs must be both respected. A man’s life is at stake we are told, the literal reading is: a man’s soul. Power should not be used to humiliate and degrade others and wealth is a form of power. It is interesting that Jeremiah 25:10 sees the sound of the millstone as comparable to joy, comparable to, quoting Jeremiah, the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride, the sound of the millstones and the light of the candle. It was a familiar and well-loved sound in the house. This was indeed a law for the protection of the poor but also for the protection of the quality and dignity of life. Jeremiah’s reference makes clear that the sounds of the millstones was one of the familiar and loved sounds of family life. It meant not only survival but also the richness of a family’s life. I recall some years ago when I was young, most tea kettles had a whistle on them and it was a very, very much loved sound to the family.

The literal reading a man’s soul is clearly is indicative of this fact. Statist welfarism may be generous to a family but it is destructive to the soul. This is the meaning of the text. We cannot strip a family of its dignity and freedom and the prohibition is total. No man, and by implication, no human agency shall take away the necessities of a man’s livelihood. We have a faint trace in this law in modern bankruptcy laws which allow a man to retain his home when he enters bankruptcy. The origin is clearly in biblical law at two points, the limitations of debt to six years and no more, so that a man for six years still cannot go into bankruptcy again after having once gone in, and second, this prohibition of the use of the necessities of life as collateral. This means that they cannot be taken from him. If the millstones cannot be taken by then implications nether can the house. In some of the older Christian cultures land and homes can only be by cash purchases, you cannot endanger them. This prevents the buyer from risking the loss of his family’s house. It is interesting that the Scottish versions of the millstones called perm was in use at least to the beginning of this century or the last of the 1800s and like instruments could be found in northern Europe in rural areas. To remove the millstones prevented a man from living and it also made it impossible to repay his debt. Thus to loan money and to require a collateral that made life difficult was a way of eliminating the poor man. We cannot appreciate the significance of this law unless we recognize that again and again people in power have wanted the elimination from society of the poor and needy. Various rationales have been used to suggest that the country would be better off without the poor, the homeless, the drifters or a group of foreigners.

Instead of conversion the solution is seen as elimination. Rich and poor, capitalist and workers, blacks, whites and others have been the target of such policies. Our century alone gives us many revolting instances of such solutions. This text is against all such beliefs. We cannot treat the poor as nothing. They are made in the image of God and like us they need salvation and they need our covenantal mercies and help. We cannot treat a man’s life and welfare as nothing. Let us pray.

Our Father we thank Thee for Thy word, for Thy law, we thank Thee that it is a restraint upon our weakness and our evil, our sin, we pray that we may again look to the freedom of Thy law, the freedom for life and for community. Teach us Thy ways oh Lord, make us joyful in Thy word and faithful in all things to Thy kingdom. In Christ’s name, Amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson? Yes?

[Question] Well even if you pay three percent on eleven that’s considered interest, right?

[Rushdoony] Yes. Usury in the bible refers to interest, period, and it is forbidden in charitable loans. Helping a brother, a covenant member in need. It is not forbidden in business loans. Yes?

[Question unintelligible] You mentioned Babylonian business practices, is that where this idea originated of some tangible object or item of property had to be pawned or given in a pledge? For the debt settled?

[Rushdoony] That’s a very important question; I’ve touched on it on times but its worth going into again in some detail. First of all there are two Babylon’s; there was old Babylon and then the Chaldean or Neo-Babylonian Empire under Nebuchadnezzar. The original Babylon began a practice which then the Assyrians picked up and then the later Babylonians or Chaldeans also used with a great deal of success. Now charging interest of course was universal, so it was nothing they invented. But normally it was for necessities that a person incurred debt, however, what the Babylonians and then the Assyrians and the neo-Babylonians did was to introduce very, very extensively the use of loans for luxury goods. Before their armies would march into any area they would send in state controlled merchants, offering credit on very easy terms for people to buy luxury items. These were called the tamkaru, and with their easy terms they would make very, very appealing for people to go into debt, so that that debt would be incurred and more and more debt until a people were head over heels in debt and were barely surviving even though outwardly well off because so much of their money was going to pay off these foreign agents, foreign merchants. Well what they knew and the Assyrians perfected it to the enth degree was that a people who were in debt are not a free people. They aren’t capable of defending themselves as well as a debt free people. Up until World War Two we were relatively a debt free people in that banks did not give long term loans in most of the United States. It was short term five year loans. This was more or less in terms of the biblical pattern which limits it to six years. As a result the American character then was a great deal different then it is now. They were more pugnacious people some would say because being relatively debt free they were ready to stand and fight and refuse to back down.

Well, this is the way it was in antiquity. Those people who did not go into debt had a strong element of freedom and of these three powers Assyria used it more efficiently and then their armies would march in the confidence that the enemy would be easy to overthrow, they would not be free men. And it is interesting that the Assyrians were not a numerous people, they were numerically a minor people in antiquity even when they had a vast empire but they utilized this fact of debt and added to it terror; so that when they moved against a people they knew these people were not going to be too warlike, the fight has been taken out of them with the debt plus the luxury goods. Then by terrorizing them they added to that, when they would conquer an area and we have their inscriptions, they’ve been translated, they would kill them off in vast numbers, create mountains, pyramids of bodies. They would take many of their people great and small, all classes, and skin them alive and let them die in screaming agony and make sure that word of this got to the nations that were going to be attacked next so that by the time they got there no matter how desperately they felt they had to win these people were virtually paralyzed with fear. Now the keystone of all of this was debt and that’s why biblical law is so emphatically against long term debt and any debt other than for necessities. Six years as the limit. Now, when you realize that every seventh year all debts were wiped out if they were not paid up and you did not loan except for a fraction of six years. So everybody started clean on year one. Let’s say year one was 1991. It would mean not many people would be in need of a loan in year one unless they had a dramatic crop failure or some such thing so that most of the loans would be contracted somewhere in the middle or at latter part of the six year period. So they could not be for much because you wouldn’t lend too much to somebody who two years from now his debt would be wiped out. So they were small loans, emergency loans, that was the essence of them. So it meant that even if you were very poor you could not put yourself head over heels into debt. So this created a free people.

It was only when the peoples of Israel and Judea began to neglect these biblical laws and to go into long term debt imitating the peoples round about them that they began to lose their independence. So this is a very important fact, no one has ever written on the history of debt, say in the United States. To trace the influence of biblical law, why are mortgages were limited mortgages and how we began to wander from them, and their impact on the national character. I’m not sure you could find very much left in the records about this but it’s there, traces of it still are there. So we have changed dramatically as a people because we’ve lost our faith in our Lord and His law and we have become a people heavily in debt. This is a disastrous fact and it has reshaped the American character. Does that help?

[Question unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] I’ve heard from people and ¾ parts of the country that real estate prices are down to what they were in about 1980 or earlier. So a great many houses are really on the brink of or into foreclosure. There are so many in some areas that they cannot process them so a house will sit there from January to December and on with a foreclosure notice but nothing has been done because they can’t keep up with the number going into foreclosure. So God’s laws with regards to debt are basic to the life of a society and a people can manage to survive and even get rich if they are not in debt. I know when the depression hit the farmers in the San Jose valley those who were in debt a high percentage of them went under. Those who had no debt were able to come out of the depression ahead because all prices for goods collapsed and whatever they made at least they could save some and invest it and investments were down to a rock bottom point. Any other questions or comments?

Well if not let us conclude with prayer.

Our Father, the world is desperately in need of Thy salvation and of Thy law, Thy justice. Grant that men turn again to Thee, know Christ as their lord and savior and Thy law word as the way of life so that we may again be a free people. Oh Lord our sins have enslaved us and have made us a slave people and even with riches slavery is still slavery and we are slaves. Thou hast made us free in Christ, enable us by Thy grace to turn to Thy word and to keep it that we may be free indeed and use us to be a beacon light of grace unto all nations. And now go in peace, God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost, bless you and keep you, guide and protect you, this day and always, Amen.