Usury

Usury is the taking of interest on a loan, and in Scripture the term covers the whole range from any charge at all for lending to the predatory gain extracted from a person in hardship.

The underlying Hebrew vocabulary is concrete. The common word rendered "interest" is neshek, literally a "bite," from a verb meaning to bite, and a second term, tarbit or marbit, means "increase." The law in Exodus 22:25 addresses lending to "my people with you who is poor" and forbids the lender to act "as a creditor" or to lay interest on him; Leviticus 25:35 commands instead that the impoverished brother be upheld so that "he shall live with you like an alien and a temporary resident." Deuteronomy 23:20 draws a line that runs through the whole biblical discussion: interest may be charged to a foreigner but not to a brother, with the promise that Yahweh will bless the lender in the land. Historically and linguistically, the distinction is between lending within the covenant community, where the loan functions as mutual aid, and lending to outsiders, where it functions as commerce.

The rest of the canon treats usury as a moral marker rather than a minor economic technicality. Psalm 15:5 places the man who "doesn't lend out his money for usury" among those who may dwell with God and "shall never be shaken"; Proverbs 28:8 warns that wealth piled up by excessive interest is gathered "for one who has pity on the poor"; Ezekiel 18:8 lists the lender who takes no increase among the righteous, while Ezekiel 18:13 says of the one who "has lent with interest" that "he shall surely die," and Ezekiel 22:12 ties interest-taking to bloodshed, oppression and forgetting God. Jeremiah 15:10 shows how fraught lending was socially — the prophet laments that he has neither lent nor been lent to, yet is cursed by everyone. Nehemiah 5:5, 5:9 and 5:13 describe a crisis of debt bondage, with fields mortgaged and children enslaved, which Nehemiah denounces as a failure to walk "in the fear of our God."

Christian traditions read this material differently. In the historic teaching of the Western church, canon law and Thomas Aquinas held that taking a price simply for the use of money in a loan is unjust, since money is consumed in being used and time cannot be sold; the English word "usury" meant any interest until it narrowed to excessive interest in the early modern period. Reformed and later Protestant moral theology, following arguments such as Calvin's in the sixteenth century, allowed moderate interest under stated conditions and treated the biblical prohibition as aimed at oppression of the poor rather than at all lending at a rate. Jewish practice formalized the Deuteronomy distinction through instruments that let business lending proceed while preserving the brother/stranger line, and Islamic finance continues to prohibit riba, interest as such. Modern Catholic social teaching has likewise come to distinguish legitimate interest from usury while retaining the ancient concern for the borrower's need. Across these positions the shared conviction, stated by the texts themselves, is that lending to a person in want must not become the means of consuming him.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.