...and forgive them their debts: Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption From Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year (THE TYRANNY OF DEBT Book 1) by Michael Hudson

Author:Michael Hudson [Hudson, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-04-04T22:00:00+00:00

Expropriation of cultivators from the land

Once debtor-cultivators or captured and enslaved populations faced the prospect of losing their land irreversibly, they were liable to flee. Some banded together to survive as outlaws in a world in which access to the land was closed off in one region after another. “One of the causes of flight certainly is personal indebtedness,” finds Renger. “Entire villages had to flee to avoid bondage for debt.”[479] Many fugitives became hapiru, landless have-nots working as migrant seasonal labor or mercenaries, or joined robber bands. Most seem to have been of Amorite stock, but the agrarian problem was so widespread that the term hapiru did not signify an ethnic identity. Diakonoff points to “the emergence all over the Near East of the characteristic social group of the ʿapiru/hapiru, who earlier were taken for the ancestors of the Hebrew tribes. …

They appear simultaneously with the mass enslavement for debt at the coming of the 2nd millennium BC, and disappear without leaving [a] trace when enslavement ceases to play an important role, shortly before the coming of the 1st millennium BC.”[480]

Unable to conquer any major land, they were confined to less desirable areas such as the mountainous part of eastern Canaan, where records pick them up in the Amarna Age c. 1400 BC. A local Egyptian official administrator writes to the pharaoh complaining about incursions led by an opportunistic leader Abdi-Ashirta: “Behold now, Abdi-Ashirta has taken Shigata for himself and has said to the people of Ammiya: ‘Kill your chiefs and become like us; then you shall have peace.’ And they fell away in accordance with his message and became like GAZ/hapiru.”[481]

Here for the first time we may speak of an uprising based on lines drawn between landowner and landless, and above all between creditors and debtors. Abdi-Ashirta is reported to have promised his army that “we shall drive the governors out of the midst of the lands, and all the lands will go over to the GAZ/hapiru.” Cancelling debts and redistributing the land would become the insurgent cry throughout Greece from the 7th century BC onward.[482] The reported words of Abdi-Ashirta find their counterpart in the Jewish Bible: 1 Samuel 22:2 reports: “David left Gath and escaped to the cave of Adullam. When his brothers and his father’s household heard about it, they went down to him there. All those who were in distress or in debt or discontented gathered around him and he became their leader. About four hundred men were with him.”

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