Bible Economics: A Review Article

ABSTRACT This review of Economics and Empire in the Ancient Near East, edited by Matthew J. M. Coomber (Eugene, OR : Cascade Books, 2023), the inaugural volume of a new series of Guides to the Bible and Economics, continues with a list of crucial issues that biblical scholarship ought to integrate in order to grasp the economic environments in which biblical texts were developed and formalized: usufruct and ownership, rich and poor, credit and debt, land and labour, and exploitation.

accustomed" (p.9).That six of the ten chapters of the volume are either authored or co-authored by Roland Boer-or rely on his understanding of Marxist-inspired Régulation theory-it seems unlikely these would help biblical scholars think of economics in terms other than the capitalist or socialist categories to which they are accustomed.Or is the Marxist framework meant as a corrective to the capitalist economic system they hold to, which may well be the case for scholars addressing a North American audience that still grants the Bible some moral authority?

Kenneth Hirth: Introducing Economy in the Ancient World
In chapter 2, "Introducing Economy in the Ancient World," Hirth defines the economy as a "socially mediated form of material provisioning and interaction involving the production and allocation of resources between alternative ends" (p.14).After an overview of the Formalist-Substantivist (written "Substantive" throughout) debate, Hirth identifies three main features.First, the economy focuses on material provisioning for everyday life to meet the needs of households.In unstable social circumstances, households survived and grew according to their abilities to match the efforts invested in subsistence activities with their own internal consumption needs as well as with the demands of others outside the household.
Second, the economy was and still is a socially mediated realm of human behavior.This means that material provisioning processes are learned behaviors that vary greatly from one society to another and cannot be understood separately from social, religious and political practices.Third, to eat, obtain mates and raise children, humans make pragmatic choices that are rational within the cultural vantage point from which they were made (pp. 15-16).
Then, Hirth warns of the dangers of the notion of self-sufficiency, a notion found in most of the subsequent chapters in the volume where it is viewed as a characteristic of the subsistence regime in opposition to regimes geared to the production of surpluses.While self-sufficiency is the goal of every household, Hirth insists that complete self-sufficiency is not an attainable or sustainable economic strategy in the environment of ancient Palestine where the availability of resources fluctuates significantly.
As Hirth notes (pp. 22, 37), self-sufficiency is dependent on the production of surpluses.As survival requires anticipating the worse, households set their production goals at levels that will meet their needs during lean years, any surplus being used in intergroup feasting (p.21).In other words, survival is ensured by storing any excess from good years to cover the risk of future shortages resulting from defective harvests.Surplus above strict necessity is a margin of security (Harris 1959: 192).
I would add that the communal banquets in Deuteronomy 14,22-26 illustrate this principle.Households meet to consume yearly tithes together, with no indication of the duration of the feast, as yields varied from year to year.Contrary to common scholarly opinion that views such feasting as wasteful, the food is devoted entirely to communal consumption, not towards the support of a temple.This means that surplus production is an essential aspect of subsistence regimes and not a divestment of producers through an enforced imposition by elites for their own benefit, as most of the other chapters in the volume would have it.At most, the extraction of surpluses by those who are not producers can be understood as a way for producers to recycle some of their surplus for economic rather than purely social aims.In other words, farmers can trade excess surpluses for goods or services.
Surplus, however, is not merely a matter of foodstuffs.Under the Levantine climate, agricultural production results in great variations in labor demands, with peaks in the few months of land preparation and harvest, and long slack periods with plenty of idle hours for the adult male population.Women experience greater regularity as their chores occupy most of their waking days throughout the year.The reservoir of male-power is productively enrolled for corvée and war by institutional economic sectors or through exchange relationships with other households.Exchange networks were crucial for household survival.Hirth mentions exchanges "with other households in the same or different communities or with groups exploiting different ecological zones" (p.17).I would think that exchanging with groups from different ecological zones is more economically significant because households within a same zone would experience similar levels of need and over-abundance at the same time.The geographical relief of Palestine-from sea level up to 900 m and down to below sea level-affords close juxtaposition of quite distinct ecological zones that offered pasturing and labor exchange opportunities within manageable distances.
Whereas external exchanges tend to be viewed as a threat to social cohesion, Hirth considers that market exchanges ensure regular provisioning, despite the fact that they involve heated bargaining.The function of markets is to shift products and services from where they are overabundant to where there is a demand for them.Obviously, this involves transport and credit facilities that are typically unavailable to local farmers.Markets become economically significant when merchants intervene to buy when prices are low at harvest time and sell when they are high at sowing time and before harvesting, which explains why they are systematically viewed as crooks.
Contrary to previous research that has focused on how elites exploited the labor and resources of non-elite households, Hirth emphasizes the importance of the domestic sector that consumed most of the resources it produced to support itself.Whatever the economic regime, the household remains the basic unit; a highly resilient unit capable of resistance and unrest when its livelihood is threatened.However developed the other sectors may be, they never eliminate households or turn the entire society into slaves as Joseph supposedly did at the end of the seven years of lean cows (Genesis 47).
Hirth identifies two characteristics of economic systems: plasticity and heterogeneity, i.e., the ability to grow in size and complexity without introducing new solutions or eliminating traditional ones so long as they continue to fulfill certain needs.The institutional economy consisted of a formal-and-informal sectors active over and above the level of the domestic economy.Informal institutions consisted of mutual assistance networks operating on a voluntary and quasi-voluntary basis between households-labor exchanges and festive parties (pp. 23-24).Formal institutions operate at the level of society as a whole when it has grown sufficiently in size and complexity to support the emergence of leaders endowed with special privileges.The resources collected to implement institutional functions could be mobilized on a voluntary basis as well as through coercion, though the existence of institutions does not necessarily imply infringement of the resources of the commoner population.Some institutions produced resources themselves, for instance from their estates.The extraction of revenues should be viewed as lying on a spectrum ranging from direct taxation to voluntary contributions, gifts, institution-directed commerce and charges rendered for service provided (p.25).Coercive taxation is but one aspect of resource mobilizing strategies, an aspect that existed already in pre-state societies (p.27), as Boer argues in the next chapter, which discusses the situation of big peasants in the subsistence regime.
Having thus delineated the general framework of ancient economies, Hirth turns to the economy of Ancient Palestine.He seems less at ease with Ancient Palestine than with the global perspective as the proffers some statements that are quite dissonant with his general presentation of ancient economies.For instance, he suggests that estates grew at the expense of village land holdings (p.28) and that imperial integration transformed the self-sufficient economies of the Israelite and Judean kingdoms into surplus exporters that enriched their overlords while impoverishing residents (p.31).If, as he argued earlier, selfsufficiency was not sustainable at the household level, how could kingdoms become auto-sufficient?More problematic: can we be sure that exporting surpluses impoverishes their producers?This is what most of the other chapters of the volume repeat, but repetition does not make it any truer.
Against Boer in the next chapter, Hirth doubts that lots of arable land would have been periodically redistributed because, according to him, it would have been detrimental to the long-term viability of households in a region where rainfall was highly variable (p.28).This is the old canard of British and French experts who considered that land consolidation was essential for the improvement of the condition of the fellahin, blind as they were to the effectiveness of musha' tenure (Nadan 2003; quoted by Boer on p. 50).
Hirth's conclusion is extremely cautious as it warns that an "economy has many moving parts that operate independently to produce and distribute resources for different reasons at many different levels of society" (p.37).

Roland Boer: Allocation versus Extraction
In "Production and Allocation in Ancient Southwest Asian Economics," Roland Boer draws upon his 2015 Sacred Economy of Ancient Israel, with a sharp opposition between allocation and extraction, though these cannot be completely separated from one another.Allocation and reallocation involve setting aside sufficient amounts of surplus produce to insure against future lean years and allocating the rest to various members of agricultural communities on the basis of their capabilities and needs.By contrast, extraction involves the appropriation of labor and produce by those who live off the labor of others, by either exploiting surpluses from one's own reserves, or expropriating the surpluses of others (pp. 44-45).
Boer delineates a broad model to account for the economic history of the four millennia before the turn of the era in Southwest Asia.The model distinguishes institutional forms and the way they interact under three distinctive economic regimes.Subsistence-survival, kinship-household, estates, and tribute-exchange are the main institutional forms that are found in constant tension within the particular constellation that constitutes a regime, with one institution dominating others.(p.45).For clarity's sake Table 1 is an oversimplification of the model, bearing in mind Boer's warning that regimes are abstractions from everyday economic life and were never entirely distinct from one another because the three regimes perpetually combined the four institutional forms.Subsistence-survival and kinship-household were the driving force of the subsistence regime that, thanks to its allocative methods, sometimes dominated for centuries, and at other times persisted in marginal areas such as Palestine's highlands for millennia.Contrary to the neoclassical assumption that stability is the norm and crisis is the exception, it is crisis that is the norm and stability the exception because a regime entails tensions and compromise between institutional bodies.Régulation involves the specific set of ideological, institutional and behavioral norms that binds tensions and compromises into an overarching mode of production.

Regimes
Subsistence survival began with the shift from hunting-gathering to agricultural practices characterized by crop and livestock diversity.This afforded a high level of food security and optimal use of pasture, water and soil, all of which were kept below carrying capacity to take into account any increase in future needs (p.50).Yet, challenges were many and subsistence survival involved patterns of exploitation and economic differentiation between what Friedrich Engels designated as small-scale, medium-scale and larger-scale peasant farmers: While smallholding peasants tilled land that was often just enough for self-sufficiency, they were also under constant pressure to provide labor for others and faced consistent encroachments on their land.Middle peasants walked a fine line between aspiring to become big peasants and slipping into small-peasant status.By contrast, big peasants exploited small peasants and less fortunate middle peasants.(p.51) The aggrandizing agenda of larger-scale farmers created perpetual tension within rural communities that tended to tolerate them as long as they did not threaten the survival of the village.This forced larger-scale farmers to show themselves in a good light as benefactors matching their status with social obligations.
In the kinship-household institution, the larger-scale farmers functioned as patrons within kinship ties or beyond when they felt the need to bring under their wing those who had fallen foul of the kinship-households structure (p.54).
Estates were primarily extractive as they supplied non-producers with the necessities and luxuries of life to which the elite had become accustomed to (p. 55).Rulers and their hangers-on had little interest in the viability of subsistencesurvival agriculture because the returns from their estates were much higher than the customary ten percent they levied whenever possible on village communities, which led to periodic collapses of the estate system (p.56).
Tribute-exchange combines patterns of tribute-tax with exchange deployed through the actions of the state and its functionaries.Whereas it is common practice to distinguish between taxation as what the state draws from its citizens and tribute from what it extracts from other states under its sway, Boer places them on a continuum as violence is always present, while the boundaries of ancient realms were always vague and shifting.Without complex control mechanisms, "ancient states had to rely on intermittent bands of soldiers and tax collectors for haphazard enforcements" (p.57).Careful and calibrated approaches to tax-tribute were thus beyond ancient states, which, in addition to the temptation to squeeze peasants, rendered the various gradations of tribute inherently unstable as authorities were unable to ensure the viability of the rural population.
Markets, which were intimately connected with various types of plunder, evolved from places where food, pottery and tools were exchanged locally through barter towards monetized markets through which taxes could be levied thanks to the introduction of coinage to solve the logistical problem of provisioning armies on the move.In theory, the coins with which soldiers were paid served to buy food from the peasants who were then made to pay their taxes in coins rather than in kind.Villagers, however, "would do their best to avoid the tax gatherer, and soldiers continued to pillage as they had already done for millennia" (p.58).Merchants were held in low esteem as they were involved in debt slavery in addition to managing estates as landlords, and collecting taxes and tribute.
The Palatine regime saw the dominance of estates while tribute exchange was a secondary feature.This regime came to an abrupt end at the end of the second millennium BCE when a subsistence regime ran from about 1200 to 900 BCE.By the ninth century BCE, the Israelite state tried to restore an anachronistic palatine regime, only to give way to a regime of plunder by the Neo-Assyrians as a response to the shortcomings of the palatine regime.Whereas the palatine regime exploited its own realm, the empires also expropriated and plundered what they did not possess.
In light of Hirth's chapter, the validity of the notion of a subsistence regime characterized by minimal surplus production is dubious, all the more so when the postulated self-sufficiency is opposed to exploitative and extractive regimes.Boer is aware of the dangers of oversimplification and repeatedly nuances his sharp distinctions to the point where the reader is left wondering if the impressive theoretical model is of much help in figuring out the economics on the ground since in the previous chapter Hirth notes that corvée work projects and labor drafts do not necessarily have deleterious effects on the domestic economy (p.22).
If indeed the temples, palaces, landlords and merchants who administered estates had little concern for the viability of subsistence-survival agriculture because the ruling classes "seemed not to be able to learn the lesson," (p.64) from the chronic shortage of labor and consistent peasant resistance they faced, how could the palatine regime have lasted three millennia?
Conversely, if the Persians learned from the Assyrians and developed a complex web of governance that relied on "smaller returns from taxation and tribute without immediately destroying its tax base" (p.66), why then did the Persian Empire last no more than two centuries?
One reasonable answer would be that the subsistence regime did more than subsist in peripheral areas such as the Palestinian highlands because it was never threatened by estates and tribute-exchange regimes as extractive regimes depended on viable households and village communities to thrive.This is not to say that tensions did not exist.Boer is certainly correct in placing tensions at the heart of economics, even within the allocation regime.Survival required some delicate and ever unstable level of symbiosis between exploiter and exploited, something Boer finds hard to admit because, though he does not quote Norman Gottwald to whom the volume is dedicated, the resurgence of the subsistence regime at the Bronze-Iron Age transition recalls the model of the peasant revolt to account for the rise of Israel in the highlands.
Whereas historians commonly evoke the crisis as collapse, Boer insists that, from the point of view of the rural laborers in the village communities, the crisis was celebrated, stating that "since they did not have to pay onerous taxes to a gang of armed men, able hands were not subjected to indentured labor on the palatine estates, and they could focus on what they knew best, subsistencesurvival agriculture" (p.61).
Indeed, who would bemoan the end of taxation?Peasants certainly celebrate the collapse of their exploiters, but does it mean that they are better off?Gangs of armed men can thrive after the collapse of estates and continue haphazard looting.The aggrandizing agenda of the larger-scale peasant farmers, which Boer borrows from Engels, is a necessary corrective for an allocative regime that would otherwise be too rosy to be credible.Exploitation is indeed inherent to any economic regime, and to life itself.Every organism exploits those below it on the food chain.Carnivores exploit herbivores, farmers exploit land, trees, water and animals, larger-scale peasant farmers exploit small ones, elites exploit peasants.Exploitation ends when over-exploitation leads to the dearth or demise of the exploited before it can reproduce and thus continue as a sustainable resource.No economic regime, however extractive, ever eliminated the subsistence economy by turning peasants into tenants and slaves because the amount of supervision needed to make them productive would have been prohibitive.The dishonest manager of the parable (Luke 16) illustrates the fallacy of the absentee landlord who enjoys a leisurely life thanks to the revenues he draws from his estate.Sharecropping is a well-tried method to reduce the effects of "foot-dragging, noncompliance, leaving crops unharvested, or simply absconding" (p.64), giving free peasants a stake in the harvest of the estate in addition, not instead of the produce of their own farms.
The awareness that the Marxist diachronic perspective overestimates "the role of class conflict in economic development"-as Hirth puts it (p.14)grows with the reading of the other chapters based on Boer's model.

Economic Relationships in the Worlds of the Bible
Chapter 4, "Economic Relationships in the Worlds of the Bible," is co-authored by Roland Boer and Christina Petterson and focuses on specific biblical texts read through the lens of Boer's model in the previous chapter.An economic timeline in the form of a table (p.76) confirms the dominance of the subsistence regime from Uruk to the Persian empire.
The Joseph story at the end of the Book of Genesis is read as the co-option of Canaanite labor for Joseph's mega-estate in Egypt.Though the text has Pharaoh suggest to Joseph to put the most capable men among Jacob's people as overseers of the royal flocks-if such men may be found (Gen 47,6)-it is read as turning Joseph's entire family into "indentured laborers, keepers of the landlord's livestock", and an illustration of the "convoluted strategies to co-opt labor for the estates".The transition between Genesis and Exodus becomes the "struggle between estates and village communes-and thus between palatine and subsistence regimes" (pp.78-79).
Then, Solomon's riches and Ezekiel's oracle against Tyre are interpreted as descriptions of the activities of the hated merchants who acquire preciosities for the rich rather than engaging in commercial exchange.The next section selects passages dealing with land tenure (Machpelah, Jacob's altar at Shechem, Ruth, the threshing floor of Araunah, Naboth, Hanamel's field) and is a welcome reminder of the centrality of usufruct over ownership.From Yhwh's statement that "the land is for me" (Lev 25,23) is drawn the implication that "anything that is Yhwh's is thereby the people's as a whole" (p.88) to support collective ownership.
Then follows a section on New Testament parables depicting God as slaveowner.The authors argue that these texts originate from the ruling class of the polis rather than from the mouth of Jesus (p.93).A final paragraph deals with the issue of slavery which was accepted as a fact by Jesus, the apostles and Paul, whose letters are full of slave metaphors.His letter to Philemon would indicate that the slave Onesimus was owned by Paul in partnership with Philemon.Rather than challenging slavery, Paul simply makes everyone a slave to resolves the contradiction of the use of slaves in the Christian mission.In this sense, the Bible is a complex metaphorization of economic realities rather than a reflection on actual economic realities.

Cynthia Shafer-Eliott: Women's Immense Economic Contribution
Cynthia Shafer-Eliott's "Women and Economics in Ancient Israel and Judah" is a welcome change from the hackneyed claim that Levantine society was patriarchal.Following Carol Meyers and others, she opts for heterarchy, recognizing that authority was shared out according to the circumstances and was distributed among different actors to create circular paths rather than a hierarchy (p.111).
Though less dependent on Boer's model, the economics in this chapter follows the social-scientific approach.A subsistence economy is "one that produces just enough for the household to survive" (p.122), with no discussion of Hirth's challenge of this notion in chapter 2 of the volume.Otherwise, this chapter is a fine example of the scientistic nature of the interpretation of archaeological evidence and can be expected to overcome etic stances by providing a plausibly scientific basis for the claim that the contribution of women's economic contributions was immense (p.125), not just in domestic tasks but as household managers, religious leaders and healthcare professionals.
That the presence of grinding slabs indicates that the grinding of grain occurred in the room where they were found is fairly obvious.Less so is that the oven, loom-weights and other artifacts found in the next room "imply that activities related to food preparation and weaving both occurred in this room" (p.114).The oven with a broken cooking pot, ashes and charcoal could just as Philippe Guillaume well suggest that this location is courtyard; one example of the challenges of household economics based on the limited exposure of domestic quarters.Field archaeologists know all too well that "definitive answers lie in the baulk," but baulks often remain in place due to limited time and funds, and the pressure to publish to obtain more funding.
The claim that the typical house had a "second floor where the household members would sleep and conduct light household chores" (p.112) is liable to over-interpretation too.The best evidence for second floors is the beginnings of a flight of stairs, something as rare in rural settings as it is common on artistic renderings of biblical dwellings.One can always argue that they were accessed by ladders, such as those used to reach the roofs of peasant houses for drying and sleeping during the summer, for which a second story is unnecessary.In cold and rainy months, sleeping in close proximity to animals was a necessity, as Boer explains in this volume (p.53), which again makes a second floor irrelevant.

Understanding Law in Ancient Near Eastern Context
Anne Fitzpatrick-McKinley's chapter, "Understanding Law in Ancient Near Eastern Context," is a welcome reiteration of her previous work on the nature of the biblical codes and legal statements that were not used as sources for legal decisions before late in the Rabbinic period.None of the biblical narratives involving legal issues-Bathsheba, Jeremiah, Amos, Ezra, Nehemiah-quote any laws of the Pentateuch to justify their claims.Disputes were settled on the basis of custom.Judges are instructed to do justice and avoid corruption (Deut 16,18-20; 2 Chron 19,6-7) not to apply Moses's laws.The same pertains to the Judean communities in Persian-era Babylonia whose records of day-to-day legal practice show no reference to biblical law, or sometimes contradict it (p.148).The contemporary Elephantine archives in Egypt mention Passover and Sabbath but do not indicate that the local Yhwh worshippers resorted to the laws of the Pentateuch to settle disputes.Like their counterparts in Babylonia, they applied local custom (p.150).
Turning to the province of Yehud, Ezra 9,1-2 lists the nations outlawed in Deut 7 and 23 but adds others, which shows that "during the sixth to fourth centuries, ancient Judeans knew about the idea of Mosaic authority-that is to say, they knew that certain regulations could be ascribed with such authoritybut they did not seem to have had an authoritative version of these" (p.155).The legal collections of the Pentateuch are the realm of scribes and reflect moral instructions based on Israel's status in Egypt, calling Israelites to show compassion, but never presenting solutions to economic inequalities.

Knight on Economics in Israelite Law
In the next chapter on "Economics in Israelite Law," Douglas Knight continues the discussion on laws, distinguishing between Israelite law, issued by those in power to enact regulations and impose penalties, and biblical law resulting from a long editorial process.The rest of the chapter basically repeats Boer's chapter, with less nuance: even in good times the minimal needs for survival from one harvest to the next could hardly be met and the people were unable to accumulate much if any surplus to carry over from one year to the next.The other two regimes were quick to extract as much as they could squeeze out of the vulnerable classes.(p.174) Or, the "villagers generally lived in a desperate, permanent state of risk and poverty.The fortunate among them had inherited a small plot of land to till, but many others were landless peasants, laborers, slaves and other vulnerable persons".By contrast, the general urban population "enjoyed luxury goods, owned slaves, resided in more spacious and better-appointed dwellings, had access to power, and benefited from better nourishment and healthcare-thus experimenting a more comfortable and less labor-intensive life than the lower classes" (p.172).Do such generalities advance our understanding of ancient economics?
Could urbanites enjoy a more comfortable life by enriching "themselves at the expense of the peasant" (p.175) who hardly had any surplus to carry his household from one year to the next?The failure to engage in real economics is epitomized in the claim that the upper classes "could often avoid the imperial demands by pressing the poor of the land to provide more from their already limited produce and labor" (p.175).Did anyone ever manage to become rich by pressing the destitute?The rest of the chapter continues on similar lines.

Rainer Kessler on Ideologies of Kinship and the Sacred in the Ancient Near East
In chapter 8, "Ideologies of Kinship and the Sacred in the Ancient Near East," Rainer Kessler demonstrates the link between royal ideology and the realities of economic life in ancient societies.Defined as the "complex of ideas about the role of the king in front of the gods, his position in society, and his task as leader of his country, including his responsibility for welfare and economic growth" (p.194), kingship ideologies are rather similar, throughout different times and cultures, in their granting of close links of the monarch with the gods who divinize him.
The king acted as military leader, protector of the weak and guarantor of the fertility of the land.Though the king was responsible for the construction and functioning of the temples and generally acted as the highest priest, temples had their own staff and enjoyed certain degree of autonomy.Their vast archives give the impression that the people working for temples and palaces worked exclusively for these institutions.Kessler warns that this is probably wrong; so too the assumption of the dominance of institutional land ownership by palaces and temples, in particular during the first millennium BCE when the productivity of their agricultural sectors was probably well below that of the intensively farmed land by city dwellers (p.203).This point is crucial, being the result of the study of quantitative data by Michael Jursa and the team who produced the Economic History of Babylonia in the First Millennium BCE.Their results challenge the significance of estates.Future advances in our understanding of biblical economics will have to integrate this new data.
For instance, Jursa and his team managed to show that the overall productivity of the agricultural sector of the two best known temples (Eanna in Uruk and Ebabbar in Sippar) was modest, despite the huge amount of records they produced.The biblical counterpart of this phenomenon is the amount of attention the Bible and biblical scholarship grant to the temple-Jerusalem's of course, as though there were no others-and the lack of any evidence of its actual economic significance.The Bible merely records tariffs and ignores the production of the huge quantity of sacrifices it expects the Israelites to deliver.
Turning to the biblical evidence, Kessler finds that among the traditional characteristics of royal ideology, there are only few allusions to economic measures taken by the king, which fits in with the idea of the modest economic significance of the institutional sector and undermines the validity of extractive regimes and confirms, if need be, the dominance of the subsistence economy until the Roman era."The royal economy was the economy of the king's household" (p.211), a household that may have been larger than typical households, but was one among thousands of other households and behaved in similar ways.I am not so sure that international trade was ever the monopoly of the state (p.212), but that the biblical evidence gives "few hints to a taxation system" (p.213) is yet another point that gives the lie to many claims made in the volume.There is indeed some evidence for the collection of agricultural produce in the archaeological record (bullae, stamped handles), but Kessler adds that the collection of agricultural produce by the king "could also have had a positive impact on the economic situation of their population" (p.214), a devastating statement for the notion of extraction being purely exploitative with no return whatsoever for the tax base.
Considering the role of the temple in ancient Israel and Judah, Kessler notes that we do not even know if and when the temples in Israel and Judah held any landed property before Hellenistic times (pp.218-219).

Economic Aspects of Prophecy, Wisdom and Apocalypticism
Kessler's chapter is followed by two chapters that close the volume, one on the "Economy and Israelite Prophecy from the Eighth to the Six Centuries BCE" Davis Hankins and the last by Samuel L. Adams on "Economic Aspects of Wisdom and Apocalypticism." Besides the problems of sorting out what reflects earlier times in Amos, Hankins repeats much of what is found in Boer's chapter and in previous socialscientific works, which adds little to our understanding of economics in the Bible, apart from the important admission that "prophets were not especially effective agents of social change" (p.257), but nevertheless "occupy a particularly meaningful position for those who dream of an alternative and more sustainable future" (p.258).These statements underline the gap between prophetic texts and real economics, where dreams have little room.
Focusing on late biblical literature (Proverbs, Daniel 7-12, Qoheleth, Ben Sira, 4QInstructions, Wisdom of Solomon, 1 Enoch), Adams argues that "instructional literature provides a significant resource for understanding social and economic life during this critical period, and that a striking number of voices speak out against stratification and the corruption that is often endemic to commerce" (p.265).The fundamental question is the same as for the interpretation of prophetic texts: do promises of eschatological reward for those experiencing difficulty "originate on the margins of society as a means of protesting inequality and offering eternal recompense to struggling persons... or does it represent the efforts of the more elite classes to maintain an unjust status quo by promising future rewards" (p.266)?"While Max Weber ascribed apocalyptic frameworks to "pariah intelligentsia" rather than to the ruling classes, Adams argues that a neat dichotomy between establishment and dissident groups should not be posited (p.267).
The biblical book of Proverbs represents three main positions regarding riches: one promising material rewards for righteousness and another that wisdom is better than gold.A third position consists of "insightful observations on the duplicity that can characterize financial transactions" (p.270).Indeed, Proverbs 28,8 warns against lending and 22, 26-27 (see also 11,15; 17,18; 20,16) about the responsibilities of one who underwrites the loan of an associate and is thus liable to have to pay the associate's debts when he defaults.For Adams, the presence of such practical advice is striking in "a sapiential collection that prizes kindness to the poor" (p.271).It is in fact less striking when kindness to the poor is recognized as good economic practice, as good as the careful analysis of the creditworthiness of a potential debtor since public displays of generosity generate social capital à la Bourdieu.
Adams' conclusion, which also concludes the volume, is that in our current day of financial inequality and huge disparities in wealth, these voices from ancient Judea offer a helpful reminder that greed and obsessiveness over money are enduring, intractable aspects of what it means to be human (p.95), a rather unpromising admission for activist communities-one of the target readership of the series-who may want to use the Bible to challenge the status quo.
After plowing through the almost 300 pages of the volume, the reader eagerly awaits some kind of synthesis of the outcome of the volume.To palliate the absence of such a conclusive chapter, I close this review with a list of the salient points that arise from these ten chapters.

Ownership and Usufruct
One positive aspect Boer's insistence on musha' as an important aspect of Levantine land tenure.The significance of the periodic re-allocation of land lots is not yet integrated in biblical scholarship.Peasants were certainly intimately familiar with every square cubit of their land, but the ban to move boundaries may reveal something other than what Hankins designates as "the existence of a ruling class in control of lands at some distance from their daily lives" (p.249).It reveals the importance of flimsy boundary markers between contiguous lots sown with the same crop at the same vegetative stage.
Another issue to integrate is the distinction between different levels of possession in a spectrum between full ownership (slaves, houses), exclusive possession (wives, gardens), co-ownership (tools, animals), and shares of usufruct in arable land, trees, war spoil, etc. Ownership is tied the notion of sedentarization, something which is now challenged for the period in which social-scientific exegetes set their utopian regime of subsistence (Ben-Yosef and Thomas 2023).

The Poor Victim of the Rich Strawmen
The "poor" is a convenient category that allows elites-royal or otherwise-to justify their privileges by making a public show of their benevolence.Rich and poor are too vague as economic concepts.The rich need the poor as much as the poor need him, and just as much does social-scientific biblical exegesis rely on a sharp rich-poor dichotomy.For instance, in "The Political Economy of Peasant Poverty," Marvin Chaney (2014: 48) argued that social stratification condemns the peasants "to one or another level of poverty".There are thus levels of poverty that we are unable to measure due to missing data for significant quantitative research."Peasant Poverty" is more relevant to politics than economics and there are good reasons to doubt the heuristic value of the "poor" in economic studies because poverty is the expression of a sentiment of inferiority.Yet, the concept of poverty ought to be retained as a true expression of how the majority in any society and time perceive themselves and are thus prone to consider themselves as authentic victims at "one or another level of poverty."As much as beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder, poverty lies in the mind of whoever compares herself or himself with others that are richer.
The social-scientific chapters reviewed above conceive poverty as a structural and immutable condition, which conveniently avoids the intractable issue of identifying where it starts and at what point one is no longer poor, other than positing that urbanites were rich and peasants were by definition poor because they did not live in cities.In fact, poverty-or real need-was and is a highly variable phenomenon with recurring seasonal cycles and other less predictable ones such as crickets, wars and droughts.Other times are by abundance, and even over-abundance, particularly in agricultural settings where the same produce ripens at the same time for everyone.To avoid structural poverty, tried survival strategies were applied: postponement of dues, debt cancelling or rescheduling, temporary migration and other such ad hoc measures.This is not to say that all was rosy, but selfportrayal as poor was a prerequisite for the beggar as much as for the debtor begging for respite.
Ben-Yosef and Thomas (2023) also challenge the notion that social complexity can only be read in the archaeological record where monumentality is present.They argue that complexity can be present without monuments.This means that the so-called subsistence regime of the Iron I Palestine highlands could coexist with social stratification and with the presence of an elite Boer designates as "big peasants."That they were motivated by an "aggrandizing agenda" that created perpetual tension within village communities is likely.That this forced the larger-scale peasant farmer to present himself as a benefactor with matching patronage is likely too.Hence, exploitation is inherent to economic relations that imply a return of sorts for the exploited, a return the exploiter judges insufficient but which the exploited considers as extortionate.Dissatisfied as both sides are, they nevertheless know that are better-off than if they refused to enter into a deal with one another.Survival is primary.Freedom is secondary.

Debt and Credit
Opposing "credit" and "debt," Boer (2007) defined credit as the allocation and reallocation of all goods within the community, and debt as an extractive device that ensures economic hierarchy by making the creditor richer.To conceive the flow of wealth as unidirectional, automatic and irresistible, is to ignore risk.Creditors exploit their debtors because they expect a return.Borrowers exploit their lenders' resources in the hope of making a profit from the loaned capital.
The term "exploitative" is a recurrent term (pp. 99, 179, 185, 255-258), with a few mentions of "usury" and the references to Nehemiah 5 to illustrate its consequences: "usury created an economic climate where profit could be made by a select few, but a household in distress might lose their long-standing family plot" (p.264).Or, "Extracanonical evidence points to usury as an intrinsic part of many transactions during this period."(p.271).
In fact, usury has no relevance whatsoever in economic discussions.Shocking as it may be for theologians, excessive interest rates, like excess surplus and bare bones subsistence levels are no economic notions.Interest rates reflect a number of factors that are not recorded in a contract, but are wellknown to the contractors: risk, trust or mistrust established on previous experience, economic prospects, and the many other "moving parts that operate independently to produce and distribute resources for different reasons at many different levels of society" (Hirth, p. 37).
To access real-world ancient economics, one to admit that standard Mesopotamian interest rate of 50% on grain were not usurious for several reasons.First, farmers contracted such loans over a number of months, not years, thus sharply reducing the actual amount of interest.Second, interest and principle were paid at the time of the harvest to shift the cost of storage onto the lender who thus had to buy low at harvest time and sell high at sowing time and in the months just prior to the harvest when household stores were empty.Third, high interest rate covered the high transaction cost arising from the granting of small loans, as is the case in modern micro-credit operations.Fourth, the interest was an insurance premium paid during good times in order to secure from the lender relief during bad times-e.g., by way of debt rescheduling reduction or even further advances.The survival of his debtors was crucial for the survival of the creditor who could only hope to recoup his losses later, after a good harvest.Hence the economic importance of debt.One may prefer the term "credit" to describe the imbrication of the mutual interest of lenders and borrowers in a complex web of interdependence.What must be clear is that credit is indeed based on mutual exploitation, which fosters survival and growth much better than independence and the purported splendid isolation of highlanders who paid no taxes and allocated goods between themselves and thus avoided social stratification.In many ways, egalitarianism is shared poverty.
Nowhere does Nehemiah 5 state that famine led to the seizure of family plots.Land and houses were indeed pledged to obtain grain and cash to pay taxes.Rather than evidence of a purported practice of lending at supposedly "predatory rates in order to appropriate land, resources, and even people" (Adams, p. 264), Nehemiah 5 illustrates the standard erasure of debt contracted under duress to portray the governor acting in a quasi-royal manner, i.e., forcing the return of pledges as was the prerogative of kings.However "exploitative", credit and taxation cannot destroy the base without destroying themselves.
While Boer quotes Amos Nadan (2003) on the matter of musha' (p.50), Nadan's 2005 article on credit is compulsory reading for anyone wanting to understand credit.It shows that Palestinian farmers preferred the "usurious" rates of traditional lenders to the low interest rates of the British bank set up by Mandate authorities to help them because the fellahin knew that in case of default the bank seized the collateral while the traditional lender postponed payment and provided relief when needed.As Isa 3,12 states, "creditors rule over them," but for the peasants being ruled by creditors meant to remain alive in time of needs.As much as survival depended on the production of surplus, it equally relied on dependence based on debt towards other households in the form of work days, and debt towards merchants and institutions able to lend seed and food to make ends meet until the next harvest.For the peasants, economic independence was a high-risk strategy while freedom from hunger meant constant indebtedness.
Another fallacy is the idea that egalitarian social relations freed the peasant "from the burdens of the tax and labor systems that supported the military" and ended "the dominance of the elite whose interests the military primarily served" p. 251).Freed from the burden of military taxation, the farmers have to dedicate as much if not more revenues to protect themselves from raiders.

Land and Labor
Chaney (2014: 49) claimed that the major differentials of power in society ensured that "landlords would pressure peasants concerning the finite and allimportant resource of arable land and the peasant labor necessary to bring it into production".Several presuppositions need to be unpacked here: that the amount of arable land was finite, that peasants had to be pressurized to bring it into production, and that landlords did the pressurizing.
In this volume, Hankins (p.236) admits that the extent to which there was population saturation in the ancient Levant is a matter of some dispute.If it did, something that cannot be proven given the limits of surveys and population estimates, it simply indicates that labor was productively dedicated to exploit land.What led to such exploitation?Demography is a factor.In the absence of machinery, the more surviving children, the more land peasants could clear; the more land they cleared the more children they could feed, as the only way to increase production was to put more hands in the field.Time spent in the field is not very elastic because specific tasks need to be done in season.Conversely, supply of land is more elastic than that of labor.Thanks to fallow cycles and land clearing, the amount of land put under cultivation is constantly adapted to needs.Needs concern those of the farmer's own family as well as those of others who extract revenues from him.
Then, we have the issue of zero-sum logic applied to land as though the development of estates reduced the land available for cultivation by the local peasants.It is more likely that land granted to courtiers or veterans came from land eschewed to the Crown or from undeveloped land.As noted by Kessler (p. 203), the productivity of estates was comparatively limited and expanding them by expropriating local peasants would not render them more viable.This was only to happen later in the Levant when Zionist agencies bought land from local landlords and evicted the tenants who had worked the land until then.Even after the arrival in the first half of the 20th century of Jewish settlers from Russia and Europe, the economic viability of estates required seasonal workers.These were obtained from local peasants who also worked their own farms, additional labor peaks being too short to justify maintaining a large workforce of tenants all year round.Instead of slaves, free peasants were hired as day laborers against wages, or as so-called debt slaves who supplied workdays to service antichretic loans granted by the estate's possessor or one of his own creditor (Rossi and Guillaume 2018).The term "debt-slavery" is a misnomer that fosters confusion with chattel-slavery.
Contrary to pledges seized from a defaulter when the tenor of the loan was reached, many loans in the ancient Near East were reimbursed by transferring the usufruct of the pledge to the creditor during the tenor of the loan (Zaccagnini 2001: 223-229).This is usually the situation erroneously referred to as debt slavery.Antichresis is the proper economic The person involved is no slave.It is the labor not the person that the borrower supplies to his creditor in order to reimburse the loan.The loan is by definition fully paid back at the maturity of the loan, when the pledge returns to its family or its master when the pledge was a chattel slave.The return is no manumission, however.The personal status of the pledge was not altered.The creditor enjoyed the use of the pledge, not its ownership.The same applies to other assets-animal, field or house-supplied by the borrower to reimburse a loan.In this sense, being a debt slave was not incompatible with being a freeholder.Obviously, debt slaves had no interest whatsoever in admitting the benefits they drew from the loans or from the wages they drew from the estate.

Exploitation Equals Injustice
All in all, social-scientific biblical exegetes have yet to grow out of the view that exploitation is intrinsically unjust.Thankfully, Boer and Petterson's chapter unmasks the purely allocatory form of economic life and its "bucolic village-commune as its basis" as an idealization (p.89).Most of the other chapters imagine self-supportive communities isolated from broader economic networks as just and other economic regimes as evils that disrupted the subsistence regime.For instance, Shafer-Elliott defines subsistence economy as what "produces just enough for the household to survive" (p.112), the exact opposite of Hirth who insist that survival is dependent on the production of more than just enough to survive (p.18).
What is enough to survive?On what basis could survival needs be defined given the superiority of the reproductive potential over the productive ability of humans (Harris 1959: 191)?Most exploited populations manage to reproduce and even thrive.Pharaoh's failure to prevent the Hebrews from multiplying illustrates the point.Moreover, need and desire are so flexible than they are never fully satisfied.In fact, they grow the more they are fed.Hence, the notion that surplus is what is in excess once needs are satisfied is fallacious.Humans do not live by bread alone, they also want cakes and never have enough of them because cakes are a biosocial necessity (Harris 1959: 193).
Nevertheless, it may well be that the idea that households start producing surpluses when they are pressured to do so by elites who extract surplus from them is to be reversed and that it is the production of household surplus to survive that fostered the rise of institutional regimes that were able to recycle some of the surplus besides what was used for gluttonous feasts and conspicuous wastage (Harris 1959: 191).
Extracting surplus to feed an army, to build a temple or undertake anything over and above subsistence related activities was not necessarily detrimental to the wellbeing of those who provided the work, however much they complained about it.As Hirth notes, "participation in corvée work projects and labor drafts could have positive returns to households when the sponsoring person or provided the mobilized labor with a meal as compensation for the work supplied" (p.22).
As long as the drafts occurred during slack times, they had a positive effect on household reserves.Despite the general view of exploitation as evil, no economic regime thrives on immorality.Given the opprobrium attached today, and often for good reasons, to international finance, it may come as a surprise that economics require morality, i.e., credit, the trust that has to be established between the different partners involved in any transactions, be they marital partners, kin, neighboring farms, agricultural associates, slave master and slave, or ruler and ruled.Crooks and free riders exist in every society (Hirth, p. 15), but it is difficult to keep on cheating the same persons and institutions.
What is held to be moral varies of course from culture to culture and from era to era, but the crucial matter is what was considered moral at any specific time and place, not what we ourselves hold to be moral or immoral.
There are not many ways to appropriate revenues other than through negotiation between agents who have developed enough trust in one another's word and enough confidence in their ability to fulfill their part of a contractual agreement, oral or written.Raids and wars are faster alternatives, but in the long run they do not represent a sustainable approach to the maximization of appropriation due to the destructions and cycles of retaliation they generate, even though ancient warfare did not entail the "high mortality rates" Shafer-Elliott claims it did (p.116).
Deuteronomy's war laws recognize the advantages of negotiation over destruction, even from the point of view of warmongers believing themselves invincible thanks to the backing of Yhwh (Deut 20,1-9).Deuteronomy conceives war more as a selection process offering a decisive advantage to the fittest males to reproduce.Young attractive female prisoners of war are the reward for risking one's life on the battle field (Deut 21,10-14).After a monthlong latency to ensure the absence of any sign of pregnancy at the time of capture, the warrior is forbidden ever to sell her into slavery, while he is exempted from military obligations for a whole year after the marriage (Deut 24,5).Forcing the father of a kidnapped unbetrothed daughter to accept marrying her to her rapist plays the same function for any daring young couple ready to withstand their families' opposition (Deut 22,(28)(29).Shocking as these texts are to feminist sensitivities, students of biblical economics need to accept that "behaviors like maximization, utility, and rational choice can only be understood in terms of the specific culture in which they occur" (Hirth, p. 15).While Gary Becker claimed (1976: 5-6) that, whether they are selfish, altruistic, loyal, spiteful or masochistic, individuals maximize welfare as they conceive it, the preference of humans for health, prestige and pleasure remain fairly stable over time and across social backgrounds and cultures.The choices humans make to obtain these fundamentals of life depend on available opportunities and constraints and may appear as outright exploitative to present-day Bible readers.
The rhetoric of poverty and exploitation is not an apt measure of injustice.That Ephron insists to let Abraham bury his dead at no cost at all (Gen 23,17) is but one side of a coin; on the other side is the urge to portray oneself as the victim of the seller.Both are and parcel of the bargaining process.Price tags are attached today to goods and services, setting the legally binding price at which they are to be acquired, thus avoiding the lengthy process of bargaining, but they are inefficient ways of adjusting price in accordance with the constant fluctuations of supply and demand.As a result, end-of-season sales are necessary to liquidate unsold items at bargain price because retailers were unable or unwilling to do so earlier.In the ancient world, everything from brides to loans was obtained through tough ritualized bargaining with claims that one would rather give the item away than sell it at the ridiculous price offered for it; claims that fooled no-one but were essential to the assessment of offer and demand before finally reaching an agreement.
Archaeological evidence continues to be over-interpreted in support of biblical texts which, despite admissions of the difficulty of identifying and dating the different literary strata, are used to connect biblical critiques of the rich with specific times of exploitation.The weakness of the arguments to be drawn from such an archaeological-biblical mix is well illustrated by the debate between Avraham Faust and Walter Houston conveniently summarized by Chaney (2014: 49-53).The critique of the rich is hardly a sign of economic inequality, nor is the virulence of the critique of the rich an indicator of the poverty of the criticizer.Quite to the contrary, such critiques found their way in the biblical corpus because they served the interests of certain elites who presented themselves as the champions of the poor against rivals.As long noted by Machiavelli, the best ally of any ruler or would-be ruler against rivals is the peasantry because the most ardent desire of the peasantry is to be ruled as little as possible.The critique of the rich is a political weapon to delegitimize political adversaries, but it has little usefulness in understanding economics, be it in the Bible or elsewhere.The exploited tend to welcome the arrival of a new exploiter, at first.The new exploiter is happy to concur with the grievances expressed by the exploited as both sides obtain a moral high ground against the old exploiters.
In a world that still grants some value to the Bible, it may be a good strategy to provide activist communities with sound biblical scholarship-the mission of the Center and Library for the Bible and Social Justice.What makes biblical scholarship "sound" is not repetition of old ideas but a "collegially and successfully engaged" debate (Coomber, p. 10) with dissenting ideas.What is missing here is a greater engagement with the fresh data produced for instance by Michael Jursa and his team.The problem of course, is that the informal economy of the private and communal sectors is invisible because it produced no written records.Yet, it survived all odds.
To conclude, will this volume help biblical scholars "think of and express biblical-economic concepts and goals in terms that are closer to the actual situation experienced by peasants in ancient Israel and Judah than to the capitalist, socialist, or other economic systems to which they are accustomed" (Coomber, p. 9)?The first part of Hirth's chapter does the job.It is a must-read for anyone interested in ancient economics for which the Bible is an important secondary source.
chapter is an antidote to the exaggerated authority biblical scholars grant to Moses's laws.Unfortunately, and contrary to the editor's claim, there is little debate in the volume to advance the discussion since none of the Régulation-inspired chapters engage with Hirth's chapter.Will the next volumes of this much needed series use more friction to grind "the false away so as to lead us closer to truth" (Coomber, p. 10)?More friction should produce the sparks of scholarship that are missing from this volume dominated by the work of theologians who explain ancient economics without taking into account the single chapter written by a professional economist.

Table 1 :
Institutions and Regimes