The Bible and Usury

I was asked to comment on usuary, and as my explination is a bit long winded this is as good a place as any. Here goes.
Generally speaking, if you do a bit of research the stranger rules that were laid down in Leviticus all had some sort of logical purpose and reason at the time. My favorite is the prohibition against inter-cropping, i.e. growing two plants together. The Land experimental farm in Epcot center is literally filled with inter-cropping experiments, designed to save people from poverty and starvation by cross breeding plants and growing one or more crops together in the same patch of land. All this is technically prohibited by Leviticus, as is my Pastor’s favorite the rule against clothing with more than one type of cloth. He noted one Sunday that if was going to literally obey those rules he was going to have to throw out his church robes, since they were some sort of modern fabric blend.
At the time they were written, these rules did make sense. Inter-cropping with the plants available at the time was a poor farming practice. But unlike the major rules in the Ten Commandments, some of these lesser rules really don’t make much sense when extended beyond the time and region they were enacted. The most obvious example of this is the rule against eating pigs. I read a paper one time noting that Pigs in ancient Israel were a very poor food source because in Ancient Israel they ate the same foods that humans did. This isn’t the case on the other side of the planet. Where feral pigs are quite common, easy to raise and an efficient food source. This particular rule was in fact specifically repealed.
Acts 15: 1-29 frees us from all this, but even before that, you will note that Jesus never rewarded anyone for obeying the letter of the law and not the spirit. e.g. Matt 15 1-10, and Matt 16:11. Not everything is out. Obviously the ten commandments still apply. No one said you can murder anyone. So how do you know what is in and what’s out? A little common sense works wonders here. Note Jesus’ initial answer to man in Mark 10:19. You know the commandments, it’s not that complicated. Scholars have tied most of the rules of Leviticus back to the commandments. e.g. magic is out because the classical power source for magic is demons or in other words other Gods. If you are talking about card tricks or modern pharmacy, that doesn’t apply. Incest? You know darn well all forms of sexual immorality are against the rules.
So what about Usury?
If you look at the sort of financial transactions going on at the time, you can make a good case that the charging of interest as practiced at that time and place is an immoral practice. Money lenders are charging very high interest rates for necessities. Think share cropping in the post civil war era. “I owe my soul to the company store” and all that.
Common sense would indicate there is a big difference between this sort of practice and the modern commercial loan. e.g. I want to buy a widget machine, but I can’t afford one. If I have one I can make a 10% return on my investment. I’m willing and happy to pay a bank 5% for a commercial loan, so I can make 5% on my money. The bank in turn pays savers 2% on their savings accounts for the privilege of using their money to make commercial loans. Everyone benefits from this system. I f you think about it, it has more in common with a partnership agreement than it does a loan shark. A lot of what modern financial institutions ( like corporations) so is manage risk and facilitate rather complex partnership arrangements.
Lets remember that Leviticus dates back to about 1500 BC, give or take a few hundred years. A lot of our modern insurance and corporation rules date back to Rhodian sea law. Rhodes had not even build the Colossus of Rhodes at the time Leviticus was written. It will be a thousand years or so before Rhodes really gets going, so again I think we can logically distinguish between Biblical usury and modern banking.
Seeing what banks charge for credit cards these days, it’s probably best that Leviticus did say something about usury. It’s an important warning to all of us that charging excessive interest can be a means of oppression. But I don’t think a clear reading of the Bible supports the notion that no one may ever charge interest on a loan at any time, for any reason.