Economics, Labor, and Charity in Ancient Judaism

Approaches to work, labor, trade, finance, and caring for the poor are all ultimately connected to how one understands the economy and economic activity. The sources in the Posen Library explore how wealth is created, maintained, lost, managed, and redistributed. Hellenistic and Roman-era Palestine have the best sources for the era (in comparison to Babylonia) and provide the background context for most of the texts in this collection.

Agriculture was long the dominant sector of the economy in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East. The ancients lived as peasants, tenants, sharecroppers, hired laborers, and landowners. Agriculture—either to provide for one’s own household or as a source of employment—provided a means of sustenance, and most adult men spent the majority of their waking hours working in agriculture. The Hebrew Bible, the central touchstone and tether for Jewish writings of the Greco-Roman era, was thoroughly soaked in an agricultural context, and the realities of agrarian daily life lie in the background of biblical thought and law. We see this, for example, in the laws on bailment (transfer of possession of goods for safekeeping, as an alternative to a mercantile partnership) in Exodus 22:6–7; lending, which assumes borrowers are poor peasants rather than businesspeople borrowing for commercial purposes (Exodus 22:24–26; Deuteronomy 15:1–11); care for the poor, where support is provided in kind at the harvest (Leviticus 19:9–10; Deuteronomy 24:19–21); and other areas. Scholars have rightly noted that the Hebrew Bible scarcely treats topics such as manufacturing, money, and banking—precisely the areas that would increase in importance during the Hellenistic and Roman periods.

Although agriculture remained the predominant sector of the economy, in the Greco-Roman era, the economy would begin to see significant advances in nonagrarian sectors. On the one hand, the pastoral and agrarian contexts in which the Hebrew Bible was written and which it primarily addresses were ill suited to cope with many of these realities. On the other hand, the authority of biblical texts (even before canonization) demanded that later Jewish authors contend with the inherited ideas and laws in the context of new economic realities. It is at the nexus of maintaining biblical traditions and reacting to contemporary developments that creative thinking on the topic of wealth took place.

An important source of change was Hellenization, which brought with it increased urbanization and trade and left an indelible mark on the region and on the Jewish thinkers who lived there. Although ancient Palestine had always been dotted with urban centers, urbanization significantly increased in the wake of Alexander the Great’s conquest of Palestine in 332 BCE. New cities were founded, and existing settlements were expanded as they became centers of Hellenistic culture. Another wave of urbanization was initiated by Herod the Great and the Herodian dynasty around the turn of the era. Of particular note is the transformation of the Galilee by Herod Antipas (r. 4 BCE–39 CE), who founded Tiberias and expanded Sepphoris, both of which would later become important centers of Jewish life. Further urbanization followed the end of the First Jewish Revolt in 70 CE, as the Flavian dynasty established military colonies in strategic locations as part of an effort to integrate Palestine into the eastern Roman Empire. Urbanization reached its peak in the second and early third centuries CE under the emperor Hadrian and then the Severan dynasty, and urban life and culture became essential and unavoidable aspects of the socioeconomic fabric of Roman Palestine during the age of the early rabbis.

An important feature of life in Greco-Roman cities was the marketplace, a central location for communication, display, and commerce. The number of coins discovered from ancient Palestine increased in the Hellenistic and Roman eras, reaching its highest level from the middle of the second century through the mid-third century CE, corresponding to the period in which the earliest rabbinic texts were taking shape. Money and material wealth are frequently mentioned in these texts: incidentally, as a fact of life; as objects of inquiry, as in discussions of loans or commerce; and in the context of narrative and metaphor, to help the authors make broader conceptual and theological points. The monetization of the Galilee was surely promoted and maintained by urbanization, Palestine’s integration into the economy of the Roman world (especially after the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132–135 CE), and increased long-distance trade and taxation, both of which promoted payment in coin.

Urbanization also meant increased population density and elevated visibility of the poor. Marketplaces, other public spaces, and densely packed domestic areas facilitated begging and brought the poor out of the shadows, laying bare their impoverished conditions. The rich, well-off, and poor lived cheek by jowl, as encounters between the poor and nonpoor became frequent and surely generated an interest among writers to address the causes of and possible remedies for poverty.

In short, texts from the Second Temple and classical rabbinic eras reflect an increasingly complex economy, affected not only by rainfall and other agricultural conditions but also by commerce and market practices, inflation, and other factors that were relatively unknown to early biblical authors. The possible ethical, moral, and theological meanings of these economic phenomena were increasingly the objects of inquiry for Jewish writers of this era. Their writings address the moral and theological value of physical labor, especially as it may come at the expense of Torah study. We also see Jewish reactions to the standard pan-Mediterranean stigmas against commerce and financial activities, as there remained an intellectual preference for livelihoods connected to agriculture. Care for the poor was a characteristically Jewish concern. During this period, charity (tzedakah) developed into one of the preeminent religious commandments and even became an identity marker of Jews and Judaism.