hich distinguishes the Hebrew
sacred writings from all others, and that is their insistent note of
proletarian revolt, their furious denunciations of exploiters, and of
luxury and wantonness, the vices of the rich. Of that note the
Assyrian and Chaldean and Babylonian writing contain not a trace, and
the Egyptian hardly enough to mention. The Hindoos had a trace of it;
but the true, natural-born rebels of all time were the Hebrews. They
were rebels against oppression in ancient Judea, as they are today in
Petrograd and New York; the spirit of equality and brotherhood which
spoke through Ezekiel and Amos and Isaiah, through John the Baptist
and Jesus and James, spoke in the last century through Marx and
Lassalle and Jaures, and speaks today through Liebknecht and Rosa
Luxemburg and Karl Kautsky and Israel Zangwill and Morris Hillquit and
Abraham Cahan and Emma Goldman and the Joseph Fels endowment.

The legal rate of interest throughout the Babylonian Empire was 20%;
the laws of Manu permitted 24%, while the laws of the Egyptians only
stepped in to prevent more than 100%. But listen to this Hebrew law:

If thy brother be waxen poor, and fallen in decay with thee,
then thou shalt relieve him, yea, though he be a stranger or
a sojourner, that he may live with thee: Take thou no
interest of him, or increase; but fear thy God that thy
brother may live with thee. Thou shalt not give him any
money upon usury, nor lend him thy victuals for increase.

And so on, forbidding that Hebrews be sold as bond servants, and
commanding that at the end of fifty years all debtors shall have their
debts forgiven and their lands returned to them. And note that this is
not the raving of agitators, the demand of a minority party; it is the
law of the Hebrew land.

There has been of late a great deal of new discovery concerning the
early Jews. Conrad Noel summarizes the results as follows:

The land-mark law, which sternly forbids encroachment upon
peasant rights; consideration for the foreigner; additional
sanitary and food laws; tithe regulations on behalf of
widows, orphans, foreigners, etc.; that those who have no
economic independence should eat and be satisfied; that
loans should be given cheerfully, not only without any
interest, but even at the risk of losing the principal. To
withhold a loan because the year of release is at hand in
which the principal is n