Usury in the Bible: What the Old Testament Actually Says About Interest

Most arguments about usury in the Bible never touch the four passages that carry the weight. Someone quotes a phrase, someone counters with the parable of the talents, and the conversation ends without anyone opening Leviticus 25. So here is what the Old Testament actually says about interest, with the Hebrew that makes the difference and the places where serious readers still disagree.

The short version: the Torah bans lending at interest to a covenant brother, defines the ban around poverty and dependence rather than around a percentage, extends it to food and "anything that is lent," and lists refusing interest among the marks of a person who may dwell on God's holy hill. What it does not do is give you a clean rule for a 2026 bond fund.

The four texts, in their own words

Exodus 22:25 sits inside the Covenant Code, in a run of laws about the vulnerable (widows, orphans, sojourners). "If you lend money to any of my people with you who is poor, you shall not be like a moneylender to him, and you shall not exact interest from him." The next two verses cover a cloak taken in pledge, which has to be returned by sundown because it is the man's only covering. Interest here is one item on a list of ways a lender can grind a poor neighbor.

Leviticus 25:35-37 sits inside the Jubilee legislation. "If your brother becomes poor and cannot maintain himself with you, you shall support him as though he were a stranger and a sojourner... Take no interest from him or profit, but fear your God, that your brother may live beside you. You shall not lend him your money at interest, nor give him your food for profit." Two things to notice: the ban covers goods and not only cash, and the stated purpose is that the brother may live beside you, meaning his household stays intact rather than collapsing into debt slavery.

Deuteronomy 23:19-20 is the broadest formulation. "You shall not charge interest on loans to your brother: interest on money, interest on food, interest on anything that is lent for interest. To a foreigner you may lend at interest, but to your brother you shall not, that the LORD your God may bless you in all that you undertake." This is the verse that makes the whole topic contested, and I will come back to it.

Psalm 15 turns the law into a character portrait. Verse 5 says the one who may dwell on God's holy hill is the one "who does not put out his money at interest and does not take a bribe against the innocent." Setting interest beside judicial bribery is the giveaway. Both are ways of converting another person's weakness into your gain.

Two more get skipped and shouldn't. Ezekiel 18:8, 13 and 17 put lending at interest alongside idolatry, adultery and robbery as the prophet contrasts a righteous man with a violent son. Nehemiah 5:1-13 is the only narrative enforcement scene: returned exiles are mortgaging fields and selling children to pay grain and tax debts, Nehemiah confronts the nobles, and they agree to return the fields, houses and the interest they had exacted.

Usury in the Bible: what the Old Testament actually prohibits in Hebrew

Two Hebrew words do most of the work here, and English translations blur them together.

Neshekh (from the root meaning "to bite") appears in Exodus 22:25, Leviticus 25:36-37, Deuteronomy 23:19-20 and Psalm 15:5. Tarbit or marbit (from the root "to increase") appears in Leviticus 25 and Ezekiel. One long-running reading, found in medieval Jewish commentary and repeated in modern scholarship, treats neshekh as the increase seen from the borrower's side (the bite taken out of him, often deducted up front) and tarbit as the same transaction from the lender's side. Others read neshekh as interest on money and tarbit as increase on commodities, which fits the way Leviticus pairs "your money at interest" with "your food for profit."

Either way the practical outcome is the same, and it is worth borrowing for a Christian reading. The prohibition never sets a rate cap. There is no biblical "excessive interest" line above which a loan turns sinful, and any stipulated increase on a loan of money or fungible goods is what the text names. That makes the modern English word "usury," which now means predatory or excessive interest, a misleading translation of what the Hebrew describes.

Halakhic practice carried this into a two-tier structure that Bais HaVaad and other contemporary batei din still administer: a biblical tier (ribbis ketzutzah, fixed stipulated interest between Jews) and a rabbinic tier (avak ribbis, "dust of interest"). Jewish commercial finance then solved the business-lending problem with the heter iska, a document that restructures a loan as a joint venture with profit sharing. Christians reading the same verses generally did not adopt that machinery, which is part of why the Christian argument stayed unresolved for centuries.

Why the ban exists: the mechanism, not just the verdict

Read the three Torah passages together and the reasoning is visible in the text rather than inferred.

In an agrarian covenant economy, a loan was almost always distress borrowing. A family's harvest failed, so they borrowed seed grain or silver to make it to next season. The collateral was the field, then the house, then the labor of the household. Exodus 22 pairs the interest ban with the cloak pledge, Leviticus 25 pairs it with redemption of land and release of Hebrew servants, and Nehemiah 5 shows the failure mode when nobody enforces it: fields mortgaged and children in bondage inside one generation.

So the mechanism the law targets is compounding claims against a neighbor whose position is already deteriorating. Sabbatical debt release in Deuteronomy 15:1-2 and the Jubilee land reversion in Leviticus 25 are the other half of the same system: the interest ban keeps the hole from getting deeper, and the release provisions eventually fill it in.

This matters for application. If you think the rule is about the rate, then a low rate satisfies it. If you think the rule is about the structure of a claim on a dependent person, then the rate is close to irrelevant and what you check is whether the lending relationship is extractive.

The foreigner clause, and the strongest case against a blanket ban

Deuteronomy 23:20 permits interest to a nokri. This is the single strongest argument that the Bible does not prohibit interest as such.

The case runs like this. Hebrew has separate words for the resident alien (ger) and the outsider trader (nokri). The ger is explicitly protected by Leviticus 25:35, which tells you to support the impoverished brother "as though he were a stranger and a sojourner," so the poverty-protection net already covers non-Israelites living among you. The nokri is the transient merchant, someone doing business rather than someone starving. On that reading the permission is narrow and consistent: charity loans inside your community carry no interest, commercial loans to a trading counterparty may. The line the Torah draws runs through the purpose and position of the borrower rather than through ethnicity.

John Calvin took roughly this route in the sixteenth century, in his letter on usury to Claude de Sachin and in his Exodus commentary, arguing that the Mosaic rules were tied to Israel's political constitution and to protection of the poor, and that a loan to a wealthy merchant for productive investment is a different act from a loan to a hungry neighbor. He still forbade lending at interest to the poor and warned against making a trade of it. Martin Luther, in Trade and Usury (1524), was harsher and treated the commercial lending of his day as plunder.

The opposing case is also strong. Psalm 15 and Ezekiel 18 do not repeat the foreigner clause; they state the refusal of interest flatly as a mark of righteousness. Ezekiel is writing in exile, well outside the agrarian setting Deuteronomy assumes, and the standard survives the move. The Christian tradition read it as general for well over a thousand years: Nicaea in 325 barred clergy from taking interest, the Second and Third Lateran Councils in 1139 and 1179 pushed the ban to the laity with real penalties, and Benedict XIV's encyclical Vix Pervenit (1745) still declared profit taken on a mutuum, a loan of fungible goods, sinful by its nature. Vix Pervenit also affirmed the extrinsic titles: compensation for actual loss (damnum emergens), forgone opportunity (lucrum cessans) and genuine risk to the principal (periculum sortis). That is how a Catholic conscience could accept modern finance without formally reversing the doctrine, and it is close in spirit to Islamic finance replacing the loan contract with murabaha, ijara or musharaka structures. Anyone who tells you the question is settled is skipping the other side's texts, so map both positions before you pick one.

What the New Testament does and does not add

Luke 6:34-35 pushes further than Deuteronomy: "lend, expecting nothing in return," addressed to disciples about enemies. It raises the bar on charity lending rather than settling commercial lending.

The parable of the talents gets deployed constantly on the other side. In Matthew 25:27 the master tells the wicked servant he should have put the money with the bankers to receive it back with interest, and Luke 19:23 has the same line. The speaker there is a harsh master inside a parable about stewardship, and the remark describes how banking worked. It shows the practice existed and was legally available, which nobody disputes, and that is a long way from a doctrinal permission.

How BRI investors actually apply this

Biblically Responsible Investing screens are built mainly around product and conduct categories: abortion, pornography, alcohol, tobacco, gambling, anti-family entertainment and human rights abuses. Balance-sheet interest is generally not one of the six, which is a real structural difference from Shariah screening and worth admitting rather than pretending BRI is a debt screen in disguise. Where the Old Testament material actually bites in a BRI portfolio is at the conduct level:

• Payday and title lenders, and subprime consumer credit aimed at borrowers who cannot service the loan. This is the Exodus 22 fact pattern with a modern legal wrapper, and it is where the Nehemiah 5 objection lands hardest.
• Debt collection practices, especially wage garnishment and litigation-heavy models against low-income defendants. The cloak pledge in Exodus 22:26-27 is a rule about what you may take from someone who has nothing left.
• Fee and overdraft structures in retail banking that draw a disproportionate share of revenue from the smallest balances.
• Capital structure, if your conscience runs closer to the strict reading. Some Christian investors voluntarily borrow the Islamic thresholds as a proxy: interest-bearing debt under roughly a third of market cap and impure income under 5 percent, the AAOIFI shape used across most Shariah methodologies.

You can see how those thresholds are constructed and where the different bodies disagree on our screening methodology page, and how the BRI lens is defined against the Islamic, Catholic USCCB, Jewish halakhic and LDS lenses in the framework comparison.

How FaithScreener flags interest exposure

Interest shows up in three separate places, answering different questions.

The income test isolates the share of revenue a company earns from interest and other non-compliant sources and measures it against the 5 percent purification threshold. For a manufacturer with a captive finance arm, this is often where the name fails.

The balance-sheet test measures interest-bearing debt and interest-bearing securities against market capitalization, using the 30 or 33 percent bands depending on which methodology you select (Dow Jones Islamic Market, S&P, FTSE and MSCI differ on both the denominator and the exact cut).

The conduct axis is where the biblical material connects most directly. Lending practices and borrower harm are scored separately from the financial ratios, so a bank can pass the ratios and still be flagged for predatory consumer lending. Run a consumer-finance name through the screener with Christian BRI selected and compare it to the Islamic result; the gap between the two verdicts on the same ticker shows you which tradition is objecting to what.

What to actually do with this

Decide in advance which reading you hold: blanket prohibition, the Calvin-style charity/commerce distinction, or the extrinsic-titles route of Vix Pervenit. Everything downstream depends on that choice, and drifting between the three depending on which stock you like is how portfolios end up incoherent.

Then apply it consistently. If you hold the charity/commerce distinction, you are free to own investment banks and still obligated to exclude payday lenders, as a hard line rather than a preference. If you hold the strict reading, the practical consequence is a much smaller financials allocation, equity over bonds, and cash yields becoming part of what you screen. If you follow the Catholic route, ask of each holding whether the return traces to real risk, real assets and real loss, or to a guaranteed increase on a sum lent.

And check what your bond allocation is doing. People who care about this tend to spend far more time on a bank's business practices than on the coupon they collect, when the coupon is where their own money is doing the lending.

The Bottom Line

The Old Testament bans stipulated increase on loans to a covenant brother, in money or in food, with no rate threshold anywhere in the text, and Psalm 15 and Ezekiel 18 restate it as a mark of righteousness without repeating Deuteronomy's foreigner clause. The one thing to carry out of these four passages is that the law targets the structure of the claim rather than the size of the rate, which means a low-interest loan to someone who cannot repay sits closer to what Exodus 22 forbids than a market-rate loan to a solvent merchant does. Standard BRI screens will not catch that for you, so the conduct axis is where you have to look.

This is educational research, not a religious ruling or personalized investment advice, so confirm your application with a qualified pastor, scholar or financial advisor before you act on it.