Do Not Withhold a Loan Because of the Shemitah Year
The Shemitah Dilemma
Deuteronomy 15:1–2 establishes the Shemitah debt-release: every seventh year, all loans to fellow Israelites are canceled. The law is designed to prevent permanent debt servitude — no one should be trapped in indefinite debt cycles. But the law created an unintended consequence the Torah anticipated and legislated against: as the seventh year approached, creditors stopped lending. The poor person who needed a loan near Shemitah could not get one, because no creditor would extend credit that would be canceled before repayment.
Deuteronomy 15:9 addresses this directly: “Beware that there be not a thought in thy wicked heart, saying, The seventh year, the year of release, is at hand; and thine eye be evil against thy poor brother, and thou givest him nought.” The verse names both the internal state (the wicked heart, the evil eye) and the external action (giving him nothing). The commandment governs a thought that produces an action — the calculation that the approaching Shemitah justifies closing the hand to the poor.
Hillel's Prozbul — Legal Creativity in Service of the Poor
By the late Second Temple period, the violation of commandment #351 had become systematic. The Mishnah (Gittin 4:3) records that Hillel the Elder “saw that the people refrained from lending money to one another before the Shemitah, transgressing what is written in the Torah.” Hillel's response was the Prozbul — a legal document transferring the loan to the court before Shemitah. Since the court is a communal institution rather than an individual creditor, it is not subject to the same Shemitah cancellation. The creditor could collect after Shemitah through the court.
The Prozbul is one of the Talmud's most significant examples of legal innovation in response to a real social problem. Hillel did not eliminate Shemitah; he found a mechanism that preserved its formal structure while restoring the lending that commandment #351 required. But the Prozbul also represents an acknowledgment of failure: the wealthy were violating #351 at such scale that the entire credit system for the poor had broken down. A legal workaround was necessary because the commandment itself was not being obeyed. Deuteronomy 15:10 states the positive: “Thou shalt surely give him, and thine heart shall not be grieved when thou givest unto him: because that for this thing the LORD thy God shall bless thee in all thy works, and in all that thou puttest thine hand unto.”
The Evil Eye and the Open Hand
Deuteronomy 15 contains a dense cluster of economic ethics that forms the context for commandment #351. Deuteronomy 15:7–8: “Thou shalt not harden thine heart, nor shut thine hand from thy poor brother: But thou shalt open thine hand wide unto him.” The Torah uses two parallel images — the hardened heart and the shut hand — for the same refusal to help. Opening the hand is the commanded positive; hardening the heart is the prohibited negative. Commandment #351 is the specific case where the hand-shutting is motivated by Shemitah calculation.
Deuteronomy 15:11 closes the section with a statement that has echoed through centuries of Jewish economic thought: “For the poor shall never cease out of the land: therefore I command thee, saying, Thou shalt open wide thine hand.” The permanence of poverty is converted into a permanent obligation to give. There is no future state in which the obligation will lapse because poverty has been eliminated. Commandment #351 stands against every version of the calculation that converts systemic obstacles (the Shemitah, the approach of the seventh year) into permission to abandon the individual poor person standing in front of you.
- Hillel the Elder — Created the Prozbul specifically because commandment #351 was being violated systematically. His legal instrument rescued the poor from being unable to borrow — the direct result of the rich calculating that Shemitah made lending unprofitable.
- The Poor Person Near the Seventh Year — The unnamed figure at the center of commandment #351: they need a loan, know Shemitah is approaching, and are turned away. The Torah's concern is for this specific person in this specific moment — not for the system in the abstract.
- The Creditor Who Calculates — The commandment's antagonist: the person who looks at the approaching Shemitah and concludes it justifies closing their hand. The Torah names their reasoning “wickedness” (beliya'al) and their resulting attitude “evil eye.”
Read the source passage in the Torah reader.
Read in the Torah Reader — Deuteronomy 15:9