Land, Credit and Crisis ─ Agrarian Finance in the Hebrew Bible

Agriculturalist, theologian, and biblical archaeologist Guillaume seeks to make biblical exegetes more familiar with ancient farming and its techniques by integrating some of the growing body of knowledge derived from economic studies of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt. The scribes of the Hebrew Bible grew most of the food they ate, he says, and presupposed a world that is beyond the immediate grasp of academics in affluent post-industrial cities, where the relation between work and food is entirely mediated by money. Taking the three aspects in turn, he considers such topics as land tenure, the myth of the helpless peasant, agricultural credit, debt in the Bible, and financing production and commerce. Distributed in North America by The David Brown Book Co. Annotation Ac2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Philippe Guillaume is a trained agriculturalist, theologian and biblical archaeologist, and has taught Old Testament/Hebrew Bible in Switzerland, Lebanon and England. He is currently writing a Habilitationsschrift at the University of Berne. His most recent publication is Land and Calendar: The Priestly Document from Genesis 1 to Joshua 18 (T & T Clark, 2009).