Ancient Babylon and banking....

Eli Maor uses a Biblical quote to begin his chapter 3 “Financial Matters” of e:A Story of a Number (Maor, 1994, p23), that refers to the commonly held Jewish law that “forbids a Jewish creditor from profiting in any way from lending to another Jew” (Jacobs, 2016).

“If you lend money to any of My people, even to the poor with thee, thou shalt not be to him as a creditor; neither shalt thou lay upon him interest”

(Exodus 22:24).

“Thou shalt not lend upon interest to thy brother: interest of money, interest of victuals, interest of anything that is lent upon interest. Unto a foreigner thou mayest lend upon interest; but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon interest; that the Lord thy God may bless thee in all that thou puttest thy hand into, in the land whither thou goest in to possess it”

(Deuteronomy 23:20-21).

This novel, historical example provides an analogy to how old “money matters” (Maor, 1994) are and have existed for a longtime before the complicated situation of our current “advanced economy” (Jacobs, 2016). The book of Exodus, while its exact date may in many cases be debatable, has been associated with the time commonly attributed to its author Moses. That puts the date of the book to around 1440 and 1400 B.C Deuteronomy is also attributed to Moses, so it can be easily assumed to have been written around the same time as well (gotquestions?.org, 2016A).

The image above is an example of a clay tablet from the Ancient Babylonian era. Many similar tablets have been found where it appears this great, ancient civilization had a significant amount of mathematical knowledge and may have been using these tables to make calculations easier, including “tables of compound interest (Mastin, 2010A) which are dated to times thousands of years before the writing of Exodus. “In a way, [the] Babylonians did use a logarithmic table of sorts,” but the Babylonians did “not possess our modern algebraic techniques” (Maor, 1994); however, the typical methods, communicated through modern formulas for compound interests and continuously compounded interest are illustrated in the figures below..

References

gotquestions?.org (2016) . Book of Exodus. Book of Deuteronomy retrieved August 8, 2016 from http://www.gotquestions.org/Book-of-Exodus.html and http://www.gotquestions.org/Book-of-Deuteronomy.html

Jacobs, Louis, Rabbi (2016) . Usury and Moneylending in Judaism . myjewishlearning.com .retrieved August 8, 2016 from http://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/usury-and-moneylending-in-judaism/

Maor, Eli (1994) . e:The Story of a Number . Princeton University Press . Princton, N.J. 1994

Mastin, Luke (2010A) . Sumerian/Babylonian mathematics . The Story of Mathematics