... And Forgive Them Their Debts

Michael Hudson spent four decades with Harvard's Peabody Museum digging into Assyrian tablets and biblical texts, and what he found will reframe how you read both. His core argument is that interest-bearing debt originated in Bronze Age Mesopotamia, that ancient rulers routinely cancelled debts through Clean Slate proclamations to prevent social collapse, and that the Bible's Jubilee provisions are fundamentally about debt cancellation — not metaphorical sin. The Financial Times named it one of the best economics books of 2018, and Assyriologists broadly support his debt-relief thesis. The caveat is that this is dense academic scholarship filtered through Hudson's heterodox economics lens, which mainstream economists sometimes resist. Faith-curious readers may find the biblical reinterpretation stimulating even if the perspective is secular-academic rather than devotional. Fully clean.