Pawn

To pawn, in Scripture, is to hand over a movable possession as security for a debt or obligation. The transaction sits at the intersection of credit and charity: the lender protects himself by holding the pledge, but the Mosaic legislation hedges that protection on every side so that the pledge never becomes a tool for grinding the poor. Around this civil-law core cluster the related practices of suretyship — pledging one's own person rather than property — and the patriarchal "security deposit" that functioned as proof of a contract.

The Pledge in Patriarchal Practice

Before the giving of the law, the pledge already operates as a recognized form of guarantee. Tamar requires a security deposit from Judah before she will trust his promise of a kid from the flock: "Will you give me a security deposit, until you send it?" (Ge 38:17). When Judah asks what she will accept, she names tokens that cannot be denied later — "Your signet and your cord, and your staff that is in your hand" (Ge 38:18) — and Judah hands them over. The pawn is later sought back through an intermediary: "Judah sent the young goat by the hand of his companion the Adullamite, to receive the security deposit from the woman's hand: but he didn't find her" (Ge 38:20). The episode shows the form of the institution in its earliest biblical appearance: a recognizable item of value, surrendered until the underlying obligation is discharged.

The Mosaic Law of the Pledge

The Mosaic legislation accepts the pledge as a legitimate instrument of credit but encloses it with restrictions that prevent it from working ruin on the debtor. The creditor may not enter the debtor's house to seize the pledge himself: "When you lend your fellow man any manner of loan, you will not go into his house to fetch his pledge. You will stand outside, and the man to whom you lend will bring forth the pledge outside to you" (De 24:10-11). The dignity of the debtor's home is therefore preserved even in the moment of giving security.

Certain objects are wholly exempt. The handmill or the upper millstone — the household's daily means of subsistence — may never be taken: "No man will take the mill or the upper millstone for a pledge; for he takes a soul for a pledge" (De 24:6). To take the means of bread is to take life itself.

When the debtor is poor, the garment-pledge must be returned each evening. "If you at all take your fellow man's garment for a pledge, you will restore it to him before the sun goes down" (Ex 22:26). Deuteronomy presses the same point: "And if he is a poor man, you will not sleep with his pledge; you will surely restore to him the pledge when the sun goes down, that he may sleep in his garment, and bless you: and it will be righteousness to you before Yahweh your God" (De 24:12-13). The widow's clothing receives an absolute protection: "You will not wrest the justice [due] to the fatherless sojourner, nor take the widow's raiment for a pledge" (De 24:17).

Pledge-Taking as the Mark of the Oppressor

The prophets and wisdom writers measure cruelty by what a creditor will seize. Job's portrait of the wicked centers on this very abuse: "They drive away the donkey of the fatherless; They take the widow's ox for a pledge" (Job 24:3) — taking, that is, the very draft animal by which the widow could earn the bread to repay. Eliphaz's accusation against Job (mistaken in its application but conventional in its categories) runs along the same lines: "For you have taken pledges of your brother for nothing, And stripped the naked of their clothing" (Job 22:6).

Amos lays the same charge against Israel's worship: "and they lay themselves down beside every altar on clothes taken in pledge; and in the house of their God they drink the wine of such as have been fined" (Am 2:8). The garment that should have been returned at sundown is instead spread out under the worshipper, and the wine bought with extorted security funds his liturgy.

Ezekiel makes restitution of the pledge a defining mark of the just man. The man who lives is the one who "has not wronged any, but has restored his pledge for debt, has taken nothing by robbery, has given his bread to the hungry, and has covered the naked with a garment" (Eze 18:5,7). Conversely, the man who dies is the one who "has wronged the poor and needy, has taken by robbery, has not restored the pledge" (Eze 18:12). And the wicked who turns is the one who "restores the pledge, gives again that which he had taken by robbery, walks in the statutes of life, committing no iniquity" (Eze 33:15). Returning the pledge is, in Ezekiel, almost a synecdoche for the whole life of righteousness.

The bed under the borrower is the last thing left; the proverb warns the would-be debtor not to risk losing it: "If you have not with which to pay, Why should he take away your bed from under you?" (Pr 22:27).

Suretyship: Pledging the Person

Where pawning surrenders an object, suretyship surrenders the person. To "strike hands" was to bind oneself to discharge another's debt if he failed. Wisdom is uniformly grim about the practice. Solomon presses his son to escape it as urgently as a bird from a snare: "My son, if you have become surety for your fellow man, If you have stricken your hands for a stranger; You are snared with the words of your mouth, You are taken with the words of your mouth. Do this now, my son, and deliver yourself, Seeing you have come into the hand of your fellow man: Go, humble yourself, and importune your fellow man; Don't give sleep to your eyes, Nor slumber to your eyelids; Deliver yourself as a roe from the hand [of the hunter], And as a bird from the hand of the fowler" (Pr 6:1-5).

The same warning is repeated as a settled principle: "He who is surety for a stranger will smart for it; But he who hates suretyship is secure" (Pr 11:15); "[A] man void of understanding strikes hands, And becomes surety in the presence of his fellow man" (Pr 17:18); "Don't be one of those who strikes hands, [Or] of those who are sureties for debts" (Pr 22:26). And where someone has been foolish enough to do it, the wise creditor takes a real pledge: "Take his garment who is surety for a stranger; And hold him in pledge [who is surety] for foreigners" (Pr 20:16); "Take his garment that is surety for a stranger; And hold him in pledge [who is surety] for a foreign woman" (Pr 27:13).

Yet suretyship is not in itself condemned. Judah pledges his own life for Benjamin's safe return: "For your slave became surety for the lad to my father, saying, If I don't bring him to you, then I will bear the blame to my father forever" (Ge 44:32). The patriarch's offer is the moral high point of the Joseph cycle, and the very thing wisdom warns against in the abstract becomes here an act of self-giving love.

Sirach holds the two sides together. He praises the surety as one who gives his soul for his neighbor: "A good man becomes surety for his neighbor, But he who has lost his sense of shame fails him. The kindness of a surety do not forget, For he has given his soul for you. A sinner destroys the estate of a surety, And he who is of an ungrateful mind fails him who delivered him" (Sir 29:14-17). Then immediately he sounds the proverbial alarm: "Suretyship has undone many who were prospering, And has tossed them about as a wave of the sea. Wealthy men it has driven from their homes, And they wandered among strange nations. The sinner who falls in his suretyship And tries to get out of it, falls into judgements" (Sir 29:18-19). The counsel that follows splits the difference: "Help your neighbor according to your power, And take heed to yourself that you do not fall" (Sir 29:20).

Lending and the Refusal of Interest

Pawning belongs inside the wider biblical frame in which lending to the brother is itself an act of charity, not commerce. "If you lend silver to any of my people with you who is poor, you will not be to him as a creditor; neither will you⁺ lay on him interest" (Ex 22:25). "Take no interest of him or increase, but fear your God; that your brother may live with you" (Le 25:36). Nehemiah confronts the post-exilic nobles for the same offense: "You⁺ exact usury, every one of his brother" (Ne 5:7). The just man "has not given forth on interest, neither has taken any increase" (Eze 18:8); the man who stands forever on Yahweh's hill is "He who does not put out his silver to interest" (Ps 15:5); and "He who augments his substance by interest and increase, Gathers it for him who has pity on the poor" (Pr 28:8). Sirach echoes the Torah note: "He who lends to his neighbor shows kindness, And he who strengthened him with his hand keeps the commandments. Lend to your neighbor in time of his need, And repay your neighbor at the appointed time" (Sir 29:1-2).

The reciprocal duties on the borrower are equally plain: "The wicked borrows, and does not pay again; But the righteous deals graciously, and gives" (Ps 37:21); "The rich rules over the poor; And the borrower is slave to the lender" (Pr 22:7); "Owe no man anything, except to love one another" (Ro 13:8). The pledge is a concession to weakness on both sides — to the poverty that needs the loan and to the prudence that wants security — but the controlling note is the open hand: "you will surely open your hand to him, and will surely lend him sufficient for his need [in that] which he wants" (De 15:8); "All the day long he deals graciously, and lends; And his seed is blessed" (Ps 37:26); "It is well with the man who deals graciously and lends; He will maintain his cause in judgment" (Ps 112:5); "But love your⁺ enemies, and do [them] good, and lend, never despairing" (Lu 6:35).

When Debt Outruns the Pledge

Where the pledge is insufficient, the body of the debtor or his family stands next in line. The widow of one of Elisha's prophets cries, "the creditor has come to take to him my two children to be slaves" (2Ki 4:1) — debt-slavery as the final security when no pawn remains. In Nehemiah's day the people are reduced to mortgaging the land itself: "We are mortgaging our fields, and our vineyards, and our houses: let us get grain, because of the famine" (Ne 5:3). The whole sequence — pledged garment, pledged ox, pledged child, pledged field — runs through the Old Testament as a single descending scale of ruin, and the Mosaic statutes against entering the debtor's house, against taking the millstone, and against keeping the garment overnight are the legislative attempt to halt that descent at its first step.