Temples of Jerusalem

Legends of Holy Relics Coincide with the Real History of Debt

Key Takeaways

1. During Biblical times, the Ark of the Covenant was last seen when Jewish captives learned the secret of Babylonian debt forgiveness.

2. During Roman times, the Holy Grail originated from the Crucifixion, when Jesus was punished for advocating for the forgiveness of debts.

3. During Medieval times, the Holy Grail reappeared in the legends of King Arthur, around the same time that the Knights Templar introduced early banking practices to England.

The Ark of the Covenant

The Ark of the Covenant was a golden chest that contained the remains of the stone tablets that were the original Ten Commandments. According to the Old Testament, it also contained the staff of Moses’ brother, Aaron, which magically flowered during the Israelites' flight from Egypt.

To the ancient Israelites, the Ark was the most sacred of all objects. It was central to both their religion and their identity. In Jerusalem, the Temple of Solomon housed the Ark until the year 586 BC, when the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar razed that city and demolished the Temple.

Nebuchadnezzar hauled the Jewish inhabitants of Jerusalem back to Babylon with him as slaves. There, the captives were exposed to the Babylonian practice of regular debt forgiveness. This practice was a common feature of the societies that emerged in the Fertile Crescent following the Agricultural Revolution. A famous example is the Code of Hammurabi, another Babylonian king who lived a thousand years before Nebuchadnezzar’s time.

The Jewish captives recognized the immense value of the societal stability afforded by regular debt forgiveness. So, after the Persian king Cyrus eventually liberated them from Babylon, they returned to Jerusalem and consecrated a Second Temple to replace the one destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar. They also formalized the Hebrew Bible and, in numerous passages, incorporated commands for regular debt forgiveness, similar to those of the Babylonian tradition.

This incorporation of debt forgiveness into Jewish scripture was a pivotal moment in the history of finance, and the episode of the Babylonian Captivity exposed the Jews to that Babylonian custom. This episode was also the moment when the Ark of the Covenant is traditionally believed to have disappeared from history.

The Holy Grail

In the century following the Babylonian Captivity, debt forgiveness reached Greece. Solon of Athens laid the groundwork for his city’s golden age with the widespread forgiveness of mortgage debts.

But when the King of Rome considered stabilizing his own society by “cutting the heads off the tall poppies” (as the Roman historian Livy put it), his wealthiest subjects ran him out of town. They convened the Roman Senate to rule in his stead as an oligarchy and established a powerful taboo against kingship. Here, the economic fates of Greece and Rome dramatically diverged.

Five hundred years later, Roman society had exploded into the largest empire the world had ever seen. This was accomplished, in no small part, through the merciless exploitation of its working class. Popular revolts and labor strikes frequently roiled Roman society. This was the economic stage onto which Jesus of Nazareth stepped. His debut sermon was a reading of the scroll of Isaiah, one of the many places in Jewish scripture that called for Babylonian-style debt forgiveness.

Jesus’ advocacy for economic justice landed him in hot water with the Roman authorities, though his public execution was ostensibly a punishment for violating the Roman taboo against kingship. Augustine of Hippo went on to reinterpret Jesus’ demands for forgiveness as forgiveness for personal moral failings, instead of forgiveness for debts owed to the oligarchy. But telltale signs of Christianity’s original meaning can still be found in the 1611 King James version of the Bible, which renders the Lord’s Prayer as, “And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.”

Despite St. Augustine’s reinterpretation, the ministry of Jesus was a significant inflection point in the history of finance. For the duration of the Middle Ages, the Roman Catholic Church banned interest-bearing loans, a major factor in the politics of the Protestant Reformation.

As with the Babylonian Captivity and the Ark of the Covenant, the history of debt once again coincides with a legend about a magical artifact. This time it’s the Holy Grail. According to lore, the Grail is the cup used at the Last Supper before Jesus’ execution, and by Joseph of Arimathea to catch the blood of Christ at the Crucifixion.

Joseph was the owner of the plot of land on which Jesus’ tomb was located, and he’s supposed to have brought the Grail to England. He’s believed to have arrived at Glastonbury with a flowering staff, eerily similar to the Staff of Aaron contained within the Ark of the Covenant. Sprigs of flowering Glastonbury hawthorn are still cut twice a year and presented to the British Monarch in acknowledgement of this Grail legend.

The Knights Templar

A generation after Jesus’ lifetime, the Roman military drove the Jews from their homeland. They fled to places like Eastern Europe, Spain, and the Netherlands. Like Nebuchadnezzar five centuries before, the Roman general Titus laid siege to Jerusalem and demolished the Second Temple that had replaced the original Temple of Solomon. A portion of the western wall remains today, a significant holy site venerated by modern Jews. In 1867, the Italian artist Francesco Hayez dramatically painted Titus’ destruction of the Second Temple. His work serves as the Title Card to this essay.

During the Crusades, the Knights Templar arrived in Jerusalem and established their headquarters on the Temple Mount, situated over the ruins of the Second Temple. Their name “Templar” comes from this location. Whispers began to circulate that the Knights had located a mysterious object of immense power while excavating the ruins. Rumors included both the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail.

In the real-life history of finance, the Knights Templar actually did accumulate immense power. They accomplished this not by discovering some holy relic, but by skirting the Church’s ban on interest-bearing debt. During the Crusades, the road to the Holy Land was rife with bandits. For safety’s sake, pilgrims began trading in their coins for letters of credit at Templar Churches, like the one that still stands today on Fleet Street in London.

Unlike coins, letters of credit were worthless to brigands. And upon arrival in Jerusalem, pilgrims could swap their letters for coins again. The Knights charged a fee for this service that was built into the exchange rates they offered. This practice was mathematically identical to charging interest on a loan, but it didn’t immediately arouse the suspicion of Church authorities. Once again, a significant moment in the history of finance is accompanied by strange tales of magical artifacts.

Conlcusion

Three significant occasions in the history of debt are accompanied by fantastical stories of holy relics imbued with extraordinary power. This bizarre pattern may be explained by the fact that the exponential power of interest-bearing debt isn’t intuitively obvious to the human mind. Albert Einstein once quipped, “Compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe.” Perhaps the notion of powerful magic artifacts arose in the minds of people unfamiliar with compound interest, who were nevertheless witnessing the wealth and power it’s capable of amassing. Whatever the case may be, the presence of magical artifacts surrounding significant moments in debt and finance is one of history’s strangest coincidences.

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Further Materials

If a man has a debt lodged against him, and the storm-god Adad devastates his field or a flood sweeps away the crops, or there is no grain grown in the field due to insufficient water—in that year he will not repay grain to his creditor.
The Code of Hammurabi, Law 26–k