Search

[German Version] I. Concept – II. Legal Aspects – III. Economics – IV. Non-Christian Antiquity – V. Bible – VI. Christianity – VII. Judaism – VIII. Islam I. Concept Interest is payment in exchange for a right of use or exploitation, typically on a temporary basis and always agreed for a fixed period of time. Money later gained increasing importance as an object of lending and now occupies a dominant position, although other items or rights remain possible as objects of lending, as for example rent. In economics (see III below), this mutual commitment between the conferral of the right to use and the corresponding obligation to pay interest remains key, and numerous explanation models have been put forward as to why interest is paid and what exactly it is intended to compensate (A.R.J. Turgot, Nassan William Senior, Eugen v. Böhm-Bawerk, J.M. Keynes, W. Eucken, Gustav Cassel, J. Schumpeter, critically: K. Marx). In the field of jurisprudence (see II below), the concept is narrowed down even further: interest claims must be computable from a capital stock with respect to a particular span of time. On the basis of this definition, the objects of lent are restricted to capital stocks or to a defined amount of comparable (“tangible”) assets, whereas rent in particular no longer counts as interest in the legal sense. What is also clearly formulated is that the element of periodic payment alone is not sufficient. For this reason, pensions are not subsumed under the concept of interest. Conversely, it is by no means necess…

[German Version] I. The State of Israel – II. History – III. Society I. The State of Israel The formal full name, State of Israel (Heb. Medinat Yisrael), calls attention to the spatial divergence between the political entity and the geographical and historical Erets Israel (Land of Israel, Palestine and its linguistic equivalents). Israel is located in southwest Asia, on the southern stretch of the eastern coast of the Mediterranean. In its northern half, inland from the shore, is the coastal area and further east are the hills, from north to south, of the Galilee, Samaria, and Judea, wi…

[German Version] I. General The word slavery denotes a social structure (including its normative legal and ethical standards) in which certain individuals are considered and treated as objects. A slave owner has the right to decide what the slaves do, as well as where and how they live; the owner also has an absolute right of disposition over their bodies and lives and the right to se…

[German Version] I. The Prophet – II. Message – III. Growth of the Book – IV. Reception The prophetic book ascribed to Micah stands in the middle of the Book of the Twelve (Prophetic books). The biographical data in the other books make him the first prophet (Prophets and prophecy: II) from the southern kingdom.…