The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
capital. To the present stock exchange black list against brokers who hold back the difference between top price and actual selling price, often corresponded the outcry against those who pleaded before the ecclesiastical court with the exceptio usurariæ pravitatis.
CHAPTER III
1. Of the ancient languages, only Hebrew has any similar concept. Most of all in the word מְלָאבָה. It is used for sacerdotal funntions (Exod. xxxv. 21; Neh. xi. 22; 1 Chron. ix. 13; xxiii. 4; xxvi. 30), for business in the service of the king (especially 1 Sam. viii. 16; 1 Chron. iv. 23; xxix. 6), for the service of a royal official (Esther iii. 9; ix. 3), of a superintendant of labour (2 Kings xii. 12), of a slave (Gen. xxxix. 11), of labour in the fields (1 Chron. xxvii. 26), of craftsmen (Exod. xxxi. 5; xxxv. 21; Kings vii. 14), for traders (Psa. cvii. 23), and for worldly activity of any kind in the passage, Sirach xi. 20, to be discussed later. The word is derived from the root לאךְ, to send, thus meaning originally a task. That it originated in the ideas current in Solomon's bureaucratic kingdom of serfs (Fronstaat), built up as it was according to the Egyptian model, seems evident from the above references. In meaning, however, as I learn from A. Merx, this root concept had become lost even in antiquity. The word came to be used for any sort of labour, and in fact became fully as colourless as the German Beruf, with which it shared the fate of being used primarily for mental and not manual functions. The expression (חק), assignment, task, lesson, which also occurs in Sirach xi. 20, and is translated in the Septuagint with διαθήκη, is also derived from the terminology of the servile bureaucratic regime of the time, as is דבַר־יום (Exod. v. 13, cf. Exod. v. 14), where the Septuagint also uses διαθήκη for task. In Sirach xliii. 10 it is rendered in the Septuagint with κρίμα. In Sirach xi. 20 it is evidently used to signify the fulfillment of God's commandments, being thus related to our calling. On this passage in Jesus Sirach reference may here be made to Smend's well-known book on Jesus Sirach, and for the words διαθήκη, ἔργον, πόνος, to his Index zur Weisheit des Jesus Sirach (Berlin, 1907). As is well known, the Hebrew text of the Book of. Sirach was lost, but has been rediscovered by Schechter, and in part supplemented by quotations from the Talmud. Luther did not possess it, and these two Hebrew concepts could not have had any influence on his use of language. (See below on Prov. xxii. 29.)
In Greek there is no term corresponding in ethical connotation to the German or English words at all. Where Luther, quite in the spirit of the modern usage (see below), translates Jesus Sirach xi. 20 and 21, bleibe in deinem Beruf, the Septuagint has at one point ἔργον, at the other, which however seems to be an entirely corrupt passage,
