This is fascinating. It's interesting that most of their loans don't seem unlike payday loans i.e. advances to produce a good or service.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Mesopotamian_units_of_...
As you said, fascinating stuff.
Jesus was the redeemer (one who buys off your debts) because he was going to cancel your moral debt of sin: the language of the gospels uses concepts familiar to his audience.
According to Graeber, the jubilee year was introduced by Nehemiah (who had just returned from exile in Babylon, where he learned about it) not out benevolence, but because too many slaves meant the state had too few taxpaying farmers.
Given the paucity of surviving texts from that place and era, that sounds like a chain of unsupported assumptions worthy of an evo psych paper.
Still, the idea just seemed too delicious to pass up: debt cancellation does not arise from benevolence but from fiscal necessity.
These days we work, THEN get the money.
Maybe capital has gotten smarter about when to pay labor - only after the fact.
There's a good book on Athenian banking:
Cohen, E. 1992. Athenian Economy and Society: A Banking Perspective. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
He goes into interesting evidence for bank money (ledger entries not backed by coins, as opposed to metal currency), fractional reserve lending, and inflation in ancient Athens.
For a wider net, on the general legal framework(s) of that time, see perhaps Ancient Greek law in the 21st century, Perlman, Paula Jean, editor:
* https://utpress.utexas.edu/9781477315217/
It turns out one of the largest banks in Athens was owned/run by some slaves: finance was not a 'respectable' profession—with farming/agriculture being the most 'noble'—so it was left to the lower classes and other riff-raff. Lots of slaves ran businesses, and the question often came up whether any associated debt belong to the business, the slave, or the slave's master (important when slaves were bought and sold).