When Debt Costs More Than Medicine

Global public debt hit $102 trillion in 2024. Developing countries hold roughly a third of that total, but their debt has grown twice as fast as advanced economies' since 2010. External debt across the developing world has quadrupled in two decades to a record $11.4 trillion.

The cost of servicing that debt is staggering. Last year, developing nations paid a record $921 billion in interest. Between 2022 and 2024, they paid $741 billion more in debt service than they received in new financing. The human toll is now quantified: 3.4 billion people live in countries that spend more on interest payments than on health or education. More than half of Sub-Saharan Africa's population lives under those conditions. Nineteen of Africa's 35 low-income countries are in debt distress.

This month, the OECD published its 2026 Global Debt Report. Ahead of the IMF's next quota review, critics note that developing nations produce 60% of global GDP but hold only 40% of voting power in the institution that shapes their debt terms.

What the text says

Deuteronomy 15 contains one of the most radical economic commands in the Hebrew Bible. Every seven years, all debts are to be released. The Hebrew word is shemittah: a letting go. The command is total. Debts are not restructured, rescheduled, or renegotiated. They are released. The system assumes that no debt should last forever, that the borrower's subjugation has an expiration date built into the calendar itself.

Deuteronomy 15:1-21At the end of every seven years you shall make a release.2This is the way of the release: every creditor shall release that which he has lent to his neighbor; he shall not exact it of his neighbor and his brother; because Yahweh's release has been proclaimed.

What makes the passage extraordinary is what comes next. The Torah anticipates the obvious response. If debts are cancelled every seven years, rational lenders will stop lending as the release year approaches. Why risk a loan you know you'll lose? The Torah sees that logic clearly. And calls it wicked.

Deuteronomy 15:9Beware that there not be a base thought in your heart, saying, "The seventh year, the year of release, is at hand;" and your eye be evil against your poor brother, and you give him nothing; and he cry to Yahweh against you, and it be sin to you.

The Hebrew phrase is davar beliya'al, a "worthless thought." Elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, beliya'al describes the most severe moral failures. Here, the Torah applies it to a financial calculation: the decision to withhold lending because the cost of eventual mercy is too high. The text treats the refusal to absorb loss on behalf of the poor not as prudent risk management, but as a category of wickedness.

The Torah's economic imagination rests on a premise that modern finance would find naive: that a system with built-in release produces justice, and that justice, over time, produces prosperity rather than undermining it.

The reflection

The international lending system has no seventh year. Debt compounds across decades, across generations. Countries that borrowed under different governments, different conditions, sometimes different constitutions, continue servicing obligations that have been repaid many times over in interest alone.

Those who advocate for debt cancellation point to the structural trap: nations caught in cycles where new borrowing services old borrowing, leaving nothing for development. Those who resist cancellation point to accountability, to the risk of rewarding fiscal irresponsibility, to the precedent it sets for future lending.

Deuteronomy 15 doesn't settle that argument. But it shifts the moral center of gravity. The text's sharpest language falls on the lender who sees the year of release approaching and closes his hand. The one who calculates that mercy costs too much. The Torah calls that thought beliya'al. Worthless.

3.4 billion people live under debt burdens heavier than their nations' health budgets. The seventh year was written into the calendar so that no one would have to petition for it. The release was structural. It didn't depend on the creditor's goodwill or the debtor's negotiating power. It came because the system was built to let go.

Modern sovereign lending has no such architecture. The interest accrues. The hand stays closed.