Yoder on the practice of prosboul

While reading through "The Politics of Jesus" by Yoder I found this particularly interesting:

“The frequent remission of debts had a serious inconvenience, already indicated in Deuteronomy 13:7-11: it froze credit. Because of this the rabbis, even the most orthodox like Hillel and Shammai, who had become the champions of the strict application of the law of Moses, hesitated to demand the strict application of the jubilee. The closer the sabbatical year came, the more the wealthy hesitated to lend to the poor for fear of losing their capital. Hereby the economic life of the country was paralyzed. The rabbis sought out a solution to this problem. Adroit commentators of the law, they knew how to make it say the opposite of what it ordered.

It was the most congenial among them, the famous Hillel, whom Jesus sometimes quoted, the grandfather of Gamaliel (who was to be in his turn the teacher of Paul), who found a neat solution to the problem.

This solution was called the prosboul. This word probably signifies: pros boule which is Greek for ‘an action formalized before the tribunal.’ According to the treatise Gittin of the Mishnas, Hillel in this way authorized a creditor to transfer to a court the right to recover in his name a debt which the sabbatical year otherwise might have canceled.

The very existence of the proboul proves that, contrary to the
statement of some authors, there was at the time of Jesus a strong current favoring the strict application of the provision of the jubilee for the periodic remission of debts. Otherwise the institution of this procedure of prosboul would have been unnecessary.” (64-65)