The Mishna (Gittin 4:3) states that Hillel established the prozbul to bypass the biblical remission of debts after the shemitah (sabbatical) year. In this essay I suggest that prozbul is one and the same as “one who submits his contracts to the court” that appears in the preceding Mishnah (Gittin 4:2), and is in fact part of a midrashic explanation of the biblical warning against not lending money in the years leading up to the seventh year.
