Commento su Shevi'it 10:4

זהו גופו של פרוזבול – its essential principle and its root.

Introduction Today’s mishnah describes what was written in the prozbul, the document we began to discuss yesterday.

והדיינים חותמים למטה או העדים – For this purpose, it is taught “the judges or the witnesses” to teach you that a witness is able to become a judge or a judge [is able to become] a witness, for according to the Rabbis a witness becomes a judge, and Prozbul is a Rabbinical ordinance.

This is the formula of the prozbul: “I turn over to you, so-and-so, judges of such and such a place, that any debt that I may have outstanding, I shall collect it whenever I desire.” And the judges sign below, or the witnesses. Through the prozbul, a person would turn his debts over to a court so that the court would collect them in his place. As we learned in mishnah two, anyone who turns his debts over to a court does not have them remitted by the sabbatical year. So before the sabbatical year was over, the creditor would write out a document through which he would turn his debts over to the court. He would then have a right to collect them after the sabbatical year was over. This was the “legal fiction” through which Hillel prevented people from not loaning to the poor.