I am not a historian but a student of economics. Within economics one uses models which include lending, yet this was not always the case. Within Christian, Islamic, and Jewish social doctrines are prohibitions on interest rewarding the lender. This has been posited, within economic circles, to inhibit the growth of economies by not using the funds necessary to those who wished to have them.
How have modern ideas, viz. lending being a good thing, supplanted older ideas about the practice of lending for a profit?
As related questions come in, I may edit this text to clarify my question.
The oldest evidence of interest on loans I am aware of dates to c. 1900-1800 BCE; both Old Assyrian and Old Babylonian economic texts document loans at interest(sometimes at very high rates!). See for example this publication, which includes a discussion of a collection of model contracts(that is, fill-in-the-blank documents made for students so they could practice drafting certain very highly standardized and repetitive contracts) including loans: http://www.academia.edu/1127591/_A_Handbook_from_the_Edubaa_An_Old_Babylonian_Collection_of_Model_Contracts_ZA_101_2
Nonethless, I'm glad you asked this question because it points to to some interesting issues with attitudes towards loans. We do know from the regular or occasional royal cancellation of loans that there was a tension between the economic necessity of loans and the potential burden they laid on the borrower; one Hurro-Hittite text describes the destruction of the city of Ebla as divine judgement for the king of Ebla's refusal to cancel debts. The Julibee year(in which all debts are cancelled) is a similar institution found in the Hebrew bible and which is probably cognate to similar practices elsewhere in the Near East.
Regarding your comment on Jewish law: There's actually an interesting body of Jewish law concerning debt that attempts to reconcile the economic need for loans and profit on borrowing of some kind with the prohibition of loans at interest to fellow Jews. One of the earliest examples of this is the prosbul, a legal fiction developed by the Talmudic rabbis by which a private debt was transferred to a court to circumvent the Jubilee loan cancellations. Interestingly, the reasoning behind this was at least somewhat humanitarian; it was instituted according to the rabbis because of fears that people were refusing to make loans they knew would be cancelled. A later development in the early modern period was a legal fiction known as the Heter Iskra that developed out of various medieval and early-modern profit-sharing contracts like the Islamic Mudabara contract and the widespread Mediterranean Commenda contract. The exact legal formula is rather complicated, but the basic principle is that the creditor is contractually entitled to a share of the expected profits rather than interest. Interestingly, this is quite different from early legal fictions in Jewish law concerning interest, having developed in the 16th and 17th centuries in response to the broader development of credit-based economies. So as you can see rabbis at least could and did find ways to accommodate the need for credit and credit-based economies.