Emancipating Debt: Biblical Jubilee and Contemporary Economics
The passage of the “American Rescue Plan Act” has not only given accent to the crisis of the pandemic. It has also underscored the unbearable economic inequality between those left behind and those who have prospered through and benefitted financially from the pandemic. The energy around President Biden’s plan has evoked for me attention to a remarkable, much neglected text that may indeed provide a clue to our economic recovery and well-being:
For they are my servants whom I brought out of the land of Egypt; they shall not be sold as slaves are sold. (Leviticus 25:42)
This verse occurs near the end of a long chapter of regulations concerning the land and the economy. In every part of this regulation, (a) provision is made to protect the well-being of the land and a neighborly economy from unrestrained predation, and (b) care is taken to enact and ensure the intent of YHWH for the land and the people who belong to YHWH.
In the specific paragraph of this verse, special protection is offered for those who become impoverished and go into debt (vv. 39-46). It is allowed that the ones indebted may be bound to their creditors, but only for a time, until the year of Jubilee.
Thus the bondage of debt has clear, precise, and non-negotiable limitations, in order to prevent the formation of a permanent debtor class. It may be noted that in our verse, the terms rendered as “servants” and “slaves” are the same term, ’eved. The two terms should both be translated in the same way, “slave” or “servant”:
“my servants … not sold as servants,” or
“my slaves … not sold as slaves.”
The double rendering as “slaves” is in my judgment preferable, because that translation makes explicit reference to the slavery of Israel under Pharaoh, thus an allusion to the emancipation of the Exodus. Thus the regulation asserts a limit to a predatory economy in which creditors enslave debtors to perpetuity.
The matter is immediately contemporary for us, because our economy readily preys upon those who remain hopelessly and forever in debt among us.
This regulation, together with its companion piece in Deuteronomy 15:1-18, constitutes the most explicit biblical teaching on the economy. The regulation of Deuteronomy 15 provides for the cancellation of debts in the seventh year, the “year of release.” In this companion piece, two verses are placed in startling juxtaposition. On the one hand,
Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I therefore command you, “Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land.” (v. 11)
This is the verse famously quoted by Jesus:
For you always have the poor with you, but you will not always have me. (Matthew 26:11; see Mark 14:7)
Not so often noticed on the other hand is verse 4:
There will, however, be no one in need among you, because the Lord is sure to bless you in the land that the Lord your God is giving you as a possession to occupy.
In light of verse 4, the observation of verse 11 is not a statement of resignation. It is, rather, an observation that makes the practice of debt cancellation urgent. The statement of verse 4, moreover, ensures that if debt cancellation is regularly practiced, poverty can and will be eliminated. Thus the two verses must be read together.
It is clear that the Torah provisions intend that the reality of YHWH’s will pertains to the interruption and subversion of conventional economic practices whereby those with money (creditors) are free to use and exploit those without resources (debtors).
My attention has turned to this text in Leviticus 25:42 on two counts. First, I was reading Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America by Saidiya V. Hartman that is a sobering, clear-eyed assessment of the import of U.S. slavery and the long enduring wake of racism after emancipation. Hartman divides her analysis into two parts. In the first part concerning slavery, she studies slave “performances” that on the one hand served to amuse slave owners, but at the same time were acts of defiance with the few tools the slaves had at their disposal. (See James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance.)
Hartman pays particular attention to the practice of “stealing away,” a phrase that referred to any momentary withdrawal from slave reality, even for worship, but that ultimately aimed at escape, emancipation, and abolition. This action of “stealing away to Jesus” is an exact echo of the request of the slaves in Egypt:
Let my people go, so that they may worship me. (Exodus 8:20; see 10:3, 7)
Worth noting is that the term “worship” is ‘eved, “serve,” the same word used in Leviticus 25:32, “servant, slave.” Thus worship equals “serve,” so that worship is a dangerous, daring act of subversion, contradicting their servitude to Pharaoh. Hartman cites a case in which slaves had such a “praise meeting” that was overwhelmingly focused on freedom:
When the patrollers discovered such meetings they would beat the slaves mercilessly in order to keep them from serving God. Turner recounted the words of one patroller to this effect: “If I ketch you here servin’ God, I’ll beat you. You ain’t got no time to serve God. We bought you to serve us.” Serving God was a crucial site of struggle, as it concerned issues about styles of worship, the intent of worship, and, most important, the very meaning of service, since the expression of faith was invariably a critique of the social conditions of subordination, servitude, and mastery. As Turner’s account documents, the threat embodied in serving God was that the recognition of divine authority superseded, if not negated, the mastery of the slave owner. (66)
It is clear that any act of “stealing away” was a performance of the claim of God in Leviticus 25:42. The slaves in the U.S. did not belong to white masters, but to the God of freedom, an affirmation that made slavery theologically illegitimate because such servitude preempted God’s own claim. Thus slavery constituted a contest between the claim of God and claim of the slave system, a contest decisively settled in our verse. Hartman draws the stark conclusion:
Serving God ultimately was to be actualized in the abolition of slavery. (67)
The second part of Hartman’s book is an acute reflection on the status of ex-slaves in the post-emancipation economy. In the wake of emancipation, state governments operated by former slave owners were quick to enact Black Codes whereby ex-slaves were now bondaged in debt and were left economically bereft and hopeless in a system that fashioned new forms of servitude:
Emancipation instituted indebtedness. Debt was at the center of a moral economy of submission and servitude and was instrumental in the production of peonage. Above all, it operated to bind the subject by compounding the service owed, augmenting the deficit through interest accrued, and advancing credit that extended interminably the obligation of service. The emancipated were introduced to the circuit of exchange through the figurative deployment of debt, which obliged them to both enter coercive contractual relationships and faithfully renumerate the treasure expended on their behalf. Furthermore, debt literally sanctioned bondage and propelled the freed toward indentured servitude by the selling off of future labor. (131)
Thus in Hartman’s exposition the two historical periods are summarized:
Slavery: servitude;
Emancipation: debt.
Both periods feature bondage in which white control was beyond question or challenge. It is clear that our text in Leviticus 25:42 pertains exactly to these two conditions; on the one hand, endless servitude and on the other, brutal debt.
It is of course important that the brutalizing realities of slavery and Jim Crow be kept alive and available in our awareness. It is equally important, however, to see that the issues of servitude and debt are not only of long ago pertinence, but are present time contemporary social realities.
A happy recent happenstance in my life is that my wife, Tia, and I discovered we were reading complementary books. Tia was reading a most important recent book, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How we can Prosper Together by Heather McGhee. At the same time I was reading Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business by Rana Foroohar. It is not often that our reading converges as it did in this case.
The book by McGhee narrates with acute critical awareness the brutal, costly reality of racism among us.
At the same time Foroohar provides important data about our current economic reality. The thesis of her book is that “finance” has come to dominate our economy to the severe detriment of business and manufacturing. By “finance,” Foroohar refers to the fact that major corporations that used to “make” things have found it more profitable (lucrative!) to engage in credit, loans, and debt on a huge scale than it is to do their ordinary business. Surprisingly enough, this includes such companies as GM, GE, and Apple.
The practice of “finance” produces immediate economic gains for shareholders. It also preys upon the vulnerable who finally may end in an ocean of debt. Thus, for example, the hustle of sub-prime loans that eventuated in the severe recession of 2008 was a strategy (scheme!) whereby vulnerable people were placed in hopeless debt and lost everything. (See the summary of that strategy by Aaron Glantz, Homewreckers: How a Gang of Wall Street Kingpins, Hedge Fund Managers, Crooked Banks, and Venture Capitalists Suckered Millions out of their Homes and Demolished the American Dream.) Foroohar’s verdict goes this way:
With the rise of the securities and trading portion of the industry came a rise in debt of all kinds, public and private. Debt is the life-blood of finance; it is where the financial industry makes its money … Finance … has, perversely, all but ensured that debt is indispensable to maintaining any growth at all in an advanced economy like the United States, where 70 percent of output is consumer spending. (9)
We may consider both the slavery-Jim Crow reality of servitude and debt and the contemporary force of finance that reduces to debt and dependency not unlike servitude in the contestation with Leviticus 25:42. I suggest that this interface of slavery-Jim Crow and contemporary “finance” with Leviticus 25:42 yields two questions that may preoccupy us:
Who serves whom?
Who owes what to whom?
These two questions concern servitude and debt. “Debt” is the leverage that the moneyed class exercises in order to maintain a dependable labor pool, an exercise that of course extends to immense student debt that requires and ensures regular long-term work.
Such debt has become definitional for our economy, ensuring that the defining relationships among us are those between creditor and debtor.
The requirements of the present arrangement are less dramatic than those of the nineteenth century of servitude and indentured debt. It is easy enough, however, to show that the same leverage that operates now works as it did then, the leverage of servitude and debt.
I suggest that we might well focus on these two questions:
Who serves whom?
Who owes what to whom?
Of course for many in the churches of the moneyed class there is no servitude and no significant debt. But then we must ask in any case, “How is it that we may participate beneficially in a system that aggressively produces debt and servitude?”
The “news” from Moses and the Torah is that the God of covenantal emancipation does not intend debilitating or immobilizing servitude. The God of covenantal emancipation intends that economic life will be ordered to preclude such ways of bondage. If and when we focus on these two questions, we have an opportunity to grasp afresh the core intent of the gospel.
So much of our attention and energy have been siphoned off into private salvation, escapist spirituality, and otherworldliness.
But the verdict of Leviticus 25:42 tells otherwise. It is this claim for the God of covenantal emancipation that sets in motion the Exodus narrative, the mandates of Sinai, and the prophetic insistence on alternative. And if that were not enough, we imagine a nearly straight line that runs from Leviticus 25:42 to the dictum of Jesus:
No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth (Matthew 6:24, Luke 16:13).
(We have nicely taken the sting out of this sharp either/or by conventionally translating the second element of the last sentence as “mammon,” a word not readily understood among us. More recent translations have boldly used the term “wealth” that makes the saying much more pointed and demanding.) In Matthew this dictum is followed by Jesus’ invitation to move beyond anxiety about “things” for a life toward God’s kingdom, a life delivered from anxiety about food, drink, or clothing, that is, a life free from covetous fear and greed (65-33). The same dictum in Luke follows Jesus’ parable of worldly advice about dishonest wealth and the offer of true riches (16:1-9).
There is a compelling expectation that this trajectory of teaching that runs from Leviticus to the teaching of Jesus can refocus our understanding of the gospel and our practice of faith. It turns out, in this trajectory, that the gospel is all about whom to serve and what to owe. While these matters are open to theological dimension, their accent is on the reality of our material life.
This trajectory constitutes an invitation (summons?) to the pastors, teachers, and interpreters of the church to give primary attention to servitude and debt, and the way in which these destructive practices continue to skew the real life of the world.
An economy based on servitude clearly does not serve the coming kingdom of God but has chosen wealth rather than God.
An economy based on debt likewise has chosen wealth rather than God. In a season of servitude, what is required is emancipation, exactly the work and will of the Exodus God. In a society of debt, what is required is cancellation of debt, exactly the intent of the Jubilee year and the “year of release.”
It is something of a surprise to find that our lead text occurs in the book of Leviticus. It is a surprise because the book of Leviticus is primarily concerned with God’s holiness and the essential safeguards that may protect that holiness. But then in the mandates of Leviticus 19 we get commandments concerning the poor (vv. 9-10) and the neighbor (vv. 17-18).
It turns out that God’s holiness is not simply a cultic affair or a religious phenomenon. God’s holiness, in biblical horizon, is other than that because this God is relentlessly committed to the neighborhood; for that reason holiness tilts toward covenantal neighborly justice. This reality serves as a corrective to the more popular notion of holiness as famously articulated by Rudolf Otto (The Idea of the Holy) who understood holiness as the awesome experience of the “numinous.” Walter Kaiser, “The Book of Leviticus,” NIB I, 1131-1132, sees that for Otto, holiness is an “affective experience, not one anchored in the character of God.” But the Bible to the contrary, and especially Leviticus 19, insists that faith and ethics are necessary aspects of the same coin, though they are by no means identical. Faith must demonstrate its authenticity by the way it operates in the ordinary affairs of life.
The religious life of faith must have ethical outcomes if it makes a claim to authenticity.
The historical review of McGhee concerning the continuing brutality of racism and the analysis of contemporary “finance” by Foroohar together attest to the practice of bondage, ancient and contemporary, that violates the holiness of God and that transgresses the requirements of neighborliness. Wealth as the ultimate goal of a slave economy, and wealth as the ultimate goal of contemporary “finance” in every case make life “nasty, brutal, and short.”
The gospel attests to an alternative. That alternative requires emancipation from servitude and cancelation of immobilizing debt.
The God of Moses and of Jesus intends otherwise, nothing less than “life abundant.” But “life abundant” requires emancipation and cancelation of debt. It turns out that these requirements are as urgent and as contemporary as the “American Rescue Plan Act.” More than that plan is required. Nonetheless that plan may provide entry into fresh exploration of the claims of faith, the reality of the holy one, and the needs of the neighborhood. The plan may hint at a wake-up call from a season when wealth and finance, servitude and debt seemed normal. Entrusted to us is responsibility for a very different normalcy that awaits implementation.
Walter Brueggemann
