Jubilee Recovered
The provision for a Jubilee Year of debt cancellation is without a doubt the most radical commandment in the Torah of the Old Testament. That commandment summons and authorizes Israel to “proclaim liberty” in the fiftieth year (Leviticus 25:10). It provides for the return of property to those who inhabited it originally, property that has been forfeited through the rough and tumble of the economy. This long exposition of restoration asserts that the land “belongs to YHWH” (v. 23), and that Israelites “belong to YHWH” and may not be sold as slaves for unpaid debt (v. 42). It introduces into ancient Israel an economy that is very different from that of conventional ruthless buying, selling, and trading. It insists that the economy is a vehicle for the enhancement and wellbeing of the community, and those economic matters must be subordinated to neighborly relations that pertain not only among Israelites but also with non-Israelites (aliens).
In his close study of the Sabbath, Patrick Miller, “The Human Sabbath: A Study in Deuteronomic Theology,” The Princeton Seminary Bulletin 6/2 (1985) 81-97, articulates the “sabbatical principle.”
The sabbatical principle, therefore, is a building into the restless movement of human existence regular times for release and recouping, for freeing from the chains and burdens that bind members of the community and for ensuring the provision of good for each member of the community, especially to provide equity and opportunity for those members of the community who in varying degrees do not have it. The sabbatical principle motivated by the Exodus experience is surely the most revolutionary force for the creating and ordering of human community that the Lord’s way with Israel set loose, because it didn’t stop with the seventh day, but began to set all kinds of ways in which the human situation is stopped and changed. It is revolutionary because it cuts against the grain, and it is meant to do so (p. 94).
In his later, fuller exposition of the Sabbath, Miller writes that the Sabbath voiced in the Decalog “opens up a large trajectory of social justice” (p. 134). The “principle” includes the Sabbath itself in which all creatures, human and non-human, are permitted rest from work. It extends to the “Year of Release” through which debts are cancelled in order that debtors can re-enter the economy in a viable way (Deuteronomy 15:1-18). And it culminates in the Jubilee Year that assures a restoration society with viable economic equilibrium which permits all parties to participate fully in the resources and wellbeing of society (Leviticus 25).
As an Old Testament teacher, I have often been asked a recurring set of questions about the Jubilee text. But no question has been asked more frequently than this: “There is no evidence that the Jubilee Year was ever really practiced, is there?” That question has most often been posed to me as a bid for reassurance that we do not have to take the Jubilee seriously because ancient Israel did not take it seriously. The question is often posed in a tone that recognizes that Jubilee restoration is a deep threat to “business as usual” in market ideology. To be sure, the abortive attempt at Jubilee emancipation in Jeremiah 34 is the only clear case that can be cited for the practice in the Old Testament. My long-standing response to the question has been, “It is enough that Israel imagined the Jubilee that only awaits enactment.” That response is a recognition that generative social action of any kind depends upon daring imagination. For that reason it is no doubt important that this daring act of imagination made its way into Israel’s Torah.
But now, upon reading Michael Hudson, a more substantive answer to the question is both allowed and required. Hudson is a renegade economist whose research and thinking is not contained within the “totalism” of market ideology. For that reason he has been able to carry his research in very different directions, to most stunning effect. He has published two remarkable books that are expansive and specific in their research. In the first of these, And Forgive Them Their Debts: Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption from Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year (2018). Hudson traces in broad sweep and in great detail the evidence that imperial regimes, from the beginning of organized governance in the Near East, regularly practiced debt cancellation as a way to restore and maintain social balance. This debt amnesty regularly included three dimensions:
The first element was to cancel agrarian debts owed by the citizenry at large. Mercantile debts among businessmen were left in place. A second element of these debt amnesties was to liberate bondservants…They were allowed to return freely to the debtor’s home…A third element of these debt jubilees (subsequently adopted into Mosaic law) was to return the land or crop rights that debtors had pledged to creditors (p. ix).
The purpose of such action was to curb and resist the predatory capacity of powerful families from monopolizing wealth and reducing the work force to dependency that resulted in debt slavery. Hudson is shrewd enough to notice that these practitioners of debt cancellation were not completely disinterested, as the rulers wanted to be sure that the working class had revenue to pay regularly into the central treasury.
The action of these rulers was to prevent excessive power and wealth of oligarchs who threatened the authority of the rulers.
While Hudson presents data on a great number of rulers in the Near East, we may take his discussion of Hammurabi as most illuminating, because we have such rich documentation from Hammurabi:
Hammurabi’s laws and clean slate proclamations tried to protect indebted community members and tenants on royal lands from being reduced to bondage, so that their labor would remain available for corvée work and military service, and their crop surpluses paid to the palace…The most troublesome fiscal problem facing Hammurabi was creditors (including officials) seizing the crops of debtors and refusing to pay the scheduled sharecropping rent and other fees or taxes due…Hammurabi’s laws aimed to ban the practice of creditors aggressively taking crops from their debtors, to prevent the sale of land held by his fighting force, and to limit the practice of reducing debtors to bondage…The guiding principle of Hammurabi’s fiscal legislation was to avoid debt obligations in excess of the normal ability to pay, except in cases of negligence or where punishment was warranted (pp. 129, 143, 147).
Hammurabi vigorously opposed creditors who refused to pay rent and other fees or taxes in a way that would deny the palace its claim of usufruct. Hudson goes to show that the son and grandson of Hammurabi, Samsuiluna and Ammisaduqa, continued the practices of Hammurabi, both to assure their own income and to maintain social balance.
Along the way Hudson shows how the same tension continues in current interpretation with a present tilt toward neoliberalism that wants to nurture the unencumbered freedom of private predators. Thus he cites even G. R. Driver and John C. Miles, The Babylonian Laws, who opine that Hammurabi’s laws went too far “in protecting needy cultivators from aggressive creditors and tax collectors” (pp. 147-148). This observation is remarkable, because Driver and Miles purport to offer a dry, scientific summary of their material; but even they could not resist a tilt toward a neoliberalism in their articulation. The other side of the argument, in current discourse, is voiced by the long-running New York State District Attorney, Robert Abrams, who sees that our legal system treats victims of debt “with indifference and disdain”…current courts have ignored the victim’s plight (148). Thus the old issue of rulers and oligarchs is joined in contemporary society.* As in olden days, it is still “powerful families” (e.g., the Koch brothers) who seek political leverage for their private gain. We keep performing the same tension, only now the tilt of opinion is strongly in a neoliberal direction.
Of course it will be noticed that Hudson’s title is a phrase from the Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:12). This phrase opens the way for his consideration of biblical texts on debt cancellation. Hudson offers a compelling consideration of the Jubilee text in Leviticus 25, the allusion to Jubilee in Isaiah 61:1, and the action of Nehemiah concerning debt cancellation (Nehemiah 5). Beyond that he considers both Torah regulations concerning debt and the bold strictures of the prophets against greedy gain. When the biblical texts are read in the context of the Near East that Hudson has lined out, the texts do not strike one as abnormal or especially radical. The biblical provisions for debt cancellation are a part of the practice of the Near East wherein centralized power sought to protect small farmers from the predatory reach of wealthy families. Hudson, moreover, carries his analysis into the New Testament. With a reflection from Sharon Ringe, Jesus, Liberation, and the Jubilee Year (1985), he sees that the Jesus movement was committed to the protection of the economy from the predatory class. Along with the Lord’s Prayer we may pay particular attention to the Matthean parable in Matthew 18:23-35. The parable features a king who deals with a debtor slave:
And out of pity for him, the lord of that slave released him and forgave him the debt (Matthew 18:27).
But the king shows so such mercy when it comes to the slave’s refusal to forgive debt owed to him (vv. 32-34). The conclusion of the parable in verse 35 suggests that the king (heavenly father) anticipates and expects that forgiveness must be a regular practice. It is evident the parable, like the prayer, concerns real economic issues that are not to be explained away by the church’s propensity either to privatize or to eschatologize the material concerns of the gospel. Hudson shows how the Jesus texts fit precisely into the Near Eastern context where sovereigns acted to protect economic victims from exploitation. We may notice an example of the church’s characteristic resistance to such teaching in the recent “ecumenical version” of the Lord’s Prayer that translates Matthew 6:12:
Forgive us our sins
as we forgive those who sin against us.
The rendering of the term as “sin” rather than “debts” effectively removes the prayer from an economic domain. In the most naive way the translation plays into the hands of neoliberal ideology that insists that Christian faith has nothing to do with communitarian management of the economy. Hudson’s summation is a compelling insistence to the contrary. Such material concern is front and center in the gospel as it is in the Torah.**
Hudson’s second book on the subject is The Collapse of Antiquity: Greece and Rome as Civilization’s Oligarchic Turning Point (2023). In this book Hudson traces the way in which the ancient long-running practice of debt cancellation slowly disappears, as public opinion and practice gradually endorsed predatory practices at the expense of vulnerable workers. Over time the oligarchs gained the upper hand from the great sovereigns who were then labeled as “tyrants.” Hudson writes, in part a quote from Plato:
An oligarchy becomes “two cities,” Rich and Poor, as great wealth is opposed to extreme poverty for the masses, and almost everyone outside the ruling class is a pauper. Rome’s oligarchy thus was a perpetrator, not a victim, especially as many wealthy estates were politically strong enough to avoid taxes while squeezing free self-supporting families, turning them into clients, bondservants, and ultimately serfs (377).
Thus a new concentration of wealth emerged in the Roman Empire. In perhaps unwitting support of this transfer of leverage, Augustine limited Christian morality to “personal selfishness” and “tiny little sins.” The great drama of debt cancellation disappeared in Christian horizon and the modern world has “inherited Rome’s pro-creditor legal philosophy” (p. 418). That philosophy of Rome, in this regard, clearly pertains in our own discourse of public economics:
Oligarchs always have minimized social spending on public services, along with the taxes levied to finance them. Rome’s Optimates kept social spending at the discretion of the rich, limited mainly to their show of civic philanthropy or staging games to gain popularity for elections. The effect of such fiscal restraint and lack of government support to meet basic needs historically has obliged citizens to rely on patrons or moneylenders for credit. That remains the case today. So does the oligarchic drive to free wealth from strong government and regulatory oversight, with today’s “free market” ideology viewing public regulation as playing only an autocratic role, much as that of Rome vilified the policy of cancelling debts and redistributing land as being that of tyrants seeking kingship (p. 418).
The modern world—and almost all of us—have been effectively brainwashed into the neoliberal ideology that is readily taken among us as normative. From this Hudson draws his inescapable conclusion:
This Western world is indeed the product of antiquity’s oligarchic collapse. It has inherited Rome’s legal philosophy giving creditor claims priority over the livelihood and property of debtors, enabling creditors to absorb most of the economy’s wealth. Contract law is still administered by the wealthiest classes, who view the sanctity of their creditor claims to be an intrinsic element of the natural order. Today’s version of individualistic pro-creditor ideology denies social-democratic royal or socialist regimes legitimate power to regulate and check the rentier classes (p. 427).
In the process our understanding of “liberty” has been completely inverted. In the ancient world “liberty” meant being unencumbered by debt enough to function in the world; now the term has come to mean unhindered leisure for wealth to dominate public life.
I take Hudson’s argument to be completely compelling. It is the victory of the “oligarchs” that has made Jubilee and debt cancellation seem so odd and radical. For the most part we in the church have been seduced into such a tilt of perception. So now, as we observe the destruction of the common good through the present work of the oligarchs, we may indeed reread the Bible more attentively. We may at the outset pay attention to the “sabbatical principle”—Sabbath/Year of Release/Jubilee Year. We may notice that Jesus is an heir of and faithful witness to this tradition of debt cancellation. We may more properly attend to a faithful rendering of the Lord’s Prayer that has debt cancellation at its center. Sharon Ringe provides a useful summation of uses of Jubilee imagery in the New Testament (p. 86). It seems clear enough that Jesus is well-situated in the Jubilee tradition of Moses and the Near East more generally. The proponents of debt cancellation clearly know that there is no middle ground on this issue of debt cancellation. One stands with the vulnerable victims of the predatory economy, or not.
This evidence mobilized by Hudson amounts to an urgent wake-up call to the church. Most of us are well schooled in the way in which the church has rather consistently spiritualized, privatized, or eschatologized gospel claims. On this reading, however, the church is called to a very different task of preaching and teaching that flies in the face of the present domination by oligarchs. For many preachers and teachers in the church, this will be a hard, tricky, and dangerous change of subjects. I have no doubt that in our time, as in the text, we are authorized and summoned to make that change of subjects. Such a change will evoke interest in a very different set of biblical texts and will in the long run cause us to sing and pray very differently. All of us are aware of the abrupt disestablishment of the church in our society. While there are grounds for regret about that disestablishment, it may also be an opportunity for a re-embrace of the urgent, quotidian truth that has been entrusted to us.
Walter Brueggemann
February 17, 2024
* This antithesis calls to mind a sign I once saw in the window of a village home in England:
Long live the Queen;
down with the landlord.
**See my book, Materiality as Resistance: Five Elements for Moral Action in the Real World
(Westminster John Knox Press, 2020).
Walter Brueggemann
Walter Brueggemann is one of the most influential Bible interpreters of our time. He is the author of over one hundred books and numerous scholarly articles.
