Abstract
The concept of the Jubilee, or the collective forgiveness of all debts and debtor/slaves, had its origins in the Ancient Near East where it was a secular practice of kings. It came into the Bible originally also as a secular practice of kings but then became the province of priests and a calendar observance to be celebrated every 50 years. It was finally understood in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament to rest in the hands of God alone, an eschatological concept of the forgiveness of all debts/sins and the redemption of all human sins, or debts to God, that became the very basis of the theological history of Luke/Acts.
Keywords
The principal legislation in the Bible on Jubilee is in Leviticus 25. The three salient obligations are a) release of slaves, b) forgiveness of debts, and c) repatriation of property, in the Jubilee year.
The primary theological base of the legislation is that the land and the people belong to God. That is the fundamental key to understanding the Biblical concept of Jubilee. “Purchase” of land, or acquiring it as settlement of a debt so that it leaves the hands of the original family to whom assigned by God as stewards, was really not purchase of the land but purchase of “Usufrucht”—the right to use the land or have rights to the produce thereof. Re-purchase or redemption of a plot of family land was not purchase either, but reclaiming of the plot to restore it to the stewardship of the family to whom originally assigned by God (Johsua 13–19; cf. Jeremiah 32). Thus the biblical concept of redemption of persons and of land had its origins in the basic Jubilee view that Israel, people and land, belonged to God with the assertion that none of the earth belongs to humans but ultimately to God alone. This “theological” point clearly indicates that capitalism as usually practiced in the “developed” world is in violation of the Bible’s assumptions. Indigenous peoples the world over have a lot to teach the “advanced” world about respect for planet earth and its marvelous gifts to all who inhabit it.
The second theological base was that Jubilee was decreed by God as a calendar year. The calendar was a sacred/sacral institution that had to be observed by the faithful. In the pre-exilic calendar Jubilee was celebrated every seven years (Deut 15), whereas beginning with the post-exilic Jewish calendar it was celebrated every 50 years (Lev 25). Juridical ploys were used in later Pharisaic/Rabbinic Judaism, specifically the “Prosbul,” to permit commerce to be uninterrupted in the increasingly urbanized, hellenized world; but the Jubilee had to be “observed” when the calendar indicated.
This last point is important because this made the institution of the Biblical Jubilee quite distinct from its antecedents in the Ancient Near East (ANE), which were under the authority of the king or monarch. The terms used in ANE languages usually meant “clean slate” or “mother state” of affairs. The best understanding of the various terms is probably “economic order.” The practice of such royal decrees was widespread. Usury was very common, often at 20% APR or more. This meant there could be many debtor-slaves in any given society, which clearly weakened the social fabric from within, leaving it vulnerable to attack from foreign sources. The main reason rulers wanted to counter the corrosive effect of widespread debt was military. When they needed soldiers they forgave debts by decree. When they perceived the danger that their land was in effect being ruled by an oligarchy of wealthy creditors, rulers could counter it by an “economic order” decree. They thus restored the normal pre-debt-crisis state of affairs, preserved widespread self-sufficiency, maintained a fighting force dependent on the crown, and secured the land’s rent for the government rather than letting it pass into the hands of creditors. When creditors economically threatened the power of the government, the monarch would counter with royal decrees. (See Michael Hudson in the February 1999 issue of Bible Review, 26–33 & 44, and the consummate study of the biblical Jubilee by John Sietze Bergsma.)
In making Jubilee a divine decree, and/or a matter of the calendar, Biblical legislation took the institution totally out of the hands of monarchs and governments. This was another of Israel’s remarkable adaptations of an ANE idea to the common good. “The land is mine, declares Yahweh, you are but strangers abiding on my land” (Lev 25:23). It lifted the whole idea of “strangers” from rich foreigners who indentured Israelites, to Israelites being but sojourners on God’s land. They were God’s “slaves” from the outset and could therefore not belong to another slaveholder or human. It was a powerful idea, and the development of the legislation can be traced from Exodus 22:25–23:13 through Deuteronomy 15 into Leviticus 25. Arguably the most frequent law uttered in the Torah is that of treating the alien, stranger, immigrant, and debtor foreign or local, with the same compassion as one would a fellow Israelite because they themselves had been immigrant-slaves in Egypt.
Judah’s last king, Zedekiah, “made a covenant” or “proclamation of liberty” (a “jubilee”) during an early Babylonian siege of Jerusalem, but then annulled it when the siege was lifted and the danger of invasion apparently past (ca. 594
The move to take the right to proclaim Jubilee out of the hands of kings, and make it a calendar observance, matched the move from the tension between king and prophet in pre-Exilic times to government by priesthood in Early Judaism. This was then followed by the move to put the power of Jubilee solely into the hands of God, even out of the calendar, and hence out of the province of humans altogether. This move can be seen in the Jubilee poem in Isaiah 61, which speaks of a herald proclaiming the Jubilee “in the year of God’s choosing” (61:1–2a, cited both at Qumran and in the NT as a Jubilee promise), hence not a calendar year.
A growing number of scholars are convinced that the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts are Jubilee “proclamations,” as it were (see Joseph). In other words, the Kingdom of God in Luke is understood as God’s eschatological and final Jubilee proclamation. In the Early Jewish period, Jubilee had been treated in the diversity of Judaism of the period in different ways. One was the Hasidic/Pharisaic mode of instituting the “Prosbul” or “waiver” whereby commerce (which sustained all of society) would not be interrupted when the Jubilee year came around on the calendar.
Another was the mode in other Jewish communities antecedent to Christianity which eschatologized the Jubilee concept (Book of Jubilees, Enoch, Qumran, etc.), taking it out of the calendar, not putting it back into human hands but into God’s hands. It would not be a calendar observance, as normally understood, but would take place when God chose Messiah should come.
Jesus’ teachings in Luke can best be understood as proclaiming that God’s Jubilee for Israel and for the world had arrived. This is signaled by Luke’s putting Jesus’ Sermon at Nazareth (Luke 4:16–30, based largely on Isa 61:1–2a) as Jesus’ first act of ministry, and as the programmatic statement of what that ministry would be like (cf. Luke 7:18–24).
Whereas the other synoptics put the Nazareth sermon late in Jesus’ ministry, Luke puts it first. The sermon is then recalled when in Luke 7 Jesus responds to the Baptist’s disciples about whether Jesus was the one who was to come (7:18–23). Jesus then tells a Jubilee story about debt forgiveness (7:36–50). Luke even makes it clear that the “Our Father” (11:2–4) is a prayer to God to proclaim the Jubilee of debts/sins forgiveness, and the coming Kingdom of God on earth. Matthew undoubtedly reflects the original (6:12) “forgive us our debts” while Luke uses both “sins” and “debts” (Sanders 1992; 2019).
The Book of Acts, the second volume of Luke’s history of God’s work in the First Century, then made clear for early Christians what it would be like to have a people observing Jubilee with their very lives, not only forgiving each other’s debts but sharing what wealth they had (Acts 4:32) knowing that their debts to God (their sins) had been forgiven. They believed that they had been redeemed by (“enslaved” to) God, that is, made God’s in Christ, proclaiming thereby that God’s Herald/Messiah had indeed come, and that the Earth, with all that is in it, belongs to God–the theological foundation of the biblical concept of Jubilee in the first place!