“Proclaim Liberty Throughout the Land”

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According to biblical law, every 50 years a Jubilee year is to be proclaimed—debts are to be canceled, and property is to be returned to its original owner. How such a year could avoid causing economic disruption and chaos, however, has been hard for scholars to understand. Many have regarded the Jubilee law as nothing more than a utopian ideal, more an expression of social idealism than a practical policy. But viewed in its broadest ancient Near Eastern context, the Jubilee turns out not to be so utopian or impractical after all, given the economic structures of ancient societies.

The announcement of the Jubilee appears in Leviticus 25 as part of the holiness code given by God to Moses on Mt. Sinai: “You shall count off seven weeks of years—seven times seven years—so that the period of seven weeks of years gives you a total of forty-nine years. Then you shall sound the horn loud…on the Day of Atonement…And you shall hallow the fiftieth year” (Leviticus 25:8–10).

Then comes the statement made famous in part by its inscription on the Liberty Bell, in Independence Hall in Philadelphia: “You shall proclaim liberty throughout the land.” Alas, this is a bit of a mistranslation. The Jubilee law refers to an economic kind of liberty. The New Jewish Publication Society translation is more precise, if not as emotionally stirring as the Liberty Bell translation: “You shall proclaim release throughout the land for all its inhabitants. It shall be a Jubilee for you. Each of you shall return to his holding and each of you shall return to his family…That fiftieth year shall be a Jubilee for you” (Leviticus 25:10–11a).

What is actually bought and sold in a real estate transaction, 028the text explains, is usufruct (the right to use the land or, more precisely, to have the produce of the land) for a fixed number of years. The land itself is not bought or sold: “What he is selling you is a number of harvests…The land must not be sold beyond reclaim…Throughout the land that you hold, you must provide for the redemption of the land” (Leviticus 25:16, 23–24).

Most critical scholars date this material to about the sixth century B.C.E. But it has antecedents that date almost two thousand years earlier. These antecedents can help us appreciate what lies behind the Jubilee.

Similar rulings, called clean slate proclamations by scholars, were widely known in the ancient world. The oldest surviving clean slate was established by Enmetena, who ruled the Sumerian city-state of Lagash from about 2404 to 2375 B.C.E. The word he used was amargi (literally, “return to the mother”), which was generally thought to signify a return to the original, “mother” state of affairs.¹ This was presumably the period prior to the accrual of rural debt levied to compensate for the economic disruptions caused by warfare between Lagash and its neighbor Umma.

About 50 years later, in 2350 B.C.E., another clean slate was declared by a successor of Enmetena, Urukagina, to celebrate his first full year of rule. “Debt servitude for theft has been abolished,” he proclaimed. He “liberated” not only lawbreakers who were indentured to families they had injured, but also other debtors.² For this general amnesty, or release, he used the same term Enmetena had used, amargi.

For many years, scholars translated amargi rather vaguely as “liberty,” although sometimes they used the more specific term “release.” It has also been translated as “tax reduction,” “free-trade act,” “debt cancellation” and “economic order” act. This last translation, by the French Sumerologist and Assyriologist Dominique Charpin, may be the most accurate. It goes to the heart of the matter: an ideal of how a well-structured society ought to function. Preserving economic order involved cancellation of back debts for “user fees,” or quasi-taxes owed to the palace, and a release of bond servants created by debts.

Another Sumerian ruler, Gudea, who was immortalized in numerous statues, also “remitted debts,” 029but without using the term amargi.³ His debt cancellation policy is mentioned in two inscriptions recorded on the skirts of his statues, which date to about 2200 B.C.E. The inscriptions are derived from Gudea’s 1,400-line poem (the longest surviving Sumerian poem) commemorating his rebuilding of the temple of Gatumdug.

However, Sumerians were not the only ones to declare clean slates; the practice was widespread. A hundred years after Gudea, in Ur, which is mentioned in the Bible as the birthplace of Abraham, ruler Ur-Nammu issued a clean slate, as did his son Shulgi.⁴

Between 2000 and 1800 B.C.E., the Babylonian and Amorite dynasties proclaimed clean slates in Isin and Larsa, at least one of which appears to have coincided with a military campaign.

At about the same time, two Assyrian rulers issued similar proclamations.⁵

Clean slates were designed to accomplish three aims:

• They restored family members to their pre-debt status. Bond servants were released. (Outright slaves, mostly women and girls who had been captured by force, however, were not freed; they were returned to the debtors who had pledged or forfeited them, along with the debtors’ wives, daughters and sons. Families were thus reunited, slaves and kin together.)

• They restored the crop rights of indebted cultivators who had forfeited or sold their usufruct rights under economic duress. However, most houses in towns were in a different category. Urban houses and orchards in the commercial sphere were exempt from these royal edicts, which were primarily intended to protect the basic self-sufficiency of small landholders.

• Personal “consumer” debts also were annulled. But here again, commercial debts were left intact. The aim was to cancel agrarian debts that had led to the forfeiture of family members and lands. This restored the basic means of self-support for the population at large.

Most debts did not actually involve loans; rather, they accrued as arrears owed by strapped cultivators to palace collectors for fees or quasi-taxes. When rulers canceled debts, they were canceling obligations owed mainly to themselves.

Debts arising from economic distress—crop failure, drought and other “acts of God”—created antiquity’s most serious economic distortions because of the interest charges that they accrued. The standard rate of interest was 20 percent per annum, or as usually stated, 1/60th of the debt principal per month. This rate of interest remained stable for more than 2,000 years. (So much for modern theories of supply 031and demand that claim that administered rates are powerless in the face of market forces!) Mathematical exercises used to train Babylonian scribes required them to calculate the amount of time it would take for a debt to double. Answer: five years. In 30 years—that is, six 5-year doubling periods—a debt multiplied 64 times (that is, 2⁶). These calculations make it clear how much more rapidly debts increased than the ability to pay them, especially when natural disasters wiped out harvests.

At this rate of interest, the dynamics of debt quickly weakened society from within, rendering it prone to attack from without. As debt claims grew more rapidly than herds, barley output or other economic activity, usury became the major lever by which absentee owners monopolized the land, drove off its inhabitants and reduced many to bondage.

Rulers sought to counter the corrosive effects of debt, largely for military reasons. Soldiers often were settled on royal lands. When creditors attempted to take the crops from these lands, they threatened to strip the ruler of the ability to fill the military draft in an age when warfare was endemic and mercenary armies were still largely unknown. To have permitted state-allocated lands and the crops they produced to pass irrevocably into the hands of creditors would have disenfranchised the armed force. Indeed, Hammurabi’s Code (1762 B.C.E.) specifically prohibits creditors from taking the usufruct of tenants on royal and other public or communally held lands whose cultivators owed military service to the palace. It also annuls any sale of rural fields, orchards or houses belonging to soldiers.

Neither the Sumerians, the Assyrians nor the Babylonians ever went so far as to ban interest-bearing debt (usury). It was recognized as inherently necessary, at least occasionally, to enable cultivators who lived on the margin of subsistence to bridge the gap between income and expenditure. But when economic conditions got out of whack, clean slates were proclaimed. Thereafter, debts were allowed to begin mounting up again until, once more, they reached an intolerable level. Hammurabi, for example, proclaimed clean slates in the year of his accession (1792 B.C.E.) and in the years 1780, 1771 and 1762. The one in 1762 was established to celebrate his thirtieth year of rule, his completion of “a month of years.” Six consecutive rulers of Hammurabi’s dynasty also canceled debts during the following 166-year period.

In sum, these royal edicts did not cause problems, they solved them—by restoring the presumably normal pre-debt state of affairs. They preserved widespread self-sufficiency on the land for its customary holders. They sustained a free and economically independent fighting force. They rendered forfeiture or sale of land and family members only temporary, recognizing that irreversible transfers would have allowed absentee landlords to evolve into a permanent wealthy aristocracy. In effect, they secured the land’s rent for the palace rather than letting it pass into the hands of creditors.

Surviving Babylonian legal records show that these royal edicts were enforced. Formal commissions were established to review real estate sales. And there are records of lawsuits brought by former landholders against creditors who refused to hand back the subsistence plots that were supposed to be returned to their original, pre-debt owners.

Creditors sought to circumvent these royal edicts by creating loopholes, but successive proclamations prevented this.

I have already noted the Sumerian word for these releases: amargi. The Assyrians most often used the term andurarum; the Babylonians, andurarum and misharum. Some scholars see an etymological relationship between the term andurarum and the Hebrew word deror (d-r-r), which is used in Leviticus 25 for canceling agrarian debts in the Jubilee year. This relationship has prompted speculation that much Jewish law, including the debt-cancellation provision of the Jubilee, was developed in the neo-Babylonian Empire, which conquered Judah in 597 B.C.E., absorbing it as a province and deporting many of its most highly educated inhabitants to Babylon.

Although the Jubilee shares the basic idea of a clean slate proclamation, it also has fundamental differences. Instead of a ruler declaring a clean slate on a whim, the principle was enshrined in Jewish law. Henceforth, this law of economic equity would be periodic and automatic. This took it out of the hands of rulers and embedded it in the national religion. What was made sacred was no longer the king, as in Bronze Age Mesopotamia, but the law. For the land belongs not to the king, but to God: “The land is mine,” declares God, “You are but strangers resident with me” (Leviticus 25:23). Thus the basis of the release from debt, as part of the Sinai covenant, was moral and ethical. It recalled the Israelites’ enslavement in Egypt.

By the sixth or fifth century B.C.E., conditions in Israel were ripe for the Jubilee. When King Solomon built the Jerusalem Temple, the Bible does not even hint that he canceled debts as Gudea had done in similar circumstances more than a millennium earlier in Sumer. Instead of freeing his kingdom from bondage, Solomon’s taxes are reported to have led to widespread debt servitude.

When Solomon died in about 930 B.C.E., his son Rehoboam initiated a crisis that split the kingdom in two. Instead of inaugurating his reign with a fiscal and debt amnesty, he did just the opposite: He 032increased the debt burden. When the Israelites sent a delegation asking him to lighten their fiscal yoke, his advisers urged him to comply with their request. But in a hubristic show of force, Rehoboam promised to make their yoke “even heavier. My father flogged you with whips; but I will flog you with scorpions” (1 Kings 12:14). The ten tribes of Israel seceded from the southern kingdom of Judah, echoing the cry of a generation earlier: “What share have we in David, what part of Jesse’s son? To your tents, O Israel! Now look after your own house, O David!” (1 Kings 12:16).

The heavy taxes imposed by Rehoboam forced many families into debt; at the same time, they lost their hereditary lands, making impoverished men unavailable for the army since only citizens could serve and citizenship depended on land ownership.

Later, the prophets denounced most of the subsequent kings of Judah and Israel for giving no more than lip service to the needs of the poor, for having become despots who no longer protected farmers from creditors. Ezekiel 45:9 declares in the name of the Lord, “Stop dispossessing my people.” In the eighth century B.C.E., Isaiah denounced absentee landlords: “Woe to you who add house to house and join field to field till no space is left and you live alone in the land” (Isaiah 5:8).

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After the Babylonians destroyed the Temple and burned Jerusalem in 587 B.C.E., the situation worsened. Judah was ruled by Babylonia, then by Persia, then by Alexander and his generals, and then by Rome. The new imperial centers and their local governors were not interested in maintaining social equity. The Roman-appointed colonial governors in particular sought to enrich themselves at local expense, often by lending money at interest to prominent families who needed help to pay their taxes.

The Jubilee law was the remedy. This law, which lay at the very core of Israelite religion, elevated to a sacred status the social duty of canceling debts, redistributing the land and liberating debt servants.

The first time a society-wide debt cancellation was proclaimed in Israel, according to the Bible, was during the reign of King Zedekiah of Judah (596–587 B.C.E.), in the years just before the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians. The debt cancellation was apparently an emergency measure to recruit debtors to fight in the war against Babylonia: “King Zedekiah had made a covenant with all the people in Jerusalem to proclaim a release [deror, the same word used in the proclamation of the Jubilee] among them” (Jeremiah 34:8). The release from debt was also accompanied by the release of Israelite slaves and those in debt bondage—“that everyone should set free his Hebrew slaves, both male and female, and that no one should keep his fellow Judahite enslaved” (Jeremiah 34:10).

However, Zedekiah seems to have gone back on his word as soon as he drove off the foreign army: “But afterward they turned about and brought back the men and women they had set free, and forced them into slavery again” (Jeremiah 34:11). For reneging on the agreement to release the slaves, the Lord granted another kind of release to the Judahites:

Lo! I proclaim your release—declares the Lord—to the sword, to pestilence, and to famine; and I will make you a horror to all the kingdoms of the earth…I will hand over King Zedekiah of Judah and his officers to their enemies, who seek to kill them—to the army of the king of Babylon, which has withdrawn from you. I hereby give the command—declares the Lord—by which I will bring them back against this city. They shall attack it and destroy it, and burn it down.

Jeremiah 34:17–22

The destruction of Judah and Jerusalem was thus portrayed as a consequence of withdrawing the release.

The fact that Israel’s first recorded release occurred only in the sixth century B.C.E. indicates that the holiness code of which the Jubilee law is a part was adopted only at a relatively late date and was retrojected to the Sinai event by the compilers of the Torah.⁶

Nehemiah also canceled debts. In Nehemiah 5, he describes how he brought many Jewish families back from Babylonia to resettle Judah in 444 B.C.E. Upon completing the rebuilding of Jerusalem’s walls, he found that cultivators were facing the harvest-time obligation to pay interest to the landed gentry and 044creditors. If they could not pay these debts, they would lose their lands. Countering the landlord-dominated assimilationist party, Nehemiah consolidated the resettlement by remitting all debts, releasing the lands and freeing bond servants who had lost their liberty and land to wealthy local families.

I called together a large meeting to deal with them and said: “As far as possible, we have bought back our Jewish brothers who were sold to the Gentiles. Now you are selling your brothers, only for them to be sold back to us!”…Let the exacting of usury stop! Give back to them immediately their fields, vineyards, olive groves and houses, and also the usury you are charging them…Then I summoned the priests and made the nobles and officials take an oath to do what they had promised.

Nehemiah 5:7–12

Promising a release from debts apparently became so widespread that it was recommended as a military tactic by a fourth-century B.C.E. Greek military writer named Tacticus. He recommended that a general who was attacking a town should promise to cancel the debts owed by its inhabitants if they defected to his side. By the same token, defenders of towns under siege could strengthen the resistance of their citizens by agreeing to annul their debts. In early Rome the patrician general Coriolanus promised to cancel the debts of men who joined him in defending the city. (But, like Zedekiah, he is reported to have gone back on his word.)

In Egypt, the young ruler Ptolemy V (204–180 B.C.E.) proclaimed a debt cancellation in 196 B.C.E. This is the edict that the Rosetta Stone commemorates, describing it in Egyptian hieroglyphics on the top, Egyptian demotic (a popular script) in the middle and Greek at the bottom. Thus the key to deciphering hieroglyphics is a clean slate proclamation.

At one point, however, the Levitical “Year of the Lord” became unworkable—at least in Judah. Precisely when is not clear, but sometime between 30 B.C.E. and 10 C.E., the sage and leader of the Sanhedrin, Hillel, declared the legitimacy of a prosbul, a legal clause by which borrowers waived their rights to avail themselves of the Jubilee year (and the sabbatical year, which contained similar release provisions). Only in this way could people who needed to borrow find lenders who would make loans as the Jubilee (and parallel sabbatical) year approached.

Sometime between the adoption of the Jubilee and the prosbul of Hillel, the economic character of warfare had changed. Instead of being composed of land-tenured cultivators, armies were increasingly manned by mercenaries, many of whom were expropriated cultivators seeking work. To buy their services, kings needed money; and the way to raise it was to levy taxes, not to forgive them.

Throughout the Mediterranean, emerging aristocracies gained control of the institution of kingship and created a new symbiosis. In Rome the patrician aristocracy overthrew the kings so as to relieve themselves of the potential check on their economic power. When Sparta’s kings Agis and Cleomenes enacted debt cancellations late in the third century B.C.E., they were overthrown. Annulling rural debts would have caused losses for wealthy families and reversed the process of land consolidation.

Bronze Age rulers had recognized that debts owed to the palace could not practically be collected in periods of crop failure or military devastation: Cultivators couldn’t harvest their crops if drought, insect infestation or other natural disasters destroyed them or if warfare called them away from their land. But as economic and political power became more dispersed, aristocratic families in most regions cared more about bolstering their own position than about promoting overall economic balance and social welfare. The wealthy families became the beneficiaries of economic polarization. Defaulting debtors were driven off the land, which henceforth was used to grow capital-intensive cash crops such as olives and dates, not food crops such as wheat or barley. Under these conditions, the idea of returning the land to its original holders would have entailed a drastic shift in land use as well as demographic resettlement. More people would have been supported on the land, but its profitability would not have been as great.

As landed wealth grew, clean slates gradually became an unworkable utopian ideal rather than a practical program for maintaining a free and self-sufficient land-tenured citizenry.

Yet the old economic laws formed the core of the Torah and related historical books. Designed for a different economy, their aim was to hold together members of a religion committed to ideals of economic equity. The legal and rabbinical glosses contained in the Mishnah and Talmud, which were composed in the early centuries of the common era, do not elaborate on the Jubilee. Indeed, of all the major biblical laws, this most radical one—based on the idea that the Lord, not private appropriators, owned the land—became the first to be cast aside.

According to biblical law, every 50 years a Jubilee year is to be proclaimed—debts are to be canceled, and property is to be returned to its original owner. How such a year could avoid causing economic disruption and chaos, however, has been hard for scholars to understand. Many have regarded the Jubilee law as nothing more than a utopian ideal, more an expression of social idealism than a practical policy. But viewed in its broadest ancient Near Eastern context, the Jubilee turns out not to be so utopian or impractical after all, given the economic structures of ancient societies. […]