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“Proclaim Liberty Throughout the Land”

The economic roots of the Jubilee

By Michael Hudson

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. […]

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Endnotes

1.

Dominique Charpin, “Les Decrets Royaux à l’Epoque Paleo-babylonienne, à Propos d’un Ouvrage Recent,” Archiv für Orient forschung 34 (1987), pp. 36–44.

2.

Maurice Lambert, “Les ‘Reforms’ d’Urukagina,” Revue d’Assyriologie et d’Archeologie orientale 50 (1956), pp. 169–184.

3.

Thorkild Jacobsen, trans., The Harps that Once…: Sumerian Poetry in Translation (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1987), p. 440 (Cylinder B, lines xvii-vii), (statue B, line vii).

4.

Jacob Finkelstein, trans., “The Edict of Ammisaduqa,” in Ancient Near Eastern Texts, ed. James D. Pritchard (Princeton Univ. Press, 1969), p. 526

5.

See A.K. Grayson, Assyrian Rulers of the Third and Second Millennia B.C., Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia I (Toronto: Toronto Univ. Press, 1987), p. 15.

6.

Baruch Levine, Leviticus, the Traditional Hebrew Text (Philadelphia, PA: New Jewish Publication Society, 1989).