Jubilee years - why they were celebrated in the olden days.
The UK is currently basking in a two-day public holiday celebrating Queen Elizabeth II’s 70-year rule. Not having to go to work for a few days is liberty of sorts, but the biblical and pre-biblical links between jubilee years and liberty were far more intimate in terms of jubilees being events declared by rulers which involved the cancellation of debt and the freeing of slaves from their personal bondage.
It is perhaps ironic in a period in which the United States has been accused ‘weaponising’ the dollar and dollar-denominated debt as a tool of geopolitical influence that Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell is inscribed with a quotation from Leviticus 25:10 which refers to this ancient practice of cancelling debts and freeing slaves every fifty years. The full bible verse is as follows:
“And you shall consecrate the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you, when each of you shall return to his property and each of you shall return to his clan.”
A financially-attuned biblical exegesis reveals a surprisingly-strong focus in the good book of the issue of debt and the problems it was perceived to have caused in the ancient world, many of which will seem surprisingly relevant to the modern reader. Aside from Leviticus, Jesus’ first sermon about not being able to love both god and mammon and calling for a return to the ‘Year of our Lord’ (Luke 4:16) is also a reference to the jubilee year and the cancellation of debt.
Records exist of similar jubilee events in ancient Babylon and Sumaria, and a lesser known fact about the Rosetta Stone, discovered by Napoleon’s forces in Egypt in 1799, is that the actual content of the text refers to a royal edict of Ptolemy V Epiphanes in 197 BCE which cancelled back taxes and other debts.1
So while modern jubilees celebrate anniversaries with a knees-up and a fly-past of historic aircraft, those of the ancient world dealt with the destabilising effect on society resulting from the compounding of interest over time which tended to create disparities of wealth between creditor and debtor, and it was this wealth inequality which the periodic write-off of debt sought to solve. Given the prominence of the Leviticus quotation on Philly’s Liberty Bell, it is quite clear that America’s founding fathers were intimately aware of the link between liberty (or the lack of it) and debt.
President Biden’s recent proposal (yet to be confirmed or even implemented) to cancel $10,000 of student debt for certain graduates would seem to be a classic jubilee event. Reactions to this have been predictably partisan, and clearly many of those who have worked hard to pay off their student debt see this type of one-off event as deeply unfair.
In part this hostile attitude reflects a backdrop in modernity where contract law on debt is ruthlessly enforced. This often goes to bizarre extremes; in terms of credit events that trigger payment for credit-default swaps, Russia is in the process of being deemed to have caused a ‘failure to pay’ event, even though it has at various points tried to pay dollar interest on its debt but has been prevented from doing so by US sanctions. The enforcement of contract law and the seizure of assets in lieu of payment is the bread-and-butter of ‘vulture’ hedge funds, but it also the very antithesis of the concept of liberty which the ancient debt jubilee signified.
The ancient jubilees were instituted because debt was seen as the cause of wealth inequality which led to social disruption. Peasants and soldiers would become alienated from the land and the king if all their possessions (including their person) could be seized in lieu of debt payments, hence the need for periodic resets to create balance in the social order in terms of ownership of the national wealth.
The problem with debt is that the compounding effect of interest means the passage of time is exponentially worse for the debtor and exponentially more profitable for the creditor. The rich get richer and the poor poorer - an ancient problem as well as one which the developed world is currently experiencing. Leviticus called for debt jubilees every fifty years. The current build up of debt roughly started in the 1970s, and it may be the case fifty years on that we are going through a similar sort of period of social and economic flux that used to demand jubilees in the ancient world.
Clearly there is a yawning gap between simple agricultural societies in the fertile crescent of Mesopotamia and the modern global, financialised economy and all those teams of lawyers to enforce contract law at all costs, but if history does teach us anything, it is that some social and economic phenomena are recursive, and if we look at our divided and unequal societies, perhaps there is a case for thinking some sort of reset is on the horizon.
Whether this is an active process (through policy) or a passive one (through economic dislocation and social unrest) is something only time will tell. A cursory glance at the breakdown of law and order in Sri Lanka in 2022 offers a glimpse of what happens if policy makers get behind the curve in terms of their stewardship of the economy and society. The mood music of the 2020’s seems to suggest something is going on. Will our own politicians be up to the task?
And forgive them their debts. Lending, foreclosure and redemption from bronze age finance to the jubilee year, Michael Hudson, Islet-Verlag 2018, Part I.