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The slate is wiped clean and everybody gets to start over. It’s a nice idea.
The Jubilee has its basis in the book of Leviticus, Chapter 25. The Israelites were instructed that every half century there should be a reversion of land to its original owners or their heirs, a general forgiveness of debt, and a manumission of bond-servants. Leviticus 25:13 In the year of this jubile ye shall return every man unto his possession. The slate is wiped clean and everybody gets to start over. It’s a nice idea. Never mind that The New Oxford Annotated Bible contains the following footnote: “there is no evidence that the jubilee program was ever carried out”... At one time or another, most of us have wished for a Jubilee (involving both our financial and personal affairs). But the imposition of a Jubilee on a credit- integrated, globalized, 21st-century economy would (will?) be a disaster. And I don’t want that disaster to be blamed on ancient tribes of wandering Israelites... Their Torah was committed to writing early in the first millennium B.C. And it was about events that took place a thousand years before they were recounted. Things have changed since then. Of course, right and wrong haven’t changed. The Ten Commandments remain carved in stone just the way they were in the movie of the same name starring Charlton Heston.
But social rules and religious observances do change. For example, a few chapters earlier in Leviticus... Leviticus 1:5 And he shall kill the bullock before the Lord: and the priests... shall bring the blood, and sprinkle the blood round about upon the altar... O’Rourke though I may be, I’ve been to temple for bar mitzvahs and bat mitzvahs and have never seen anything like that. Plenty of things are extant in the Bible that today’s observant Jews and Christians frown upon – slavery, polygamy, child marriage. God gives us rules according to time and circumstances. God did not speak through Moses to tell the ancient tribes of wandering Israelites, “Thou shalt not look upon thy iPhone at the dinner table.” The Jubilee – from the Hebrew word yobel , meaning “ram,” hence “triumphant blast of a ram’s horn” – has its basis in the particular circumstances of the Israelites in the 2nd millennium B.C. The most important circumstance was that the Israelites lived in a zero-sum economy. They were farmers and shepherds. They were dependent on land. There was (excluding a brief parting of the Red Sea) a fixed amount of land. Land in the possession of someone
American Consequences | 7
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