Chapter #5 – The Jubilee and the Redemption of Debtors/Slaves:
God and/or Brother as Redeemer
“Proclaim Liberty in the Land to All the Inhabitants” (Lev. 25:10)
A.The Jubilee System
Leviticus 25: The Three Stages of Accelerating Destitution
and Three Forms of Brotherly Redemption
The Family Motif: Redeeming My Needy Brother
No Dead End Poverty: A Policy of Rehabilitation
No-Fault Insurance
A Grant, Rather Than a Favor: Biblical versus Roman Manumission
Brotherly Dignity in the Face of Economic Degradation
Ancient Near Eastern Misharum Reforms and Leviticus 25's Jubilee
B.Ideology and Utopia: Social Thought and the Jubilee
Jubilee – History, Nostalgia, or Social Critique?
The Utopian Role of Law
The Priestly Utopia: Jeffrey Fager
Restoration, Not Revolution: Walter Houston
The Rhetoric of Brotherhood versus the Rhetoric of the Market
Appendices:
In Need of Adoption by a “Big Brother": Reb Arye Levin in Jerusalem
Brotherhood without Regard for Color or Creed: “A Woman of Valor” – “She opens her hands to the poor” (Proverbs 31:20): Maya Bernstein’s Great-Grandmother
First Neighbors, Guild Brothers and Shul Mates
Puritan Brotherhood and Sisterhood in Christ:
The Model of Christian Interdependence
Political Democracy and the Biblical Jubilee:
The HebrewRepublic and the Call for Redistribution of Land (England, the 1650s)
Henry George's Progress and Poverty and Moses’ Jubilee Legislation
"It is up to man to save man: the divine way of relieving misery is not through God's intervention. The true correlation between man and God depends on a relation of man to man in which man takes full responsibility, as if there were no God to count on.”
-Emmanuel Levinas, “Secularism and the Thought of Israel”[i]
“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”
“I should have called it something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”
- Robert Frost, “The Death of the Hired Man”
“To be alive is to be at risk. Even the most fortunate find themselves ill and too soon old, while fire, flood, disease, and random violence ravage those caught in their paths. Neither virtue nor foresight can effectively shield individuals from the fragility of the human body in a hostile world. Communities, in contrast, can do much to protect their members. They can guard, insure, inoculate, and nurse. They can supply work, food, shelter, and defense. The group can protect - or at least sustain - its members in ways unavailable to most people, because of its greater resources."[ii] - L. H. Lees, Solidarities of Strangers
“Proclaim liberty/dror throughout the land (Lev. 25:10) refers to the swallow – “like a bird migrating, like a dror (swallow) flies away” (Proverbs 28:2), for the swallow sings when free, but if in captivity will not eat until it dies.” - Abraham Ibn Ezra, Spanish commentator, 12th C.
“Gilad Schalit, the Israeli soldier kidnapped by Hamas in Gaza, was liberated from five years of imprisonment incommunicado, in a prisoner exchange in 2011. Upon his release, he was greeted by the blowing of the shofar, reminiscent of the Jubilee when the shofar proclaims the release of all slaves and their right to return home to their families.”(anonymous)
The Jubilee is the Bible’s most radical and comprehensive welfare program to solve the problem of poverty within a society of fellow citizens. Unlike the agricultural gifts, which at best can provide food maintenance for the landless, the Jubilee redistributes land to all citizens in equal parcels, adding equality as well as ongoing economic independence to its social goals. It is a “system” – a self-corrective system – which provides multiple mechanisms to retard the fall of citizens to landlessness and debtor slavery. It is, therefore, a “solution” to the problem of poverty, not merely a way to alleviate suffering or remove injustice and limit exploitation. It is important to note, however, that the Biblical description of the Jubilee system does not proclaim as its goal the eradication of poverty. In fact the poor are not mentioned even once in regard to the Jubilee. The Jubilee is about liberty, deror, about preventing or redressing the enslavement of one Hebrew by another that flows from their economic misfortunes and, hence, their dependence for life, for survival, on others. The truly poor – the female orphan, widow and resident alien without land rights – are excluded from its terminology and its mechanisms of rehabilitation.
Yet again perhaps liberty is not the highest goal of Leviticus 25, which also declares all Hebrews to be God’s slaves and all their land to be God’s inalienable possession on which their only standing is as serfs or tenant farmers. Brotherhood, rather than freedom of the individual, is the highest social ideal of the Jubilee’s liberty. A society of mutually helping, mutually “redeeming” brothers will aid one another economically, while seeking to “live with one’s brother” side by side. Those with economic advantages must foreswear the temptation to take advantage of their brother’s distress, thereby creating more permanent relations of mastery and dependence. This society has been ethically traumatized by the slave system they encountered in Egypt, entitled “the house of bondage” in the Ten Commandments (Ex. 20: 2). Here I refer not to the mistreatment of resident aliens – the Hebrews – but to the economic relationship between Egyptians as described when Joseph buys up all of Egypt as slaves to Pharaoh in exchange for feeding them during the seven years of famine. The issue in Leviticus 25 is not the personal narrative of the giver, but the the duties of society to their fellow economically stressed citizens in general, and the duties of brothers to their nearest of kin in particular. In detail this chapter explores the ideal image of human relations among citizens when viewed as brothers as well as the specific mechanisms of this unique agricultural society in remedying the situation of the failing farmer.
However, the Jubilee system has some glaring and instructive blind spots built in to its ideology and its “system.” Even its radical “solution” to poverty – re-allotment of land and manumission – offers no solution to impoverished resident aliens, who have no right to land and may become slaves – permanent possessions of the Hebrews – if their economic situation fails. Residents aliens must be satisfied with the mechanisms discussed above from other laws in the Torah such as the prohibition of illegal economic and judicial exploitation and the provision of subsistence foodstuffs from peah. Only Ezekiel’s redemptive vision of a new Israel returned from Babylonian exile is concerned with their plight and promises those ethnic outsiders an inheritance in a future and more inclusive re-allotment of all of the land of Israel after God’s next redemption of Israel. At that time, the Jubilee will encompass resident aliens (Ezekiel 47:22-23). While Egyptian bondage is central to the social and economic visions of Leviticus 25’s Jubilee, it is not the category of the bondage of Israelas resident aliens that guides its moral sensibility or its formal programs of relief.
In this chapter we consider three aspects of the Jubilee system: legal and economic mechanisms for aiding the poor, the social vision of relations between brothers, and the theological motifs that interact with the economic and social aspects. The most primary theological narrative is geulah, redemption.[iii][iv] In the Torah God the Redeemer functions as the patron of God’s own people, as their redeemer from slavery, their closest kin, their blood brother and, when necessary, their avenger (Numbers 35:19), rather than as the Judge of the whole earth pursuing justice for all.[1] Human brothers are expected to imitate God’s redemptive responsibility for their brothers’ economic and, hence, political and legal fate. Alongside that motif of God as redeemer and, hence, liberator who took Israel out of Egypt and liberates the Hebrews once every fifty years from debt slavery, there is a secondary theological motif in Leviticus 25 in which God is the master. As master, God is the "slave" owner ofIsrael, whom God has redeemed from Egyptian service for service to God. Those newly acquired slaves are brought to reside on, rather than own, God’s fiefdom – the land. For to Me the children of Israel are slaves, my slaves whom I took out of the land of Egypt (Leviticus 25: 55) and The land shall not be sold permanently for to Me belongs the land and because you are merely resident aliens with Me [on My land] (Leviticus 25:23). While this second motif does not directly undergird a social welfare policy, it does justify the prohibition of permanent land transfers that would otherwise lead to permanent socio-economic gaps between landowners and the landless agricultural proletariat.
In analyzing the ancient Jubilee we will, on one hand, compare it to ANE law codes and, on the other, follow into the present ways that modern social activists and Bible scholars have sought to derive principles from the Jubilee which are applicable to social policies of today. While many historians of the ancient world claim that the Jubilee legislation was never a social reality, even if that was the case that does not vitiate its contribution to social-economic thought about our society’s duties to the poor. Even if the Jubilee is not a historic instance, it still contributes to a utopian tradition that feeds our aspirations for what could be a future reality.
Since an overview of the Jubilee system is necessary for any analysis, we provide first a translation of Leviticus 25 provided by the greatest scholar of Leviticus, who was my neighbor in Jerusalem and a wonderful teacher, Jacob Milgrom. He divides the chapter into three progressive stages with changing remedial responses to the escalating economic distress of a fellow citizen/brother.
Leviticus 25: The Three Stages of Accelerating Destitution
and Three Forms of Brotherly Redemption
Translated by Jacob Milgrom [v]
Stage One: Sold Land and Houses and Their Redemption
25 When your brother (Israelite) becomes impoverished and has to sell part of his holding, his closest redeemer shall come and redeem the sold property of his brother. 26 If a man has no redeemer but prospers and acquires enough for his redemption, 27 he shall compute the years since its sale, refund the difference to the man to whom he sold it, and return to his holding.
28 If he does not acquire sufficient means to recover it, his sold property shall remain with its buyer until the jubilee year; it shall be released in the jubilee, and he shall return to his holding.
Stage Two: Lost Land
35 If your brother declines, falls with you, you should hold him up (strengthen him) (as though he were) a resident alien, let him live with you.[2]
[But you are warned not to exploit that destitution with loans entailing usury]:
36 Do not exact from him advance or accrued interest. Fear your God, and let your brother live with you. 37 Do not lend him money at advance interest, or lend him food at accrued interest.
38 I, YHWH, am your God, who freed you from the land of Egypt, to give you the land of Canaan, to be your God.
Stage Three: "Slavery"[vi]
39 If your brother, being (further) impoverished with you and is sold to you, do not make him work as a slave.....
[Do not exploit that destitution with harsh treatment as if he were a slave]:
46 As for your Israelite brothers, one brother to another, no one shall rule over the other with harshness [treating them as a slave]....
40 He shall remain with you as a resident hireling; he shall work with you until the jubilee year.
41 Then he and his children with him shall be released from you; he shall return to his kin group and return to his ancestral holding.
42 For they are my slaves, whom I freed from the land of Egypt; they shall not be sold as slaves are sold. 43 You shall not rule over him with harshness; you shall fear your God.
53 As a worker hired by the year shall he be with him, (however) he shall not rule over him with harshness in your sight.
Relief of Last Resort: Jubilee Liberation – Divine Redemption
54 If he has not been redeemed in any of these ways, he and his children with him shall go free in the jubilee year. 55 For it is to Me the Israelites are slaves. They are my slaves whom I freed from the land of Egypt. I am YHWH your God....
8 You shall count for yourself 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. 9 Then you shall sound the horn loud; in the seventh month, on the tenth day of the month - the Day of Purgation (Yom Kippur) - you shall have the horn sounded throughout your land, 10 and you shall sanctify the fiftieth year, proclaiming liberty/release (deror) throughout the land for all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee (yovel)[vii] for you, when each of you shall return to his holding and each of you shall return to his kin group.
Redemption of Property: The Basic Principle
23 Furthermore, the land must not be sold beyond reclaim, for the land is mine; you are but resident aliens with me. 24 Therefore, throughout the land you hold, you must provide redemption for the land.
The Family Motif: Redeeming My Needy Brother
God, in the role of redeemer,[viii] is an extension of a human institution – the brother as go’el. The Biblical brother is expected toredeem his brother from debt,[ix] and, if necessary, from enslavement. For example, Judah offers to serve as slave in place of Benjamin, when the latter is to be enslaved for theft by the Egyptian vizier (Genesis 44:33). Boaz, a distant brother-redeemer of Ruth's deceased husband, offers to buy back the land of Naomi’s deceased sons, as well as to marry Ruth and provide an heir for the deceased, as a brother is expected to do in a levirate marriage.[x] Another responsibility of the redeemer is to avenge the spilled blood of one's brother, as done by Yoav, David's general, who avenges the killing of his younger brother, as is expected by the Torah.[xi](
So too God’s redemption of Israel is understood in familial metaphors of obligation. Israel are the children of God’s beloved founding fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Hence God is obligated by his promise to redeem them from Egyptian slavery. God is also envisioned directly as the father of Israel, when Israel is described by God as Israel,my first born (Exodus 4:22-23) or as sons of God (Deuteronomy 14: 1-2). God’s fatherhood is sometimes described as a quasi-adoption, as in the verse that refers to Israel as God’s "people" (Exodus 6:7, see Psalm 2:7). God is also an avenging brother, so God must take vengeance on nations that spill Israel’s blood by spilling their blood. That is called “redemption” (geulah) by Isaiah, who envisions God’s vengeance on Edom, which he connects with the year of My geulah (Isaiah 63:1-9).
That redemptive responsibility is also invoked for orphans. God is expected to step in as a substitute “father- redeemer” when his people lacks a patron (We were orphans without a father - Lamentations 5:3, see Jeremiah 49:11). Since God is seen as the "redeeming father" of orphans in society, economic exploiters of the powerless must beware. Do not violate the permanent boundaries, do not enter the fields of orphans, for their redeemer is powerful and will sue their case against you (Proverbs 23:10-11). These powerful theological images reinforce the sacred moral responsibility of a human brother-as-redeemer.
Leviticus 25 systematizes this extended familial responsibility into a national social welfare system where everyone has a designated patron or brother redeemer and everyone “covers each other's back.”When your brother (Israelite) becomes impoverished (sinks) and has to sell part of his holding, his closest redeemer shall come and redeem the sold property of his brother. (Lev. 25:25). The family provides a safety net for those who are sinking (makh), for the nature of human life and economic life is that someone is always rising and someone is always falling.[xii]
Individual families – each with its own ancestral holding – are imagined as self-sufficient economic units dependent on their own labor and God's fructifying rain, rather than as competing with one another for resources in a market economy (as in Thomas Hobbes’ “war of all against all”). Yet they are not isolated socially or economically even though each one has a privately owned farm since they are embedded into extended family networks. The ethos of the family, both nuclear and extended, is different from that of the market society, in which distribution of goods is supposed to reflect the "just deserts" of an individual's talents and efforts. The family is a structure founded on the interdependence of unequal members who, nonetheless, see themselves as a whole. As David Novak explains in his book, Jewish Social Ethics: