Bear in mind that farming in the ancient Near East offered nothing near the yield of modern agriculture, in which a relatively small portion of the populace feeds everyone else. Even in the fertile Nile valley, subsistence-level farming was the order of the day. A 20 percent tax-in-kind would have eaten up what little surpluses many farmers would have been able to produce. While they may have grown accustomed to paying the tax during the seven years of plenty, when that 20 percent was saved for the famine, it would have been extremely difficult to try to do so during a famine.
Additionally, the farmers’ land no longer belonged to them, but to the Egyptian throne. They could not use it as collateral, and they could not pass it down to their children as an inheritance. In the span of a few years, they went from being relatively independent farmers to being serfs, controlled by the crown and sharecropping to stave off starvation. Though relinquishing ownership of their land may have saved their lives, it came at a devastating economic cost.
Joseph’s actions were exploitive, not heroic. They were shrewd, yes, and certainly effective, but exploitative nonetheless. “You have saved our lives,” the farmers said. Perhaps, but that is all that Joseph has left them with. They had become Pharaoh’s de facto slaves. Their exclamation should perhaps be read as acceptance of a status already reached than as an expression of gratitude.
The Year of Jubilee (Leviticus 25:8–55)
You will make the fiftieth year holy, proclaiming freedom throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It will be a Jubilee year for you: each of you must return to your family property and to your extended family. (25:10)
Levitical law gets a bad rap—and I would say unfortunately so—directly because of the public witness of Christians. I do not say that to make light of the ways in which, say, Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 have been taken out of context by Christians for decades and subsequently weaponized against LGBTQ people. Rather, I say this precisely because such approaches to Leviticus—and to the Tanakh more broadly—have made many Christian interpretations of Levitical law woefully shallow and explicitly harmful to a great many people, LGBTQ persons among them.
Taking Leviticus out of its context cuts in the other direction as well—just as verses like 18:22 and 20:13 are taken to be literally true by homophobic and transphobic Christians, so too is pretty much the rest of Leviticus consigned to the Christian Bible study scrap heap with nary an ounce of consideration of the book’s context and aims. This is genuinely a tragedy; a religion whose founder and namesake declared the Levitical law “You must love your neighbor as yourself” from 19:18 to be one of the two most important commandments ought to have a far deeper understanding and respect for the context of that commandment.
So, let us try—for a few pages, at least—to do justice to the context of a seminal Levitical mandate: the Year of Jubilee.
The need for restoration often centers around the number seven in the Tanakh. The seventh day is kept as Sabbath, a holy day of rest. The seventh year is when slaves must be offered their freedom.3 Leviticus 25 sets aside the seventh year for the land to have its own rest from its agricultural labors, and the fiftieth year was to be consecrated as a Year of Jubilee, because it comes after seven groups of seven years. During a Year of Jubilee: outstanding debts were to be forgiven, slaves and prisoners were to be released, and all land was to be returned to its original holders. It was a societal clean slate, meant to avoid the cyclical poverty.
The return of land to its original occupants was not included by happenstance. A crucial characteristic of life under the kings of Israel and Judah was the growth of a landed gentry, an elite minority that possessed the lion’s share of resources and land, in contrast to most people, who lived on a subsistence level or were enslaved. The economic disparity had the potential to destabilize the economy of ancient Israel. The word choices in Leviticus 25 suggest the Year of Jubilee was included as a sort of failsafe against such economic instability. Tanakh commentator Baruch J. Schwartz notes that the Hebrew term deror, which can be translated as “freedom” (Common English Bible) or “liberty” (New Revised Standard Version), is related to a “term known from Mesopotamia, where it indicates the general release proclaimed occasionally by kings in order to create or restore economic stability.”4
That concentrating wealth and land in the hands of too few people is inherently destabilizing was evident to the composers and compilers of the Tanakh, but is too often disregarded by people of faith in the twenty-first-century United States. For freedom and liberty to be tangible, economic stability for all the people is vital.
Our collective memory may be short, but, thankfully, the memory of scripture is more long-lasting. We have seen a number of attempts to recreate an economic Jubilee that includes the forgiveness of debts and the restoration of assets. Organizations like R.I.P. Medical Debt, which was started by former debt collectors who had a change of heart and began working to forgive debts rather than collect on them, have partnered with people as famous as John Oliver of Last Week Tonight and as humble as a psychoanalyst and a retired chemist to purchase household debts for pennies on the dollar and forgive them.5
Pathway Church in Wichita, Kansas, where I was born, offered a congregational template for Jubilee by buying and then forgiving $2.2 million of medical debts for roughly sixteen hundred people as a part of their Easter 2019 celebration.6 Such a good work may be doable for a megachurch with Pathway’s resources, but what about smaller congregations that may struggle simply to keep the lights on? A step in the right direction would be to understand the Year of Jubilee as not a one-off, but a system intended to occur regularly. The Year of Jubilee was designed not so one isolated generation, but so that all generations, would experience liberation from the bondage of financial insecurity.
The Year of Jubilee is framed in Leviticus 25 not only a forgiveness of debts but also a release of slaves and indentured servants, and a return of land to its original holders. Land could likewise be lost to indebtedness by being put up as collateral or violently confiscated. Because of this, our modern efforts to recreate this biblical mandate are mostly piecemeal. But discussion of a wider Jubilee that values financial security for families across generations must be on the table in parish halls and city halls alike.
The story of Naboth’s vineyard in 1 Kings 21 is a biblical case study on the importance of maintaining family land. King Ahab coveted the vineyard, which was adjacent to the palace. Ahab offered to replace Naboth’s vineyard, or to buy it outright, but Naboth replied, “Lord forbid that I give you my family inheritance!” He characterized the vineyard not as his, but as his family’s, handed down from generation to generation, which fits with the understanding throughout the Tanakh of land belonging not to individuals, but families, and, ultimately, on loan from God who created it to begin with. Ahab was willing to do whatever it took to get the vineyard. He cast aside the precepts of Leviticus 25 and the Year of Jubilee to satisfy his selfish wants and desires, and God, through the prophet Elijah, condemned him for it. Many commentators agree that there is no ironclad evidence that the Year of Jubilee was practiced widespread in ancient Israel, and it is easy to see why: it directly inhibits the large-scale accumulation of land and wealth, which defined the ruling elite class.
Today, adherence to the spirit of the Year of Jubilee represents a direct threat to the economic interests of the One Percent. The forgiveness of debts represents a direct threat to many predatory pursuits, from payday lending to subprime mortgages. And implementation of the mandate to return land to its original holders would entail the removal of the United States as we understand it in deference to the indigenous peoples of North America. Even if we are not among the One Percent, we still benefit from centuries of wealth redistribution away from certain peoples and toward others.
This landed gentry in ancient Israel emerged over centuries despite the mandate of the Year of Jubilee. With the