The Spirit of Jubilee

Abstract

The Jubilee texts of the Hebrew Bible call for debts to be forgiven and enslaved persons freed every seven years and for farmland to be restored to families every fifty years.  Tightly interwoven into the legal, narrative, and prophetic vision of the text, the Jubilee tradition offers an inspiring and dramatic vision of socioeconomic justice for multiple religious traditions. Yet the American legal tradition, which purports to draw on its religious heritage for inspiration and moral authority, has not fully drawn on the Jubilee tradition for a contemporary vision of equality and justice.  This Essay seeks to rekindle that conversation.  I pull together the Jubilee tradition from various texts in the Hebrew Bible and argue that the Jubilee represents a distinct and fundamental narrative in the text.  I conclude that a jubilee goes far beyond debt forgiveness alone: a jubilee is a generational reset of the private property most central to economic creativity, in order to ensure equitable opportunity for every community.  I then show how the Jubilee texts have inspired and encouraged American socioeconomic justice movements from independence to abolitionism to forgiveness of debt.  Indeed, the only word in the American legal tradition big enough to capture the spirit of Jubilee is reconstruction.  Finally, I argue that while the Jubilee ideal of forgiveness of debt and restoration of land cannot be implemented literally in modern economies, the spirit of Jubilee calls for broad, sweeping reforms to ensure equal opportunity in contemporary economic life.

Keywords: jubilee, bankruptcy, reparations, debtors' prisons, debtors' prison, Hebrew Bible, forgiveness, abolition, Juneteenth, debt, religion, law