LIKE RUNNING WATER

Imagine this: You're visiting Philly and decide to check out the Liberty Bell. You notice--or remember from your high school history class-- the famous words inscribed on the Bell:

Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land Unto All the inhabitants thereof

You’re standing there thinking and, all of sudden you turn to the person standing next you, saying: "That's what I'm talking about. Living in a country where you're free to do your thang. Liberty!"

It just so happens, though, that the person standing next to you is a Hebrew Bible scholar. Relaxed and friendly--but always professorial-- she responds, first of all, by reminding you that the inscription is a quotation from Leviticus 25:10 and then goes on to say:

"You know, the Hebrew word translated as 'liberty' in the Leviticus text is deror."

And before you can say

"Dey-who?!"

Not missing a beat, Prof. continues:

"It's a cognate--a comparable word-- to andurarum in AKKadian, a related Semitic language of early Babylonia. The root meaning of which is to move freely like running water. Like bondservants liberated to rejoin their family. Like land set free and returned to those who previously cultivated it. Like amnesty on arrears of back taxes and other personal debts. Deror."

BACK TO THE FUTURE

Tradition holds that proclamations of debt jubilees were a regular feature in the ancient Near East from 2500 BC in Sumer to 1600 BC in Babylonia and its neighbors, and then in Assyria in the first millennium BC. Typically, new rulers would issue such proclamations upon assuming the throne, in the aftermath of war, or upon building or renovating a temple. These debt amnesties would go on to be appropriated, shaped, and centered in Mosaic Law, including the Jubilee Year of Leviticus 25.

Subsistence farming is rough business. It's extraordinarily hard to produce enough to feed your family plus make a go at paying taxes and an assortment of fees. You're going to need loans to bridge the time span between the planting and the harvest. Money lenders would be posted up in the temples making grain loans to farmers. But given the difficulty of the business, plenty of people find it impossible to pay their tabs, temple taxes, and any other assortment of fees. All of which can be exacerbated by forces beyond human control--like drought and pestilence. The next thing you know is that you and your peeps are damn near drowning in debt. Wanting their scratch, creditors eventually make a move on you. The land that your family has been occupying and cultivating forever and day gets snatched. Or, perhaps, your kinfolk is sold into debt slavery and they have to hump to whittle down the arrears owed to the creditors. In the absence of some kind of response the inevitable result is a growth in human bondage, spreading insolvency, and increasing social chaos.

The Jubilee proclamation, then, was like running water that wiped the slate clean. Land was to be returned to the previous occupants/cultivators, agrarian debt was largely cancelled, and bondservants--kinfolk who had been pledged as collateral to creditors-- were to be set loose and allowed to freely return to the debtor's household. Sort of like a financial reset.

COVID, ECONOMIC RECOVERY, AND JUBILEE

The pain of our current pandemic induced recession-- as well as our hopes for a post-pandemic economic recovery-- reveals the continual relevance of the Jubilee tradition. The abysmal policy response to this pandemic has not only snatched the last breath out of more than 300,000 Americans; it has also resulted in the loss of millions of jobs, plummeting incomes, sapped spirits, and a debt backlog that is primed to explode in the near future.

Think about this: Various forbearance programs have enabled tens of millions of households to catch a breath by delaying rental payments for a specified amount of time. Here's the thing, though: At some point these households will have to cough up the cash to catch up on their rent--or face eviction. According to one estimate, come January 2021 these households will be on the hook for somewhere between 25 and 35 billion bucks. Anyway you cut it, that's a pretty hefty bill. And at some point, it's going to hit.

These kind of debt overhangs--and there are others-- possess the power to drain the punch out of any post-pandemic recovery. Robust economic recoveries are handcuffed when millions of people are awash in arrears. James Galbraith, an economist at University of Texas-Austin and a supporter of some variant of a Jubilee, emphasizes this very point when he states:

There will be a vast tangle of unpaid debts that cannot be cleared, and--what is different from 2008 and 2009--the model of foreclosures, evictions, and repossessions to deal with them is going to be absolutely unacceptable. People sheltering at home without any income are in no way responsible for their circumstances and will refuse to accept the terms of those contracts. So the contracts will have to be suspended, and the debts cleared away, or there will be confrontation on a vast scale...The right model is that of the treatment of the inter-allied war debts after World War II; They were cancelled, because dealing with the common enemy was a common effort. So, the whole financial system will have to be reset.

Likewise, the late anthropologist David Graber, pointedly called for writing down certain debts. Some kind of cleaning the slate. Some version of a Jubilee.

"It seems to me," Graeber wrote, "that we are long overdue for some kind of Biblical-style Jubilee; one that would affect both international and consumer debt."

NOW'S THE TIME

Now's the time. Again.

Time to retrieve and reflect

Time to envision and enact

Time to reveal and revel

in what was

in what could be

Again.

Time to allow the waters of life to flow

freely

Nurturing a dream of old

A continuing dream

Of people set free

Of a future that serves

The common good

Prioritizes the poor

That refuses to bow to forces that join

House to House

And

Field to Field

Now's the time to dream of

running waters

Deror,

Doc Greene