THE LOST TRADITION OF DEBT CANCELLATION

Here is an excerpt from a booklet called THE LOST TRADITION OF DEBT CANCELLATION.     I have a hard copy of the book in my office.  It goes along with this weeks torah portion (Lev. 25).     Keep in mind that the ancient Rosetta Stone, discovered in 1799 was a debt cancellation document that was written in three different languages.


The Mosaic tradition provided a dramatic wrapping to present these laws as being prescribed by the Lord as part of a sacred compact, to be preserved by the Israelites in memory of the fact that they had once been enslaved and must never again permit economic oppression to develop. The Israelites are portrayed as having made a covenant to protect the economically weak by holding the land as the Lord's gift to support a free rural population. "Land must not be sold in perpetuity, for the land belongs to me and you are only strangers and guests. You will allow a right of redemption on all your landed property," and restore it to its customary cultivators every fifty years (Lev. 25:23-28). Israelite bond servants likewise were to go free periodically in the Jubilee Year, forthey belonged ultimately to the Lord, not to any person (Lev. 25:54).

Until fairly recently most Biblical historians doubted that these policies really were applied in practice. Advocacy of such laws seemed to be just one more way in which the Israelites emphasized their differences from surrounding societies and gods. However, during the past half-century similar economic reorderings have been found to have been traditional in Sumer, Babylonia and their commercial periphery from about 2400 to 1600 BC. It has become clear that the freedom advocated by the Covenant Code of Exodus, the septennial year of release in Deuteronomy and the Jubilee Year of Leviticus's Holiness Code were not just abstract literary ideas, but concrete legal practices freeing rural populations from debt servitude and the land from appropriation by absentee foreclosers. What made the revival of these releases revolutionary in Israel was their removal from the hands of rulers to become a sacred popular commandment.

The Bible is a unique composite embedding ritual traditions and laws of social behavior in a dramatic context of stories and legends intended to appeal to the widest possible audience. This popularization was greatly aided by the spread of alphabetic writing, which made documents accessible to the population at large, in contrast to the cumbersome syllabic cuneiform prevalent prior to the first millennium BC. But the greatest innovation was to democratize liturgical texts that earlier Near Eastern societies had restricted to temple priesthoods. Deut. 31:10 directs that the laws be read aloud publicly every seven years, in the year of cancelling debts (the shemitta), so that all the population would know they were to be freed from bondage.

Here is a PDF of the book I mentioned. Just the beginning paragraph of the overview is a very astute observation.
> http://michael-hudson.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/HudsonLostTradition.pdf