By all accounts, the Jubilee law has not been practiced since around 600 BCE, roughly the same period of time that the law was written in the book of Leviticus. One wonders if it was actually practiced before that time, or if it was just one of those "nice to have" laws, an ideal rather than an actual practice. Ideal it certainly is, and if hard to practice during the time it was written, how much more so today.

Jubilee (a term derived from a Hebrew term meaning trumpet blast, or shout for joy) is like hitting the reset button, and starting over. When my laptop has been on too long it starts to slow down. Some applications have consumed all the resources, hogging the memory and dragging down the cpu response time. Other applications struggle to function. Eventually nothing works properly and the only thing to do is hit the restart button, allowing the resources to be distributed again more equally. That's Jubilee.

In the Jubilee year, heralded by a blast from a ram's horn trumpet, God's people were asked to write off all debts and free all their slaves and bondsmen. It was the year of equalisation, a hope on the horizon for those struggling on borrowed money to make ends meet, and for those fallen so far into debt that the only resource they had left was themselves, their personal freedom, and even that was taken by the creditor, rendering the debtor a bondsman, an indentured servant.

Debt and interest rates cripple the poor today all over the world. And there is no hope, no Jubilee to look forward to, no equalisation, no forgiveness, no amnesty. The idea is barely creditable in a capitalist society. What we have instead are laws that allow bailiffs to strip the poor of what few possessions they have left, and turn them out of their homes onto the streets. And today we call that justice. The Israelites may not have practiced the Jubilee law around debt forgiveness, but they had back ups for the treatment of bondsmen and bondswomen. In Deuteronomy we read,

For the poor shall never cease out of the land: therefore I command thee, saying, Thou shalt open thine hand wide unto thy brother, to thy poor, and to thy needy, in thy land. And if thy brother, an Hebrew man, or an Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: Thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the Lord thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. — Deuteronomy 15:11-14

Again, a sense of fairness, equalisation, and brotherly love shine through. Today our governments and our individual political psyches are stripped of such compassion. The poor must rely on charity for any semblance of redress. Imagine for a moment what our societies could be like if a form of the Jubilee law was written into every constitution—and actually practiced. Now that's a fantasy to stretch the imagination!