The Mathisen Corollary: Amnesty and debt jubilee in the world's ancient wisdom

image: Wikimedia commons (link).

Professor Michael Hudson, whose indispensable perspective has been the subject of many previous blog posts, finds abundant evidence to support the conclusion that a central message of the ancient scriptures of the Bible involves debt and the principle of debt-forgiveness -- and that this emphasis echoes the same focus in the ancient wisdom given to other cultures of the world, including those of ancient Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt, and indeed cultures on other continents including the Americas.

In his vitally important 2018 book entitled . . . and forgive them their debts: Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption from Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year, Professor Hudson points to the text of Isaiah 61 which contains the Hebrew word deror, used in Leviticus and other ancient texts to signify the cancellation (forgiveness) of debts during the Jubilee Year (Hudson, 9), and a cognate word directly related to the earlier Mesopotamian concept of andurarum, which also meant a debt amnesty which was typically granted by Babylonian rulers at the beginning of their reign (Hudson, xv).

Of the passage in Isaiah, Professor Hudson writes (on page 10; all inserted glosses in brackets and parentheses as found in the original of Professor Hudson's text):

Isaiah 61: 1 - 2 provides the bridge to the New Testament. Written by the prophet known as Third Isaiah c. 400 BC soon after the codification of the Priestly Laws of Leviticus in the wake of Nehemiah and Ezra, this remarkable passage reads:
The spirit of the Sovereign Lord [Yahweh] is upon me, for the Lord has anointed me to preach good news [gospel] to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty (deror) for the captives and release for the prisoners, to proclaim the Year of the Lord's favor and the day of vengeance of our God . . .
Many of these phrases have become so familiar that they appear hackneyed today, but they were quite specific in their original setting. The word "gospel" means literally "good news." But apart from Isaiah 61 and its quotation by Jesus in his inaugural sermon (in Luke 4: 18f. and Matthew 11: 6 // Luke 7: 23), the full phrase "good news to the poor" appears nowhere else in the Synoptic gospels. It refers to the deror tradition, the amnesty freeing citizens from bondage and restoring their means of self-support on the land in "the Year of the Lord's favor," the Jubilee Year. The Year's yobel trumpet is to be blown on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement signaling a restoration of worldly order, righteousness and equity. The yobel trumpet, a ram's horn blown on the tenth day of the seventh month, gave its name to the Jubilee.

Professor Hudson demonstrates that the ancient principle of debt cancelation goes back at least as far as Sumer in the third millennium BC (see Hudson xv) and that it was understood as preserving the order of society, rather than as disrupting it:

These public needs took priority over the acquisitive ambitions of creditors. Cancelling debts did not disrupt economic activity, nor did it violate the idea of economic order. By saving debtors from falling into servitude to a financial oligarchy, such amnesties preserved the liberty of citizens and their subsistence land rights. These acts were a precondition for maintaining economic stability. Indeed, proclaiming amnesty to restore the body politic -- like periodically returning exiles from cities of refuge -- was common to Native American as well as Biblical practice. The logic was universal. xvi.

Professor Hudson's book shows that Old Testament kings were judged as being either righteous or unrighteous depending upon whether they followed the practice of preventing oligarchy by proclaiming such amnesties (which is righteous) or failed to do so and thus failed to stop oligarchs from devouring the blessings bestowed upon the land for all the people (which is unrighteous).

He also shows that this tension, between creditors wishing to capture the land of others for themselves and the "royal power capable of enforcing debt amnesties and reversing land foreclosures on homes and subsistence land," played out in other cultures as well, notably those of ancient Greece and Rome, where creditors eventually won out, with the result being that "a rising proportion of Greeks and Romans lost their liberty irreversibly" (xii, xiv).

Thus, when the gospel accounts tell us that the first public sermon of Jesus upon returning to Nazareth has him unrolling the scroll of Isaiah and finding the place where it is written: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord (Luke 4: 18 - 19)," this was a radical rebuke of those who had abandoned the ancient principle of debt cancelation, an ancient principle stretching back to Isaiah and to Leviticus in the Old Testament scriptures, and stretching back to the very earliest texts of ancient Sumer that we have available to us today -- and an ancient principle preserved in the original instructions given to other cultures around the world.

However, as Professor Hudson wryly points out, those who take the scriptures of the Bible literally on all sorts of points where they should not be taken literally somehow refuse to perceive this very clear and central theme of the Biblical scriptures regarding the cancelation of debts. He writes:

Fundamentalist Christians show their faith that God created the earth in six days (on Sunday, October 23, 4004 BC according to Archbishop James Ussher in 1650) by building museums with dioramas showing humans cavorting alongside dinosaurs. While deeming this literal reading of Genesis to be historical, they ignore the Biblical narrative describing the centuries-long struggle between debtors and creditors. The economic laws of Moses and the Prophets, which Jesus announced his intention to revive and fulfill, are brushed aside as anachronistic artifacts, not the moral center of the Old and New Testaments, the Jewish and Christian Bibles. The Jubilee Year (Leviticus 25) is the "good news" that Jesus -- in his first reported sermon (Luke 4) -- announced that he had come to proclaim. xv.

He notes that the very words "redemption" and "redeemer" have to do with the forgiveness of debts, but that "In today's world the Christian idea of redemption has been turned into an analog for amnesty and salvation to heal suffering in general -- almost everything except indebtedness" (16).

Professor Hudson also points out the very important distinction that the debts being described in the ancient texts and traditions are personal debts, owed to private creditors, rather than business debts which were often owed to the palace and which would be forgiven by the king in the event of a war or a drought or a plague (or "pandemic," as we would call it today). And, in an important recent interview with fellow-economist Steve Keen, on Steve Keen's Debunking Economics podcast (embedded below), Michael Hudson and Steve Keen discuss with Steve Dobbie the need for a revival of this ancient concept of a debt jubilee, particularly when governments choose to impose lockdowns in response to a perceived pandemic, as has happened in 2020 and as continues to happen as we go into 2021. A textual transcript of that interview is also available here.

Michael Hudson and Steve Keen perceive that unless we regain the concepts of amnesty and debt jubilee, which are central to the ancient wisdom preserved in cultures literally around the globe, we will continue to inflict absolutely unnecessary misery, unemployment, impoverishment, anxiety, and trauma upon millions or even billions of men, women and children, and our economies and societies will continue to court grave danger and even potential self-destruction.

That concepts we would categorize as "economics" can be found at the very heart of the world's ancient wisdom is a subject about which I have written in many previous blog posts, and about which I have spoken in many previous videos as well. The ancient myths very clearly and directly declare that the bountiful resources of the earth -- the fertile soil and the growing crops, the rolling rivers and the spacious harbors, the broad seas teeming with fishes and the dark forests filled with all manner of trees, the sunshine and the rain so necessary to life, and even the mysterious mineral wealth concealed beneath the surface of the land -- are gifts of the gods (or, if you prefer, gifts of the divine realm), given for the benefit of the men and women that heaven allows to be born into that land.

And, one step further, the ancient myths and scriptures also demonstrate quite emphatically that the gifts and talents and capabilities given to men and women themselves have their source and origin in the heavenly realm, and that men and women would be wise to remember the source of those talents, and never in their pride place their skill above the source from whence those gifts derive.

For previous posts exploring this subject, or mentioning the work of Professor Hudson, see for example: