The Biblical Jubilee and "Human Capital" Provision

January 1990

By John D. Mason

WENHAM, Massachusetts—Biblical scholars, ethicists, and social scientists disagree over the nature and implications of early Israel's year of Jubilee (Leviticus 25). Some hold that this "return of land" to the family of original ownership every 50th year was only a utopian ideal, concocted later during the period of Israel's exile, and never intended for actual practice. Others contend that it was received as God's command in the early years of Israel's history (where the Bible places it), and thus was intended to be practiced. Almost all agree that there is little evidence that Jubilee was ever practiced.

My main concern with the year of Jubilee is to explore the likely implications for our own day, and not to debate its historicity. But in order to grasp the contemporary implications, we must have a good understanding of how Jubilee could have functioned in that earlier time, and thus we must grapple with the biblical data.

What Did Jubilee Do?

First, my hunches and conclusions about the likely way Jubilee functioned in early Israel are these. I believe it was designed for the period in which the Bible places it. Its primary purpose was to maintain a secure productive base for each extended family in the face of inevitable natural and socio-economic arbitrariness. In the normal circumstances of life, land would have been sold (or taken) only for nonpayment of debt after a family had put it up as collateral for a loan. Assuming general compliance with the Mosaic legislation by all citizens in the small communities of early Israel, those who lost their land would strive to gather a surplus to buy back their patrimony. Those who had taken the land for non-payment of debt would stand willing to sell it back when the purchase price was offered. If the year of Jubilee occurred before sufficient surplus had been raised, then the land would revert to the family of original ownership, and whatever surplus had been accumulated would be offered to the family returning the land.

This plausible understanding is consistent with the general concern in Lev. 25 for market-oriented fairness (vss. 15-16, 27, 50-52). It also suggests that the Jubilee year could have been practiced any number of times with little attention paid to it because of the small amounts of money involved. In that case, the silence of the biblical record on the practice of Jubilee cannot so easily be taken as evidence that it was never practiced.

To summarize then: the primary purpose of Jubilee in the biblical record was to restore a productive base to each family so that short-term economic adversity did not foster long-term harm. The obvious result would have been a stronger (extended) family base for that society as well as a fairly widespread distribution of landed property.

What Are the Implications for Today?

What, then, are the implications of these intended purposes for modern states? Others have seen the Jubilee principle leading to the elimination of "intolerable extremes of wealth and poverty" and "limiting the effects of debt and poverty to roughly a single generation." In other words, the Jubilee principle aimed to strengthen the family economically.

My way of specifying this is to say that a privately owned productive base needs to be restored to the family. The best way to achieve this today is by assuring that each citizen has a sound "human capital" base--that is, a good education and/or on-the-job training. A number of recent studies of the U.S. economy have shown that the surest protection against economic adversity is possessing a good general education. This means at least a very sound secondary education and better yet some post-secondary education. Exactly like the return of landed property in Lev. 25, this asset must be "worked" in order to provide economic sufficiency.

As the early Israelite "state" (the elders at the gate) ideally would have overseen the faithful observance of Jubilee, so the contemporary state should oversee the proper provision of human capital accumulation. The purpose of Jubilee was to restore and strengthen the independence of the family, so that every family could "sit under their own vine and fig tree" (I Kings 4:25; II Kings 18:31; Isaiah 36:16; Micah 4:4; Zechariah 3:10). In keeping with this, the state's oversight of human capital provision should allow as much family autonomy as possible in the accumulation and use of human capital.

Though a sound education today might best express the spirit of Jubilee at a foundation level, the principle surely extends beyond this. We also need Jubilee-year thinking to devise social insurance and welfare structures that will reinforce rather than tear apart the family. And we need public policies based on a general wariness of the dangers of excessive concentrations of wealth.

[Prof. John Mason teaches economics at Gordon College.]