Essay of the Day: The Lost Tradition of Biblical Debt Cancellations

Excerpted from Michael Hudson:

“THE once-glowing core body of law within the Judeo-Christian Bible has become all but ignored – indeed, rejected – by the colder temper of our times. This core provided for periodic restoration of economic order by rituals of social renewal based on freedom from debt-servitude and from the loss of one’s access to self-support on the land. So central to Israelite moral values was this tradition that it framed the composition of both the Old and New Testaments.

Radical as the idea of cancelling debts and restoring the population’s means of subsistence seems to modern eyes, it had been a conservative tradition in Bronze Age Mesopotamia for some two millennia. What was conserved was self-sufficiency for the rural family-heads who made up the infantry as well as the productive base of Near Eastern economies. Conversely, what was radically disturbing in archaic times was the idea of unrestrained wealth-seeking. It took thousands of years for the idea of progress to become inverted, to connote freedom for the wealthy to deprive the peasantry of their lands and personal liberty.

So far has the modern idea of market efficiency and progress gone that today, although the Bible remains our civilization’s defining book, it is perceived largely as a composite of stories, myth and wisdom literature best epitomized perhaps in spirituals and hymns, not economic laws. The Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule have THE once-glowing core body of law within the Judeo-Christian Bible has become all but ignored – indeed, rejected – by the colder temper of our times. This core provided for periodic restoration of economic order by rituals of social renewal based on freedom from debt-servitude and from the loss of one’s access to self-support on the land. So central to Israelite moral values was this tradition that it framed the composition of both the Old and New Testaments.”

Read the whole essay here.

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