The Jubilee Debate throughout the Bible
A number of biblical scholars today have come to realize that the writers of the biblical books and those who were deciding which books would actually be included in the 66 books were presenting, and debating, two conflicting worldviews: one centered in Creation, the other centered in the millennia-long project of civilization. Wes Howard-Brook, University of Seattle, calls these two views two religions: the religion of creation and the religion of empire. He explains these fully in his enlightening books, “Come Out My People!” God’s Call Out of Empire in the Bible and Beyond (Orbis, 2010) and Empire Baptized: How the Church Embraced What Jesus Rejected, 2nd-5th Centuries (Orbis, 2016) I refer to the worldviews as OneEarth (creation) and MultiEarth (civilization/empire), charging that the MultiEarth view builds societies that use more than the resources of our planet while the OneEarth view arranges human life within the capacities of Earth.
Jubilee is caught up in the debate of these two worldviews because it is the economic model and spirituality of the OneEarth, Creation-centered, or religion of creation view. So, even when it isn’t named, Jubilee is embedded in the narratives of the Bible speaking from the perspective of, and in favor of, the Creation-centered, OneEarth worldview. On the other hand, those parts of the Bible that serve the MultiEarth, civilization-centered, or religion of empire view, have embedded in them the extractive economic models such as the capitalisms and socialisms of recent centuries.
These two views—OneEarth and MultiEarth—were debated before and during the period of the Bible’s composition. The debate has continued into the present. The Bible stepped into the ongoing stream of the debate as it proceeded through the Neolithic Era. That Era stretched from10,000 BCE to 2000 BCE, depending on which part of the globe you lived in. The Neolithic changes spread slowly into different geographical regions. It is often called the Neolithic Revolution because it brought into being the changes that the MultiEarth way of thinking and living has come to embody. As the MultiEarth views and practices spread, they radically changed how many humans interacted with Creation. It was during the Neolithic Era that the imperial model of governing societies and economies grew significantly and came to be the primary mode of governance, economics, and social structures.
Some biblical narratives and teachings side with the changes toward MultiEarth ways that the Neolithic Revolution brought into practice. Other biblical writers, describe OneEarth’s resistance to Neolithic thinking and living. Some of them explicitly speak of Jubilee, others use different language to describe resistance to the MultiEarth worldview.
Because the Bible contains opposing voices in this debate of worldviews, efforts to make the Bible speak with a single, consistent voice distorts and misses one of the major ways the Bible can guide us today. The power of the Bible is that it displays the tension and antagonism between these views, not that it reconciles them. When we see the antagonism and distrust clearly in the Bible, then the Bible provides us with lenses to see the same worldviews in conflict in our world today. With such seeing, we are able to take from the Bible lots of help on living OneEarth ways. We are not only environmentalists, ecologists, and justice-seekers, but all of these become explicitly our spiritual practice. We depend on our connection with God’s Spirit to live the OneEarth ways because the MultiEarth ways are currently so threatening, often ruthless, and ever-overwhelming.
Conversely, when we read the Bible in ways that collapse the antagonistic views and try to make them speak with a uniform voice, the Bible loses its power to inspire our resistance to MultiEarth ways in the name of Creation and OneEarth living. Once we recognize these two worldviews vying for the hearts and minds of people throughout the Bible, the Bible becomes a more effective guide for radical resistance to the powers of domination imposed by the powers of the MultiEarth religion of empire.
Where Jubilee is named in the Bible, it always defines practices of the OneEarth religion of creation. The single exception happens in Ezra-Nehemiah where Ezra and Nehemiah, in service to the Persian imperial authorities, invoke Jubilee to support former landowners returning to “their lands” following their deportation by the Babylonian Empire. The former landowners appeal to Jubilee to argue that the lands they left, lands subsequently taken over and tended by peasants, should now be returned to them. It's an example of Jubilee being used to argue for a land-grab by wealthy people from poor people. Other than this exception, wherever the biblical stories and authors are describing the views and ways of OneEarth religion of creation, Jubilee is the economic practice of justice for all.
My hope is that by using the lenses of these two worldviews, we will be able to see Jubilee operating in far more parts of the Bible than what we would otherwise notice. Also, these lenses will reveal to us where the Bible’s stories and teachings portray the MultiEarth worldview. When they do, we need to understand that these stories and teachings are not there for us to emulate. They are there for us to see how imperial, MultiEarth religion and practice destroy God’s Creation and undermine the best that humans are capable of. By showing us both, the texts of the Bible increase in value as spiritual guidance, sorting out the options of our lives by asking, “Is this OneEarth and Creation-based or MultiEarth and empire-based?” We stop looking for MultiEarth views to behave according to Jubilee, even as we expect OneEarth views to express Jubilee with stronger and clearer practices.
