Debt release in Mesopotamia and Israel (1)

Text
In Leviticus 25:10 the jubilee year is ordained once every fifty years. One of its provisions is release from debt:

‘You will declare this fiftieth year sacred and proclaim the liberation of all the inhabitants of the land. This is to be a jubilee for you; each of you will return to his ancestral home, each to his own clan.’

The word used for ‘liberty’ in Hebrew, dǝrōr, is also found in Babylonian and Assyrian texts going back to around 2000 BCE, andurārum and durāru. The Sumerian equivalent to the term is found even earlier, in texts of Uruinimgina king of Lagaš. The cuneiform texts that use the word refer to periodic royal edicts which cancel the debts of citizens, debts which often resulted in enslavement. The amnesty is not of regular occurrence but appears to be intermittent, dependent on the king’s decision. Often it was proclaimed soon after the accession of a new king, or after many years of a long rule. The difference in Palestine is that debt release was regular, linked to the agricultural practice of letting land lie fallow, and it did not depend upon a king’s decision. The word for justice in Babylonia, mīšarum, was sometimes linked to edicts of debt release as well as to writing down laws, and it is cognate with the Hebrew word mēšārīm. The word seems to have a similar range of meaning in both languages.

Source (list of abbreviations) (source links will open in a new browser window)
Leviticus 25:10

Bibliography

Stephanie Dalley

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