Sabbath and Jubilee

Richard H. Lowery

• Publisher: Chalice Press
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9780827234901
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

Each book in this series provides an in-depth look at a major recurring theme in the Bible and its lasting theological influence. The series is designed to enhance the reader's understanding of our biblical heritage and its relevance to faithful life today. This book examines the biblical sabbath, sabbath-year, and jubilee traditions as part of a broader effort to reflect theologically on these challenges and points to ways we might build a global ethic of economic and environmental justice.

SABBATH AND JUBILEE

1

AN ETHIC OF ABUNDANCE
AND SELF-RESTRAINT

Many of us are overworked, while others languish in spirit-killing idleness. Goods and services are inadequately distributed, even when overproduced. Meanwhile, the human-life-supporting natural environment suffers the ill effects of reckless production. These crises pose key challenges for theological reflection today. Sabbath and jubilee offer a fresh angle for people of biblical faith to think theologically about spiritual, social, ecological, and economic limitations and possibilities at the millennium’s turn. This book examines the biblical sabbath, sabbath year, and jubilee traditions as part of a broader effort to reflect theologically on this moment of challenge, to build a global ethic of economic and environmental justice, and to encourage spiritual practices of personal, social, and ecological care.

Troubled Souls, Troubled Families

Individuals and families today face a spiritual crisis. We are overworked, stressed out, in debt, and chronically neglecting the basic disciplines of spiritual growth and family nurture. The problem is personal, but its causes and effects are more broadly social and economic.

The emerging global economy offers great potential for human survival and fulfillment, but it also poses enormous threats to social and spiritual well-being. The imperatives of global markets demand more work from fewer workers. There is always more to be done than can be done well in the time there is to do it. The mobility of capital and rapidly changing networks of production and distribution increase uncertainty and undermine the stability of families and communities worldwide. On average, parents are working longer hours for less pay than twenty years ago. Their absence, exhaustion, and anxiety about finances take a toll on the family. Children in wealthy nations have more disposable income than ever before and less access to public space and meaningful participation in the life of the community. The ubiquitous logic of consumption drives young and old to perpetual dissatisfaction. Our spirits hunger for wholeness.

Ecology and Economy

Global economic integration poses serious ecological questions already widely discussed in popular culture. Anyone who can read a placemat at McDonald’s knows that bulldozing rain forests in the Amazon region has a negative impact on the natural environment in North America. Saturday morning cartoons teach children that blowing sulfur out of smokestacks can kill trees and lakes half a world away. Wal-Mart recycles. Oil companies contribute to Ducks Unlimited. Madison Avenue thinks there is plenty of “green” to be made in “green-conscious” marketing. Increasing numbers of people of all political persuasions are concerned about how human lifestyles are affecting the ecological balance that makes human life possible.

It is less widely understood, however, that economic inequality also threatens the ability of the ecosystem to sustain human life. Unrestrained consumption at the top of the economy turns vast quantities of natural resources into unusable and irretrievable thermal energy, while producing more garbage and other pollution than the natural environment can process in the foreseeable future.

On the underside of the world’s economy, international debt wreaks havoc with the social and natural environment. Rural poverty prompts mass migrations into sprawling cities that are not socially and ecologically viable. Unsanitary conditions there breed virulent diseases that are difficult to treat and hard to contain. The poor cut down trees for fuel, shelter, and space to grow crops just ahead of the desert that creeps closer with every felled tree. While wealth, education, and good health care yield low or no population growth in rich nations, population explodes among the industrializing world’s poor, to the severe detriment of the natural environment.

Meanwhile, these ecologically taxing processes are exacerbated by national “debt restructuring” plans imposed on poor countries by the International Monetary Fund. These plans require poor debtor nations to cut domestic spending on health care, education, and job training and to devote the lion’s share of the national budget to paying off international loans. To attract the “hard currency” necessary to repay their international debt, they are required to turn their economies into “export platforms,” replacing more environmentally friendly subsistence agriculture with cash crops. These crops strain the environment and flood international commodities markets, depressing farm incomes worldwide and creating a chronic global farm crisis. Rain forests are cut, pesticides and herbicides drench fields and pollute water tables, and populations soar in the places least able to absorb more people. Maldistribution of the planet’s wealth, especially the crushing burden of international debt, is leading to environmental disaster. Gentler, more ecologically sound lifestyles must include a better distribution of wealth and debt relief for poor countries.

Sabbath and Jubilee

Biblical sabbath and jubilee traditions provide a lens by which to focus theological reflection on the spiritual, ecological, and economic challenges that face us in this era of globalizing economy. In its biblical contexts, sabbath protests conditions of scarcity, overwork, and economic inequality that prevailed under Israel’s kings and foreign emperors. By celebrating a divinely ordained cosmic order built on natural abundance, self-restraint, and social solidarity, sabbath critiques the oppressive consequences of a royal-imperial system built on tribute, forced state labor, and debt slavery.

In the modern context of globalizing economy, sabbath can serve a similar critical function. As individual alienation increases and a sense of social solidarity declines, as the boundaries of time and place that once defined the world of work disappear into cyberspace, sabbath speaks a word of proportion, limits, social solidarity, and the need for rest, quiet reflection, and nonconsumptive recreation. In the emerging world, sabbath consciousness may be the key to human survival, prosperity, and sanity.

Ancient Origins and Modern Applications

I am convinced that it is not possible at present to reconstruct the earliest history of weekly sabbath observance. Mesopotamian cultures had market days tied to the lunar cycle, but Israel’s seventh-day sabbath is unparalleled in the ancient world. It seems to arise in Israel ex nihilo. The Bible only deepens the mystery. Most texts that describe seventh-day sabbath observance are exilic and postexilic or are impossible to date. The references to sabbath that might be preexilic connect it with new moon observance, suggesting that sabbath once was a lunar festival of some sort, perhaps a full moon celebration. It is certain that sabbath became an important part of Jewish cultural identity sometime in the postexilic period among those who finally produced and collected the Hebrew Scriptures. But it is not clear whether this postexilic sabbath had anything at all to do with the “sabbath” mentioned in preexilic texts.¹

It is also unclear how weekly sabbath is related to sabbath year and jubilee. I once believed that sabbath year and jubilee were expansions of sabbath. Sabbath year and jubilee were “sabbath days with an attitude,” sabbath writ large. I now think that the historical picture is much more complicated. The development first ran in the opposite direction. I suspect that seventh-year debt release gave rise to seventh-day sabbath. Sabbath day, in turn, became the conceptual model for Priestly “sabbath year” and “jubilee,” which are rather different than the older seventh-year “release” laws in Deuteronomy 15 and Exodus 21 and 23. A periodic release from debt and its burdensome consequences eventually was celebrated as a weekly cessation of work. Along the lines of Christian Sunday as a “little Easter,” biblical sabbath is a “little sabbath year,” a “little jubilee.” It is an enduring sign in Israel of the social solidarity and economic justice implied in seventh-year debt release.

Today’s consumption-based globalizing economy is in many ways vastly different from the agrarian royal economy in which biblical sabbath was born. But the modern economy puts working people in an updated version of the ancient bind: too much work and not enough money. By exploring several biblical sabbath, sabbath year, and jubilee texts with an eye toward social and economic issues, this book aims to bring the healing wisdom and critical challenge of ancient biblical sabbath tradition into conversation with our own stressed-out, overworked, spiritually starving world.

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¹There is a long history of scholarship on the origin of sabbath. I find Gnana Robinson’s 1975 University of Hamburg dissertation most compelling. It was published in English (with numerous untranslated German citations) as The Origin and Development of the Old Testament Sabbath (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1988). This in-depth form-critical analysis of sabbath texts is not particularly accessible to a nonscholarly audience, but Robinson’s argument is convincing that preexilic references to “sabbath” in the Bible are in fact references to a “full moon day,” associated with royal power. After the collapse of the Davidic monarchy in 586 B.C.E., sabbath was associated with seventh-day rest and became a celebration of Yahweh’s universal sovereignty. The practical import of Robinson’s historical reconstruction is that “sabbath” may not have a single meaning in the Bible, and we need to be very careful in our comparisons of different sabbath texts. There is a very interesting scholarly discussion about the evolution of sabbath as a day of worship (usually dated to the Roman era). A convenient introduction to the issues is found in the composite volume The Sabbath in Jewish and Christian Traditions (Tamara C. Eskenazi, et al, ed. ; New York: Crossroad, 1991). The Adventist scholar Samuele Bacchiochi’s book From Sabbath to Sunday: A Historical Investigation of the Rise of Sunday Observance in Early Christianity (Rome: Pontifical Gregorian University Press, 1977) is an important contribution to the debate. Heather McKay’s Sabbath and Synagogue: The Question of Sabbath Worship in Ancient Judaism, Religions in the Graeco-Roman World, Vol. 122 (Leiden: Brill, 1994) is the most recent major work. McKay argues that sabbath was strictly a household observance that became a day of communal worship no sooner than 200 C.E.

SABBATH AND JUBILEE

2

HOUSEHOLDS AND KINGS,
HONOR AND SHAME

Biblical sabbath, sabbath year, and jubilee traditions are properly understood in the context of the political economy, kingship ideology, and honor-shame culture of the ancient Near East. A strong commitment to social justice and care for the economically vulnerable provides the literary and legal background for sabbath, sabbath year, and jubilee laws. This humanitarian concern has a theocratic rationale. God’s royal honor is at stake in Israel’s treatment of “the widow, orphan, and resident alien.”

Households

Israel’s economic system was essentially unchanged through the entire Old Testament period.¹ The society was mostly rural, with only a few poorly developed urban areas that served primarily as royal administrative and religious centers. The vast majority of people farmed relatively small plots of land handed down through generations as ancestral property. Social life was organized around mostly self-sufficient villages devoted to agriculture, small-cattle herding, and craftwork. Under Davidic monarch or foreign king, Israel’s small farmers were the backbone of this agrarian mode of production. They engaged in subsistence agriculture but had to provide sufficient “surplus” and labor to support the extensive royal bureaucracy and its large-scale “public works”—state buildings, military garrisons, military campaigns, roads, water projects, and so on.

The “household” (bet ’ab),² a compound family including perhaps three generations, was the basic economic unit. Households consisted of a senior family, adult sons and their wives, and unmarried children. Adult daughters left the birth household and joined the households of their husbands.³ Wealthy households (a tiny portion of the total population) may have included debt slaves, permanent slaves, a family priest, and affiliated resident aliens.

A typical adult Israelite male had a life expectancy of forty years. Infant mortality rates were high, perhaps as high as 50 percent.⁴ So women typically had two pregnancies for every one child who reached age five. Since the economic survival of the household depended on the production of able-bodied children, women married immediately after puberty and were pregnant or nursing for a relatively large portion of their adult life. Dangers of childbirth and the heavy physical toll of multiple pregnancies significantly shortened women’s average life span. Few survived to menopause. Most lived about thirty years. Few households faced the need to provide long-term care for elderly parents. Also, life was harsh and medical knowledge was limited. Forty-yearold people might well be in poor physical condition.

It is likely that each conjugal unit in the household had two to six members. With three or so houses in the household complex, the typical bet ’ab probably consisted of ten to fifteen people. Though intergenerational tensions and sibling rivalry no doubt were common,⁵ the household operated as a single economic unit. Economic functions defined the characteristics of the household, roles of family members, and moral codes that bound families and communities together. Geography and climate shaped the economics of households.

Agriculture

Cereals and grains were the staples of the ancient diet, but the hilly topography and dry climate of Palestine combined with the limited technology available to the ancient Israelites to make large-scale grain production impossible in most of the land. Agricultural terracing and the development of sturdier plows around the 1200s B.C.E. allowed Palestinian farmers to move into the highlands and cultivate land that otherwise could not be farmed. Terraces allowed ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. An Ethic of Abundance and Self-restraint
• 2. Households and Kings, Honor and Shame
• 3. Free the Hebrew Slave!
• 4. Release the Debt! Release the Wealth!
• 5. Proclaim Liberty!
• 6. Sabbath and Creation
• 7. Sabbath and Household Hospitality
• 8. Sabbath Made for Humans
• 9. A Modern Spirituality of Sabbath and Jubilee
• Scripture Index