What does the future hold for Britain in the wake of the current financial crisis?
by Melvin Rhodes
British newspapers do not normally quote Scripture, so it surprised me to see two prominent and highly respected British writers calling for the introduction of the biblical year of jubilee.
According to the Old Testament statute, the jubilee was the year of release, held once every 50 years—release, that is, from debt. Everybody's debts were cancelled and economic life began all over again.
Niall Ferguson, a historian who was born in Scotland but now teaches at both Harvard and Oxford, was the first to mention the jubilee. In a full-page article titled "The Age of Obligation" (Financial Times, Dec. 18, 2008) Ferguson wrote: "In the Old Testament Book of Leviticus, God commands the children of Israel to observe a jubilee every 50 years. Nowadays we tend to associate the word with celebrations of royal anniversaries such as Queen Elizabeth's golden jubilee in 2002. But the biblical conception of a jubilee was more precise: that of a general cancellation of debts.
"This point is spelt out in Deuteronomy: 'Every creditor that lendeth ought unto his neighbor shall release it; he shall not exact it of his neighbour, or of his brother; because it is called the Lord's release.'
"Such injunctions may strike the modern reader as utopian. How could any sophisticated society function if all debts were cancelled twice a century ... Yet we know that such general cancellations of debt really did happen in the ancient world. In 1788 BC, for example, about 500 years before the time of Moses, King Rim-Sin of Ur issued a royal edict declaring all loans null and void, wiping out some of history's earliest known moneylenders."
Ferguson also showed that a cancellation of debts is not unknown in modern times. In 1923 hyperinflation led to the collapse of the German currency, thereby wiping out all paper denominated debts.
