Economy of joy 1/ Jewish sources begin the journey into the meaning of an event with revolutionary potential: why we are not the ‘masters’ of anything
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 11/03/2025
The biblical jubilee was above all an economic and social affair. It was the announcement of a different, extraordinary year, when slaves were set free, land was returned to its original owners, and debts were cancelled. The word jubilee comes from the Hebrew word Jôbel, the sound of the ram's horn with which some great festivals were opened. But perhaps there is also an echo of another Hebrew word, jabal, which meant ‘to give back, to send away’, which emphasises the social and economic dimensions. The jubilee was in fact a sabbatical year squared, which occurred every seven sabbatical years, therefore every 49 years, rounded up to 50.
To understand the Christian jubilee we therefore need to look at the biblical jubilee, and to understand this we need to start from the sabbatical year and therefore from the shabbat, the Sabbath. The place of the fundamental Scripture is chapter 25 of Leviticus. There we find the three pillars of the Jubilee: the land, the debts, the slaves. In the Jubilee, the gestures of human fraternity (debts and slaves) and cosmic fraternity (land and plants) that are celebrated every seven years in the sabbatical year had to be carried out with greater radicalness. During that special year the land must rest. Furthermore, if a piece of land has been alienated by a family out of necessity, each person reverts to their previous property: ‘You shall hallow the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you; each of you shall return to his property and each of you shall return to his family. … You shall not sow, nor reap the aftergrowth, nor gather the grapes from the undressed vines. … But you may eat the produce of the field’ (Lev 25,10-12). Then debts: ‘If your neighbour, who lives with you in the city of YHWH, becomes impoverished and is unable to repay you, you shall support him as a foreigner and a guest, so that he may live with you. You shall not exact interest from him or take any profit from him … You shall not lend him your money at interest, nor give him your food at a profit.’ (Lev 25,35-37). The rules regarding the Jubilee do not explicitly mention the remission or cancellation of debts, because the Jubilee being a sabbatical year, it takes for granted what was already to be done every seven years: ‘At the end of every seven years, you shall grant a release. This is the law of the jubilee: every creditor who holds on to the pledge of a loan made to his neighbour shall let his right fall (Dt 15,1-2). Finally, the slaves: ‘If your brother who has been reduced to poverty sells himself to you ... he shall serve you until the Year of Jubilee; then he shall leave you, together with his children, and shall return to his family and to the property of his forefathers ... He shall leave in the Year of Jubilee, he and his children, free of charge’ (Lev 25,39-41,54). And in the book of Deuteronomy we have some important details: ‘If your brother sells himself to you, he shall serve you for six years, but in the seventh you shall let him go free. When you let him go free, you shall not send him away empty-handed. You shall give him gifts from your flock, from your threshing floor, and from your winepress’ (15:12-14). Not only will the slave be freed, but the liberation will be accompanied by the surplus of the gift. One must not remain indebted forever, one is not a slave forever: only for six times, not for the seventh.
The sabbatical year follows the same logic as the shabbat (Sabbath), that marvellous institution of the Old Testament without which biblical humanism is not fully understood. The Sabbath is the ultimate icon of that principle dear to Pope Francis: time is superior to space, because by placing a seal of gratuitousness on one day of the week he has taken time away from the absolute and predatory dominion of men: ‘that your ox and your donkey may rest, and the son of your maidservant, and the stranger, may be refreshed’ (Ex 23:11-12). If you can't exploit your animals, the land, your employees, the stranger, yourself, in a day, then you, homo sapiens, are not the dominus of the world. You are just one of its inhabitants, like all the others: you have more power but you are not the master of the earth, of work, of animals, of trees, of oceans, of the atmosphere. Because the earth is always the promised land never reached, because all goods are common goods. And so is that piece of land belonging to our house, so are the goods we have legitimately purchased on the market, so is our bank account. Before private property there is a law of gratuitousness in the world, a law that is more profound and general and that concerns everything and everyone, a radical prophecy of human and cosmic fraternity. The earth is not ‘Mazzarò's stuff’ (G. Verga), workers are not slaves or servants, animals do not only have value in relation to us: first of all, everything has value in relation to itself. Because, according to the Bible, every property is imperfect, every dominion is secondary, every contract is incomplete, no man is truly and only a stranger, brotherhood comes before debts and credits, and changes their nature.
The Sabbath is therefore a deposit of another time, of the ‘seventh time’ of Joachim of Fiore and the Franciscans, of a messianic time when everything and everyone will be only and always Sabbath. It is therefore the distance between the law of the sabbatical year and that of the other six that is the first indicator of the ethical and spiritual capital of a civilisation, of every civilisation. It is the distance between the citizen and the stranger, between our rights and those of every creature, between the land I use today and the one I leave to my children, that reveal the moral quality of human society. On the other hand, when we forget that there is a different and free day that is not under our control, the earth no longer breathes, animals and plants are only valuable if they can be exploited, foreigners never become part of the family, hierarchies become ruthless, leaders are never followers, work is never brother work but only slave or master.
Jesus was well aware of the Jubilee, as Luke reminds us, showing us Jesus just returned to Nazareth, who in the synagogue reads the chapter of Isaiah relating to the jubilee year: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me ... and he has sent me to proclaim good news to the poor, to proclaim liberty to captives and to the blind new sight, to set the downtrodden free, and to proclaim the Lord's year of favour’ (Luke 4, 18-19). A ‘year of the Lord's favour’ (aphesis), that is, a year of liberation: a jubilee year. Jesus criticised a Sabbath that was losing its prophetic nature to tell us that the Kingdom of Heaven is a perpetual Sabbath, a seventh time that becomes all new time. What Deuteronomy assigns to the sabbatical year - ‘There should be no poor among you!’ (Dt 15:4) - in the new community of the Kingdom will become the rule of ordinary life: ‘There was no needy person among them’ (Acts 4:34).
It is probable that the people of Israel did not celebrate the jubilee year throughout their history, as we can see from the repeated denunciations by the prophets regarding the slaves not being freed, the debts not being cancelled and the lands not being returned. Not even Christians have managed to make the sharing of goods their normal way of doing things, they have not entered into the sabbatical way of doing things of the Kingdom.
If the West had taken the jubilee culture seriously, we would not have generated capitalism or it would have been very different. Our capitalism has in fact become the anti-Shabbat, its negation, its antichrist, its prophecy in reverse: ‘Capitalism is the celebration of a cult “without respite and without pity”. There are no ‘working days’; there is no day that is not a holiday, in the frightening sense of the unfolding of every sacred pomp, of the extreme effort of the venerable’ (W. Benjamin, Capitalism as Religion, 1921). It knows no rest, labour never casts off its yoke; no hour, no day, no season is different from the others, the earth is just a resource to be exploited, preferably to become rare earth.
The presence of the jubilee year is the Bible's main anti-idolatrous device. A civilisation that consumes time as a commodity is technically idolatrous, because by making itself the master of every day and every moment, it makes itself the only god to be worshipped. Capitalism is idolatry because it has marked the definitive death of the seventh day of the week, it has devoured the Sabbath and Sunday, transforming them into the weekend, which is the apotheosis of consumerism.
The jubilee year has already been underway for a few months. However, for a few of us, a different time has begun. We are not allowing the land to rest, we are not freeing any debtors or slaves. In the coming weeks, with this new series of articles, we will make a pilgrimage through the spirit of the jubilee, in its economy of joy.
Perhaps the people of Israel wrote the rules about the jubilee year to commemorate the great liberation from the Babylonian exile, and therefore the slaves' return home and the restitution of the land. The enormous trauma of the Babylonian exile became a forced jubilee year that Israel was finally obliged to observe after having forgotten it for a long time: ‘Nebuchadnezzar deported to Babylon all those who had escaped the sword... until the land had enjoyed its sabbaths’ (2 Chronicles 36, 20). It was during the exile that the people learnt about the jubilee. Will we too be forced to learn a different economy of the earth and of social relations from this ecological exile and from the new wars?
