Christ's Debt Reset & Biblical Debt Jubilee
As I have written in my previous posts on Jesus and the Temple-Bank and The Prophets against BAAL, much of the The Bible is about economics and civic society. This includes debt, creditor rule, and the social corruption that follows in a debt-economy. The Bible is the blueprint foundation for a holistic civic society, both on an individual and larger macro-level. The foundation of this worldview is found in Christ and The Prophets.
I received a bachelor’s degree in business, where I learned what economics was not. They never had us read something like Aristotle’s politics, where economics is simply defined as the order of the home, expanding first from the family then to the community, town, and outwards to the state. We are not meant to work for the the “GDP”, faceless corporations and the federal government, we are meant to work first for the health of the home.
Today’s fake economy, which has become a borderline superstitious entity, is operated through debt. Debt is stored in “fetishized commodities” like real-estate and stocks, while wages are kept low so workers have to spend all their money on rents, mortgages and subscription services. Through this system, social degeneration is encouraged and incentivized, while it requires more and more unethical labor to pay bills. This is where the topic of debt reset in the The Bible begins.
In the ancient world, debt resets were seen as a “clean slate”, which restored things to their natural order. Debt resets were primarily done to guarantee citizens would not have their land taken by creditors (bankers). Land tenure was maintained to keep citizens self-sufficient on generational land, guaranteeing they would have more time to build the economy, work on infrastructure projects, or fight in wars. If debt was allowed to keep building with compound interest, creditors would begin to privatize the economy and foreclose on people’s land. This would eventually lead to an overthrow of the royal class by the creditors.
The royalist class would force creditors to reset the debt in order to protect themselves from being overtaken by the creditors, and guarantee taxes continued coming into the palace. Land was the main target of creditors, changing laws toward privatization (stealing the land). Creditors would amass a private mercenary army of dispossessed people from their lands and eventually take over the state-religion (not different from Rockefeller taking over the theology seminaries). This would eventually lead to debtors (borrowers) being sold into slavery, fleeing the province, or eventually collapsing the state. Populist uprisings in Rome and Greece were often centered around debt resets, the populists labeled as “tyrants” by the aristocracy.
The Old Testament & Mosaic Debt Jubilee
This is the backdrop of The Bible starting from Solomon’s monarchy (Kings I&II) leading into the major/minor prophets, and then to Jesus. Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Amos, Micah, and others were populist prophets on behalf of the debtor class who were a pastoral or agricultural economy in southern Judea. This is seen all through their texts, Jeremiah especially campaigning for debt reform against the state’s “false prophets” who protected the elite’s interests with propaganda.
Prior to the monarchy in Israel, Moses’ debt resets (debt jubilees) were written into the laws of Deuteronomy and Leviticus, requiring ancient Israelites to reset their debts. Israel’s anti-royalist suspicion against having a king as described in the book of Samuel (1 Samuel 8) meant the debt reset was written into the religion instead, in order to maintain a theocratic-community free of monarchist corruption.
Once monarchy was implemented and Solomon allied with the merchants of Tyre, Israel was transformed into a global trading center and an oligarchic debt economy. The debt resets ceased, and Israel became corrupted like the nations around it. Solomon divided the nation into 12 provinces (inversion of the 12 tribes) with an annual tax of 666 talents of gold. The Baal cult was introduced to normalize debt bondage when Solomon intermarried with the daughters of foreign royalty.
Sabbaths and debt jubilees are described in Leviticus 25 and Deuteronomy 15 as occurring on every seventh year and every forty-ninth year. The fields are commanded to not be farmed in the seventh year to let the soil recover, and also to give food away to the poor, both local and foreign. This was done to prevent the poorest from going into debt slavery. If anyone had to sell their land out of necessity, the land would be restored to them.
“Restoring liberty to the land” in Leviticus 25, meant to reset the debts after forty-nine years and restore the natural order. Deprivation of liberty meant the denial of guaranteed self-sufficiency on land. While agrarian debts were cancelled, mercantile or commercial debts were left in place. Bondservants were released from their debt obligations back to their homes. This enabled the population to continue paying taxes to the temple and use their labor for the community and economy.
The prophets began a political campaign against debt and usury after Israel’s economy entered into a Victorian-styled oligarchy. What the prophets all shared is that they agreed the reigning elites had justified their debt and interest-lending behind materialism, Baalist mysticism, and rejection of the old religion. Although they condemned the citizens for letting the corruption effect them, they acknowledged the oppressive economic practices had contributed to social decline.
Ezekiel accuses the elites of Judea of worshipping demons, who are the gods of the nations they are financially conspiring with (Ezekiel 8). Jeremiah had a political program to reset the debt and restore land ownership to the people, which was eventually implemented after Judea’s defeat by Babylonia. Isaiah denounces the seizure of land by the aristocracy (similar to the enclosure act near the Victorian era), centralizing people into cities (Isaiah 5:8). All prophets forecasted the immanent doom of Israel/Judea if the economic situation was not fixed, because it had weakened and corroded the society, making it primed to be invaded by Assyrians or Babylonians.
God was associated with universal justice for the oppressed against the merchant cult of Baal (Amos 9:7). Jeremiah’s debt and land reforms were implemented in an ironic round-about way after Judea was conquered by Babylonia and the corrupt aristocracy were all captured as prisoners. This solidified the sentiment that “the meek will inherit the Earth”.
Jesus’ ministry was partly economic focused, referring to the Pharisees (who were lenders of the Jerusalem temple-bank) as seizing the land of widows and orphans. When Jesus walks into the Nazarene synagogue and reads the scroll of Isaiah calling for a debt reset (Luke 4:18) to his Nazarene peers, they attempt to throw him off a cliff after Christ condemns them as false prophets for allowing widows’ homes to be foreclosed on. Jesus reading the scroll of Isaiah was announcing that he had come to fulfill the prophecy, that he was the Son of God.
It is significant in Luke 4 that Jesus is first tempted by Satan with the powers of the world. Only after he denies Satan and earns the “power of the Spirit”, is he able to begin his ministry by announcing “good news for the poor” and “liberty for the broken hearted”, liberty referring to both sin and the debt jubilee in Leviticus 25.
Jesus quotes Jeremiah 7:11 when flipping over the tables in the temple. “My house will be a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves”. The Pharisees had violated the eighth commandment by foreclosing on people’s land, they had become thieves. Matthew 23:15-18 sees Jesus accusing the Pharisees of turning the entire religion into a debt trap, and actually “sanctifying” debt. Even traveling “sea and land” converting people as a means to corrupt them like themselves.
In Matthew 23:1-4 Jesus says that the Pharisees “sit in Moses’ seat” “bind heavy burdens… and lay them on men's shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers.”, implying they are inverting the Mosaic debt jubilee of Deuteronomy and Leviticus. The Pharisees were a political party under Roman rule who had waived any debt forgiveness possibilities as penned by Babylonian rabbi Hillel. This is why Jesus says “Lend without expecting anything in return” (Matt. 6:35). In Matthew 18 Jesus presents the parable of the unforgiving servant who does not return the favor of debt forgiveness.
The Lord’s prayer prays “forgive us our sins as we forgive our debtors”, asking for both a spiritual and economic clean-slate. This is of course because avoiding the temptation of sin would help prevent debt, and vice versa. This is also why constant warnings to “fear God only” are paired with this message, as fear could be a lure into debt.
Christ and the Prophet’s social-religious movement to erase debt and restore social-order then spread to Rome, who’s populist movements had already failed against a Roman oligarchy. Luke 24:47, Christ commands the message to be preached to all nations in his name. We could go on for days with examples from both the prophets and the gospels on all of this, but you’ll see it when you read it yourself now.
“Christendom” began with a debt reform in the 5th century, freeing the Roman debt-slaves from male-only barracks, letting them occupy farmland and have wives. The Byzantine Empire regularly managed and reset their debts, to guarantee the prosperity of their farmers and soldiers. Even America has done numerous land redistributions and debt defaults, like the homestead act of 1862 (only ended in the 1970’s).
The Liberty bell quotes Leviticus 25 referring to “let liberty reign”, liberty meaning freedom from debt in the verse. Over time debt resets were gradually forgotten or erased by aristocrats, only preserved in the Byzantine empire.
In the House of Representatives, a collection of 23 portraits of populist leaders who had erased debts hangs on the walls (Moses on the top left). The early American ideal was to maintain a state of “liberty” which meant low debt and self-sufficiency, modeled as a culmination of all of the populist ideas in one.
Debt & Natural Law
Giambattista Vico wrote in 1725, “class conflict” is a perennial conflict. I am not reducing the Bible to class-conflict, but highlighting the importance of material reality in The Bible, and to religion today. Hosea 4:2-3 states that society had “broken all bounds”, this is because debt extends beyond what is natural, it “cannot scale”. The reason for GMO fake food, is a scalable solution to feed an entire civilization in a debt economy, rather than a sensible agrarian solution with localized food supplies of real food.
The “breaking of all bounds” is to decouple from reality, and to raise up “idolatry” in reality’s place. Usury, sodomy, and idolatry were associated together in the Baal cult because the economic practices of debt, which is to create imaginary value out of exchange itself, leads to a decoupling from reality (idolatry). This is why mysticism and chaos magic often act as a shield to protect the illusions around economic mechanisms, “false structures of meaning” which can incentivize people to do things against the nature of creation.
Debt Today
What is happening today is still the aftermath of the 2008 economic collapse, when most of the country lost or foreclosed on their businesses/homes. In any sane time, the debt would have been simply reset in order to keep society functioning, but only banks were bailed out instead of normal people with jobs, leading to population-centralization in cities, followed by COVID lockdowns.
Since then, FIRE assets (finance, insurance, real estate, education) have inflated with the lockdown money printing. Taxes, housing, and general overhead are inflating while monopolies are putting rent-services in front of everything. Owning land is becoming a luxury for upper-middle class vloggers to post on YouTube. Normal people should be guaranteed land for self-sufficiency as America did with the 1862 homestead act, and the debt should be reset to encourage self-employment, which was the entire reason people migrated to America in the first place.
Any Christian community must be economics-conscious in order to maintain harmony and bring the Kingdom of God to Earth.
Works Cited
Michael Hudson - …and forgive them their debts
RYB Scott - Relevance Of The Prophets
Matthew Raphael Johnson - Usury and the prophets