Moses — probably a secret Calvinist — announced to Israel God's will for money and property, one of the most distinctive marks of Biblical ethics. It's called Jubilee. Moses — the secret Calvinist — declared as God's will: every fifty years you must give back to the people the land and property that is inalienably theirs that they have lost in the rough and tumble of the economy. You must give it back, even if you own it legally, and it is properly yours. You must give it back, because in the end it is theirs and not yours, inalienably. The start of the occasion for the return of property is signaled by a trumpet, in Hebrew, yabal, from which we get Jubilee, Jubilation, a huge celebration of bringing things back to where they ought to be. So imagine, when the yabal sounds, when the signal is given, everybody returns property, everybody cancels debts, everybody breaks off the mad scramble of accumulation and acquisition. It is a signal not unlike the great gavel that ends the fury of Wall Street every day, only it signifies something very different. At the center of biblical faith is a command from God that curbs economic transactions by an act of communal sanity that restores everyone to proper place in the economy, because life in the community of faith does not consist in getting more but in sharing well. . . .

It is ethical. Moses observed the working of the market, the practice of accumulation and acquisitiveness and greed and monopoly. He observed, as anyone can see, that in the long run the operations of accumulation and acquisitiveness tend to monopoly, so that some end up with a lot and some end up with a little or with none, have and have-nots, wealth and poverty. And what Moses figured out is that such a process is an impossible way to run a community. And so he announces in that long speech in Leviticus 25, at the end of forty-nine years of accumulation, the property will be returned to its proper owners (vv. 27-28). The land cannot be sold to perpetuity (v.23), that is, irreversibly, because the land belongs to God and not to the accumulators. God wants the little ones, who always lose in the market game, to have their stuff. When the signal is given, the vicious cycles of accumulation are broken, wealth is divested back to the ones who do not have it. It is an act of divestment.

It is likely here, more than anywhere, that the Bible questions our usual assumptions about our life in the world.

Walter Brueggemann, Inscribing the Text by Anna Carter Florence