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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   27519 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 6, 2023

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Do you have a single source to back that up?

Do you have a single source to back that up?

Biblical Jubilee year

In ancient Near East, periodical debt forgiveness was common(people were then not so advanced as to pull themselves by their bootstraps from hereditary debt slavery), but biblical system pushed it further, into land redistribution every 50 years.

Remember, equal land division was always in agricultural societies the most extremely extremist demand of the most hardcore rebels.

As late as 1793, sooo radical French revolutionaires decreed death penalty for anyone who would dare to propose "agrarian law".

Here it was the law and the norm, explicitly designed to stop accumulation of land by few families, stop emergence of large hereditary landowners and resulting feudal system.

Add ban on lending on interest (what, in peasant village conditions, meant extortionary loan sharking, not investment in productive enterprises) and limiting slavery (for Hebrews only OFC) to seven years.

Yes, there is no evidence that the biblical economic system was ever actually implemented, but was well thought off. Bible writers were well aware about conditions in their world (all powerful kings, crushing taxation, omnipresent serfdom and slavery, few oligarchs and plantation owners owning most land), didn't like it and tried hard to find way to avoid it.

It is significant, and it is even more significant than not even the most Old Testament loving Christians who brought back biblical punishments and biblical genocides, never ever thought about putting this system into practice.

As late as 1793, sooo radical French revolutionaires decreed death penalty for anyone who would dare to propose "agrarian law".

Two things should be particularly noted about this decree: Firstly, that it was passed amid scenes of general and almost hysterical enthusiasm, with the only voice of caution coming from Jean-Paul Marat

That’s like saying ‘the only voice of caution coming from Vladimir Lenin’. Marat was already endorsing the execution of his fellow revolutionaries for not being radical enough, he just understandably didn’t want it done to him.

Btw, I like your comments, but in half of them it's hard to tell what your position is because there’s so much sarcasm. As in “See biblical commandments that do not make sense to you in this light, and they will fit. “ This seems like aggressive overfitting to me, but I'm going to guess 'not sarcasm'.

And what are those of us billions who number the people who are not the sons of Judah? What does the law of this universal and great god say of us?

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