Reply #4: The year of release didn't always restore much to the poor. [View All]

[Igel]

Nor was the land completely redistributed.

With years of release you'd have no loans greater than 6 years. None. And as the year of release approached you'd find the length of permissible loans to be smaller and smaller. Who would grant a 30 year mortgage if after 3 years it's forgiven?

Land was redistributed to families and clans. Not only would Mr. Igel have to go to the land that was distributed to his clan when the land was initially settled and inheritances given by lot, but he'd have to go to the portion that belonged to his family. This isn't very much an option. If you were given 50 acres and 100 men return there, welcome to poverty. You don't grow your family on 5 acres. Population growth would kill that system. If your family had a lot of girls born to it you may be the only male and have 50 acres to farm. Woo-hoo! Randomness in births would level this out, but it's still stochastic.

However, it means that you're not very likely to make any improvements to the land that would last for more than 48 years if it's not your patrimony. You buy land 10 years from the year of jubilee, in 8 years it's fallow and in year 10 it reverts to its rightful owner. Irrigation? Factories? Barns and other buildings? Why bother, if you can't not only recoup your investment two years before the year of jubilee with a hefty profit.

In the US there was no initial division of the land. No redistribution under Levitical law is possible, so this isn't a problem. Since there's no system to apply, it's a nice fantasy but it's completely undefined--any system promoted wouldn't be one that Jesus would have had in mind or intended. Moreover, would they really want to assign land to people like that? The inevitable result is that any immigrants *after* the allotment is made can never truly possess land. In the year of jubilee, they and all their descendants that followed and exclusively male line (son having son) all would forced into the cities, with no exceptions. Or be forced "home."

Moreover, it didn't apply to land in the cities. That could be bought and sold in perpetuity. Large landholders who had no outstanding debt would have no problem retaining their properties. However, it meant cities couldn't expand into patrimonies. If there was urban sprawl, in the year of jubilee Houston's 13 million would have to leave for their ancestral homes or all scrunch into what was usually a very small walled city. Look out for rental property prices under those conditions.

The year of release would remake the system. Somehow people only see what would benefit those or those they empathize with--or, more importantly for many, hurt those they despise. Still, they overlook the aspects of the change that would hurt them.