Economy of joy 2/ What the biblical story of the liberation of the slaves during the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem teaches us
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 25/03/2025
The sabbatical and jubilee culture informs the entire biblical humanism. The weekly celebration of the Shabbat, and then of the sabbatical year every seven years and finally of the Jubilee, used the cyclical rhythm to create a true sabbatical culture. For centuries, the Church also used the cyclical method of liturgy and feasts to create Christian culture and Christianity. Every popular culture is born from worship, therefore from repeated, daily and cyclical actions. We can clearly see this with capitalism and its many buying cults, including the latest ritual of entering a shop, paying 20 euros to receive a parcel ‘blindly’ that the buyer has never collected - before the advent of the capitalist religion, we would have organised charity lotteries with these orphan parcels. For this reason, in biblical history, sabbatical gestures didn't only follow the seven-year rhythm. They could also take place outside the sabbatical or jubilee year, as we know, among other things, from an important episode narrated by the prophet Jeremiah - prophets are essential to understanding biblical jubilee culture.
We are in Jerusalem, which has been besieged for some time by Nebuchadnezzar and his Babylonian army, a siege that will lead to the destruction of the city in 587 BC (or 586 BC), and then to exile. The kingdom of Judah had already lost its autonomy. Ten years earlier, at the time of the first deportation, Nebuchadnezzar had deported the then king Jehoiakim and in his place had put Zedekiah, the last king of the kingdom of Judah, a king who ‘did what was evil in the eyes of the Lord’ (2 Kings 24,19). This king, small and weak, during the long months of the siege of Jerusalem, made an important gesture: ‘This word came to Jeremiah from the Lord, after King Zedekiah and all the people in Jerusalem had made a covenant to proclaim the freedom of the slaves, each of them to release his Jewish male and female slaves, so that no one would force any of his countrymen to remain in bondage. All the princes and all the people, who had entered into the covenant, consented to set their slaves, both men and women, free, so that they would no longer force them into slavery’ (Jeremiah 34,8-10). We are probably dealing with a historical fact. Perhaps as a last political-religious resort to avert total defeat, and on the advice of Jeremiah, Zedekiah made a pact with the people, a gesture that closely resembles a sabbatical year. It even seems to repeat the rite of the Abrahamic covenant, with the contracting parties passing between the two parts of the quartered calf (34,17-21). This jubilee gesture was particularly concerned with the liberation of slaves. At that time a Jew would become the slave of another Jew to pay off debts. They were economic slaves. The Law received by Moses established that economic slavery could not last more than six years (the most ancient code of Hammurabi foresaw a maximum of three years: § 117). In that culture slavery could not last forever, economic failure did not have to become a life sentence, the economy was not the last word on life. Slaves are not set free, debts are not cancelled if there is no pact between us that is deeper than contracts. Millennia after the biblical law, we wrote constitutions and codes that in some ways are more humane and ethical than the Law-Torah (thanks also to the biblical seed that became a tree), but we were not able to imagine a different time of liberation for the many slaves and the too many debts of the unfortunate, because we cancelled every pact that was deeper than contracts.
Jeremiah knew that the Sabbath law had not been respected in the past: ‘Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: I made a covenant with your fathers when I brought them out of the land of Egypt, freeing them from that state of slavery. I said to them, ‘At the end of every seven years, each of you shall set free a brother Hebrew who has been sold to you and has served you six years, and you shall set him free.’ But your fathers did not listen to me or pay attention to me’ (34:12-14). The fathers had not experienced the sabbatical culture. Jeremiah therefore wondered if this time things would turn out differently.
From the story we immediately learn that the people obey, and therefore the slaves are effectively freed: ‘All the officials and all the people who had entered into the covenant agreed to set their male and female slaves free, so that they would not make them continue in bondage’ (34,10). Everything seems to be moving towards a real conversion, the slaves are really set free, after so many past failures. In the face of the greatest tragedy imminent, Zedekiah's pact of liberation seems to have finally succeeded.
But here's the twist: those liberators ‘took back the male and female slaves they had set free and brought them back into slavery’ (34:11). We are faced with an anti-repentance, a perverse conversion that cancels out the first good conversion. The people change their minds and re-establish their original iniquitous condition. We don't know the reasons for this opposite repentance, but probably its main cause was a temporary loosening of Nebuchadnezzar's siege (34,22). A temporary tactical retreat produced a new wave of nationalistic ideology from the false prophets who had always fought Jeremiah. In the summer of 587, Nebuchadnezzar suspended the siege of Jerusalem. The false prophets, always looking for ways to continue to deceive the people to their advantage, had therefore used that temporary event to convince the king that once again (as in the time of the prophet Isaiah and the defeat of the Assyrians) God was intervening, a miracle was coming: David would once again defeat Goliath. The easing of the great fear was therefore enough to violate that pact of liberation, to deny the alliance. The slaves were freed for a moment, the dream vanished, they returned to the house of slavery.
In every pact, the crucial element is time. The pact is an asset of duration. We can and must say to each other on our wedding day ‘forever’ with all the sincerity and truth of which we are capable; we can truly repent and promise to change our lives, to say it to ourselves and to each other. But only God and his true prophets can change the reality of things by saying them. Saying the words to us is not enough to create a new reality: that word must become flesh, individually and collectively, and therefore needs time. Even Mary needed nine months. We cannot know today the degree of truth of the words we are sincerely pronouncing now - this ignorance about the outcome of our sincere conversions is part of the moral repertoire of homo sapiens, even the best ones. Perhaps, only at the end, in the embrace with the angel of death, will we discover the truth of the most beautiful words we have sincerely said throughout our lives.
But the most serious and tremendous perverse regrets are collective ones. When a community or an entire generation renounces the words and gestures that their prophets had said and done in some luminous moments of history. We raise walls that on a brighter day we had torn down, we close borders that on a shining day we had opened, we let children die with a beautiful report card sewn on their shirt (let's not forget) in a mare nostrum that has become a mare monstrum. And then, a fake ‘loosening of the siege’ is enough for the false prophets to convince us that there is no real climate crisis, that we are innocent, that the glaciers and rivers are to blame. A small change in mutual geopolitical interests was enough to erase higher words spoken after great collective wounds, carved into the tombstones of our squares, in our cemeteries, in our constitutions. And we return to the hulls with the sundials of death, we follow the pied piper who convinces us to wage war by quoting the true prophets of yesterday. We return to the streets and go in search of slaves, we imprison them in galleys made of meritocratic and leaderocratic ideologies, we condemn them because they are guilty of their poverty and misfortune. Cain once again triumphs over Abel, fratricide over brotherhood, Jezebel once again eliminates Naboth, Uriah is once again killed by David, Golgotha triumphs over the empty tomb.
For years the false prophets had done everything they could to deny the great crisis and the end of the kingdom, they had convinced (almost) everyone that the real enemy was not Nebuchadnezzar but Jeremiah who wanted to deceive the people with his conspiracy theories and defeatism. They quoted Isaiah to refute Jeremiah, just as we quote De Gasperi to rearm ourselves; we even use the ‘sword’ in the gospel to justify our swords. We build new Bastiani Fortresses, we send new Giovanni Drogo to defend it from imaginary enemies, only to discover, perhaps, in the end that the real enemy to fight was only the fear of dying of our dying civilisation.
The Bible and human history are marked by a deep struggle between honest prophets and false prophets. With one constant: the powerful (almost) always listen to the false prophets. And so, even if sometimes during great collective fears and pains (wars, dictatorships, tragedies, pandemics...), we manage to believe the true prophets and convert, after a few weeks or months the false prophets win again. And we go back out onto the streets to hunt down those slaves we had freed in a better day.
Come back true prophets, come back now, the city is about to be destroyed again.
Dedicated to Pope Francis.
