The Jubilee as Land Reform: There Shall be no Poor Among You

John Perkins tells this story:

  Give a person a fish and she eats for a day (charity).
  Teach a person to fish and he eats for a lifetime (job training).
  That's a lie!  The crucial question is:  Who owns the pond? (ownership)

The purpose of the Sabbatical/Jubilee laws was:  "There shall be no poor among you."  The method:
stop oppression and do justice.  Traditional debt and slavery led to lifelong or even generational (children) oppression so every seven years debts were to be canceled; every seven years slaves were to be freed.  Every fifty years land was to be returned to the original family owner.  In an agricultural society every family should own their own plot of land.

  The following are examples of the practicing of some aspects of the Jubilee:

1. Nehemiah 5--from poverty and oppression to justice.
2. Jubilee 2000--a massive campaign to cancel some of Third World debt with some success.
3. General Grant--by military decree he rented freed slaves the Davis plantation to farm.  They worked hard, had a good crop and made a profit.  They started to build a community.  But, after the Civil War, as an act of reconciliation, the farm was returned to the Davis family.  This left the freed slaves out in the cold.  Freedom, but no land.  They did not own the pond--the "Forty Acres and a Mule".  Without ownership, without justice, soon what freedom they had was lost as they fell under the bondage of segregation.
4. India--after Gandhi, after Independence, the government initiated massive land reform.  As peasants were able to own their own far, great social and economic improvements followed.  Documented in Behind Mud Walls, by Wiser.
5. World War II Pacific Peace Treaty--Demanded major land reform in Japan, Korea and Taiwan, but not in the Philippines.  MacArthur was friends of the Filipino elite.
6. Early church fathers strongly opposed the Roman emphasis on private property so often abused by the rich.  They wanted the koina, [natural resources], to be used to promote koinonia.  See Ownership:  Early Christian Teaching, by Charles Avila.