The First and Lasting Yovel
YHWH as Verb, Jubilee as Reset, and the Enduring Call to Liberation
The scene at the burning bush presents us with one of scripture’s most enigmatic moments. When Moses asks for the divine name, he receives not a noun but a verb: אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה (ehyeh asher ehyeh). This grammatical peculiarity has reverberated through millennia of theological reflection, yet its implications remain revolutionary. What if the divine name is not a static identifier but a dynamic promise? What if YHWH represents not “being” in the Greek philosophical sense, but “becoming” in the Hebrew covenantal sense—specifically, becoming-as-liberation?
This essay argues that understanding YHWH as verb rather than noun fundamentally transforms our theology, revealing jubilee (yovel) not as ancient economic legislation but as the cosmic mechanism through which the divine verb acts in history. Drawing from Hebrew linguistics, liberation theology, comparative religious studies, and contemporary economic justice movements, we trace how this verbal understanding of divinity manifests as periodic reset, restoration, and renewal across cultures and centuries. The jubilee emerges not as utopian idealism but as humanity’s recurring technology for preventing the concentration of power that leads to systemic collapse.
Part I: The Verb at the Bush—Linguistic Foundations
The traditional rendering of Exodus 3:14 as “I AM WHO I AM” reflects more about Greek philosophical categories than Hebrew verbal dynamics. As Walter Brueggemann emphasizes in his Theology of the Old Testament, YHWH in the biblical text is characterized by “responsive verbs”: God heard, God remembered, God looked, God took notice. This God is not Aristotle’s unmoved mover but one who “turned out to be the listener” to the cries of the oppressed. The divine self-revelation at the burning bush must be understood within this framework of active engagement rather than static essence.
Daniel McClellan’s cognitive linguistics approach, detailed in YHWH’s Divine Images: A Cognitive Approach, provides crucial methodological insight. McClellan demonstrates how ancient peoples conceptualized divine action and agency differently than modern theological categories suggest. The Hebrew verb הָיָה (hayah), occurring 3,576 times in the Hebrew Bible, fundamentally means “to be,” “to become,” “to come into being,” or “to happen.” The imperfective aspect of אֶהְיֶה suggests not completed being but ongoing becoming—a promise of presence rather than a philosophical definition.
S.D. Goitein’s provocative 1956 article in Vetus Testamentum proposed an alternative etymology deriving YHWH from Proto-Arabic hawaya, meaning “love, affection, passion, desire.” While this remains a minority view, it illuminates something essential: the Hebrew conception of divinity emphasizes pathos and engagement over abstract being. Goitein suggested translating ehyeh asher ehyeh as “I shall passionately love whom I love,” reading Exodus 34:14’s qanna not as “jealous” but as “The Impassioned One.” Whether or not we accept this etymology, it highlights how far removed the original Hebrew understanding was from the Scholastic interpretation of God as esse ipsum subsistens—”Being itself.”
The implications cascade through scripture. When Moses receives this verbal name, he is not given a philosophical treatise but a survival promise: “I will be with you” (ehyeh ‘immakh). The enslaved Israelites need not a cosmic principle but an active liberator. The name functions not as identification but as pledge—I will be there in your suffering, I will become what liberation requires. This is endurance theology, not ontology. As one midrashic reading suggests, the burning bush itself models this endurance: it burns but is not consumed, it transforms but persists, it endures through its very becoming.
Part II: Yovel as Divine Verb Enacted—The Jubilee Mechanism
If YHWH represents the divine as verb, then jubilee (yovel) represents that verb’s concrete manifestation in socio-economic reality. John Bergsma’s comprehensive 2024 study, Jesus and the Jubilee: The Biblical Roots of the Year of God’s Favor, demonstrates that jubilee was not peripheral to Israelite religion but central to its covenantal structure. The Dead Sea Scrolls, particularly document 4Q319 showing a calendrical system based on six consecutive jubilees (294 years), reveal that Second Temple Judaism maintained active interest in jubilee chronology even when practice had lapsed.
The Hebrew term יוֹבֵל (yovel) carries triple meaning: it designates the ram’s horn that proclaims the year, the fiftieth year itself, and the concept of homecoming/restoration. This linguistic richness integrates means (shofar blast), timing (fiftieth year), and purpose (restoration) in a single term. As Rabbi S.R. Hirsch synthesized, yovel means “homebringer”—the ram leading the flock home parallels the year bringing people home to ancestral land. The shofar blast on Yom Kippur that inaugurates jubilee connects atonement with economic liberation, revealing them as inseparable dimensions of covenant fidelity.
Christopher J.H. Wright’s paradigmatic approach in God’s People in God’s Land identifies three interpretive angles for jubilee: theological (land belongs to God), economic (equitable resource distribution), and social (preventing permanent poverty). Crucially, Wright emphasizes that jubilee concerned restoration not redistribution—returning to God’s original design rather than socialist leveling. This distinction matters: jubilee does not impose artificial equality but prevents the permanent alienation from means of production that creates structural poverty.
Michael Hudson’s groundbreaking work with the International Scholars’ Conference on Ancient Near Eastern Economies (ISCANEE) revolutionizes our understanding of jubilee’s historical context. His team documented extensive Mesopotamian debt cancellation traditions going back to Enmetena of Lagash (c. 2400 BCE). Hammurabi’s Code included provisions for debt forgiveness when crops failed. The Akkadian andurāru and Sumerian amargi (”return to mother,” the first written word for “freedom”) show that debt cancellation was standard practice across ancient west Asian settlements.
Hudson argues that biblical jubilee represents a significant advancement: by codifying debt relief into religious law rather than depending on royal prerogative, it created predictability that allowed both creditors and debtors to plan. The regular 49/50-year cycle transformed sporadic royal mercy into systematic covenant obligation. This was, in Hudson’s analysis, a “significant advance in justice and the rights of the people.”
Part III: Liberation Theology and the Preferential Option—Jubilee as Praxis
Gustavo Gutiérrez’s A Theology of Liberation (1971) established the methodological reversal that characterizes liberation theology: theology becomes “critical reflection on praxis in the light of the Word of God” rather than abstract speculation applied to practice. For Gutiérrez, who recently passed in 2024 after decades shaping Catholic social thought, commitment to the poor represents not humanitarian charity but theological imperative rooted in God’s own preferential option.
Gutiérrez’s reading of Exodus reveals God not as neutral arbiter but as one who takes sides: “I have seen the sufferings of my people... I have heard their cries... I know their agonies... I have come down to deliver them.” This is not observation from above but descent into the concrete conditions of oppression. The God who “comes down” anticipates the incarnational logic that culminates in Jesus’s jubilee proclamation at Nazareth.
Enrique Dussel’s Ethics of Liberation provides philosophical framework through his concept of “exteriority”—the space of the Other outside the dominant system. His analectical method goes beyond Hegelian dialectic, which remains within the system, to start from the perspective of those excluded. For Dussel, “living labor”—human creative capacity before incorporation into capital—exists in exteriority to the capitalist system. When the poor cry “We’re hungry! We have the right to eat!” their claim is not justified by the system’s laws but founded in their exteriority, their existence outside and prior to the system’s logic.
This connects directly to jubilee’s function. The periodic reset does not reform the system from within but interrupts it from without—from the exteriority of divine command that supersedes all human economic arrangements. Leviticus 25:23’s declaration—”The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants”—establishes divine ownership as the foundation that relativizes all human property claims. Jubilee is the recurring intrusion of divine exteriority into human economic systems.
Part IV: The Ebionite Witness—Living Jubilee
The Ebionites, those early Yahwistic Apostles who called themselves “the poor” (ebyonim), provide historical evidence of communities attempting to live jubilee principles. James Carleton Paget’s careful scholarship in Jews, Christians and Jewish Christians in Antiquity warns against uncritical acceptance of patristic sources, which often reflected polemical agendas. Nevertheless, certain patterns emerge consistently across sources.
The Ebionites maintained Torah observance while accepting Jesus as Messiah, practiced communal ownership reflecting Acts 2:44-45, and emphasized voluntary poverty as spiritual discipline. Their name itself—”the poor”—directly references jubilee’s beneficiaries. Epiphanius notes they “boastfully claim that they are Poor because they sold their possessions in the apostles’ time,” connecting them to the Jerusalem community’s practice of selling property to distribute to the needy.
The Dead Sea Scrolls reveal striking parallels. The Community Rule (1QS) mandates property sharing; the Damascus Document outlines economic regulations preventing exploitation. Archaeological evidence shows lack of personal wealth indicators at Qumran. Both communities—Qumran sectarians and Ebionites—appear to have created alternative economic systems embodying jubilee principles: voluntary poverty, communal property, debt forgiveness, and periodic restoration.
These were not utopian experiments but survival strategies for communities under empire. By practicing economic sharing, they created resilience against Roman extraction. Their poverty was not deprivation but liberation from the anxiety of accumulation. They embodied what Reza Aslan’s Zealot partially grasps but ultimately misreads: not violent revolution but economic revolution through communal practice. Aslan correctly identifies the radical edge of Jesus’s movement but wrongly associates it with the Zealots’ militancy. The Ebionites show us another model: resistance through economic alternatives, revolution through jubilee practice.
Part V: Global Resonances—Jubilee as Universal Human Wisdom
The principles underlying jubilee appear across cultures, suggesting not borrowing but parallel human recognition of economic reset’s necessity. Rowland Abiodun’s analysis of Yoruba àṣẹ—the life force regulating all movement in the universe—reveals how West African cosmology incorporates cyclical restoration. Akinwumi Ogundiran’s The Yoruba: A New History documents periods of “Atrophy and Regeneration,” showing how Yoruba societies understood restoration as inherent to historical cycles.
John V. Murra’s revolutionary work on Andean ayni demonstrates how pre-Columbian communities maintained reciprocity across ecological zones without market exchange. The ayllu system—land-owning social units defined by kinship—prevented permanent wealth concentration through obligatory labor exchange and redistributive feasting. Temporal reciprocity extended across generations, ensuring future welfare through present restraint.
The Haudenosaunee Great Law, estimated from the late 12th century, establishes governance principles including communal land ownership, collective labor, and periodic redistribution. Article 28’s requirement that leaders cast “self-interest into oblivion” and consider “those whose faces are yet beneath the surface of the ground” parallels jubilee’s intergenerational justice. The Seven Generations principle—making decisions considering impact seven generations forward—embodies the temporal horizon jubilee economics requires.
Buddhist economics, as articulated by E.F. Schumacher and developed by Clair Brown, seeks “maximum well-being with minimum consumption.” The sangha’s democratic governance, collective property ownership, and dependence on alms models non-acquisitive living. The annual Vassa retreat provides regular renewal parallel to sabbatical years. These traditions demonstrate that periodic reset, redistribution, and renewal represent not peculiarly Hebrew innovations but universal human wisdom about preventing systemic collapse.
Part VI: Contemporary Applications—Jubilee 2000 and Beyond
The Jubilee 2000 campaign represents the most successful modern application of biblical jubilee principles, achieving approximately $100 billion in debt cancellation for 35+ countries. The campaign’s 21 million signatures demonstrated massive grassroots mobilization around explicitly biblical language. Archbishop Justin Welby called it “perhaps the churches’ finest hour in dethroning Mammon.”
Contemporary movements continue this work. Jubilee USA Network has won over $130 billion in debt relief. The Debt4Climate movement links debt cancellation to climate justice, recognizing how climate-vulnerable countries service debts instead of addressing climate impacts. Student debt cancellation proposals and medical debt relief initiatives explicitly invoke jubilee principles. During COVID-19, as global debt jumped by $24 trillion, economists including Michael Hudson and Steve Keen advocated comprehensive debt jubilee as recovery strategy.
These movements demonstrate jubilee’s ongoing relevance. The mechanism that prevented permanent debt slavery in ancient Israel offers solutions to contemporary debt crises. The principle that land should not be permanently alienated informs community land trusts and indigenous land back movements. The recognition that periodic reset prevents systemic collapse challenges economic orthodoxy that treats all debt as sacrosanct.
Part VII: The Trumpet and the Verb—Theological Synthesis
Returning to our linguistic beginning: if YHWH is verb rather than noun, then speaking the name is not identification but activation. The prohibition against pronouncing the Tetragrammaton was not about excessive reverence but about unauthorized activation. To speak the name was to sound the trumpet, to call for divine intervention, to initiate the cosmic reset that jubilee represents.
The shofar becomes the proxy sound for the unutterable name. Its blast—a raw, guttural wail rather than triumphant fanfare—sounds like creation in distress, the cry that summons divine response. When blown at jubilee’s inauguration, it announces not human legislation but divine interruption. The wordplay is intentional: YHWH + El = YoHW’El = Yovel. To call jubilee is to speak the name; to speak the name is to call jubilee.
This explains why Yehoshua of Nasrat’s proclamations contained explosive power. When he read Isaiah 61 - “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me... to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord” - and declared, “Today this scripture is fulfilled,” he was not offering metaphorical comfort. He was sounding the trumpet, calling the jubilee, speaking the name. The Temple Action—overturning money changers’ tables—was not symbolic housecleaning but literal jubilee enactment, striking at the financial tentacle of empire in the sacred space where divine presence was supposed to dwell.
Reza Aslan’s Zealot correctly identifies the political threat this posed but misunderstands its nature. This was not Zealot violence but Ebionite economics—not armed rebellion but a jubilee revolution. While some, if not even many, within the crowds who followed Yehoshua to Jerusalem expected military victory, they had all experienced his economic resets, town by town. The culminating action at the Temple during Passover can be read as an overthrow of Rome through the cancellation of debts. The threat to empire was not insurrection but interruption—the periodic reset that prevents permanent accumulation of power.
Conclusion: The Enduring Call
Understanding YHWH as verb and jubilee as that verb’s manifestation reveals a coherent theology of liberation running from Exodus through the prophets to Jesus and beyond. This is not abstract doctrine but concrete program: periodic reset of economic relations, restoration of means of production to the dispossessed, interruption of accumulation that creates structural oppression.
The scholarship surveyed—from Brueggemann’s theological dynamics to Hudson’s economic history, from Gutiérrez’s preferential option to the Ebionites’ communal practice, from Yoruba àṣẹ to Haudenosaunee governance—converges on recognition that human societies require periodic reset to prevent collapse. The biblical innovation was to encode this wisdom in covenant law, making reset not royal prerogative but divine obligation.
Contemporary crises—spiraling debt, ecological collapse, extreme inequality—represent accumulations that jubilee was designed to prevent. The movements invoking jubilee today are not engaging in nostalgic biblicism but activating humanity’s ancient technology for survival. They recognize what our ancestors knew: without periodic reset, systems concentrate power until they collapse, taking everything with them.
The divine name remains verbal—not “I AM” but “I WILL BE THERE.” The promise is not abstract presence but concrete accompaniment in liberation. Jubilee remains the mechanism through which that promise manifests, the recurring intrusion of divine economy into human economy. The trumpet still sounds wherever debts are cancelled, land restored, and captives freed. The verb continues to act wherever communities practice restoration over accumulation, liberation over domination, jubilee over empire.
The question for our moment is not whether jubilee is realistic but whether survival without it is possible. As inequality approaches historic extremes, as debt crushes nations and individuals, as ecological systems near collapse, the ancient wisdom speaks with renewed urgency. The God who is verb rather than noun, who becomes through liberating action rather than remaining in static perfection, continues to sound through history’s cries for justice. The jubilee that seemed impossible yesterday becomes necessary today, inevitable tomorrow. The trumpet sounds. The only question is whether we will hear and respond.