The Lore of Sevens

No Debts, No Masters...

A creaturely economy in the old lore of Moses works in cycles of sevens. Since it seemed to be the fallen bent of things to separate themselves out, it was given that, periodically, the community would open itself to curated interruptions. These were common events that would keep the social fabric creaturely and integrated. A stirring of the broth to keep the soup from separating out, so to speak.

First is the holy-day that is kept every seventh day, the sabbath. This day is a leveller, to be enjoyed by all regardless of station or identity. It is also a species leveller. The earth carries on quite well without human grind and innovation. As Ched Myers puts it: “This world can be improved upon by no human work—it is abundant, satisfying and magical.” This creaturely rest, this participation by simply being, is also a window in the world as it should be, an image of the messianic age, life liberated from toil.

Then, every seventh year comes the sabbath year. This event collapsed economic power relations in the canceling of all debts. It collapsed class power relations, in the freeing of all who had fallen into servitude or slavery. And it collapsed ecological power relations, by giving the land rest from cultivation. The community would eat what they had saved from the previous year and whatever they foraged as hunter gatherers—whatever the lands yields by itself. They took every seventh year off being agricultural humanity, lest they began to think of nature as resource and to develop a distanced and extractive mis-relation to it.

Finally, after seven sabbath years (after forty-nine years, that is) comes the Year of Jubilee. In the year of jubilee all land and property that had been accumulated by wealthy elites and powerful families was to be returned to the hands of whoever had historically lived there. Land back. And so in every generation there was a reset event in which creeping monopolies and colonising developments were cut back to the ground. This was to prevent those people becoming lonely and fey and poisonous atop their grand towers, so that they might find peace close to the earth. Close to kith and kin. 

There is an old idea that the messianic age would come after six thousand years, from whenever someone started counting. Prophecies that the messianic age would last a thousand years were perhaps related to this notion. A sabbath millennium, so to speak. A messianic jubilee at the end of history, which begins, just like a jubilee year, with the sound of a horn. And so the messianic idea which mostly developed after these laws, emerged in resonance with these cycles of seven. These regular interruptions in creeping movements of separation would finally become the law—the new law that would make all law superfluous. The sabbath, the jubilee, would simply become the way it is: all things fully integrated and fully at rest, dividing themselves from themselves no more.