Well, in part the ideas was not get into big debts. People could self-sustain much more easily in the past. No need to buy iPhone each year help on that.
Is important to note that the jubilee was a measure against the worst case scenarios: Persons that sell themselves as slaves (or sons of slaves), people that lost the hereditary land and things like that.
This also means the society was based around this expectations.
People live form the land or livestock. Even without much money you could get food. Plus, was part of the Law that anyone could harvest from any field after the first pass from the owners, as measure against starvation.
If you live in a rural area, even today, you will see that is normal and easy to share and get food free or very cheap (in fact, a lot of food will not get in the supermarket for lack of ways to fully utilize the capacity!).
Is kind of simply to maintain a live if your are friendly in the community.
You're thinking too much in terms of modern debt. In ancient (and not-so-ancient) times, the ordinary peasant always owed something to the landowner/sovereign for the privilege of dwelling on their land.
Sometimes, that debt would be higher than what could reasonably be paid back and so the debt would accumulate.
In other words, they'd rig the game from the start and then loosen the thumbscrews along the way.
Well it was also illegal to charge interests, so in theory it would not be economically rational to lend money except for safekeeping. Lending was probably more about lending land.
The rationale of the jubilee-rule was probably to avoid multi-generational debt-slavery.
It's obvious this law would restrict economic development, but the Hebrews made that tradeoff for social stability.
The main feature of the Jubilee law was that land could not be permanently sold, it could only be leased for up to 50 years. This together with their inheritance laws guaranteed that each clan or family group would have an economic base in perpetuity.
They wouldn't and maybe it's a bad idea to enter debt that last more than 50 years. It pretty much means to borrow money that the next generation has to pay off.
I understood the original comment to mean everyone’s debt is zeroed at 50 year intervals, e.g. 1900, 1950, 2000, etc. regardless of when it started.
What you are suggesting is all debt is zeroed out 50 years after it’s issued? Then why would any borrower pay off any principle at all?
This whole jubilee thing makes no sense, may be a little bit if the jubilee happens unexpectedly so that people can’t just plan around it. But that kind of sort of happens after a war.
