Behar-Behukkotai 5786
Liberty
This week we are reading another double parashah, Behar and Behukkotai (Leviticus 25–27), meaning we’ll finish the book of Leviticus this week. Because they’re combined, I don’t have to deal with the subject of why Behar includes the first two verses of Leviticus 26; maybe next year. What I want to talk about today is the phrase from one verse in our parashah that’s inscribed on a big, cracked bell seven blocks from where I used to live in Philadelphia:
Lev 25:10 And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubilee unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family.
Those who know some Hebrew but don’t know the verse may be guessing what word is translated “liberty” there. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing; I would certainly not have been able to guess correctly when I might first have tried. The word is a somewhat surprising one, not obviously connected to “freedom” or “free.” It’s דְּר֛וֹר d’ror, a word that also happens to mean “a swallow” (the bird).
That version of the word occurs once in Psalms and once in Proverbs, both times parallel to צִפּוֹר tzippor, a more generic word for “bird.” So we might think that when you have liberty you are as free as a bird. But maybe it’s not that simple. Let’s look at some of the other Hebrew words for freedom and liberty and see what that comparison tells us.
One of them is חירות ḥeirut, and Passover is called in the Jewish prayer book זמן חרותינו z’man ḥeiruténu ‘our time of freedom’. But ḥeirut is not a biblical word. There is a biblical word ḥarut, describing God’s writing as being “incised” on the second set of two tablets (Exod 32:16), which Jewish tradition insists is the moral equivalent of ḥeirut:
m. Avot 6:2
אַל תִּקְרֵי חָרוּת אֶלָּא חֵרוּת
Don’t read חרות as חָרוּת [“engraved”], read it as חֵרוּת [“freedom”].
The actual biblical root for the concept of freedom is חפשׁ ḥ‑p‑sh, occurring once in the Bible in verb form and once in noun form (both in Lev 19:20, which we read two weeks ago), and 17 times in the form חָפְשִׁי ḥofshi ‘free’:
Exod 21:2 When you acquire a Hebrew slave, he shall serve six years; in the seventh year he shall go free [חָפְשִׁ֖י], without payment. 3 If he came single, he shall leave single; if he had a wife, his wife shall leave with him. 4 If his master gave him a wife, and she has borne him children, the wife and her children shall belong to the master, and he shall leave alone. 5 But if the slave declares, “I love my master, and my wife and children: I do not wish to go free [חָפְשִֽׁי],” 6 his master shall take him before God. He shall be brought to the door or the doorpost, and his master shall pierce his ear with an awl; and he shall then remain his slave for life. [NJPS]
So it would seem that, if you were a slave expecting to be freed at the jubilee — the 50th year after 7 cycles of 7 years, each ending in a sabbatical year — this is the kind of “freedom” you would expect. In fact that is the word that is always used for a slave going free, and there are only two occurrences in which the word is used another way. One is Job 39:5, “Who sets the wild ass free [חָפְשִׁ֑י]?” The other is a strange expression in Ps 88:6 where the psalmist calls himself “חָ֫פְשִׁ֥י among the dead,” which I won’t try to solve.
Let’s keep our eyes on the prize: What about our word דרור d’ror, the “liberty” word of Lev 25:10? We do find that word too in a number of places in the Bible:
In Isa 61:1, the prophet says YHWH has sent him לִקְרֹ֤א לִשְׁבוּיִם֙ דְּר֔וֹר “to proclaim liberty to captives.” (The entertaining poetic parallel word in the next phrase, translated by NJPS as “liberation,” is פְּקַח־קֽוֹחַ p’qaḥ-qo’aḥ; feel free to explore this unusual, fun-to-say hapax legomenon on your own.)
Jeremiah 34 has not only our דרור d’ror word, “liberty,” but also חפשׁי ḥofshi ‘free’. It’s the passage where YHWH reminds Jeremiah that the Israelites had been commanded to free their Hebrew slaves after six years of work — which they did, but only technically; they had immediately re-enslaved them, with the following consequence:
Jer 34:17 Assuredly, thus said the LORD: You would not obey Me and proclaim a release [לִקְרֹ֣א דְר֔וֹר], each to his kinsman and countryman. Lo! I proclaim [קֹרֵא֩] your release [דְּר֜וֹר]—declares the LORD—to the sword, to pestilence, and to famine; and I will make you a horror to all the kingdoms of the earth.
What we see from the Jeremiah verse is that d’ror does not mean “liberty” as we normally think of that English word. What it seems to mean is “You’re on your own!”
Now we turn to The Context of Scripture for an ancient Near Eastern analogue to our word. It comes from a receipt for the purchase of a debt slave:
Exclusion clause (lines 6–7)
6 At a general release
7 she may not be released.1
And that footnote gives the original Akkadian:
ina an-da-ra-ri-im ul i-na-an-da-ar.
Richard Hess, the translator of the text, introduces it this way:
Debt slavery was well known in the ancient Near East. The use of the andarārum was a special dispensation that allowed all those in debt to be freed of their debts. In order to circumvent this possibility, Sumunnabi had a special clause written into the agreement. Perhaps this type of permanent servitude, with no exclusions, was what Leviticus 25:39–42 addressed. It required release of all those in debt during the Year of Jubilee.
Indeed, Leviticus 25 takes things much further than merely “releasing” the slave to his own devices. If we look at what’s not inscribed on that famous bell, we find this: “ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family.”
It is not a matter of handing the guy $5 and some civilian clothes. It is “release” in the sense that a spring is released and returns to its original shape. When you are released through דרור you are supposed to return to your own family and to your original landholding, the one your family was awarded when the land was first divided among the (descendants of the) slaves freed from Egypt.
Our Leviticus chapter is all about counting off seven years and then counting seven of those sevens, then adding a year to get to the Year of Jubilee. As this post is dropping, we’re in the middle of the annual microcosm of this 50-year jubilee, the seven weeks between Passover and Shavuot. We can’t really do in a few weeks what the Israelites were instructed to do every 50 years, but it was this: hit the reset button on the economy and send everyone back to “Go” to start all over again with equal resources.
2 Chron 36:21 suggests that even the sabbatical years never actually took place, let alone the Jubilee. Nonetheless, that reset of the economy is what Leviticus means by d’ror. That’s what it means to “proclaim liberty throughout the land to all the inhabitants thereof.” Some people like to say that American democracy derives from the Bible. If that’s so, this seems like a good text to look at when we are ready to start reviving our original tradition.
