Jubilee

The word jubilee traces its origins back to ancient Hebrew.

Every 50 years, there was an incredibly important event that took place. To commemorate the event, a hollowed out ram’s horn called a yovel was blown so that the sound would resonate far and wide.

This yovel was a specific type of horn, blown only at the start of this generational party. The celebration was centered around the forgiveness of debt, and it is clear that this forgiveness was far-reaching.

This celebration was much more than just a party—it was a near-complete social reset. Land was returned to its original tribal owners, and any Israelite slaves were freed.

By the time all this was written down in Leviticus, the word shofar was in common use, so that’s the word we find in the Bible. Yet, the word yovel lives on in a different way.

By the time yovel had made its way to the Latin-speaking world, the Roman empire, it had done its fair share of traveling—and linguistic drifting. Around 200 BCE, an early Greek translation of the Bible was spreading throughout the Eastern Mediterranean region. Here, the word yovel is translated into Greek as iōbēlaios (ἰωβηλαῖος).

Romans didn’t really like to use the letter I at the start of words. Or, rather, they didn’t pronounce the letter the same way we do. In fact, it was much more like the letter J.

Iōbēlaios to Greek ears became jubilaeus in Roman mouths.

Meanwhile, the Romans already had a word that meant to shout for joy. This word, jubilare, continues in English as jubilation, which has come to mean intense happiness associated with a celebration.

Happiness associated with a celebration? That makes perfect sense; case closed.

Only that’s not quite right. This was a goof on the part of the Romans, who assumed they were hearing a word closely related to jubilare (shout for joy) when they heard the word jubilaeus. How could those two words be unrelated?

Those two words were unrelated.

The Romans had simply taken something from another culture and mashed it up with the Latin language. The Romans were great at subsuming other cultures. They didn’t so much as destroy the existing ideas as make them their own, or at least make them seem like their own ideas.

This idea of debt cancelation and forgiveness is ever-present in the 21st century. Governments and corporations routinely give a haircut to valuations, and our culture has developed the concept of bankruptcy to help smooth things over for both debtors and creditors. The jubilee celebration may not still happen once every fifty years, but there’s more of a constant deleveraging going on all the time.

Debt forgiveness goes back a long way—thousands of years before Hebrews heralded with horns. The Code of Hammurabi addresses debt forgiveness on a smaller scale, but Mesopotamian kings were famous for forgiving debts at a massive scale.