Justice, Jubilee and Generational Poverty

Ezekiel 18:1-19:14
Hebrews 9:1-10
Psalm 106:32-48
Proverbs 27:10


It can be so easy to read the passage in Ezekiel 18 these days and just nod and agree or maybe even shake our heads and wonder at the barbarity of ancient Israelite culture that demanded that whole families be repaid for the crimes or sins of a child or a father.  The principle was summed up in a proverb, " The parents have eaten sour grapes, but their children’s mouths pucker at the taste."


The problem is we operate the same principle in our own culture but largely in an economic sense, although also partly in a judicial sense.  


What do I mean?  


I mean that when a parent messes up their lives financially or morally by wasting their family's money on drink, drugs, gambling, reckless spending or whatever, then we do very little as a society to financially repair families that are left in this mess.  The mess is the fault of the parent but the results are felt by the children and even debts can be handed down from generation to generation (as happened with a friend of men who was left with a sizeable debt after the death of his father) meaning that children can be caught in a downward spiral of generational poverty.


In the book of Leviticus (chapter 25 and following) God prescribes a cure for generational poverty in the form of the Jubilee principle.  When the tribes first conquered the Promised Land the territory was divided up equally between the tribes and within the tribes it was divided up evenly between clans and families.  Land could be sold but only for a set period of time.  Every 50 years the land reverted to the original owners.  This meant that if I, for example, squandered my property and ended up sold as a slave in poverty then by the time the next Year of Jubilee came round my family would have some chance of getting themselves back on their feet as they would get the land back in a set period of time.


It's not known if Jubilee was fully put into practice in ancient Israel at all but it finally broke down around the time of a king called Ahab in the mid 800s BC.  If it ever did work then it was a brilliant device for breaking the cycle of generational poverty.  Now we live in a very different society and the link between wealth and land is not as strong as it once was but how could we mirror that Jubilee principle in our own society and so remove our own barbaric practice of enforcing generational poverty on innocent children whose father's sour grapes have forced their mouths to pucker?