Question

From time to time, rulers in Mesopotamia enacted social reforms, which mainly included the cancellation of debts and the release of slaves and prisoners. These social reforms, called “freedom” (durarum) or “equity” (misharim), are documented in records dated from the middle of the third millennium BCE onward. For example:
Urukagina, king of Lagash, published freedom ordinances in the 24th century BCE, ending with these words (Urukagina 4, XII, 22–13):

(Urukagina) canceled the debts of the people of Lagash, who had been held (imprisoned in the debtors’ house) over burdens or over the barley tax imposed on them, or over barley owed to the treasury, or over theft or murder — and proclaimed freedom for them. He made a covenant with the god […] that he would not deliver a widow and orphan into the hands of the powerful.

When Urukagina came to power, he found that power and wealth in Lagash had been concentrated in the hands of a small and corrupt group of royal officials. Urukagina’s reform therefore included the cancellation of debts, the release of prisoners, and protection for the weaker classes in society against wealthy collectors and employers. In this way, Urukagina tried to restore the social order that had existed in Lagash before the period of corruption that preceded his rise to power.
Ammi-ṣaduqa as well, king of Babylon in the 17th century BCE, issued “equity” ordinances, including the cancellation of debts, the release of citizens who had become enslaved because of their debts, tax relief, and exemption from military service for various populations, for example:

Section 2: The remaining debts (tax arrears) of the farmers […] the shepherds and tax-bearers to the palace […] according to their debt documents for payment — were released. The creditor shall not press the house of the tax-bearer.
Section 19: A soldier (or) “fisherman” who leased a field for three years […] shall not go out for the king’s labor in this year, because the king has established equity in the land.
Section 20: The son of Numhia […] the son of Idmaratz […] the son of Erech, the son of Isin […] who was seized for debt, and delivered himself, his wife, or his children into slavery — because the king has established equity in the land, he is released; his freedom is decreed.

These ordinances reflect a social-economic need for immediate relief for the weaker classes in society through the wiping out of debts or release from military service and the like. This is not about restoring an earlier social order, nor is it about a fixed procedure carried out every set number of years in advance. Even so, the accepted assumption in scholarship is that the people of Israel borrowed the basic idea of the “Jubilee” from other cultures in the ancient Near East, selected among those ideas, changed them, and edited them to fit Israelite belief. And indeed, one can identify a basic similarity between the Mesopotamian idea of “freedom” and the biblical idea of the “Jubilee,” despite the significant differences between them. The very fact that these royal proclamations aimed to change the unfair distribution of property points to the conceptual similarity to the aspiration embodied in the biblical law of the Jubilee.
 

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