The redistribution of land also prevented the accumulation of capital in the hands of a few. At the time of the Jubilee every tribe repossessed the land it had received when the people of Israel first settled in Canaan. Similarly, each family regained the lands it might have lost in the interval. In this way, even though God was the ultimate owner of the land, he did not operate as a tyrant oppressing his people in slavery. Rather, he acted as a good master, entrusting to his servants the administration of his goods, which he let them enjoy, but whom he would call to account at regular intervals and once again distribute the capital he alone possessed.
Second, God is the liberator and redeemer of his people. The Jubilee is but a social and concrete rendition of God’s redemptive act. “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt to give you the land of Canaan…” (Lev. 25:38). Because God set Israel free from Egyptian bondage, social liberation (from debts, from slavery, from oppression) is to have the force of law among his people. Deuteronomy justifies the institution of the Sabbath in this way: “The seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God… Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the Lord your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the Lord your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day” (Deut. 5:14–15).
Consequently, the mercy that manifests itself during the “year of favor” is not arbitrary. It is not the result of the king’s despotic benevolence. Nor does it contradict the requirements of justice, which characterize Yahweh’s will for his people. It is, rather, an expression of God’s justice, which occurs at regular intervals to regularize his relations with his people. Israel’s debt to God will not stack up indefinitely; accordingly, debts between fellow Israelites must also be cancelled periodically.
The following rules summarize how the sabbatical year and the Jubilee were to be celebrated:
First Measure – Every seventh year the land was to lie fallow. By a special blessing of Yahweh, the land would produce a double harvest during the sixth year.
Second Measure – During the seventh year all debts between Hebrews were to be cancelled.
Third Measure – After six years of slavery every Hebrew slave was to be set free by his master.
Fourth Measure (reserved for the Jubilee, every 49 years) – Each family was to regain possession of the land and houses it had lost in the meantime. Between two Jubilees a buyer owned the land only temporarily. As the Year of Jubilee approached, the value of the land dropped in proportion to the remaining years of tenure.
Jubilean Practice
It seems that the sabbatical year proved too difficult to apply and was therefore often ignored. This could well be the prime motive behind the year of Jubilee. The economic life of the land would have been paralyzed by the recurrence every seven years of a measure as radical as the abolition of debts or the freeing of slaves. Nevertheless, the year of Jubilee, with its additional requirement of land redistribution, does not seem to have been followed any more closely than the sabbatical year.20
After the return from exile, both the Mishnah and the Talmud justified the neglect of the more rigid sabbatical and jubilean measures with various unconvincing arguments. Actually, the sabbatical year and the Jubilee had already faced opposition from the ownership classes before the exile. In vain the prophets of Israel demanded the restoration of these institutions, which they saw as precursory signs of the coming of David’s reign. Unfortunately, unfaithfulness usually got the upper hand. The two most remarkable attempts at restoring the Jubilee, namely those of Jeremiah and Nehemiah, are relevant here.
Under the reign of Zedekiah, the last king of Judah (598–587 B.C.), the rich had agreed to free their Hebrew slaves according to the Jubilee ordinance but soon regretted their decision and took them back. Their disobedience aroused Jeremiah’s indignation, and he prophesied that it would cause the destruction of Jerusalem.
Then the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah: “This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: I made a covenant with your forefathers when I brought them out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. I said, ‘Every seventh year each of you must free any fellow Hebrew who has sold himself to you. After he has served you six years, you must let him go free.’ Your fathers, however, did not listen to me or pay attention to me. Recently you repented and did what is right in my sight: Each of you proclaimed freedom to his countrymen. You even made a covenant before me in the house that bears my Name. But now you have turned around and profaned my name; each of you has taken back the male and female slaves you had set free to go where they wished. You have forced them to become your slaves again.
“Therefore, this is what the Lord says: You have not obeyed me; you have not proclaimed freedom for your fellow countrymen. So I now proclaim ‘freedom’ for you, declares the Lord –‘freedom’ to fall by the sword, plague and famine. I will make you abhorrent to all the kingdoms of the earth.” (Jer. 34:13–17)
The second attempted reform the Old Testament mentions was undertaken by Nehemiah after the return from exile, around 423 B.C. (Nehemiah 5).21 Having called the leading citizens of Jerusalem together, Nehemiah rebuked them for requiring the poor to pawn their sons and daughters in order to eat and stay alive. And he tells them, “Give back to them immediately their fields, vineyards, olive groves, and houses, and also the usury you are charging them – the hundredth part of the money, grain, new wine, and oil.” And they said, “We will give it back…and we will not demand anything more from them.” However, the last chapters of Isaiah, as well as of Ezekiel, still count the Jubilee among the institutions to be reestablished.
A few additional remarks will help us better understand the scope of the jubilean ordinances. According to Deuteronomy 15, slaves were set free after seven years of service. This liberation did not necessarily coincide with the sabbatical year. It should also be noted that the freed slaves were Hebrew. The jubilean ordinances did not apply to foreigners. The Jews had no obligation to free the foreign slaves they might have owned. Loans with interest were also forbidden among Jews but could be made to foreigners in matters of trade. A Jew could also require the reimbursement of a debt from a foreigner, in spite of the Jubilee.
These distinctions which the Mosaic Law made between Jews and foreigners belong to the background of the Gospels. In a later chapter, we will examine Jesus’ struggle to abolish them.
It should be noted, however, that the Roman or Oriental type of slavery was nonexistent among the Jews. Slavery for the Jews was a consequence of mortgages taken by a creditor on the lands of an insolvent debtor. The creditor could use the lands until their revenue had paid off the amount of the debt. If this did not suffice he could require the debtor (with his wife and children) to work for him until the entire debt had been paid off. This resulted in a form of effective slavery, which was still practiced in Jesus’ time. If a Jubilee occurred, the “slave” would be ipso facto freed, since all debts were cancelled, and he could regain his ownership rights.
In Jesus’ time, a period we will study in more depth in the next chapter, the situation could be summed up as follows: The anonymous author of the Book of Jubilees, as well as Philo of Alexandria, attached merely ritual significance to the Jubilee. It was limited to celebrating the days, months, and years, according to an orthodox calendar. On the other hand, the Pharisaic rabbis recommended the observance of sabbatical years, while simultaneously trying to attenuate their strictness. Letting the land lie fallow every seventh year was the sole surviving sabbatical practice obeyed by the people.
Certain historical events prove that this practice was still observed, at least to some extent. According to the First Book of the Maccabees 6:48–53, the Jews who in 162 B.C. had given up defending Beth-zur against Lysias’s Syrian troops were also forced to abandon the defense of Mount Zion. “They had no food in storage, because it was the seventh year; those who had found safety in Judea from the Gentiles had consumed the last of the stores.” The historian Flavius Josephus reports the same event.22