Chapter 51: The Jubilee Year
Update: 4/13/20
For six years you will sow seed on your land and gather in its produce. But in the seventh year you will leave it unplowed and fallow, so that the poor among your people may eat. What they leave, the wild animals will eat. You will do the same with your vineyards and olive orchards (Exodus 23:10–11).You must count off seven Sabbaths of years, that is, seven times seven years, so that there will be seven Sabbaths of years, totaling forty-nine years. Then you must blow a loud trumpet everywhere on the tenth day of the seventh month. On the Day of Atonement you must blow a trumpet throughout all your land. You must set apart the fiftieth year to the Lord and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It will be a Jubilee for you, in which property and slaves must be returned to their families. The fiftieth year will be a Jubilee for you. You must not plant or conduct an organized harvest. Eat whatever grows by itself, and gather the grapes that grow on the unpruned vines. For it is a Jubilee, which will be holy for you. You must eat the produce that grows by itself out of the fields. You must return everyone to his own property in this year of Jubilee (Leviticus 25:8–13).
The law of Exodus 23 was repeated in the opening section of Leviticus 25. [North, Leviticus, ch. 22] The sabbatical year of rest for the land was integral to the jubilee year (Leviticus 25:1–7). The pattern of the sabbatical year was the same as the pattern of God’s creation week. There were six days of labor, and the seventh day was a day of rest. This was supposed to be the pattern of land ownership in the nation of Israel. This law began as soon as the Israelites conquered the land. It was originally a law of the jubilee, although it was tied to it; it was a law of the sabbath. This leads us to an important implication: the law of the jubilee was an extension of the sabbatical principle of rest. The sabbatical year law was primary; the jubilee land laws were secondary. The sabbatical year law was more fundamental than the jubilee land laws.
The sabbatical year was supposed to begin at the time of the conquest, although the law preceded the announcement of the jubilee. The annual count-down for jubilee year was also to have begun. Why was there no trace of this pair of integrated laws prior to the conquest? They had nothing to do with the covenant of God with Abraham. Only after the exodus from Egypt did God announce this law. Furthermore, there was an expiration date on this law. Ezekiel announced this. “So you will distribute the inheritances for yourselves and for the foreigners in your midst, those who have given birth to children in your midst and who are, with you, like the native born people of Israel. You will cast lots for inheritances among the tribes of Israel. Then it will happen that the foreigner will be with the tribe among whom he is living. You must give him an inheritance—this is the Lord’s declaration” (Ezekiel 47:22–23). [North, Prophets, ch. 22] Ezekiel announced this at the beginning of Judah’s exile in Babylon. When Israel returned to the land under the Medo-Persians, the nation never again had rulers from the tribes of Israel. The nation was always under the domination of one of the three pagan empires: Medo-Persia, Greece, and Rome.
The sabbatical year was not honored by the nation. Jeremiah announced this as the reason for the coming exile for Judah. It also applied retroactively to the already exiled northern kingdom, which was in Assyria at the time of Jeremiah’s ministry. Of the Chaldeans/Babylonians we read: “They burned down the house of God, broke down the wall of Jerusalem, burned all its palaces, and destroyed all the beautiful things in it. The king carried away to Babylon those who had escaped the sword. They became servants for him and his sons until the rule of the kingdom of Persia. This happened to fulfill the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah, until the land should have enjoyed its Sabbath rests. It observed its Sabbath for as long as it lay abandoned, in order to pass seventy years in this way” (II Chronicles 36:19–21). Because the sabbatical years were not honored, it is clear that the jubilee year was also not honored.
The sabbatical year was a time of debt forgiveness, but only for those Israelites who had fallen into poverty and who had received zero-interest charitable loans. The rules governing the sabbatical year’s release of debt appear in Deuteronomy 15. “At the end of every seven years, you must cancel debts. This is the manner of the release: Every creditor will cancel that which he has lent to his neighbor; he will not demand it from his neighbor or his brother because Lord’s cancellation of debts has been proclaimed. From a foreigner you may demand it; but whatever of yours is with your brother your hand must release. However, there should be no poor among you (for the Lord will surely bless you in the land that he gives you as an inheritance to possess), if only you diligently listen to the voice of the Lord your God, to keep all these commandments that I am commanding you today. For the Lord your God will bless you, as he promised you; you will lend to many nations, but you will not borrow; you will rule over many nations, but they will not rule over you” (vv. 1–6). [North, Deuteronomy,, ch. 36] It is safe to say that this aspect of the sabbatical year was also not honored.
The jubilee year was a time of debt forgiveness. But it applied differently. It applied to the rural land of Israel. We read that “property and slaves must be returned to their families” (Leviticus 25:10b). [North, Leviticus, ch. 24] This took place after Israel’s conquest of the land. The land was distributed by the casting of lots (Joshua 17). In the jubilee year, the heirs of the original families were to receive their share of the family plots. This law did not apply to walled cities. “If a man sells a house in a walled city, then he may buy it back within a whole year after it was sold. For a full year he will have the right of redemption. If the house is not redeemed within a full year, then the house in the walled city will become the permanent property of the buyer and his descendants. It is not to be returned in the year of Jubilee” (Leviticus 25:29–30).
Commentators do not deal with this fundamental historical issue: the jubilee had its origin in genocide. The Israelites conquered the land of Canaan through war. That was Abraham’s promised inheritance. This conquest began on the east side of the Jordan River when Israel conquered lands that had belonged to tribes that had attacked Israel (Deuteronomy 3). Those families that had been involved in the conquest gained original ownership of the conquered lands 40 years after the exodus. This is why the jubilee year has nothing to do with the New Testament era.
Consider a grant of capital in the form of developed land. God gave His people the Promised Land as their inheritance. Also included were existing houses and fields (Joshua 24:13). They inherited the capitalized value of the houses and planted fields of the Canaanites. The Canaanites had unknowingly served as stewards of the land, building up its value until the fourth generation after Israel’s descent into Egypt (Genesis 15:16). [North, Genesis, ch. 23]
Having delivered a capital asset into their hands, God specified that they must, as a nation, rest the land every seventh year. This was to be a national year of rest. The law applied only to agricultural land. It did not restrict commerce, manufacturing, equipment repair, or anything except planting and harvesting by owners. Urban occupations were not under the terms of this law. This law granted a year of rest from field work to all those under the household authority of landowners, including hired servants.
The year of rest was an acknowledgment of the limits on man’s knowledge. Man cannot know everything about the land. The land’s owner therefore was not allowed to treat the land indefinitely as if it were a mine. The “mining” of the soil could go on for six years in seven, but not in the seventh year. He was not allowed to strip the soil of its productivity. The seventh year was a rest period for the land in the broadest sense, including worms, bugs, birds, weeds, and every other living creature that dwelled on or in the land. This would preserve the land’s long-run value. This limitation on the landowner’s extraction of present income from the land was a means of preserving the capitalized value of the land over time. This placed a limit on both man’s greed and ignorance. It forced the landowner to honor the future-orientation of God’s covenant. It preserved the landed inheritance for future generations. God’s sharecroppers in one generation were not allowed to undermine the future value of the land by overproduction in the present. God, as the land’s ultimate owner, was thereby able to maintain a greater percentage of the land’s original capitalized value.
The sabbatical year was a system for forcing men to become self-consciously dependent on God’s grace. Dependent on Him, they were to become dominion-minded. Subordinate to God, they were to become active toward the creation. This is the mandated hierarchical pattern for the dominion covenant: those who are meek before God will inherit the earth. The year of debt release was also to be the year of open access to the fields for non-owners: the community’s poor. It was a year of hard work for harvesters.
The church has never argued that the sabbath rest of the land every seventh year is binding in New Testament times. Theologians recognize that there is a fundamental discontinuity between the Mosaic sabbath and the New Testament’s Lord’s day. The fact that the day is not celebrated on the same day, meaning Saturday, is indicative of a fundamental discontinuity. Theologians debate over just how discontinuous the Lord’s day is. With respect to the resting of the land, there has never been support for the idea of the Lord’s year.
1. The Weekly Sabbath
First, the Mosaic model for the sabbatical year was the weekly sabbath: a day of rest at the end of the week. In the New Covenant, the locus of authority of sabbath enforcement has shifted from the state and church to the individual (Romans 14:5–6) [North, Romans, ch. 14:B] . This is the judicial basis for the annulment of the death penalty for violating the weekly sabbath (Exodus 31:14–15).
Second, the law in Israel established a national sabbatical year governing both agriculture and charitable debt. This was possible to impose because the Israelites had entered the land as conquerors at a specific point in time. That historical starting point no longer exists.
The absence of a fixed sabbatical year could be changed today through civil legislation, but is there biblical justification for this? Only in the name of ecology. The individual is to enforce the weekly sabbath, not the state. The same is true of any seventh-year sabbath. Is the individual still duty-bound by God to honor the sabbatical year? Does God threaten negative sanctions, corporate or individual, against those who refuse to honor its provisions? Or was the sabbatical year limited to the Mosaic Covenant?
Were the sabbatical year laws exclusively part of the jubilee system? No. The law was given first in Exodus 23:10–11. It was given primarily for the benefit of the poor in the land and secondarily for the beasts of the field (v. 11). The context was the sabbath in general (v.12), not the jubilee system. [North, Exodus, ch. 53] The identification of the beasts of the field as recipients of the benefit of rest leads to the broader question of just which beasts God has in mind. Did He mean domestic animals only? Or is the wild beast included? What about the worm and the insect?
2. Ecology
Man has creaturely limits on his knowledge. He is not omniscient, nor will he ever be. He can harm land through mono-crop agriculture and other techniques that can prove to be exploitative over time. Overuse of pesticides in modern times may prove to be a cause of major ecological damage. Scientists do not presently agree on this. Eventually, a majority of them may agree, although it may take a crisis to produce such agreement, or else generations of additional agricultural productivity. The question is: “Is a compulsory year of rest for the sake of the land established by God’s law?” This raises other questions. “Should the state compel the owner of every farm, every garden, and every vineyard to cease cultivating his land one year in seven—not necessarily all enterprises in the same year, but each enterprise one year in seven?” Alternatively, “should land-use enforcers be sent out to police every farm, determining that one-seventh of each plot under cultivation be left fallow each year?” The regulatory nightmare that would result from either interpretation suggests an answer: no. But is the potential cost of regulation a sufficient reason for abandoning this law? No. There has to be a judicial reason for ignoring any of God’s Old Covenant laws, not mere pragmatism or presumed convenience. The familiar refrain is not sufficient: “God’s Old Testament laws applied only to an ancient agricultural economy.” That is an invalid objection covenantally; it is also weak in this instance. This happens to be an agricultural law. If the law’s primary goal was ecological—rest for the creatures of the field and soil—then the New Covenant can be said to have changed this law’s validity only if it established a new relationship among God, man, and the land. Did it? Yes. The land ceased to be a judicial agent of God. [North, Leviticus, ch. 33]
3. Sanctions and Sanctification
First, we have already considered one major change in relation to the land’s function as a judicial agent for God. The Promised Land vomited out the Canaanites (Leviticus 18:28). This judicial act is now performed by Jesus Christ (Revelation 3:16). The land no longer serves as the judicial agent of God. Second, the curse of the land was definitively overcome by the New Covenant. Men are no longer polluted by the land. This is why foot-washing is no longer ritually mandatory in the post-resurrection, post-temple era. Progressive sanctification, individually and corporately, steadily removes the restraints of the land’s scarcity. This has been happening rapidly for at least two centuries. The price of agricultural commodities compared to the price of labor has steadily dropped as the jurisdiction of the free market economy has advanced.
The exploitation of the land, net, may still be going on. We may be facing an agricultural calamity as a result of our techniques of agricultural production and land management. Or we may not. The ecological evidence is unclear; well-informed people can be found on both sides in this debate. This evidence, however, is clear: no agricultural calamity is foreseen by those whom we reward to forecast such possibilities. The industrial revolution has also been an agricultural revolution.
The covenantally significant question is: “Can we legitimately attribute a supposedly looming agricultural calamity to our failure to rest the land?” Then there is an economic question: “Had the national government required a year of national rest for the land, would this have offset all the other commercial farming practices that supposedly erode the land’s long-term productivity?” There is no way to know. We are comparing a conjectural future (famine) with a conjectural past (the rate of land erosion under the sabbatical year). So, in order to understand the sabbatical land law in the Mosaic economy, we have to decide in terms of biblical judicial issues, not ecology.
This is not to say that resting the land will not prove to be a means of increasing long-term agricultural output, and therefore income, but the test must be profit and loss under free market conditions. The general law of the New Covenant Lord’s day must prevail: the decision of each individual landowner operating under the sovereign jurisdiction of his conscience. We dare not move from the annulled jubilee year laws to the sabbatical land law in New Covenant times, nor dare we move from the New Covenant Lord’s day to a national year of rest. This leaves the landowner in charge. Paul wrote: “One person values one day above another. Another values every day equally. Let each person be convinced in his own mind. He who observes the day, observes it for the Lord; and he who eats, eats for the Lord, for he gives thanks to God. He who does not eat, refrains from eating for the Lord, he also gives thanks to God” (Romans 14:5–6). The same covenantal principle of individual jurisdiction also applies to the sabbatical year of rest.
The jubilee laws are important for Christians because of Jesus’ first public announcement concerning the nature of His ministry.
The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. He opened the scroll and found the place where it was written, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he anointed me to tell good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.” Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. He began to speak to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (Luke 4:17–21).
Jesus’ application of Isaiah’s language of liberation indicates that He saw His ministry as the fulfillment of the jubilee year. [North, Luke, ch. 6] This is consistent with the New Testament’s judicial theology of rest. Jesus’ work in history is the judicial foundation of man’s sabbatical rest; His kingdom is the definitive basis in history for man’s future rest (Hebrews 4:1–11).
The jubilee year of release was an aspect of the conquest of the land by Israel. This has nothing to do with the New Testament church. It has nothing to do with the kingdom of God. There was a time when it did, but that time ended with the judgment of God against Israel and then Judah: the exiles in Assyria and Babylon. After the land rested, and the people returned to the land, there is no indication that there was ever a jubilee year. There was no way to enforce this. The land was partially occupied by people who had been brought in from the Assyrian Empire and the Babylonian Empire. They did not lose their land when the Israelites returned. They were not part of the conquest of the original Canaanites. After the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, the land ceased to have any covenantal relevance.
There is a great deal of confusion in modern Christian circles, both fundamentalist and liberationist, regarding the applicability of the jubilee laws in the New Covenant era. Furthermore, Christians can gain little from a study of the rabbinical sources dealing with the jubilee, since very few of these texts deal in detail with these post-temple applications of the jubilee laws. The question arises: “Is the sabbatical year law still in force?” This is another way of asking: “What in the New Testament may have annulled it?”
Beginning in the 1970s in the United States, Christians who identified themselves with the political Left began calling for a redistribution of wealth in order to achieve greater economic equality. This was standard rhetoric of welfare state liberals. By the time that Christians got actively involved with Left-wing politics, the welfare state was four decades old in the United States. The same economic inequality that had prevailed in the 1920s still prevailed in the 1970s. Clearly, the welfare state had failed to redistribute wealth sufficiently to achieve anything remotely resembling economic equality.
In the next decade, Protestant Christians who identified themselves with the political Right also began calling for a jubilee year. They wanted a jubilee year of debt annulment. It was not clear exactly which debts were supposed to be repudiated. If all debt had been repudiated, this would have bankrupted the banks, bankrupted every civil government, destroyed the government-funded retirement programs, and produced a massive depression. But the groups were never forthright about the details of how this Jubilee debt reduction declaration would be implemented.
In January 1999, Pope John Paul II issued this statement: Ecclesia in America.
The existence of a foreign debt which is suffocating quite a few countries of the American continent represents a complex problem. While not entering into its many aspects, the Church in her pastoral concern cannot ignore this difficult situation, since it touches the life of so many people. For this reason, different Episcopal Conferences in America, conscious of the gravity of the question, have organized study meetings on the subject and have published documents aimed at pointing out workable solutions. I too have frequently expressed my concern about this situation, which in some cases has become unbearable. In light of the imminent Great Jubilee of the Year 2000, and recalling the social significance that Jubilees had in the Old Testament, I wrote: “In the spirit of the Book of Leviticus (25:8-12), Christians will have to raise their voice on behalf of all the poor of the world, proposing the Jubilee as an appropriate time to give thought, among other things, to reducing substantially, if not cancelling outright, the international debt which seriously threatens the future of many nations.”
There were multiple secular organizations in at least 60 nations in the year 2000 that called for debt relief. These calls were not for third-world nations unilaterally to repudiate their debts to Western governments and banks. Rather, they were calls for Western governments to allow the repudiation of debts, and also to provide free money to foreign governments so that they could repay large Western banks, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). These projects’ pleas fell of deaf political ears. None of these groups seriously invoked Leviticus 25 as judicially binding in the modern world. But the biblical rhetoric sounded good.
The judicial foundations of the sabbatical year of rest were two-fold: (1) the sabbath rest principle; (2) God’s original ownership of the land. At the time of the conquest, God transferred control over the land to families that held legal title on a sharecropping basis, operating under specific terms of the original leasehold agreement. The lease provided a payment to God (the tithe), i.e., a high percentage return to God’s authorized sharecropper-owners (90% before taxes), and a provision for the maintenance of the long-term capital value of the land (the sabbatical year). Those residents in Israel who did not own the land had legal title to the output of the land: unrestricted harvest in sabbatical years. The legal title of the gleaners was to be enforced by the Levites and priests on landowners.
The judicial issue of the sabbatical year was rest: rest for the land, hired workers, and animals. This also included release from the requirement to repay charitable debts (Deuteronomy 15). By “rest,” the law meant a respite for the landless from the requirement to work for the landed. This law governed agricultural land and those who worked it. There is nothing in the Bible to indicate that it governed any nonagricultural occupation.
This law pressured landowners to plan and save for the sabbatical year. They had to store up both food corn and seed corn. When this law was enforced, it forced them to develop the habit of thrift, i.e., future-orientation. The law also required landowners to forfeit the automatic (though not “natural”) productivity of the land in the seventh year. The poor, the stranger, the field animals, and the regular harvesters all had a legal claim on this production, if they were willing to do the work to glean it.
The Levites were the enforcers of this law as it applied to the gleaners’ lawful access to the fruits of the land. The Levites refused. This indicates they had little or no short-term economic incentive to enforce it. This in turn indicates that their tithe income was greater when the land was planted and harvested. Finally, this indicates that there was less net agricultural output in the seventh year than in the other six.
This law was good for the land and all the creatures great and small that inhabited it. Owners were restrained in their use of God’s land. Agricultural practices that overworked the land were restrained by this law. The land, as God’s judicial agent, deserved its rest. This law mandated it. If this land-protecting aspect of the law was enforced by the state, as I believe it was, it rested on the legal status of the land as God’s judicial agent, not on the state as an agency of wealth redistribution to the gleaners. This law is no longer in force in the New Testament era because the land ceased to be a covenantal agent in A.D. 70.
The sabbatical year law was enforced after the Babylonian exile (I Maccabees 16:14–16). The fear of God is a great incentive. During the exile, God had substituted His negative sanctions in history for the failure of the priesthood and the state to enforce the sabbatical year law. Exile was God’s partial disinheritance of Israel. It warned Israel of comprehensive disinheritance, should the nation continue to rebel. The exile altered land tenure: a new distribution replaced the original distribution under Joshua. The exile severed the judicial link between each family’s plot and the conquest generation. The jubilee land laws had been established by genocide, but genocide was neither authorized by God nor possible after the exile. The jubilee’s heathen-slave laws remained in force, but the residents who participated in any post-exilic distribution were to become immune to the threat of permanent servitude by Israelites.
The primary covenantal issue of the jubilee laws was holiness. The jubilee inheritance law had little or nothing to do with assuring economic equality, except in times of national covenantal cursing: stagnant population. The law had everything to do with the mandating of political and cultural inequality: giving a permanent head start to heirs of the conquest over immigrants, even those immigrants who became members of the covenant through circumcision, but not members of land-inheriting families. Only through adoption, either directly or through marriage (for females), could immigrants gain this advantage.
The sabbatical land law was an extension of the law of the sabbath. It was not a subset of the jubilee land laws. On the contrary, the jubilee land laws were temporary applications of the sabbath law’s principle of rest. If there are any New Testament applications of the sabbatical year of rest for the land, they are based on ecology or the general authority of sabbath rules, not on the jubilee’s military conquest. This transfers the locus of authority to the landowner: individual, not corporate.
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