The Sabbatical Year (Shmita)

Sacrifices & Feasts of the Old Testament collection. Sabbath command extended from a day to a year, from people to soil. The most demanding act of faith in Israel's calendar - asks a subsistence agricultural economy to stop for twelve months on a promise. Chronicles says the exile lasted seventy years so the land could catch up on the sabbaths Israel never gave it.

Requirements

• Every seventh year, counted nationally rather than per-field, since the Jubilee cycle depends on a synchronised count (Lev 25:8).
• No agricultural work. No sowing, no pruning, no reaping the volunteer growth as a harvest.
• Common access to what grows (25:6-7). Food for the owner, his servants, his hired worker, the sojourner, his livestock and the wild animals. Exod 23:11 puts the emphasis on the poor: "let it rest and lie fallow, that the poor of your people may eat."
  • Distinction is between not harvesting and not eating. Anyone may gather what they need; nobody may bring in a crop.
• Release of debts (Deut 15:1-2). Wright: the Lev 25 sabbatical year "is an expansion of the fallow year law of Exodus 23:10-11, which was also further developed in Deuteronomy 15:1-2 into a year in which debts (or more probably the pledges given for loans) were to be released."
• Public reading of the law at Booths in the sabbatical year (Deut 31:9-13).
• A promise attached (25:20-22). God anticipates "What shall we eat in the seventh year?" and answers: the sixth year will produce enough for three.

The Covenantal Triangle of Sabbaticals

• Lev 25:2 calls it "a Sabbath to the LORD" - same term as the weekly day. Grudem's argument about the Sabbath commandment summarising related laws includes this one: Sabbath day, Sabbath year and Jubilee are one legal family. See The Sabbath.

It gave the land a chance to rest and be rejuvenated by lying fallow for a year; thus it completed the covenantal triangle of sabbaticals: YHWH rested at the end of creation week (Exod. 20:11), Israel rested every seventh day (Exod. 20:9-10; 23:12), and the land rested every seventh year.

• Daniel I. Block, For the Glory of God

• God, people, land. Three rests, one principle - the third is the test of whether the first two were believed.
• Block: "The sabbatical year also reminded Israelites that the land was not theirs… By observing the sabbatical year, Israelites relinquished their monopoly on its produce; they shared it with needy human beings and offered wild animals free access to whatever it produced naturally."
• Sklar on the breadth of the provision - the Lord's care extends to the land (vv. 2, 4, 5), the animals in it (v. 7), the foreigners who work it (v. 6) and the Israelites who tend it, and Israel is to show the same care "for everything in their Father's world."

Two Institutions, Not One

• Block treats the sabbatical year of Lev 25 and the seventh-year release of Deut 15 as distinct institutions, not one law with two clauses.
  • First concerns land. Second concerns people - "requiring creditors to remit all debts and release indentured servants in the seventh year."
  • Linking term is šĕmiṭṭâ, release (Deut 15:1) - where the modern name Shmita comes from.
• Block: "It is unclear whether the seventh year referred to a standardized year applying to all Israelites, or if it could vary, depending on the year a household was established."
  • For the land sabbath the count must be national, since the Jubilee depends on it. For the release of servants it may not have been.
• Millar: "It is surprising that there is no sabbath legislation in the Deuteronomic collection. It has often been suggested that the laws of release stand in its place."
  • Motivation attached to the fourth commandment in Deut 5:14 is "remember that you were slaves in Egypt," and Deut 15 is dominated by a sabbatical pattern.
  • His conclusion: "Now that the nation has arrived in Canaan, it seems that the Sabbath principle goes beyond a universal right to rest one day in seven, but allows each Israelite to be free to enjoy the rest which Yahweh has given in the land."

The Most Demanding Act of Faith in the Calendar

Whatever grows by itself may be consumed, but Israel must have faith that God will provide enough growth in the years preceding the sabbath year that the people can survive the year of rest. The manna they have received since leaving Egypt has operated in a similar, albeit weekly, manner, so the principle is not new. Still, the scope of Israel's faith must broaden, and for it to do so the people must truly believe that life does not consist simply of work, money, power, success and appetite.

• Paul R. House, Old Testament Theology

• The manna comparison makes the theology make sense. The double portion on the sixth day proved God could stretch provision across a rest, and Israel watched Him do it for forty years. The sabbatical year asks them to believe the same thing at a scale where being wrong means starving.
• Block puts the question in the form the farmer felt it: "The sabbatical year posed an even more serious test of Israel's faith than the seventh-day Sabbath. Could they trust YHWH to provide for them if they left their tools and plows at home for a year?"
• Sklar: "This would be like someone today giving up pay every seven years, only more so, since there was no natural guarantee that the harvest of the eighth year would be good."
• How far the promise had to stretch in the worst case. Milgrom's timing reconstruction: where a sabbatical fell immediately before a Jubilee, the sixth-year crop had to feed the nation through year 49 (sabbatical), year 50 (Jubilee, when they sow), and up to the harvest of year 51.
  • Sklar's summary: "the Israelites can obey the Lord's commands boldly because they know he will provide for their needs (cf. Matt. 6:25-34)."

The Poverty Trap

Deut 15:4 says "there will be no poor among you." Deut 15:11 says "there will never cease to be poor in the land." Millar refuses the easy move of calling it a contradiction:

This legislation is not designed to eradicate poverty as such but to ensure that the phenomenon of the 'poverty trap' never arises in Israel, either for the ethnic Israelite or for the landless 'brother Hebrew'. Yahweh has not redeemed Israel to allow individual members of the community to languish in poverty, thus questioning the point of his redemption in the first place. Verse 11 is then both a realistic admission (that there will always be Israelites in financial difficulties) and an implicit reminder of the necessity of generosity and the careful observation of the year of release, lest Israelites are abandoned and stripped of hope.

• J. Gary Millar, Now Choose Life (NSBT)

• Millar: this is "probably the best example of the tension which often arises in Deuteronomy between the goal which the Mosaic preaching aims for and the reality which it expects."
• The distinction between eliminating poverty and eliminating the trap is worth carrying into any Christian discussion of economics.
• It's exactly what Luke reports of the early church: "there was not a needy person among them" (Acts 4:34) - a quotation of Deut 15:4. See The Year of Jubilee.

The Land Is Not Yours

• Lev 25:23 is the hinge verse for this and the Jubilee: "The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine. For you are strangers and sojourners with me."
• Wright says two things:
  • God's land. "One of the central pillars of the faith of Israel was that the land they inhabited was YHWH's land… Far more often than it is ever called 'Israel's land,' it is referred to as 'YHWH's land.'" Land in Israel's possession, under God's ownership - and this dual tradition "was associated in some way with every major thread in Israel's theology": election, exodus, covenant, judgment, restoration.
  • God's tenants. Gērîm wĕtôšābîm, strangers and sojourners, normally describe non-Israelite residents with no stake in land tenure. Wright's reading of the analogy: "Just as the Israelites had resident guests living on with them in the land they owned, so the Israelites were resident guests living on the land that YHWH actually owned."
    • His corrective that keeps it from being demeaning: "the terms are not (as they might sound in English) a denial of rights but rather an affirmation of a relationship of protected dependency."
• A field that stops producing for a year is a landlord's prerogative to exercise and Lev 25 is God essentially exercising it.

Was It Kept? Almost Certainly Not

• 2 Chr 36:20-21 - exile lasted "until the land had enjoyed its Sabbaths… to fulfil seventy years."
• Lev 26:34-35 had already threatened exactly this: "Then the land shall enjoy its Sabbaths as long as it lies desolate… the rest that it did not have on your Sabbaths when you were dwelling in it."
• Seventy years of exile for 490 years of unkept sabbaticals.
  • Clearest instance in Scripture of a covenant curse functioning like a divine collection notice.
• Wright's caution about the parallel Jubilee question applies here too: "there is no historical narrative recording a jubilee happening. But then, there is no historical record of the Day of Atonement, either. Silence in the narratives proves almost nothing." The Chronicles verse is stronger evidence than silence would be.
• Neh 10:31 records the returned exiles binding themselves to keep it > the lesson had landed.

Daniel's Seventy Sevens Are Sabbatical Years

Makes the unkept sabbatical the organising principle of a major prophecy.

• Hamilton: Lev 26 announces God will discipline Israel "sevenfold" four times over (26:18, 21, 24, 28), then that in exile "the land would enjoy the sabbatical years that Israel disobediently refused to give it" (26:34-35). Jer 25 and 29, Dan 9 and 2 Chr 36 all build on those declarations.
• Gentry & Wellum: The "weeks" of Dan 9:24-27 are units of seven years - sabbatical cycles. They quote Williamson:

The 'seventy sevens' chronography is probably best understood against the background of Jewish sabbatical years, and the Jubilee year in particular… Thus understood, the seventy sevens constitutes ten jubilee years, the last (the seventieth seven) signifying the ultimate Jubilee (cf. Isa. 61:2).

• Paul Williamson, quoted in Gentry & Wellum, Kingdom Through Covenant

• Their proposed symmetry: ~70 sabbaticals from the beginning of the kingdom to the fall of Jerusalem > 70 years of exile in which the land took its rest > 70 sabbaticals until the exile is finally over.
  • Summary line: "the time required to resolve the problem of Israel's sin is precisely the same time it took to create the problem in the first place."
    The underlying point doesn't depend on the numbers: the exile is measured in sabbaticals because the sabbatical is what was owed.
  • And if the seventieth seven is the ultimate Jubilee, Luke 4:21 is its announcement. See The Year of Jubilee.

New Testament Fulfilment

No NT text identifies the sabbatical year with Christ. No typological reading on offer. Two possible connections.

• Heb 3:7-4:11 takes the theme of entering God's rest and applies it to the gospel. Gentry & Wellum's application of the creation ground applies with equal force: "We cannot do anything to add to the work of Jesus Christ. We are simply to enjoy it."
  • The sabbatical year taught that a year's provision could come without a year's work, on the strength of a promise. Not a typology of justification, but the same shape of faith - and the resistance it met in Israel is the resistance justification by faith meets in every generation. Working is the thing we know how to do.
• Grudem's consistency argument. "If the command about the Sabbath day requires the same observance by Christians today as it did by the Jewish people in the nation of Israel, then it is hard to see why the Sabbath year and the Year of Jubilee are not also morally binding on us today."
  • Part of why the verdict at The Sabbath lands where it does. Anyone insisting the fourth commandment binds Christians in its Mosaic form needs an account of why the seventh-year fallow doesn't.

The Ethic

• The theology underneath doesn't disappear: the land is God's, provision is God's, and neither the soil nor the people who work it are infinitely extractable.
• Wright's summary names the connection between the vertical and horizontal claims. To apply this model "requires that people obey the sovereignty of God, trust the providence of God, know the story of the redeeming action of God, experience personally the sacrificial atonement provided by God, practice God's justice and put their hope in God's promise for the future."
• Not a set of principles for agrarian Israel. A description of what it looks like to believe the gospel with your calendar and your bank account.
• And the person who cannot stop working is being told something about what they actually trust.