The Year of Jubilee

Sacrifices & Feasts of the Old Testament collection. Capstone of the sabbatical architecture, most economically radical legislation in the Torah. Announced by trumpet on the Day of Atonement. Isaiah 61 turns its vocabulary into eschatology; Jesus reads Isaiah 61 aloud in Nazareth, sits down, and says it's fulfilled today.

Requirements

• The fiftieth year, after seven sabbatical cycles.
  • Wright notes the uncertainty: some scholars think it may have been the forty-ninth (the seventh sabbatical year itself); others propose a single day within the fiftieth year or an intercalary month, with the same calendrical effect as a leap year.
• Announced on the Day of Atonement, by trumpet (yôbēl, the ram's horn the year is named for).
• Two provisions, and Wright identifies them as fundamental:
  • Liberty (dĕrôr) from the burden of debt and the bondage it entailed.
  • Return to ancestral property and to family.
  • "It was these two components of the jubilee (freedom and restoration, release and return) that entered into the metaphorical and eschatological use of the jubilee in prophetic and later New Testament thought."
• A fallow year, since the Jubilee also functions as a sabbatical (25:11-12).

How It Worked - Three Descending Stages of Poverty

Marked in the chapter by the recurring phrase "if your brother becomes poor" (25:25, 35, 39, 47). Wright's reconstruction:

• Stage 1 (25:25-28). Impoverished landowner sells some land.
  • Nearest kinsman (gōʾēl) has first duty to pre-empt or redeem it.
  • Seller retains the right to redeem it himself if he recovers the means.
  • And in any case the property reverts to the original family at the Jubilee.
• Stage 2 (25:35-38). Situation worsens > kinsman must maintain him as a dependent labourer by interest-free loans.
• Stage 3 (25:39-43). Total collapse > he and his family enter the bonded service of the wealthier kinsman, who is commanded in strong and repeated terms not to treat him as a slave but as a resident employee.
  • Wright's emphasis: "This undesirable state of affairs is to continue only until the next jubilee, that is, not more than one more generation." vv. 41, 54 make clear the original debtor may have died and the next generation still benefits.
• Stage 3b (25:47-55). If the debt-bondage is to a non-Israelite, the whole clan bears the obligation to redeem him.

Redemption Vs Jubilee

• Timing. Redemption could be exercised any time as circumstances required. Jubilee was a national event twice a century.
• Purpose. Redemption preserved the wider clan. Jubilee benefited the smaller household.
• This second distinction is where the genius of the law sits…

The regular operation of redemption over a period could result in the whole territory of a clan coming into the hands of a few wealthier families, with the rest of the families in the clan in a kind of debt servitude, living as dependent tenants of the wealthy, that is, precisely the kind of land-tenure system that Israel had overturned. The jubilee was thus a mechanism to prevent this.

• Christopher J. H. Wright, The Mission of God

• Redemption, working exactly as designed, produces landlords. The Jubilee is the override.

The Economic Architecture

Wright sets out two features distinguishing Israel's land tenure from pre-Israelite Canaan, where land was owned by kings and nobles and worked by tax-paying tenants.

• Equitable distribution. Land allotted to clans and households by size and need (Num 26:52-56; Josh 13-21), with the intention that it "should be distributed throughout the whole kinship system as widely as possible."
• Inalienability. Family land couldn't be traded as a commercial asset. This is the principle behind Naboth's refusal to sell his vineyard to Ahab (1 Kgs 21) - not stubbornness but obedience.
• Wright's conclusion: "The primary purpose of the jubilee was to preserve the socioeconomic fabric of multiple-household land tenure and the comparative equality and independent viability of the smallest family-plus-land units. In other words, the jubilee was intended for the survival and welfare of the families in Israel."

Its Theology Is Evangelical before It Is Economic

This is where Jubilee discussions usually go wrong in one of two directions - reducing it to a proof text for a political programme, or dismissing it as ancient agrarian legislation with nothing to say. Wright's five theological foundations:

1. Sovereignty of God over time and nature - keeping the Jubilee required submitting to it.
2. Providence of God - the fallow year required faith that He would provide.
3. The redeeming action of God - appealed to repeatedly: you were slaves of Pharaoh and are now the redeemed servants of the LORD (25:38, 42-43, 55).
4. The experience of forgiveness - the Jubilee was proclaimed on the Day of Atonement.
5. Eschatological hope - God's final restoration of humanity and nature.

Point 4 should be our focus

To know yourself forgiven by God was to issue immediately in practical remission of the debt and bondage of others. Some of the parables of Jesus spring to mind.

• Christopher J. H. Wright, The Mission of God

• The unforgiving servant of Matt 18 is Lev 25:9 inverted.
• Wright: "The theological underpinning of the socioeconomic legislation of the jubilee is identical to that which undergirds the proclamation of the kingdom of God."
• House's four principles run parallel: fear God and don't exploit one another (25:17); trust Yahweh to sustain them (25:18-22); the land belongs to God who divides it by grace rather than merit (25:23-24); and they themselves belong to God, "therefore human beings are not human property in any permanent sense" (25:35-55).

Was It Ever Kept?

• No narrative records a Jubilee. Wright's response: "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."
• He also notes scholars with deep ANE knowledge point to periodic debt amnesties and land restorations attested in Mesopotamia centuries before Israel - though nothing on a regular fifty-year cycle.
• We do know: the symbolism outlived the practice and became the vocabulary of hope.

From Leviticus to Isaiah

• Wright: The two Jubilee thrusts - release and return - transferred readily from economics to eschatology.
• Isa 61 is the clearest instance. Uses jubilee images to portray the one anointed as herald "to proclaim liberty to the captives (using the word dĕrôr, which is the explicitly jubilary word for release), and to announce the year of YHWH's favor (almost certainly an allusion to a jubilee year)."
• Isa 58 attacks cultic observance without social justice and calls for liberation. Isa 35 combines redemption and return with the transformation of nature.
• Wright: the two uses coexist rather than compete. "the jubilee could be used to portray God's final intervention for messianic redemption and restoration, but it could still function to justify ethical challenge for human justice to the oppressed in the present."

11QMelchizedek

• Envisions an eschatological Melchizedek as an anointed high priest who, fulfilling Isa 61:1-4, will free the sons of light and forgive "the debt of their iniquities."
• More strikingly, substitutes "the year of Melchizedek's favor" for "the year of the LORD's favor" - implicitly identifying the figure with Yahweh.
• Given that Jesus applies Ps 110, with its Melchizedekian priest, to Himself in His final week, the DJG suggests this "may explain many of his aims and practices as being rooted in his vocation as the priestly inaugurator of the great and long-awaited Jubilee."

The Nazareth Manifesto (Luke 4:18-21)

• Wright calls it "the closest Jesus comes to a personal mission statement."
• DJG notes the detail that clinches the Jubilee reading: Luke's quotation splices a phrase from Isa 58:6 into Isa 61, which "could hardly have been accidental" and "doubles the reference" to aphesis, release - the LXX's word for Jubilee liberty, which occurs fifteen times in Leviticus 25.
• Wright:

Luke will not allow us to interpret this jubilee language as flowery metaphors or spiritual allegories… Jesus fulfilled the Jubilee that he proclaimed.

• quoted in Christopher J. H. Wright, The Mission of God

• Fulfilment presented as holistic in four respects: proclaimed and enacted; spiritual and physical; for Israel and the nations; present and eschatological.
• DJG traces how Luke develops it: the answer to John the Baptist repeats and extends the list (7:21-22); "the poor" broadens from a subjugated nation to lepers, widows, children and the destitute; aphesis is applied to liberation from the demonic, from economic enslavement, and from sin - since aphesis hamartiōn is the standing phrase for forgiveness.
• Sloan (via Wright): aphesis carries both spiritual forgiveness of sin and financial remission of debts.
  • "If we are to pray the Lord's prayer, 'release for us our debts,' we must be willing to release others from theirs. It is not a matter of deciding between a spiritual and a material meaning, for both can be included as appropriate."

Bock's Caution

Bock resists the liberationist reading that reduces Luke 4 to a social programme. His question: is Jesus a social, economic and political revolutionary? Is the church's mission primarily to confront structures?

• His answer holds both: "Jesus' social teaching in Luke 4 is certainly challenging, but the spiritual dimension and its individual character cannot be overlooked or understated, since it is Jesus' starting point. He preached to people and did not speak out directly against political structures or leaders."

The gospel does have societal implications, not so much directly for society, as it does for how the redeemed community approaches humans and social structures. Compassion, concern, love, truth, and service are to be concretely expressed by the church, just as they were evidenced in Jesus. Many in stressing the individual have missed these elements of ministry.

• Darrell L. Bock, Luke 1:1-9:50 (BECNT)

• "These texts cannot be spiritualized. The poor and the blind in these texts do not exclude the poor and the blind!"

The Church Practised It

• Wright: Acts 4:34 - "there was not a needy person among them" - is "virtually a quotation of the Greek Septuagint translation of Deuteronomy 15:4."

The new community of Christ, now living in the eschatological era of the Spirit, is making the future hope a present reality in economic terms. Or to put it another way, the church by its internal practice was erecting a signpost to the reality of the future.

• Christopher J. H. Wright, The Mission of God

• The early church didn't wait for the consummation to start behaving as though it had come. Result Luke records: a community "marked by an integral combination of verbal proclamation and visible attraction," which grew.

A Conlusion

• Not binding legislation for the church, for the reasons at The Sabbath and The Sabbatical Year (Shmita). Nobody is required to return property in 2076.
• But the trumpet was blown on the Day of Atonement…
  • The order is fixed: God forgives, and then His people forgive.
  • The debt cancelled at the altar is the reason the debts in the ledger get cancelled too.
• Get that order wrong in either direction and you have either a social programme with no gospel, or a gospel with no hands.
• Wright's summary: "the wholeness of the jubilee model embraces the wholeness of the church's evangelistic mission, its personal and social ethics and its future hope."