#Leviticus 25:1-7
The sabbatical year
Six years you can plant and harvest as usual; in the seventh year, though, none of that - you can eat only what the land produces on its own, without your intervention.
That ought to work out just fine.
The sabbatical year
Six years you can plant and harvest as usual; in the seventh year, though, none of that - you can eat only what the land produces on its own, without your intervention.
That ought to work out just fine.
There’s an obvious utopian quality to this law - as it will essentially go on to explain a few verses later. It might have once been workable on a field-by-field level, but not nationally, which is what is clearly proposed here. This is the sabbath writ large.
Having moved through all the realms of the sacred, we’re now come to the biggest and last: the land itself. The sabbath is about sacred time; the sabbatical is about sacred land (in time). It’s also fundamentally about property, as will become increasingly clear.
Whose land is this? Who is the owner, and who is merely working it, as if a laborer? The land becomes the key to understanding the relationship between YHWH and Israel, their relative standing, and the reality or fiction of Israel’s self-identity and even story.
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