Thread by @JoelBaden

#Leviticus 25:8-12

The jubilee year

Every fifty years, we get the jubilee: not just a year of rest like the sabbatical (though that too), but a year of restoration: everyone returns to their lands and to their people. What a nice biblical idea! Except it isn’t (biblical).

The big announcement of the fiftieth year is the restoration, or dror (דרור). This word comes to Hebrew, and the Bible, from the Akkadian andurarum, which is the same basic concept, just at the whim of the king rather than set on the calendar.

Always good to have the reminder that so much of what is known as biblical law is in fact just borrowed ancient Near Eastern practice. (You may think that these are God’s laws, but if they are, God nicked them from Mesopotamia.)

The details of the restoration aren’t really set out, though the intent seems reasonably clear: if you’ve sold your land, or if you’ve loaned it to someone, it is returned. Landholdings were eternal - decreed by God, as we see worked out in the book of Joshua.

In a few verses this will be stated outright: the land belongs to YHWH - it isn’t yours to sell or buy anyway. It can and will always be reset to its original distribution, which is how YHWH intended it to be. (This is also why inheritance is such a big deal.)

And of course those Israelites in debt to, and thus working for, other Israelites are also to be restored to their people, on similar grounds, as we’ll see: Israelites don’t belong to other Israelites, they also belong to YHWH.

It is no coincidence that the jubilee year is proclaimed on Yom Kippur, for both are effectively restorations to factory settings - the day for the sanctuary, and the year for the land and its inhabitants. Everything back in its proper place - a new start. Very priestly.

So the principles of the jubilee year are actually quite basic, in both senses. They are fairly simple, but they are also fundamental theologically here. This concept of land and people is nowhere else quite so clearly laid out.