Lev 25:18-22
Magical sabbatical year crops
Worried about how you're going to manage to eat enough in the sabbatical year, when you can't sow or harvest? Don't you fear: YHWH will make the sixth year miraculously abundant! Three years' worth in one! Well, that's reassuring.
Magical sabbatical year crops
Worried about how you're going to manage to eat enough in the sabbatical year, when you can't sow or harvest? Don't you fear: YHWH will make the sixth year miraculously abundant! Three years' worth in one! Well, that's reassuring.
It's utopian, obviously. But that's actually a pretty big deal, and sort of wild, when you think about it. Here's what is presented to us as law - don't sow or harvest in the seventh year - but which can't ever have actually been practiced, or even imagined to be practiced.
We might think of this through a somewhat skeptical lens as H writing from a time when none of these good things happened, and Israel was in some trouble, and that could be blamed, in fact, on Israel not having followed these laws, which were given so long ago.
But we should also recognize that when we try to reconstruct ancient Israel's cultic practices and religious beliefs, we should be pretty careful about taking any of the biblical texts as directly representative of real practice. It's all literature.
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