Everything about Jubilee Biblical totally explained
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For other uses, see Jubilee (disambiguation)
The
Jubilee (Hebrew
Yovel יובל) year, is the year at the end of a seven cycles of
Sabbatical years, and according to
Biblical regulations had a special impact on the ownership and management of land, in the territory of the
kingdoms of Israel and
of Judah; there's some debate whether it was the 49th year (the last year of seven sabbatical cycles), or whether it was the following 50th year. The
English term
Jubilee derives from the Hebrew term
yobel (via
Latin:
Jubilaeus), which in turn derives from
yobhel, meaning
ram; the Jubilee year was announced by a blast on an
instrument made from a ram's horn, during that year's
Yom Kippur. The biblical rules concerning
Sabbatical years (
shmita) are still observed by many religious
Jews in the
State of Israel, but the regulations for the Jubilee year have not been observed for many centuries.
Regulations
The biblical regulations concerning the Jubilee year form part of the
Holiness Code, which appears in the
Torah as part of the collections of laws given on
Mount Sinai or Mount Horeb. According to these regulations, the Jubilee be sounded once 49 years have been counted, raising an
ambiguity over whether the Jubilee was within the 49th year, or followed it as an
intercalation in the 7 year sabbatical cycles; scholars and
classical rabbinical sources are divided on the question.
The biblical requirement is that the Jubilee year was to be treated like a Sabbatical year, with the land lying
fallow, but also required the compulsory return of all property to its original owners or their heirs, except the houses of laymen within walled cities, in addition to the
manumission of all Israelite
indentured servants. The biblical regulations state that the Jubilee was only to come into force after the Israelites had gained control of Canaan, presumably because it would otherwise require the Israelites to return the land to the Canaanites within 50 years; similar nationalistic concerns about the impact of the Jubilee on land ownership have been raised by
Zionist settlers. From a legal point of view, the Jubilee law effectively banned sale of land as
fee simple, and instead land could only be
leased for no more than 50 years; the biblical regulations go on to specify that the price of land had to be proportional to how many years remained before the Jubilee, with land being cheaper the closer it's to the Jubilee.
Since the 49th year was already a sabbatical year, the land was required to be left fallow during it, but if the 50th year also had to be kept fallow, as the Jubilee, then no new crops would be available for two years, and only the summer fruits would be available for the following year, creating a much greater risk of starvation overall;
Judah haNasi contended that the jubilee year was identical with the sabbatical 49th year. However, the majority of classical rabbis believed that the biblical phrase
hallow the fiftieth year, together with the biblical promise that there would be three years worth of fruit in the
sixth year, implies that the jubilee year was the 50th year. The opinion of the
Geonim, and generally of later authorities, was that prior to the
Babylonian captivity the Jubilee was the intercalation of the 50th year, but after the captivity ended the Jubilee was essentially ignored, except for the blast of the
shofar, and coincided with the sabbatical 49th year; the justification given for this lapse of adherence to the Jubilee was that the Jubilee was only to be observed when the Jews controlled all of Canaan, including the territories of
Reuben and
Gad and the eastern half-tribe of
Manasseh.
Origin and purpose
Biblical scholars argue that the Jubilee is an obvious development of the Sabbatical year. Rather than waiting for the 50th or 49th year, the
Deuteronomic code requires that slaves be liberated during their 7th year of service, as does the
Covenant Code, which
textual scholars regard as pre-dating the Holiness Code; the
Book of Ezekiel, which textual scholars also regard as earlier than the Holiness Code, refers to a
year of liberty (
דרור שנת), during which property is returned to the original owner (or their heirs), but the word
דרור is used by
Jeremiah to describe the release of slaves during the Sabbatical year, which scholars take to imply that Ezekiel must have been referring to the sabbatical year. Scholars suspect that the transfer of these regulations to 49th or 50th year was a deliberate attempt to parallel the fact that
Shavuot is 50 days after
Passover, and follows
seven weeks of harvest; this parallel is regarded as significant in
Kabbalah.
The Bible argues that the Jubilee existed because the land was the possession of
YHWH, and its current occupiers were merely aliens or
tenants, and therefore the land shouldn't be sold
forever; however,
Midrashic sources argue that the jubilee was created to preserve the original division of land between the
Israelite tribes, as evidenced by the Biblical specification that the Jubilee shouldn't be imposed until the Israelites were in control of Canaan. The Bible also states that the Israelites were the servants of YHWH, which classical rabbis took as justification for the manumission of indentured Israelite servants at the Jubilee, using the argument that no man should have two masters, and thus as the servants of YHWH, the Israelites shouldn't also be the servants of men.
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