this is what the Lord says: You have not obeyed me; you have not proclaimed freedom for your fellow countrymen. So I now proclaim ‘freedom’ for you, declares the Lord –‘freedom’ to fall by the sword, plague and famine. I will make you abhorrent to all the kingdoms of the earth.” (Jer. 34:13–17)
The second attempted reform the Old Testament mentions was undertaken by Nehemiah after the return from exile, around 423 B.C. (Nehemiah 5).21 Having called the leading citizens of Jerusalem together, Nehemiah rebuked them for requiring the poor to pawn their sons and daughters in order to eat and stay alive. And he tells them, “Give back to them immediately their fields, vineyards, olive groves, and houses, and also the usury you are charging them – the hundredth part of the money, grain, new wine, and oil.” And they said, “We will give it back…and we will not demand anything more from them.” However, the last chapters of Isaiah, as well as of Ezekiel, still count the Jubilee among the institutions to be reestablished.
A few additional remarks will help us better understand the scope of the jubilean ordinances. According to Deuteronomy 15, slaves were set free after seven years of service. This liberation did not necessarily coincide with the sabbatical year. It should also be noted that the freed slaves were Hebrew. The jubilean ordinances did not apply to foreigners. The Jews had no obligation to free the foreign slaves they might have owned. Loans with interest were also forbidden among Jews but could be made to foreigners in matters of trade. A Jew could also require the reimbursement of a debt from a foreigner, in spite of the Jubilee.
These distinctions which the Mosaic Law made between Jews and foreigners belong to the background of the Gospels. In a later chapter, we will examine Jesus’ struggle to abolish them.
It should be noted, however, that the Roman or Oriental type of slavery was nonexistent among the Jews. Slavery for the Jews was a consequence of mortgages taken by a creditor on the lands of an insolvent debtor. The creditor could use the lands until their revenue had paid off the amount of the debt. If this did not suffice he could require the debtor (with his wife and children) to work for him until the entire debt had been paid off. This resulted in a form of effective slavery, which was still practiced in Jesus’ time. If a Jubilee occurred, the “slave” would be ipso facto freed, since all debts were cancelled, and he could regain his ownership rights.
In Jesus’ time, a period we will study in more depth in the next chapter, the situation could be summed up as follows: The anonymous author of the Book of Jubilees, as well as Philo of Alexandria, attached merely ritual significance to the Jubilee. It was limited to celebrating the days, months, and years, according to an orthodox calendar. On the other hand, the Pharisaic rabbis recommended the observance of sabbatical years, while simultaneously trying to attenuate their strictness. Letting the land lie fallow every seventh year was the sole surviving sabbatical practice obeyed by the people.
Certain historical events prove that this practice was still observed, at least to some extent. According to the First Book of the Maccabees 6:48–53, the Jews who in 162 B.C. had given up defending Beth-zur against Lysias’s Syrian troops were also forced to abandon the defense of Mount Zion. “They had no food in storage, because it was the seventh year; those who had found safety in Judea from the Gentiles had consumed the last of the stores.” The historian Flavius Josephus reports the same event.22
Josephus refers to two other famines that were aggravated by sabbatical years: one in 135–134 B.C., which occurred during the siege of the Dagon Fortress by John Hyrcanus, and the other in 38–37 B.C., when Herod the Great was besieging Antigonus in Jerusalem. While these dates don’t exactly fit the sabbatical calendar, 23 after Christ the chronology becomes more precise.
We know, for example, that A.D. 47–48 marked the beginning of a great famine, which affected the whole empire. This was the famine announced by Agabus in Acts 11:28. In Palestine it was aggravated by the return of the sabbatical year. According to the Sotah tractate of the Mishnah (vii, 8), the preceding sabbatical year had been celebrated with particular solemnity by Herod Agrippa I, grandson of Herod the Great. He is the Herod mentioned in Acts 12, to whom Emperor Claudius, out of gratitude, had given back the entire kingdom of his grandfather in A.D. 41.
To please the Jews, Herod Agrippa persecuted the Christians (he beheaded James, the brother of John) and practiced the Jewish religion with ostentation. In A.D. 41 he publicly read the Law of Moses to mark the end of the sabbatical year, as prescribed in Deuteronomy 31:10. Having gathered the people in Jerusalem, he began to read but broke out in tears when he came to Deuteronomy 17:15: “He must be from among your own brothers. Do not place a foreigner over you, one who is not a brother Israelite.” In fact, the Herodians were Idumaeans, and therefore foreign to Israel. But the people reassured the king by shouting, “You are our brother, you are our brother!” because they were quite fond of Agrippa.
This story is of great interest for our chronology because it enables us to set A.D. 26–27 (two septennials earlier) as the date of the sabbatical year Jesus inaugurated in the synagogue of Nazareth. It would then have been in A.D. 26, on the tenth day of the month of Tishri, which is the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur), that Jesus announced the complete restoration of the jubilean practices in Israel. We say “jubilean practices” because, as we have seen, the ordinances of the sabbatical year and of the Jubilee coincided. The calendar of jubilean years was subject to controversy even among the Jews, making it hard for us to recreate it with accuracy.24
Two centuries after Jesus, the orthodox Jews who remained in Palestine still observed the sabbatical year. Rabbi Abrabu recalls the way some Gentiles made fun of Jews. They would bring an emaciated camel to the theater and rail, “Why is this camel so afflicted? Because the Jews are observing their sabbatical year, and since they have run out of vegetables, they are eating the plants this camel used for food.”
When Jesus proclaimed good news to the poor, liberty to the captives, and sight to the blind, his audience knew very well what he meant: now is the time to put into effect the year of Jubilee. Jesus’ speech in Nazareth was no sermon of religious platitudes. He was announcing that a social revolution was underway – the messianic reign had begun. For the poor, this was good news. All things would be made right again. For those whose interests were vested in the establishment, however, such news was a threat. Was Jesus serious? How far did he plan to take all this? Where would it lead?
CHAPTER THREE
Implications of Jubilee
T he speech at Nazareth alone would not be enough to prove that Jesus proclaimed a Jubilee. A more complete reading of the Gospels is needed to validate our thesis. As we have just seen, the Jubilee or sabbatical year prescribed four provisions: letting the land lie fallow, the remittance of debts, the liberation of slaves, and the redistribution of capital. This chapter will explore further references in the Gospels to these four provisions.1
The Fallow Year
Jesus does not directly mention the provision of letting the land lie fallow. His silence on the subject is not surprising, since this sabbatical prescription was the only one already accepted by the people. It was therefore unnecessary to encourage the Jews to put it into practice. But they surely needed courage to let their land lie fallow every seventh year while counting on God to give them what they needed. In Leviticus 25:20–21 Yahweh foresaw their uneasiness and declared, “You may ask, ‘What will we eat in the seventh year if we do not plant or harvest our crops?’ I will send you such a blessing in the sixth year that the land will yield enough for three years.”
Jesus talked to his disciples in similar terms. His proclamation of the Jubilee may have troubled them because they had abandoned their land and their boats by the lake to follow him. “So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or
