Jubilee in Sacred Scripture
An analysis of the birth of Jubilee and a reference to Scripture
“You shall count seven weeks of years, that is, seven times seven years; these seven weeks of years shall make a period of forty-nine years. On the tenth day of the seventh month, you shall make the sound of the horn echo; on the day of atonement you shall make the horn echo throughout the whole earth.
You shall declare holy the fiftieth year and proclaim deliverance in the land for all its inhabitants. It will be a jubilee for you; each of you will return to his property and his family.
The fiftieth year shall be a jubilee for you; you shall neither sow nor reap what the fields will produce themselves, nor shall you make harvest of the unpruned vines. For it is a jubilee: it shall be holy to you; you may, however, eat the produce which the fields shall yield.
In this year of jubilee everyone shall return to his own property. When you sell something to your neighbor or when you buy something from your neighbor, let no one wrong his brother.
You will adjust the purchase you make from your neighbor according to the number of years since the last jubilee: he will sell to you according to the years of harvest. The more years that remain, the more you will raise the price; the fewer the years, the more you will lower the price, for he will sell you the sum of the harvests.
Let none of you oppress his neighbor; fear your God, for I am the Lord your God” (Leviticus 25:8-17).
Genesis
According to Chapter 4 of the book of Genesis, the biblical patriarch Lamech, a descendant of Cain, had two sons: Yabal, considered the progenitor of all nomadic cattle breeders (Bedouins who lived in tents) and Yubal his brother, considered the first to have invented wind instruments, made from the horns of rams (shofàr).
Yòbel (pronounced Yòvel) in Hebrew more precisely means the ram, and specifically ram’s horns. As is evident, the word Jubilee derives from this instrument and its particular sound, as it was linked to a special event that marked the beginning of a year of “grace” (Isaiah 61), a year of rest, of respite, in a society still very much tied to the land, its rhythms and its products.
When the Leviticus passage speaks of a year of “deliverance” (deror), it means the ability to flow freely, like a stream whose dams are removed or a horse that is allowed to run free.
Just as every week must have its day of rest (shabbat), when we stop from work to devote ourselves to family, to ourselves, to our relationship with God to whom we owe all our happiness, so every seven years the Jewish law speaks of a “sabbatical year” and every 49 years of a particular year: the Jubilee.
Agriculture and farming
Now we too are called to rediscover the wisdom of these provisions. Those who engage in agriculture know that the land also needs oxygen, rest. If it is always and continually exploited, the fruits it gives us are less and less. Let us not talk about the difficult talk about property: in the fiftieth year, everyone could redeem lost family property, could return to their homes, slaves sent back free.
The reference text here is Deuteronomy chapter 15, in which the Bible invites us to “suspend right over what is yours,” that is, to forgive debts. Great teaching that invites us to liberate ourselves and fight greed, the unbridled desire to accumulate, without even knowing whether we can safely enjoy the fruit of so much toil.
We do not know if these laws, were ever really put into practice, although solemnly proclaimed in the book of Leviticus, which more than any other in the Bible emphasizes not only legislation and legal boundaries in which to move, as a society of human persons, but the very holiness of God: “Be holy for I, the Lord your God, am holy.”
From these ancient archaic forms of Jubilee, related to the land, agriculture and farming, even in the Jewish world there was a later phase. We find it in a book where it already speaks of a people of Israel in exile, in diaspora, that is, scattered in various nations of the world.
It is the prophecy of the book of Daniel in chapter 9. Here the young Daniel, with the help of the archangel Gabriel, reflects on the words of the prophet Jeremiah, who had spoken of a time of 70 years for the deliverance of Israel, deported to Babylon.
The text is interpreted as “70 weeks of years,” or 490 years. The prophet Daniel is told by the archangel: a time of “seventy weeks for your people and for your holy city, set to put an end to ungodliness, to put seals on sins, to atone for iniquity, to establish everlasting righteousness, to seal vision and prophecy, and to anoint the Holy of Holies” (Daniel 9:24).
New Testament
It is a mysterious text, which is taken up in the New Testament by the last book given to us by the Christian tradition, the Revelation of John.
However, this “mystery” might become simple if we consider that from time immemorial, according to Hebrew biblical spirituality, human time has been divided not into decades (as the Romans did) but into periods of seven days, which, with its multiples (49 or 490) still indicate that we human beings must insert breaks in our time, take time in which to stop thinking solely of gain sustenance (things that are moreover more than legitimate), stop thinking about the exploitation of our neighbor and illicit enrichment in order to find joy (iubileum in Latin from jubilee), happiness, peace in our lives and in the lives of those around us also thanks to concrete gestures of solidarity with the less fortunate, of forgiveness and condonation, of liberation and peace.
However, we have to wait until the year 1300 for a codification in the Christian world of a celebration such as the biblical jubilee year. Initially it was scanned every hundred years, rising to the current 25 for the ordinary Jubilee (there are also extraordinary ones). It was immediately called, as already in the text of Leviticus, a holy year.
In the biblical mindset, “holy” indicates something or someone “separate,” distinct from the everyday, the ferial. A space, a place, a time, a person “separate” from all that is not the fullness of happiness for which we human beings were created.
In the distinction – again according to the Bible – lives our creation: the possibility of human life is founded precisely on the law of separation (light and darkness, word and silence, man and woman, good and evil, etc.). Without this, everything would be confused, and any attempt at confusion means returning to primordial chaos, where there is no possibility of life, least of all a serene, beautiful, peaceful, joyful and bright life.
Jesus himself, in the synagogue of Nazareth (according to the evangelist Luke), comes out of the anonymity of his carpenter’s store and begins his public life by announcing as “fulfilled” in him the word taken from the text of Isaiah that is proposed to him at the reading, “I have come to bring glad tidings to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Luke 4:16-21). We Christians can rightly say that Jubilee coincides with the coming and acting on earth of our Lord Jesus Christ.
From these few words, we can, therefore, only glimpse something of the extraordinary wealth of meaning that is condensed into the term Jubilee and the year we are about to begin.
A year in which the key word is once again Mercy. Leviticus spoke of a year of “atonement,” a term we normally associate with some form of scourging ourselves, a steeping in one’s repentance. Although repentance remains an important component of human life, nevertheless, the original term harkens back to the “covering” (kippur) that God performs in regard to our weakness and failure to meet the mark (sin).
Year of God’s mercy, then, toward us and mercy among us human beings, called to forgive each other as God forgives all of us. A year in which to remove (or at least try to do so) everything that hinders our free run toward the Lord Jesus, our Passover, our deliverance, our “Jubilee,” our joy and light.
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