Jubilee

This is one of the most amazing pieces of legislation that you find in the Old Testament, at least to those people who have been taught that an unlimited and unhindered accumulation of wealth is the ultimate good. In the Year of Jubilee, all land holdings in Israel reverted to the original owners. This was one of the earliest—and perhaps the first—processes and laws for land reform in the history of the world, and certainly one of the most unique.

In this year the land was to revert to the original family owners. But if you look at the text carefully, that’s not the way the chapter itself talks about it. The text actually speaks not of the land returning to the people but of the people returning to the land. Now that must be important because it’s said five times over (see vv. 10, 13, 27, 28, and 41). The point seems to be that God is more concerned with the people than the land. We usually think the other way around. We are glad to manipulate people or get rid of people as long as we can accumulate our holdings. Now today, of course, it’s not generally land so much as it is bank accounts and stocks and so forth. But we manipulate people in order to have things. God says what’s important is the people, not the things.

There’s another important idea in this chapter, and it’s that of the kinsman-redeemer (see vv. 25-28). If a family was poor and was forced to sell their land, it wasn’t always necessary for them to wait till the Year of Jubilee came around to get it back. That could be a lifetime away. If that year came in your youth, you may be an old man before you got your land back. However, it was possible for the land to be bought back and restored to the original owner by a near relative who was called a kinsman-redeemer. Or, if the original owner prospered, he had the right to buy it back again. Now the amount the original owner had to pay was the difference between what the buyer had paid for it originally and the amount of crops that he had gotten out of it in the meantime. So if he had paid for ten years of crops and only three harvests had gone by, he had to be paid for the seven years of crops.

The long and concluding section of this chapter is verses 35 to 55, which has to do with duties to the poor. You might say, at first glance, “Why in the world are these duties to the poor here at all? Why does this belong in a chapter having to do with the Jubilee?” Well it shows that the central concern of the chapter is to protect or help the poor. There are a number of cases here.