Sabbath and Jubilee Years

(Leviticus 25:1 - 25:13)

When Moses was on the mountain in Sinai, Jehovah told him to give the following instructions to the people of Israel, "When you have settled upon the land I am giving you, the land itself must observe a Sabbath, a time of rest, every 7 years.  For 6 years you should plant your fields, prune your vineyards and harvest your crops, but the 7th year must be a Sabbath year of total rest.  During that year, devoted to Jehovah, you must not doing any planting or pruning.  You must not harvest what has grown untended in your fields, or pick the fruit of your unpruned vines.  It must be a year of complete rest for the land.  However, whatever the land yields during the Sabbath Year will be subsistence for yourself, your male and female slaves, the hired hands and migrant workers who live with you, as well as your livestock and the wild animals on your property.  Whatever grows wild on the land may be eaten.

"Counting off 7 weeks of sabbath years, that is, 7 times seven years, the result adds up to 49 years.  On the Day of Atonement (on the 10th day of seven month, Tishri) of the 5oth year a ram's horn should sound loudly throughout the land.  The 50th year will be regarded as holy, and liberty will be proclaimed throughout the land to all its inhabitants.  It will be for you a jubilee.  Everyone should return to his ancestral lands and to his own family.  The 50th year will be a jubilee for you.  You must not plant or harvest what has grown untended in your fields, or pick the fruit of your untended vines.  For this is the Jubilee Year, holy to you.  You must eat only what grows wild on your land.  In this Jubilee Year each person must return to his own property."

Notes
1.  The concept of letting fields lie fallow every few years is a sound and long-observed agricultural practice.  However, letting all of one's fields go untilled for a year would seem unwise, since it is impossible to predict whether there will be a good harvest or not.  A bad harvest before the Sabbath Year would result in a hungry community.

2. The demand that on the Sabbath Year one must leave to rot on the vine and in the field any fruits and crops that might grow on their own seems an incredible waste.  But the commands of Jehovah, arbitrary as they are, must be obeyed.

3. On the Jubilee Year everyone is to return to his family and ancestral property.  One wonders to what extent Israelites, even in later times, would have traveled and settled away from where they were born.