The Astronomy of the Bible / An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References of Holy Scripture

by E. Walter Maunder

"Thou shalt number seven sabbaths of years unto thee, seven times seven years; and the space of the seven sabbaths of years shall be unto thee forty and nine years. Then shalt thou cause the trumpet of the Jubile to sound on the tenth day of the seventh month, in the day of atonement shall ye make the trumpet sound throughout all your land. And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a Jubile unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family."

In this year of Jubilee all land, and village houses, and the houses of the Levites were to revert to their original owners. These, in other words, could be leased only, and not bought outright, the price of the lease depending upon the number of years until the next Jubilee. A foreigner might not buy a Hebrew outright as a bondslave; he could but contract with him as a servant hired for a term; this contract might be abolished by the payment of a sum dependent on the number of years until the next year of Jubilee, and in any case the Hebrew servant and his family must go out free at the year of Jubilee. In the last chapter of the Book of Numbers we get a reference again to the year of Jubilee, and indirect allusions to it are made by Isaiah, in "the acceptable year of the Lord" when liberty should be proclaimed, and in "the year of the redeemed." In his prophecy of the restoration of Israel, Ezekiel definitely refers to "the year of liberty," when the inheritance that has been granted to a servant shall return again to the prince.

The interpretation of the sabbatic year and the year of Jubilee has greatly exercised commentators. At what season did the sabbatic year begin? was it coterminous with the ecclesiastical year; or did it differ from it by six months? Was the year of Jubilee held once in every forty-nine years or once in every fifty? did it begin at the same season as the sabbatic year? did it interrupt the reckoning of the sabbatic year, so that a new cycle commenced immediately after the year of Jubilee; or was the sabbatic year every seventh, irrespective of the year of Jubilee? did the year of Jubilee always follow immediately on a sabbatic year, or did this only happen occasionally?

The problem will be much simpler if it is borne in mind that the Law, as originally proclaimed, was eminently practical and for practical men. The period of pedantry, of hair-splitting, of slavery to mere technicalities, came very late in Jewish history.

It is clear from what has been already said in the chapter on the year, that the only calendar year in the Old Testament was the sacred one, beginning with the month Abib or Nisan, in the spring. At the same time the Jews, like ourselves, would occasionally refer vaguely to the beginning, or the end, or the course of the year, without meaning to set up any hard and fast connection with the authorized calendar.

Now it is perfectly clear that the sabbatic year cannot have begun with the first day of the month Abib, because the first fruits were offered on the fifteenth of that month. That being so, the ploughing and the sowing must have taken place very considerably earlier. It is not possible to suppose that the Hebrew farmer would plough and sow his land in the last months of the previous year, knowing that he could not reap during the sabbatic year.

Similarly, it seems hardly likely that it was considered as beginning with the first of Tishri, inasmuch as the harvest festival, the Feast of the Ingathering, or Tabernacles, took place in the middle of that month. The plain and practical explanation is that, after the Feast of Tabernacles of the sixth year, the farmer would not again plough, sow, or reap his land until after the Feast of Tabernacles in the sabbatic year. The sabbatic year, in other words, was a simple agricultural year, and it did not correspond exactly with the ecclesiastical or with any calendar year.

For practical purposes the sabbatic year therefore ended with the close of the Feast of Tabernacles, when the Law was read before the whole people according to the command of Moses; and it practically began a year earlier.

The year of Jubilee appears in the directions of Lev. xxv. to have been most distinctly linked to the sabbatic year.