Rest for the land every seventh year
The Hebrew Bible extends the pattern of the seven-day week to years. Exodus tells farmers to sow and harvest for six years and to let the land lie fallow in the seventh, leaving what grows of itself for the poor and for animals. Leviticus 25 develops the idea into the sabbatical year, called shemitah (“release”) in later Jewish tradition. In that year the fields are not sown or pruned, and the produce is not harvested in the ordinary way.
Deuteronomy adds a social dimension. At the end of every seventh year, it directs, debts owed by fellow Israelites are to be released, and the text warns lenders not to refuse a loan because the release year is near. The text also connects the release to the freeing of a bonded servant, who is to be let go after six years of service in Exodus and Deuteronomy. The common thread is the same: the seventh unit of time is set aside for rest and for restoring balance, whether for the soil, the debtor or the servant.
Seven sevens and the fiftieth year
Leviticus 25 then adds a larger cycle. The people are told to count seven sabbaths of years, seven times seven years, which makes 49 years. In the fiftieth year, a horn is to be sounded on the Day of Atonement across the land, and liberty is proclaimed. This is the jubilee, known in Hebrew as yovel, a word usually connected to the ram’s horn used to announce it.
The jubilee has three main provisions in the text:
- The land is to rest again, as in a sabbatical year.
- Ancestral land that was sold returns to the family to which it was originally allotted.
- Those who had sold themselves into servitude because of debt go free.
The reasoning is stated plainly in Leviticus: the land belongs to God, and the people are tenants. As a result, a sale of land is treated as a lease whose price depends on the number of harvests remaining until the next jubilee. This arrangement was meant to prevent long-term accumulation of land and permanent loss of family holdings, though the text does not say how it was supposed to be enforced.
Is it forty-nine or fifty?
One of the oldest questions about the cycle is how the fiftieth year relates to the next count. Does the jubilee year count as the first year of a new seven-year cycle, or is it an extra year that stands outside the cycle? The text says “the fiftieth year”, which suggests an additional year, and some later authorities took this view, while others argued that the jubilee coincides with the forty-ninth or with the first year of the following cycle. The question is a good example of how a numerical rule that looks simple becomes complicated when applied to a calendar. It is also related to the seven-week count between Passover and Shavuot, in which forty-nine days are counted and the fiftieth day is a festival; the structure is similar, and the practice is described in the article on counting the Omer.
Was the jubilee ever observed?
This is disputed. The Bible contains references to the release of debts and to the sabbatical year in the period after the return from exile, and Nehemiah records a commitment to leave the land fallow in the seventh year. For the fiftieth-year jubilee, however, there is little direct evidence of strict practice in the biblical period, and scholars differ. Some think it was an ideal that was rarely or never fully implemented; others think it reflects an older practice that fell out of use; still others see it as a utopian program designed during or after the exile. The evidence does not allow a confident answer.
Rabbinic tradition holds that the jubilee ceased to apply after the tribes east of the Jordan were exiled, since the law is tied to the whole people living on the land. Later, a legal device attributed to the sage Hillel, known as the prosbul, allowed lenders to protect their loans from cancellation, an adaptation commonly understood as responding to the practical effects of the release of debts.
Observance today
The sabbatical year is still observed in some form in modern Israel and by many Jewish farmers, with legal arrangements such as the sale of land to non-Jews, a long-debated approach, being used to permit continued farming. The most recent sabbatical year ended in the autumn of 2022 (the Hebrew year 5782), and the next is due in the Hebrew year 5789, which begins in the autumn of 2028. The jubilee is not observed in current Jewish practice, since it is held to depend on conditions that do not now apply.
Echoes in Christian and wider usage
The word jubilee passed into Christian use and then into everyday English. In the Catholic Church, the Jubilee or Holy Year began in 1300 under Pope Boniface VIII; it was first meant to be a hundred-year interval and is now held more frequently, typically every twenty-five years. It has features of pardon and renewal that echo the biblical idea, though the content differs. Christian number symbolism has often drawn on the same biblical interest in sevens and fifties. In English, “jubilee” is now also used for anniversaries, such as a fiftieth or sixtieth year of a reign, which is a looser sense than the original.
The place of seven
The sabbatical and jubilee systems show how seven could organize both time and society. The cycle takes the week as a model and stretches it into years, then into a longer cycle of 49. The same idea, that time can be divided into sevens and that the final unit should be a time of rest, runs through the biblical calendar, as discussed in the article on the seven days of creation and the Sabbath. It is one of several ways in which the biblical writers used number to give a pattern to the passing of time, alongside the seven-day week and the calendar systems of the surrounding world.