Its Party Time

The Year of Jubilee

JUBILEE IN THE OLD TESTAMENT

Jubilee (ju’-bi-lee) = Productive. He will be made able

The Exhaustive Dictionary of Bible Names

Opposite of productive: unproductive, sterile, unfruitful, incapable, ineffective.

Is there anyone here who has felt any of these things? Are you there now?

Unfruitful christian.

Sterile marriage.

Unproductive relationships.

Incapable man or woman.

Leviticus 25:8–22 (ESV)

“You shall count seven weeks of years, seven times seven years, so that the time of the seven weeks of years shall give you forty-nine years. Then you shall sound the loud trumpet on the tenth day of the seventh month. On the Day of Atonement you shall sound the trumpet throughout all your land. And you shall consecrate the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you, when each of you shall return to his property and each of you shall return to his clan. That fiftieth year shall be a jubilee for you; in it you shall neither sow nor reap what grows of itself nor gather the grapes from the undressed vines. For it is a jubilee. It shall be holy to you. You may eat the produce of the field.

“In this year of jubilee each of you shall return to his property. And if you make a sale to your neighbor or buy from your neighbor, you shall not wrong one another. You shall pay your neighbor according to the number of years after the jubilee, and he shall sell to you according to the number of years for crops. If the years are many, you shall increase the price, and if the years are few, you shall reduce the price, for it is the number of the crops that he is selling to you. You shall not wrong one another, but you shall fear your God, for I am the Lord your God.

“Therefore you shall do my statutes and keep my rules and perform them, and then you will dwell in the land securely. The land will yield its fruit, and you will eat your fill and dwell in it securely. And if you say, ‘What shall we eat in the seventh year, if we may not sow or gather in our crop?’ I will command my blessing on you in the sixth year, so that it will produce a crop sufficient for three years. When you sow in the eighth year, you will be eating some of the old crop; you shall eat the old until the ninth year, when its crop arrives.

The Lexham Bible Dictionary. During this year, economic debts were to be forgiven, land restored to families who sold in order to repay debt, and slaves sold to repay debt were to be liberated. While clearly specified in the biblical text, there is no biblical or extrabiblical evidence that the practice of a Year of Jubilee was ever celebrated. The term is only found in the Pentateuch with most references in Lev 25–27.