Jubilee's Radical, Biblical Vision
Sylvia C. Keesmart
January 1, 2000
It's Sunday morning, and your pastor has just preached a sermon against adultery. Immediately following the service, he is challenged by a parishioner who argues that Israel never really obeyed the laws about adultery. Even though Jesus radicalized and deepened those laws, the story of the women taken in adultery shows that even in the first century it was difficult to obey. Given this track record, why take the laws about adultery so seriously?
Not many Christians would buy this argument. And yet this is precisely the argument raised almost every time I give a workshop on Jubilee: it was never practiced. So what? Israel never managed to follow most of the laws in their scriptures, yet we don't dismiss them as impractical. Even though Jubilee as outlined in Leviticus 25—which calls for the freeing of slaves and the return of everyone to their ancestral land—may never have been enacted in Israel (we don't know for sure), this passage provides a powerful vision of God's hope for his people: a community where not only are debts forgiven and slaves set free, but everyone is permitted to return to their land, and thus to begin once again on a level economic playing field.
However, while we can't be sure that Jubilee was ever practiced, we do know that the laws regarding the sabbatical years were enacted. These are the laws found in Deuteronomy 15:1-18, which stipulate that every seven years debt was to be forgiven and slaves were to be freed and given generous portions of cattle, grain, and wine (the latter presumably so they could celebrate!). These laws were reinstated by Ezra and Nehemiah when the exiles returned to Israel, and the presence of elaborate laws in the first century (called the prozbol), by which one could avoid ...
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