sabbath

The Gospel as a Year of Jubilee

Lois Tverberg

by Lois Tverberg

In Leviticus, we read an intriguing law that God gave Israel about observing a year of Jubilee:

‘You are also to count off seven sabbaths of years for yourself, seven times seven years, so that you have the time of the seven sabbaths of years, namely, forty-nine years. ‘You shall then sound a ram’s horn abroad on the tenth day of the seventh month; on the day of atonement you shall sound a horn all through your land. ‘You shall thus consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim a release through the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you, and each of you shall return to his own property, and each of you shall return to his family. ‘You shall have the fiftieth year as a jubilee; you shall not sow, nor reap its aftergrowth, nor gather in from its untrimmed vines. (Lev 25:8 – 11)

God proclaimed that every seventh year was to be a sabbath for the land: crops were not to be planted, and they were to live on what God had provided before that time and what grew up by itself.

After seven sabbath years came a year of Jubilee, which along with being a Sabbath for the land, also was a “year of release.” This meant that all Israelites who were in bondage were freed, and anyone who had sold his ancestral property would receive it back, and all debts were forgiven. The word “Jubilee” comes from the word Yovel, a Hebrew word for the ram’s horn that was used to proclaim the year.

Another name for it was a “year of release (deror).”  The Hebrew word deror means “release” or “liberty.” Early Americans, who knew their Bibles better than we do, placed Leviticus 25:10 on the Liberty Bell: “Proclaim LIBERTY throughout all the Land unto all the Inhabitants thereof.”

Our founding fathers found inspiration in the year of Jubilee as they were establishing the United States. What did they find so special about this concept?

The Purpose of the Year of Jubilee

As part of God’s covenant with Israel, he promised to give the Israelites the land of Canaan. After the conquest of the land, it was divided among the tribes so that each family had its own share. In the ancient world, owning land was greatly prized because it was a source of food, income and security.

In that economy where people depended on the crops they raised, if a family had a bad harvest and ran out of food, they were forced to go into debt or even sell their land. If they couldn’t recover but fell further behind, they would have to sell themselves into slavery or leave the country, like Naomi and Elimelech in the book of Ruth.

People did not borrow money and sell land for business purposes, they did it only out of desperate economic need. So the Jubilee was for one main purpose — to provide for the poor who had gone into debt or lost their land, so that they would be able to start over again. Without it, the wealthy would always do better in bad years, and the land would tend to move into their hands while those who had lost their land would become permanently enslaved.

Another effect of the Jubilee would be to stop the destruction of families. If a man lost his land and sold himself and his family into slavery, or if he moved out of the country, he would likely never see his family together again. Part of the reason Naomi was distraught was because not only had she lost her hope for future descendants, but by leaving Israel, she also lost her family and past. When she returned, she was reunited with her family.

The year of Jubilee was to be a year that people returned home and families were brought together again.

The evidence suggests that Israel never observed the year of Jubilee. In 2 Chronicles it reports that they never allowed the land to have its Sabbath every seventh year, and if they never did that, they most likely never observed the year of Jubilee either. Several of the prophets lament the exploitation of the poor by the rich, which also hints that they never observed a Jubilee year.

There is, however, evidence from other Middle Eastern countries that years of release were proclaimed in ancient times when a new king came into power. It would be a way to ensure support from the masses when a king would declare all debts void and set free all those in bondage to debt.

It is interesting that the prophets thought of this association of a year of Jubilee with the coming of the Messiah. The primary image of the Messiah was that he would be a king like David, so just as the new kings of other countries declared a Jubilee when they came into power, the Messianic king would as well. Isaiah says:

The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me,
because the LORD has anointed me
to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim freedom for the captives
and release from darkness for the prisoners,
to proclaim the year of the LORD’s favor. (Is 61:1-2)

This is a picture of the coming messianic King, right after he is anointed by God, declaring good news of the jubilee year. Each phrase is about how great the “year of the Lord’s favor” will be to those who have been imprisoned or enslaved because of their debt. The king will let them go home and start life over, to their great joy.

Jesus and the Year of Jubilee

In Luke 4, at the beginning of his ministry, Jesus reads the passage from Isaiah 61 in the synagogue in his hometown, and he says “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing!” his audience would have heard this as an obvious claim to be the Messiah who has now come into power.

Throughout Jesus’ ministry he uses images from the year of Jubilee, but he takes the image of the poor person set free from debt, and uses debt as a metaphor of sin. For instance, when the sinful woman comes and washes his feet with her tears and Simon, his host, wonders if he knows what a sinner she is, he tells the parable:

Two men owed money to a certain moneylender. One owed him five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. Neither of them had the money to pay him back, so he canceled the debts of both. Now which of them will love him more?” Simon replied, “I suppose the one who had the bigger debt canceled.” “You have judged correctly,” Jesus said. (Luke 7:41-43)

The poor who are set free in the Messianic kingdom are the poor in spirit, those who know they are in debt to God because of their sin. So the “good news of the kingdom of God” is that the Messianic King has come, and has declared complete forgiveness of debt — sin —for those who will repent and enter his kingdom. It is good news to the poor rather than to the rich who don’t see that they need to be forgiven.

We see in Jesus’ use of the picture of the Jubilee the greatest picture of God’s grace through Christ. Those in prison are those who are under a crushing debt they could never repay. We see Jesus, the new king, setting prisoners free of debt that they owe because of their sin. Through Jesus’ work on the cross, those who become a part of his Kingdom receive a forgiveness of a debt they cannot repay themselves so that they can start over as new person.

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Photos: Tony the Misfit on Flickr [CC BY 2.0], Nitin Bhosale on Unsplash, Peter Paul Rubens [Public domain]

Saving a Whole World

Lois Tverberg

by Lois Tverberg

“And He said to them, ‘Is it lawful to do good or to do
harm on the Sabbath, to save a life or to kill?'” Mark 3:4

When Jesus defended his actions about healing on the Sabbath, he used the Jewish legal concept of pikuach nephesh, which literally means “preserving life,” a supreme value to rabbis of his time. The idea was that human life is extremely precious, and that every other law can and must be set aside to save a life. Even though the Sabbath laws were very strict, any one of them could be broken if a life was at stake. There was some debate about what circumstances were considered “life-threatening,” and Jesus was taking part in a discussion about whether improving a person’s life by healing them was considered pikuach nephesh.

Man caring for childThe idea that saving a life is a supreme value may seem second nature to us, but it was without precedent in other ancient cultures. In other lands, many minor crimes were punishable by death, but not in Israel. God had made it clear that since humans were made in his image, we are precious to him. We don’t often contemplate how this singular idea has transformed our entire civilization to the point that it is what makes us “civilized.” Hospitals, orphanages, and charities of all types have arisen our of the belief that human life must be preserved at any cost.

Jews have a profound way of expressing the idea of the preciousness of life that comes from the first case of shedding of innocent blood, Cain’s murder of Abel. God said to Cain,

“The voice of your brother’s blood (bloods, literally) is crying to Me from the ground.” (Gen. 4:10)

The Hebrew word for blood is dam, and the plural is damim. When the Bible talks about murder, or “bloodguilt,” it uses the plural form, damim. Using the logic that the blood contains the life of a person, to speak of blood in the plural implies that a murder doesn’t just take the life of one person, it takes the lives of many. Jews therefore have a tradition that the voice of the “bloods” crying out from the ground was actually the voices of all of the future descendants of Abel that would have ever lived. From this they have a saying, “To take the life of one person is like taking the life of a whole world, and to save the life of one person is like saving a whole world!”

Photo: John Severns

Why Carrying Wood?

Lois Tverberg

by Lois Tverberg

Now while the sons of Israel were in the wilderness, they found a man gathering wood on the Sabbath day. Those who found him gathering wood brought him to Moses and Aaron and to all the congregation; and they put him in custody because it had not been declared what should be done to him. Then the LORD said to Moses, “The man shall surely be put to death; all the congregation shall stone him with stones outside the camp.” Numbers 15:32-35

Carrying WoodSome scenes in the Old Testament leave us scratching our heads about why God was so harsh and the regulations so arbitrary. The case of the man who was caught carrying wood on the Sabbath is one of them. It seems like an innocuous thing, but it seems to be especially serious. How can this be?

Several cultural things may be helpful in understanding this. The prohibition that the man was clearly intending to break was to light a fire on the Sabbath, as it says in Exodus 35:3. Lighting a fire was not a minor task – a person searched far outside the camp until he or she had a large load of wood, and then carried the heavy bundle back home, and then took some time to get a flame going. It would be likely that he was planning to cook or do other work that required a fire, and that gathering the wood was just the first step toward having a day full of activity that would willfully ignore the commandment to honor the Sabbath day.

The Sabbath itself was an especially important commandment to the Israelites when the covenant was given. It was the sign of the covenant that God had made with them:

The LORD spoke to Moses, saying, “But as for you, speak to the sons of Israel, saying, `You shall surely observe My sabbaths; for this is a sign between Me and you throughout your generations, that you may know that I am the LORD who sanctifies you. Therefore you are to observe the sabbath, for it is holy to you. Exodus 31:12-14

Wedding RingA sign of a covenant was a symbolic remembrance of the whole covenant. To break it was like breaking the whole thing. A modern analogy is the wedding ring, which is a kind of “sign,” a remembrance of the covenant of marriage. If a woman got rid of another piece of jewelry her husband gave her, it would not be very important. But if she threw away or sold her wedding ring, it would say something about her feelings about the marriage as a whole. Similarly, the man who was willfully ignoring the Sabbath was spurning the entire covenant, which he and all of Israel were accountable to keep as a people. If one person broke it, it affected all of them.

Even though our situation is much different than this, we can see that in its time, this sin was very serious, and indicated an attitude of rebellion that impacted all of Israel. Having its cultural setting helps us have the right lenses to grasp it the way was understood in its time, and why it resulted in such a strong reaction from Moses and from God.

Photo: WambuiMwangi and Eivind Barstad Waaler

The Logic of Sabbath

Lois Tverberg

by Lois Tverberg

Doesn’t each of you on the Sabbath untie his ox or donkey from the stall and lead it out to give it water? Then should not this woman, a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has kept bound for eighteen long years, be set free on the Sabbath day from what bound her?” Luke 13:15-16

Historically, many Christians have misinterpreted Jesus’ teachings about Sabbath, reading them as an annulment of all Jewish law. Without knowing the context of his words, we can’t know the debates going at the time and how Jesus’ words fit in.

First, many underestimate the importance and holiness of the Sabbath in God’s covenant with the nation of Israel. It was called a “sign” of the covenant, a weekly day to honor the entire covenant. Breaking it was punishable by death according to the Scriptures (Ex. 31:14-16), because doing so was considered a rejection of the entire agreement God had made with his people. Often Jesus himself did not heal on the Sabbath, but waited until after sunset, when the day officially ended.

donkeys

In Jesus’ time there was a strong emphasis on keeping the Sabbath as devotedly as possible, because only a few hundred years earlier the Jews had been exiled from their land due to their disobedience to God’s laws. Therefore the Jewish people took special care to outline what activities constituted “work,” so that they could avoid them and fully rest on the Sabbath. “Work” included untying animals to take them out to plow, since animals were supposed to rest on the Sabbath too. Certain types of healing activities were proscribed also, because they involved grinding herbs or other actions not allowed on the Sabbath. People with long-term illnesses simply endured them through the day.

While strict adherence to the Sabbath was valued, the early rabbis ruled that some situations warranted an override of Sabbath regulations. If human life was in danger, all rules against working would be set aside for the reason of “pikuah nephesh” — to save life. Also, some rules were set aside out of compassion for animals, so they wouldn’t suffer from not being fed or taken out for water. This was called tzar baalei hayim—preventing suffering to living things.

Jesus seems to be using the logic of tzar baalei hayim in his statement about healing the woman. It was not a life-or-death need that she be healed that day, but she had suffered for 18 years. If an animal can be untied to be led to water to prevent its suffering thirst, shouldn’t she be “unbound” too?

Interestingly, the one “breaking” the Sabbath was not Jesus in this case—he merely prayed for her healing, which wouldn’t have been prohibited by anyone. Those who protested even this prayer would have been seen as extreme by the rest of the rabbinic community too. According to Jesus’ logic, the one who did the “unbinding” was God himself! So contrary to popular belief, Jesus was working within the rules, not negating them, and showing how God longs to take every opportunity to show compassion for the suffering of his people.

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To explore this topic more, see chapter 10, “Thinking with Both Hands” in Walking in the Dust of Rabbi Jesus, Zondervan, 2012, p 130-42.