Yovel

The Yovel or Jubilee is the fiftieth year, arriving after seven cycles of seven, and it is set out in Leviticus 25. It is announced on the Day of Atonement by the blast of a ram's horn, the yovel from which the year takes its name, and it carries three provisions: the land lies fallow as in a sabbatical year, ancestral holdings revert to the families that originally held them, and Israelites who have sold themselves into servitude go free. Its charter sentence, "proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants" (Leviticus 25:10), is cast on the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, one of the more consequential afterlives any biblical verse has had.

The reason the text gives is theological rather than economic: "the land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; you are strangers and sojourners with me" (25:23). Because the land is God's, what changes hands can only be a lease of the intervening harvests, and the legislation says so explicitly, instructing that the price be reckoned by the number of crop years remaining before the Jubilee. Permanent alienation of a family's inheritance is thereby made legally impossible, and with it the accumulation of land that the prophets denounce.

Whether it was ever practised is disputed. No narrative in the Hebrew Bible records an observance. Historical-critical scholarship generally assigns Leviticus 25 to priestly legislation and divides over its relation to practice, some treating it as a programmatic or utopian text and others pointing to the periodic debt-release and manumission edicts of Old Babylonian kings, the misharum and andurarum proclamations, as evidence that measures of this kind were a real feature of the ancient Near East, whatever Israel did with the idea. In rabbinic law the Jubilee's operation is tied to conditions no longer met, chiefly the settlement of the majority of Israel in the land by tribal allotment, and it has accordingly been treated as not currently in force.

Its influence has far outrun its observance. The Jubilee image runs through Christian social teaching, through abolitionist argument in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and, most recently, through the Jubilee 2000 campaign for the cancellation of the external debt of the poorest countries, which took both its name and its argument from Leviticus 25.

The Jubilee legislation of Leviticus 25 generated two quite separate later religious institutions, one Christian and biblical, the other Christian and ecclesiastical, and neither is well known to be connected to the other or to the original Israelite law.

In Luke's Gospel, Jesus opens his public ministry in the synagogue at Nazareth by reading from Isaiah 61, "he has sent me to proclaim release to the captives... the acceptable year of the Lord" (Luke 4:18-19), and states that the scripture has been fulfilled in the hearing of those present. Isaiah 61 itself draws on Jubilee language, release, liberty, a proclaimed year, and many modern interpreters, especially in liberation theology, read the citation as a deliberate claim to be inaugurating something like a Jubilee, extended metaphorically to a comprehensive vision of restoration and social liberation, though the reading is contested by scholars who caution against assuming so specific an allusion in Isaiah's own poetic language.

Independently, the Catholic Church developed its own Holy Year, or ecclesiastical Jubilee, beginning with Pope Boniface VIII in 1300, who granted a plenary indulgence to pilgrims visiting Rome that year, an event that drew such crowds and income that the interval between Jubilees was progressively shortened, from a century to fifty years and eventually to twenty-five, still the schedule for the Church's ordinary Jubilees today, alongside occasional extraordinary ones. The ecclesiastical Jubilee borrows the biblical name, the theme of release reinterpreted as release from the debt of sin through indulgence, and a periodic cycle, but its actual content, pilgrimage and indulgence, has no counterpart in the Levitical institution beyond shared vocabulary.