The Year of Jubilee

A ram's horn trumpet sounds from a hilltop. Then another, from the next village. And another. Across the whole land, the trumpets are calling. Something is about to be set free.

At Mount Sinai, God is preparing his people for life in the land he has promised them. Each family and tribe will receive a share of it, fields and olive groves and vineyards. But God knows what happens to people over time. Harvests fail. Families fall into debt. Someone has to sell a field to buy bread. Someone else buys up more and more. And before long, a few are rich and many have nothing. So God gives Moses a law unlike almost any other in the ancient world. A law that would reset everything.

Count off seven sabbath years, God says. Seven times seven years, forty-nine years in all. Then, on the Day of Atonement, in the seventh month, sound the trumpet throughout your land. Make the fiftieth year holy. Proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you. And in that year, every one of you will return to your own family land, and every one of you will return to your family. Imagine a grandfather who had to sell his fields when he was young. Now, in the jubilee, his grandchildren can walk back onto the land that was always meant to be theirs.

This changed how buying and selling worked. God says: when you sell land to your neighbour, or buy it, do not take advantage of each other. Count the years until the next jubilee. If there are many years left, the price is higher. If there are few, the price is lower. Because really, you are not buying the land. You are buying a number of harvests. And then God explains why. The land must not be sold permanently, he says, because the land is mine. You are foreigners and guests with me. If a family member does fall on hard times and sells land, a close relative should buy it back for them. Families were meant to look after each other.

And it was not only land. If your brother becomes poor and cannot support himself, God says, help him. Let him live alongside you. Do not charge him interest. Do not sell him food for profit. If he becomes so poor that he sells himself to you, do not make him work like a slave. Treat him as a hired worker. And in the year of jubilee, he goes free, with his children, back to his family and his ancestors' land. Why? Because they are my servants, God says, whom I brought out of Egypt. Of course, people worried. If no one sows or reaps in the jubilee, what will we eat? God answers that too. I will send my blessing in the sixth year, so the land produces enough for three years. Trust me.

In Philadelphia, in the United States, hangs a famous cracked bell called the Liberty Bell. It was made in the 1750s for the Pennsylvania State House, the building now called Independence Hall. Around its top are words from this chapter, Leviticus twenty-five, verse ten. Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof. Later, people campaigning to end slavery took up the bell as a symbol, and gave it the name it still carries.

The Year of Jubilee. You'll find it in Leviticus chapter twenty-five. Every fifty years, a trumpet, a homecoming, and a fresh start, because the land and the people belonged to God. So here is a question to carry with you. Who around you needs a fresh start, and how could you help them get one?