Chapter 21

"When ye come into the land which I give you, then shall the land keep a Sabbath to Jehovah. Six years shalt thou sow thy field and prune thy vineyard, and gather in the fruit thereof; but in the seventh year shall the land keep a Sabbath of rest unto Jehovah: thy field shalt thou not sow, thy vineyard shalt thou not prune; that which groweth of its own accord of thy harvest shalt thou not reap, neither shalt thou gather the grapes of thy vine undressed; the land shall have a year of rest, and the Sabbath of the land shall be food for you; for thee, and for thy servant, and for thy maid, and for thy hired servant, and for thy cattle, and for all the beasts that are in thy land, shall all the increase thereof be food."

The expressions make it impossible to doubt that Exodus xxiii. 10, 11 lies at the foundation of this law; but out of this as a basis it is something different that has been framed. The seventh year, which is there a relative one, has here become fixed,--not varying for the various properties, but common for the whole land, a sabbatical year after the manner of the Sabbath day. This amounts to a serious increase in the difficulty of the matter, for it is not one and the same thing to have the abstinence from harvest spread over seven years and to have it concentrated into one out of every seven. In like manner a heightening of the demand is also seen in the circumstance that not merely harvesting but also sowing and dressing are forbidden. In the original commandment this was not the case; all that was provided for was that in the seventh year the harvest should not fall to the lot of the proprietor of the soil, but should be _publici juris_,--a relic perhaps of communistic agriculture. Through a mere misunderstanding of the verbal suffix in Exodus xxiii. 11, as has been conjectured by Hupfeld, a surrender of the _fruit_ of the land has been construed into a surrender of the land itself--a general fallow year (Leviticus xxv. 4). The misunderstanding, however, is not accidental, but highly characteristic. In Exodus xxiii. the arrangement is made for man; it is a limitation, for the common good, of private rights of property in land,--in fact, for the benefit of the landless, who in the seventh year are to have the usufruct of the soil; in Leviticus xxv. the arrangement is for the sake of the land,--that it may rest, if not on the seventh day, at least on the seventh year, and for the sake of the Sabbath-- that it may extend its supremacy over nature also. Of course this presupposes the extreme degree of Sabbath observance by absolute rest, and becomes comprehensible only when viewed as an outgrowth from that. For the rest, a universal fallow season is possible only under circumstances in which a people are to a considerable extent independent of the products of their own agriculture; prior to the exile even the idea of such a thing could hardly have occurred.

In the Priestly Code the year of jubilee is further added to supplement in turn the sabbatical year (Leviticus xxv. 8 seq.). As the latter is framed to correspond with the seventh day, so the former corresponds with the fiftieth, i.e., with Pentecost, as is easily perceived from the parallelism of Leviticus xxv. 8 with Leviticus xxiii. 15. Asthe fiftieth day after the seven Sabbath days is celebrated as a closing festival of the forty-nine days' period, so is the fiftieth year after the seven sabbatic years as rounding off the larger interval; the seven Sabbaths falling on harvest time, which are usually reckoned specially (Luke vi. 1 ), have, in the circumstance of their interrupting harvest work, a particular resemblance to the sabbatic years which interrupt agriculture altogether. Jubilee is thus an artificial institution superimposed upon the years of fallow regarded as harvest Sabbaths after the analogy of Pentecost. Both its functions appear originally to have belonged also to the Sabbath year and to be deduced from the two corresponding regulations in Deuteronomy relating to the seventh year, so that thus Exod xxiii. would be the basis of Leviticus xxv. 1-7 and Deuteronomy xv. that of xxv. 8 seq. The emancipation of the Hebrew slave originally had to take place on the seventh year after the purchase, afterwards (it would seem) on the seventh vear absolutely; for practical reasons it was transferred from that to the fiftieth. Analogous also, doubtless, is the growth of the other element in the jubilee--the return of mortgaged property to its hereditary owner--out of the remission of debts enjoined in Deuteronomy xv. for the end of the seventh year; for the two hang very closely together, as Leviticus xxv. 23 seq. shows.

As for the evidence for these various arrangements, those of the Book of the Covenant are presupposed alike by Deuteronomy and by the Priestly Code. It seems to have been due to the prompting of Deuteronomy that towards the end of the reign of Zedekiah the emancipation of the Hebrew slaves was seriously gone about; the expressions in Jeremiah xxxiv. 14 point to Deuteronomy xv. 12, and not to Exodus xxi. 2. The injunction not having had practical effect previously, it was in this instance carried through by all parties at the same date: this was of course inevitable when it was introduced as an extraordinary innovation; perhaps it is in connexion with this that a fixed seventh year grew out of a relative one. The sabbatical year, according to the legislator's own declaration, was never observed throughout the whole pre-exilic period; for, according to Leviticus xxvi. 34, 35, the desolation of the land during the exile is to be a compensation made for the previously neglected fallow years:

"Then shall the land pay its Sabbaths as long as it lieth desolate; when ye are in your enemies' land then shall the land rest and pay its Sabbaths; all the days that it lieth desolate shall it rest, which it rested not in your Sabbaths when ye dwelt upon it."

The verse is quoted in 2Chronicles xxxvi. 21 as the language of Jeremiah,-- a correct and unprejudiced indication of its exilic origin. But as the author of Leviticus xxvi. was also the writer of Leviticus xxv. 1-7, that is to say, the framer of the law of the sabbatic year, the recent date of the latter regulation also follows at once. The year of jubilee, certainly derived from the Sabbath year, is of still later origin. Jeremiah (xxxiv. 14) has not the faintest idea that the emancipation of the slaves must according to "law" take place in the fiftieth year. The name drwr, borne by the jubilee in Leviticus xxv. 10, is applied by him to the seventh year; and this is decisive also for Ezekiel xlvi. 17: the gift of land bestowed by the prince on one of his servants remains in his possession only until the seventh year.