NOTES for Lev 25:25-55

The jubilee year, according to the prescriptions of Leviticus, was to be a special year. In that year it was prescribed that land bought from its former owners be returned to them, the land that was hereditary and belonged to a person as his communal allotment. The point is that all land among the Hebrews, except urban real estate, was communal. Plots in cities were a different matter (more precisely, in settlements, which in the Pentateuch are usually called cities): here the issue was precisely the private property of specific people, belonging to them as private persons. As for farmland, whether fields or pastures, it belonged to the whole community as such: first to the clan community, and later, after territorial communities began replacing clan communities, to the territorial community.

The communal tract was divided into allotments assigned to specific members of that community. These allotments are what the prescriptions concerning the jubilee year are about: in the jubilee year they had to be returned to the original owner, the one to whom they belonged at the time when the communal land was divided. In this way social and property stability was maintained in Hebrew society in the pre-state period, and perhaps partly later as well.

In addition, in the jubilee year debts were to be forgiven and those who had fallen into debt slavery were to be released, even if the slave had not yet worked off his debt. As for private property not connected with communal lands, the rule of return in the jubilee year did not apply to it: such property belonged completely to its owner, who disposed of it solely at his own discretion. The division into communal and private property was, of course, historically conditioned and connected with the very process by which the Hebrews settled the territories they had conquered in Palestine.

Yet there was something else here too: the attitude toward the land as God's gift. After all, it was God who gave the people the land on which they lived, and He Himself distributed it among the tribes. Therefore the land had to remain with those to whom God had allotted it; otherwise His will would have been violated, and the people for whom He had intended it would have been left without their land. Such a state of affairs would have completely distorted God's design for the people and for the land, which could not be allowed at all. That is why the law of the jubilee year appears in the Pentateuch.