With the approach of the millennium it seems appropriate to look at an institution, the Year of Jubilee, that, despite confounding interpreters as to its original meaning, has never ceased to capture the imagination of religious thinkers and political reformers down through the centuries. The law establishing the Jubilee, which goes back two and a half thousand years, continues to stimulate models for liberation from oppressive forces, for reconciliation, and for new beginnings¹.

        I will argue in this paper that the Sabbatical and Jubilee cycle, with its climactic Year of Jubilee, becomes intelligible once we relate it back to the developments in Egypt at the time of the famine there. The policy adopted by the pharaoh in line with Joseph’s counsel is the key to how the Israelite institution came to be formulated. How the formulation chimes with what we know of comparable institutions in the ancient Near East will also come under scrutiny.

I. Survey of the interpretation of the biblical Jubilee since 1950

        Bewilderment about the laws of the Sabbatical year and the related Jubilee year in Leviticus 25 is understandable. Their unreal aspect is manifest. Every seven years there is to be no sowing or harvesting throughout the entire land. Every fiftieth year, the Year of Jubilee, one year after the seventh Sabbatical year, the land has again universally to lie fallow. In prospect, then, are two years in succession of fallow conditions that deprive the entire population of its normal source of food. If these rules were actually observed, how, then, would the people eat?

        Equally baffling are the requirements that all Israelite slaves must be released from servitude when a Jubilee year comes round and that every Israelite must return to his ancestral land. Commentators are quick to point to the problems. Unlike the equivalent Exodus and Deuteronomic rules, which have slaves released after six years

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service, the Levitical law could have a slave serve for forty-nine years. In effect, those who became slaves just after a Jubilee year would never experience freedom. Contrariwise, Alfonso Tostado, writing in the sixteenth century, points out that if the slave’s service begins close to a Jubilee year he might only serve a year, or even a few months². As for the requirement that Israelites have their ancestral property restored to them at the Jubilee, we can only imagine the enormous upheaval that would result because of the relatively complex economic conditions that the laws take for granted. Roland de Vaux assumes that the laws presuppose conditions during the monarchical period in the history of ancient Israel and states, "The practical implementation of the policy meets with insuperable obstacles"³.

        Little wonder, then, that critics view the laws as "surrealistic" in the sense that they are impossible to observe⁴. Typical are the following responses to the unrealistic aspects of the different rules in Leviticus 25. The lawgiver is given to artificial theorizing and hyperbole⁵. He shows an optimism that "defies the irregularity of drought conditions which occur on the average of every two to four years"⁶. If enforced, these laws would cripple a society’s economy: "Economically a single universal fallow would have been unsound if not disastrous"⁷.

        Some critics come to terms with the baffling nature of the laws by treating them as utopian, although it is hardly the term to use when a law requires deprivation to be visited upon an entire population at regular intervals. They speculate that the lawgiver wanted the Israelites, who were coming back from exile in Babylon, to return to a system of landholdings that supposedly existed before

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the time of the monarchy⁸. Another very common response is to explain away the unreal aspect of the laws. For example, a universal fallow year is not intended. Individual Israelites can set up their seven-year cycles in keeping with their own agricultural needs: "the Sabbath-year ‘fallow’ was particular and rotating, not simultaneously universal, at least primitively, and probably also in Lv"⁹. Or, contrary to this view, a universal year is intended but not on all of the land. In line with standard agricultural practice every year some parts of the field would be left fallow, but neighboring areas would still be cultivated. G.C. Chirichigno, who upholds this view, has difficulty in arguing why the seventh year is so special. He postulates a link-up of the Sabbatical year with an "earlier Sabbath institution which had both social-humanitarian and religious-cultic connotations" from the outset¹⁰.

        Again, it is very common to argue that the Jubilee year is not really the fiftieth year but is identical to the previous forty-ninth¹¹. By merging the two years, those critics who adhere to this view lessen the unreality of the Israelites having two years in a row given over to fallow conditions on the land. As for the release of slaves, one common rationalization is to claim that the release law of Deuteronomy, in which a slave can choose to become a permanent part of his master’s household, still applies. The Levitical law is thinking solely of those slaves who choose not to be manumitted in their seventh year of service but opt to be permanent slaves of a master. The permanence of that slave’s status is, in fact, limited, lasting only until the Year of Jubilee¹². A major influence on those scholars who regard the laws in Leviticus 25 as meant for real life

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is a practice found in the Near East. Albeit at sporadic intervals in contrast to the regularized Israelite institution, a ruler might proclaim a misharun, an act of "justice", and release debt-slaves and land with a view to re-ordering economic life in his community¹³. For those scholars who appeal to this background, the Levitical lawgiver sets up an institution that in some way resembles the Near Eastern example: "The biblical laws of the Jubilee year thus incorporate Near Eastern legal institutions of great antiquity"¹⁴.

        Critics sometimes express uneasiness with their rational attempts to explain the laws. Robert North writes, "Obviously our interpretation runs counter to the surface-sense of certain expressions of the sacred text"¹⁵. In fact, the common tendency among all those commentators is to explain away or even to disregard the impractical or implausible elements of the rules, which are, nevertheless, manifestly expressed in the text.

II. The Sabbatical/Jubilee Cycle of Leviticus 25 and the Joseph Story

        I wish to take a different approach in attempting to understand these laws. Their very strangeness is the crux of the matter. The aim of the rules is to trigger historical memory and it is precisely the oddness of the provisions which does just that. The Sabbatical year and the integrally linked institution of the Year of Jubilee function, I suggest, as a means of commemorating events particularly during Joseph’s time in Egypt. Like many other biblical laws, for example, the Passover festival and the rest from toil every seventh day, the laws of the Sabbath for the land and the Year of Jubilee recall formative events at the beginning of the nation’s history.

        The texts that express the two rules about the Passover and the seventh-day rest explicitly associate the oppression of the Israelites in Egypt with these two institutions (Exod 12,14-27; Deut 5,12-15; 16,1-8). The rules about the Sabbatical and Jubilee years also mention this same period of oppression in Egypt, but they do not

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openly cite the other major period of time in focus, namely, the preceding era, Joseph’s time, when a severe famine afflicted the land. Characteristic of the presentation of the laws of Moses is that he openly refers to the past only when the event, the slavery in Egypt, for example, took place in his own lifetime. He does not cite events before and after his time, for example, the problem of primogeniture posed by Jacob’s marriage to a hated and a loved wife (Deut 21,15-17), and the institution of the monarchy when Solomon’s excesses are taken account of (Deut 17,14-20). The fictional character of the laws with their attribution to a legendary figure, Moses, accounts for this reticence.

        In light of my claim that the Levitical laws about the Sabbatical and Jubilee years hark back to Egyptian history in Joseph’s time, it is worth noting how commentators evaluate the narrative in Genesis 47 about the contrast between the Israelites and the Egyptians at the time of the famine. J.B. Skinner observes that "the interest of the biblical account [Gen 47,18-27] is aetiological. The Hebrews were impressed by the vast difference between the land-tenure of Egypt and that under which they themselves lived"¹⁶. B.A. Levine and G.J. Wenham actually compare developments in Genesis 47 with some of the rules in Leviticus 25 but they do not explain why they do so¹⁷. In their assessments, these critics, implicitly in one instance, explicitly in the other two, are contrasting the contents of Genesis 47 with the substance of the rules in Leviticus 25.

        Every seventh year the land experiences famine-like conditions¹⁸. These are brought on, not by nature but by people’s ceasing to work the land. Indeed, not only are sowing and reaping prohibited, even the natural aftergrowth of the previous year’s harvest may not

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be taken. Yet, according to the rule, everyone in the land is fed in the Sabbatical year. The reason is that in the preceding year the deity causes the harvest to be so bountiful that supplies for three years are available from it (Lev 25,2-7. 20-22). The bumper crop is like those from the seven years of plenty in Egypt. Neither the Israelite harvest in the sixth year, nor each of the seven Egyptian harvests is a normal harvest. In each case enough food is grown during fertile times to feed the whole population during the famine or fallow years. In Genesis God directs Joseph to store the harvests (Gen 41,37-40). In Leviticus the explicit statement that old food will be eaten contains the implicit idea that the crops provided by God during the sixth year will be stored and eaten for three years (Lev 25,21.22)¹⁹.

        In formulating a law about some matter, the biblical lawgiver typically turns to a first-time occurrence of a problem in the nation’s history to see how it was resolved²⁰. The first example in the history of the nation of a famine overcome is in Egypt at the time of Joseph²¹. The famine that afflicts the land threatens starvation but in the event that does not happen. There are in fact seven successive years of famine in Egypt but there is no problem in feeding the Egyptians during these seven years. Joseph’s divinely directed policy of storing grain from the bumper harvests that precede the years of famine ensures that all in the land are fed (Gen 41,28).

        There are, however, economic and social upheavals brought about by the famine. Genesis 47 singles out a two-year climactic period, presumably at the end of the famine. During the first year of this two-year period the Egyptians give up all their money and

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then their livestock to pay for the food they receive that year. The transaction with the money will not have been different from the ones to obtain food in the preceding years. The bartering away of the animals, however, heralds a major change in prospect. The next year indeed proves momentous and alters the lives of the Egyptians forever. With their money and their livestock all gone, they have to give over this time their "bodies and their lands" to the pharaoh in order to buy food (Gen 47,18.19). The result is that all the Egyptians lose their private landholdings, which become the property of their king, and they also become permanent slaves to him. From this point on — once the famine is over — the Egyptians receive seed from the pharaoh to sow the land and in return, at harvest time, they are to keep four fifths for themselves and give him the remaining fifth.

        In Leviticus 25 the lawgiver introduces the Jubilee year by counting seven Sabbatical years, that is, a period of forty-nine years: "And thou shalt number seven Sabbaths of years unto thee, seven times seven years ¼" (Lev 25,8). One of the lawgiver’s aims in specifically highlighting the seventh of the Sabbatical years is to introduce the next year, the fiftieth, as a climactic occasion, the Year of Jubilee. That year, like the Sabbatical year the year before it, is also to be a fallow year for the land. Just as the narrator of Genesis 47 focuses on a two-year climactic period of time, so does the lawgiver.

        In the law, during the first year of this two-year period, the forty-ninth year, the people experience famine-like conditions on the land but nonetheless have plenty to eat. After the forty-ninth year, which is the seventh of the Sabbatical years, the Israelites have now experienced, at intervals, seven years of famine-like conditions. The seven Sabbatical years constitute a parallel to the seven years of famine in Joseph’s Egypt²². Not only are there seven but food is divinely made available for each of the years to provide for the population.

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        The next year, the Year of Jubilee, produces its own parallel to the second year of the climactic two-year period in Joseph’s Egypt. Like the developments that take place in Egypt, the events of the Jubilee year entail major social and economic changes. During this fiftieth year, all Israelites are to return to their ancestral landholdings and all Israelite slaves are to be freed from any service to a human master. The outcome is in striking contrast to the Egyptian situation when all the Egyptians lose their landholdings and become enslaved to the one human master, the pharaoh.

        Evidence that the lawgiver is looking at the Israelites’ history in Egypt when formulating his laws comes from noting that he explicitly draws attention to that history. To explain why Israelites should not experience permanent enslavement the lawgiver states that the Israelites became slaves to Yahweh when he brought them out of Egypt (Lev 25,42.55). The period of time that the lawgiver has in mind at this point is in the years succeeding the famine. Then a new pharaoh appeared — "Now there arose up a new king over Egypt, which knew not Joseph" (Exod 1,8) — who enslaved the descendants of Jacob’s family. It comes about, then, that the Israelites themselves, like the Egyptians in Joseph’s generation, become enslaved to the pharaoh. Yahweh, however, ensures that in no way are the Israelites to share the fate of the Egyptians. He causes the Israelites to be released from their service to the pharaoh. The Israelites, instead of being slaves to Pharaoh, become enslaved to their divine master, Yahweh.

        We can, I think, only comprehend the laws in Leviticus 25 by setting them against the background of Israel’s time in Egypt²³. The Israelites become slaves to their god but there is no bar at the human level to prevent one Israelite from becoming enslaved to another Israelite. The one effect of the notion that Yahweh is Israel’s master is that if an Israelite does become a slave his Israelite master is to regard him less as a slave and more as a hired servant or a

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sojourner. Contrastingly, the Egyptians became enslaved to their human ruler and hence one Egyptian could not become a slave to another Egyptian. Again, the lawgiver claims that the land belongs to Yahweh. That is why at the human level land can be bought and sold but none of it can be sold in perpetuity (Lev 25,23). The contrast is with how in Egypt the pharaoh, a human ruler, because of the famine, becomes the owner of the land, with the implication that no Egyptian can ever again buy or sell any of it.

        There are exceptions when it comes to the sale of land in both the Egyptian and Israelite situations, but these exceptions prove revealing. The priests in both places are treated differently from the general population. The Egyptian priests retain their lands because they have a special relationship with the pharaoh (Gen 47,22.26). Likewise the Israelite priests, the Levites, are to have a perpetual possession in the land of Canaan because of their special relationship to Yahweh. For example, the fields of common land belonging to the Levitical cities cannot be sold (Lev 25,34).

        The occasion of the Jubilee year is, I submit, to celebrate the difference between the Israelites and the Egyptians in line with the lawgiver’s declared aim to set out a policy for the Israelites that contrasts with Egyptian policy. Thus the lawgiver’s programmatic statement is, negatively: "After the doings of the land of Egypt, wherein ye dwelt, shall ye not do" (Lev 18,3), and, positively, "Wherefore ye shall do my statutes, and keep my judgments, and do them" (Lev 25,18). Unlike the Egyptians, the Israelites are to retain their landed possessions. Unlike the Egyptians, they are not permanently to become slaves to any human master, because in some sense they are slaves to Yahweh. Unlike the Egyptians, whose entire population became enslaved within one year, every fiftieth year the entire Israelite population is to be free from enslavement. The background to each of the laws in Leviticus 25 is the history of the developments in Egypt as laid out in Genesis 47²⁴. For example,

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the detailed laws about how individual Israelites should deal with one another in matters of money, land, and houses are necessary to set up the opposing Israelite legal order to that of the Egyptian²⁵.

        The Genesis narrative itself takes under review both the time of the famine and the later period of Israel’s enslavement to the later pharaoh (Gen 46,4: "I will go down with thee into Egypt and I will also surely bring thee up again"). Its account of how the Israelites, that is, Jacob and his family, fare at the time of the famine in contrast to how the Egyptians fare further illuminates aspects of the laws in Leviticus 25. Whereas the Egyptians become wholly dependent for their livelihood upon the pharaoh, Jacob’s family receives from him a holding in the land of Goshen "in the best of the land" of Egypt (Gen 47,6). The term used for their landholding is hzwx) (Gen 47,11.27). The lawgiver uses the same term when he has the Israelites in the Jubilee year return to their landholdings (Lev 25,10.13.41). Moreover, Jacob and his family are sojourners in Egypt and some of them become hired servants to the pharaoh (Gen 47,4.6). In the law in Lev 25,40 an Israelite who becomes dependent upon another Israelite for his survival serves, not as a slave, but as a hired servant and as a sojourner because they are slaves to their ruler Yahweh.

       That Joseph’s policy of enslavement for the Egyptians should

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invite an Israelite lawgiver’s scrutiny is not surprising. The claim that God directs Joseph in all his actions (Gen 41,32; 45,8; 50,20) inevitably raises the question whether or not the Israelites in Canaan should have a similar institutional method of dealing with those who, upon becoming impoverished, have to sell themselves. Moses dictates a policy that is both similar to and, because of Israel’s ethnic identity, different from the Egyptian one authored by Joseph. The rule in Lev 25,39 opens with a concern about how a brother should treat an impoverished brother. The formulation may owe something to the first Israelite family of brothers wherein one is in a position of dominance and the others confront impoverishment. The rule closes with the appeal to the Israelite master not to rule over his slave "with rigor." Recalled is the harsh treatment by the later pharaoh when he had the descendants of Joseph and his brothers serve "with rigor" (Exod 1,13.14). The expression (Krpb) only occurs in the Hebrew Bible in these two passages and in Ezek 34,4.

        Further links between the laws and the narrative about Joseph also prove illuminating. The announcement of the Jubilee year takes place on the tenth day of the seventh month, the day when atonement is made for all the people of Israel because of their sins (Lev 25,9). Critics have been greatly puzzled by this linkage. North speaks of an insoluble problem in the clash between Lev 25,10 as a joyful day of return to one’s home and family, which is marked by a trumpet-blast, and the solemn Day of Atonement²⁶. In light of the link between the law and Joseph’s history, however, the decision to announce the year of the Jubilee on the Day of Atonement is singularly appropriate, for the Day of Atonement recalls a crucial moment in the history of the first family of Israel. It was precisely at the time of the famine, two years into it to be exact, when Joseph effects reconciliation with his brothers (Gen 45,1-15). He then goes on to forgive them their original offense against him (Gen 50,15-21). Their father Jacob, who himself had suffered grievously because of the offense, initiates the process of forgiveness (Gen 50,16). The entire family of Israel as constituted at that time is therefore involved in seeking expiation for wrongdoing²⁷.

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        The influence of Joseph’s policy for the Egyptians illumines other puzzles in the Book of Leviticus. According to Genesis 47 the Egyptians finally settle down to a life of serfdom under the pharaoh. He gives them seed to sow the land and at harvest time they take four fifths for themselves and hand over a fifth to the pharaoh. The concluding two chapters of Leviticus, 26 and 27, set out the Israelite equivalent to this arrangement between supreme authority and subject. Leviticus 26 outlines the kind of relationship the Israelites should have with Yahweh. He will guarantee their harvests in return for their allegiance to his governance:

"If ye walk in my statutes, and keep my commandments, and do them; Then I will give you rain in due season, and the land shall yield her increase, and the trees of the field shall yield their fruit. And your threshing shall reach unto the vintage, and the vintage shall reach unto the sowing time; and ye shall eat your bread to the full, and dwell in your land safely" (Lev 26,3-5)²⁸.

        Like the pharaoh providing seed for all the Egyptians (Gen 47,23), Yahweh provides food for the Israelites, even attending to the initial process of the growth of the seed itself.

        Critics assume that the peroration about loyalty in Leviticus 26 is the conclusion to the Book of Leviticus, and that the rules in Leviticus 27 about dedications to Yahweh constitute some kind of addendum²⁹. The matter is otherwise, however, if the lawgiver is laying out the Israelite equivalent to the concluding developments in Genesis 47. The Year of Jubilee comes into reckoning in these rules (Lev 27,17.18.21.23.24), one indication that they do not constitute an appendix but follow on naturally because of the lawgiver’s focus on Genesis 47. Pharaoh acquires both the Egyptians’ possessions and their persons, and he enters into a

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transaction with them when he gives them seed to grow in the fields. Leviticus 27 addresses issues about Yahweh’s claims to an Israelite’s possessions and person, and the transactions that follow.

        For the Levitical lawgiver the figure of Yahweh corresponds to the figure of the pharaoh. He is, however, alert to the obvious fact that in translating this correspondence into real life the perception of Yahweh is necessarily different from the perception of the pharaoh³⁰. Yahweh does not have power over the Israelites in the same way that the pharaoh has power over the Egyptians. Consequently, the situations of the Egyptians and the Israelites differ. The Egyptians have no fields or houses or animals to give over to the pharaoh because he has already acquired them, nor can they give their persons because they already belong to him. The only transaction they enter into with the pharaoh concerns the production of food. He gives them seed to sow the fields and later at the harvest they keep four fifths of its yield for themselves and give him the remaining fifth.

        In regard to their possessions and persons the Israelites have a different but related order from the Egyptian one. Sometimes Yahweh, like the pharaoh, unconditionally requires the Israelites to hand over certain of their animals, certain produce from their fields, and even certain persons (those "devoted" or "banned" [Mrx], Lev 27,28.29). The exercise of such absolute authority on the part of Yahweh is on a scale comparable to the pharaoh’s at the time of the famine. Although I would stress that the ruling power in Israel is but analogous to the one in Egypt it seems clear that there has been a conscious attempt to relate the effects of the one to the other. Thus the rates of redemption in the rules for persons who are dedicated to Yahweh (as against those "banned") appear to be the equivalent of those for slaves³¹. In other words, the analogous, not strictly parallel, Israelite situation to the Egyptian one is that of the religious equivalent of secular slavery.

        Other times an Israelite, unlike an Egyptian with the pharaoh,

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can freely hand over to Yahweh fields, houses, animals, and persons. Any compulsion to do so comes from within the Israelite himself. For example, he might dedicate a house or field to Yahweh. He can take it back but an act of redemption is necessary. There is also an additional cost to the transaction. He has to pay a one fifth premium over the value that the receiving priest on behalf of Yahweh had originally placed on the gift. The premium is like the one fifth value of the harvest that the Egyptian has to pay to his lord and master for the initial seed that he gives to his serf. Interestingly, when an Israelite redeems a field he actually pays the extra premium according to the seed that is sown in the field (Lev 27.16.19). Even though the Israelite situation is necessarily different from the Egyptian, the assessment for the Egyptians may have influenced the assessment for the Israelites.

        It is common to think that the biblical lawgiver only constructs laws as a direct response to social and economic forces in his time. But that is to entertain a too narrow, overly passive conception of the nature of law. Sometimes laws aim to shape or reinforce cultural identity. The laws in Leviticus 25–27 are of this kind. They are literary constructions that incorporate symbolic pointers to historical events. The lawgiver’s intent is to give sharper definition to an Israelite’s identity by having him recall his nation’s experience when living in a foreign land.

III. Dreams, Levitical Sabbatical and Jubilee Laws

        The story of Joseph itself presents a literary construction elements of which encapsulate historical events in symbolic form. I refer to the famous dreams. Each of the dreams, Joseph’s, the butler’s, the baker’s, and the pharaoh’s, alludes to historical developments. Indeed, the pharaoh’s dreams may well have inspired the Levitical lawgiver.

        It is first of all interesting to note that, like the Levitical Sabbatical and Jubilee laws, the dreams use numbers to convey the passage of time in Egyptian history. The three branches on the vine in the butler’s dream represent three days within which period of time he is released from prison and becomes his master’s butler again (Gen 40,13). In the baker’s dream the three baskets of cakes on his head betoken the three days within which he too is released from prison, but is hanged on the third day. More pertinent for our purposes are the pharaoh’s own dreams in which there are seven sleek cows,

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seven gaunt ones, also seven plump ears of grain and seven blighted ones. Alluded to is the combination of the seven years of plenty and the seven years of famine, precisely the combination that the lawgiver focuses on in his seven Sabbatical years and the seven times seven-year periods culminating with the year of the Jubilee.

        If we ask ourselves what came first, the dreams or the legend of the famine in Egypt and Joseph’s role in it, the answer has to be the alleged history. The dreams will have been formulated in response to some original outline of that history. From a rational viewpoint it is just not likely either that the dreams and the history belong together originally, or that the dreams did indeed generate the history. When the lawgiver constructs his laws about the Sabbatical and Jubilee years on the basis of the Joseph story, he engages in a process as sophisticated as the one that integrated the dreams into the story³².

        In a recent study, Moshe Weinfeld claims that the contents of the laws about the Sabbatical and Jubilee years are "rooted in the reality of the Ancient Near East, but are permeated with idealistic-utopian elements"³³. What he means is that the kinds of relief for the indigent that are laid out in Leviticus 25 can be duplicated, more or less, in Near Eastern sources. He suggests that in a remote period in ancient Israel the institution of the Jubilee had a social reality in "communal tribal society"³⁴. It continued to exist but experienced breakdown because of changing economic circumstances. In a decidedly deteriorated form it re-emerged with royal edicts of the type familiar to us from Mesopotamia, Egypt, Persia, and Greece: proclamations that released debts and restored property. What the biblical authors did was to preserve in theory the substance of the supposedly ancient laws about the Jubilee and the release of debts and idealistically attribute the proclamations to the Israelite god because Israel’s religion had an ethical character not matched in, for example, Mesopotamian religion³⁵.

        There is much that is speculative about Weinfeld’s sketch of a biblical institution. There may also be an apologetic undercurrent,

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the claim about the uniquely ethical character of Israel’s religion, and possibly a desire to locate ancient Israel firmly within the firmament of the nations of the Near East in a fashion that today’s Israel would like to emulate. Nonetheless, it would be foolish not to recognize that the ideas that underlie the biblical laws had indeed some basis in the life of ancient Israel despite the lack of direct evidence. When Weinfeld states that the proclamation of liberty in Leviticus 25 is "functionally speaking identical with" the Mesopotamian edicts, he hastens to add the important qualification that the literary framework into which the Israelite institution has been woven adds "a utopic coloring"³⁶. My claim is that this coloring, if not everything, is of crucial importance. The biblical scribe sets out to recall Israel’s legendary past in Egypt with a view to laying out an institution that, however much it may resemble contemporary ones in either the Israel of his time or among his neighbors, differs significantly from them. The difference lies in the fact that the scribe sketches it by way of contrasting it with the Egyptian institution in Joseph’s time. Indeed, what is inside the literary framework should not, as Weinfeld implies, be kept separate from the framework itself. If my inclination is to maximize the inventiveness of the biblical scribe, Weinfeld’s is to reduce it to a religious gloss.

 © 1999 Biblica

Summary

The comparative method is of limited value in locating the Sabbatical/Jubilee cycle of Leviticus 25 within the framework of similar institutions in the ancient Near East. Not only is the character of the biblical institution distinctively Israelite, but so is the manner in which the Levitical lawgiver devised the entire cycle. The lawgiver formulated rules to ensure that the Israelites do not do what the Egyptians did in their land (Lev 18,3). Borrowing details from the Genesis account of the seven-year famine in Egypt, the lawgiver set out Yahweh’s scheme for his people’s welfare. The scheme stands opposed to the pharaoh’s for the Egyptians at the time of the famine.

Notes: