¹ See the recent volume of essays: H. UCKO ed., The Jubilee Challenge, Utopia or Possibility (Geneva 1997).

² A. TOSTADO, Commentario in Leviticum (Venice 1596) 283. Indispensable for a survey of the work done on Leviticus 25 is the exhaustive and erudite study of R. NORTH, Sociology of the Biblical Jubilee (AnBib 4; Rome 1954).

³ R. DE VAUX, Ancient Israel, Its Life and Institutions (London 1961) 175.

⁴ So B. EERDMANS, Alttestamentliche Studien, vol. 4, Das Buch Leviticus (Giessen 1912) 123, when he characterizes as a surrealistic gloss Lev 25,20-22 (the provision of food for three years from the harvest of the sixth year).

⁵ See A. BERTHOLET, Leviticus (Tübingen 1901) 87.

⁶ N.K. GOTTWALD, "The Biblical Jubilee: In Whose Interests?", The Jubilee Challenge, 36.

⁷ NORTH, Sociology, 134; also J.A. FAGER, Land Tenure and the Biblical Jubilee (JSOTSS 155; Sheffield 1993) 110.

⁸ Representative of this attempt to suggest an appropriate historical context for Leviticus 25 is FAGER, Land Tenure, 45-51. B.A. LEVINE, Leviticus (JPSTC; Philadelphia 1989) 274, similarly thinks that Leviticus 25 and Nehemiah 5 share the same historical setting in the post-exilic period: "The priestly leaders of the repatriated Judean community formulated a theory to legitimize their situation".

⁹ So NORTH, Sociology, 120.

¹⁰ See G.C. CHIRICHIGNO, Debt-Slavery in Israel and the Ancient Near East (JSOTSS 141; Sheffield 1993) 306. He does not take stock of North’s point that an agricultural fallow without plowing would be useless and even harmful, see Sociology, 116. If certain fields were left fallow every year they would still have to be plowed over and doing so would go against the intent of the law.

¹¹ CHIRICHIGNO, Debt-Slavery, 318-321.

¹² J.E. HARTLEY, Leviticus (WBC 4; Dallas 1992), 433.

¹³ See, for example, J.J. FINKELSTEIN, "Ammisaduqa’s Edict and the Babylonian ‘Law Codes’", JCS 15 (1961) 91-104. Ammisaduqa’s misharun from around 1640 BCE is the only example of a fully preserved edict.

¹⁴ LEVINE, Leviticus, 172. M. WEINFELD’s study Social Justice in Ancient Israel (Jerusalem 1995) is the most comprehensive yet in laying out such a thesis. I shall return to it.

¹⁵ NORTH, Sociology, 119.

¹⁶ J.B. SKINNER, Genesis (ICC; Edinburgh 1910) 501. If, as seems certain, Skinner has the laws in Leviticus 25 in mind, he assumes that the Israelites actually observed them.

¹⁷ LEVINE, Leviticus, 272: "In Leviticus 25 we observe, curiously enough, a similar process [to what Genesis 47 describes]". Levine thanks H.L. Ginzberg for drawing his attention to the similarity; G.J. WENHAM, Genesis 16–50 (WBC 2; Dallas 1994) 448.

¹⁸ Although critics are clearly aware of this aspect, it does not engage their attention because for them God’s ownership of the land is the important idea underlying the Sabbath rest for it. See, for example, H.J. BOECKER, Law and the Administration of Justice in the Old Testament and Ancient East (London 1980) 89-92; HARTLEY, Leviticus, 433; M. NOTH, Leviticus (OTL; London 1965) 186.

¹⁹ NORTH, Sociology, 118, mentions this likelihood. He also cites the rationalizing view of J.D. MICHAELIS, Mosäisches Recht (Reutlingen 1793) 2:34, that the blessing on the harvest of the sixth year refers to the completion of the abundance stored up in the other years. E.S. GERSTENBERGER, Leviticus (OTL; Louisville 1996) 376, in addressing the issue of how the people are to be fed when the land lies fallow for a year, states, "Joseph’s own clever management of stores in Egypt (Gen 41:47-57) may serve to illustrate the tradents’ thinking at this point". Gerstenberger also points out (375) that the rest from work on the seventh year only applies to tillable land. Nothing is said about other aspects of work in daily life. The reason, I think, is the focus on the famine in Egypt when there is necessarily a cessation from work on tillable land.

²⁰ On this major feature of all biblical law, see C. CARMICHAEL, Law, Legend, and Incest in the Bible: Leviticus 18–20 (Ithaca, NY 1997) 9, 10.

²¹ I mean expressly overcome in the sense that a policy is put in place to organize relief from starvation. No such policy is described for the famine that takes Abram to Egypt (Gen 12,10).

²² Manifestly, a commemoration of divine providence in Joseph’s Egypt could not have gone in for the totally unreal parallel of seven fallow years in succession. WEINFELD, Social Justice, 175, 178, tries to make sense of the numbers by switching between the feast of weeks in Lev 23,15-21 (with its seven times seven weeks and a following fiftieth day) and references to a Nuzi document (fifty years as the maximum time to mortgage a man for debt) and a Babylonian document from the Seleucid period (fifty years as the maximum time for enslavement because of debt).

²³ Not surprisingly, interpreters cite texts (Isa 5,8; Mic 2,1.2; Neh 5,3) that point to oppressive forces in Israelite society which would cause the hardships (confiscation of land, debt enslavement) the Year of Jubilee is meant to relieve. See R.C. ELLICKSON – C. DiA. THORLAND, "Ancient Land Law: Mesopotamia, Egypt, Israel", Chicago-Kent Law Review 71 (1995) 403. The lawgiver gives no hint, however, in Leviticus 25 that he is thinking of such oppressive forces and the explanation would be that his focus is on Yahweh’s doings for the Israelites over against the pharaoh’s for the Egyptians.

²⁴ The significance of the term lbwy, "Jubilee," engenders much discussion. The biblical terms lwby and lwb, "yield of the harvest, produce from the earth" and lbt, "world," indicate, according to North, that the basic meaning of lby is "to bring abundantly." He notes that by following this line of reasoning one should conclude that lbwy refers to a good harvest. He rejects this conclusion, however, because he states that it is precisely such a harvest that is missing in the lbwy, and he opts for the LXX’s translation a!fesij, "release." But even in regard to a!fesij he notes the base meaning to be i!hmi roughly equivalent to "send, bring." In light of my thesis drawing a direct link between the lbwy and the Joseph story, I find it at least suggestive that both the story and the legislation in Leviticus 25 is about Yahweh’s abundant provision for the Israelites despite manifest deprivation. In other words, the notion of abundant growth from the land with the emphasis on its being a divine gift is what lbwy does indeed highlight. The second fallow year, the one after the forty-ninth, is, miraculously, a year of abundance. NORTH’s (Sociology, 34, 102-105) comment about the term lwby in Lev 26,4.20 is pertinent: "Two allusions to abundant crops, yebul, Lv 26,4.20, are at least coincidental reminiscences of yobel, the jubilee". The root of lby compares with Akkadian biltu, from wabalu, "to bring", a term particularly used for yields from the soil. See N.P. LEMCHE, "The Manumission of Slaves-the fallow year-the sabbatical year-the jobel year", VT 26 (1976) 50, n. 36.

²⁵ Egyptian sources indicate that the pharaoh’s "ownership" of the land was sometimes real, but oftentimes theoretical. There was much land in private hands. The biblical lawgiver appears to be under the sway of the fiction — much evidenced in Egyptian sources — that the pharaoh owned all the land. See J.G. MANNING, "Demotic Egyptian Instruments of Transfer as Evidence for private Ownership of Real Property", Chicago-Kent Law Review 71 (1995) 237-268; D.B. REDFORD, A Study of the Biblical Story of Joseph (VTS; Leiden 1970) 237.

²⁶ NORTH, Sociology, 99. Cp. N. MICKLEM, Leviticus (IB 2; Nashville, TN 1953) 121: "This trumpet is to be sounded, very curiously, on the day of Atonement which is the great penitential day of the Hebrew calendar".

²⁷ The one other reference outside of the Book of Leviticus to the Year of Jubilee is in Num 36,1-12. The heads of households bring to Moses the problem about the loss of inheritance to another tribe at the Jubilee should the daughters of Zelophehad marry men from outside their tribe. Num 36,1.5.12 expressly state that the households in question are those of the sons of Joseph. For the links between the Day of Atonement and the Joseph Story, see C. CARMICHAEL, "The Story of Joseph and the Book of Jubilees", The Dead Sea Scrolls in their Historical Context (eds. T.H. LIM – L. HURTADO – G. AULD – A. JACK) (Edinburgh 1999).

²⁸ The term for the harvest increase is hlwby. See note 24.

²⁹ M. NOTH, Exodus (OTL; Philadelphia 1962) 203: "Clearly a later supplement"; N.H. SNAITH, Leviticus and Numbers (CB; London 1967) 174: "This chapter has been added".

³⁰ The major problem for Weinfeld and others who see the ideology of the ancient Near Eastern kings transferred to the Israelite god, Yahweh, is to explain how this transfer has been accomplished.

³¹ GERSTENBERGER, Leviticus, 441: "Prices probably reflect tariffs customary among slave traders"; WENHAM, Leviticus, 338: "To free themselves from the vow, they had instead to pay to the sanctuary the price they would command in the slave market".

³² C. WESTERMANN, Genesis 37–50. A Commentary (Minneapolis 1986) 39, states: "The author has amalgamated the dreams with his story in such a way that they can be explained only out of the context in which they now stand".

³³ WEINFELD, Social Justice, 127.

³⁴ Ibid., 178.

³⁵ Ibid., 16, 17.

³⁶ Ibid., 156.