Michael J. Rhodes
Few texts in all of Scripture capture the imaginations and hearts of modern readers like Leviticus 25’s Year of Jubilee. Yet this powerful text also prompts an eerily predictable response from church folk: “You know it never happened, right?”
Indeed, Walter Brueggemann goes so far as to say that in his long experience no other text in all of Scripture elicits more protests concerning its historicity.1 While not always stated explicitly, the point of the pushback seems to be that if the Israelites themselves never practiced the Jubilee, contemporary Christians probably shouldn’t take it too seriously in their own economic lives.
I confess that I find this bewildering. On the one hand, the absence of evidence is by no means evidence of absence. On the other hand, the Bible and Christian experience suggest that people of faith often blow it on that whole “thou shalt not commit adultery” thing, but I know of very few Christians who take that to mean we shouldn’t take the seventh commandment seriously in our sexual ethic.
Nor should we imagine that the implied audience of Leviticus would have heard the legislation as demanding something unimaginably difficult. Israel’s neighbors practiced occasional declarations of community-wide debt release and the right of return to lost lands for at least 1,000 years before Israel came on the scene. The Bible offers an innovative alternative to this tradition by fixing the Jubilee in time and placing the responsibility for demanding it in the hands of the divine king, rather than a human one. But there can be no doubt that the Jubilee was an improvisation on a theme Israel had already heard. There’s no good reason to suggest they would have understood Leviticus 25 as anything other than a serious possibility demanding their actual obedience. Indeed, Leviticus 26 makes it pretty clear that God would punish Israel severely if they failed to practice the Jubilee.
So why does the historicity of the Jubilee come up so often? Perhaps one reason is that we just can’t imagine anybody, including ourselves, ever really embracing it. It’s a nice idea, but people just aren’t like that. And if people aren’t like that, then pretending that a Jubilee way of life is possible might not just be distracting, it might be downright dangerous.
But what if becoming “people like that” is part of the point? What if Leviticus itself recognizes the community will struggle to become the kind of people capable of pulling off the Jubilee? And what if, instead of shrugging its shoulders over this reality, the text offers the community a way of life designed to help them become Jubilee people?
Leviticus doesn’t just present its audience with a powerful economic practice. Leviticus invites its audience into a process of moral discipleship aimed at making that economic practice a possibility. Perhaps by paying attention to the sort of jubilary discipleship Leviticus envisions, we can begin to imagine what it would look like to become jubilary disciples in our own day.
Becoming Jubilary Disciples in Leviticus
One obvious place to begin exploring such jubilary discipleship would be Leviticus’s emphasis on cultivating a commitment to repentance and repair, not least by having the Year of Jubilee announced on the Day of Atonement. Because I’ve recently explored that dynamic elsewhere, though, I want to focus here on two other aspects of the book’s program of moral formation: the cultivation of jubilary desire and the cultivation of jubilary dependence.
Cultivating Jubilary Desire
First, Leviticus seeks to shape the community to practice the Jubilee by cultivating jubilary desire among the people of God. Scripture knows that human beings are creatures driven by desire, and so the text’s depiction of the Jubilee intends to orient the community’s desires towards a jubilary way of life.
That’s why the rhetoric of the text places the costly and controversial work of restoring lost land in the midst of a command to celebrate a lengthy, joy-filled sabbatical from business as usual. After the never-ending harsh slavery of Egypt, Yahweh gave his people a sabbath day of rest. In Leviticus 25, Yahweh offers them back-to-back sabbatical years free from the daily grind, years during which the overwhelming abundance of their farms will provide more than enough for all their needs (Lev 25:18–22).
Leviticus 25:6 makes it clear that this same abundance will also provide for the most marginalized members of Israel’s society and economy. Indeed, the subtle reference to the wild animals being fed by the community’s fields during sabbatical years evokes a sense of cosmic peace and prosperity experienced in the midst of the land of promise (25:7).
But Leviticus 25 isn’t just offering its audience a pretty picture; it’s inviting them to practice a way of life together that includes serious shared celebration and worship. We cannot know for sure if the Israelites ever practiced the Jubilee the way it’s described. But I think that it’s safe to say that if they had, the embodied practice of a multi-year vacation with God, taken alongside the most vulnerable members of the community and made possible by the sheer abundance of the land of promise, would have trained these disciples’ hearts to long for the Jubilee. And hearts that long for the Jubilee cannot fail to embrace it.
Indeed, perhaps the reverse is also true. Maybe the only way to become Jubilee people is by practicing the Jubilee. Maybe it is only through tasting the goodness of God’s counter-cultural economy that disciples learn to desire that way of life.
Cultivating Jubilary Dependence
Second, both the rhetoric of Leviticus 25 and the practices the text commends intend to cultivate what Alasdair MacIntyre calls the “virtues of acknowledged dependence.”2 So, for instance, the text both assumes and subtly promotes a classless society in which any member of the community might benefit from the Year of Jubilee.3 While critical scholarship sometimes makes much of the idea that the implied audience of the biblical laws are the more powerful members of society, Lev 25:10 begins by saying you shall return to your lost land. By subtly suggesting that the audience may well benefit from the Jubilee Year of release, the text reminds that audience that all ultimately depend on the community for their long-term economic well-being. If they’re in the position to buy land now, they may well need to mortgage land to survive in the future (25:14a). If any audience member was likely to see the requirement of returning lost land to their poorer brother as a burden, the text subtly reminds them that in the future, the ability to return to their own lost land may well be received as a gift.
The point may seem subtle, but it’s actually explosive. When a congressional representative makes an impassioned plea for food stamps in Congress, that plea rarely suggests that the representatives debating the matter might themselves be in need of such social welfare programs. Congressional representatives, by and large, are not members of the class that depends on food stamps. In contrast, because the Jubilee assumes a community without class, it presents a policy designed to be embraced by all, not least because it could be a benefit to anyone who experienced tragedy or injustice.4
Of course, it’s hard to live this way, especially given humanity’s constant attempts to use economic success as a way to escape a disposition of acknowledged dependence. Because of this, Leviticus also offers its audience a set of formative practices intended to cultivate these jubilary virtues.
For instance, every seven years, when the land celebrates a “sabbath to YHWH” (Lev 25:2), the Israelites take a break from all organized planting and harvesting (25:4–5). During this time, the land itself provides food, and the people gather what grows of itself (25:6–7). The socio-economic hierarchies inevitably intertwined with Israel’s system of food production are interrupted, and all, from the household head to the most vulnerable immigrant, become gleaners together.
We might imagine the formative power of a year in which every employee of a major corporation, including the CEO and Board of Directors, all worked together on the assembly line. But this doesn’t quite capture it, because such gleaning is also and at the same time the experience of God’s generosity in providing apart from the normal operations of economic life; it is, in other words, a form of work that represents a break from the assembly line altogether. In some ways such fallow years are like a return to the provision of manna in the wilderness.5 Such a practice, then, would force Israelite household heads to practice the kind of vulnerable, acknowledged dependence that their power and position would normally tempt them to avoid.6 If they did, it would shape them for the kind of generous justice that the Jubilee required.
This dynamic can also be seen if we imagine an Israelite household’s experience of returning to their lost land during the Jubilee, and how this return would shape them for vulnerable dependence and a recognition of YHWH as the ultimate owner of their newly (re)acquired land.
Consider the hypothetical example of an Israelite family that lost their land twelve years before the Jubilee Year. On the tenth day of the seventh month, the entire community participates in the Day of Atonement and its ritual purging of sin. On this very same day, the trumpet is blown and the Jubilee year is announced; in this year, both sins and debts are forgiven, and the family that had been forced to live and work in another’s household for more than a decade regain possession of their land.
Imagine the joy of this moment! Imagine the dreams and desires! After having served as hired hands for a generation, now to be restored to a position of social and economic strength!
However, such a family returns to this land at the very end of harvest season and in the midst of a fallow year, a year in which all organized agriculture has been suspended.7 So the moment they regain “control” of the land, the sabbatical system forces them to renounce that control, and instead simply receive the bounty of the land’s provision apart from organized harvesting.
Then, just five days after their return to their ancestral land, the entire community celebrates the final, most joyful festival of the entire calendar: the Festival of Booths. This festival lasts for a full week, during which the entire community feasts on the harvest. In the jubilary fallow year, however, this feast would presumably foster a deep sense of dependency among festal participants, because what was feasted on would be the results of YHWH’s abundant provision in previous years, YHWH’s provision through the fallow fields’ natural growth, and the livestock that had grazed in those fallow fields all year long.
Moreover, the Israelites spent the entirety of this festival living in huts or booths. YHWH himself explains the reason for such a strange ritual: “You shall dwell in booths for seven days…so that your generations may know that I made the people of Israel dwell in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt” (Lev 23:42–43).
In other words, at the very height of the Israelites’ celebration of prosperity at the end of a successful agricultural season, YHWH forces them to celebrate the year’s agricultural success by ritually re-enacting their vulnerability as landless people led by God in the wilderness.
This dynamic would be even more poignant for those returning to their land in the Jubilee. Such a ritual reminder would shape them to realize, at the very moment they received back their longed-for land, that the land was theirs only because they lived as vulnerable, dependent recipients of YHWH’s overwhelming generosity.
To summarize, the Jubilee would be possible only if Israel acquired virtues of “acknowledged dependence”8 oriented towards humility, generosity, and trust rather than vices of greed, control, acquisition, and ambition oriented towards self-security. Recognizing this, the text offers a morally formative program of discipleship designed to foster the kind of individual and corporate character the Israelites would need in order to practice the Jubilee.
Becoming Jubilary Disciples Today
What would it look like for us to become jubilary disciples today? Amidst the endless possibilities, let me close by making a few suggestions.
First, the preaching and teaching of the church should cultivate the desire for a Jubilee way of life among the congregation. Too often, we who preach and teach the Jubilee and passages like it focus on trying to shame or strong arm our audiences into some shallow attempt at obedience. Instead, our first task is to allow Scripture’s socio-economic vision to set our imaginations on fire. Our preaching and teaching should help the church learn to long for a world in which “everyone will sit under their own vine and fig tree, and none shall make them afraid” (Micah 4:4). If we want people to take the Jubilee seriously, we have to help God’s people begin to desire, deep down in their bones, the genuinely jubilant way of life Scripture envisions.
Second, the church’s liturgy and practice must also aim at forming in us a desire for this jubilary way of life. Perhaps a first step in this direction would be for the church to welcome all and sundry to the feast. The entirety of Scripture and endless anthropological research bears witness to the way that extravagant, shared meals create a sense of community and belonging among those who share in them. Feasting together forms us to associate our joy with the joy of our neighbors, including the orphans, widows, immigrants, and poor among us. Practically speaking, as Robby Holt and I argued in Practicing the King’s Economy, churches could regularly celebrate the Lord’s Supper as a full meal, a meal in which all God’s people, including the marginalized, participate.
Third, the preaching and teaching of the church ought to cultivate the virtues of acknowledged dependence among God’s people. This will be tough work, because few virtues are so universally despised in our age as these. Our hyper-individualistic, affluence-addicted way of life constantly shapes us to see independence as the ultimate goal. It is all too easy for us to then preach a God who is glad to use his sovereign power to shore up our individual security.
The teaching and preaching of the church should instead shatter any illusion that such independence is either possible or desirable. Scripture invites us into a community that experiences their radical dependence on God through relationships of deep interdependence with one another. The preached word of God unmasks the myth that we could ever escape the need for God’s generosity offered to us through his people. Having unmasked that myth, the preacher must then reveal our endless attempts at individual self-security for what they are: idolatrous rejections of God’s jubilary way of life.
Finally, the church’s liturgy and practice ought to shape God’s people for this sort of acknowledged, jubilary inter-dependence. This might be the most difficult work of all, because while Leviticus 25 originally addressed a classless society, we hear the text in a world with an ever-widening gap between the “haves” and the “have nots.” Because this work is so counter-cultural, we should not be surprised if we have to start small.
Such small starts might include encouraging church groups to pursue sacrificial generosity together,9 gathering members of Christ’s body across class-lines for shared projects that require each member of the body to depend on all the others, and making space for the most marginalized in the community to share their gifts with the rest of the church.10 Such liturgies and practices shape us to see that we are indeed each members of Christ’s body, all dependent on God’s gifts given to each of us through all the others, including those others we’re most likely to think of as unable to offer us anything.
Others may be able to use their vocational capital to practice the virtues of acknowledged dependence at work. To take but one example, in Practicing the King’s Economy, we suggested that Christian business leaders could promote profit-sharing, employee ownership programs, and on-the-job-training as ways to enable marginalized workers to gain assets that function in our economy similarly to the way that family farms functioned in Israel’s.11 But when company leadership also embraces greater levels of employee ownership in terms of decision-making, they simultaneously enact a jubilary redistribution of power and practice an acknowledged dependence on those workers in their economic life. Such a practice of shared power and acknowledged dependence would shape those who embrace it for the creative work of further contextualizing the jubilee in our modern economy and society.
Small starts, indeed. But perhaps if the church committed itself to such small acts of jubilary discipleship, an economic way of life inspired by the Jubilee might become just a bit more plausible. Instead of protesting “well, you know they never did it, right?,” we might begin participating in the way of life for which we were designed. Perhaps it might even be said of us, as it was said of an earlier community of jubilary disciples, “And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved” (Acts 2:47).
Dr. Michael J. Rhodes has been involved with neighborhood-based community development for the last 10 years and currently serves as the Director of Community Transformation at Union University. He is the co-author of Practicing the King’s Economy: Honoring Jesus in How We Work, Earn, Spend, Save, and Give (Baker 2018) and is working on a new book on moral formation for justice in Scripture with IVP Academic. In 2021, Michael will take up a new position as Old Testament lecturer at Carey Baptist College in Auckland, NZ.
Image: “Year of Jubilee,” from The Story of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation (1873)
- Walter Brueggemann, Reverberations of Faith: A Theological Handbook of Old Testament Themes (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2002), 114–5.[↩]
- Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues, The Paul Carus Lectures (Peru, IL: Open Court, 2001), 121. The language of acknowledged dependence is crucial; we do not start out independent and choose dependence as a way of life; we are always already deeply dependent on others. The question is whether we will cultivate a willing acknowledgment and celebration of such vulnerable dependence.[↩]
- See Walter J. Houston, Contending for Justice: Ideologies and Theologies of Social Justice in the Old Testament (New York: T&T Clark, 2006), 196–9.[↩]
- Nobuyoshi Kiuchi, Leviticus, AOTC (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2007), 451.[↩]
- Cf. Michael Rhodes and Robby Holt, with Brian Fikkert, Practicing the King’s Economy: Honoring Jesus in How We Work, Earn, Spend, Save, and Give (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2018),164–73.[↩]
- For a similar concern within the Pentateuch, see Deut 8:11–20.[↩]
- The dating of the Jubilee and its relationship to the sabbatical year is hotly contested. Scholars debate whether the Jubilee year is simply the seventh sabbatical year in the cycle; a full, second fallow year; or an additional 12 months of fallow that serves as a “bridge” between the 49th and 50th year. Cf. Robin J. DeWitt Knauth, “The Jubilee Transformation: From Social Welfare to Hope of Restoration to Eschatological Salvation” (PhD diss., Harvard Divinity School, 2004), 190. Thankfully, however, most of what I describe in the following paragraph holds true regardless of how one understands the relationship between the sabbatical and Jubilee year, because even if the Jubilee coincides completely with the seventh sabbatical year in the cycle, the newly re-enfranchised farmer feasts on the fallow of the first half of the 49th year and is prohibited from organized planting in the second half.[↩]
- See MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals, 119.[↩]
- See Rhodes and Holt, Practicing the King’s Economy,71–83.[↩]
- See Rhodes and Holt, Practicing the King’s Economy, 85–128.[↩]
- Rhodes and Holt, Practicing the King’s Economy, 175–96.[↩]