Leviticus 23-25
Key Scriptures
23:1-43 The Lord gave these instructions to Moses: “Tell the Israelites there are holy days I have appointed for them to regularly honor me through sacred assemblies. …The Sabbath is a holy day of rest from your labors. You may work on six days, but on the seventh—the Sabbath Day—you are to do no work; rather congregate together in a sacred assembly. …The Lord’s Passover begins at dusk on the fourteenth day of the first month. The Feast of Unleavened Bread will be on the next day—the fifteenth day of the first month. ...When you enter the land I give you as a gift and harvest your first crops there, bring a sheaf of the first-harvested grain to the priest. The priest will wave it before the Lord on the morning after the Sabbath as a wave-offering from you. …Fifty days after the wave-offering…you are to bring a grain-offering from your harvest to the Lord. …At the start of the seventh month, the whole nation is to have a day of rest and congregate in sacred assembly, accompanied by blasts on the shofar—the consecrated ram’s horn. There you are make offerings to the Lord by fire. …On the tenth day of the seventh month you are to celebrate the Day of Atonement. …The Feast of Booths begins on the fifteenth day and lasts for a full seven days. …Days one and eight are days of rest. … Every Israelite is to dwell in a temporary straw hut during the week of the Feast of Booths as a remembrance of the time I brought your ancestors out of Egypt as refugees.”
25:2-31 “When you arrive in the Promised Land I will give you, see to it that the land is given the Lord’s Sabbath rest. Do your work of sowing, pruning, and harvesting for six years straight, but in the seventh year you will cease cultivating the land that it may have a full year to rejuvenate—the Lord’s provision of a Sabbath rest. …During the Sabbath year, whatever grows on its own will be food for you and your family and for all those dependent on you for their sustenance, man and beast alike. …Every fifty years—a period of seven Sabbath years—is to be a sacred year…in which liberty is to be extended throughout Israel to everyone enslaved and endebted. It is the year of Jubilee, when Israelites return to their family’s original property.”
25:18-22 “If you obediently follow my laws and commandments, you will live in peace and security in the land I am giving you. It will respond to your obedience with abundance so that all your needs will be met. There is no need to ask, ‘But if we don’t plant on a Sabbath year, what will we eat?’ Know this: I will make the sixth year so productive—bless you with more than you can imagine—that there will be provision enough for a full three years.”
25:23-28 “Remember that all the land belongs to the Lord and no man can own it permanently. You are but sojourners and caretakers of my land. …Therefore I decree that if someone cannot afford to buy back land he has sold to support himself, it must be returned to him in the Year of Jubilee. In the Year of Jubilee he will return to his ancestral land to reacquire it from the purchaser as his own property. …If an Israelite has lost his land due to poverty, his nearest relative should make an attempt to buy it back for him before the Jubilee year. If no relative is able to buy it back but the original owner gains the means to buy it back himself, the buyer must sell it to him so he can return to his original property. The selling price will be adjusted according to the years left before the Jubilee. Yet if neither the seller nor a relative can afford to buy it back, it must be returned to him during the Year of Jubilee so at that time he can regain possession of his ancestral property.”
25:35-55 “When a neighbor becomes poor and unable to meet his basic needs, you are to give him assistance in the same way you would an immigrant or visitor whom you want to make welcome. Do not ignore his needs and do not charge him interest on loans so he will have an opportunity to remain living in the community. Do it out of reverence for the Lord; never take advantage of someone who is down and out. …If a neighbor becomes so poverty-stricken that he must sell himself as a slave, you are to treat him well—as you would one of your valued workhands or a visitor doing work for you. If the man sold into slavery has a close relative who can buy him back…or he himself finds the means to pay a slave’s price, you must let him buy his freedom. The amount paid will be adjusted according to the time left before the Year of Jubilee. …But if he cannot find the money for redemption, on the Year of Jubilee he and his family are all to be freed to return to their home lands. Remember that all Israelites are my servants. I freed them from a life of slavery when I brought them out of Egypt.”
Basic Message
God told Moses there were appointed holy days that were to be observed. The weekly Sabbath was the most common, while the Passover and the Day of Atonement were the most solemn. Others included a celebration of the fall harvest and the Feast of Booths when the Israelites were to live in small huts to remember the days of their deliverance from Egypt.
God also told Moses that the land they were to inhabit was his and the Israelites should consider themselves tenant-owners. They were to farm their given land for six years and then let it lay fallow every seventh year, harvesting only those crops that ripened on their own without cultivation. Then on the fiftieth year, a special year of Jubilee was declared. Not only was the land to lie uncultivated, but it was to be returned to its original owners who sold it out of need. If such poor Israelites found the means to buy back their land before the Jubilee, either through a relative or via their own prosperity, it was to be sold back to the owner according to its value in relation to the Year of Jubilee (i.e., the closer to Jubilee the less valuable the property was to the buyer). In addition, any Israelites who had sold themselves as slaves were to be freed in the Year of Jubilee to return to live among relatives on their reclaimed family lands.
When Israelites became indigent, their neighbors were to help them in whatever way they could out of reverence for God. Taking advantage of someone who had become indigent was not allowed. If a person had become so poor as to sell himself to another Israelite as a slave, he and his family were to be treated well, as one would hired workmen or even guests. They were not to be exploited in any way. God told the people that by following the laws regarding their fellow Israelites and laws pertaining to the land, he would reward them with prosperous and secure lives—insuring that the land would yield more than enough to meet their needs, even in the years when there was no cultivation.
Comments
* The laws in Leviticus 23-25 deal with time and place. God’s intention was that the Israelites learn to consider both realms sacred. As slaves in Egypt they had no such perspective. Each day of forced labor was like any other; they dwelled as aliens in a country belonging to and benefiting others. By setting aside holy days within the calendar year, the people of Israel could learn to view each and every day as being sacred, as belonging to and inhabited by God. The Sabbath was key in this regard, a kind of temporal leavening that was meant to spread throughout the rest of the week. As elucidated by the Jewish theologian and philosopher, Abraham Joshua Heschel, the Sabbath was not meant as a holiday to make one more productive during the rest of the week (as we think of Sunday and the weekend now); rather, the rest of the week existed so one could rightly celebrate the Sabbath as real time, as life was intended to be lived. The Sabbath was meant to become a permanent mindset, an orientation of the heart that recognized total dependence on and devotion to God alone for every moment one lived. It was sacred time that, when lived as such, produced sacred living.
* Likewise, the Israelites were to view the land as sacred space. We tend to view it as property to be utilized for our private benefit. But God insisted the Israelites view it as his possession that was given them on temporary loan. They were to revere God by treating the land with respect. To insure that it was not overused and devalued, it was to lie fallow every seventh year so it could regenerate. By institutionalizing the practice, not only was the land healthier and more productive, but the Israelites were forced to declare their dependency on God to provide for them in the years they did not cultivate; and by extension, they learned their utter dependency on him even in years when they did.
Many modern farmers have recognized the wisdom in this approach and also moved away from the harmful use of commercial fertilizers. Pushed on farmers in both the developed and developing world by profit-minded petrochemical companies, non-stop cultivation via chemical fertilizers not only degrades the land, it also promotes the erroneous view that we prosper by our ingenuity and industry alone—the apparent masters of our own fate. Letting land lie fallow every few years is counter-intuitive, but it makes for more productive and sustainable land. God designed it that way and by following the principles inherent in the seventh-year fallow law, one cultivates a deeper faith in the Creator and Provider of all we have and are.
* Treating the land with reverence was not to be divorced from treating the landless with respect. God insisted that those who had lost their property be helped to recover it, demonstrating his deep concern for the welfare of each individual and the community as a whole. The way of the world is for the wealthy to take advantage of the poor, a natural human inclination that, ultimately, degrades the whole community. To support the poor and to help recover their land—the means of not only their livelihood but their very identity—is to strengthen the community and everyone in it. The same concept applies to a healthy body that suffers if one appendage is injured. Poverty drags down everyone in some form or another, whether through increased crime or the need to increase taxes to cover programs for indigents. It’s a point lost on many who today support political agendas that veer toward the right, driven by fearful attempts to protect the advantages and often excessive possessions of the well-to-do. Their way is not God’s way.
* God’s solution to the human impulse to amass possessions to the detriment of the poor was the year of Jubilee. It was a wonderfully celebratory reset button for the entire nation, one that equalized possessions and thus power and influence within the community as a whole. The poor didn’t get poorer while the rich got richer—the widening gap that defines not only the situation within developed countries like the U.S., but also between Western nations and the developing world. Rather, the year of Jubilee enforced other Laws that commanded love of neighbor and the pursuit of a peaceful, righteous way of life for all—the ideal captured in the biblical concept of shalom. In anthropological terms, it was a divinely-instituted “leveling mechanism.”
A similar means to keep the whole community more-or-less equal in terms of wealth has been well-studied in small-scale cultures as diverse as the San of the African Kalahari and the traditional Indian tribes of the Pacific Northwest—the latter utilizing the ceremonial potlatch to redistribute wealth within the community. Such communities intuitively recognized the dangers that inequality posed for the community as a viable, functioning unit. God instituted Jubilee to remedy the problem in a different and likely more effective way that directly related to the Israelites’ reverence for him.
Biblical Themes
1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 11, 12, 13, 15
