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CHAPTER TWO

Jesus Proclaims Jubilee

At the beginning of his public ministry, Jesus the prophet gave an extremely important speech in the synagogue of his hometown, Nazareth. Matthew and Mark offer but a brief summary of this event, but Luke’s account is quite detailed. Here it is in its entirety:

Jesus went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. And he stood up to read. The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,

because he has anointed me

to preach good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners

(and recovery of sight for the blind,)¹

to release the oppressed,

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him, and he began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his lips. “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?” they asked. Jesus said to them, “Surely you will quote this proverb to me: ‘Physician, heal yourself! Do here in your hometown what we have heard that you did in Capernaum.’”

“I tell you the truth,” he continued, “no prophet is accepted in his hometown. I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land. Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon. And there were many in Israel with leprosy in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed – only Naaman the Syrian.”

All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this. They got up, drove him out of the town, and took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, in order to throw him down the cliff. But he walked right through the crowd and went on his way.

Then he went down to Capernaum, a town in Galilee, and on the Sabbath began to teach the people. They were amazed at his teaching, because his message had authority. (Luke 4:16–32)

This narrative deserves commenting on at length. First, although Matthew and Mark place this incident later in Jesus’ ministry, Luke, who spends more effort in chronological research, places it at the beginning of Jesus’ public activity, following the temptation and a first preaching tour in the synagogues. We will follow Luke’s chronology.² It was indeed logical and congruent with the Old Testament pattern for the Spirit-filled Jesus to begin his ministry in his hometown and to try to secure the adherence of his own people to the kingdom of God. Moreover, in Matthew 4:12–13 these words follow the account of the temptation: “When Jesus heard that John had been put in prison, he returned to Galilee. Leaving Nazareth, he went and lived in Capernaum, which was by the lake.” John 2:12 also places the trip to Capernaum at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, though he does not mention the dramatic events of Nazareth. All this agrees quite well with Luke’s account.

Second, the part of Jesus’ speech beginning with the words, “Surely you will quote this proverb to me: ‘Physician, heal yourself!’” set off a wave of anger that drove Jesus from the synagogue and provoked an attempted assassination. But one cannot immediately see why Jesus would have wanted to offend his fellow kinsmen if they had not already disbelieved the beginning of his speech. Matthew and Mark also present the succession of events in this light.

Third, even under these circumstances, it is hard to understand why some of Jesus’ listeners reacted with such explosive violence while others displayed astonishment and even enthusiasm. It would have taken more than a few comments about the widow of Zarephath or about Naaman the Syrian to initiate the attempt to kill Jesus. According to Jewish law only certain crimes, such as blasphemy against God or violations of the Sabbath, deserved the death penalty. But Jesus had committed none of these offenses. Perhaps he had threatened the life or interests of a part of Nazareth’s population. This is what we must now investigate.

A Revolution

The passage Jesus read from Isaiah 61 gives us the answer. Here the Messiah, the Anointed One, speaks in first person: “The Lord has anointed me.” Jesus chose to read precisely this passage in the synagogue of his youth, before his parents and friends. And he added, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” In other words, to our knowledge, Jesus officially acknowledged for the first time that he was the Messiah whom the prophets had announced.³ It is now easy to understand the amazement of some and the offense of others.

But this messianic proclamation alone could not have aroused such murderous anger. There had been others besides Jesus who made similar claims. The rest of the passage from Isaiah helps to explain it.

The Messiah announced by the prophets was the liberator. People believed he would reestablish the legitimate Davidic dynasty and free the people from foreign domination. Isaiah 61 refers to a specific liberation, and it is a social one: “To preach good news to the poor…to proclaim freedom for the captives and release for the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Being the hoped-for Messiah, Jesus meant to accomplish what the prophet announced as the task of the Messiah. He was setting out to liberate the oppressed⁴ of Israel. He was proclaiming a “year of freedom” (“the year of the Lord’s favor” or the “acceptable year of the Lord”).

We now hold the key to the problem. By proclaiming a “year of freedom” in Nazareth, Jesus was threatening the interests of property owners, those with power. This is what incited their murderous anger. His adversaries never admitted the real motives behind their fear and hate. As good conservatives do, they hid behind noble pretexts to discredit the prophet from Nazareth. They wanted to defend certain institutions, the temple in Jerusalem, and the tradition of their fathers.⁵ They resisted the “year of the Lord’s favor.”

Exactly what was this “year of the Lord’s favor” that Jesus proclaimed? Most exegetes agree that it was nothing less than the sabbatical year or Jubilee instituted by Moses.⁶

Moses had instituted a genuine social revolution aimed at preventing the accumulation of capital in the hands of a few. This was to recur every seven and every forty-nine years. I use the term “revolution” intentionally because the social readjustments commanded by Moses were far more radical than the efforts of modern revolutionaries. Contemporary revolutions grow primarily out of economic disparities caused by technological developments. Jesus’ revolution, on the contrary, drew its strength from God’s liberating justice. By proclaiming the Jubilee, Jesus wanted to bring about a total social transformation, with an eye to the future, yet based on the vision of justice God had already set forth in the past.

The Jubilee, with it practices and norms, would have been known to both the poor and the rich of Nazareth. Was not the Law of Moses read every Sabbath in the synagogue? But it was not being fully put into practice. Here Jesus suddenly demanded that the Law be put into immediate effect – “today.”⁷ Was this good news or bad? That depended on who you were. The Jubilee demanded, among other things, expropriating the lands of the wealthy and liquidating the usurious system by which the ruling class prospered. It is easy enough to understand the enthusiasm of the poor, as well as the fear of the rich, which prompted them to try to stop this social revolution by means of a crime. Before specifying the details of the jubilean provisions and regulations, it would be good to explain the meaning of certain terms used to describe the Jubilee, which help to reveal its radical social significance. When Jesus quoted Isaiah, the jubilean connotations of these words would not have been not lost on his listeners.

The Language of Jubilee

Isaiah speaks of the “year of the Lord’s favor” (Luke 4:19 – Isa. 61:2). The adjective “favorable,” in Hebrew ratson, comes from the verb ratsah, which means either “to pay a debt” when it refers to the person paying it, or “to be favorable” when it refers to God accepting the payment. The Revised Standard Version uses “acceptable year,” which points to the double meaning of ratson. For example, in Leviticus 26:41, we read, “Then [when they are in exile] when their uncircumcised hearts are humbled and they pay for their sin,” and further on (v. 43), “For the land will be deserted by them and will enjoy its Sabbaths [it will lie fallow to compensate for all the unobserved sabbatical years]…and they will pay (ratsah) for their sins.”⁸ Here payment of debt is in view. Other passages, however, emphasize favor and acceptance.⁹ In the passage quoted by Jesus, the Messiah proclaims, “The Lord has anointed me to…proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor (a year of acceptance, or ratson) and the day of vengeance of our God.” Jesus stops the quote with “the Lord’s favor,” but for Isaiah, the God “of vengeance” and the God “of mercy” are one and the same, in whom there is no contradiction.¹⁰ In this context the “year of favor” proclaimed by Jesus involved a judgment as well as a pardon or the forgiveness of God. This was the content of the good news.

The passage in Isaiah also refers to “freedom.” “The Lord has anointed me…to proclaim freedom to the captives.” The Hebrew word derôr, which means literally “liberty,” is also found in Leviticus 25:10: “Consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you.” Ezekiel 46:17 also calls the Jubilee the “year of freedom.” This strongly suggests that derôr was used as a technical term referring to the periodic liberation of slaves as prescribed by Moses.¹¹

Closely related is the idea of “release.” This word (shemittah, in Hebrew) is found neither in Isaiah nor in Leviticus, but only in Deuteronomy (chapters 15 and 31). The verb shamôt means “to let alone, to let rest, to release, to remit (the payment of a debt).” Shemittah occurs six times in Deuteronomy 15:1–11, where it means “release, periodic cancellation of debts.”¹²

In Luke’s text, the Greek word aphesis translates both shemittah and derôr.¹³ “The Lord has anointed me to proclaim aphesis (liberty, release) to the captives.” Aphesis comes from the verb aphiemi (to send away, to liberate, to leave aside, to remit a debt). Sometimes it means “liberty,” or better, the “liberation” of a slave, sometimes, “the remittance of a debt.”

This word occurs quite frequently in the Gospels both as a substantive and as a verb. For instance, when John the Baptist preached the baptism of repentance it was for the release of sins considered as debts (Mark 1:4).¹⁴ Later, referring to the healing of the paralytic, Jesus stated, “The Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive (aphiemi) sins” (Matt. 9:6). For the Messiah, the jubilean remission of debts extended to all areas of life – material, moral, and social. In the parable of the unforgiving servant, Jesus portrays God as a king who remits (aphiemi) debts acquired by his servant (Matt. 18:27–32). In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus advises us to also “let go” or “remit” our cloak to him who wants our coat (Matt. 5:40).¹⁵

The jubilean significance of aphesis in the first three Gospels is beyond doubt. Peter, Andrew, James, and John, when called by Jesus, “left everything (aphientes panta) and followed him” (Luke 5:11). Shortly before Jesus’ final entry into Jerusalem, the apostles happily reminded him that they had put the jubilean ordinance into practice as soon as they had heard his call: “We have left everything (aphekamen panta) to follow you! What then will there be for us?” (Matt. 19:27). And Jesus told them that their obedience meets God’s generous jubilean initiative: “No one who has left (apheken) home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age (homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children, and fields – and with them, persecutions), and in the age to come, eternal life” (Mark 10: 29–30).

Finally, Jesus uses the same word during the Last Supper, where the Jubilee is announced in eschatological terms: “This is my blood of the covenant which is poured out for many for the forgiveness (aphesis) of sins. I tell you, I shall not drink of this fruit of the vine from now on until that day when I drink it anew with you in my Father’s kingdom” (Matt. 26:28–29). The supreme Sabbath celebrated in the kingdom of God is thus announced by a terrestrial Jubilee that foreshadows it.

In addition to the above language of freedom and release there is the notion of restoration. The word “jubilee” itself (yobel, in Hebrew) does not seem to have had any particular meaning. The yobel was probably the ram’s horn used in the land every forty-nine years on the Day of Atonement, the tenth day of the seventh month, to proclaim the beginning of the year of Jubilee. Later, it became associated with the Latin word jubilum (from jubilare, to rejoice, to exult), but this was merely a verbal coincidence. Philo of Alexandria, a contemporary of Jesus, rightly designated the Jubilee by the term apokatastasis. This word means to reestablish something or somebody to his previous state, a restoration or restitution of prisoners or hostages, for example. This is a subject to which Philo devotes several chapters throughout his works (cf. his Decalogue) and it squares beautifully with the basic meaning of the Jubilee. The very purpose of the Jubilee was to “reestablish” the tribes of Israel as they were at the time they entered Canaan.

The New Testament itself uses apokatastasis several times to express the idea of restoration. For instance, it can mean the reestablishment or “recovery” of a sick person.¹⁶ In Matthew 17:11, referring to the messianic “restoration” of the kingdom of Israel, Jesus said, “Elijah comes and will restore all things.” In Acts 1:6 the disciples asked Jesus, “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” And later in Acts Peter, quoting Deuteronomy 18:15–19, declares, “Jesus must remain in heaven until the time comes for God to restore everything, as he promised long ago through his holy prophets. For Moses said, ‘The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own people…’” (Acts 3:21–22).

In the last passage, Peter describes Jesus as a second Moses, who will once again enforce the ancient ordinances. Moses’ return and consequently the reestablishment of the Jubilee through repentance and remission of sins are described as the condition for the great restoration when Jesus returns. Whether referring to the healing of persons or the reestablishment of the king, apokatastasis should be understood as having jubilean connotations. The restoration of the sick, the reestablishment of Israel, and the reestablishment of property were all part of the Messiah’s redemptive task. Jesus’ mission was one of jubilee!

Jubilean Provisions

The year of Jubilee was celebrated every forty-nine years, that is every seventh Sabbath of years (seven times seven).¹⁷ Just as the week ended with a “day of release” called the Sabbath and a “week of years” ended with a sabbatical year (every seventh year), each period of forty-nine years ended with a Year of Jubilee.

Why the Year of Jubilee? What were the religious principles upon which the Year of Jubilee was based? We can identify two basic rationales.

First, God is the owner of the land. In Leviticus 25:23 we read, “The land shall not be sold permanently, because the land is mine and you are but aliens and my tenants.” In the ancient world, such a declaration was not unique. The land, along with the flocks, constituted the only source of capital, and its possession guaranteed wealth and power. As a general rule, the land belonged to the god of the area or country. In practice this meant that it belonged either to the priests of the god or to the king who incarnated the god, as in Egypt. The situation was then somewhat similar to modern socialist states: the king granted the use of his lands to whomever he pleased.

But the remarkable thing about the Jubilee was that it did not lead to this type of state collectivism. On the contrary, the jubilean provisions limited the arbitrariness of the sovereign.¹⁸ Furthermore, the interval between Jubilees did not paralyze individual initiative. It gave everyone the opportunity to invest his capital and to buy and sell goods.¹⁹

The redistribution of land also prevented the accumulation of capital in the hands of a few. At the time of the Jubilee every tribe repossessed the land it had received when the people of Israel first settled in Canaan. Similarly, each family regained the lands it might have lost in the interval. In this way, even though God was the ultimate owner of the land, he did not operate as a tyrant oppressing his people in slavery. Rather, he acted as a good master, entrusting to his servants the administration of his goods, which he let them enjoy, but whom he would call to account at regular intervals and once again distribute the capital he alone possessed.

Second, God is the liberator and redeemer of his people. The Jubilee is but a social and concrete rendition of God’s redemptive act. “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt to give you the land of Canaan…” (Lev. 25:38). Because God set Israel free from Egyptian bondage, social liberation (from debts, from slavery, from oppression) is to have the force of law among his people. Deuteronomy justifies the institution of the Sabbath in this way: “The seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God… Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the Lord your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the Lord your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day” (Deut. 5:14–15).

Consequently, the mercy that manifests itself during the “year of favor” is not arbitrary. It is not the result of the king’s despotic benevolence. Nor does it contradict the requirements of justice, which characterize Yahweh’s will for his people. It is, rather, an expression of God’s justice, which occurs at regular intervals to regularize his relations with his people. Israel’s debt to God will not stack up indefinitely; accordingly, debts between fellow Israelites must also be cancelled periodically.

The following rules summarize how the sabbatical year and the Jubilee were to be celebrated:

First Measure – Every seventh year the land was to lie fallow. By a special blessing of Yahweh, the land would produce a double harvest during the sixth year.

Second Measure – During the seventh year all debts between Hebrews were to be cancelled.

Third Measure – After six years of slavery every Hebrew slave was to be set free by his master.

Fourth Measure (reserved for the Jubilee, every 49 years) – Each family was to regain possession of the land and houses it had lost in the meantime. Between two Jubilees a buyer owned the land only temporarily. As the Year of Jubilee approached, the value of the land dropped in proportion to the remaining years of tenure.

Jubilean Practice

It seems that the sabbatical year proved too difficult to apply and was therefore often ignored. This could well be the prime motive behind the year of Jubilee. The economic life of the land would have been paralyzed by the recurrence every seven years of a measure as radical as the abolition of debts or the freeing of slaves. Nevertheless, the year of Jubilee, with its additional requirement of land redistribution, does not seem to have been followed any more closely than the sabbatical year.²⁰

After the return from exile, both the Mishnah and the Talmud justified the neglect of the more rigid sabbatical and jubilean measures with various unconvincing arguments. Actually, the sabbatical year and the Jubilee had already faced opposition from the ownership classes before the exile. In vain the prophets of Israel demanded the restoration of these institutions, which they saw as precursory signs of the coming of David’s reign. Unfortunately, unfaithfulness usually got the upper hand. The two most remarkable attempts at restoring the Jubilee, namely those of Jeremiah and Nehemiah, are relevant here.

Under the reign of Zedekiah, the last king of Judah (598–587 B.C.), the rich had agreed to free their Hebrew slaves according to the Jubilee ordinance but soon regretted their decision and took them back. Their disobedience aroused Jeremiah’s indignation, and he prophesied that it would cause the destruction of Jerusalem.

Then the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah: “This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: I made a covenant with your forefathers when I brought them out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. I said, ‘Every seventh year each of you must free any fellow Hebrew who has sold himself to you. After he has served you six years, you must let him go free.’ Your fathers, however, did not listen to me or pay attention to me. Recently you repented and did what is right in my sight: Each of you proclaimed freedom to his countrymen. You even made a covenant before me in the house that bears my Name. But now you have turned around and profaned my name; each of you has taken back the male and female slaves you had set free to go where they wished. You have forced them to become your slaves again.

“Therefore, this is what the Lord says: You have not obeyed me; you have not proclaimed freedom for your fellow countrymen. So I now proclaim ‘freedom’ for you, declares the Lord –‘freedom’ to fall by the sword, plague and famine. I will make you abhorrent to all the kingdoms of the earth.” (Jer. 34:13–17)

The second attempted reform the Old Testament mentions was undertaken by Nehemiah after the return from exile, around 423 B.C. (Nehemiah 5).²¹ Having called the leading citizens of Jerusalem together, Nehemiah rebuked them for requiring the poor to pawn their sons and daughters in order to eat and stay alive. And he tells them, “Give back to them immediately their fields, vineyards, olive groves, and houses, and also the usury you are charging them – the hundredth part of the money, grain, new wine, and oil.” And they said, “We will give it back…and we will not demand anything more from them.” However, the last chapters of Isaiah, as well as of Ezekiel, still count the Jubilee among the institutions to be reestablished.

A few additional remarks will help us better understand the scope of the jubilean ordinances. According to Deuteronomy 15, slaves were set free after seven years of service. This liberation did not necessarily coincide with the sabbatical year. It should also be noted that the freed slaves were Hebrew. The jubilean ordinances did not apply to foreigners. The Jews had no obligation to free the foreign slaves they might have owned. Loans with interest were also forbidden among Jews but could be made to foreigners in matters of trade. A Jew could also require the reimbursement of a debt from a foreigner, in spite of the Jubilee.

These distinctions which the Mosaic Law made between Jews and foreigners belong to the background of the Gospels. In a later chapter, we will examine Jesus’ struggle to abolish them.

It should be noted, however, that the Roman or Oriental type of slavery was nonexistent among the Jews. Slavery for the Jews was a consequence of mortgages taken by a creditor on the lands of an insolvent debtor. The creditor could use the lands until their revenue had paid off the amount of the debt. If this did not suffice he could require the debtor (with his wife and children) to work for him until the entire debt had been paid off. This resulted in a form of effective slavery, which was still practiced in Jesus’ time. If a Jubilee occurred, the “slave” would be ipso facto freed, since all debts were cancelled, and he could regain his ownership rights.

In Jesus’ time, a period we will study in more depth in the next chapter, the situation could be summed up as follows: The anonymous author of the Book of Jubilees, as well as Philo of Alexandria, attached merely ritual significance to the Jubilee. It was limited to celebrating the days, months, and years, according to an orthodox calendar. On the other hand, the Pharisaic rabbis recommended the observance of sabbatical years, while simultaneously trying to attenuate their strictness. Letting the land lie fallow every seventh year was the sole surviving sabbatical practice obeyed by the people.

Certain historical events prove that this practice was still observed, at least to some extent. According to the First Book of the Maccabees 6:48–53, the Jews who in 162 B.C. had given up defending Beth-zur against Lysias’s Syrian troops were also forced to abandon the defense of Mount Zion. “They had no food in storage, because it was the seventh year; those who had found safety in Judea from the Gentiles had consumed the last of the stores.” The historian Flavius Josephus reports the same event.²²

Josephus refers to two other famines that were aggravated by sabbatical years: one in 135–134 B.C., which occurred during the siege of the Dagon Fortress by John Hyrcanus, and the other in 38–37 B.C., when Herod the Great was besieging Antigonus in Jerusalem. While these dates don’t exactly fit the sabbatical calendar, ²³ after Christ the chronology becomes more precise.

We know, for example, that A.D. 47–48 marked the beginning of a great famine, which affected the whole empire. This was the famine announced by Agabus in Acts 11:28. In Palestine it was aggravated by the return of the sabbatical year. According to the Sotah tractate of the Mishnah (vii, 8), the preceding sabbatical year had been celebrated with particular solemnity by Herod Agrippa I, grandson of Herod the Great. He is the Herod mentioned in Acts 12, to whom Emperor Claudius, out of gratitude, had given back the entire kingdom of his grandfather in A.D. 41.

To please the Jews, Herod Agrippa persecuted the Christians (he beheaded James, the brother of John) and practiced the Jewish religion with ostentation. In A.D. 41 he publicly read the Law of Moses to mark the end of the sabbatical year, as prescribed in Deuteronomy 31:10. Having gathered the people in Jerusalem, he began to read but broke out in tears when he came to Deuteronomy 17:15: “He must be from among your own brothers. Do not place a foreigner over you, one who is not a brother Israelite.” In fact, the Herodians were Idumaeans, and therefore foreign to Israel. But the people reassured the king by shouting, “You are our brother, you are our brother!” because they were quite fond of Agrippa.

This story is of great interest for our chronology because it enables us to set A.D. 26–27 (two septennials earlier) as the date of the sabbatical year Jesus inaugurated in the synagogue of Nazareth. It would then have been in A.D. 26, on the tenth day of the month of Tishri, which is the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur), that Jesus announced the complete restoration of the jubilean practices in Israel. We say “jubilean practices” because, as we have seen, the ordinances of the sabbatical year and of the Jubilee coincided. The calendar of jubilean years was subject to controversy even among the Jews, making it hard for us to recreate it with accuracy.²⁴

Two centuries after Jesus, the orthodox Jews who remained in Palestine still observed the sabbatical year. Rabbi Abrabu recalls the way some Gentiles made fun of Jews. They would bring an emaciated camel to the theater and rail, “Why is this camel so afflicted? Because the Jews are observing their sabbatical year, and since they have run out of vegetables, they are eating the plants this camel used for food.”

When Jesus proclaimed good news to the poor, liberty to the captives, and sight to the blind, his audience knew very well what he meant: now is the time to put into effect the year of Jubilee. Jesus’ speech in Nazareth was no sermon of religious platitudes. He was announcing that a social revolution was underway – the messianic reign had begun. For the poor, this was good news. All things would be made right again. For those whose interests were vested in the establishment, however, such news was a threat. Was Jesus serious? How far did he plan to take all this? Where would it lead?