Jubilee · The Types of Christ
Jubilee
Every fiftieth year, Israel blew a trumpet and the whole economy reset: slaves went home, debts cleared, land went back to the family that first owned it. Jesus stood up in His hometown synagogue, read the prophecy about it, and said it was happening that day.
The Law, Counted Out
— Leviticus 25 — a fifty-year clock, and what it does when it strikesTHE ARTWORKRembrandt’s little etching is not a scene from Leviticus, and it is not trying to be. It is Christ preaching, and the people He is preaching to are poor — sitting on the ground, leaning on their hands, one man half asleep. That is Luke 4:18 rendered as an image rather than an idea, and it is why the page opens with it: the jubilee’s news was always for people who had lost something.
Seven sabbaths of years — forty-nine — and then a trumpet, on the tenth day of the seventh month, the Day of Atonement itself. Four things follow, and Leviticus lists them without ornament: liberty is proclaimed through the land, every man returns to his possession, every man returns to his family, and the land rests. Because the land’s harvests are what a buyer is really purchasing, sale prices are prorated to the years remaining before the next jubilee.
1–7
8–14
15–21
22–28
29–35
36–42
43–49
the jubilee
Forty-nine years in seven blocks of seven. The shaded year in each block is the sabbatical year, when the land itself rested. Then the fiftieth — and the trumpet that opens it sounds on the Day of Atonement.
Then you are to sound the horn far and wide on the tenth day of the seventh month, the Day of Atonement. You shall sound it throughout your land.Leviticus 25:9
Liberty proclaimed
So you are to consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty in the land for all its inhabitants. It shall be your Jubilee, when each of you is to return to his property and to his clan.
The land returns
In this Year of Jubilee, each of you shall return to his own property.
The family returns
Then he and his children are to be released, and he may return to his clan and to the property of his fathers.
The land rests
The fiftieth year will be a Jubilee for you; you are not to sow the land or reap its aftergrowth or harvest the untended vines.
The same rare word, seven centuries later
The Spirit of the Lord GOD is on Me, because the LORD has anointed Me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent Me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and freedom to the prisoners,Isaiah 61:1
Isaiah’s “liberty” is דְּרוֹר deror — eight occurrences in the whole Bible, and one of the other seven is Leviticus 25:10. The prophet reaches for the jubilee’s own word.
and He began by saying, “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”Luke 4:21
Where Scripture is silent
The Old Testament never records a jubilee actually being kept. The law is given in detail and no narrative anywhere celebrates one.
The building block: the seventh yearLeviticus 25:1-7 — its own page comes later
The fiftieth year is built out of a smaller cycle. Every seventh year the land itself kept a sabbath: no sowing, no pruning, no organised harvest, and whatever grew of its own accord was food for the household, the hired worker and the animals alike. Seven of those cycles make the forty-nine years the jubilee is counted from.
Then the LORD said to Moses on Mount Sinai, “Speak to the Israelites and say to them: When you enter the land that I am giving you, the land itself must observe a Sabbath to the LORD. For six years you may sow your field and prune your vineyard and gather its crops. But in the seventh year there shall be a Sabbath of complete rest for the land—a Sabbath to the LORD. You are not to sow your field or prune your vineyard. You are not to reap the aftergrowth of your harvest or gather the grapes of your untended vines. The land must have a year of complete rest. Whatever the land yields during the Sabbath year shall be food for you—for yourself, your manservant and maidservant, the hired hand or foreigner who stays with you, and for your livestock and the wild animals in your land. All its growth may serve as food.The sabbatical year — the seven-year cycle the fifty-year clock is assembled out of.
The seven-year cycle has enough in it for a study of its own, and it gets one later in this build. This page keeps to the fiftieth year.
How the sums actually workedLeviticus 25:14-17 · 25:47-55
Two practical passages show the law functioning as law rather than as an ideal. Because the jubilee returns the land, what a buyer actually purchases is a number of harvests — so the price is calculated from the years remaining, and overcharging on that calculation is named as wronging your neighbour. The same logic covers a person: an Israelite who sells himself to a foreigner keeps a right of redemption, at a price prorated the same way, and in the jubilee he goes free regardless.
If you make a sale to your neighbor or a purchase from him, you must not take advantage of each other. You are to buy from your neighbor according to the number of years since the last Jubilee; he is to sell to you according to the number of harvest years remaining. You shall increase the price in proportion to a greater number of years, or decrease it in proportion to a lesser number of years; for he is selling you a given number of harvests. Do not take advantage of each other, but fear your God; for I am the LORD your God.The price is the number of harvests, and a fair count of them is treated as a matter of the fear of God.
If a foreigner residing among you prospers, but your countryman dwelling near him becomes destitute and sells himself to the foreigner or to a member of his clan, he retains the right of redemption after he has sold himself. One of his brothers may redeem him: either his uncle or cousin or any close relative from his clan may redeem him. Or if he prospers, he may redeem himself. He and his purchaser will then count the time from the year he sold himself up to the Year of Jubilee. The price of his sale will be determined by the number of years, based on the daily wages of a hired hand. If many years remain, he must pay for his redemption in proportion to his purchase price. If only a few years remain until the Year of Jubilee, he is to calculate and pay his redemption according to his remaining years. He shall be treated like a man hired from year to year, but a foreign owner must not rule over him harshly in your sight. Even if he is not redeemed in any of these ways, he and his children shall be released in the Year of Jubilee. For the Israelites are My servants. They are My servants, whom I brought out of the land of Egypt. I am the LORD your God.The same arithmetic applied to a person — and the reason given: the Israelites are God's servants, whom He brought out of Egypt.
The Reason the Law Gives
— Leviticus 25:23 — before any application, God's own stated groundIt would be easy to read Leviticus 25 as ancient social policy — a clever brake on runaway inequality, which it certainly is. But the chapter does not argue that way. It gives a reason, and the reason is ownership: the land cannot be sold permanently because it is God’s land, and Israel are tenants living on it with Him.
Everything else in the chapter follows from that one sentence. If the land is His, no human transaction can transfer it forever, and a fiftieth-year reset is not charity — it is the paperwork catching up with the truth.
The land shall not be sold for ever - the land is mine - As God in a miraculous manner gave them possession of this land, they were therefore to consider themselves merely as tenants to him; and on this ground he, as the great landholder or lord of the soil, prescribes to them all the conditions on which they shall hold it. This one circumstance was peculiarly favorable to their advancement in religion, in righteousness, and true holiness; for feeling that they had nothing which they could call their own upon earth, they must frequently, by this, be put in mind of the necessity of having a permanent dwelling in the heavenly inheritance, and of that preparation without which it could not be possessed.
Adam Clarke· Commentary on the Bible, 1832Methodist
Leviticus 25:23
The land must not be sold permanently, because it is Mine, and you are but foreigners and residents with Me.The law's own ground: the land is Mine, and you are foreigners and residents with Me.
These verses express the principle on which the law of Jubilee, as it regards the land, was based. The land belonged to Yahweh, and it was He who allotted it among the families of Israel for their use. No estate could therefore be alienated in perpetuity, by any human authority, from the family to whose lot it might fall. Lev 25:24 Grant a redemption for the land - i. e. grant power to recover the land to the original holder who had parted with it.
Albert Barnes· Notes, Explanatory and Practical, on the Old and New Testaments, 1832-1869Presbyterian
Leviticus 25:23
The artwork
Millet painted three women bent over a field that is not theirs, gathering what the harvesters left — the practice Leviticus commands a few chapters earlier and assumes all through chapter 25. It is the best available picture of what these laws are actually about. The field is large, the stacks in the background are someone's wealth, and the law's whole insistence is that the field's owner does not finally own it either.
Jean-François Millet, The Gleaners (1857) — Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
One more figure stands in the middle of the machinery, and this page names him and hands him on rather than expounding him. When an Israelite sells his land, Leviticus 25:25 gives his nearest relative the right to buy it back. The Hebrew for that relative is goel — the kinsman-redeemer, the same word that runs through the book of Ruth. Matthew Henry draws the line to Christ himself.
The kinsman is called Goel, the redeemer ( Num. v. 8; 9 ), to whom belonged the right of redeeming the land. And this typified Christ, who assumed our nature, that he might be our kinsman, bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, and, being the only kinsman we have that is able to do it, to him belonged the right of redemption.
Matthew Henry· Commentary on the Whole Bible, 1710Puritan
Leviticus 25:25
This Day
— Luke 4:16-21 — nothing on this page outranks the sentence He said sitting downHe came to the town He grew up in, went to synagogue as He always had, stood up to read, and was handed the scroll of Isaiah. He found the place, read it, rolled the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. Everyone was watching. Then He said one sentence — and it is the reason this page exists.
Then Jesus came to Nazareth, where He had been brought up. As was His custom, He entered the synagogue on the Sabbath. And when He stood up to read, the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to Him. Unrolling it, He found the place where it was 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 liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Then He rolled up the scroll, returned it to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fixed on Him, and He began by saying, “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”The reading, and then the sentence: today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.
This was enough to introduce a great deal: This day is this scripture fulfilled. Note, [1.] All the scriptures of the Old Testament that were to be fulfilled in the Messiah had their full accomplishment in the Lord Jesus, which abundantly proves that this was he that should come. [2.] In the providences of God, it is fit to observe the fulfilling of the scriptures.
Matthew Henry· Commentary on the Whole Bible, 1710Puritan
Luke 4:21
"The Spirit of the Lord is on me," etc. These words are manifestly said with regard to Zerubbabel but actually with regard to our Lord, as he has testified by himself. "Today," he said, "that Scripture has been fulfilled at your ears."
Ishodad of Merv· Commentary on Isaiah 61:1, 850Church of the East
Isaiah 61:1
There is a detail in the reading itself worth noticing, and it is a fact about where He stopped rather than a theory about why. Isaiah 61:2 runs: to proclaim the year of the LORD’s favour, and the day of vengeance of our God. Luke records the first clause and not the second. The commentators noticed it long before anyone made a sermon out of it.
acceptable year--the year of jubilee on which "liberty was proclaimed to the captives" (Isa 61:1; 2Co 6:2). day of vengeance--The "acceptable time of grace" is a "year"; the time of "vengeance" but "a day" (so Isa 34:8;
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown· Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible, 1871Reformed
Isaiah 61:2
The Spirit of the Lord GOD is on Me, because the LORD has anointed Me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent Me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and freedom to the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the LORD’s favor and the day of our God’s vengeance, to comfort all who mourn, to console the mourners in Zion— to give them a crown of beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, and a garment of praise for a spirit of despair. So they will be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the LORD, that He may be glorified.The whole passage He was handed — including the clause the reading in Nazareth stopped before.
To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord - (see the notes at Isa 49:8). There is probably an allusion here to the year of Jubilee, when the trumpet was blown, and liberty was proclaimed throughout all the land (so Lev 25:9-10). In like manner the Messiah would come to proclaim universal liberty - liberty to all the world from the degrading servitude of sin.
Albert Barnes· Notes, Explanatory and Practical, on the Old and New Testaments, 1832-1869Presbyterian
Isaiah 61:2
What happened next in NazarethLuke 4:22-30
The sermon does not end with admiration. Jesus goes on to name two Old Testament occasions when God’s help went to outsiders — a widow in Sidon, a Syrian general — and the congregation tries to throw Him off a cliff. The jubilee proclamation and the fury are the same scene, and Luke reports both without softening either.
All spoke well of Him and marveled at the gracious words that came from His lips. “Isn’t this the son of Joseph?” 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.’” Then He added, “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in his hometown. But I tell you truthfully that there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and great famine swept over all the land. Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to the widow of Zarephath in Sidon. And there were many lepers in Israel in the time of Elisha the prophet. Yet not one of them was cleansed—only Naaman the Syrian.” On hearing this, all the people in the synagogue were enraged. They got up, drove Him out of the town, and led Him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, in order to throw Him over the cliff. But Jesus passed through the crowd and went on His way.The same congregation, minutes later.
Is Luke 4 a Jubilee Announcement?
— two careful readings, and the page does not pickEveryone agrees the words are Isaiah’s and the fulfilment is His. The question is narrower and more interesting: when He said “the year of the Lord’s favour,” was He announcing the jubilee specifically, or announcing an era of grace of which the jubilee is one picture among several?
Specifically the jubilee
The release Leviticus pictured is what He announces, and the vocabulary is the evidence. Albert Barnes makes the connection on both ends — on Luke 4:19 and again on Isaiah 61:2 — and it is worth noting that he hedges it with a perhaps. The hedge is his, and it stays.
To peach the acceptable year of the Lord - The time when God is willing to accept of people, or to receive sinners coming to him. The gospel assures us that the guilty may return, and that God will graciously receive them. There is, perhaps, here, an allusion to the year of jubilee - the fiftieth year, when the trumpet was blown, and through the whole land proclamation was made of the liberty of Hebrew slaves, of the remission of debts, and of the restoration of possessions to their original families, Lev 25:8-
Albert Barnes· Notes, Explanatory and Practical, on the Old and New Testaments, 1832-1869Presbyterian
Luke 4:19
The whole acceptable era
The “acceptable year” is not one calendar year at all but the age of grace that opened when He spoke and has not closed. Bede puts it plainly: the year in which our Lord preached is acceptable, and so is the year in which the apostle preaches.
For not only was that year acceptable in which our Lord preached, but that also in which the Apostle preaches, saying, Behold, now is the accepted time. (2 Cor. 6:2.) After the acceptable year of the Lord, he adds, And the day of retribution; that is, the final retribution, when the Lord shall give to every one according to his work.
Bede· Catena Aurea by Aquinas, 735Church Father
Luke 4:19
The two readings are not rivals so much as different distances from the same object. The image He reached for is the jubilee; the reality He announced is larger than one year. This page leaves it there, with both men quoted and neither corrected.
A second dispute, named and not settledwas the fiftieth year separate from the forty-ninth?
Leviticus is not explicit about whether the jubilee stood on its own as a fiftieth year — leaving two fallow years back to back — or coincided with the forty-ninth. Both readings are ancient, both have serious defenders, and the text does not decide it. Naming the dispute is honest; adjudicating it here would not be.
Origen, on how far anyone can get with this lawOn Prayer 27.14
Origen is worth hearing before anyone gets confident about the jubilee’s meaning. He treats it as a law whose sense is real but not fully open to us — a bracing note for a page that has just spent several sections explaining it.
Who is there who has grasped the mind of Christ so well that he knows the meaning of the seventh year of freedom of Hebrew slaves and the remission of debts and the intermission of the cultivation of the holy land? Over and above the feast of every seventh year is the feast called the jubilee. No one can ever come near divining its precise meaning or the true import of the prescriptions enjoined by it, except him who knows the Father's will and his disposition for every age according to "his incomprehensible judgments and unsearchable ways."
Origen of Alexandria· On Prayer 27.14, 253Church Father
Leviticus 25:10
Read Further
— the writers quoted above, in their own hands — and where Marcus landsIn the law the fiftieth year was ordered to be called [the year] of jubilee, that is, "forgiving" or "changed." During it the people were to remain at rest from all work, the debts of all were to be canceled, slaves were to go free …
Bede· Homilies on the Gospels 2.17, 735Church Father
Leviticus 25:10
Among modern teachers, Chuck Misslertaught the appointed times as a prophetic calendar and put the jubilee’s Day-of-Atonement trumpet inside it (Learn the Bible in 24 Hours). Jonathan Cahn works the seven-year sabbatical cycle underneath the jubilee at book length in The Mystery of the Shemitah, and Rabbi Jason Sobel reads the calendar from inside its Jewish setting in Aligning with God’s Appointed Times. The seven-year cycle itself gets its own page later in this build; this one keeps to the fiftieth year.
Notes on the Old and New Testaments
Albert Barnes · 1832-1869
The source of this page's jubilee link on Luke 4:19, hedge and all. Barnes is the most useful public-domain commentator for a reader who wants the argument shown rather than asserted.
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Matthew Henry · 1710
For Luke 4:21 and for the kinsman-redeemer at Leviticus 25:25 — the two places this page leans on him hardest.
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Adam Clarke · 1832
Clarke on Leviticus 25:23 is the best short statement anywhere of why tenancy, not policy, is the chapter's foundation.
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