The Jubilee in History
This is the fifth in a series on the Jubilee Year of 2025.
If implemented, the jubilee described last week would have been revolutionary in the best way. Every fifty years, the trumpet would sound and all would receive God’s justice and mercy. If you had suffered, you would be invited back into society to rest as your debts were paid, your servitude ended, and your land restored. If you had prospered, you would be invited to sacrifice for the less successful, but would still have enough for a good life. The biggest problem with the jubilee? No evidence exists that it was ever implemented!
Human nature resists God’s call to conversion, from the Garden of Eden to the present day. Though the prophets challenged Israel’s rich and powerful to proclaim the jubilee, the latter had strong incentives not to listen to these inconvenient voices. Their refusal to curb the offenses against God (idolatry) and their fellow man (injustice) brought disaster upon them through a civil war and the conquering armies of Assyria (722 BC) and Babylon (587 BC). On the brink of collapse, the prophet Jeremiah (Jer. 34) pleaded with the people to perform the jubilee’s elements (redemption, release, return, rest) in order to be right with God and others, but they refused and were crushed by Babylon. The land which they had not allowed to rest each Sabbath Year now rested for seventy years straight!
As always, the Jewish people’s suffering did not mean God had abandoned them. Instead, the prophets sent to the people emphasized that God would rescue Israel through the jubilee’s spiritual dimensions. Ezekiel (Ez. 40-47) pointed to the construction of the new Temple where Jews would find the forgiveness of spiritual debts, the release of their bondage to the devil, and the return to and resting in God’s favor. Isaiah revealed an Anointed One (Messiah) who would proclaim and practice the jubilee to redeem, release and return Israel to God’s eternal rest. He would accomplish this jubilee, paradoxically, not through military victory and royal proclamation but through his suffering and death. “My servants shall justify many, and their sins he will bear” (Is. 53:11). The prophet Daniel (Dn. 9:24ff) received a vision of when this would occur: seventy weeks of years or ten jubilees (490 years) after the announcement of the Second Temple’s construction (457 BC), the Anointed One would come to take away sin and establish justice, die at the hands of the people, and predict the destruction of the Temple and the end of its sacrifices.
All of these prophecies meant that by the first century, with the new Temple constructed and the 490 years coming to fulfillment, the people’s excitement for the coming Messiah was at a fever pitch! Ideas of where he would come from, how he would appear, and what he would do differed among the people, but one group out in the desert had remarkable insight into these questions. We’ll look at them next week, and then pull back the curtain on the Messiah who would proclaim the final jubilee!