Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

SABBATICAL YEAR

The “seventh year” in a seven-year cycle, designated as a “year of resting” and a “year of release.” The Sabbatical Year extends the weekly sabbath principle of resting the seventh day, foundational to the covenant community (Exod. 31:12-17). The Ten Commandments motivate sabbath as imitating God’s act of rest after creating the world (Exod. 20:8-11) or in remembrance of Israel’s release from slavery in Egypt (Deut. 5:12-15) and thus as a relief measure for the poor (Exod. 23:12). This principle is then extended into the whole seventh year, to be set apart for rest from labor, providing food to the poor, cancellation of debt, and reading the law. The cancellation of debt is later connected with forgiveness of sins in the Dead Sea Scrolls (11QMelch 2; 1QDM 3). Freeing slaves is also mandated on a seven-year cycle, but in the seventh year after the indenture of a given individual, rather than in a universal release (Exod. 21:2-4; Deut. 15:12-15). An ancient Near Eastern parallel is the Mesopotamian tradition of mīšarum edicts (e.g., the Edict of Ammisaduqa), issued upon accession of a new king, also providing for cancellation of debt and freeing of debt slaves. Finally, the Sabbath Year is further extended in the Jubilee Year, every seventh Sabbatical Year, when land ownership reverts to the inherited line (Lev. 25:8-17, 23-28).

The main text on the Sabbatical Year is Lev. 25:1-7, 20-22, emphasizing “rest for the land.” Sowing fields, pruning vineyards, and harvesting crops are prohibited. The produce of the untended land will be food for slaves, hired workers, aliens, livestock, and wild animals. The legislation in Exod. 23:9-12 is almost identical (here called the “seventh year”).

What this means and how to apply it is debated. A system of rotating fallow, allowing revitalization of the soil as in modern farming, is attractive but without basis. A universally observed fallow year threatens severe hardship to a subsistence-level, agriculturally based economy. Such hardship would seem to be inconsistent with the stated purpose of this legislation as providing food and relief for the poor. Another possibility, given that the Jewish calendar year begins with harvest and ends with planting, is that the law envisions a full crop planted in the sixth year which is then exempt from harvest in the seventh, but is left for the poor and for animals as food, some of which will naturally reseed itself when sowing is prohibited later that year. This would allow minimal hardship to the community and maximum benefit to the poor, but little of the environmental benefit expected in our modern understanding of “fallow.”

Parallel laws in Deut. 14:28–15:18 do not mention a fallow, but provide for feeding the poor by allocating a tithe of produce every three years for Levites, aliens, widows, and orphans. The “seventh year” is designated a “year of release” (NRSV “year of remission”) for canceling debts. Deut. 31:10-13 further mandates a public assembly in the “year of release” every seventh year in which the Law will be read, possibly as part of a regular covenant renewal ceremony.

As with the release of slaves in the seventh year, reckoned on an individual basis from whenever the enslavement began, it is possible that the cancellation of debt “at the end of seven years” (Deut. 15) originally meant seven years from whenever the debt was incurred, after which time full repayment would have been completed with interest, just as six years of slave labor calculated according to the standard yearly wage of a hired worker would pay off the price of a slave (cf. Lev. 25:47-53). Hammurabi §88 and Eshnunna §§18a, 20, 21 specify a yearly interest rate of 20 percent. Such excessive interest was forbidden outright in Lev. 25:35-38, which may explain its failure to mention any cancellation of loans after seven years. This rate of payment, if observed in Israel, would have paid back the full original debt within five years, plus an extra 40 percent the sixth and seventh years before cancellation.

Deut. 15:9 would seem to imply, however, that (at least in later years) the “year of release” was universally observed. If so, it is possible that the cancellation of debt was temporary, as necessitated by the lack of agriculturally related income to be expected in a fallow year. Only the interest or payment due for that year was cancelled, or full repayment postponed for that one year. The same verbal root used here for the “dropping” of debt (šmṭ) is also used for the temporary cessation of agricultural work during the fallow year. Otherwise the pressure to refrain from lending shortly before the “release” (as warned in Deut. 15:7-11), or to circumvent the law, becomes overpowering.

Biblical references to these laws (as with many other laws) often record noncompliance (Lev. 26:43; 2 Chr. 36:20-21; Jer. 34:8-22; Neh. 5:1-13), but later practice is attested in 1 Macc. 6:48-54; Josephus Ant. 11.8.6(343-44); 13.8.1(234-35); 14.10.6(202); 16.2(475); 15.1.2(7); BJ 1.2.4(60); 1QM 2:6-9. These mention a policy of not waging war in Sabbatical Years, remission of Jewish taxes/annual tribute in consideration of the Sabbatical Year fallow, and food shortages caused by the fallow.

See Jubilee, Year of.

Robin J. DeWitt Knauth

Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

SABBATICAL YEAR

Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000)