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?
CHAPTER THREE
Implications of Jubilee
T he speech at Nazareth alone would not be enough to prove that Jesus proclaimed a Jubilee. A more complete reading of the Gospels is needed to validate our thesis. As we have just seen, the Jubilee or sabbatical year prescribed four provisions: letting the land lie fallow, the remittance of debts, the liberation of slaves, and the redistribution of capital. This chapter will explore further references in the Gospels to these four provisions.1
The Fallow Year
Jesus does not directly mention the provision of letting the land lie fallow. His silence on the subject is not surprising, since this sabbatical prescription was the only one already accepted by the people. It was therefore unnecessary to encourage the Jews to put it into practice. But they surely needed courage to let their land lie fallow every seventh year while counting on God to give them what they needed. In Leviticus 25:20–21 Yahweh foresaw their uneasiness and declared, “You may ask, ‘What will we eat in the seventh year if we do not plant or harvest our crops?’ I will send you such a blessing in the sixth year that the land will yield enough for three years.”
Jesus talked to his disciples in similar terms. His proclamation of the Jubilee may have troubled them because they had abandoned their land and their boats by the lake to follow him. “So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (Matt. 6:31–33).
Such an exhortation might be misunderstood as encouraging laziness, but in the framework of expecting God’s kingdom (of which the Jubilee was to be a foretaste) it can easily be explained. One can interpret Jesus’ exhortation as follows: “If you work six days (or six years) with all your heart you can count on God to take care of you and your loved ones. Let your land lie fallow without fear. Just as he does for the birds of the sky, who neither sow nor reap nor gather away in barns, God will also provide for your needs. The Gentiles who ignore the Sabbath are no richer than you are.”
Remittance of Debt and Liberation of Slaves
Unlike the preceding regulation, the second and third jubilean provisions are not marginal, but central to Jesus’ teaching, even to his theological vision.
The Lord’s Prayer, which sums up Jesus’ thinking about prayer, contains the following request: “Forgive (or remit) us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors.” Several versions translate this passage incorrectly as: “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” In reality, the Greek opheilema means a money debt, a sum owed, in the material sense of the word.2 Jesus is not vaguely recommending that we forgive those who have created problems for us. No, he is instructing us to forgive sins, which includes completely canceling the debts of those who owe us money, that is, to practice the Jubilee.
The material connotation of the word “debts” in the Lord’s Prayer was so obvious that Jesus thought it fitting to add a commentary to the prayer, to explain that the words concerning the debts also applied to “trespasses” in general: “For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their sins [the term he uses here is paraptoma, or transgression], your Father will not forgive your sins” (Matt. 6:14–15).
Thus, the Lord’s Prayer is truly jubilean. In this context, Jesus’ listeners understood it to mean: “The time has come for God’s people to cancel all the debts that bind the poor because their debts to God have also been cancelled.” Jesus was setting up a rigorous equation between practicing the Jubilee and the grace of God. Although he was not otherwise a legalist and unhesitatingly forgave even prostitutes and people of ill repute, Jesus was very strict on this one point: only he who grants forgiveness can be forgiven. God’s aphesis toward you is in vain if you do not practice aphesis toward others.3
The parable of the unmerciful servant and the parable of the unjust steward both further clarify Jesus’ thought on this point. The first expresses the strictness of the “equation” of the Lord’s Prayer: no mercy for him who has none (Matt. 18:21–35).
Why has this parable been detached from its sociological background? Why has it been understood as a rather pale portrayal of the forgiveness of sins granted by God to those who forgive their brothers? In fact, its sorry hero was almost certainly a real person, a Galilean peasant whose name was probably known to Jesus’ disciples. He had been a beneficiary of the proclamation of the Jubilee, having been granted forgiveness by God. All his debts had been cancelled, though they were enormous: 10,000 talents (approximately ten million dollars!). This astronomical figure expresses the debtor’s insolvency toward the prince.
We now know how Galilean peasants who had been free proprietors before Jesus’ time had been forced into slavery by their progressive indebtedness. To a large extent, Herod the Great was to blame for this situation. He had overburdened the people with taxes and expropriated the recalcitrant proprietors.