Jubilee: Real or Ideal?

Many scholars have concluded that the Jubilee legislation of Leviticus 25 is an idealized portrait of an institution that Israel never practiced. 

In a 2003 essay in Vetus Testamentum, Lee Casperson takes issue with this viewpoint: “There are extensive parallels in the ancient Near East, long predating the entry of the Israelites into Canaan, and there may be no fundamental reason why the activities associated with the jubilee could not actually have occurred” (286).

Casperson’s main argument, though, has to do with the connections of temple and jubilee. He suggests that Solomon’s original construction of the temple was associated with a Jubilee, and speculates that “Solomon ought also to have declared a cancellation of debts and freeing from bondage” (291). He lays out a chronology of temple-repair projects to argue that “all temple construction and repair projects between 1000 B.C. and 500 B.C. may have been timed to commence during jubilee years. A total of five such projects have been identified. The first of these seems to be compatible with the jubilee interpreta- tion, and three others may be in exact agreement. A popular date for the remaining temple project of Josiah is off from the corresponding postulated jubilee year by about four years, and a reconsideration of that chronology may be worthwhile. It seems unlikely that this level of agreement between the five known projects and a forty-nine year calendar model could happen by coincidence, and ancient Near Eastern parallels increase the plausibility of such a jubilee correlation” (296).

Though Casperson doesn’t draw any theological conclusions, his study caries some significant implications. It may throw some light, for instance, on Jesus’ use of Isaiah’s jubilee announcement (Luke 4, quoting Isaiah 61, alluding to Leviticus 25): Jesus is the “Son of David,” the new Solomon who comes to build a new house of God. Manumission and debt cancellation are aspects of Jesus’ temple-repair project.

(Lee W. Casperson, “Sabbatical, Jubilee, and the Temple of Solomon,” Vetus Testamentum 53 [2003’ 283-96).