Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 325 · November 21
The Fiftieth Year
“And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubile unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family.”
A bell was ordered from London in 1751 for the Pennsylvania State House, and the men who ordered it chose the inscription: Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof, with chapter and verse cast into the metal beside it. It cracked, was recast in Philadelphia, and for eighty years nobody called it the Liberty Bell. Abolitionists took it up in the 1830s and the name comes from them.
The verse on the bell is a piece of economic legislation. Leviticus 25 counts seven sabbaths of years unto thee, seven times seven years, sounds a trumpet on the day of atonement, and then does something to the property market. Ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family. Land goes back to the family that lost it. Debt slaves go home. Nobody sows that year.
It is not a sentiment, and the chapter proves that by telling you how to price a field. According to the multitude of years thou shalt increase the price thereof, and according to the fewness of years thou shalt diminish the price of it. Every sale was quoted with the countdown built in, because nobody was selling land, only the harvests left before it went back. One bad decade could not finish a family.
Now the hard part. No passage in the Old Testament records a jubilee kept. What is recorded is the one attempt at something like it: Zedekiah proclaimed liberty for Hebrew slaves in a besieged city, the owners obeyed, and then took it back. But afterward they turned, and caused the servants and the handmaids, whom they had let go free, to return. The answer came in their own vocabulary. Behold, I proclaim a liberty for you, saith the LORD, to the sword, to the pestilence, and to the famine.
A law can be cast in metal, quoted at ceremonies, and admired for two centuries by people with no intention of returning anything. The warning is not about a bell. The land got its rest in the end, while the people who owed it were in Babylon, and Chronicles reports that with no comfort attached: as long as she lay desolate she kept sabbath.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 325 is Rain in Due Season (Deuteronomy 11:14).