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.”
In 1751 a bell was ordered from London for the Pennsylvania State House. The men who ordered it chose the words to put on it: "Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof," with the chapter and verse cast into the metal beside them. The bell cracked and was recast in Philadelphia. For about eighty years nobody called it the Liberty Bell. Then, in the 1830s, people working to end slavery took it up as their symbol, and the name comes from them.
The verse on the bell is a law about money and land. Leviticus 25 tells Israel to count "seven sabbaths of years unto thee, seven times seven years." Then a trumpet sounds on the day of atonement, and the fiftieth year does something to the land 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. People who had sold themselves into service because of debt go home. Nobody sows a crop that year.
This was more than a nice feeling, and the chapter proves it 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 had the countdown built into the price. Nobody was really selling land; they were only selling the harvests left before it went back. That meant one bad decade could not finish off a family for good.
Now comes the hard part. No passage in the Old Testament records a jubilee being kept. What it does record is one attempt at something like it. King Zedekiah proclaimed liberty for Hebrew slaves while Jerusalem was under siege. The owners obeyed, and then went back on it: "But afterward they turned, and caused the servants and the handmaids, whom they had let go free, to return." God answered them in their own words: "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 centuries by people who have no intention of giving anything back, and that warning is aimed at people like us. In the end the land got its rest anyway, while the people who owed it that rest were captives in Babylon. Chronicles reports it plainly: "as long as she lay desolate she kept sabbath." Yet the very next verse tells how the LORD "stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia" to send His people home. Even after they had refused to set anyone free, God proclaimed liberty to them.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 325 is Rain in Due Season (Deuteronomy 11:14).