Bible Commentaries

The sabbatical year and the year of Jubilee belong to that great sabbatical system which runs through the religious observances of the Law, but rest upon moral rather than upon formally religious ground. It is not, therefore, without reason that they are here set apart from the set times which fell strictly within the sphere of religious observances.

Vineyard - Rather, fruit-garden. The Hebrew word is a general one for a plantation of fruit-trees.

A sabbath of rest - See Leviticus 23:3 note. The express prohibition of sowing and reaping, and of pruning and gathering, affords a presumption in favor of the sabbatical year beginning, like the year of Jubilee Leviticus 25:9, in the first month of the civil year Leviticus 23:24, the seventh of the sacred year, when the land was cleared of the crops of the preceding year.

The great material advantage of the institution must have been the increased fertility of the soil from its lying fallow one year out of seven, at a time when neither the rotation of crops nor the art of manuring were understood. It must also have kept up a salutary habit of economy in the storing of grain. Compare Genesis 41:48-56. Its great spiritual lesson was that there was no such thing as absolute ownership in the land vested in any man, that the soil was the property of Yahweh, that it was to be held in trust for Him, and not to be abused by overworking, but to be made the most of for the good of every creature which dwelt upon it.

Vine undressed - That is, "unpruned"; literally "Nazarite vine", the figure being taken from the unshorn locks of the Nazarite. Numbers 6:5.

The sabbath of the land shall be meat for you - That is, the produce of the untilled land (its "increase," Leviticus 25:7) shall be food for the whole of you in common, rich and poor without distinction Exodus 23:11.

The land was to be divided by lot among the families of the Israelites when the possession of it was obtained. Numbers 26:52-56; Numbers 33:54, etc. At the end of every seventh sabbatical cycle of years, in the year of Jubilee, each field or estate that might have been alienated was to be restored to the family to which it had been originally allotted.

Leviticus 25:8

Seven sabbaths of years - seven weeks of years.

Cause the trumpet of the jubile to sound - Rather, cause the sound of the cornet to go through (the land). The word jubile does not occur in this verse in the Hebrew. The trumpet is the shofar שׁפר shôphār, i. e. the cornet (rendered "shawm" in the Prayer-Book version of Psalm 98:7), either the horn of some animal or a tube of metal shaped like one. As the sound of the cornet (see Leviticus 25:10 note) was the signal of the descent of Yahweh when He came down upon Sinai to take Israel into covenant with Himself Exodus 19:13, Exodus 19:16, Exodus 19:19; Exodus 20:18, so the same sound announced, at the close of the great day of atonement, after the Evening sacrifice, the year which restored each Israelite to the freedom and the blessings of the covenant.

The fiftieth year - The Jubilee probably coincided with each seventh sabbatical year, and was called the fiftieth, as being the last of a series of which the first was the preceding Jubilee.

A jubile - Commonly spelled jubilee. The original word first occurs in Exodus 19:13, where it is rendered "trumpet," margin "cornet." It most probably denotes the sound of the cornet, not the cornet itself, and is derived from a root, signifying to flow abundantly, which by a familiar metaphor might be applied to sound.