Calum Carmichael, «The Sabbatical/Jubilee Cycle and the Seven-Year Famine in Egypt», Vol. 80 (1999) 224-239

The comparative method is of limited value in locating the Sabbatical/Jubilee cycle of Leviticus 25 within the framework of similar institutions in the ancient Near East. Not only is the character of the biblical institution distinctively Israelite, but so is the manner in which the Levitical lawgiver devised the entire cycle. The lawgiver formulated rules to ensure that the Israelites do not do what the Egyptians did in their land (Lev 18,3). Borrowing details from the Genesis account of the seven-year famine in Egypt, the lawgiver set out Yahweh’s scheme for his people’s welfare. The scheme stands opposed to the pharaoh’s for the Egyptians at the time of the famine.

service, the Levitical law could have a slave serve for forty-nine years. In effect, those who became slaves just after a Jubilee year would never experience freedom. Contrariwise, Alfonso Tostado, writing in the sixteenth century, points out that if the slave’s service begins close to a Jubilee year he might only serve a year, or even a few months². As for the requirement that Israelites have their ancestral property restored to them at the Jubilee, we can only imagine the enormous upheaval that would result because of the relatively complex economic conditions that the laws take for granted. Roland de Vaux assumes that the laws presuppose conditions during the monarchical period in the history of ancient Israel and states, "The practical implementation of the policy meets with insuperable obstacles"³.

        Little wonder, then, that critics view the laws as "surrealistic" in the sense that they are impossible to observe⁴. Typical are the following responses to the unrealistic aspects of the different rules in Leviticus 25. The lawgiver is given to artificial theorizing and hyperbole⁵. He shows an optimism that "defies the irregularity of drought conditions which occur on the average of every two to four years"⁶. If enforced, these laws would cripple a society’s economy: "Economically a single universal fallow would have been unsound if not disastrous"⁷.

        Some critics come to terms with the baffling nature of the laws by treating them as utopian, although it is hardly the term to use when a law requires deprivation to be visited upon an entire population at regular intervals. They speculate that the lawgiver wanted the Israelites, who were coming back from exile in Babylon, to return to a system of landholdings that supposedly existed before