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.

the detailed laws about how individual Israelites should deal with one another in matters of money, land, and houses are necessary to set up the opposing Israelite legal order to that of the Egyptian²⁵.

        The Genesis narrative itself takes under review both the time of the famine and the later period of Israel’s enslavement to the later pharaoh (Gen 46,4: "I will go down with thee into Egypt and I will also surely bring thee up again"). Its account of how the Israelites, that is, Jacob and his family, fare at the time of the famine in contrast to how the Egyptians fare further illuminates aspects of the laws in Leviticus 25. Whereas the Egyptians become wholly dependent for their livelihood upon the pharaoh, Jacob’s family receives from him a holding in the land of Goshen "in the best of the land" of Egypt (Gen 47,6). The term used for their landholding is hzwx) (Gen 47,11.27). The lawgiver uses the same term when he has the Israelites in the Jubilee year return to their landholdings (Lev 25,10.13.41). Moreover, Jacob and his family are sojourners in Egypt and some of them become hired servants to the pharaoh (Gen 47,4.6). In the law in Lev 25,40 an Israelite who becomes dependent upon another Israelite for his survival serves, not as a slave, but as a hired servant and as a sojourner because they are slaves to their ruler Yahweh.

       That Joseph’s policy of enslavement for the Egyptians should