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.

seven gaunt ones, also seven plump ears of grain and seven blighted ones. Alluded to is the combination of the seven years of plenty and the seven years of famine, precisely the combination that the lawgiver focuses on in his seven Sabbatical years and the seven times seven-year periods culminating with the year of the Jubilee.

        If we ask ourselves what came first, the dreams or the legend of the famine in Egypt and Joseph’s role in it, the answer has to be the alleged history. The dreams will have been formulated in response to some original outline of that history. From a rational viewpoint it is just not likely either that the dreams and the history belong together originally, or that the dreams did indeed generate the history. When the lawgiver constructs his laws about the Sabbatical and Jubilee years on the basis of the Joseph story, he engages in a process as sophisticated as the one that integrated the dreams into the story³².

        In a recent study, Moshe Weinfeld claims that the contents of the laws about the Sabbatical and Jubilee years are "rooted in the reality of the Ancient Near East, but are permeated with idealistic-utopian elements"³³. What he means is that the kinds of relief for the indigent that are laid out in Leviticus 25 can be duplicated, more or less, in Near Eastern sources. He suggests that in a remote period in ancient Israel the institution of the Jubilee had a social reality in "communal tribal society"³⁴. It continued to exist but experienced breakdown because of changing economic circumstances. In a decidedly deteriorated form it re-emerged with royal edicts of the type familiar to us from Mesopotamia, Egypt, Persia, and Greece: proclamations that released debts and restored property. What the biblical authors did was to preserve in theory the substance of the supposedly ancient laws about the Jubilee and the release of debts and idealistically attribute the proclamations to the Israelite god because Israel’s religion had an ethical character not matched in, for example, Mesopotamian religion³⁵.

        There is much that is speculative about Weinfeld’s sketch of a biblical institution. There may also be an apologetic undercurrent,