John Sietze Bergsma, «The Jubilee: A Post-Exilic Priestly Attempt to Reclaim Lands?», Vol. 84 (2003) 225-246

The article examines the hypothesis that the jubilee legislation of Lev 25 was a post-exilic attempt on the part of returning Judean exiles — particularly the priests — to provide legal justification for the reclamation of their former lands. This hypothesis is found to be dubious because (1) the jubilee did not serve the interests of the socio-economic classes that were exiled, and (2) Lev 25 does not show signs of having been redacted with the post-exilic situation in mind. A comparison with Ezekiel’s vision of restoration points out the differences between Lev 25 and actual priestly land legislation for the post-exilic period.

        However, according to Jacob Milgrom, Gottwald apparently no longer advocates this position¹⁰.

        Nonetheless, this stream of interpretation has apparently become powerful enough to sway Klaus Grünwaldt¹¹, Francesco Bianchi¹², and perhaps the greatest scholar of the jubilee, Robert G. North, who has recently revised his original settlement-era dating of the jubilee legislation¹³:

[We] feel securely within the competent majority in claiming that the Jubilee-decree itself was the last part of Lev 25 to be composed, near the end of the Exile and in view of repossessing Judah [sic] lands, though quite possibly retrieving a similar proposal from as early as the Joshua-settlement era¹⁴.

        Most of these scholars are somewhat vague about how the jubilee legislation would have functioned practically in a land dispute between