Leviticus 25 Bible study: Proclaim liberty

The chapter opens, "When you come into the land which I give you, then the land shall keep a Sabbath to the LORD" (25:2). In Hebrew, "keep" there is shavat, spelled like the verb in "he rested on the seventh day" (Genesis 2:2) and listed under the same Strong's number (H7673). Brown-Driver-Briggs gives this use its own entry, a verb made from "Sabbath": "keep, observe (sabbath)". It is the land that rests. "You shall sow your field six years" (25:3), "but in the seventh year there shall be a Sabbath of solemn rest for the land" (25:4): no sowing, no pruning, no reaping of what grows of itself (25:4-5). Yet the resting land still feeds everyone: "for yourself, for your servant, for your maid, for your hired servant, and for your stranger, who lives as a foreigner with you" (25:6), and "For your livestock also, and for the animals that are in your land" (25:7). Exodus had given the seventh year "that the poor of your people may eat" (Exodus 23:11).

Leviticus 25:10→leads toLuke 4:19

Leviticus says, "proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants" (25:10), in the fiftieth year. Isaiah uses the same two Hebrew words, "to proclaim liberty to the captives", and goes on, "to proclaim the year of the LORD’s favor" (Isaiah 61:1-2). In the synagogue at Nazareth Jesus read that passage, "to proclaim release to the captives" (Luke 4:18), "and to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord" (Luke 4:19). Neither Isaiah nor Luke names the jubilee or Leviticus 25, so reading them together is an interpretation. Some hear in Isaiah's "year" and "liberty" the jubilee's year of release, now announced by Jesus. Others note that Jeremiah uses the same words, "to proclaim liberty" (Jeremiah 34:8), for freeing Hebrew servants under the law of release "At the end of seven years" (Jeremiah 34:14), and read Isaiah 61 and Luke 4 without tying them to the jubilee.

יוֹבֵלyovelsay yo-VEL

Brown-Driver-Briggs: "ram, ram's horn, cornet". Strong's: "the blast of a horn (from its continuous sound)", "hence, the instrument itself and the festival thus introduced". Its first use is at Sinai: "When the trumpet sounds long, they shall come up to the mountain" (Exodus 19:13), and at Jericho it is "the ram’s horn" (Joshua 6:5). Here it names the fiftieth year: "It shall be a jubilee to you" (25:10). The horn blown in 25:9 is a different word, shofar. The chapter uses yovel 14 times, and Leviticus 20 of the word's 27 in the Hebrew Bible. The WEB uses "jubilee" only in Leviticus 25 and 27 and in Numbers 36:4.