Parashat Behar contains the commandment of the jubilee year introduced, famously, with the verse inscribed on the Liberty Bell.
¹⁰ And you shall hallow the fiftieth year and you shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you: you shall return, every one of you, to your property and every one of you to your family… ¹³ In this year of jubilee you shall return, every one of you, to your property.
[Perkins, Pheme. The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha: New Revised Standard Version (Page 179). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.]
This commandment is to be observed:
“When you come into the land that I give you…” (Lev 25:2) i.e. into the land that God has promised to Israel.
While there are differences of interpretation regarding the exact boundaries of the land given by God to the Israelites, Chapter 34 of the Book of Numbers provides an account of its boundaries and lists those individuals who are commanded to supervise the division among the tribes. That Chapter is also introduced by the phrase:
“34 The Lord spoke to Moses, saying: ² Command the Israelites, and say to them: When you enter the land of Canaan (this is the land that shall fall to you for an inheritance, the land of Canaan, defined by its boundaries),
Perkins, Pheme. The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha: New Revised Standard Version (Page 241-242). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
In general, the land is to be divided among the tribes according to a population-based formula, although there are adjustments and exceptions provided for the Levites, for instance, and for the tribes that chose to remain east of the Jordan.
It is important to note that, while Lev 25:13 uses the term achuzato, for “(his) possession” when specifying the “return” in the jubilee year other passages make it clear that the sense of the commandment is more specific.
It is not simply a person’s “possession” that he is to return to; it is his ancestral or inherited possession. The phrase achuzat avotav (the possession of his fathers/ancestors, Lev 25:41), variations of the phrase achuzat nachala (an inherited possession) or simply nachala (inheritance) are used in multiple references to the land, its apportionment and the rights to it of succeeding generations.
The case of the daughters of Zelophehad (Numbers 36) makes clear the importance of the rights of descendants to inherit the land of their forebears. And helps introduce another key point.
Rabbi Hertz, in his commentary on mechanics of the jubilee makes the point clearly:
“In this way the original equal division of the land was restored. The permanent accumulation of land in the hands of a few was prevented, and those whom fault or misfortune had thrown into poverty were given a ‘second chance’…His children thus enjoyed the same advantage of a ‘fair start’ as their father before them.” (Hertz, Pentateuch and Haftorahs, p533)
The unspoken but clear assumption here is that it is the same land originally given the people…
But, importantly, no more than that.
The description of the land given to Israel and the procedures for its use and succession are of critical importance to our text because that’s all the land Israel is to have!
Hertz’ comment above, his pointing out that it represented the “moralization of property” and the more contemporary discussions about the eco-consciousness that the system of the sabbatical and jubilee years demonstrate are important and instructive; but my interest has been drawn in another direction this year.
The Oxford University Press publishes a wonderful series of books on diverse subjects under its “Very Short Introduction” imprint. I was reading recently the volume on the Koran by Michael Cook. In a discussion on what is known as the Koran’s “sword verse”, Cook writes:
“The Koran has much to say about the treatment of false belief, but the traditional Muslim scholars saw the core of it in two verses. The first they dubbed ‘the sword verse’:
‘Then, when the sacred months are drawn away, slay the polytheists wherever you find them, and take them, and confine them, and lie in wait for them at every place of ambush. But if they repent, and perform the prayer, and pay the alms, then let them go their way; God is All-forgiving, All-compassionate. (Q9:5)’
In other words, you should kill the polytheists unless they convert. A ‘polytheist’ (mushrik) is anyone who makes anyone or anything a ‘partner’ (sharīk) with God; the term extends to Jews and Christians, indeed to all unbelievers.
Such a prescription (writes Cook) for dealing with people outside one’s own religious community is considerably gentler than, for example, the stipulation in the Biblical law of war that ‘of the cities of these people, which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth’ (Deut. 20:16).
(emphasis mine)
Cook, Michael. The Koran: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (Kindle Locations 606-614). OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition.
Cook is an eminent scholar of Islam and an acclaimed interpreter of its history and philosophy but his public biography does not suggest a deep background in Judaism or rabbinic literature. I think he deserves the benefit of the doubt that he is unaware of Jewish traditional discussions and analyses of the laws of war found in Deuteronomy 20. The conclusion, for instance, that, even in the case of the seven nations, an offer of peace had to be extended and refused before war commenced, would perhaps not be known to him.
But Cook’s implication that the “sword verse” and similar Koranic direction regarding relations with non-Muslims should be viewed somehow as humane when compared to “the war verse” he cites from Deuteronomy, suggests a clearly biased view, in my opinion.
First, the Israelites clearly did not abide by, or adhere to, the instructions of Deuteronomy 20 in their actual entry into and conquest of the lands promised. In fact, much of the later Biblical canon addresses issues that arise from their failure to do that. The facts of intermarriage, religious syncretism and adoption of the ways of the seven nations, are made very clear in the books of the Prophets and the Writings. Cook certainly has access to those texts and appears to ignore them.
Additonally, there is substantial conversation in Talmudic sources regarding the conditions required to justify war and the restrictions on leaders who are either too quick to wage war or too hesitant. These conversations among the Jewish religious leaders of the day and their influence over the civil authorities of the community had been codified and were well known before Mohammed was even born. These, too, are available to anyone seeking an understanding of the Jewish attitude towards war and geographic expansionism.
On the other hand, the Sira — the life of Mohammed — as well as the Koran itself, makes it clear that Islam did act in accordance with “the sword verse”. The slaughter of Jews after the Battle of the Trench, and the enslavement of their wives and children is but one example among many.
The comparison made by Cook is, at best, ill-informed.
But back to the jubilee.
The laws of jubilee, and specifically of return to one’s ancestral land, act to confine the Israelites’ physical rule within the geographic boundaries of the land identified by God as theirs.
It is true that the laws of war in Deuteronomy 20 do not preclude the Israelites from conflict with and conquest of peoples other than those of the seven nations, but the rules attached to such discretionary wars are quite different from those set down for obligatory wars and those rules acted to substantially inhibit, not to foster, expansionism.
While there was some land conquered by Israelites in discretionary war (under King David, for example) it was neither substantial not long-held. And those discretionary wars were not undertaken to spread the Israelite religion.
The clear and unambiguous language of the Hebrew Bible acts to define and restrict the land that the Israelites are to hold. And it is the permanence of possession and habitation within that defined area that the Hebrew Bible prescribes.
The jubilee acts as the “re-set button” returning everyone to his/her ancestral land within that defined area.
Issues of social justice and equity typically dominate comments on the jubilee year. And discussion of those issues is clearly appropriate and important.
But there is another important implication as well.
The commandment of jubilee acts to restrict any long-range motives of geographic expansionism or adventure. The language of the Torah in this matter is not language of permission. That is: the clear sense of the language is not that each can return to his ancestral holdings but that each must return.
If the Israelites were to extend their influence much beyond the boundaries of the land given them, it would therefore have to be by the spread of ideas and by commerce; by cooperating with and providing services to peoples in other lands; not by conquering them.
And that, in fact, is precisely what history suggests.
The spread of Islam in the days after Mohammed moved to Medina and began the expansion of his power, was just the opposite.
Islam was spread by means of a calculated and unremitting political and military enterprise that only after physical conquest turned to the imposition of religious rule and conversion of the conquered.
The influence of Islam was not spread on the basis of ideas, teaching, cooperation and commerce. It was spread by force of arms.
One analysis of the 13-year period after Mohammed’s move to Medina, during which Islam overtook much of western Asia and the Middle East and the entire Arab population, found that Mohammed and his associates were involved in an act of warfare of some sort on average every 6 weeks.
Every 6 weeks for 13 years there was a battle or a skirmish or an incursion, or some other type of offensive military action.
Islam was religiously supercessionist and geographically expansionist. But it was the geographic expansion that consumed the bulk of energy, resources and attention. The sword verse makes the religious choice clear: submit or die.
To suggest, as Cook does, that the territorial adventures of the Israelites, and their treatment of the peoples they were to dispossess, should be seen as less humane than the behavior prescribed in the sword verse of the Qur’an is disingenuous.
The commandment of the jubilee year acted to inhibit geographic expansionism and, in doing so, it acted to cultivate the capacity of the Israelites to deal with other nations and cultures in a way that furthered their interests by nonviolent means.
The call to the Israelites in the jubilee was a call to t’shuvah by the ram’s horn, not a battle cry with sword held high.
©Charles R. Lightner