Jubilee: A Rallying Cry for Today’s Oppressed - The BAS Library
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Home > Magazines > Bible Review > April 1997

Jubilee: A Rallying Cry for Today’s Oppressed

The laws of the Jubilee year offer a blueprint for bridging the gap between the have and have-not nations.

By Jacob Milgrom

Last spring I witnessed the unfurling of the flag of the Jubilee. The flag was a vivid symbolic reminder of the biblical year of redemption, and its unfurling took place during the Jewish-Christian Symposium on the Jubilee sponsored by the World Council of Churches, in Bossey, Switzerland. Present were 32 representatives from 15 countries, including India, Uganda, Brazil, the Philippines and Indonesia. I single out the Third World nations because, first, I was enabled to feel, even vicariously, their people’s pain and suffering and, second, because I witnessed a vivid demonstration that their hopes for remedial action are expressed […]

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Endnotes

1.

Jacob Milgrom, The Book of Numbers (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1950), pp. 219, 480–82.

2.

Moshe Weinfeld, “The Sabbatical Year and Jubilee in the Pentateuchal Laws and their Ancient Near Eastern Background” in The Law in the Bible in Its Environment, ed. Timo Veijola (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht), pp. 39–62.

3.

Dietz O. Edzard, The Near East: Early Civilizations, ed. Jean Bottero, et al., trans. R.F. Tannenbaum (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1965), p. 225.

4.

Yonah Bar-Maoz, “The ‘Misharum’ Reform of King Ammisaduga” in Researches in Hebrew and Semitic Languages (Tel Aviv: Bar-Ilan, 1980), pp. 40–74.

5.

U.N. Human Development Report (1993), p. 37.

6.

U.N. Report, p. 45.

7.

U.N. Report, p. 30.

8.

For the range of rabbinic views see H|anoch Albeck in Seder Zera’im (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1957), p. 383 (Hebrew).