Regulations
The biblical regulations concerning the Jubilee year form part of the Holiness Code, which appears in the Torah as part of the collections of laws given on Mount Sinai or Mount Horeb. According to these regulations, the Jubilee was to be sounded once 49 years had been counted, raising an ambiguity over whether the Jubilee was within the 49th year, or followed it as an intercalation in the 7 year sabbatical cycles; scholars and classical rabbinical sources are divided on the question.
The biblical requirement is that the Jubilee year was to be treated like a Sabbatical year, with the land lying fallow, but also required the compulsory return of all property to its original owners or their heirs, except the houses of laymen within walled cities, in addition to the manumission of all Israelite indentured servants.
The biblical regulations state that the land was to rest a "Sabbath" when the Children of Israel came to the land God was giving them Israel. The Seder Olam Rabbah (second century AD), stated that this verse meant that the counting was not to start until after the Israelites had gained control of Canaan, which the Seder Olam, based upon received tradition, placed at 14 years after their entry into the land. This interpretation has been largely adopted in later rabbinic scholarship. One reason for this interpretation of the Levitical text was that if counting started before the land was completely conquered, it would require the Israelites to return the land to the Canaanites within 50 years; similar nationalistic concerns about the impact of the Jubilee on land ownership have been raised by Zionist settlers. From a legal point of view, the Jubilee law effectively banned sale of land as fee simple, and instead land could only be leased for no more than 50 years. The biblical regulations go on to specify that the price of land had to be proportional to how many years remained before the Jubilee, with land being cheaper the closer it is to the Jubilee.
Read more about this topic: Jubilee (biblical)
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