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Westminster Theological Journal 68 (2006): 71-83
The Talmud’s Two Jubilees
and Their Relevance to the Date of the Exodus
The Babylonian Talmud mentions two, and only two, occasions for the observance of a
Jubilee. The question of whether there actually were Jubilees at the times specified, or
whether these passages reflect a later projection of ideas back into a previous age, is a
matter of some importance. It bears on the question of when Leviticus was written,
because many scholars date the composition of Leviticus, particularly of the so-called
“H” or Holiness Code that established the Jubilee and Sabbatical years (Lev 17–26), to
exilic or post-exilic times. An exilic or post-exilic date for the Holiness Code would be
difficult to maintain if it could be shown that Sabbatical years or Jubilee years were
observed before the exile, since the observation of such rituals in the ancient Near East
always presupposes their written codification.
One way to evaluate whether the two Jubilees mentioned in the Talmud were genuine
historical events is to examine the dates assigned to them. The two passages are in b.
‘Arak. 12a, mentioning a Jubilee in the time of Ezekiel, and in b. Meg. 14b, mentioning
a Jubilee in the time of Josiah. The ‘Arakin passage is as follows: “Is it not written: In
the five and twentieth year of our captivity, in the beginning of the year, in the tenth day
of the month, in the fourteenth year after that the city was smitten. Now which is the
year the beginning of which falls on the tenth of Tishri? Say: This is the jubilee year.”
1
The argument the Talmud presents here is that the verse quoted (Ezek 40:1) gave the
day as both “the beginning of the year” (Rosh HaShanah or New Year’s Day) and also
as the tenth of the month. Only in a Jubilee year did Rosh HaShanah move from its
customary place on the first of Tishri to the tenth of the month. Consequently this verse
associates Ezekiel’s vision with the beginning of a Jubilee year. The reason for the shift
of nine days in the observance of the New Year is explained in tractate b. Rosh Hash.
8b: “
AND FOR JUBILEE YEARS
. [Is the New Year for] Jubilees on the first of Tishri?
Surely [the New Year for] Jubilees is on the tenth of Tishri, as it is written . . .” The
tractate then begins a citation from Lev 25:9, 10, which says, “You shall then sound a
ram’s horn abroad on the tenth day of the seventh month; on the day of atonement you
shall sound a horn all through your land. You shall thus consecrate the fiftieth year and
proclaim a release through the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you,
and each of you shall return to his own property, and each of you shall return to his
family” (
NASB
). Since the Jubilee year was to begin on the Day of Atonement (the tenth
of Tishri), this explains why the Talmud says that the only time that Rosh HaShanah
was at the same time as the Day of Atonement was in a Jubilee year. Therefore the text
of Ezek 40:1 indicates that the date of Ezekiel’s vision marked the beginning of a
Jubilee.
1
The Babylonian Talmud (London: Soncino, 1948).
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Ezekiel gives two methods of dating his vision in the text cited. The first is that it was in
the twenty-fifth year of the captivity (or exile) that he shared with Jehoiachin. The
Babylonian Chronicle says that Jehoiachin was captured on Adar 2 of 597
BC
, so that
his first year of captivity was in the Judean regnal year that began in Tishri of 598
BC
.
2
His twenty-fifth year of captivity was therefore the year beginning in Tishri of 574
BC
.
3
Ezekiel also dates his vision to fourteen years after the fall of the city. The Hebrew
preposition in this phrase is rx), “after,” which implies that a full fourteen years had
elapsed since the city fell to Nebuchadnezzar, as can be shown by the use of this
preposition in the genealogies of Gen 5 and elsewhere in Scripture. The capture took
place in the month of Tammuz in the summer of 587
BC
, which was in the year that
began in Tishri (the fall) of 588
BC
by Judean court reckoning. Fourteen years later was
the year beginning in Tishri of 574
BC
, in agreement with Ezekiel’s other date-formula.
It is of some interest that Ezekiel’s two date-formulas cannot be reconciled if we
assume that Ezekiel used Nisan years, or if we assume that the city fell in 586
BC
. Both
these possibilities are ruled out by Ezekiel’s double method of dating.
4
The other Talmudic passage indicating a Jubilee is in b. Meg. 14b, where there is a
discussion of whether Jeremiah was present when Huldah the prophetess was consulted
by the representatives of King Josiah (2 Kgs 22:14). The Megillah passage is as
follows: “R. Johanan said: Jeremiah was not there, as he had gone to bring back the ten
tribes. Whence do we know that they returned?—Because it is written, For the seller
shall not return to that which is sold. Now is it possible that after the Jubilee had ceased
the prophet should prophesy that it will cease? The fact is that it teaches that Jeremiah
brought them back.” The modern footnote explaining this passage reads “So that in that
year they commenced counting years again for the Jubilee.” The reasoning behind this
seems altogether obtuse to a modern reader, but the idea is that Jeremiah was not there
because he was bringing back the ten tribes from captivity, and when they came back
the counting for the Jubilees started over again, since according to rabbinic thinking the
Jubilee could not be celebrated unless all twelve tribes were in the land. The text “For
the seller shall not return to that which is sold,” from Ezek 7:13, was cited because it
2
For evidence that Judah measured its regnal years from Tishri, see Edwin Thiele, The Mysterious
Numbers of the Hebrew Kings (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 1981), 51–53, or D. J. A. Clines, “The Evidence
for an Autumnal New Year in Pre-Exilic Israel Reconsidered,” JBL 93 (1974): 22–26.
3
The Hebrew preposition “of” in the phrase “of our captivity” is l, which must be taken in the sense
given here. It never means “after.” By a similar usage in English, when we speak of our first year of
college we mean the time before we had been there a full year.
4
See the discussion of all date-formulas associated with the end of the Judean monarchy in Rodger
Young, “When Did Jerusalem Fall?” JETS 47 (2004): 21–38 (online:
http://etsjets.org/jets/journal/jets.html). Even the expedient of saying that Jehoiachin’s exile began one
month later than when he was taken captive, in Nisan instead of Adar, will not allow Ezekiel’s two date-
formulas to agree with a 586 date for the fall of the city. Ezekiel, as a priest, would have been quite
careful about the designation of dates. We do a disservice to him and to the other writers of Scripture
when we assume that their methods of reckoning time were not exact, and when we impose our ideas of
how they should have counted years on the texts instead of making it our first priority to find out what
system they were using.
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was assumed to pertain to a time a few years later, and it was further assumed that the
reference is to one of the characteristics of a Jubilee year, namely the returning of
individuals to their ancestral property. Rabbi Johanan was arguing that the Jubilees
must have been reestablished under Jeremiah, because otherwise Ezekiel, some time
later, would not have said that they would cease at a future time.
The idea that Jeremiah brought back the ten tribes is of course utterly fantastic. This
notion was introduced to explain how a Jubilee could have been observed in that year.
Since apparently a Jubilee was observed at that time, and since it was assumed that all
twelve tribes had to be in the land in order for there to be a Jubilee, therefore the ten
tribes must have gotten back into the land somehow. The Megillah passage said that this
“teaches that Jeremiah brought them back”—in other words, Jeremiah’s bringing them
back was inferred from the observation that all twelve tribes must have been in the land,
which in turn was inferred from the observation that a Jubilee was observed in the year
that Josiah asked advice of the prophetess Huldah. The whole chain of reasoning is
patently fallacious, but that does not mean that the premise it started from, and which it
was trying to explain, was fallacious. That initial premise was that a Jubilee was
observed at the time specified. The consultation with Huldah took place in the
eighteenth year of Josiah (2 Kgs 22:3), which gives the year for the assumed Jubilee.
5
The faulty reasoning in b. Meg. 14b might tempt us to discard altogether its assumption
of a Jubilee in Josiah’s eighteenth year, even though the Jubilee was the starting place
for the faulty reasoning rather than the conclusion of that reasoning. But there are two
additional arguments that support the passage’s starting premise that there was a Jubilee
at that time. The first argument is that evidence for such a Jubilee is found in a source
older than the Talmud. The second argument is mathematical.
The source older than the Talmud is the Seder ‘Olam, a rabbinic work of the second
century
AD
, attributed by the Talmud (b. Nid. 46b, b. Yebam. 82b) to Rabbi Yose ben
Halaphta, a disciple of the famous Rabbi Akiba. It is widely recognized that the Seder
‘Olam forms the basis of the chronological reckonings of both the Jerusalem and
Babylonian Talmuds. Many of its chronological statements were incorporated in the
Mishnah, which is a body of learning that was memorized by rabbinic scholars after the
destruction of the Second Temple in an attempt to preserve the nation’s traditions.
Between
AD
100 and
AD
500 rabbinic scholars contributed comments, called Gemara, to
explain the Mishnah. These two sources, the Mishnah and the Gemara, were combined
to form the Talmud, of which there are two forms, the Jerusalem Talmud, completed
about
AD
400, and the Babylonian Talmud, completed about
AD
500. The Babylonian
Talmud is the more frequently quoted of these, and a reference to just “the Talmud” can
be taken as referring to that source.
5
The Jewish Encyclopedia (New York and London: Funk and Wagnalls, 1909, 10:607) simplifies and
summarizes the discussion of this passage in the Talmud by saying that “[t]he sixteenth jubilee occurred
in the eighteenth year of Josiah . . .” This is consistent with the modern footnote in the Talmud that states
that counting for the Jubilee began again at that time.
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Anyone reading either of the Talmuds soon recognizes that their general pattern of
presentation is to cite a Scriptural text or a passage from the Mishnah, and then to
present, in the Gemara, the statements of various rabbis who attempt to explain or draw
conclusions from the passage cited. Usually the diverse opinions and disagreements are
presented with no firm conclusion drawn to resolve the issues discussed. As can be seen
from the quoted Megillah passage, these explanations of the selection from the
Scripture or the Mishnah can be highly imaginative. How could anyone believe that
Jeremiah, whose life-story was to be rebuffed by kings, priests, and fellow-villagers,
and whose advice was soundly rejected by all these at each of several crisis points, was
somehow a great leader of men who rallied the ten tribes in their diaspora and
triumphantly brought them back into the land?
The fancifulness of such a Gemara should not obscure the fact that what the Gemara
was trying to explain may have been not at all fanciful. As a generalization, it could be
said that the source that any Gemara was attempting to explain was considered as
authoritative, while the various opinions in the Gemara itself were acknowledged as
speculative. Applying this understanding to the Megillah passage, the points that were
accepted as authoritative were the two Scriptural references cited and the idea that there
was a Jubilee in Josiah’s eighteenth year. The premise of a Jubilee in Josiah’s
eighteenth year apparently arose from the fact that it is mentioned in the Seder ‘Olam,
and the Talmud generally accepts quotations from the Seder ‘Olam as authoritative.
Chapter 24 of the Seder ‘Olam cites 2 Kgs 22:3 referring to the eighteenth year of
Josiah and then says, “In that year, the book of the Torah was found in the Temple and
that year was also the beginning of a Jubilee. In that year had Josiah made repairs to the
Temple.”
6
This explains why the Megillah passage presupposed that there was a Jubilee
at that time: it was trying to reconcile this passage in the Seder ‘Olam with the rabbinic
idea that a Jubilee could not have been celebrated at the time unless all twelve tribes
were in the land. The ‘Arakin passage about a Jubilee shows the source of these
traditions quite plainly, because the discussion there is preceded by three quotations
from Chapter 11 of the Seder ‘Olam.
Before proceeding with the second argument (the mathematical argument) for the
historicity of a Jubilee in Josiah’s eighteenth year, it will be useful to introduce a
convenient way of displaying dates in the Hebrew calendrical system. In order to
6
The most recent translation of the Seder ‘Olam into English is that of Heinrich Guggenheimer, Seder
Olam—the Rabbinic View of Biblical Chronology (Northvale N.J. and Jerusalem: Jason Aronson, 1998).
This phrase about the Jubilee is not in Guggenheimer’s translation, apparently because it was omitted in
some non-European manuscripts. It appears in other translations, and Guggenheimer accepts that the
statement about the Jubilee must have been in the original text of the Seder ‘Olam when he says on p.
224: “Since Josiah had the Temple renovated in the Jubilee year . . .” The reason for the omission in some
manuscripts may have been because it is not possible to reconcile a Jubilee at that time with the time of
the following Jubilee using Rabbi Yose’s non-accession counting. As will be demonstrated shortly, the
impossibility of such reconciliation is an argument in favor of a real Jubilee in the eighteenth year of
Josiah, not a hypothesized Jubilee based on a calculation scheme.
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express the Judean regnal year, which began in the fall month of Tishri, we shall write
the
BC
year in which it began followed by a small “t,” for Tishri. Sabbatical and Jubilee
years may be written in this fashion, since according to the Talmud (b. Rosh Hash. 1a)
Sabbatical and Jubilee years also began in Tishri. A year beginning in Nisan will be
expressed by the
BC
year followed by a small “n,” for Nisan.
7
With this notation, we can
say that Josiah came to the throne in 641t (a date that was established by Edwin
Thiele
8
), and his thirty-one year reign ended in 610t. His eighteenth year, the year that
the Talmud gives for a Jubilee, was therefore 641t – 18 = 623t. This is exactly forty-
nine years before the date of the other Jubilee mentioned in the Talmud, which was 574t
in the notation that has been introduced here.
There is rather weighty evidence from ancient records that the Jubilee cycle was forty-
nine years in length, not fifty years as assumed by most modern commentators. The
Talmud has repeated debates on this issue, with the name of Rabbi Judah associated
with the argument for a forty-nine year cycle (b. ‘Arak. 3c, b. Rosh Hash. 9a). Post-
Talmudic commentators such as Maimonides and Rashi generally settled on a fifty-year
cycle. Sources earlier than the Talmud, however, very strongly indicate that the cycle
was forty-nine years. These sources include the Book of Jubilees (second century
BC
)
and the fragments from Qumran known as 11QMelchizedek or 11QMelch (probably
early first century
AD
).
9
The Book of Jubilees everywhere assumes that the Jubilee cycle
was forty-nine years, and the work would have had no credibility with its intended
audience if people in the second century
BC
thought that the Jubilee cycle was fifty
years. In 11QMelch, the seventy “sevens” of Daniel 9:24 are interpreted as seventy
weeks of years, and these 490 years are then characterized as ten Jubilee periods.
Further historical evidence comes from the practice of the Samaritan community, which
observed a forty-nine year cycle.
10
The well-known animosity between the Jews and the
Samaritans makes this an important independent piece of evidence, because the
Samaritans would not be likely to have been influenced by any late Jewish writings or
practices concerning the Jubilees, but very probably preserved the original tradition in
this matter.
There are other reasons that favor a forty-nine year cycle. The ancient sources that deal
with the Jubilees (the Scriptures, the Babylonian Talmud, and the Seder ‘Olam) always
assumed that the Jubilee cycles and the Sabbatical cycles would be in phase, which
could not have been the case for a cycle length of fifty years unless an extra year were
inserted in the Sabbatical cycles every time a Jubilee occurred, and there is no mention
7
The religious year began in Nisan (Exod 12:2), as did the regnal years of Babylon, Assyria, and the
northern kingdom of Israel. I have elsewhere called this way of expressing dates the “Nisan/Tishri
notation. Notice that with this system, 623n represents a twelve-month period that is six months earlier
than the twelve-month period represented by 623t.
8
Thiele, Mysterious Numbers, 180–81.
9
Jack Finegan, Handbook of Biblical Chronology (rev. ed.; Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1998), 128.
10
A. Neubauer, Chronique Samaritaine (1873), 3, 8 ff., cited in Encyclopedia Judaica (Jerusalem: Keter,
1972), 14 col. 579.
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in these writings of any such extra year. Also, despite some misunderstandings in this
regard, there is no mention anywhere in Scripture of two voluntary fallow years in
succession, which would be required if the Jubilee year were a separate fiftieth year
following the seventh Sabbatical cycle.
11
All these problems are resolved by assuming
that the cycle length was forty-nine years, so that the forty-ninth year was both a
Sabbatical year and a Jubilee. Lev 25:9 says that the Jubilee year was to be announced,
and presumably began, in the seventh month of the forty-ninth year of the Jubilee cycle.
The seventh month is reckoned according to the religious calendar that began in Nisan
in the spring. According to this way of expressing things, the Jubilee really began in
year forty-nine-and-one-half of the cycle. Such terminology is of course foreign to the
Scripture; it is simply called the fiftieth year. The Talmud (b. Rosh Hash. 1a) says that
Sabbatical and Jubilee years both began in Tishri, and so the seventh Sabbatical year
and the Jubilee year began at the same time, on the Day of Atonement of the forty-ninth
year of the cycle.
12
11
Some authors cite Lev 25:21, 22 as evidence for a Sabbatical year followed by a Jubilee year. But these
two verses are only speaking of the Sabbatical cycle. The “eighth year” here is the first year of the next
Sabbatical cycle, just as the “ninth” year is the second year of that cycle. The eighth year could not be a
Jubilee because planting is mentioned for that year, whereas planting and reaping are forbidden for a
Jubilee year (Lev 25:11). Others have imagined that Isa 37:30 and its parallel in 2 Kgs 19:29 refer to a
Sabbatical year followed by a Jubilee year, since the prophecy speaks of two years in succession in which
there would be no harvest. But the first year could not be a Sabbatical year, because in it the people were
allowed to eat “what grows of itself,” for which the Hebrew word is xyps. In Lev 25:5 the reaping of the
xyps is forbidden during a Sabbatical year. Whatever the exact meaning is for this word, its use in
Isaiah’s prophecy and its prohibition in Lev 25:5 means that the first year of the Isaiah and Second Kings
passages could not have been a Sabbatical year. This rules out the possibility that the passage is dealing
with a Sabbatical year followed by a year of Jubilee. The proper understanding of the passage is that the
harvest of the first year had been destroyed by the Assyrians, and the defeat of the Assyrian army came
too late in the year to allow sowing that year. The destruction of the Assyrian host came the night after
the giving of the prophecy (2 Kgs 19:35), so the reason that sowing and reaping were forbidden for the
next year must have been because that year, the second year of the prophecy, was going to be a Sabbatical
year. Isa 37:30 says that in the second year the people could eat the syx#$, a word that only appears here
and in the parallel passage in Second Kings, and which seems to correspond to the Cr)h tb#$, the
“sabbath products of the land,” that were allowed to be eaten in a Sabbatical year in Lev 25:6.
12
A recent study dedicated to the biblical Jubilee also comes to the conclusion that the Jubilee year was
identical to the seventh sabbatical year. See Jean-François Lefebvre, Le Jubilé Biblique: Lv 25 — Exégèse
et Théologie (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003), pp. 154–66. Lefebvre arrives at this
conclusion primarily by a careful examination of the text of Lev 25 and passages related to it in the
Pentateuch, with only a slight consideration of the practical issues involved and no consideration at all of
the arguments from history that have been employed in the present paper. In a carefully reasoned
argument, Lefebvre contradicts other recent studies by showing the unity of the sabbatical and Jubilee
legislation. His reasoning, however, for assigning the sabbatical and Jubilee legislation to the Persian
period (pp. 331–32) could with equal or better logic date the legislation to the period when Israel was
about to take possession of the land of Canaan. The strength of Lefebvre’s work is his literary analysis
and his extensive exploration of the theological import of these laws. One weakness is exemplified in his
statement that “No trace of the observance of the jubilee is detectable either in the Bible or in extra-
biblical literature” (p. 333).
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The mathematical argument to support the authenticity of the two Talmudic dates for a
Jubilee is based on the observation that the dates for the two Jubilees mentioned were
exactly forty-nine years apart, in agreement with these various arguments that establish
a forty-nine year cycle. The calculation methods of the authors of the Talmud, however,
were inadequate to determine that the eighteenth year of Josiah was exactly forty-nine
years before the vision of Ezek 40:1. Talmudic reckoning of regnal years was by the
non-accession method, which means that the last year of a king’s life was counted
twice, once for him and once for his successor, so that one year needs to be subtracted
from the Scriptural years of reign when adding reign lengths to determine elapsed time.
This method of calculation was taken over from the Seder ‘Olam, where the non-
accession method of counting is made explicit in Chapters 4 and 12. Furthermore, the
850 years that Seder ‘Olam assigns to Israel’s time in the land (Chapter 11) can only be
reconciled when non-accession counting is used for all Judean regnal years. This 850-
year figure is accepted in the Talmud (b. Git 88a, b. Sanh. 38a) without question, again
showing the great authority that the Talmud gave to the Seder ‘Olam in chronological
matters.
Using the non-accession years of the Seder ‘Olam and the Talmud, the time between the
eighteenth year of Josiah and Ezekiel’s vision would be thirteen years remaining until
the thirty-first year of Josiah, then zero years for Jehoahaz’s three months,
13
ten years
for Jehoiakim, zero years for Jehoiachin, ten years for Zedekiah, and then fourteen years
to Ezekiel’s vision. The total is 13 + 10 + 10 + 14 = 47 years between the two times that
the Talmud gives for Jubilees, rather than the correct figure of forty-nine years that can
be established by modern scholarship, as anchored to fixed dates from the Babylonian
Chronicle. The evidence therefore is that the Talmud and the Seder ‘Olam did not
establish the date of the Jubilee in the days of Josiah by calculation. The only alternative
that suggests itself and which explains why the time between the two Jubilees is exactly
correct is that the dates of these two Jubilees were from observation—that is the
remembrance of historical events. The years came out correctly because the priests were
actually counting Sabbatical and Jubilee years during these times.
This does not mean that the people in general were practicing the stipulations of the
Jubilee and Sabbatical years, as spelled out in Chapters 25 and 27 of Leviticus. It only
implies that the Levitical priests (Ezekiel was one of them, as was Jeremiah) were
faithful in carrying out their obligation to keep track of the Sabbatical and Jubilee cycles
over the years, whether or not the people chose to obey the commands associated with
those years. As in other Near Eastern societies, it was the duty of the priests to preserve
all calendrical cycles. As long as the priests did this, the system of Sabbatical and
13
That zero years are assigned to both Jehoahaz and Jehoiachin is evident from the 850-year summation
for Israel’s time in the land, which was derived by the adding of Judean reign lengths to the 439 years
from the start of the conquest to the fourth year of Solomon (see 1 Kgs 6:1 [Hebrew] and Josh 5:6). The
Seder ‘Olam implicitly assumed that the reigns of Jehoahaz and Jehoiachin did not cross a New-Year
boundary to begin a new regnal year, which would have been necessary if Judean court scribes were to
assign a reign of one year.
Page 8 of 13
Jubilee years was a marvelous device for measuring the years over a long period of
time. The interlocking nature of the two cycles, with seven Sabbatical cycles making up
one Jubilee cycle, was a means of insuring accuracy throughout the centuries of Israel’s
existence in the land. A lapse of even one year would have been ruled out by the
shortness of the Sabbatical cycle, and the larger Jubilee cycle would have preserved the
correct span of time for long-term measurements. If the priests kept track of the years in
this way, then the system would have exceeded in accuracy even the limmu-lists of the
Assyrians that are usually regarded as the backbone of ancient Near Eastern
chronology. This is perhaps how one of the judges, Jephthah, knew that it was 300 years
from the conquest of the trans-Jordan region to his own day (Judg 11:26). It may also
explain how the author of 1 Kgs 6:1 knew that 479 years had passed from the Exodus to
the laying of the foundation of Solomon’s Temple, so that he could date that latter event
in the 480th year of the Exodus era.
Evidence that the Sabbatical/Jubilee system functioned in this way—as a calendrical
system for keeping track of the years—is found in the Babylonian Talmud. Tractate b.
Sanh. 40a,b says that in the time of the judges the courts made a formal record of an
event (a crime, a contract, etc.) by asking in which Septennate (Sabbatical cycle) of a
Jubilee and in which year of the Septennate an event occurred. This is followed by a
discussion of whether it was necessary to ask in which Jubilee the event happened, with
the conclusion that such a question would not be necessary because a court trial would
only be concerned with recent events, not those that took place in past Jubilee cycles.
According to the Talmud, then, the Jubilee and Sabbatical cycles provided an exact
method of keeping track of the years for legal purposes. Notice that there is no
consideration given here to the possibility that the Septennates could be out of phase
with the Jubilee cycles, as might be expected if the cycle length were fifty years.
The system of dating described in b. Sanh. 40a,b is used in the apocalyptic Book of
Jubilees, usually dated to the second century
BC
. In Jubilees, Adam’s death is said to
have occurred in the sixth year of the seventh Sabbatical period of the nineteenth
Jubilee. This is certainly an imaginative projection of the system back in time, since
Jubilees were not instituted until Israel entered Canaan. It shows, however, that this
concept of dating was known in the second century
BC
. A better example, one that
indicates a real usage as contrasted with the artificial schemata of Jubilees, is taken
from the practice of the Samaritan community. In the fourteenth century
AD
, an editor
of the Samaritans’ Tolidah wrote on his copy of the text that he finished his work in the
sixty-first Jubilee cycle since the entry into Canaan, in the fourth year of the fifth
Sabbatical of that cycle.
14
These examples show that there is nothing at all improbable
in the Talmud’s remark that this kind of reckoning was done in the days of the judges.
14
Encyclopedia Judaica, article “Samaritans,” 14, col. 751. When I inquired of the present-day
Samaritans if they still observe the Jubilee, a member of the community replied that the calculation of the
Jubilee was lost some hundreds of years ago, but that today the priests are making an effort to return to
the year when the calculation was stopped and to start counting again. Another person closely associated
with the community affirmed that the counting would be according to a forty-nine year cycle.
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But did it continue later? Are there any evidences that the priests were marking the
Sabbatical and Jubilee cycles continuously from the time of the judges down to the
Jubilees in the days of Josiah and Ezekiel? There are indeed such evidences, arising
from considerations that are quite independent of those already discussed. The first
consideration has to do with the recognition of a Sabbatical year in the days of
Zedekiah. The relevant passage is Jer 34:8–22, where King Zedekiah proclaimed a
release of all Hebrew indentured servants. Although the original intent of the law for
Hebrew servants was that the servant was to go free at the end of six years of service,
irrespective of when those years started (Deut 15:12), in later years it became
customary to associate the time of release with a Sabbatical year, consistent with the
Sabbatical year being called a year of release (shemitah) in Deut 31:10.
15
In agreement
with this is the observation that Zedekiah released all the slaves at the same time.
Therefore in the eighteenth century, William Whiston asserted that Zedekiah’s
emancipation would have taken place at the beginning of a Sabbatical year,
16
an idea
that resurfaced in the twentieth century in the writings of Cyrus Gordon.
17
Pursuing
this idea, Nahum Sarna used the chronological notes of Jer 34, coupled with a passage
in Ezekiel (Ezek 30:20–21), to date the release to Tishri in the year 588
BC
.
18
The
consequence is that Zedekiah recognized 588t as a Sabbatical year. This has an
immediate correlation with the Jubilees observed in 623t and 574t; since each Jubilee
year was also a Sabbatical year, the year fourteen years prior to 574t must also have
been a Sabbatical year.
19
The consequence is that a Sabbatical year in 588t is consistent
15
The release was from the payment of debt-installments.
16
Wm. Whiston in Josephus, Complete Works (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 1964), Dissertation V, paragraph
46 (p. 703). The original edition was published in 1737.
17
Cyrus Gordon, “Sabbatical Cycle or Seasonal Pattern?” Or 22 (1953): 81.
18
Nahum Sarna, “Zedekiah’s Emancipation of Slaves and the Sabbatical Year” in Orient and Occident:
Essays presented to Cyrus H. Gordon on the Occasion of his Sixty-fifth Birthday (ed. H. Hoffner, Jr.;
Neukirchen: Butzon & Bercker Kevelaer, 1973), 144–45. Although Sarna followed the chronologies of
Thiele and Malamat that gave 586 for the fall of Jerusalem, he correctly determined from Ezek 30:20–21
that the Egyptian relief force had been rebuffed before Nisan of 587, which was his pivotal date in
placing the manumission in the previous fall.
19
From these considerations, it is obvious that a complete list of pre-exilic Sabbatical years may be
constructed, similar to the lists of post-exilic Sabbatical years given by such scholars as Zuckermann and
Wacholder. The Talmud (b. ‘Arak. 32b) and Seder ‘Olam Ch. 30 state that the counting of Sabbatical
years began anew after the exile, in the days of Ezra and Nehemiah (Neh 9:38, 10:28, 29), so there is no
reason to expect that the cycle of post-exilic years would be in agreement with pre-exilic Sabbatical years
when compared to any modern (absolute) calendar. The Seder ‘Olam mentions pre-exilic Sabbatical years
in several passages, but an adequate treatment of Sabbatical and Jubilee years in the Seder ‘Olam has yet
to be published. For now, it could be mentioned that when the Seder ‘Olam uses the 850 years that it
calculated for Israel’s time in the land, its computations of the times for Sabbatical years and Jubilee
years are in error, but this 850-year figure and calculations from it are abandoned for the last two
Jubilees—those in 623t and 574t. The reason for the abandonment of the calculation scheme is that the
dates for these two Jubilees were not subject to calculation or speculation because they were based on
historical remembrance of Jubilees. Rabbi Yose could not move the times for these last two Jubilees even
though their dates conflicted with the calculation scheme he had used earlier in the Seder ‘Olam. The
ones who set these times were Israel’s priests, not the author of Seder ‘Olam.
Page 10 of 13
with the idea that a Jubilee was observed in 574t, and therefore we have another
confirmation that the priests were keeping track of the Sabbatical and Jubilee years at
the end of the Judean monarchy.
20
Evidence that the priests were marking the Sabbatical and Jubilee cycles long before
this, starting from the time of Israel’s entry in the land under Joshua and then continuing
down to the days of Josiah, Zedekiah, and Ezekiel, is found in an incidental reference in
Seder ‘Olam Chapter 11. In this passage, Rabbi Yose cites Ezek 40:1, and then says that
the vision referred to in this verse was “at the beginning of a Jubilee.”
21
It is further
stated that the Jubilee completed seventeen Jubilee periods. Its numbering as the
seventeenth Jubilee is repeated in the Talmud (b. ‘Arak. 12b). Could this also be a
remembered tradition, just as it was argued above that the times of the Jubilees in the
days of Josiah and Ezekiel were based on remembrance, not on a later calculation? In
Lev 25:8, Israel was commanded to count the Sabbatical cycles, and if the Sabbatical
and Jubilee cycles were being used for calendrical purposes as indicated earlier, then the
Jubilee cycles would also have been counted. It should not be considered as anything
remarkable that the priests would have known which Jubilee they were observing.
An easy way to check whether the reported Jubilee number is reasonable is to do the
arithmetic. If the seventeenth Jubilee was due in 574t, then the first Jubilee, sixteen
cycles earlier, was due in 574t + (16 x 49) = 1358t. The year starting in Nisan of 1358
BC
was therefore the forty-ninth year of the first Jubilee cycle, in accordance with Lev
25:8–10. The first year of that cycle, forty-eight years earlier, was the year that began in
Nisan of 1406
BC
. The reference to the seventeenth Jubilee in the Seder ‘Olam and the
Talmud therefore allows us to place the entry into the promised land in Nisan of 1406
BC
. The Exodus, forty years earlier, took place in Nisan of 1446
BC
. This is in exact
agreement with the date that many writers have already inferred for the Exodus, based
on the statement in 1 Kgs 6:1 that Temple construction began in the 480th year of the
20
Gordon, “Sabbatical Cycle” 81, wrote, “The view that the Sabbatical and Jubilee Cycles are late and
artificial legislation can no longer be maintained. Jeremiah (34:12–16) attests the attempted revival of
Sabbatical obligations that had fallen into disuse. It is interesting to note that the snags this attempted pre-
Exilic revival encountered did not include the determining of when the Sabbatical Year fell. This means
the Sabbatical Cycle had all along been in use as a means of reckoning time, even though its obligations
had been neglected because they called for material sacrifices on the part of the people. Accordingly, the
construction of an Anno Mundi chronology in terms of Jubilees and Sabbatical Cycles in the Book of
Jubilees is not a late invention out of thin air, but rather a logical conclusion of institutions harking back
to a pre-Israelite past.”
21
Guggenheimer somewhat inappropriately translates lbwyh tlxtb in the Seder ‘Olam passage as
“[a]t the beginning of a Jubilee period” instead of the simpler and more accurate “at the beginning of a
Jubilee.” It is of some interest that the part of Ezek 40:1 that says it was Rosh HaShanah and also the
tenth of the month is not included in the citation in the Seder ‘Olam passage (only the beginning of the
verse is given—the reader was expected to supply the rest of the verse by memory), and no argument is
given to say that this implies a Jubilee year, as is done in the Talmud. Rabbi Yose simply writes,
apparently based on historical remembrance, that the vision was “at the beginning of a Jubilee.”
Page 11 of 13
Exodus era, which was also Solomon’s fourth year, and also based on Edwin Thiele’s
date of 931n for the death of Solomon and the beginning of the divided monarchies.
22
The correspondence between these two ways of determining the date for the entrance
into Canaan is not a rabbit out of a hat—that is, a sudden wild idea produced to support
a far-fetched theory. Thiele’s date for the beginning of the divided monarchy has stood
the test of time and scholarly scrutiny since it was first published over fifty years ago,
23
and when we measure from Solomon’s death before the seventh month (Tishri) of that
year, then the information contained in 1 Kgs 6:1 yields the same date for the entry into
Canaan as that given by calculating from the Jubilee cycles. How can this be explained
except by accepting the basic hypothesis that 623t really was a Jubilee year, the
sixteenth, and 574t really was the time of the seventeenth Jubilee? In other words, that
these were real events—real at least in the sense that the priests knew to announce the
Jubilees at those times, whether or not the people chose to obey their stipulations.
Certainly no writer before the time of Thiele could firmly establish 1446 as the date of
the Exodus, because the crucial date for the beginning of the divided monarchies was
not properly derived until Thiele’s work in the middle of the twentieth century. This
includes the writers of the Seder ‘Olam and the Talmuds; their calculation methods are
not capable of coming up with this date. The only alternative seems to be that we have
here a direct evidence that counting for the Sabbatical and Jubilee cycles started in 1406
BC
, and that Israel’s priests were faithful over the years in proclaiming the Sabbatical
and Jubilee years, blowing the shofar every forty-nine years to a largely unheeding
people, until that tragic day fourteen years after the destruction of the city when it was
time once again for a Jubilee but it could not be observed because the people were
captives in a foreign land.
22
See Rodger Young, “When Did Solomon Die?” JETS 46 (2003): 589–603 (online:
http://etsjets.org/jets/journal/jets.html) for a slight disagreement with the way these figures are usually
handled. In that study, it is shown that placing Solomon’s death before Tishri of 931n, rather than in the
latter half of that year as assumed by Thiele, resolved problems that Thiele’s chronology encountered
with the reigns of Jehoshaphat, Ahaziah, and Athaliah. Another correction is that the Hebrew expression
for the passage of time in 1 Kgs 6:1 means that 479 years had passed, not 480, since the time of the
Exodus. These two corrections combine to agree with the date of 1446
BC
calculated by most writers who
assume the validity of 1 Kgs 6:1. Those who approach the Scriptures with the viewpoint that they are not
reliable in historical and chronological matters interpret the 480 years of 1 Kgs 6:1 as a stylized number
that was artificially constructed to represent a certain number of generations. The impartial reader should
be able to judge for himself or herself whether such a viewpoint can explain the phenomena presented in
the present article.
23
Among the many scholars who have accepted Thiele’s date of 931n for the beginning of the divided
monarchies are T. C. Mitchell, “Israel and Judah until the Revolt of Jehu (931–841 B.C.),” in Cambridge
Ancient History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982) III, Part 1, 445–46; John H. Walvoord
and Roy B. Zuck, editors, The Bible Knowledge Commentary, Old Testament (Wheaton, Ill.: Victor,
1983), 632; Leslie McFall, “A Translation Guide to the Chronological Data in Kings and Chronicles,”
BSac 148 (1991): 12; Gershom Galil, The Chronology of the Kings of Israel and Judah (Leiden: Brill,
1996), 14; Finegan, Handbook, 246, 249; Kenneth Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 83.
Page 12 of 13
A logical consequence of this is that since the counting for the Sabbatical and Jubilee
cycles started in 1406
BC
, then the laws establishing the counting were in existence in
written form at that time, consistent with the practice of all surrounding nations to
codify in writing all such matters of ritual and legal practice. One explanation that is not
possible is the contention that the Sabbatical and Jubilee cycles were established in
either the exilic or post-exilic period and those who originated the legislation then
claimed that it came from the time of Moses. Such an exilic or post-exilic deception is
ruled out because of 1) the incidental way in which the text of Ezek 40:1 is phrased—it
does not state directly that a Jubilee was due at that time, but the date-formula used
shows that it was a Jubilee year; 2) the evidence for a pre-exilic Sabbatical year in the
time of Zedekiah; 3) the fact that the date for Zedekiah’s Sabbatical year fits the pre-
exilic calendar as derived from the Jubilee cycles; 4) the remembrance of another
Jubilee in the time of Josiah, forty-nine years before Ezekiel’s Jubilee, whereas later
writers could not have calculated this time correctly; 5) the “coincidence” that the times
for the Jubilees in the days of Josiah and Ezekiel would make 1406
BC
, the year of entry
into Canaan based on 1 Kgs 6:1, to be the first year of a Jubilee cycle; and 6) the
extreme coincidence that 1406 would have marked the beginning of the very first cycle
when we take into account the tradition that Ezekiel’s Jubilee was the seventeenth
Jubilee. These last two considerations are also incompatible with any theory that dates
the establishment of the laws of the Sabbatical and Jubilee years as late as the early
monarchic period, or even as late as the latter part of the time of the judges. Alternative
explanations are invited, but at the present time there is only one theory that explains all
these phenomena, and it is that the Book of Leviticus was in Israel’s possession in 1406
BC
.
CONCLUSION
Evidence has been presented to show that the chronological calculations of the Talmud
were incapable of correctly determining the dates of the Talmud’s two Jubilees, so that
these dates must have been based on historical remembrance, not on calculation. That a
Jubilee was due in 574
BC
can also be inferred from a close look at the text of Ezek 40:1
even without reference to the Talmud, but the Talmud is helpful in explaining why the
Hebrew text of this verse implies a Jubilee at that time. The Talmud’s other Jubilee, in
Josiah’s eighteenth year, can be dated to forty-nine years before Ezekiel’s Jubilee,
consistent with evidence from antiquity and with several other considerations that show
that the Jubilee cycle was forty-nine years, not fifty years as assumed by modern
commentators who never faced the practical issues involved in carrying out the
commands that instituted the Sabbatical and Jubilee cycles. Ezekiel’s Jubilee is called
the seventeenth Jubilee in the Talmud and the Seder ‘Olam, which would mean that
counting for the Sabbatical and Jubilee years began at the entry of Israel into Canaan in
1406
BC
, with the Exodus in 1446
BC
. This is in exact agreement with the date of the
Exodus derived from Thiele’s date for the beginning of the divided monarchies and the
chronological note in 1 Kgs 6:1.
It is difficult to imagine how this remarkable
agreement for the year of the Exodus as derived by two independent means of
calculation can be explained by theories that place Israel’s entry into Canaan at any
Page 13 of 13
time other than 1406
BC
, or that deny that Israel, at that time, had in its possession the
legislation of the Book of Leviticus that established the Sabbatical and Jubilee cycles.
Thus the Talmud’s two Jubilees are compatible with a careful exegesis of Ezek 40:1,
and dates that can be calculated for these two Jubilees provide a verification that the
480 years of 1 Kgs 6:1 and the date of the Exodus that can be determined from this
number are historically authentic figures. The elegance of the system of Sabbatical and
Jubilee cycles in providing a long-term calendar for Israel and thereby supplying this
verification should be manifest to anyone except to those who have a fixed commitment
to the subjective source-analyses of the higher critical schools, since such theorizings
start from the a priori presupposition that the Book of Leviticus could not have been
written as early as 1406
BC
.