Leviticus; The Law of Holiness and Grace

The Jubilee III

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Genre: Lessons with Q & A

Lesson: 69

Track: 69

Dictation Name: RR172AL69

Date: Early 70s

Let us worship God. Grace be unto you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ. The Lord is in His holy temple. Let all the earth keep silence before Him. God is a spirit and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth.

Let us pray.

Almighty God our Heavenly Father, we thank Thee that by Thy Word and by Thy Spirit Thou hast set forth before us the way of life and given us a vision of those things which must be and those things which we are to work for. Make us joyful in our calling, that with all our heart, mind and being, we may day by day press forward to do those things which Thou hast ordained, to conquer the powers of darkness and to be more than overcomers through Christ. In His name we pray, amen.

Our scripture is Leviticus 25:25-34 and our subject again for this third time, “The Jubilee.” Leviticus 25:25-34:

“25 If thy brother be waxen poor, and hath sold away some of his possession, and if any of his kin come to redeem it, then shall he redeem that which his brother sold.

26 And if the man have none to redeem it, and himself be able to redeem it;

27 Then let him count the years of the sale thereof, and restore the over plus unto the man to whom he sold it; that he may return unto his possession.

28 But if he be not able to restore it to him, then that which is sold shall remain in the hand of him that hath bought it until the year of jubilee: and in the jubilee it shall go out, and he shall return unto his possession.

29 And if a man sell a dwelling house in a walled city, then he may redeem it within a whole year after it is sold; within a full year may he redeem it.

30 And if it be not redeemed within the space of a full year, then the house that is in the walled city shall be established forever to him that bought it throughout his generations: it shall not go out in the jubilee.

31 But the houses of the villages which have no wall round about them shall be counted as the fields of the country: they may be redeemed, and they shall go out in the jubilee.

32 Notwithstanding the cities of the Levites, and the houses of the cities of their possession, may the Levites redeem at any time.

33 And if a man purchase of the Levites, then the house that was sold, and the city of his possession, shall go out in the year of jubilee: for the houses of the cities of the Levites are their possession among the children of Israel.

34 But the field of the suburbs of their cities may not be sold; for it is their perpetual possession.”

As we have seen, the doctrine of the jubilee is of very great importance. It is the key aspect of the Sabbath Doctrine. There’s not only to be one day of rest in seven, but every seventh year debts are to be cancelled. A man must live providently therefore because in the seventh year he is to have no income.

As I have pointed out, the absence of long-term debt means a vast saving of interest. Most young couples today, as I’ve said last week, are putting out $70,000 or more every six years in interest, so that the abolition of this kind of living means providential living. The Bible says the debtor is slave to the lender.

Then every fiftieth year there was to be a jubilee, an extra Sabbath year after the forty-ninth year. And God says those who observe this law will be blessed. They will have enough to care for the Year of Sabbath and they will rejoice in the Lord. At the same time, the Sabbath years and the Jubilee Year are to be times of family reunions.

Now in these verses in Leviticus 25:25-34, well, let’s make a brief survey of the specific meaning of these rules before going further:

Land was sold (or actually leased) at a price for the years remaining to the next time of release so that the value was calculated in terms of the time remaining before it was repossessed. If, because of poverty, a man had to sell his land, his closest kinsman had a duty to redeem it for him if at all possible. This means that members of the family have an obligation to relieve distress within the family to prevent the loss of land and also various forms of need. The Bible is insistent that family members care for another. He that careth not for his own, Paul says in terms of this law, is worse than an infidel and hath denied the faith. And we are to care for fellow believers. We are also to extend charity to others.

If no relative is able to redeem the land, but a little later the man himself is able to do so, then according to the law, the price of redemption is calculated in terms of the number of years remaining until the release or Jubilee.

If a man owned a house within a walled town or in a city, it could only be redeemed within the first year. Urban properties were not subject to the Jubilee.

Houses in open unwalled villages were properly a part of the rural areas and could be redeemed and did revert to the original family in the Jubilee.

The only urban exception was the house and the cities of Levites. These were to be their permanent heritage of the Lord for His purposes. This law also includes the pasture of the Levitical cities. They could never be sold.

The fact of the Levites and their positions is important. They included the priests or clergy, but they also included a variety of other functions, all religious and all tied to God. They were, we are told, the instructors of Israel, the scribes, the experts on Law, who interpreted the law for the courts, they were the Christian scholars (we would say) or they would say in the Old Testament times, masters of God’s Law and of learning associated thereto. They were the teachers and scholars of Israel.

Their cities were throughout the land, strategically located to give every area a center of learning and a radiating influence. The tribe of Levi was given no farmland but it was given cities and it was the normal channel though which tithes were distributed, and one tenth of the tithe or one hundredth of a man’s income went to the priests for worship, according to Numbers 18:20-32.

Now the meaning of this is important. God is saying that godly learning, godly ministries to the various areas of life must be protected, must be supported, must get the major support. Worship itself it to get one tenth of the tithe. The rest goes to the Levites for their work and in terms of scripture, it is organizations like Chalcedon and Rutherford and others similarly that are the Levitical organizations. God protects by His Law, godly scholarship. The meaning is very plain. And more than theologians are here meant. Christian schools and their staffs, men in various fields of learning who have a biblical faith and perspective and so on, all of whom form, to use a very good word too often disregarded, a clerisy, whom God’s Law requires us to protect and support. A clerisy has a broader meaning than a clergy, but it means the people who are dedicated in their particular field to the application of God’s Word to life, to enlightening people in terms of a biblical perspective.

The Medieval Era was thoroughly right in seeing the support of scholarship as a religious necessity. But it was wrong in requiring it to be part of the Church directly and under the clergy. It is a clerisy. And in the Levites, while they do not have as important a function in worship—only a secondary function there—had the bulk of the tithe for their work, and that’s why they were able to have an impact on society.

The distinction between urban and rural properties is important. Both must observe the Jubilee as well as the Sabbath Years. They must be times of rest, of rejoicing in the Lord. But the city is exempt except for the Levites and their property, from the restoration of properties. The countryside is thus made the area of stability and the city and area of change. Once scholar, George A.F. Knight, a New Zealander, cites an old proverb (an English proverb), “banks and churches never sell.” Well, that’s no longer true. But it still reminds us that once certain constants remained in a community.

Now God’s Law stipulates His constance while man posits himself as the constant with all else variable as man sees fit. This is why the meaning of the Sabbath Years and the Jubilee are important. Not only valuable in terms of what they tell us about man and the land, but also what they tell us about God’s purpose in society.

Gustav Eyler, said of this, “The Year of Jubilee, by which the Sabbatic cycle is completed, while involving the idea of the Sabbath Year, has moreover its own specific import in the idea of release and of the reinstatement of the theocracy in its original and its divinely appointed order in which all were as the servants of God to be free and each was to be assured of his earthly maintenance by being restored to the enjoyment of the inheritance allotted to his family for this purpose. The God who once redeemed the people from Egypt and acquired them as His possession here appears again as a redeemer to restore to the bondman his personal freedom and to re-endow the poor with the share allotted him and the inheritance of his people, for among the covenant people no poor should properly have been found, according to Deuteronomy 15:4. And the fruit of a consistent carrying out of the Law of the Year of Jubilee would at least have been that a proletariat could not have been found in Israel. Before such a year of grace however, could appear, transgressions must have been pardoned. Hence the Year of Jubilee was to be proclaimed on the Day of Atonement.”

After the Babylonian captivity, which came about because the Sabbath Years and Jubilees were not observed, with Nehemiah the Sabbath Years were restored. But we have no information as to what happened to the Jubilee Years. It is apparent that at least by the time of our Lord, there no longer was a Jubilee. However, in the generations proceeding the fall of Jerusalem, leaders like Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar freed the Jews from taxes in sabbatical years because they recognized how important these were to the people.

The sad fact is today there are some of the Orthodox Jews in Israel who are supposedly complying with the Sabbatical and Jubilee Laws. But theirs is a warped compliance, because they do not give the land rest. They stopped working it in the seventh year and they lease the land to Muslims and Muslims only, which is an evasion of God’s purpose.

We do not know whether or not the Jubilee was observed by the Early Church or the early Medieval Era. No one has been interested in that data or even to record the data of its observance among some groups in this country like the Mennonites or Amish.

Later on we know that it was spiritualized and observed in an Ecclesiastical form at least as early as 1300 when Pope Boniface VIII proclaimed a jubilee as a time of pilgrimage and grace and also of indulgences. In time, this jubilee was held every twenty-five years. We should not thus rule out the possibility of jubilee celebrations in Church History. The sad fact is, too much documentation has been lost and this has been of too little interest to historians in the Modern Age. We do know that the practice of gleaning—and there is no book written about it—has been very commonplace in this country and is still being practiced. But so much of this sort of thing, because scholars are not interested, disappears from the pages of history. After all, historians have not been interested in God’s Law and how people have kept it, only in defaming God’s Law.

In another sphere, indirect attention is being given to the Jubilee. Nikolai Kondratiev, a Russian economist of the early years of the 20th century, set out to prove the fallacy of Capitalistic economies. He studied all economies and he found a 50-60 year cycle of prosperity and depression, the average cycle being 54 years. The Kondratiev Wave Theory held that human action could not effect this cycle, which he held was a natural phenomenon. The gains of the prosperity of the early part of this cycle, he saw as wiped out by the inevitable collapse.

Now, the Kondratiev Wave Theory has had quite a bit of opposition; not because his data is unsound. Historically, the cycles have occurred. The problem is the explanation. Are they natural phenomenon? Have they been inevitable? Are they inescapable for man? Well, the idea militates against modern man’s Humanism. Stalin found Kondratiev’s opinions traitorous. Many have held that while the cycles have been true of the past, now that the State is fine-tuning the economy, this will prevent their recurrence. But we are seeing its recurrence in spite of all the fine-tuning of recent years. And such men view Kondratiev’s work as an historical account of things past, rather than as a binding law for the present and the future. But the events of this past month have certainly been confirming Kondratiev’s theory.

William Kirkland, writing from the naturalistic perspective, has said about the Kondratiev Wave Theory, “The primary reason the Kondratiev Wave Theory is so difficult for academics to accept is that its premises are counter to accepted economic logic. Even in their most basic courses, economists are taught to solve scientific questions by sequential reasoning, that is by manipulating known economic and financial variables in a logical manner until a desired results are determined. The Kondratiev Wave Theory takes an entirely opposite tact, stating that the end result is already known and that the economic and financial variables interacting to achieve that financial result are largely irrelevant in determining the outcome.” In other terms, we could say that the issue is this: most people, in opposing Kondratiev, are Hegelians. And they say the rational is the real. According to their theory, such-and-such things should happen because man is now applying the rational to the human scene, and the rational is the real. Therefore, Kondratiev cannot be true now that man has achieved true rationality.

Well, at heart the issue is really a religious one. Kondratiev held to a naturalistic economic determinism. His data seemed to confirm his belief. Other economists hold to a Humanistic determinism, that is either man or the State determines the economy for better or for worse.

It is interesting that the Kirklands, in their book on the Kondratiev Wave Theory, Power Cycles, find only one instance in past history of an awareness of this cycle—the Levitical Law of the Jubilee! The fact of the seven-year Sabbaths and the end of debt and the Jubilee with the restoration of people to their land, as well as the cancellation of debt, placed a break on accumulated debt, prevented inflation, and prevented the continuing build-up and expansion of credit. And because of this, the cycle was controlled and disaster averted. Of course, that doesn’t mean in recognizing that the Law of Jubilee has been the only antidote to the Kondratiev Wave Cycle, that they are ready to accept it as the revelation of God. No. It was an amazing, intuitive insight on the part of the Ancient Jews.

We can go further. We can say that the Sabbath Years and the Jubilee worked together to prevent the boom-and-bust cycle from occurring. They blocked long-term debt. They militated against all the evils of modern economic life and practice, against inflation and credit expansion. With the observance of sabbaths and the jubilees, the economy of man then moves not in terms of man’s will but in terms of God’s Law. Modern economics whether Conservative, Liberal or radical, insists that human action can determine economics and shall determine it. The Law of God tells us that no less than the light of the Son He created dominates the physical universe and the physical life of man. So, too, God’s laws govern man’s economic life and all things else.

So as Christians, we should not be surprised that Kondratiev is right, although his explanation for the cycle is wrong. In every sphere, it is God who prevails. In every sphere, without exception, it is always true that the wages of sin is death, and sin is very plainly defined for us. It is, says John in I John 3:4, “the transgression of the Law of God.”

Let us pray.

Lord, we thank Thee for Thy Word; that Thy Word is truth. And we pray that men and nations may awaken to the light of Thy Law, may know that their theories cannot determine reality for their rationality cannot create reality. And man’s rational is never the real. Thy Word is truth. And Thy Word is a lamp, a light for our way and for our steps. Teach us to walk in the light of Thy Word. In Christ’s name, amen.

Are there any questions now on our lesson?

Yes

[Audience] Currently, the Jews never wrote any histories; because there’s a great puzzle in my mind as to how long have they obeyed any of these rules?

[Rushdoony] Well, they did write some histories, we have Josephus for one, the most notable,

[Audience] And that’s unreliable

[Rushdoony] Ah, very often, very unreliable, but it is being recognized that he was probably much more accurate than the Greek and Roman historians; much more accurate.

Josephus’ trouble was that he could be compared with the Bible, and there was a check on his accuracy; so that at times when he chose to give us another story, it was easy to say, well now why did he depart from this?

We have little bits of history embedded throughout the Talmud of varying accuracy, but by and large, because they were in rebellion against this during so much of their history, they weren’t going to report the fact that what God had said about them and what would happen to them was true, so it did put a break on too much writing about themselves. The Greeks and Romans could sit down and brag and invent history, and where we are able, for example, to have a check from the records of other countries where they’ve survived, we know how many of these nations of antiquities felt that history was the best means of propaganda.

Any other questions or comments?

Yes

[Audience] You mentioned boom-and-bust cycles and how these laws would prevent that sort of thing. Would you be able to comment on the activity of the stock market of the last two weeks in this light?

[Rushdoony] Well, it was predicted by a number of people, several people who are brokers in our circle, Dan Harris, James Flannigan, Vic Porlea and others have been telling people this is what’s coming. And they knew it because they were looking at the market realistically.

One of the interesting things is that the question of what had happened came up more than once at the meetings in Memphis, came up in questions addressed to us during the question and answer period, to Gary DeMar, John Lofton, and myself, and came up in the hallways. The sad fact is, so many people want to know if there were one thing that could be done that would solve the whole problem—a quick fix in other words, is what people wanted. And one or two were very upset when they were told there was no such thing and John Lofton said if you want to know what’s happening, remember the title of a sermon by Jonathan Edwards, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. That did not rest well with at least one very upset person!

But it’s possible that it could revive for a while, for a year or two or three, but it’s all practical intent, the beginning of the end. Certainly the Federal government is doing a great deal. One of the men there who’s in charge of investments and a vice president of an investment bank, James {?} was telling me what was being done by the Federal government right now to bring the market back up. But basically we have to say that with the economic policies we’ve had: the world debt, the decline of production, the increasing corruption in every country in the world, any respite is a short-term thing. It’s not likely to last more than a very few years.

Yes.

[Audience] What most people seem to overlook is that stock exchanges are a mirror; a mirror of conditions

[Rushdoony] Yes

[Audience] And it’s the only un-{?} poll every taken in our society. Of course, it’s a limited poll because it’s taken only of the financial and investing communities, but the stock exchange values reflect existing situations. Now, they’re effected by emotion of course, but everything that man does is effected by emotion so to say that not to down-play it. And it’s the opinion of the bourgeois so to speak, that their world has gone off the cliff—out of control.

[Rushdoony] Well, it is interesting that one of our group who is known to all of you, Ford Schwartz, called me about a week ago and he said that, a week before Black Monday, car sales suddenly stopped. Very few sales were made. And the market had been doing very well up till that point. And it was not only the dealership of which he is a manager, one of the biggest in the peninsula, but others. And other businessmen were suddenly experiencing a dramatic down-turn in sales. So he said, I believe the market is reflecting the economy, rather than leading it. And I think he is almost certainly right.

Yes.

[Audience] At one time, at one time managing a liquor store, I noticed that certain brands of liqueurs which didn’t move year after year would suddenly be called for by people from various parts of town in one night. And it convinced me that we’re not as individual as we think we are. And people come to some decisions; a great many people come to decisions simultaneously.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] And {?} what you just said verifies that.

[Rushdoony] Well, we are told that the spirit of man is in the hand of the Lord. I know some years ago, when I was in the pastorate, a group of us pastors were discussing the fact that for about four or five Sundays, attendance was very low. We found accidentally in our conversation, we were all worrying about the same thing and concerned. Were we doing something wrong, because attendance had taken such a drop? It wasn’t bad weather, there wasn’t weather that drove people to take trips, didn’t seem to be anything.

So after that, we started sharing our experiences and we found that there was a pattern that was apparent in all the churches—a very different source in the rise and fall of attendance, so that one Sunday it could be 250 for example, and the next 150, for no discernible reason, and the other church would drop from about 100 to about 60 and so on. There’d be a similar pattern. No one’s been able to account for it. I’ve talked to businessmen who say they’ve noticed the same kind of pattern in talking with friends who are in business. So we have no way of accounting for it. We don’t like this kind of data; don’t pay much attention to it, because we are Hegelians. We want to believe that everything is in the control of man.

Any other questions or comments? Well if not, let us conclude with prayer.

Our Lord and our God, we thank Thee that as we face a troubled world, we know that Thou art with us, Thou wilt never leave us nor forsake us, so that we may boldly say the Lord is my helper, I shall not fear what man may be able to do to me. We thank Thee that we live and move and have our being in Thee, not in the State, not in the plans and purposes of men. Make us strong therefore in Thy Word and in Thy Spirit. And now, go in peace. God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost bless you and keep you, guide and protect you this day and always. Amen.