Leviticus 25

If livestock can graze freely in fields that produce the only fresh grain a farmer might collect that year, it could a good year to finally butcher a few sheep or a cow. A cow can eat 50 pounds (26 kg) of food in a day. That’s about 10 times more than a sheep eats: 5 pounds (2.6 kg).

Known today as Yom Kippur, this is the most solemn day on the Jewish calendar. The high priest appeals for the forgiveness of sins that the people of the nation had committed in the past year. Jews taught that God’s footrest was the lid on the Ark of the Covenant, the gold-covered chest that held the Ten Commandments (1 Chronicles 28:2).

Every 50 years, the Israelites were to free their slaves, forgive debts that people owed them, and return property rights to the original Israelite owner. So, if someone bought land from an Israelite, they were really just renting it until the next jubilee year.

Israelites who sold their land got it back for nothing in the jubilee year. But between jubilees, if a man wanted his land back, he had to buy it back or find a relative who would buy it back for him. Otherwise, he had to wait for jubilee. Jews later stopped observing jubilee. Jewish scholars say the law applied only to the time when Israelites first settled into what was then called Canaan. That’s when they divided the land among 12 extended families called tribes. A few centuries after Israelites invaded Canaan, King Solomon reorganized the nation around districts, instead of tribes. That allowed him to control the districts by appointing his preferred district supervisors. Tribal elders lost their voices at the king’s court, and tribal boundaries eventually dissolved into the nation of Israel.

This interpretation is a guess because it’s not clear what the law meant. The law might refer to the time left before the next jubilee or to the time that had passed since the last one. When Israelites sold part of their land, it was temporary. Land was supposed to revert to them at no cost in the jubilee year. So, people buying the land paid for it based on the years they had it for planting and harvesting. If they paid for 10 years because that’s how long they had until jubilee, they expected to produce harvest for 10 years. If the original owner wanted it back early, he had to pay the difference between what the buyer paid for and what the buyer got. Maybe it worked something like this: A man pays $1,000 to farm the land for 10 years, and the original owner wants it back two years early. A $200 refund might seem fair. Though the buyer might have a good argument in reminding the owner that reclaiming the land early is going to cost the buyer two years of harvest profits.

The tribe of Levi was the only tribe that didn’t get a big plug of territory in Canaan. Instead, they were assigned a few dozen cities throughout the 12 tribes. Thirteen cities belonged to the priests and 35 other cities belonged to all the other members of Levi’s tribe. This policy scattered priests and their associates among the tribes, as a way of providing locals with the services of a priest.