"18 Wherefore ye shall do my statutes, and keep my judgments, and do them; and ye shall dwell in the land in safety. 19 And the land shall yield her fruit, and ye shall eat your fill, and dwell therein in safety. 20 And if ye shall say, What shall we eat the seventh year? behold, we shall not sow, nor gather in our increase: 21 Then I will command my blessing upon you in the sixth year, and it shall bring forth fruit for three years. 22 And ye shall sow the eighth year, and eat yet of old fruit until the ninth year; until her fruits come in ye shall eat of the old store. 23 The land shall not be sold for ever: for the land is mine; for ye are strangers and sojourners with me. 24 And in all the land of your possession ye shall grant a redemption for the land. 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 overplus 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 jubile: and in the jubile it shall go out, and he shall return unto his possession." — Leviticus 25:18-28 KJV.
These verses should be read in connexion with vers. 1-7, since they chiefly relate to the same topic. They seem to be misplaced in their present position, amid precepts relating to the jubilee, though they are not in reality. The purport of verses 18 and 19 is, that safety and temporal prosperity in the land of promise hinge on obedience to the declared will of Jehovah.
20. What shall we eat the seventh year — This question is kindly anticipated and answered by God, lest the strain upon their faith might be too great if the people were left with no special promise. He knoweth our frame.
21. Fruit for three years — The fact that three years are here provided for instead of two, which the sabbath year required, is evidence that the jubilee succeeds the seventh sabbath year and is not identical with it, as some suppose. No merely human legislator would have ventured to enact a law forbidding seed sowing from the sixth to the eighth year, and harvesting from the sixth to the ninth year, omitting two successive harvests and thereby sinking two sevenths of the entire national wealth. Nor would any people have received such a law except on an unwavering faith in its divine origin. We regard obedience to this law the highest proof of Moses’s divine legation. The evident provision here made for the year of jubilee accounts for the apparent but not real displacement of this paragraph. We have only two passages of Scripture where this promise is alluded to, namely, 2 Kings 19:29, Isaiah 37:30.
THE JUBILEE YEAR CONTINUED — THE REDEMPTION OF LAND, 23-28.
23. The land shall not be sold for ever — The usufruct only could be sold. In their deeds of conveyance the phrase “to him and to his heirs forever” had no place. After an equal allotment of the land at the start this is a merciful safeguard against oppressive monopolies, and a provision to secure to the family a perpetual inheritance. To effect the restoration of all lands twice each century to the family to which it was originally allotted by Joshua required the utmost care in the preservation of the genealogical records of every tribe and family. By this means evidence was afforded of the exact lineage of the Messiah in fulfilment of the prophecies, evidence which has been unavailable to every Jew since the destruction of these records in the destruction of Jerusalem. For the land is mine — Jehovah held the fee simple of Canaan. Hence he is justified in the ejection of non-paying tenants, first the Canaanites, then the Israelites. For further justification of the extermination of the Canaanites, see Joshua 6:21, note. For ye are strangers — This implies that foreigners, resident in the land, could not acquire even a temporary title to the soil. See Leviticus 23:22, note.
24. Ye shall grant a redemption — The original proprietor, or his next of kin (גואל, (goel) one who redeems,) could at any time recover the possession of an alienated field by paying for its redemption according to an equitable rule, or sliding scale, graduated by the number of years before the jubilee.
25. Any of his kin — Kranold observes that there is no record of the גואל (goel) ever exercising his right till after the death of him who sold the field. But this does not disprove his right to redeem it during the life of the impoverished seller. “The person sustaining this office was a lively figure of Christ, who assumed our nature that he might be our kinsman-redeemer, bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, and in reference to whom it is said, ‘The Redeemer shall come out of Zion.’ He has by his sufferings and death brought back to man that inheritance which had been forfeited by sin.” — Bush. How this deepens the significance of those words of Isaiah, the evangelical prophet, quoted by our Saviour in the synagogue in Nazareth, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord. This day is this Scripture fulfilled in your ears.”
27. Count the years — The fruit-bearing years. Thus a possession sold in the twentieth year before the jubilee would have seventeen fruit-bearing years. If redeemed in the tenth year there are eight such years, which the redeemer must pay for in equity as the overplus.
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