Land Tenure in the Biblical Jubilee: a Moral World View

The sociology of knowledge can provide another tool for the scholar's workbench as he or she attempts to disclose the deeper meanings of an ancient document. Writers such as Peter Berger, Clifford Geertz, Thomas Luckmann, Karl Mannheim, and Alfred Schutz (note particularly the works cited in the bibliography} have outlined the ways in which people gather and transmit knowledge (or traditions), create world views, and relate moral norms with their perceptions of reality. By applying the tools of analysis described by these sociologists to the laws of the jubilee found in Leviticus 25, we discover clues both within and beyond the text that reveal three different levels of meaning and how they interact dialectically. Finding the underlying moral world view of the jubilee and understanding how it might affect an ethical system can lead to the postulation of moral implications based on that world view which extend beyond the jubilee legislation itself. 1 We begin such a study with a diachronic analysis of the evolution of the concept of jubilee and the attachment of the several laws to it. 2 The Israelite jubilee was not created ex nihilo, but it grew out of notions of land tenure that existed in the world around it. In examining several of the societies of the ancient Near East, we discover that, in one way or another, all of them limited the absolute right of individuals to buy or sell land at will. 3 Within this milieu, Israel understood itself to be