[Imu Shalev] Welcome to Into the Verse, where we share new and unexpected insights about the parsha or an upcoming holiday … diving deep into the verses to uncover the Torah’s own commentary on itself.

Hi, I’m Imu Shalev. Soon it will be time to celebrate Shavuot. So I’m getting together everything I need for this special time of year: I’ve scheduled my tractor tune-up, I’ve cleared out my silo to make space for the new crops… and of course, I’ve got my extra spring-allergy medication to get me through the long days of harvesting. 

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, that’s because the way we celebrate Shavuot today seems to have nothing to do with the way the Bible describes it! The Shavuot we’re familiar with – zman matan Torateinu – is the holiday that commemorates our receiving of the Torah. Yet when we see what the Torah itself says about Shavuot… there isn’t one word about the Revelation at Mount Sinai! Instead, it talks about reaping the grain with your sickle and having a big feast. So what’s going on here? 

It turns out that these two sides of Shavuot aren’t as different as they appear. They’re actually very deeply connected, and together, they help us understand the real significance of Revelation. I gotta say, this piece by Rabbi Fohrman is one of my personal favorites. When we first put it together, I felt lied to – Matan Torah isn’t mentioned in the Torah in reference to Shavuot? Those Rabbis invented an entirely new holiday? I was on the edge of my seat until these problems were resolved. But what I love about this piece is how the Rabbinic and Biblical versions are reconciled. Their reconciliation isn’t just fun to see, but this piece really elevated, for me, my understanding of what Revelation really means, what Torah really means, and why it matters thousands of years later. Here’s Rabbi Fohrman.

[Rabbi David Fohrman] Hi folks, this is Rabbi David Fohrman, and welcome to Aleph Beta. The holiday of Shavuot – it is on its way. What is that holiday all about? Well, as it turns out, the answer to that question is not really as simple as it might seem.

1. A Commemoration of Sinai

Most of us know this day as the anniversary of the giving of the Torah at Sinai. We stay up, many of us, all through the night, learning Torah in honor of that incredible, momentous event that we actually read about in the synagogue in the morning – the story of the Revelation of the Torah. We’re almost like the Israelites themselves encamped around that mountain long ago, waiting to hear the Ten Commandments. This focus on the Sinai experience, I think it really defines Shavuot for most of us. As we are used to saying in our prayers, it's zman matan Torateinu, this is the time of the giving of the Torah.

But there is one problem with all this. All of this stuff, that focus – it comes to us from later, rabbinic sources in our tradition. In the Torah's own descriptions of this holiday of Shavuot – and there are several scattered throughout the Torah – exactly none of those descriptions describe Shavuot as meant to commemorate the giving of the Torah at Sinai. There just seems to be no mention of that at all in the Bible itself.

And by the way, you would expect to see something like that in the Biblical text. After all, the text, when it ordains the holiday of Pesach, say, it's not shy about telling you why you are supposed to celebrate Pesach: We do it to remember the Exodus from Egypt. The same goes for Sukkot: We do it to remember the protection that God provided us in the desert after we left Egypt. So you’d expect to hear a pretty straightforward verse somewhere telling you about how happy we are that we got the Torah and how we are supposed to remember that each year by celebrating this newly-minted holiday, Shavuot. But we don't hear that.

What does the Torah tell us about this holiday?

2. Shavuot in the Torah

It tells us about all sorts of other stuff. In particular, we hear that Shavuot is a חַג הַקָּצִיר – a harvest holiday (Exodus 23:16). We hear that it’s יוֹם הַבִּכּוּרִים – a day on which first fruits are brought (Numbers 28:26). In particular, it’s a day on which we bring a special offering: two loaves of bread, the ”shtei halechem,” from the new crop of wheat.

And we hear about some other things. The Torah tells us that on Shavuot we should be happy. We should rejoice together with poor and dispossessed people: 

וְשָׂמַחְתָּ לִפְנֵי יְקוָה אֱלֹקיךָ אַתָּה וּבִנְךָ וּבִתֶּךָ וְעַבְדְּךָ וַאֲמָתֶךָ 

(Deuteronomy 16:11)

You should rejoice with God – you, your family, your servant, your maidservant, the Levite. And right after that, it tells us (verse 12): וְזָכַרְתָּ כִּי-עֶבֶד הָיִיתָ בְּמִצְרָיִם – you should remember that you were slaves in Egypt. But throughout all of this, the text seems to neglect to tell us what seems like the most important part: the part about commemorating the giving of the Torah at Sinai. I mean, why are we staying up all night anyway?

3. Are There Two Versions of Shavuot?

 So we are a little confused over here. It almost seems like there is a Biblical Shavuot and a rabbinic Shavuot. The Biblical Shavuot seems to be some kind of harvest festival, a day on which we give first fruit, we’re supposed to be happy and rejoice with the less fortunate, a day to remember we were once slaves in Egypt. I mean, there are some gaps here, I guess, in how this all fits together. Exactly why we are supposed to be happy doesn't really get spelled out; exactly how the holiday is meant to help us understand that we were once slaves doesn't really get spelled out. But basically, that's what the holiday is like.

But that whole picture of Shavuot seems very different than the rabbinic Shavuot – the one that celebrates the giving of the Torah, the one where we stay up all night, we read the Ten Commandments. So what happened here? Did the rabbis get it wrong somehow? Did they not bother reading the Biblical description of the holiday? And what are we, you know, regular, ordinary people, supposed to do with Shavuot? Are we supposed to happily learn all night and ignore what seems to be the Biblical version of the holiday? Pretend we don't know that Sinai seems curiously absent from the Torah's own description of Shavuot? 

Or maybe… let's just go out on a limb here and be heretical for a minute and discard this rabbinic version of the holiday and go back to what we think is a purer understanding of the day. Maybe we should just go back and celebrate the Biblical Shavuot, or what we think the Biblical Shavuot is. But where would that even leave us? Everybody else in shul is learning all night long, and you, you're doing what? You don't have a farm. You don't have a harvest. You can't bring first fruits. So who are you kidding? How exactly are you supposed to connect with the Biblical version of the day, you rabbinic-rejecting purist?

I want to suggest to you that there really aren't two Shavuot holidays, a Biblical one and a rabbinic one; there is a singular, unitary Shavuot, a Shavuot that melds the two visions seamlessly. Astonishingly, I think, it is that Shavuot, the unified one, which is truly relevant to us throughout time, even in a more urban, less agricultural age. To focus on either the rabbinic or what appears to us to be the Biblical Shavuot is to celebrate an incomplete holiday. The rabbis, I want to suggest to you, they weren't willfully ignoring the Biblical text. On the contrary, they were reading it quite carefully indeed.

What did they know that you and I don't yet know? That's what we need to figure out. 

4. Counting Sevens

So in trying to figure out the essence of Shavuot, this holiday, the natural place to start would be the Biblical verses that describe it. So let's try one on for size. Here's a verse from Leviticus, from Sefer Vayikra, which describes Shavuot as part of a larger parshat hamo’adim – which is to say, a section of text that describes all the holidays. It’s kind of a calendar listing of the holidays:

וּסְפַרְתֶּם לָכֶם מִמָּחֳרַת הַשַּׁבָּת … שֶׁבַע שַׁבָּתוֹת תְּמִימֹת תִּהְיֶינָה: עַד מִמָּחֳרַת הַשַּׁבָּת הַשְּׁבִיעִת תִּסְפְּרוּ חֲמִשִּׁים יוֹם

(Leviticus 23:15-16)

And you shall count for yourselves from the day after the Sabbath (and that, the commentaries understand to mean the first day of Passover; that’s when you should start counting) – you should count seven Sabbaths, complete ones, until the day after the seventh Sabbath. You should count for fifty days until you get to this day that you make a holiday, Shavuot.

Now I want to play a little game with you. Meditate with me on those phrases and ideas we just heard. Do they remind you of anything else in the Torah? Think about the different elements that we’ve been hearing here: When it comes to this holiday, Shavuot, the Torah asks us to "count for yourselves." When else does the Torah ask you to count units of time for yourself? And it's not just any time period we are being asked to count. It is a seven-times-seven count, seven times seven days that we are supposed to count. When else are we asked to count seven times seven units of time?

Moreover, look at how the Torah characterizes the seven-day unit here with Shavuot: "Shabbat," in the words of the verse, שֶׁבַע שַׁבָּתוֹת. When else are we supposed to count seven Sabbaths, until you get to a fiftieth?

You might have guessed by now the other event I'm talking about: Yovel, the Jubilee year in English. All the stuff associated with Shavuot over here is associated with Yovel too, down to the precise language of the text, which I'll show you in just a minute. The only difference really is whether you are counting days or years.

5. Sabbatical Years

Let me give you the background, here’s what I’m talking about: So the Torah says when you get to the land of Israel, you start counting years. Every seventh year is known as the Shemitta or Sabbatical year. During Shemitta, outstanding debts are canceled and the land "rests." It lies fallow and unharvested, and all the fruit is available for the picking by anyone, not just the owners of that particular field.

So the Torah tells us that not only are we meant to count years until we reach seven, at which time we are also meant to proclaim a "Sabbath year” – but the Torah also tells us that we are supposed to count these Sabbaths, these seven-year units. And every seven of those, in other words, after every forty-nine years in total – well, the very next year after that, the fiftieth – we are meant to proclaim a Yovel year, or a Jubilee year.

On the Yovel year, just like the Shemitta year, fruits are available for picking by anyone, and the land can't be tilled or harvested by the owner. But in addition to all that, two more crucial things happen. Servants are automatically set free from their masters; in the words of the text, they return to their families. And land returns to its original, ancestral owner, which is to say, land in Israel was apportioned to tribes, and to families within those tribes, as an inheritance. So if you were someone who possessed a certain plot of ancestral land, you could sell part or you could sell all of it, but on the Yovel year, that land would go back to you.

So that's your quick background on Yovel, and let's just kind of add things up here. For Yovel, you are supposed to count seven units of seven years – seven Sabbaths, according to the text – and the next one, you are supposed to proclaim as Yovel. And on Shavuot, you are supposed to count seven units of seven days – again, seven Sabbaths, according to the text – and then the next one, you’re supposed to proclaim as the holiday of Shavuot.

And by the way, I'm not making up how eerie this correspondence sounds; it's right there in the verses. Listen to that language carefully, and you'll see how even the particular words the Torah picks to describe these two phenomena – Yovel and Shavuot – really seem to contain intentional echoes of one another.

With Shavuot, we had: וּסְפַרְתֶּם לָכֶם מִמָּחֳרַת הַשַּׁבָּת … שֶׁבַע שַׁבָּתוֹת תְּמִימֹת תִּהְיֶינָה – You should count for yourselves from the day after the Sabbath, seven Sabbaths, and then תִּסְפְּרוּ חֲמִשִּׁים יוֹם – you should count for fifty days. 

Now listen to the langugage with Yovel. Again,

וְסָפַרְתָּ לְךָ שֶׁבַע שַׁבְּתֹת … וְקִדַּשְׁתֶּם אֵת שְׁנַת הַחֲמִשִּׁים שָׁנָה

(Leviticus 25:8, 10)

You should count seven Sabbaths, and then finally, you should make holy this fiftieth year.

You hear it? It's really all the same. The סָפַרְתָּ לְךָ language – the language for counting, the language of שֶׁבַע שַׁבָּתוֹת – the seven Sabbaths, until the fiftieth… it's really all the same. The only difference is, what are you counting, days or years?

It almost seems like what Yovel is for years, Shavuot is… every year.

6. Is Shavuot a “Version” of Yovel?

So here is the possibility I want to raise with you: Could it be that the holiday of Shavuot really is related to the idea of Yovel, the Jubilee year? And keep in mind an interesting fact: Those two sets of verses about Shavuot and about Yovel that I was just reading to you – they actually appear almost back to back in the Torah towards the end of the book of Vayikra, Leviticus. First you've got parshat hamo’adim, this listing of all the Torah's festivals including Shavuot, and then a chapter later or so, you have the Torah revealing to us the laws of Shemitta and Yovel. So could it be that when the Torah tells us about Yovel, it is sort of referencing what it just told us about Shavuot? In other words, could the Torah be suggesting to us that Yovel really is just a kind of iteration of the Shavuot idea?

I want to make a bold claim here that the connection between Shavuot and Yovel is actually the missing link that helps us unify the two "Shavuots," the Biblical version of the holiday, as it were, and the rabbinic one.

Now you might say: “That's ridiculous! I see how maybe Yovel might be connected to the Biblical idea of Shavuot. I get all those language connections, Fohrman, that you’ve been talking about. But what about the rabbinic side of Shavuot? If Shavuot really is a holiday that, according to the rabbis, celebrates the giving of the Torah at Sinai – staying up all night, reading the Ten Commandments in the morning – what would any of that have to do with the Yovel-like themes we seem to find associated with Shavuot?”

7. Yovel and Sinai

Well, let me play a little game with you. Take a minute to guess the very first place in the Bible that the word "yovel" ever appears. Believe it or not, it is not with reference to the Yovel year. The word actually appears way before that. It appears all the way back in the Book of Exodus. There we had a single, solitary reference to Yovel. And it comes, of all places, in the Torah's description of the Revelation at Sinai.

The Torah tells us that at Sinai, the people weren't actually allowed to touch the mountain. But at the close of the moment of Revelation, there was a great shofar blast, and when that shofar blast was heard by the people, that was the signal that it would be safe for the people to approach and to touch the mountain.

The word for that shofar at Sinai? It was "Yovel":

בִּמְשֹׁךְ הַיֹּבֵל הֵמָּה יַעֲלוּ בָהָר

(Exodus 19:13)

When the ram's horn (or the "yovel," in Hebrew) sounds long, that’s when they may come up the mountain.

Fascinating. Something called the "Yovel shofar" signaled the end of Revelation. But now ask yourself: How does a Yovel year actually start? What signals its onset? As it turns out, the signal for the beginning of the Yovel year is a shofar blast, too:

בַּחֹדֶשׁ הַשְּׁבִעִי בֶּעָשׂוֹר לַחֹדֶשׁ בְּיוֹם הַכִּפֻּרִים תַּעֲבִירוּ שׁוֹפָר בְּכָל-אַרְצְכֶם: וְקִדַּשְׁתֶּם אֵת שְׁנַת הַחֲמִשִּׁים שָׁנָה

(Leviticus 25:9-10)

When Yovel begins, it’s on the Day of Atonement, the tenth day of Tishrei, and it says that you should cause the shofar to be heard throughout the whole land. So the very instrument that signals the end of Revelation signals the beginning of the Yovel year. It's almost like Yovel picks up where Revelation left off.

And to further our sense that that might be so, let's note that there are even more connections between the Sinai event and the Yovel year. Again, let's come back to the numbers: Remember the fifty-year count of Yovel – in other words, count seven times seven years, and the one after that is Yovel? Well, when did the Revelation at Sinai take place? According to our tradition, which identifies the holiday of Shavuot as signaling the anniversary of Sinai, Revelation actually took place fifty days after Pesach, when we came out of Egypt. Which means that the same seven times seven, plus one, count that brings you to Yovel… brought us first to Mount Sinai.

8. The Land Is Mine

And now, let's go back once more to language. One of the striking things about the Yovel year is the way the Biblical text sums it up. According to the text, all the Yovel laws – the return of land, slaves going free, letting the land rest, all of that – it all gets summed up in these pithy words spoken, as it were, by God about Yovel: כִּי-לִי הָאָרֶץ – for the entire land is Mine (Leviticus 25:23).

Yovel expresses the truth that the land ultimately belongs to God. At some level, human possession of land is really only an illusion. God is the ultimate possessor of this resource. It’s a very intriguing idea, and we’ll come back to it later, but just for the moment, focus on the language. Think about that phrase, and ask where you have heard it before: כִּי-לִי הָאָרֶץ…

That phrase didn't actually originate with Yovel. It appears one other time, earlier in the Five Books of Moses. Where? The lone other occurrence of that phrase is at Mount Sinai. God says that Israel will be a treasure to God among the nations כִּי-לִי כָּל-הָאָרֶץ – because all the earth is Mine (Exodus 19:5).

So it’s hard to know exactly what to make of all this yet, but at the same time, it’s also hard to resist the sense that somehow, as I briefly suggested before, the Yovel year is modeled after an earlier event – the Sinai event. Somehow, the Torah asks us not to let the Sinai event pass into the realms of history, but we’re actually meant to recreate that event in some way, every fifty years.

I know that kind of sounds strange, because in the Yovel year, we don't re-enact the giving of the Torah; we don't make little models of Mount Sinai with toy people gathered around the foot of the mountain. Instead we do other things, things that seem to have nothing to do with Sinai, things like setting slaves free, returning land to its ancestral owner. It is hard to see how any of that reminds us of Sinai. But I want to suggest to you that it actually does. 

You and I, we tend to see the significance of Revelation in terms of the giving of the Torah. But perhaps the language through which the Bible introduces the laws of Yovel suggests that there is another lens through which to see Revelation: the Yovel lens. That blast of the Yovel shofar, it wasn't tangential to revelation. It was important. That sound, the shofar sound, gets commemorated somehow with a Yovel event every fifty years. Maybe, through that piercing sound of the shofar, Yovel, the Jubilee year, really is a kind of Sinai re-enactment every fifty years.

But how? That is the challenge that you and I must try and decipher.

9. Not Just at Sinai

So I want to suggest to you that we’re not quite at a point where we can understand this yet, because we don't have enough data. We’re not yet seeing all the pieces of this particular puzzle. Because if it's true, as we've posited, that before there was ever the law of Yovel there was a great nationwide Yovel experience, which is to say, Sinai – it turns out that this was not the only great nationwide Yovel-like experience that the children of Israel went through on their way out of the desert, as they were heading to the Land of Israel. There was actually another one, too.

I want to suggest to you that there were two great historic Yovel events – the Sinai event and a second event that I'll tell you about in just a minute – and that these together form two halves of a whole. In other words, together they express in our collective history something that the Yovel laws are going to recreate a version of every fifty years. So it's not enough to understand how the Sinai event prefigures Yovel; we’re going to have to take a look at that second historic Yovel event also in order to complete the picture.

So what was that second historic Yovel event? I want to argue to you it was the conquest of the city of Jericho.

10. Jericho

The city of Jericho, of course, was the first city conquered by the children of Israel as they entered the land of Canaan. The tale of that conquest is told in the beginning of the Book of Joshua. The narrative there has many dramatic elements, but maybe the most dramatic one of all is the way in which God engineers the city's capture: The Almighty actually causes the walls surrounding Jericho to simply collapse under themselves.

Now, parenthetically, we might ask why it had to happen that way. I mean, it's dramatic and all, don't get me wrong; the optics are terrific. But was there any meaning to God's choice of this particular means of engineering the conquest of the city? Fire and brimstone raining down from heaven would have done the trick too, albeit a little bit more messily. Was there any meaning in this particular choice of miracles, causing the walls of Jericho to collapse?

But let's not lose our train of thought. The bigger point I want you to focus on right now is that the miracle of the walls' collapse didn't just happen out of the blue. God actually required an elaborate ceremony to be performed first by the children of Israel, who were encamped outside the city. And when you look at that ceremony, it seems a little, shall we say, haphazard. It's almost like God was asking us to say "abracadabra" before His great Heavenly magic trick of causing the walls to fall down. Was it a random bunch of ceremonies we needed to undertake before the Great Magician in the Sky, God, did His astonishing wall-collapsing trick? Or was there some deep and abiding reason for that strange ceremony?

Let's take a look at the ceremony. Here's what God asked Joshua to do: First, all the Israelite warriors must walk around the city. They need to make a circuit around its walls once a day for six consecutive days. While they do that, seven kohanim (priests) holding seven shofarot should be walking in front of the Ark of the Covenant and in advance of the warriors. Then on the seventh day, the people should circle the city seven times. And then the kohanim should blow on those seven shofarot. Then the people would all cry out – and at that moment, the walls would fall.

Look at all the sevens here. Seven days. On the seventh day, seven circuits around the city. Seven kohanim with seven shofars. Once again, everything is seven times seven. And what tops it all off? The shofar blast. The seven times seven days of Jericho come with shofar blasts at the end. And the seven times seven years of the Yovel cycle come with a shofar blast at the end too.

So I don’t think it’s my imagination here; Jericho really is starting to sound a lot like Yovel. And if you keep on looking, the correspondence just deepens. Take a look, for example, at the shofarot at Jericho. The shofarot, the text says, were to be in motion; they were going around the city. In Hebrew the words for that are: עָבְרוּ וְתָקְעוּ בַּשּׁוֹפָרוֹת – they shall pass by and they shall blow on the shofarot (Joshua 6:8). 

And now look at the Biblical description of the Yovel year. You'll find, curiously, that the idea of "shofar in motion" pops up there, too:

וְהַעֲבַרְתָּ שׁוֹפַר תְּרוּעָה … תַּעֲבִירוּ שׁוֹפָר בְּכָל-אַרְצְכֶם

(Leviticus 25:9)

Same language: And you shall cause to pass a shofar blast on Yom Kippur; you shall cause to pass a shofar throughout all of your land. That’s how Yovel gets started, the same language of “causing to pass.”

11. The Skeptic

So now look, maybe you're a bit of a skeptic, and you're feeling especially dismissive right now, and you say something like: "Look, Fohrman, I don't really know. I don't necessarily buy that the Torah means to create some kind of conceptual link between the Jericho event and the Yovel year. Yes, there are multiple cycles of sevens with both. Yes, there is a shofar that signifies the onset of both. Yes, the verbs – וְהַעֲבַרְתָּ – they’re the same, the whole ‘shofar in motion' thing, I get it. But those correspondences might just be coincidental or something. Can you give me more? I'm not convinced."

Well, here's the kicker: As it turns out, the Torah gives a name to those shofarot that were blown at Jericho. What name does it give them? You probably guessed it. The shofarot of Jericho were called שׁוֹפְרוֹת הַיּוֹבְלִים –  just like the shofar at Sinai was:

וְשִׁבְעָה כֹהֲנִים יִשְׂאוּ שִׁבְעָה שׁוֹפְרוֹת הַיּוֹבְלִים לִפְנֵי הָאָרוֹן

The seven kohanim will carry seven Yovel shofars before the Ark. 

(Joshua 6:4)

Not only that: Even the language of the text describing these two events, it's all so remarkably similar. Listen to it in Hebrew. First, at Sinai: בִּמְשֹׁךְ הַיֹּבֵל הֵמָּה יַעֲלוּ בָהָר – The text says that when the shofar would blow an elongated blast at Sinai, that's when it would be safe for the people to touch the mountain and ascend it. But look at those words in Hebrew: בִּמְשֹׁךְ הַיֹּבֵל … יַעֲלוּ בָהָר. Pay attention to those three words: מְשֹׁךְ  …יֹּבֵל … יַעֲלוּ – go up.

Look at Jericho now:

וְהָיָה בִּמְשֹׁךְ בְּקֶרֶן הַיּוֹבֵל… וְעָלוּ הָעָם

(Joshua 6:5)

Same three words, virtually identical. When the shofar of the Yovel would blow elongated blasts, וְעָלוּ הָעָם – the people would ascend and would conquer Jericho. The walls, they would fall, but the people, they would ascend.

One more element, too, while we’re at it: Encirclement. At Sinai the mountain was encircled, as the text says (Exodus 19:12): וְהִגְבַּלְתָּ אֶת-הָעָם סָבִיב – and at Jericho the city was encircled, too (Joshua 6:3): וְסַבֹּתֶם אֶת-הָעִיר. The encirclement at Sinai somehow put the mountain off-limits – anyone who would touch it would die – and the encirclement at Jericho somehow put the city off-limits; Joshua says that anyone who goes back to Jericho and rebuilds it is cursed with death – death of his children (Joshua 6:26).

So it does seem like the Revelation at Sinai was not the only Yovel-like event in our collective history. There was another one, too: the conquest of Jericho. Together, these two experiences that the children of Israel lived through, as they traveled from Egypt to the Promised Land – they expressed two sides of the same coin. And the laws of Yovel are the secret to the connection between these events.

To this point, we've seen a lot of language connections. Shavuot seems related to Yovel, so does Sinai, so does Jericho. But connections are one thing; deciphering why things are connected is entirely something else. That's what we need to turn to now. If we can understand something of the meaning behind these language connections, if we can understand why Sinai and Jericho have anything to do with Yovel, then we might begin to understand what it is that the Yovel year is meant to replay, what it is that Shavuot is meant to replay.

To do that, to piece together the meaning behind all of this, we are going to have to look a little more closely at the laws of Yovel. Let's do that now.

12. A Closer Look at Yovel

What exactly does this year do? The truth is that it does two things. And both of those things might have had a great deal of relevance to the nation of Israel that, wandering through the desert, experienced the Revelation at Sinai and then experienced the Jericho conquest. These two things that Yovel does are expressed by the Torah in the following sentence:

וּקְרָאתֶם דְּרוֹר בָּאָרֶץ לְכָל-יֹשְׁבֶיהָ יוֹבֵל הִוא תִּהְיֶה לָכֶם וְשַׁבְתֶּם אִישׁ אֶל-אֲחֻזָּתוֹ וְאִישׁ אֶל-מִשְׁפַּחְתּוֹ תָּשֻׁבוּ:

(Leviticus 25:10)

You should proclaim freedom throughout the land, it's a Yovel year for you, and each man will return to his ancestral plot, and people will return to their families – slaves, that is, they’ll return to their families as well.

So just to review: The Torah says that land goes back to its primary owner and slaves are released. Hmm… do you see how those two things might have been more than idle curiosities for the Israelites on their journey through the desert?

13. Land Returns to Its Owner

Let's first talk about land. The Israelites were about to conquer the land of Canaan. But in a deep way, they weren't really "conquering" it. There was a Yovel event that was going on simultaneously with the conquest. The land had been promised as an ancestral holding to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, our forefathers who had lived in this land long ago. That land was now returning to its rightful place as the inheritance of the children of Israel. The seven circuits of the people on the seven days, and the seven circuits on the seventh day – it was like the seven times seven circuits of time that comprise the forty-nine years of the Yovel cycle. And as a consequence, the walls of Jericho were going to come tumbling down.

It wasn't a coincidence that the walls came tumbling down, that this, of all things, was the mode by which Israel would take possession of Jericho. It would happen through the walls coming down because walls signify ownership. The Canaanite walls would evaporate, because their hold on the land – not just their physical control of the land, but their legal control, their title – was evaporating. The land of Canaan was going back to its deeper owner, the progeny of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. They were the ancestral holders of the land.

14. Slaves Become Free

So much for Jericho, but what about Sinai? In what way was Sinai a Yovel-like event? Well, remember that Yovel does a second thing, too. It doesn't just release ancestral land back to its original owners; it also takes slaves and makes them free.

Interesting, slaves. That would have been the second great imperative for the children of Israel: Freedom. Because think of these people on a journey through the desert – at the endpoint of that journey, once they got to the land, then yes, it would be important to them that the land would actually belong to them, that title would revert to them, that the land they were entering was really going to be theirs. But remember, at Sinai, they hadn't yet gotten to the land. They had just left Egypt. And in Egypt they were slaves.

Yes, having escaped Egypt, they were no longer subjugated by cruel Egyptian masters. But is it possible that on some level, they were also not yet completely free? In other words, could it be that an escaped slave is not the same thing as a fully free person? And if that’s the case, could Sinai, then, have been the event that finally did free them, in some ultimate way? In other words, could Sinai have been their Yovel event – the moment at which slavery completely evaporated and became just a restless memory of times past? 

15. Questions We Should Ask

So this is shaping up to be an interesting theory, that the Yovel events of Sinai and Jericho were actually meant to address freedom from slavery and title for the land of Canaan. But there are some issues, I think, that we want to clarify if this theory's really going to be convincing. Here are two potential problems with this theory that I think we need to address. 

First, exactly why would escape from Egypt not in itself be enough to set Israel free? That point, I think, would need to be refined a bit more. Because the minute the children of Israel left Egypt, they were no longer subject to their Egyptian masters, so they're free, right? What else needs to happen exactly? Why do I need Sinai to somehow complete the process? In what sense, really, is an escaped slave not fully free?

Secondly, an even more basic question should bother us about the theory that Sinai was a Yovel event. Because on a very basic level, why would that be so? We haven't really answered that yet. Let's grant that the language of Sinai is suffused with Yovel-like language. And let's even grant that Sinai made the nation of Israel free, just like the laws of Yovel would ultimately free individual slaves every fifty years. But what does the experience of standing around a mountain and accepting the Torah have anything to do with Yovel? Even if you could show me somehow, cleverly, that the effects of these two events are the same, that the numbers associated with them are the same, that the language a book uses to speak about them is the same – I'd still want to know: How, essentially, are they the same?

There must be a fundamental similarity in these events that we are missing. What is that?