The land, moreover, shall not be sold permanently, for the land is Mine; for you are but aliens and sojourners with Me. (Leviticus 25:23 NASB)
Rural land in Israel in the time of Moses cannot be sold permanently. They have a fifty year lease hold.
When a person sells a home in a walled city, it may be bought back until a year after its sale. The period for buying it back will be one year. If it is not bought back before a full year has passed, the house in the walled city will belong to the buyer permanently and their descendants forever. It will not be released at the Jubilee. But houses in settlements that are unwalled will be considered as if they were country fields. They can be bought back, and they must be released at the Jubilee.
Levites will always have the right to buy back homes in the levitical cities that are part of their family property. Levite property that can be bought back—houses sold in a city that is their family property—must be released at the Jubilee, because homes in levitical cities are the Levites' family property among the Israelites. But the pastureland around their cities cannot be sold, because that is their permanent family property. (Leviticus 25:29-34 CEB)
For land in walled cities, it is treated differently.
Showing posts with label Jubilee. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jubilee. Show all posts
Sunday, June 28, 2015
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
Moses's Law - Answer to Unbridled Meritocracy
Just read on this website "Moses and Mosaic Law" some interesting comment on Moses's Law. It is based on a speech "Moses, Apostle of Freedom" made in 1878 by a certain Henry George.
QUOTE
It was not an empire such as had reached full development in Egypt, or existed in rudimentary patriarchal form in the tribes around, that Moses aimed to found. Nor was it a republic where the freedom of the citizen rested on the servitude of the helot, and the individual was sacrificed to the state.
QUOTE
It was not an empire such as had reached full development in Egypt, or existed in rudimentary patriarchal form in the tribes around, that Moses aimed to found. Nor was it a republic where the freedom of the citizen rested on the servitude of the helot, and the individual was sacrificed to the state.
It was a commonwealth based upon the individual – a commonwealth whose ideal it was that every man should sit under his own vine and fig tree, with none to vex him or make him afraid. It was a commonwealth:
- in which none should be condemned to ceaseless toil; in which, for even the bond slave, there should be hope; and
- in which, for even the beast of burden, there should be rest.
- A commonwealth in which, in the absence of deep poverty, the many virtues that spring from personal independence should harden into a national character–
- a commonwealth in which the family affections might knit their tendrils around each member, binding with links stronger than steel the various parts into the living whole.
It is not the protection of property, but the protection of humanity, that is the aim of the Mosaic code. Its sanctions are not directed to securing the strong in heaping up wealth as much as to preventing the weak from being crowded to the wall. At every point it interposes its barriers to the selfish greed that, if left unchecked, will surely differentiate men into landlord and serf, capitalist and working person, millionaire and tramp, ruler and ruled.
- Its Sabbath day and Sabbath year secure, even to the lowliest, rest and leisure.
- With the blast of the Jubilee trumpets the slave goes free, the debt that cannot be paid is cancelled, and a re-division of the land secures again to the poorest their fair share in the bounty of the common Creator.
- The reaper must leave something for the gleaner;
- even the ox cannot be muzzled as he treadeth out the corn.
Everywhere, in everything, the dominant idea is that of our homely phrase: "Live and let live!"
UNQUOTE
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