Abstract
A remarkable change occurred in the adaptation of the common Ancient Near Eastern practice of the monarch’s declaration of a jubilee year to the Biblical Jubilee. It is this change that has become a focal issue of biblical theology today. “In making Jubilee a divine decree, and/or a matter of the calendar,” James A. Sanders wrote in BTB 50:1, “biblical legislation took the institution totally out of the hands of monarchs and governments.”
“When creditors economically threatened the power of the government, the monarch would counter with royal decrees,” Sanders explains.
The main reason rulers wanted to counter the corrosive effect of widespread debt was military. When they needed soldiers they forgave debts by decree. When they perceived the danger that their land was in effect being ruled by an oligarchy of wealthy creditors, rulers could counter it by an “economic order”decree.”
The Biblical Jubilee, by contrast, becomes a divine ordinance: “The land is mine, declares Yahweh, you are but strangers abiding on my land” (Lev 25:23). This change in regency redirects the meaning and application of the Jubilee from an economic-military tool toward the social mandates of the biblical prophets.
Biblical Theology Bulletin’s year-long Biblical Jubilee observance has correspondingly focused on these values, as Ryan McLaughlin writes in BTB 50:2:
In honor of the BTB’s 50th year, the journal has embraced a theme of “Jubilee,” focusing particularly on how Israel’s sabbatical laws may help readers reflect on issues of sociopolitical justice.… Such topics include the plight of marginalized peoples, the relationship between justice and mercy, and the place of environmental concern in biblical studies and theology.
The present issue concludes BTB 50 with the following critical studies.
The Jubilee tradition—once the constitutional vision of ancient Israel, now an inspiring vision of eschatological justice and peace—may yet hold out a promising future of restoration, but its proponents will have to wrestle with the social, economic, political, and theological implications of how ancestral sovereignty and custodianship of the land needs to be translated into different languages for a different time.
Interpretative focus on the water in these stories challenges and fundamentally reshapes traditional interpretations. It demonstrates a mutualistic, life-enhancing relationship between a human being and what is often treated as an inanimate resources. Paying attention to the relationship between the water and Hagar produces interpretations that contradict the “mechanistic and instrumental logic that defines everything and everybody in terms of their contribution to the development and defense of white world supremacy” (Cone: 291). Such a reading takes passages that have been long been understood as criticizing human attempts to hasten the fulfillment of God’s promises and recasts them as a prophetic condemnation of social structures that commodify water and women alike.
By focusing on visual and auditory aspects of the story, it becomes clear that the reactions of the characters to events and to evoked memories are tied to “seeing” and proclaiming the purpose of the monument. To better understand this strategy, Olick’s model of the shaping of social memory and the use of mnemonic practices to “consciously and unconsciously facilitate the process of social remembering and the (re)shaping of shared narratives and group identity” can be employed.
By interpreting the parable as a teaching on distributive justice and seeing the landowner as a steward of earthly resources also both places the parable within the context of Jesus’s discourse on wealth (Matt 19:16-20:16) and anchors it in the opening phrase (20:1) likening the landowner’s action to the kingdom of heaven…. In this reading, the parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard can thus be understood as teaching how the seemingly impossible task of saving a rich person could be accomplished.
Jesus told parables of divine judgment postponed, and now we see why: They leave room for his serving as redemptive moral-kingmaker for God. They thus provide an opportunity to build God’s society, with freely offered and freely received shared moral-kingship under diving moral authority. So, measuring Jesus by a standard of a kingdom as a completed society under God misses the point. It thus misses the point of the mission of Jesus in human history.”
The “plan of God” term seems to have been used by Luke to appeal to his Hellenized audience. Luke expressed the Christian message with fidelity to the Scriptures and what God had done in Jesus, and translated that message into terms his Hellenized audience would recognize and accept. By using the term “plan of God,” Luke effectively recovered and utilized an OT term that would also have meaning for his Hellenized audience. Rather than a mere stenographer, Luke is a theologian in his own right…. The simplicity of the term became programmatic for later church fathers, catechisms, and preaching.