Leviticus 25:8

"And thou shalt number seven sabbaths of years unto thee, seven times seven years; and there shall be unto thee the days of seven sabbaths of years, even forty and nine years. Then shalt thou send abroad the loud trumpet on the tenth day of the seventh month; in the day of atonement shall ye send abroad the trumpet throughout all your land. And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubilee unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family. A jubilee shall that fiftieth year be unto you: ye shall not sow, neither reap that which groweth of itself in it, nor gather the grapes in it of the undressed vines. For it is a jubilee; it shall be holy unto you: ye shall eat the increase thereof out of the field."

It is quite obvious that on the year of Jubilee, coming immediately following the seventh sabbatical year, there would have been back to back sabbatical years, and this has been such a problem to some that they have even attempted to make the Jubilee correspond with the 49th year, but the text makes it certain that there were in fact two sabbath years together. "The Jubilee occurred every fiftieth year, and not as some suppose, in the forty-ninth."[10] See Leviticus 25:21, where God's instructions mentioned particularly the "three years" increase promised on the year before the two adjacent sabbath years.

"The loud trumpet ... on the day of atonement ..." (Leviticus 25:9). The word for "Jubilee" testifies to the antiquity of Leviticus. "The title alone (Jubilee) is an indication that it was an institution of great antiquity."[11]

"Proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof ..." These words are engraved upon the Liberty Bell situated in Independence Hall, Philadelphia, but, in their original context, the words refer to slavery and not to political subjection. Despite this, the words were a powerful motivation in the Revolutionary War.

"Ye shall return every man to his possession ..." The meaning of this was that every Israelite was to be returned to the ancestral lands which belonged to his forebearers. God was the actual Owner of all the land, and any Israelite in possession of it was merely a tenant at will. Whose will? God's will. The occupancy and crops produced by the land in specified years could be sold, but title to the land was not transferable. It always reverted on the Jubilee to their heirs and successors of those persons to whom God had assigned it at the time when Joshua divided the land of Canaan among the Twelve Tribes. People of all times and nations have praised this arrangement, impractical as it most assuredly would be in our own times. The Jubilee stressed God's absolute ownership of the land. It was God's right by creation, and by right of maintenance. The Jubilee discouraged and prevented the endless building of greater and greater estates and effectively prevented the development of a culture in which wealthy owners of most of the land would be able to oppress and defraud the poor. Although most scholars do not believe that Israel ever actually observed the Jubilee, the preservation of land within families of the original persons receiving it seems to have prevailed for a long time. The incidents of Ruth (Ruth 4) and of Naboth (1 Kings 21) show that the law against alienation of the land prevailed in those times, and the case of Naboth in particular shows the hatred of that law by the Monarchy which succeeded in the ultimate nullification of it. Isaiah decried those who "lay house to house, and field to field" (Isaiah 5:8). These were the monopolists who were buying up all the land, contrary to the Word of God.

"And ye shall return every man to his family ..." (Leviticus 25:9). This elaborates the heralded clause, "Proclaim liberty ... to all the inhabitants ..." This meant liberty from slavery. Slaves were to be emancipated in every sabbatical year, making six years the maximum time that one could be a slave. The law of the sabbath year and of the Jubilee "would not suffer it to be forgotten that the slave was a man, protecting him in every way possible in those times."[12]