1976

Introduction

On several occasions during the last few years the royal edicts known from the Old Babylonian period have been associated, because of their social tendencies, with the Israelite laws of manumission, land regulation and transactions etc. The Israelite laws are, for the most part, to be found in the legislation related to the Sabbatical Year in Deuteronomy 15:1–18, and to the Jubilee Year in Leviticus 25. According to the Old Testament, these particular years occurred every seventh or every fiftieth year. In the absence of any proof, however, that the Babylonian edicts should have been issued at regular intervals, F. R. Kraus and J. J. Finkelstein are rather unwilling to accept that the Babylonian institution is parallel to the Israelite one. J. Lewy, on the other hand, goes further and attempts to prove from the cuneiform literature that the Mesopotamian decree on the remission of debt, manumission, etc. and the Israelite Jubilee Year legislation had mutual origins in the Amorite population which was spread over a large part of Mesopotamia, as well as Palestine and Syria. In pre-monarchical Israel the institution was supposed to recur at regular intervals due to the lack of governmental authorities, whereas in Mesopotamia the various kings were free to regulate the dates freely.

M. Weinfeld has recently gone further in his comparisons and tries to show that the Israelite Sabbath and Jubilee Year institutions survived all through the period of the Israelite monarchy in the form of royal reform laws, issued at regular intervals.