Sabbath Day/Year Commandments – Six Days/Years of Work/Sowing Required?

People are surprised that I take the time to answer their emails. Yes, I am busy with a young family and living in Costa Rica makes everything take longer to accomplish. For example, yesterday I had to hit a few places to find a replacement NVidia video card with the HDMI connector I needed. Not complaining…I enjoyed walking in the warm sunny weather in between the stores. It just takes longer.

But what readers do not know is that I love answering questions. I love the blessings that come from questions. One big one is the provision of new insights through the Socratic method. Questions force you to think, something we all tend to avoid whenever we can =). But in thinking you can mine some great discoveries from even old elementary topics you thought you mastered long ago.

49 Year Jubilee Cycle Objection:
Six Years of Planting Required?

Case in point is a discussion I had over the Jubilee year cycle with someone who doubts my conclusion that it is 49 years long.  He saw the good points I had but he still saw it as unclear. His final objection that leaned him towards a 50 year Jubilee cycle was this:

I still lean towards the 50 year cycle because if Israel goes back to work right after the jubillee sabbath year, they will be breaking the command to work 6 years and rest the 7th, since they will then be only working 5 years and resting the 6th year after the jubilee year.

I had never heard such an objection to a 49 year Jubilee cycle. I had to stop and think about it. He was right that a 49 year Jubilee cycle “broke” the six years of planting mentioned in the Sabbath year command. You ended up with only five following a Jubilee year before the next Sabbath year.

I had to admit that I had not thought of the Sabbath year command as requiring Israel to plant for six years on their fields. Was he right? I decided to give it a chance and to think it through.

Six Days of Work Required, Too?

If this was true about the Sabbath year command then it must be true about the Sabbath day command as well. By this line of interpretation, the sabbath day commandment would require Israel to work six days just as much as they were commanded to not work on Saturday by it.

But immediately I saw a problem with this. What about when you are sick? By this interpretation you still must work. What happens when you want to take a vacation for a week? You cannot or you are breaking the 4th Commandment, “Six days you must work.” Or is that what the 4th Commandment says?

Exodus 20:9 (HCSB) ⁹ You are to labor six days and do all your work,¹⁰ but the seventh day is a Sabbath to Yahweh your God. You must not do any work—

The interesting part here is “do all your work”. Not God’s work. God has not commanded average Israelites to do any work in particular during the week days. That would be God’s or “my work”. Instead he tells Israel to do “all your work.” If Israel had no work to do then they did not have to do anything for six days. If an Israelite had enough money to provide for his own, then the sabbath commandment is not telling him to make busy work for show. If he wanted to take a vacation, then there was no prohibition on that.

The intent of the Sabbath day command is obvious when you think it through. The intent was for Israel to not overwork themselves seven days per week. They would keep Saturday set apart to reconnect with their family and God.

Six Years of Planting Not Required, Either

Once I realized the above, I knew the same applied to the Sabbath year commandment. What if an Israelite bought a field and did not have the money to plant it. Was he breaking the Torah in doing nothing with his field for six years? No. As long as he did not decide at last to plant in the 7th year when all Israel was keeping field fallow, then he was in compliance with the intent of this command. Failure to leave fields fallow causes agricultural yields to diminish eventually. Then farmers resort to unnatural means to coax the field into producing what it used to. Chemical fertilizers and pesticides. The people eating the food pay the price for that in their health through the modern diseases we have today (not that toxins and poorer nutrition from food is the only cause of disease).

The passage supports that the planting is optional during the six years. It says “may”, not “must”.

Leviticus 25:3 (HCSB) ³ You may sow your field for six years, and you may prune your vineyard and gather its produce for six years.

What About Six “Planting Optional Years” Before a Sabbath Year?

You still might wonder if a 49 year Jubilee year cycle does not at least break Scripture. Does not the sabbath year have to follow six “planting-optional years?” Is that not the intent?

Once again, I believe we must think it through to get the true intent. The true intent is to establish a seven year cycle. The commandment names six years and one year. Six plus one equal seven. That’s a seven year cycle.

Now we must understand that commandments of the Torah can override each other. We see this with the Sabbath Day commandment. Jesus pointed out that the priestly duties were done on sabbath, “profaning it” (Mt 12:5). This was their main work, yet they did it on sabbath. They had a special case that overruled the general blanket command of ceasing from labor on Sabbath.

That is what is happening here with the the Jubilee command. It is overriding the detail that there are six years available for planting before a sabbath year. It is saying that the first year of the 8th (15th, 22nd, 29th, etc.) sabbath year cycle is not going to be for planting, but will be a special Jubilee of no planting (among other things) following the preceding sabbath year of no planting making two years of no planting in a row.

Conclusion

The 49 year Jubilee cycle maintains the strict seven year cycle for Sabbath years just like the Torah gives for sabbath days every seven days. The objection that having the Jubilee year be one of the six planting years of a sabbath year cycle breaks Scripture does not hold. When you properly understand the intent and focus of the sabbath year on preventing overwork of fields, you can see that it does not require planting in any year or for any number of years. The Sabbath year command simply forbids Israel to plant in the special seventh year, just as the Sabbath day command simply forbids Israel from working on Saturday.

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5 Responses

1. Jim Fincham Says: February 6th, 2010 at 5:03 pm

   Shalom Tim; My take on the 50 year cycle is that counting the 50th year as the second sabbatical year is then followed by the required 6 years of planting etc etc. In this manner there is a 50 year cycle which does not infringe on the next 50 year cycle. There may be some obvious reason that this is not the case, but I am not aware.

   I am presently studying the Planet X Survival Guide and am surprised to find that the authors, claiming Planet X comes only every 3300 years or so, could possibly think that it came both at the time of Noach and Moses as these events are only 1000 or so year apart, according to geneaology statistics. I can accept one or the other (probably Noachs time), but certainly not both. Or the orbit of Planet X is extremely unstable. What do you think?

   Jim Fincham

2. Tim McHyde Says: February 7th, 2010 at 8:50 am

   Jim, again, nowhere is “six years of planting” given as a “requirement”. It says “may” (see above the sabbath year verse quote from the HCSB). The only requirement is to leave land fallow in the 7th year. You never see people in Scripture punished for not planting but Judah was exiled for 70 years, one year for every sabbath year they did not keep.

   There is no proof in the Bible that Wormwood has passed before at all, let alone being responsible for the Exodus plagues or Noah’s flood. However, if the Sumerians knew about this 10th planet, perhaps it had to pass before. Regarding the flood, the best explanation I have found is a passby with Mars. Read this fascinating book that explains how we lost the 360 day calendar that Genesis records “in the beginning”: http://www.creationism.org/patten/PattenMarsEarthWars

3. anonomous Says: February 26th, 2010 at 12:53 pm

   Tim,

   I read your article on the Jubilee Year Cycle and found it interesting;
   but I disagree with your arguments and findings.

   In your article you seam to argue the point that the Jubilee cycles “must” repeat in 49 year cycles simply because it is in sync and that by adding one year after 49 years the cycle drifts by one year. Your words were “A Jubilee cycle of 50 years falls out of sync with the Sabbath year cycle since 50 is not a multiple of seven.” This requirement of yours that the “Sabbath of weeks of years” must be in sync with the “Sabbath of years” is the basis for your argument; but this interpretation of yours is a self imposed and self created constraint to prop up your conclusion that has no scriptural basis. It is an interesting argument; but using a comparison to other Sabbaths is not a conclusive argument. It is an interesting comparison but not positive proof. For instance, the Feast days of Israel are considered Sabbaths but by using your reasoning that the Sabbath must follow a continual 7 + 7 + 7 + … cycle, there would be no way to include the Feasts as a Sabbath. The Feasts by your reasoning would disrupt the neat 7 + 7 + 7 + … flow that you have self imposed. I suspect you would argue that even with the inclusion of the Feast days, the end of week Sabbath day is still on the same calendar day every week. Again, I would say
   that is an interesting fact; but is not proof that the “Sabbath of weeks of years” must do the same. Since God defined the Feast Sabbaths as falling on varying days of the week, it is possible that God intended the “Sabbath of weeks of years” to fall on varying calendar “cycle” years.

   In my opinion, the scriptures do not say that the “Sabbath of weeks of years” must remain in sync with the “Sabbath of years”. If you count 49 years + 1 year and repeat that sequence and argue that 50 year cycles are God’s intended plan, than that argument is just as valid at “face value” as your argument that the cycle is 49.

   You also make an argument that “inclusive reckoning” as a counting practice is the norm in the Bible.

   It is not. There are instances of the use of inclusive reckoning such as the counting of generations by Mathew in 1:17 but that is in the minority of uses. Most often counting is performed as is normally performed today. As an example, Christ rose on the third day. By your assertion, Jesus would have been in the tomb for two days. There are numerous other examples I could give.

   Thanks for the interesting article,

   Anthony

4. Tim McHyde Says: March 10th, 2010 at 4:13 pm

   I don’t consider it a limit I am “imposing”. I’m just reading the text at face value. 1) It says every 7th year is a sabbath year. 2) It says jubilee years follow every 7th sabbath year. 3) There is no mention anywhere of “except do not count the Jubilee year when you count the sabbath year.” That’s a rather major omission, akin to the missing mention of the moon in the sabbath day instruction that Lunar Shabbatniks do not want to talk about.

   FYI, the annual holy days are not considered “sabbaths”. The only one that is called that is Yom Kippur because it is fast day, not a feast day. See http://www.karaitekorner.org for more.

5. Chuck Says: July 16th, 2010 at 10:19 pm

   I agree with you on the 49 year cycle. I have a chronology book by Dr. Floyd Nolen Jones that I highly recommend called The Chronology Of The Old Testament, which I found to be a gold mine of information. He also agrees with the 49 year cycle.
   To add to what you wrote above; when we observe Pentecost on the 1st Day of the week we can only work 5, not 6 days until the next Sabbath Day. So 5 years of sowing does not break the Sabbatical Year command either. And the same logic applies to Annual Holy Days wherein no servile work was to be done.

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