TIYBILEE, TILE YEAR OF (Heb. Yobel), a peculiar institution among the Hebrews (Leviticus xxv.), by which, every fiftieth (not forty-ninth) year, the land that in the. interval had passed out of the possession of those to whom it originally belonged was restored to them, and all who had been reduced to poverty, and obliged to hire them-. selves out as servants, were released from their bondage; no less were (Jos. Ant. iii. 12. 3) all debts remitted. The jubilee forms, as it were, an exalted sabbatical year (q.v.),. and the land was completely to be left to itself in the former as in the latter. The design, of this institution was chiefly the restoration of the equilibrium in the families and 'tribes. It was to prevent the growth of an oligarchy of landowners, and the total impoverishment of some families; as well as to increase the fertility of the soil and the growth of the population. It was proclaimed at the end of the harvest-time, like the sabbatical year, on the tenth day of the seventh month—the day of atonement—by the yobel (a kind of born), hence also its name. There is no trace in the whole history of
the Hebrews down to the Babylonian exile that the jubilee had ever been observed: after the return, however, it appears to have been rigorously kept, like the sabbatical year, for some time at least; but, from its general impiacticability, it must soon have fallen into disuse. When the sabbatical year was de facto repealed by Hillel's prosbol (a legal document entitling the creditor to claim his debt during this period), mention is no longer made of the yobel. The speculations of modern critics on the possibility of the :yobel, and on the date of its inauguration, cannot prevail against the undeniable fact that it has been kept, and also that it is much more in harmony than the primitive theo cratic character of the Mosaic institutions—according to which all the land was held as a kind of loan from Jehovah, who alone had an absolute right over it—than with those of any later period, to which it otherwise would have to be referred.