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“25:10. a jubilee: you shall go back, each to his possession. In the law of the jubilee, YHWH commands that every fifty years all property is to return to the original owners. This appears to be an economic program designed to prevent the feudal system, common in the rest of the ancient Near East, from developing in Israel. That is, it functions to prevent the establishment of a class of wealthy landowners at the top of the economic scale and a mass of landless peasants at the bottom. Every Israelite is to be apportioned some land (described in the books of Numbers and Joshua), and the deity commands that in every fiftieth year the system returns to where it started. If an Israelite has lost his ancestral land as a result of debt or calamity, he regains ownership of it in the jubilee year. Land is unalienable. Individuals can suffer difficult times, but there is a divinely decreed limit to their loss, and the nation as a whole can never degenerate into a two-tiered system of the very rich and the very poor.” — Richard Elliott Friedman