Priests have to maintain the lamps in the tabernacle.
There’s a rare break in the deluge of laws and festival as we hear about a young man from an Israelite mother and an Egyptian father who swore the lord’s name during a fight as a curse. The Israelites held him until God told Moses what to do with him, which ended up being to take him outside the camp and stone him to death. Now anyone who blasphemes the name of the Lord, native or alien, must be put to death. Also, damages done against someone else must be paid back equally, an eye for an eye. If you kill someone, then the people have the right to kill you back for it.
God declares that the land itself is to have a rest of its own. Every seventh year is a Sabbath year and no crops can be harvested. God promises to provide such a bounty on the sixth year that you will be able to get by through the next one. Every seventh Sabbath year there’s a Sabbath of Sabbaths, which we call a year of Jubilee. Every fifty years all property reverts back to the original owner, so when you buy or sell property, the price should be based on how long it is until the next year of Jubilee because you’re not really buying it, but only leasing it for a while. The same is true for Israelite slaves. Really you’re supposed to help out your neighbors if they fall on hard times so they don’t ever have to go so far as to sell their land or themselves off for food, but if that does happen, they get the chance to redeem themselves later on. If they can come up with the money to buy back their house or themselves, then they have to have the option to do so. If you buy foreign slaves, you can keep them forever, will them to your relatives, do pretty much whatever you want with them, but Israelites were slaves in Egypt so they are not allowed to be harsh or permanent owners to other Israelites.
This is also enforced for foreign buyers. Hopefully they let them know before hand, but either way, anyone who buys an Israelite slave has to give them the opportunity to be redeemed or to redeem themselves and even if no one does, they have to release them during the year of Jubilee.
This one’s kind of tough to get my head around because of the idea of an original owner gets complicated after so many years. I guess when they first get to the promised land everyone is going to go stake out their family plot, but after even a few generations those family claims are going to be complicated. When I was in Israel, I was amazed that the whole idea of the original building or original owner were almost meaningless. The Cardio is a famous road in the old city of Jerusalm, the original site (if you don’t count the city of David). If you want to find out about the original roads though, youn find out that the cardio was built by the Romans thousands of years after the Israelites had settled there. The city itself was already thousands of years old when the Isralites got there even. Most modern Israelis don’t even know what tribe their from, let alone where their family parcel of land is. And that’s if you don’t consider the confounding factor of the entire population of pre-israel Palistine living there for hundreds of years in the interim. This system of ownership reverting back every fifty years is an unenforceable mess.
I guess it was only designed to last for a few hundred more years though. Once the messiah comes these rules become largely obsolete.
I dated a Catholic girl in high school and when the year 2000 rolled around she said that the pope had declared a year of jubilee. According to her there was a list of things you had to do in a year of Jubilee, personal, unquantifiable stuff like perform a merciful act, and if you completed the list then you got a free pass to heaven, or you got all your sins forgiven up through that point for free or something like that. I wonder if that policy is based on this section of Leviticus. It’s pretty loose if it is. I think that sometimes the Catholic Church still likes to just make stuff up though.
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