The Sabbatical Year Legislation and Temple Land Possession: Remarks on Socio-economic Legislation of the Hebrew Bible during the Persian Period

The key question of inquiry here is how the biblical legislation stipulated in the Pentateuch about the Sabbatical Year, namely the law exempting people from agricultural labour every seven years, functioned. Previous explanations of how this regulation functioned, including a recent one proposed by Philippe Guillaume, are unconvincing. The principles of the Sabbatical year law make sense from an economic perspective only if the law issued by the temple elite applied only to land belonging to the temple. Contrary to prevailing scholarly opinion, it appears that the temple in Jerusalem, like many centres of worship in Mesopotamia, did in fact possess land. It is the cultivation of this land, or rather the exemption from its cultivation every seven years, that the Sabbatical Year regulations address.