JUBILEE PER EZEKIEL
I recently mentioned that I hoped to talk/write about the Jubilee again soon. Well, this post is the next installment on Jubilee. Here’s the initial teaching in Leviticus 25:8-22, “You must count off seven Sabbaths of years, that is, seven times seven years, so that there will be seven Sabbaths of years, totaling forty-nine years. 9 Then you must blow a loud trumpet everywhere on the tenth day of the seventh month. On the Day of Atonement you must blow a trumpet throughout all your land. 10 You must set apart the fiftieth year to Yahweh and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It will be a Jubilee for you, in which property and slaves must be returned to their families. 11 The fiftieth year will be a Jubilee for you. You must not plant or conduct an organized harvest. Eat whatever grows by itself, and gather the grapes that grow on the unpruned vines. 12 For it is a Jubilee, which will be holy for you. You must eat the produce that grows by itself out of the fields. 13 You must return everyone to his own property in this year of Jubilee. 14 If you sell any land to your neighbor or buy any land from your neighbor, you must not cheat or wrong each other. 15 If you buy land from your neighbor, consider the number of years and crops that can be harvested until the next Jubilee. Your neighbor selling the land must consider that also. 16 A larger number of years until the next Jubilee will increase the value of land, and a smaller number of years until the next Jubilee will decrease the value, because the number of harvests the land will produce for the new owner is related to the number of years before the next Jubilee. 17 You must not cheat or wrong one another; instead, you must honor your Almighty, for I am Yahweh your Almighty. 18 Therefore, you must obey my decrees, keep my laws, and carry them out. Then you will live in the land in safety. 19 The land will yield its produce, and you will eat your fill and live there in safety. 20 You might say, “What will we eat during the seventh year? Look, we cannot plant or gather our produce.” 21 I will command my blessing to come upon you in the sixth year, and it will produce harvest enough for three years. 22 You will plant in the eighth year and continue to eat from the previous years’ produce and the stored food. Until the harvest of the ninth year comes in, you will be able to eat from the provisions stored in the previous years.”
There may be a few other Scriptures that have some teaching on the Jubilee, but Leviticus 25 gets you into the basic teaching. When searching the Scriptures, you don’t see that the Hebrew or Israelite or Jewish people ever really celebrated the Jubilee Year per Yahweh’s command.
Yahweh gave me a revelation about Jubilee back in the spring of 2009, right around the turn of the new year. I was beginning or continuing my studies in sacred chronology, biblical chronology, so I was reading in Ezekiel. Ezekiel 1:1-2, “In the thirtieth year (of the 50-year Jubilee Cycle), the fourth month, and the fifth day of the month, it came about that I was living among the captives by the Chebar Canal. The heavens opened, and I saw visions of the Almighty. 2 On the fifth day of that month, it was the fifth year of the exile of King Jehoiachin,” Notice, I added the phrase in parentheses “of the 50-year Jubilee Cycle”. That is the revelation that exploded in my head when I read “In the thirtieth year” in Ezekiel 1:1. I will try to insert my spreadsheet showing that I have this 5th year of King Jehoiachin tied to 594 BC. Don’t worry about the year at this point, it will be important later. When the Lord showed me that revelation about Ezekiel’s thirtieth year, I was off in the Spirit for several days, I was not useful to anyone for awhile. I was just meditating and contemplating that Scripture for several days. It was an awesome time with Yahweh and Yeshua. Many students and scholars have tried to explain what Ezekiel meant by the 30th year phrase. Some say it was his birth year, some say it was 30 years from finding the Torah scroll during Josiah’s reign, some thought it might be the 30th year of Jeremiah’s ministry. Nothing fits, except the 30th year of the Jubilee Cycle, as I will show you later in this post. It just resonates in your spirit once you get the revelation.
Now you have to get the context of Ezekiel’s life at the time he wrote this Scripture. He was in captivity, in exile, in Babylon, 500 miles from Jerusalem. He had to be discreet in his writings, prophecies, and teachings. If he had said or written something the Babylonians did not like, they would have killed him.
Ezekiel was a priest, the son of a priest, he knew the Jubilee Cycle! He was literally tracking the Jubilee Cycle on his personal calendar. Possibly, that was his job back at the Temple in Jerusalem. We’ll have to ask him when we meet him! This is pretty amazing, considering that no one else in the world seems to have known then when the Jubilee was, or knows today, when the next Jubilee year will occur. The priests were meticulous in their Temple and Feast calendar work. Ezekiel didn’t just mention the Jubilee here in chapter 1 verse 1 and 2, but he mentioned it in several places with Scriptures that we biblical chronologists call synchronizations. Ezekiel literally marked his book with time synchronizations tied to the captivity year of King Jehoiachin. Notice verse two begins in the 5th year of King Jehoiachin’s captivity. That means Ezekiel and King Jehoiachin were taken in what is known as the Second Deportation in 598 BC, or year 1 of King Jehoiachin’s captivity. Go read Esther 2:5-6 and you will see that Mordecai and possibly baby Esther were taken when Ezekiel and King Jehoiachin were taken to Babylon! We won’t pursue that study today, but it’s a fascinating one.
Let’s begin in 598 BC with 2 Chronicles 36:9-10, “Jehoiachin was eighteen years old when he began to reign; he reigned three months and ten days in Jerusalem. He did what was evil in the sight of Yahweh. 10 In the spring, after the beginning of the new year, King Nebuchadnezzar sent men and brought him to Babylon, with the valuable things from the temple of Yahweh, and made Zedekiah, his relative, king over Judah and Jerusalem.” and let’s continue with 2 Kings 24:12, “and Jehoiachin the king of Judah went out to the king of Babylon, he, his mother, his servants, his princes, and his officers. The king of Babylon captured him in the eighth year of his own reign.”
As we proceed through time, we come to the twelfth year of King Jehoiachin and Ezekiel’s captivity in Ezekiel 33:21, “It happened in the twelfth year, on the fifth day of the tenth month of our captivity, that a fugitive came to me from Jerusalem and said, “The city has been captured!”” This verse identifies the first fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of Solomon’s Temple in the summer of 587 BC. This messenger, Ezekiel calls him a fugitive, ran or hiked the 500 miles from the summer of 587 BC and reached Ezekiel in the 10th month, on the 5th day with this sad news that Jerusalem had been captured by the Babylonians. This translates to the 37th year of the Jubilee Cycle.
Many students and scholars put the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of Solomon’s Temple in 586 BC. I use 587 BC because I read one of the best studies on chronology ever done by one Dr. Rodger C. Young. He proved 587 BC from several directions, so that’s good enough for me. It’s a solidly proven year, so I use it.
Let’s continue down our timeline and see the next Scripture, Ezekiel 40:1, “In the twenty-fifth year of our captivity at the beginning of the year (Rosh Hashanah) on the tenth day of the month, in the fourteenth year after the city was captured, on that same day, the hand of Yahweh was upon me and he took me there.” Notice the two synchronizing passages in this one verse. We see the 25th year of their captivity is tied to the 14th year of Jerusalem’s capture and destruction! Counting down our timeline from 587 BC, that brings us to 574 BC, and the 50th year in the Jubilee Cycle, the JUBILEE YEAR!!
Notice that Ezekiel states he’s at the beginning of the year. In the Hebrew, it literally says Rosh Hashanah. When a Jew says Rosh Hashanah on the 10th day of the month (Yom Kippur), he’s identifying the Jubilee year!! A normal Rosh Hashanah is on the first day of the month, so we know Ezekiel is telling us this is the Jubilee Year, and it matches our timeline exactly! This verse, Ezekiel 40:1, is the only verse in the entire Tanach that states the phrase Rosh Hashanah. I cannot find it anywhere else in the Scriptures! That’s not a coincidence, it’s a point Ruach HaKodesh and Ezekiel were trying to make. Ezekiel literally was making the Jubilee announcement in chapter 40, verse 1. It only took about 2,601 years to get that message into my head. This was my 17th attempt at a Jubilee Timeline. 2601 divided by 17 = 153 fishes! (John 21:11) I finally had my net full to the breaking point!
If we follow this timeline down to the 20th century, we see that according to Ezekiel there was no Jubilee in 1947-48, or in 1967-68. No big deal, those were still significant times for Israel. Nobody has known the Jubilee Cycle since Ezekiel’s time.
If we follow this timeline down to the 21st century, we see that the next Jubilee Year will be in 2027 AD. That means Yeshua could possibly return in 2026 AD, a Shemitah year and 49th year in the Jubilee Cycle, to announce the Jubilee year in 2027, the 50th year. That is an exciting prediction. Recently, Tim McHyde of www.escapeallthesethings.com mentioned he’s leaning toward 2026 as a real possibility for Messiah’s return. I hope I live that long, but that is exciting news. It’s exciting because we are coming to the Deadline folks. We’re coming to the end of all these things. My wife keeps saying we’re in the end at the end. Well, she’s my wife, and she has to be right, right?
Time is running out. Get your life right with Yahweh today. Ask him to forgive you for all your sins and to wash you in the blood of Yeshua. Yeshua will be here in the blink of an eye. I pray we will all be ready to meet him!
Gene Benjamin II