Following the Feasts of YHWH timeline and understanding its artistic chiastic format, we see Pentecost is the consummation of Passover, and Shavuot’s memorial finds expression in Yom Teruah, forming the Pentecost/Trumpets dual center, the focal turning point of creation. The jubilee trumpet blown on the Day of Atonements is the consummation of Yom Teruah. Pentecost itself is a jubilee of weeks, fifty days. Three sacred feasts of YHWH tied to His return, Pentecost, the Feast of Trumpets, and the Day of Atonements, are skillfully bound to the center point of the seven-day creation week. All three involve trumpets, yobel, translated as jubilee twenty-one times out of twenty-seven (see Blog 84). Creation week’s fourth day involved setting in motion the Feasts of YHWH timeline year by year, whose midpoint is Mount Sinai, the site of Leviticus’s Atonements (see Blog 100). This blog investigates why the jubilee trumpet is blown on the Day of Atonements and how the tracking of Jubilee time is the voice of covenantal identity.

God sent Israel into captivity for idolatry and Sabbath-breaking. Taking care of the poor was an integral part of Israel’s religion, which they neglected badly. The seventh-year land Sabbath, the seven-year dept and servant release laws, and the fifty-year Jubilee ensured economic stability and equity for the poor. The land was to rest every seven years and every fifty years; the landowner YHWH blessed the sixth year with triple abundance. At the blast of the jubilee trumpet every fifty years, the land, purified through Atonements, returned to its rightful inheritors. In the Jubilee year, the people “ate the produce of the land,” trusting their needs entirely to YHWH. Similar identifiers for the jubilee year appear as “in an acceptable time” and “the acceptable year of YHWH” (Isa. 49:8; 61:2). The term “acceptable” refers to “the desire, delight, favor” of YHWH at humanity’s homecoming (Strong’s H7522).

Is it important to know when the Jubilee cycle occurs? Biblical authors emphasize ages and years in the sacred scrolls, repeatedly giving the reader time markers that tell us critical information. In the Genesis to Exodus story, the patriarch’s ages are emphasized to show YHWH’s covenant faithfulness in bringing about events exactly as prophesied, proving YHWH alone is God. Leviticus 25 instructed Israel to begin the Jubilee counting process “when they came into the land” (forming the second arm around the Holiness code’s center, chapter 24:1-9, the first arm being Leviticus 23). Joshua gave one of the jubilee codes, “and they ate the produce of the land” (Jos. 5:11), to suggest that the Jubilee was on Joshua’s mind to obey all the words of YHWH fully. The Sabbatical year and the Jubilee were sacred time markers, just as were weekly Sabbaths and the Feasts of YHWH, all of which pointed to the Tabernacle’s intimate Holy Place of Meeting expanding to the cosmos. Perhaps this is why Ezekiel described his symmetrically ordered temple made without human hands in terms of the Jubilee, 500 cubits square (Eze. 42:16-20, 45:2).

Moving forward in time from the date of Israel entering Canaan as the starting point of the jubilee counting (day 1) to the kingship of Hezekiah, the sign God gave him that Sennacherib would not take Jerusalem was the Sabbatical year and the Jubilee (Isa. 36:30-32, 2Ki. 19:29-31). With the text littered with time markers, can we know the date? If the Jubilee count started when Joshua entered the land by crossing the Jordan River, then from that date to Hezekiah’s Jubilee should be a multiple of seven land Sabbaths. Using the List of Assyrian Eponyms¹ is helpful based on the solar eclipse of 763 BC over Nineveh during the reign of Jeroboam II.² If we merge the scriptural sources with the dates around Shalmaneser’s reign to Sennacherib’s threat to Jerusalem, we can accurately find the date of the fourteenth year of Hezekiah’s twenty-nine-year reign. The match is perfect when Hezekiah’s reign timeline maps onto the Assyrian Eponyms list with its dates (added in red).