Jubilee

And thou shalt number seven sabbaths of years unto thee, seven times seven years; and the space of the seven sabbaths of years shall be unto thee forty and nine years.
Then shalt thou cause the trumpet of jubile [sic] to sound on the tenth day of the seventh month, in the day of atonement shall ye make the trumpet sound throughout all your land.
And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubile unto you. ...

-- Leviticus 25: 8-10 (KJV)

For the Israelites, good things came in sevens, so all the better in seven times seven. Each seventh year was a "sabbatical" year when, according to various and contradictory accounts, either debts among the Jews were canceled, field-workers were released from labor, the poor were granted special dispensation, Jews enslaved to other Jews were freed, or mortgages were dissolved.

In any case, "Jubilee" was occasion for all of the above, being the sabbath of sabbaths, the seven times seventh year. The phrasing here is unclear -- does Jubilee happen during the forty-ninth year, during the following year, or both? The Bible may use "fiftieth" as a round figure, but in the matter of such laws it is rarely ambiguous. The latest theory is that Jubilee happened every fifty years before the fall of Jerusalem, and every forty-nine years later.

According to the OED, the Hebrew word for Jubilee (yobel) seems to have originally meant "ram" but was then applied to the ram's horn used as a trumpet to proclaim the Jubilee year. In St. Jerome's Latin (Vulgate) Bible, yobel becomes jubilaeus by way of association with the roughly homonymous Latin verb jubilare, to shout or to rejoice -- whence our word "jubilation." This mixing up of senses accounts for our own use of "jubilee," via Wyclif's fourteenth-century translation of this passage. (His "jubilee" became "jubile" in later translations, such as the King James, but the two words were pronounced alike.) Thereafter, "jubilee" could refer to a fiftieth anniversary, a period of freedom from duties and debts, a season of celebration, a general rejoicing, or any bang-up affair at which one can gratify indulgences and maybe even wear silly hats.

 
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Michael Macrone is Associate Site Producer of GraceCom and the author of nine books on language, literature, and ideas, including the best-selling Brush Up Your Shakespeare!