In the Bible, there was so much more than that to the understanding of jubilee. Yes, it happened after 50 years (after seven cycles of seven) but rather than being only about partying, it was very clearly about returning, redeeming and releasing.
Returning referred to land that had been sold to someone else. The assumption here is that people probably wouldn't be selling their land because they wanted rid of it, but rather because their economic situation had prompted them to sell. Perhaps they had fallen on hard times and needed the money they'd get from selling the land. Perhaps it was because a man only had a few children and didn't need so many crops; or perhaps he mostly had daughters and didn't have enough manpower to work the fields. Whatever the reason for selling, God ordained that in the fiftieth year, all the land should return to its original owner and all the people should return to the land that had belonged to their ancestors.
In a sense, this shows God's mercy to future generations by protecting their inheritance. If a father or grandfather had been a poor steward or a negligent farmer, or had been overtaken by misfortunate and forced to sell some land to make ends meet... somewhere along the line, the inheritance would come back to his descendants, so that future generations weren't doomed to poverty with ever decreasing amounts of land.
"All the land belongs to me," said the Lord, and it was never to be sold on a permanent basis. People were allowed to redeem their own land if and when they had the money. And even if they were never able to buy it back, the land was nevertheless returned to them in the year of jubilee. The clear principle was that no one should seek to benefit from another's misfortune - not on a permanent basis - because God is a God of justice and compassion. Laws about how to decide the selling price made sure that both buyer and seller were treated in a just way.
Jubilee was not only about returning and redeeming property, but also about releasing people. It was not only the land that was returned in the year of jubilee, but also the people who had ended up in slavery.
There must be no heavier feeling than knowing that you have nothing left of any value except yourself. Even in modern movies, the sign that a woman is at rock bottom is often when she realises that turning to stripping or prostitution is the only way she can get food to feed her children. It's a known fact that in some Asian countries, people break their own children's legs, so that the crippled child will elicit more sympathy when begging on the street.
God wanted His people to be servants of the Lord and not slaves of another person. (Leviticus 25: 42 and 55) But sometimes it happened that a person saw no hope of economic recovery and so he was forced to sell himself or another family member as a slave. Even when this happened, there were laws that required the slave to be treated with dignity. If a family managed to come up with sufficient money, they were allowed to redeem the person at a fair price, based on what a worker would earn in the market place. But even if that didn't happen, the year of jubilee meant that a time was coming when all slaves were to be released. Even a person who had been born in slavery was to be set free with his parents when the year of jubilee came around.
So jubilee represents so much more than a big celebration to mark an anniversary. It was a landmark year that tangibly demonstrated the character of God: a God of mercy and compassion, a God who protects our inheritance, a God who redeems us from enslavement, a God whose heart longs for us to be set free. That's what jubilee was really about.
