Having previously described festivals that the Israelites were to celebrate in particular months every year (see this blog post) Leviticus moves on in chapter 25 to describe instructions for special years. The first of these, described in verses 1 -7, is the so-called sabbath year.
Every seventh year, the fields were to be left unplanted and the vines unpruned. From a purely pragmatic perspective, leaving the fields fallow for a year is a good agricultural principle, allowing the soil to "rest" and recover its goodness. Here again, we see that God is giving the people instructions for their own good. Uninterrupted cultivation over many years would have brought them to a situation of decreasing harvests.
But beyond the purely practical aspect of good farming practice, the sabbath year law promoted, and possibly tested, the people's dependence on God. What did it feel like to begin a new farming season knowing that you weren't going to harvest any crops that year? The people had to trust that the surplus from the previous year, or the previous six years of crops, would be enough to carry them through this seventh year. They had to trust that God would still bless and protect their livestock. They had to relax and expect that what the land produced on its own would be enough to sustain them. (Although they weren't intentionally planting and working towards harvest, they were allowed to eat anything that the land produced by itself.)
In fact, the sabbath year didn't only push them to trust God for the year itself. Because they were instructed not to store up any of the crops that happened to grow that year, they were also taking a step of faith and dependence for the following year, the first one in the next cycle of seven. Everything would start from scratch, and they needed to believe that God would bless them with a good harvest that year; that He would be as faithful to them in the next seven years as He had been in the previous seven. The command not to store the (meagre?) produce of the seventh year was protecting them from falling into a poverty mentality and depending on their own efforts rather than on God.
As Christians, we need to learn to live with this same attitude of trusting dependence. How do we strike the right balance between working hard and saving for the future (which are also principles clearly commended in scripture) and still living a life of joyful dependence on God? What are our modern equivalents of this sabbath year principle?
