“The Land Is Mine” (Leviticus 25:23): Reimagining the Jubilee in the Context of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict

The Biblical Jubilee

In a recent issue of this journal, James A. Sanders has traced the history and development of the Jubilee from its original political function to its theological appropriation, calendrical formulation, and theocratic-priestly institutionalization in early Judaism (Sanders 2020). According to the book of Deuteronomy, a “remission of debts” was to be held “every seven years” (15:1–3). Israelite slaves were to be set free (15:2). According to the book of Leviticus, every seven years there should be “a sabbath for the land” (Lev 25:1; cf. Exod 23:10–12), a Sabbatical year (shmita). During shmita, the land rests and agricultural activity ceases, but every fifty years, there should be a Jubilee year: the “trumpet” (shofar) will sound “throughout all your land” on Yom Kippur and “liberty” will be proclaimed “throughout the land to all its inhabitants” (Lev 25:8–12). Israelites will have their land “restored” to their families. It will be a year of “holy” rest. In Deuteronomy, debts are to be remitted in the Sabbatical year. In Leviticus, the land is to be restored in the Jubilee year.

Historical questions related to the conquest and administration of the land, the Israelites’ relationship(s) to its original inhabitants, and its changing demographics continue to be debated. The release of debts during the Sabbatical years may have been held intermittently during the Second Temple period. This legislation may have been modified by the Pharisees in their institution of the prosbul, ascribed to Hillel, that allowed for the subordination of debt-release in order to ensure the continuity of commerce and financial transactions. Whether or not the prosbul was a genuine practice in the Second Temple period or a legal fiction (for the latter, see Falk 1972: 112; Neusner 1990: 122), the observance of the Jubilee seems to have been discontinued in the post-exilic period.

Proclaiming the year of the Jubilee—once the province of the royal and priestly spheres of authority—shifted to the prophetic and apocalyptic agents of God. The Jubilee would now be “in the year of God’s choosing” (Isa 61:1–2a) and not necessarily a calendar year. In the post-exilic period, “obvious overtones” of the Jubilee legislation inspired visions of social and economic restoration, dreams of divine reversal of Israel’s (mis) fortunes (Blosser 1979: 69, citing Isa 29:18–20). The restoration of sight to the blind—and land to the dispossessed—could now be regarded as prophetic predictions of an imminent future (Isa 35:5–10). Visions of liberty and justice—of prisoners released from bondage (Isa 42: 6–7)—culminate in Isaiah 61, where God and his herald proclaim the arrival of the Jubilee, but now as the time of salvation. Isaiah 52:7 envisions an age of peace and salvation to be inaugurated by a “messenger”:

The Dead Sea Scrolls represent several textual developments in the direction of a prophetic, apocalyptic, and eschatological proclamation of Jubilee. First, they show that the Qumran community knew the Jubilee tradition. 11QMelchizedek, for example, is a pesher (scriptural interpretation) drawing from Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Isaiah, and the Psalms, announcing the arrival of an eschatological Jubilee (van der Woude 1965: 354–73; idem 1966: 301–26; Fitzmyer: 25–41; Flusser: 23–29; Yadin: 152–54; Miller: 467–69; Miner: 144–48; Milik: 95–112; Sanders 1973: 373–82; Puech 1987: 483–513). Melchizedek appears as a heavenly figure inaugurating the liberation of the “captives” (Isa 61:1) and ushering in the “day of [peace].” This text, drawing directly from Isaiah 61:1–2 (11QMelch 2.4, 6, 9, 13), may have been “the first messianic re-interpretation of the jubilee” (Bergsma: 202). Conflating Isaiah 52:7 and 61:1–2 in its depiction of the coming “messenger … anointed of the spirit” who will announce “salvation,” 11QMelchizedek 2.18–19 illustrates exegetical imaginings of Jubilee.

Second, the Dead Sea Scrolls illustrate that the Jubilee tradition was developed by the Qumran community. For the Dead Sea sect, eschatological redemption and salvation—the time when the poor, oppressed, and imprisoned would hear the “good news” of God’s favor and release—seems to have been an imminent reality. According to the Messianic Apocalypse (4Q521), a text copied at Qumran, God’s eschatological blessings and deeds would be dispensed during the “messianic” age. Like 11QMelchizedek, 4Q521 draws from a number of Isaianic passages, (Fitzmyer: 37; Puech 1992; 475–519; 1998: 1–38; Tabor & Wise; Vermes: 299–305; Schiffman: 347–50; Collins: 98–112) describing a time of

Like 4Q521, the Sayings Source Q also cites a series of Isaianic passages in order to confirm Jesus’ identity as “the one who is to come,” explicitly referring to the eschatological “good news” being proclaimed to the poor:

Whether or not the author of Q knew the exegetical tradition underlying 4Q521 (Joseph 2012; 2018), both texts cite Isaiah 29:18, 35:5–6, and 61:1 in order to affirm an imminent eschatological age (Tuckett: 21). The early Jesus tradition thus affirms his role as the eschatological “messenger” sent by God to deliver the “good news.” That is, Jesus announces his ministry as the arrival of the Jubilee year. It is possible to see “all the healing stories” in the Gospels as literarily allusive to and perhaps even “manifestations of the message of liberation” reminiscent of the Jubilee (Ringe 1981: 230). These healing stories illustrate Jesus’ “liberative” power over disease, demons, and even death. The relationship between physical healing and the “forgiveness of sins” is also made explicit in the healing of the paralytic (Matt 9:1–8/Mark 2:1–12/Luke 5:17–26). According to the Gospel of Luke, Jesus even begins his ministry by explicitly citing Isaiah 61:1 (Sanders 1975: 1:75–106; idem, 1987: 75–85; idem, 1993: 84–92; Sloan; Ringe 1981; Blosser):

Isaiah 61 “is used to inform and delineate the teaching of Jesus … and his own interpretation of his work” (Tuckett: 21). Similar themes emerge in the Lord’s Prayer, where Jesus refers to the cancelling of debts: “Forgive our debts for us, as we too have cancelled for those in debt to us” (Matt 6:12/Luke 11:4) in a kind of “Jubilee prayer” (Ringe 1981: 248, 258). Jesus also instructs his followers to repeatedly forgive interpersonal sin (Q 17:3–4). Surveys of these passages lead to the conclusion that “Jubilee themes figured in the teachings and ministry of Jesus” (Ringe 1981: 264). Whether or not Jesus thought that the Jubilee’s socio-economic provisions were to be implemented literally and immediately we cannot know. What can be said is that even the idea of the imminent release of debts (and/or the forgiveness of sins) would have transformed the social, economic, and political landscape of first-century Judea (Sanders 1975: 81; 1993: 87–88).

In The Politics of Jesus, John Howard Yoder proposed that Jesus embraced a politics of nonviolence based on the Jubilee tradition (Yoder: 39, 64–77; Trocmé: 41–52). Yoder argued that prevailing assumptions about Jesus—that he was “simply not relevant in any immediate sense to the questions of social ethics” because he was “a simple rural figure” advocating an “interim ethic”—were problematic (Yoder: 15, 17). No, the historical Jesus was not Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. We will not find anachronistically principled affirmations of “nonviolence” in the historical record (Martin: 219). Nonetheless, the Gospels “go out of their way” to depict just such a Jesus (Martin: 218). The general ethos of the Inaugural Sermon (Q 6:20–49) is “characterized by nonviolence” (Kloppenborg 1986: 224–35, 235; idem, 1987: 287–306).

Jesus’ biographers clearly “remembered” him as a Teacher who eschewed interpersonal violence: “throughout all of our traditions, Jesus is regularly and consistently portrayed as a teacher of nonviolence” (Ehrman: 169). The Matthean Jesus calls disciples to be “peacemakers” (Matt 5:9; cf. Matt 5:38–48 // Luke 6:27–32) (Lührmann: 412–38). To be sure, there are indeed “troubling texts” in the Jesus tradition in which Jesus also invokes images of eschatological violence (Neville; Joseph 2014; 2017). The Synoptic parable tradition contains a number of disturbing “representations” of both “realistic” and “imaginary” violence (Kloppen-borg 2011: 323–351). Some Jesus traditions—like the infamous “Temple tantrum” scene narrated in all four Gospels (Mark 11:11–25; Matt 21:12–17; Luke 19:45–46; John 2:13–22)—may be better described as portraying “vehemence” rather than “violence” (Neville).

Whether this theme of nonviolence developed as an apologetic strategic response to the overwhelming military power of Rome (Hezser: 221–250, 248) or a genuine memory of Jesus’ advocacy of nonretaliatory responses to violence (Knapp: 127), “the abundant number” of “pacifist statements on the lips of Jesus should give us pause and make us suspect that they might well represent accurate memories of his teachings” (Ehrman: 169). Jesus was “remembered” not simply as proclaiming, but as embodying a message of peace.

The author of Luke sees the eschatological significance of Jesus’ ministry as the proclamation of God’s restorative work. We may presume that the historical Jesus, like the Pharisees, “knew the love of his native land” (Davies: 354), but the Christian tradition—as it grew to incorporate an increasing number of non-Judeans or Gentiles—began to view Jesus as more focused on creating a “universal community” than restoring national sovereignty in the land (Davies: 355–65). Given the rapid dominance of Gentiles within the movement and the “cosmic eschatology” of the tradition, “the concern of Judaism for the land was demoted,” rapidly giving rise to an attitude of “rejection” and “spiritualization” in the tradition (Davies: 367). The early Christian tradition was “cut loose from the land” (Davies: 336; Hagner: 283). Christianity “increasingly abandoned the geographic involvement of Judaism.” This is not, however, to re-inscribe a (false) dichotomy or binary between “Jewish particularism” and “Christian universalism.” To be sure, the construction of a distinctive “Christian” identity obscures, to some extent, the universalistic Jewish framework of the eschatological ekklēsia-movement within which Gentiles were included in the first place. Christian “universalism,” in other words, was conceived as an extension of an earlier Jewish universalism that drew inspiration from the prophetic tradition in which the renewal of Israel’s covenantal status was attributed to Yahweh, the God of all peoples.

Nonetheless, the Jubilee year entered the Christian tradition as a progressively symbolic transference away from physical debt, slavery, and the Land. This “spiritualization” or metaphorization of economic debt as sin, of physical release from economic slavery as other-worldly salvation, underscored by a dissociation of the universalistic, trans-ethnic Christian from the Land, allowed the memory of Jubilee to change registers, inspiring both the Christian tradition as well as non-religious ideologies undergirded by the Christian heritage.

America, for example, was imagined as the new “Israel,” a new “Promised Land,” a nation inspired, in part, by the Jubilee tradition (Corrigan: 164–65). America was the Servant called “to help liberate the captive and the oppressed … to banish ignorance, superstition, poverty, and disease in far corners of the earth” (Corrigan: 164). America’s divine calling was to inaugurate the great Day of Jubilee “when the oppressed everywhere would shake off their chains and the whole world would be free” (Corrigan: 164). In an address delivered at Plymouth in 1827, Lyman Beecher referred to America’s revolutionary spirit as a divine destiny: “Then will the trumpet of Jubilee sound, and earth’s debased millions will leap from the dust, and shake off their chains” (Hudson: 99–105). The American experiment of a society based on the Enlightenment ideals of freedom and equality informed the Abolition movement, the Women’s Liberation Movement, and the Civil Rights movement, each imagining an ideal society based on eschatological Jubilee principles of peace, liberty, and prosperity. We could cast our net even wider and include Liberation Theology as drawing from and developing Jubilee themes of liberation, social justice, freedom, and equality for the poor.

The Jubilee tradition—originating in a constitutional vision of ancient Israel periodically restoring its ancestral sovereignty as custodians of the land—can now be identified in literarily allusive and theologically symbolic expressions of “liberty, justice, and peace” on an international scale. It might be profitable, therefore, to extend our survey and discussion of the Jubilee tradition beyond its signification in Christian, biblical, and American contexts. What, for example, would the Jubilee have to contribute to the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, where the dream of “Peace in the Middle East” plays out in predominantly politicized contexts? Given that the Jubilee entered the Western religious imagination via ancient Israelite/Jewish, Christian, and now modern North and South American contexts—and thus became unmoored from its original literary and legislative intention—it would be unwise to anachronistically impose a “biblical” Jubilee tradition onto a contemporary setting. Yet insofar as the Jubilee lives on in both the religious imagination and the modern English lexicon, it might prove worthwhile to explore how the term “Jubilee” and Jubilee themes resonate in a contemporary political discourse. Here our discussion moves from tracing the genealogical influence of the biblical Jubilee tradition over time into a comparative mode, where the goal is not to posit influence or genealogical relationship, but rather to juxtapose, through “disciplined exaggeration,” different items of interest (Smith 1971: 67–90; 1982: 19–35; 1990; Freiberger; Carter: 3–11).

Liberating the Captives: The Palestinian/Israeli Conflict

Since the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, the relationship(s) between indigenous Arab Muslims of Palestine and the local Jewish settler population have often been characterized by political conflict and violence. How did we get here? Why did so many Palestinian Arabs of the British Mandate refuse to recognize the existential legitimacy of Israel as “a Jewish state,” especially in light of the horrors so recently inflicted on Jews during the Shoah? Why have many Palestinians supported the use of violence, terror, and suicide bombing against Israeli civilians? Why have Palestinian leaders tacitly encouraged and invoked a variety of incentives, including both financial-economic (this-worldly) and paradisal (other-worldly) rewards, for “every drop of blood spilled” by the shahid (“martyr”) (Abbas)? There are no easy or comforting answers.

It is common today to use the terms “Arab-Israeli” or “Palestinian-Israeli” conflict—as opposed to the “Jewish/Muslim” conflict—and thereby foreground the politico-geographical nature of this conflict rather than its “religious” aspects. Nonetheless, it is apparent to most observers that religious resources from both traditions have been mobilized and deployed to counterattack, defend, and maintain their respectively entrenched positions. The invocation of an apocalyptic Jihad, for example, under-girds Palestinian rhetoric of resistance and reclamation of Islamic lands whereas the re-naming of the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria” appeals to the religious language of biblical Israel. Consequently, those who argue that the conflict does not have religious and/or biblical-theological resonances and reservoirs obfuscate the role of ideology alongside the economic, social, and political tensions within this relationship. Moreover, this foregrounding of the political—to the exclusion of religious aspects—also serves to obfuscate anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic strains within political anti-Zionism.

The nineteenth-century emergence of Zionism as a secular-nationalist ideal arose as a political response to the increasing threat of European anti-Semitism. The new state also absorbed and adopted many of the colonial assumptions and cultural prejudices of nineteenth-century Europe (Katz, Leff, & Mandel: 1–25; Penslar: 276; Thompson: 317–26). In modern Palestine Studies, the “settler colonialism” of Zionist nationalism, practiced in collusion with covert imperial warfare and bad faith, violated human/civil rights, illegally “occupied” territories, and interferes with “Palestinian peoples’” rights to self-determination (Khalidi 2020; 2013; 2007; 1991; 1997; Porath 1974; 1977; Lesch; Muslih). The modern construction of a Palestinian nationalistic identity from the remnants of the Ottoman Empire occurred in contradistinction to Zionist nationalism (Gelvin: 92–93; Nasser). What has been described as “Palestinian rejectionism” of a Jewish state (Pipes 2017; 2015; 1997; Jirvis: 61–84; Kass & O’Neill) can be traced back to Nazi-collaborator Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem (Perlman; Schectman; Kiely: 110–14; Laqeuer; Mattar; Elpeleg), but one of the interpretive problems associated with the Palestinian–Israeli conflict is how easily anti-Semitism now slides into anti–Zionism. The two ideologies, however, should not be equated, as there are anti-Zionists who are not anti-Semites, and anti-Semites who are not anti-Zionists. The Neturei Karta (“Guardians of the City”), for example, represent a small number of Haredi (“Ultra-Orthodox”) Jews who reject political Zionism as a secular ideology and believe that Israel should not exist until the Messiah arrives and redeems the nation. Most Haredi Jews have a less polemical opposition to the existence of the state, but resist mandatory military service for their young men. Other Jews reject secular Zionism and promote a vision of religious Zionism, including the reclamation of “Judea and Samaria.” Secular Jews tend to resist the religious strictures of Orthodoxy, but nonetheless affirm the ethnic legitimacy of their presence in the Land.

Since 1967, Israel has become an increasingly militarized state in an aggressive and sometimes belligerent reaction to violent Palestinian rejectionism, with one response being the Settlement of “Judea and Samaria” (Shavit). These efforts both to protect and expand wreak havoc on the politico-geographic viability of a two-state solution, but they also represent a kind of secular messianism insofar as they facilitate envisioning an in-gathering of the tribe(s) and the “re-occupation” of the Promised Land. This construction of settlements in disputed territories has led to charges of Israeli Rejectionism, the insinuation that Israel rejects peace even while it appears to seek a two-state solution (Amit & Levit: 163). An increasingly vocal religious Zionism, born of a strong sense of peoplehood and the reclamation of the Land, combined with the conviction of divine election, has compromised the possibility of peace because it is embroiled with military solutions of security and surveillance. To speak of Jubilee in this context is to risk both political and religious offense by re-locating an ancient biblical tradition in(to) a contemporary arena that may seem irrelevant or one-sided at best. How would the biblical theme of “liberating the captives” play out in the context of the Occupied Territories of “Judea and Samaria?” How would the Jubilee imperative of treating the “stranger” and the “resident alien” now be understood in terms of dispensing “justice” in the Land?

Interestingly, the modern state of Israel has recently appealed to the language of Jubilee by announcing the years 2017–2018 (5777–5778) as “The Jubilee Years” (http://jubilee-years.gov.il), commemorating the “Jubilees” of the First Zionist Congress (1897), the Balfour Declaration (1917), UN Resolution 181 (1947), the Six-Day War (1967), the Reunification of Jerusalem (1967), and Anwar Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem (1977). Here, of course, the term Jubilee signifies more to the concept of a commemorative anniversary than the biblical Jubilee, but this rhetorical appeal to Jubilee seems nonetheless intended to critique “the Palestinian rejection of the connection between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel,” a rejection that “lies at the heart of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict” (http://jubilee-years.gov.il/?q=1967). In light of this explicit rhetorical appeal to “the Jubilee Years” associated with the liberation of East Jerusalem, linked to questions of Jewish “sovereignty” over the Temple Mount, and “Palestinian denial of the Jewish people’s profound and unbroken connection to its ancient homeland,” it is telling that the state insists that “Palestinian recognition and acceptance of Israel’s Jewish character and the Jewish people’s inherent and legitimate connection to the land and to Jerusalem is essential for the achievement of peace.” The peace envisioned as the fruit of the Jubilee tradition is contingent on Palestinian recognition of an ancestral Jewish claim to the Land.

To be sure, “The Jubilee Years” of 2017–2018 did not represent the 50-year anniversary of the state’s founding. In 1998, the state celebrated its fiftieth anniversary with the motto, “Together with Pride, Together in Hope,” a program described as “a fairly transparent effort to put a cheery and busy façade on a jubilee whose organization has suffered from severe infighting, and whose gloss has been tarnished by a political climate that has caused a serious drop in tourism” (Schmemann). In 1998, the people of Israel were still processing the failure of the 1993 Oslo Accords and the November 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a Jewish religious extremist, along with the rise of a more militant nationalism under the administration of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The failure of the Oslo Accords and the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin, exacerbated by the rise of suicide terrorism throughout Israel, have not provided much optimistic hope for peace in our time.

In 2000, the Second Intifada—widely held to have begun with Ariel Sharon’s provocative visit to the Temple Mount on September 28, 2000—expressed Palestinian frustration with the failure of the Middle East Peace Summit at Camp David between President Bill Clinton, Ehud Barak, and Yasser Arafat in July 2000. The leaders simply could not reach agreements on territory, Jerusalem, the Temple Mount, the right of return for Palestinian refugees, and/or Israel’s security concerns. Scholars continue to debate whether Arafat planned, implemented, or simply supported the Intifada in response to this diplomatic failure, but Sharon’s visit—a symbolic demonstration of Israel’s political and military authority over the Temple Mount—was met with Palestinian rioting and stone-throwing, resulting in Israeli police using tear gas, rubber bullets, and live ammunition to suppress the uprising.

After September 11, 2001, the Middle East Peace Process became a vastly more complicated geo-political problem coinciding with the rise of Islamophobia, anti-Muslimism, and new waves of Anti-Semitism. Israel’s treatment of Palestinians was now exacerbated by the American “war on terror and the Iraq “war” for the liberation of the Iraqi people. By 2005, the death toll of the Second Intifada and the psychological, political, and military effects of its atrocities resulted in the construction of the West Bank Barrier and the withdrawal of Israel from the Gaza Strip. The Second Intifada is only a recent illustration of the cycle(s) of violence that have plagued the Middle East for centuries, if not millennia.

The evident failure of the “peace process”—a failure made obvious insofar as the alleged brokers of peace do not have that which they seek to broker—cannot be attributed simply to broken ceasefires or the sudden collapse of diplomatic negotiations. The mutual appeal to violence as a way of resisting and expelling an undesired, foreign, impure, polluting, and desecrating “other” is a central characteristic of this relationship. On the Palestinian side, the sacralization of terrorism as martyrdom (and/or secularized as political resistance) is fueled by fears that Israel seeks to rid the Land of Palestinians and remove the Al-Aqsa Mosque from the Temple Mount, mirror-image projections of the “ethnic cleansing” of Jews many Palestinians now seek for their own state, often imagined as the “liberation” of Palestine (Pappé). Naturally, Israel’s declaration of independence is remembered differently by Palestinians (as the Nakba, or “Catastrophe,” Karsh; Morris 2008), but once the war of independence was underway, atrocities occurred on both sides (Morris 1987: 286). Today we are no nearer resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict than ever before. Indeed, Israeli’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s stated desire to “annex” the Jordan Valley and up to thirty-percent of the West Bank (including over 100 Jewish settlements) has received considerable support from the Trump administration—under their Vision for Peace Conceptual Map initiative—and continues to provoke fears and anxieties over whether such a move might lead to a new uprising, re-occupation, and the collapse of the Palestinian Authority, leaving Palestinians in second-class “status” without citizenship, a quintessential symbol of “captives” seeking “liberation.”

Conclusion

The Land is Mine, says the Lord. But who se God is it? In contemporary Interfaith dialogue, the term “Abrahamic religions”—a kind of sub-category in the “World Religions” paradigm—is an appealing gesture toward the concept of shared ancestry and family relationship. This modern appeal to Abrahamic descent, however, also obscures the many differences that have developed between the faiths (Bakhos). Abrahamic descent cuts both ways. Asserting familial relationship while reinforcing covenantal rivalry, it both unifies and divides (Bakhos: 54). Biblical theology has long wrestled with the paradoxical God who is both the God of all peoples and shows “no partiality” (Rom 2:11; Acts 10:34) while simultaneously electing Israel as his “Chosen People.” Age-old covenantal rivalry may explain some of the tension between Jews and Muslims, and now Israelis and Palestinians, but much of this allegedly ancient rivalry is non-biblical in origin and thus “biblically unsubstantiated” (Bakhos: 138). Jewish and Christian “interpretive traditions” constructed this rivalry, mapping Isaac and Ishmael onto increasingly hostile cultural and political relationships throughout the Middle Ages. Islamic traditions, on the other hand, tend to regard both sons of Abraham as prophets. Perhaps it would be best for practicing Jews, Muslims, and Christians to regard themselves as continuing to wrestle with what has been called the “monotheizing process” leading from polytheism and henotheism to “true monotheism,” where there is only one God after all (Sanders 2014: 1). As Sanders points out, the Jubilee tradition points not only to the idea that the Land belongs to God, but so does everything in it: “none of the earth belongs to humans but ultimately to God alone” (Sanders 2020: 4, 6).

For generations, Jews, Muslims, and Christians have defined themselves in contradistinction to each other. Each makes the other the scapegoat. Each identifies itself as the “chosen people” of the same God. Each resorts to violence to defend the sacred, finding little comfort in their common ancestry in Abraham. For many Jews, the founding of the state of Israel represents the restoration of the Land held in trust for centuries of foreign occupation. For many Muslims, the Jews are intruders whose chronological priority in the covenantal narrative remains a source of ambiguous tension, if not outright hostility. For many, the Jewish rejection of Muslim/Arab/Palestinian claims to the Land mirrors and reflects the Jewish rejection of the prophetic authority of Muhammad, fueling fantasies of defeating the Jews in Jihad. The question, then, of whether Palestinians can affirm the existence of a Jewish state must acknowledge an ancestral historical memory that the Land once belonged to them as well.

The Jubilee tradition—once the constitutional vision of ancient Israel, now an inspiring vision of eschatological justice and peace—may yet hold out a promising future of restoration, but its proponents will have to wrestle with the social, economic, political, and theological implications of how ancestral sovereignty and custodian-ship of the land needs to be translated into different languages for a different time. For generations, an ancient legacy of mutual rejection(ism)—internalized as victim, externalized as aggressor—has been politically and militarily mapped onto the Middle East, with Evangelical Christians sometimes seeing these dramas as “signs” foreshadowing the imminent arrival of Jesus (cf. Matt 23:39). The land may belong to God (Lev 25:23), but it is currently the site of a conflict that sees no end in sight.