The Land of Israel Rested for 70 Years — Because Israel Didn't Let It

God told Israel that the land had to rest. Every seven years, no planting, no pruning, no harvesting. What grew on its own, anyone could take. Fields were thrown open. Agricultural debt was frozen. For one year in seven, the entire economy of the Land of Israel stopped. The command is in Leviticus 25:1-7. Israel observed it — sometimes. And according to 2 Chronicles 36:21, when they eventually stopped observing it, the land kept track. The seventy years Israel spent in exile in Babylon were, the text says explicitly, the land's repayment for the Sabbatical years that were skipped.

What Exactly Is the Sabbatical Year?

The shemitah (from the root meaning "release" or "dropping") is the seventh year in a seven-year agricultural cycle. Leviticus 25:2-7 commands that during this year, no field may be sown, no vineyard pruned, no harvested crop stored in the owner's storehouse. The entire yield of the fallow land is declared ownerless (hefker) — available to anyone who wants to take it. The Mishnah in tractate Sheviit (compiled c. 200 CE, one of the most complex tractates in the agricultural order, with ten chapters) governs the details: when plowing must stop in the year preceding shemitah, what produce may be sold, how market prices of shemitah produce may be used. The underlying principle, stated in Leviticus 25:23, is the same as the Jubilee: the land is not yours. It belongs to God. You are tenants who must periodically acknowledge the landlord's rights.

Why Did Israel Stop Observing It?

The economic pressure was immense. An agricultural economy cannot simply stop for one year in seven without careful planning. The Midrash Rabbah on Leviticus (Vayikra Rabbah 1:1, compiled c. 400-500 CE) acknowledges the difficulty: shemitah requires extraordinary faith that the sixth year's crop will sustain the community through the seventh year and into the new planting season. Leviticus 25:20-22 anticipates the anxiety explicitly — "What shall we eat in the seventh year?" — and promises a tripled crop in the sixth year to provide for the fallow year and the transition. But the biblical record in Chronicles, Kings, and the prophets suggests that compliance was inconsistent. The prophet Jeremiah (c. 627-586 BCE) includes violation of the Sabbatical year in his indictment of the nation before the Babylonian destruction. The Legends of the Jews (Louis Ginzberg, 1909-1938) records traditions that the leaders of Israel who violated shemitah did so not out of ignorance but calculation — prioritizing agricultural output over covenantal obligation.

How Did the Sages Calculate 70 Missed Years?

2 Chronicles 36:21 states that the exile lasted seventy years "to fulfill the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah, until the land had enjoyed its Sabbaths; for as long as it lay desolate it kept Sabbath, to fulfill threescore and ten years." The Talmud in tractate Megillah (11b, compiled c. 500 CE) works backward: if 70 shemitah years were violated, the span of violation would have been 70 times 7 = 490 years. This matches, roughly, the period from the entry into the Land of Israel under Joshua (c. 1250 BCE in traditional dating) to the Babylonian exile (586 BCE). The calculation is not presented as mathematical precision but as theological accounting: the land's debt was exactly repaid. Every missed Sabbatical year was collected. The exile lasted exactly as long as the accumulated debt required.

What Is the Heter Mechira?

When modern Zionist settlers began farming in the Land of Israel in the 1880s and needed to know how to handle shemitah, a practical problem arose: observing a full agricultural shutdown threatened the economic survival of struggling colonies. Rabbi Shmuel Mohiliver and Rabbi Yitzchak Elchanan Spektor, writing in 1888-1889, developed a legal workaround called the heter mechira — a "sale permit" — by which the land was formally (and temporarily) sold to a non-Jewish owner for the duration of the shemitah year, allowing farming to continue on land that was technically no longer Jewish-owned. The Chief Rabbinate of Israel has relied on this mechanism in modern shemitah years (the most recent were 2021-22 and 2028-29 will be the next). The heter mechira remains controversial: ultra-Orthodox authorities reject it as a legal fiction; mainstream Israeli Orthodox rabbinate accepts it as a necessary accommodation. Explore the agricultural theology of the Hebrew Bible across our Tanchuma collection at jewishmythology.com.

What Does Shemitah Mean Spiritually?

The Kabbalah collection at jewishmythology.com contains Zoharic texts (c. 1280 CE) that interpret shemitah cosmically: just as the world operates on a seven-year agricultural cycle, it operates on a seven-thousand-year cosmic cycle — one cosmic "day" for each day of creation. The seventh millennium is the cosmic shemitah, the great Sabbath of history in which no agricultural metaphor applies because the whole frame of human civilization rests. The sabbatical year is thus a miniature rehearsal for the end of history — a practice in releasing control, in accepting that the land does not belong to you, in trusting that provision will come from beyond your own effort. Each seven-year cycle is a complete unit of divine-human negotiation, concluding with the land's insistence on its own sovereignty. Discover the full tradition of sabbatical law and its prophetic implications in our collection at jewishmythology.com.