What is the Jubilee year in the Torah?

The Jubilee, or yovel, is commanded in Leviticus 25:8-13. Israel is to count seven cycles of seven years — forty-nine years — and then, on the Day of Atonement of the fiftieth year, sound the shofar and "proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof." Two things happen in that fiftieth year: land that had been sold reverts to the family that originally held it, and Israelite servants who had sold themselves into service go free and return to their own family and property. Like the shmita (sabbatical) year, the Jubilee land also lies fallow — but the Jubilee is not simply a bigger shmita. Shmita is a seven-year cycle governing debt release and letting fields rest every seventh year; the Jubilee is the fiftieth year layered on top of seven shmita cycles, and its distinctive act is economic reset rather than agricultural rest alone: ancestral land can never be permanently sold, only leased until the next Jubilee, because, as Leviticus 25:23 puts it, the land ultimately belongs to God and Israel are "strangers and sojourners" on it. The practical effect was to prevent permanent generational inequality — a family that fell into poverty and sold its fields, or even sold itself into servitude, was guaranteed a reset within a lifetime. Rabbinic tradition holds that the Jubilee applied only when all twelve tribes were settled in the land, and it lapsed after the northern tribes' exile, but its vision of built-in economic restoration remains one of the Torah's most distinctive social laws.