The year of Jubilee was regulated by the sun and moon. The Lord God required the children of Israel to observe it (though there is no indication that they ever did) every fifty years once they entered Canaan. It was to be kept as a constantly recurring festival beginning in the autumn harvest of each fiftieth year. Jubilee was counted from the tenth day of the first month, that being the month in which Israel crossed the Jordan. It was an important factor in reconciling solar and lunar time. Forty-nine years is a solar-lunar cycle. The interval from the tenth day of the first month of the year to the tenth of the seventh month of the forty-ninth year is exactly six hundred lunar cycles. All the sabbaths of the fifty year period were all worked into the Levitical calendar by divine appointment.
So precise
and detailed is the order of God’s providence, that even the cycles of the
solar system were set by him, and are maintained by him, that the Jews and
Romans, with their wicked wills crucified the Lord of Glory (according to the
calculations of those who calculate such things) at the time of passover, at
the time of the evening sacrifice, in the place where God required the
sacrifice to be made (Jerusalem), in the year of jubilee! That makes Acts 2:23
a little more astounding, doesn’t it? None but God
could have instituted a system so precise
and perfect (see Gen. 1:14).