““This will be the sign for you, Hezekiah:
‘This year you will eat what grows by itself,
and the second year what springs from that.
But in the third year sow and reap,
plant vineyards and eat their fruit.
Once more a remnant of the kingdom of Judah
will take root below and bear fruit above.'”
Isaiah 37:30-31, NIV
This is another of those confessions that I am in the extremely slow class. I have been reading Isaiah, and both noting, and meditating on, this passage, for nearly 50 years. And until this evening, I have always read it as a beginning.
“Here you are, Hezekiah: you are going to start small, just eating what pops up this year, and next year, what grows from this year’s ‘pop-up’; but in the third year, you are in business: get cracking.”
And I am quite ready to believe that I am the only person who has ever missed the whole point here.
This is the end of a cycle, not the beginning. Specifically, the end of the 50-year cycle of sabbath years. “This year you will eat what grows by itself” could be any sabbath year, but “and the second year what springs from that.” anchors it as a specific sabbath year: the 7th in the cycle, meaning the 49th year, followed by the 50th year. And that would be the Year of Jubilee.
That is the only time two years of “just eating what arose” happened for Israel; the last sabbath year, followed by the Year of Jubilee.
Of course, even though it was a definite commandment to Israel, I have never seen any biblical evidence that they followed these instructions during the time of the Kings. They may have, and perhaps Jewish sources have preserved this fact; but our scriptures seem silent on the matter.
But if they had, or if Hezekiah recognised the reference and went off to study it, he would have recognised three important facts, of immediate and immense relevance to himself and the whole people of Judah. In the 49th year, all debts are forgiven, as they are each sabbath year. In the 50th year, all land reverts to its original owners, and all indentured workers are set free (no one was supposed to be actually enslaved, but again, their actual mileage practice may have varied…).
So the sign to Hezekiah, at the time when Sennacherib was threatening destruction, both to Hezekiah and Judah (not to mention, Yahweh), was that over the next two years, you will give the land its rest, you will forgive debt, restore land, free slaves – and by the third year you will have no threat hanging over you and will restart the nation’s economic life.
And that is the end of one cycle and the clean start of another.
Seeing the Kingdom 