Editing Shmita (section)

===Jubilee and Sabbatical years as a long-term calendar for Israel===

The Jubilee and Sabbatical year provided a long-term means for dating events, a fact that must have become obvious soon after the legislation was put into effect. It is of some interest, then, that the Babylonian Talmud (tractate ''Sanhedrin'' 40a,b) records that in the time of the judges, legal events such as contracts or criminal cases were dated according to the Jubilee cycle, the Sabbatical cycle within the Jubilee cycle, and the year within the Sabbatical cycle. The Samaritan community apparently used this method of dating as late as the 14th century CE, when an editor of one of the writings of the Samaritans wrote that he finished his work in the sixty-first Jubilee cycle since the entry into Canaan, in the fourth year of the fifth Sabbatical of that cycle.<ref>''Encyclopaedia Judaica'' (Jerusalem: Keter, 1972), 14, col. 751.</ref> These cases of usage of the Jubilee/Sabbatical cycles make no provision for the possibility of the Sabbatical cycles being out of phase with the Jubilee cycles, which is additional evidence that the Jubilee was contemporaneous with the seventh Sabbatical year.{{citation needed|date=September 2017}}