The Beginning of the Jubilee

There is a lot to be worked on here. There are four separate points in time that have to be kept separate. First there was the memorisation of the Song of Moses and the depositing of it in the Ark. Second there was the crossing of the Jordan in the first month, and then the Passover. Third, six months later, in the seventh month, the temporary altar was set up on Mt. Gerizim and the blessings and curses were recited in the valley between the two mountains, one set of six tribes facing one way and the other set facing the other way. Fourth, at the end of the first year and the start of the second year, the Tabernacle was inaugurated, and the whole Torah could be read out. You will see that this leaves room for three different opinions on where to start the counting of the shemittah years and the Jubilee years, i.e. 1/1/01 or 1/7/01 or 1/1/02. I think you should re-read the Samaritan Arabic Joshua in Crane’s translation, using my article The Transmission of the Samaritan Joshua-Judges to separate the original book from the accretions. There is a remark in the article saying that that Abu ‘l-Fateh. seems to differ slightly in the dating of the temporary altar (but I say this right now from memory, so it needs to be verifed). Notice what I said about the two readings in the narrative at the start of the second year and the inauguration of the Tabernacle, originally “they started counting the shemittah years” but in a later recension “they used to count the shemittah years”, meaning in the context that the counting had started before then.