Question VII. Whether, at the time of the siege of Jericho, the Jubilee years had already begun?

Because the Lord here commands that [the trumpets] be sounded with “the buccinae of the Jubilees,” someone might suppose, not without reason, that the jubilee years had already been received into use and custom. But it is not so: because, from the precept given about them, XL [forty] years had not yet elapsed, much less L [fifty], as appeared above (chs. 3 & 4). The “trumpets of the Jubilees,” therefore, are here to be understood — not [trumpets] of which there had already been any use in their [the Jubilees’] proclamation, but such as ought to be [used] when the longed-for time of that kind should have come — whether some [Jubilees] had already been held, or were only now being held; and again, whether the same in number were afterward employed, or not, but others quite like these. But concerning the time when the first Jubilee began, more in its place afterward, where the division of the land will have been treated in general (qq. 14 & 15).