Blow ye the trumpet, blow,
The gladly solemn sound;
Let all the nations know,
To earth’s remotest bound,
The year of jubilee is come;
Return, ye ransomed sinners, home.
Extol the Lamb of God,
The all-atoning Lamb;
Redemption in His blood
Throughout the world proclaim:
The year of jubilee is come;
Return, ye ransomed sinners, home.
Ye slaves of sin and hell,
Your liberty receive,
And safe in Jesus dwell,
And blest in Jesus live:
The year of jubilee is come;
Return, ye ransomed sinners, home.
Public domain hymn text (1750). Words by Charles Wesley.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Charles Wesley wrote this hymn's text in 1750, building its entire structure around the Old Testament institution of the Jubilee year described in Leviticus 25, a specially designated year occurring once every fifty years within the ancient Israelite legal and religious calendar, during which enslaved Israelites were to be set free, ancestral land that had been sold due to debt was to be returned to its original family, and debts generally were to be forgiven, all announced publicly across the land by the sounding of trumpets — an ancient institution of periodic, comprehensive economic and social release that Wesley uses throughout the hymn as an extended metaphor for the spiritual freedom and forgiveness available through Christ.
Wesley's deliberate choice of this specific, somewhat unusual Old Testament legal institution, rather than more commonly used biblical images of shepherds, kings, or sacrifice found in many other hymns throughout this collection, reflects his own considerable skill at finding fresh, less commonly used scriptural material to illustrate familiar Christian doctrine, treating an ancient economic and social law most congregations would have known only abstractly as a vivid, concrete picture of spiritual liberation.
The hymn's repeated command to 'blow ye the trumpet,' addressed to an unspecified collective 'you' throughout, gives it an unusually public, proclamatory quality compared to more inwardly focused, personal devotional hymns — this is a hymn explicitly about public announcement and communal celebration rather than private reflection, fitting its origins in an ancient legal institution that was itself fundamentally about public, communal, trumpet-announced release rather than any private or individual experience.
The hymn remains a standard piece of Christian worship specifically associated with themes of liberation, forgiveness, and jubilee, and has found particular renewed use in recent decades within Christian communities and traditions specifically emphasizing social justice and liberation theology, drawn to Wesley's direct use of an Old Testament economic-justice institution as the hymn's central organizing image.
