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The Sabbath year

¹The LORD spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai. He said, ²“Speak to the Israelites and tell them: ‘When you enter the land I am giving you, the land is to have a Sabbath rest in honor of the LORD. ³For six years you may plant your fields and trim your vineyards and gather what they yield. ⁴But the seventh year is to be a Sabbath of complete rest for the land, a Sabbath for the LORD, when you neither sow your fields nor prune your vineyards. ⁵Do not harvest the grain that comes up on its own from the last crop, and do not pick the grapes from the vines you have left unpruned. It is to be a year of complete rest for the land. ⁶Whatever the land produces in its Sabbath year will be food for all of you: for you, your male and female servants, your hired worker, and the resident who stays with you, ⁷and for your livestock and for the wild animals in your land. All that the land yields may be eaten.

The year of Jubilee

⁸Count off seven Sabbaths of years, seven times seven years. The time of the seven Sabbaths of years will come to forty-nine years. ⁹Then on the tenth day of the seventh month send the loud blast of the ram’s horn out across the country. On the Day of Atonement have the horn sounded through all your land. ¹⁰Set the fiftieth year apart as holy, and announce freedom in the land for everyone who lives in it. This will be your Jubilee, when each of you goes home to your own property and to your own clan.^{ab 11}That fiftieth year is to be your Jubilee. Do not sow, and do not harvest what springs up by itself or pick the grapes from the unpruned vines. ¹²For it is a Jubilee, and it is to be holy to you. Eat what the field gives, straight from the field. ¹³This Jubilee year is when each of you goes home to your own property. ¹⁴When you sell land to your neighbor or buy it from your neighbor, do not cheat one another. ¹⁵The price you pay your neighbor is to depend on how many years have gone by since the Jubilee, and the price he asks is to depend on how many years of harvests remain. ¹⁶If many years are left, the price goes up; if only a few, it goes down. For he is selling you a certain number of harvests. ¹⁷So do not cheat one another; fear your God instead. I am the LORD your God. ¹⁸Put my statutes into practice, and be careful to keep my rules. Then you will live in safety on the land. ¹⁹The land will produce its fruit, you will have all you want to eat, and you will be safe living there. ²⁰You might ask, “What are we to eat in the seventh year, if we are not to sow or bring in our harvest?” ²¹I will order my blessing on you in the sixth year, so that the harvest of that year will be enough to last three years. ²²When you sow in the eighth year you will still be eating from the old harvest. You will go on eating the old store until the ninth year, when that year’s crop comes in. ²³No land is to be sold for good, for the land belongs to me. You are only outsiders and residents living with me.^{c 24}Throughout the land you hold, you must allow land that has been sold to be bought back.

Buying back land and houses

²⁵Suppose a fellow Israelite falls into poverty and has to sell some of his land. Then the relative closest to him, his redeemer, is to come and buy back what his kinsman sold.^{d 26}If someone has no one to redeem it but later prospers and gathers enough to buy it back himself, ²⁷he is to work out the years since he sold it, pay the buyer back for the years that remain, and go back to his land. ²⁸But if he cannot raise enough to pay him back, the land he sold stays with the buyer until the Jubilee year. In the Jubilee it is released, and he goes back to his land. ²⁹If someone sells a home inside a walled city, the right to buy it back lasts until a full year has passed since he sold it. He has a year in which to redeem it. ³⁰If it is not bought back before the full year is over, the house in the walled city becomes the permanent property of the buyer and his descendants. It is not released in the Jubilee.^{e 31}But a house in a village with no wall around it counts as part of the farmland. The right to buy it back remains, and at the Jubilee it goes back to its owner. ³²In the case of the Levites’ towns, the houses in the towns they own, the Levites have the right to buy them back at any time. ³³And if a house in one of their towns is acquired from a Levite, the sale ends at the Jubilee, for the houses in the Levites’ towns are their property among the Israelites.^{f 34}The pastureland around their towns may not be sold at all; it is theirs for all time.

Caring for the poor

³⁵If a fellow Israelite near you falls into poverty and can no longer provide for himself, you are to support him, and he is to live beside you like an outsider or a resident.^{g 36}Do not take interest from him or add anything to what he owes. Fear your God, and let your fellow Israelite keep on living with you.^{h 37}When you lend him money, take no interest, and when you supply him with food, take no extra back. ³⁸I am the LORD your God. It was I who brought you out of the land of Egypt, so that I could give you the land of Canaan and be your God.

Israelites who sell themselves

³⁹Suppose a fellow Israelite living near you becomes so poor that he sells himself to you. You must not make him do a slave’s work.^{i 40}He is to stay with you on the footing of a hired worker or a resident, and work for you up to the Jubilee year. ⁴¹Then he and his children are to leave you and go back to his clan, and he will return to the land his ancestors held. ⁴²For they are my slaves, since I brought them out of the land of Egypt. They must not be sold the way slaves are sold.^{j 43}Do not lord it over him with cruelty. Fear your God. ⁴⁴If you want male or female slaves, you may buy them from the nations that live around you. ⁴⁵You may also buy them from the residents who are staying among you, and from their families who are with you and were born in your land. They may be counted among your holdings. ⁴⁶You may hand them down to your children after you as property they will hold, and they may work for you permanently. But over your own kin, the Israelites, you must not rule harshly, one over another.

Buying back an Israelite sold to an outsider

⁴⁷If an outsider or resident living among you becomes rich, and a fellow Israelite near him grows poor and sells himself to that outsider or to a member of the outsider’s clan, ⁴⁸he still has the right to be bought back after selling himself. One of his brothers may redeem him, ⁴⁹an uncle could do it, or a cousin, or any other close relative in his clan. Or if he gets the means, he can buy himself back. ⁵⁰Together with the man who bought him, he is to work out how many years run from the year of the sale to the Jubilee year. The money for his sale is then reckoned by those years, as though his time with the buyer were the time of a hired worker. ⁵¹If there are still many years to go, he is to give back a matching part of the money paid for him to buy his freedom. ⁵²If only a few years remain before the Jubilee year, he is to reckon them up and pay for his freedom in line with those years. ⁵³He is to live with the buyer like a worker hired from year to year, and you must not let the buyer treat him harshly while you look on. ⁵⁴Even if no one redeems him by these means, he and his children are to go free in the Jubilee year. ⁵⁵For the Israelites are slaves who belong to me. They are my slaves, the people I brought out of the land of Egypt. I am the LORD your God.