A Sabbath for the Land
1 Yahweh said to Moses on Mount Sinai, 2 “Speak to the children of Israel, and tell them, ‘When you come into the land which I give you, then the land shall keep a Sabbath to Yahweh. 3 You shall sow your field six years, and you shall prune your vineyard six years, and gather in its fruits; 4 but in the seventh year there shall be a Sabbath of solemn rest for the land, a Sabbath to Yahweh. You shall not sow your field or prune your vineyard. 5 What grows of itself in your harvest you shall not reap, and you shall not gather the grapes of your undressed vine. It shall be a year of solemn rest for the land. 6 The Sabbath of the land shall be for food for you; for yourself, for your servant, for your maid, for your hired servant, and for your stranger, who lives as a foreigner with you. 7 For your livestock also, and for the animals that are in your land, shall all its increase be for food.
The ground itself gets a seventh year off, and in that year the food belongs equally to the owner, his servants and the wild animals.
The weekly pattern is extended to the soil. Six years of sowing and pruning, and then in the seventh year there shall be a Sabbath of solemn rest for the land, a Sabbath to Yahweh Leviticus 25:4.
Nothing is sown, nothing is pruned, and whatever comes up on its own is not harvested Leviticus 25:5. For a full year the country's agriculture stops.
The agricultural sense of it is real — fallow ground recovers — but the reason given is not agronomic. It is called a Sabbath to Yahweh, in the same words as the seventh day, and the land is the beneficiary in its own right. This book treats the ground as something with a claim.
What happens to the food in that year is where the legislation becomes remarkable.
The Sabbath of the land shall be for food for you; for yourself, for your servant, for your maid, for your hired servant, and for your stranger, who lives as a foreigner with you Leviticus 25:6. And then: for your livestock also, and for the animals that are in your land Leviticus 25:7.
Whatever grows untended is not private property. The owner may eat it, and so may his slaves, his employees, the resident foreigner, his animals, and the wild creatures — all named in one list, on the same footing.
For one year in seven the distinction between an owner and everyone else simply lapses. Nobody harvests, so nobody stores, so nobody controls the supply, and a landless man eats from the same field as the man whose name is on it.
The obvious objection is raised in the text itself, three verses later, in the words a farmer would use: what shall we eat the seventh year? Leviticus 25:20.
The answer is a promise of a triple crop in the sixth year Leviticus 25:21 — which means the whole arrangement runs on trust in a harvest that has not yet come, and can be broken by anyone who decides not to risk it. The history records that it was broken for centuries, and that the exile was reckoned as the land taking the rest it had been owed 2 Chronicles 36:21.
settled What this mark means