1. on Mount Sinai. The mention here of Mount Sinai has become proverbial in Hebrew for a puzzling juxtaposition of two disparate terms—in Rashi’s classic formulation: “What is the connection between Mount Sinai and the Year of Release?” The most plausible explanation, put forth by several recent scholars, is that there is an invocation of a Mesopotamian practice, in which a king assuming his throne would issue a general proclamation for the release of slaves. Thus God announcing His kingship at Sinai definitively releases the Israelites from the status of slaves to which they had been reduced in Egypt. They become instead God’s slaves (a parodoxical definition of their new freedom), as the end of this chapter pointedly reminds us.

2. the land shall keep a sabbath to the LORD. More literally, “the land shall cease a cessation to the LORD.”

4. your vineyard you shall not prune. The vines of course do not have to be planted annually like the grains, but without annual pruning, they will not yield an adequate crop of grapes.

5. untrimmed vines. A very literal representation of this phrase would be “nazirite vines.” The Hebrew nazir reflects a root that means “to set apart,” but because the nazirite refrains among other things from cutting his hair, the idiom here may be a simple analogical extension from uncut hair (because it is forbidden) to untrimmed vines (because it is equally forbidden).

6. the land’s sabbath shall be food for you. This phrasing is an obvious ellipsis for “the land’s sabbath yield shall be food for you.”

your resident hirelings. Throughout this section, the two nouns sekhirkha wetoshavkha, connected by “and,” should be understood not as separate items (“your hireling and your resident”) but as a hendiadys, two terms indicating a single concept.

7. all its yield. “Its” (feminine in the Hebrew) refers either to “land” or to “sabbath.”

9. send round. This verb is chosen because what is suggested is that the ram’s horn is to be carried around the country from place to place by delegated heralds and to be appropriately sounded, so that everyone will know that the jubilee year has arrived.

10. call a release in the land to all its inhabitants. One must regretfully forgo the grandeur of the King James Version, inscribed on the Liberty Bell: “proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.” In fact, the passage is concerned with the legal arrangements regarding property in the jubilee year, and modern scholarship has persuasively demonstrated that deror does not mean “liberty” but is cognate with a technical Akkadian term, anduraru, which means a release from, or moratorium on, debts and indenture.

jubilee. Though scholarly debate persists about the etymology of this word (which has entered English from the Hebrew), the noun yovel in Exodus 19:13 clearly indicates a ram’s horn (the alternate term is shofar), and thus it is plausible that the fiftieth year was called jubilee, yovel, because this was when loud blasts of the ram’s horn were sounded throughout the land.

12. its yield. The only proximate candidate for an antecedent of “its” (feminine) is “jubilee year.”

13. you shall go back, each man to his holding. Without the notion of inalienable property holdings, the whole system of permanent division of the land according to tribes, and then clans, would have broken down. On the other hand, the arrangements for the jubilee release entailed the most cumbersome complications, as verses 16–17 concede, and once the tribal territories had disappeared as a historical fact in the Second Temple period, the rabbis devised a legal mechanism that in effect abrogated the jubilee.

16. since he is selling you the number of yields. If, say, there remained only three years until the jubilee, the buyer would enjoy only three harvests before the land would revert to its original owner, and so the seller could demand only a limited purchase price (in all likelihood, ¾₉ of its intrinsic value).

19. its fruits. Here the term functions in its general sense of “produce.”

21. I have charged My blessing for you in the sixth year, and it will produce yield for three years. This miraculous intervention in order to generate a harvest in the sixth year sufficient for three years suggests that the legislation for the sabbatical year was in a way utopian, and could have been observed only imperfectly for compelling practical reasons.

23. sojourning settlers. As everywhere in biblical usage, the two Hebrew nouns (literally, “sojourner and settler”) are a hendiadys with the modern legal sense of “resident alien.”

24. you shall allow a redemption for the land. Land can be redeemed at any time either by its original owner or by a relative acting on behalf of the original owner, and the buyer is obliged to sell back the land, to “allow redemption.” The jubilee, then, is a kind of backup system: if neither the original owner nor his kin can come up with the price of redemption, the land will in any case revert to its original owner in the jubilee.

28. released. The literal meaning of the verb yatsaʾ is “go out,” but in contexts of property law it has this technical meaning, and the literal sense would not be intelligible in English.

30. the house in the town that has a wall shall pass over irreversibly to its buyer. In an agrarian economy, real property in open fields was a permanent and indispensable source of livelihood, whereas urban real estate was primarily a residence rather than a source of income. As a result, it was not regarded as inalienable property and might be permanently relinquished if the seller could not scrape together funds to buy it back within a year.

35. his hand buckle under you. The verb here is more typically associated with the foot, where it has the sense of “stumble.” Because “hand” is a metonym for “power,” the idea is that the person has suffered something we would call economic collapse.

he shall live under you. That is, he shall live under your authority or power, with the understanding that you shall take reasonable steps to allow him to subsist.

36. advance interest or accrued interest. There is some uncertainty as to the precise differentiation between these two kinds of interest. The former term, neshekh, etymologically means a “bite”; the latter, marbit, comes from the verb that means “to multiply.”

42. For they are My slaves. The parodoxical consequence of the fact that the Israelites, as God’s covenanted people, have assumed the condition of God’s slaves is that they are prohibited from treating each other as slaves. The status outlined here, with mandatory release in the jubilee year, is a kind of indentured servitude. In contrast, however, to the sabbatical laws in Exodus and Deuteronomy, manumission occurs only in the jubilee, so the maximum period of servitude is forty-nine years, not six.

43. You shall not hold crushing sway. This idiom combines two locutions for exercising absolute authority, the verb radah (see Genesis 1:26, with the second comment there) and the adverb befarekh, which is used for the harsh enslavement of the Hebrews by the Egyptians (see the comment on Exodus 1:13).

47. hand . . . attain means. The object “means” has been added in the translation for the sake of intelligibility, the idea being that the resident alien has amassed the wherewithal to purchase an impoverished Israelite.

48. after being sold, he shall have a redemption. This system, which envisages Israelite domination of the land, is sharply asymmetrical. An Israelite sold into slavery to an alien has the permanent right, without temporal restriction, to have his freedom bought for him, whereas the alien sold to an Israelite may become a permanent slave.

50. reckon . . . from the year of his sale . . . till the jubilee year. The procedure is precisely parallel to that for the redemption of property. Since in the fiftieth year the owner would in any event be obliged to release the Israelite slave, the closer the time of buying back his freedom is to the jubilee, the less his market value.

like the time of a hireling he shall be under the other. The value of the slave shall be computed as though he were a hireling. If a hireling is paid x amount of silver per year, and there are twelve years remaining until the jubilee, his value is 12x of silver. In the translation, “the other” is added for clarification: the Hebrew, a bit cryptically, simply says “under him.”