Leviticus 25:8-34

Common English Bible

The Jubilee year

⁸ Count off seven weeks of years—that is, seven times seven—so that the seven weeks of years totals forty-nine years. ⁹ Then have the trumpet^[a] blown on the tenth day of the seventh month.^[b] Have the trumpet blown throughout your land on the Day of Reconciliation. ¹⁰ You will make the fiftieth year holy, proclaiming freedom throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It will be a Jubilee year^[c] for you: each of you must return to your family property and to your extended family. ¹¹ The fiftieth year will be a Jubilee year for you. Do not plant, do not harvest the secondary growth, and do not gather from the freely growing vines ¹² because it is a Jubilee: it will be holy to you. You can eat only the produce directly out of the field. ¹³ Each of you must return to your family property in this year of Jubilee.

¹⁴ When you sell something to or buy something from your fellow citizen, you must not cheat each other. ¹⁵ You will buy from your fellow citizen according to the number of years since the Jubilee; he will sell to you according to the number of years left for harvests. ¹⁶ You will raise the price if there are more years, or lower the price if there are less years because it is the number of harvests that are being sold to you. ¹⁷ You must not cheat each other but fear your God because I am the Lord your God. ¹⁸ You will observe my rules, and you will keep my regulations and do them so that you can live securely on the land.

Food during fallow years

¹⁹ The land will give its fruit so that you can eat your fill and live securely on it. ²⁰ Suppose you ask, “What will we eat in the seventh year if we don’t plant or gather our crops then?” ²¹ I will send my blessing on you in the sixth year so that it will make enough produce for three years. ²² You can plant again in the eighth year and eat food from the previous year’s produce until the ninth year. Until its produce comes, you will eat the food from the previous year.

Buying back family property

²³ The land must not be permanently sold because the land is mine. You are just immigrants and foreign guests of mine.

²⁴ Throughout the whole land that you possess, you must allow for the land to be bought back. ²⁵ When one of your fellow Israelites faces financial difficulty and must sell part of their family property, the closest relative^[d] will come and buy back what their fellow Israelite has sold. ²⁶ If the person doesn’t have someone to buy it back, but then manages to afford buying it back, ²⁷ they must calculate the years since its sale and refund the balance to the person to whom they sold it. Then it will go back to the family property.^{[e] 28} If they cannot afford to make a refund to the buyer, whatever was sold will remain in the possession of the buyer until the Jubilee year. It will be released in the Jubilee year, at which point it will return to the family property.

²⁹ When a person sells a home in a walled city, it may be bought back until a year after its sale. The period for buying it back will be one year. ³⁰ If it is not bought back before a full year has passed, the house in the walled city will belong to the buyer permanently and their descendants forever. It will not be released at the Jubilee. ³¹ But houses in settlements that are unwalled will be considered as if they were country fields. They can be bought back, and they must be released at the Jubilee.

³² Levites will always have the right to buy back homes in the levitical cities that are part of their family property. ³³ Levite property that can be bought back—houses sold in a city that is their family property—must be released at the Jubilee, because homes in levitical cities are the Levites’ family property among the Israelites. ³⁴ But the pastureland around their cities cannot be sold, because that is their permanent family property.