Leviticus 25:1-12

New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition

The Sabbatical Year

25 The Lord spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai, saying, ² “Speak to the Israelites and say to them: When you enter the land that I am giving you, the land shall observe a Sabbath for the Lord.^{(A) 3} Six years you shall sow your field, and six years you shall prune your vineyard and gather in their yield, ⁴ but in the seventh year there shall be a Sabbath of complete rest for the land, a Sabbath for the Lord: you shall not sow your field or prune your vineyard. ⁵ You shall not reap the aftergrowth of your harvest or gather the grapes of your unpruned vine: it shall be a year of complete rest for the land. ⁶ You may eat what the land yields during its Sabbath—you, your male and female slaves, your hired and your bound laborers who live with you,^{(B) 7} for your livestock also, and for the wild animals in your land all its yield shall be for food.

The Year of Jubilee

⁸ “You shall count off seven weeks^[a] of years, seven times seven years, so that the period of seven weeks of years gives forty-nine years. ⁹ Then you shall have the trumpet sounded loud; on the tenth day of the seventh month—on the Day of Atonement—you shall have the trumpet sounded throughout all your land.^{(C) 10} And you shall hallow the fiftieth year, and you shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a Jubilee for you: you shall return, every one of you, to your property and every one of you to your family.^{(D) 11} That fiftieth year shall be a Jubilee for you: you shall not sow or reap the aftergrowth or harvest the unpruned vines. ¹² For it is a Jubilee; it shall be holy to you: you shall eat only what the field itself produces.