Leviticus 25:1-24

Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition

The Sabbatical Year

25 The Lord said to Moses on Mount Sinai, ² “Say to the people of Israel, When you come into the land which I give you, the land shall keep a sabbath to the Lord. ³ Six years you shall sow your field, and six years you shall prune your vineyard, 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 the Lord; you shall not sow your field or prune your vineyard. ⁵ What grows of itself in your harvest you shall not reap, and the grapes of your undressed vine you shall not gather; it shall be a year of solemn rest for the land. ⁶ The sabbath of the land shall provide food for you, for yourself and for your male and female slaves and for your hired servant and the sojourner who lives with you; ⁷ for your cattle also and for the beasts that are in your land all its yield shall be for food.

The Year of Jubilee

⁸ “And you shall count seven weeks^[a] of years, seven times seven years, so that the time of the seven weeks of years shall be to you forty-nine years. ⁹ Then you shall send abroad the loud trumpet on the tenth day of the seventh month; on the day of atonement you shall send abroad the trumpet throughout all your land. ¹⁰ And you shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants; it shall be a jubilee for you, when each of you shall return to his property and each of you shall return to his family. ¹¹ A jubilee shall that fiftieth year be to you; in it you shall neither sow, nor reap what grows of itself, nor gather the grapes from the undressed vines. ¹² For it is a jubilee; it shall be holy to you; you shall eat what it yields out of the field.

¹³ “In this year of jubilee each of you shall return to his property. ¹⁴ And if you sell to your neighbor or buy from your neighbor, you shall not wrong one another. ¹⁵ According to the number of years after the jubilee, you shall buy from your neighbor, and according to the number of years for crops he shall sell to you. ¹⁶ If the years are many you shall increase the price, and if the years are few you shall diminish the price, for it is the number of the crops that he is selling to you. ¹⁷ You shall not wrong one another, but you shall fear your God; for I am the Lord your God.

¹⁸ “Therefore you shall do my statutes, and keep my ordinances and perform them; so you will dwell in the land securely. ¹⁹ The land will yield its fruit, and you will eat your fill, and dwell in it securely. ²⁰ And if you say, ‘What shall we eat in the seventh year, if we may not sow or gather in our crop?’ ²¹ I will command my blessing upon you in the sixth year, so that it will bring forth fruit for three years. ²² When you sow in the eighth year, you will be eating old produce; until the ninth year, when its produce comes in, you shall eat the old. ²³ The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; for you are strangers and sojourners with me. ²⁴ And in all the country you possess, you shall grant a redemption of the land.