Leviticus 25:6-39

⁶But you are permitted to eat whatever crops grow by themselves during that year without having been planted. You and your male and female servants, and workers whom you have hired, and people who are living among you temporarily are permitted to eat it.

⁷Also, during that year your livestock and the wild animals in your land are permitted to eat it.”

⁸“Also, after every 49 years has ended, you must do this: ◄On the tenth day of the seventh month/At the end of September► of the next/50th year, blow trumpets throughout the country, to declare that it will be a day on which you request that I forgive you for the sins that you have committed.

¹⁰Set apart that year, and proclaim that throughout the country, it will be a year of restoring the land and freeing people: All the people who sold their property will receive back the property that they previously owned, and slaves must be ◄freed/allowed to return to their property and their families►.

¹¹That year will be a Year of Celebration; during that year do not plant anything, and do not harvest in the usual way the grain/wheat that grows without having been planted, or the grapes that grow without the vines being pruned.

¹²It will be a Year of Celebration, so eat only what grows in the fields ◄by itself/without any work being done to produce anything►.

¹³In that Year of Celebration, everyone must return to their own property.

¹⁴If you sell some of your land to a fellow Israeli or if you buy some land from one of them, you must treat that person fairly:

¹⁵If you buy land, the price that you will pay will depend on the number of years there will be until the next Year of Celebration. If someone sells land to you, he will charge a price that is determined by the number of years until the next Year of Celebration.

¹⁶If there will be many years before the next Year of Celebration, the price will be higher; if there will be only a few years until the next Year of Celebration, the price will be lower. You could say that what he is really selling you is the number of crops which you can harvest before the next Year of Celebration.

¹⁷Do not cheat each other; instead, revere me. I, Yahweh your God, am the one who am commanding this.

¹⁸Obey all my laws DOU carefully. If you do that, you will continue to live safely in your country DOU.

¹⁹And crops will grow well on the land, and you will have plenty to eat.

²⁰But you may ask, ‘If we do not plant or harvest our crops during the seventh year, what will we have to eat?’

²¹My answer is that I will bless you very much during the sixth/previous year, with the result that during that year there will be enough crops to provide food for you for three years!

²²Then, after you plant seed during the eighth/next year and wait for the crops to grow, you will eat the food grown in the sixth year, and continue to eat it until more food is harvested in the ninth year!

²³You must not sell any of your land to belong to someone else permanently, because the land is not yours; it is really mine, and you are only living on it temporarily and ◄farming/taking care of► it for me.

²⁴Throughout the land that you will possess, you must remember that if someone sells some of his land to you, he is permitted to buy it back from you if he wants to.

²⁵So, if one of your fellow Israelis becomes poor and sells some of his property to obtain some money, the person who is most closely related to him is permitted to come and buy that land for him.

²⁶However, if a man has no one to buy the land for him, and he himself prospers again and saves enough money to buy that land back,

²⁷he must calculate how many years there will be until the next Year of Celebration. Then he must pay to the man who bought the land the money that he would have earned by continuing to grow crops on that land for those years.

²⁸But if the original owner does not have any money to buy the land that he sold, it will continue to belong to the man who bought it, until the next Year of Celebration. In that year it must be returned to its original owner, and he will be able to live on it again.

²⁹If someone who lives in a city that has a wall around it sells a house there, during the next year he will be permitted to buy it from the man who bought it.

³⁰If he does not buy it during that year, it will belong permanently to the man who bought it and to his descendants. It must not be returned to the original owner in the Year of Celebration.

³¹But houses that are in villages that do not have walls around them are considered to be as though they are in a field. So if someone sells one of those houses, he is permitted to buy it back at any time. And if he does not buy it, it must be returned to him in the Year of Celebration.

³²If any descendants of Levi sell their houses in the towns in which they live, they are permitted to buy them back at any time.

³³And because the houses in their towns are on land that was given to them by other Israelis, that land will become theirs again in the Year of Celebration if they do not buy it back before then.

³⁴But the pastureland near their towns must not be sold. It must belong to the original owners permanently/forever.

³⁵If one of your fellow Israelis becomes poor and is unable to buy what he needs IDM, others of you must help him like you would help a foreigner who is living among you DOU temporarily.

³⁶If you lend money to him, do not charge any kind of interest DOU. Instead, show by what you do that you revere me, your God, and help that man, in order that he will be able to continue to live among you.

³⁷If you lend him money, do not charge interest; and if you sell food to him, charge him only what you paid for it; do not get a profit from it.

³⁸Do not forget that I am Yahweh your God, who brought you out of Egypt to be your God and to give you the land of Canaan, and I did not charge you for doing that.

³⁹If one of your fellow Israelis becomes poor and sells himself to you, do not force him to work like a slave.