Deuteronomy 15:1

Summary

The verse opens the legal instruction on the shemitah ("release," H8059) by specifying its timing: it is to occur mi-Ketz sheva shanim ("from the end of seven years," H9006/H7093/H7651/H8141). The verb ta'aseh ("you will observe/do," H6213I) places the obligation on the addressee in the second-person masculine singular imperfect.

Key words

• Ketz ("[the] end of", H7093) — masculine singular construct noun, requiring a following genitive; here it governs sheva shanim, forming the phrase "end of seven years."
• sheva ("seven", H7651) — common gender singular numeral, in construct-like position modifying shanim.
• shanim ("years", H8141) — masculine plural noun, the counted unit that Ketz measures.
• ta'aseh ("you will observe", H6213I) — qal imperfect, second-person masculine singular; the imperfect aspect signals a recurring or future-oriented obligation rather than a single past event.
• shemitah ("a remission", H8059) — feminine singular noun, the direct object of ta'aseh; it names the act itself without specifying its content (e.g., debts, land) within this verse.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built around a temporal prepositional phrase followed by a verb-object pair: mi-Ketz sheva shanim ("from the end of seven years") sets the time frame, and ta'aseh shemitah ("you will observe a release") states the required action. The construct chain Ketz sheva shanim links "end" to "seven years" as a single temporal unit, meaning the seven-year period must fully elapse before the release occurs — the noun Ketz specifically denotes a terminal point, not a midpoint or "each" year.

The verb ta'aseh is a qal imperfect, second-person masculine singular. In Biblical Hebrew, the imperfect aspect can carry a sense of ongoing, habitual, or future obligation, which here frames the release as a recurring cyclical requirement tied to the seven-year marker rather than a one-time historical act. The object shemitah is a feminine singular noun that in this verse simply names "a release" or "remission" — the Hebrew text itself does not specify here what is being released (debts, land, persons); that content is not lexically present in this verse's wording.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the opening temporal phrase as Δι᾿ ἑπτὰ ἐτῶν ("through/after seven years"), which does not carry a separate word corresponding to Ketz ("end of," H7093); it compresses the Hebrew's two-part construct phrase into a single prepositional expression. The Vulgate reads Septimo anno ("in the seventh year"), using an ordinal singular construction, differing from the Hebrew's construct phrase "from the end of seven years," which emphasizes a completed span rather than a single ordinal year. The BSB gloss adds "every" and specifies "debts" as the object of cancellation; neither "every" nor "debts" appears as a distinct lexical item in the Hebrew text provided, where the object is simply shemitah ("a remission").