Deuteronomy 15:12

Summary

Deuteronomy 15:12 opens the law of the Hebrew bondservant: if a fellow Israelite man or woman sells himself/herself into service, that person serves six years, and in the seventh year the owner must release him free of charge. The verse sets the conditional trigger (the sale) and the fixed term of service before the year of release.

Key words

• yimmakher ("he will sell himself", H4376) — niphal imperfect, marking a passive/reflexive sense: the subject undergoes being sold rather than performing the selling.
• 'achikha ("your countryman", H0251I) — masculine singular construct, tying "brother" grammatically to the following description "the Hebrew."
• ha'ivri / ha'ivriyah ("the Hebrew [masc/fem]", H5680) — gentilic adjective in both masculine and feminine forms, explicitly covering both a man and a woman under the same law.
• 'avadkha ("he will serve you", H5647G) — qal sequential perfect, continuing the narrative chain begun by the niphal imperfect, expressing the consequence that follows the sale.
• teshallechennu ("you will send him away", H7971H) — piel imperfect with 3rd person suffix, an intensive verb form indicating a deliberate, effected release, not a mere passive departure.

What the text says

The verse is built as a conditional (ki, H3588A) followed by a chain of verbs in different stems and aspects. The protasis uses the niphal yimmakher, which grammatically frames the person as the one acted upon (sold), not as an agent selling another. The apodosis then shifts to a qal sequential perfect 'avadkha, which in Biblical Hebrew narrative syntax continues the time-line set by the preceding verb — "and [as a result] he will serve you six years." The construct phrase 'achikha ha'ivri ties "your countryman" directly to the gentilic "Hebrew," and the text explicitly doubles this with the feminine ha'ivriyah, joined by 'o ("or", H0176A), showing the law is stated for both sexes as alternative subjects of the same condition. The final clause uses the piel teshallechennu, an intensive causative form, followed by the adjective chofshi ("free", H2670) and the preposition phrase me'immakh ("from with you"), specifying that the release is a full separation from the household, not merely a change of status while remaining under the same roof.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew joins "Hebrew man" and "Hebrew woman" with 'o ("or", H0176A), presenting them as alternative subjects. The LXX instead uses καὶ ("and"), grammatically combining them as a joint subject, though the following verb δουλεύσει remains singular. The Vulgate preserves the disjunctive sense with "aut Hebraea" ("or a Hebrew woman"), matching the Hebrew's alternative structure rather than the LXX's conjunctive one.