Leviticus 25:10

Summary

The verse instructs the community to consecrate the fiftieth year and to proclaim liberty throughout the land for all its inhabitants. It states that this year will be a jubilee, in which every person returns to his ancestral landholding and to his clan.

Key words

• ki.dash.Tem ("you will set apart as holy", H6942G) — piel sequential perfect, second person masculine plural; the piel stem intensifies the action, marking the year itself as consecrated, not merely observed.
• de.Ror ("liberty", H1865) — masculine singular noun functioning as the direct object of ke.ra.Tem ("you will proclaim", H7121I), naming the specific content of the proclamation rather than a general announcement.
• yo.Vel ("a jubilee", H3104) — masculine singular noun, the term that names the fiftieth year itself; it stands as the predicate identifying what "it" (hi', H1931) will be.
• 'a.chu.za.T-o ("his possession", H0272 + H9023) — feminine singular noun in construct with a third-person masculine singular suffix, denoting a specific, personally-held landholding rather than land in general.
• mish.pach.T-o ("his clan", H4940 + H9023) — feminine singular noun with possessive suffix, paired structurally with 'a.chu.za.T-o, distinguishing return to land from return to kin-group.

What the text says

The verse is built on a chain of sequential perfect verbs (ki.dash.Tem, ke.ra.Tem, shav.Tem) that continue one another as successive required actions: consecrating the year, proclaiming liberty, and returning to one's holding. This verbal chain gives the sentence a procedural rhythm — each act follows from the prior one rather than standing as an isolated command. The object phrase shenat ha-chamishim shanah ("the year of the fifty, a year", H8141 + H2572 + H8141) doubles the word for "year," framing the fiftieth year as a distinct, marked unit rather than simply "year fifty."

The clause yoVel hi' tihYeh laKhem ("a jubilee it will be for you") places the predicate noun yo.Vel before the pronoun hi' ("it", H1931) and the imperfect verb tih.Yeh ("it will be", H1961), a fronting that emphasizes the identity of the year as yo.Vel itself. The final clause repeats the structure "'ish 'el..." ("each one to...", H0376I + H0413) twice, first for 'achuzzato and then for mishpachto, before closing with the plural verb ta.Shu.vu ("you will return", H7725G) — a distributive construction where each individual's singular return is stated before the collective plural verb concludes the sentence.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders de.Ror ("liberty", H1865) as ἄφεσιν ("release/remission"), and later restates the jubilee year as ἐνιαυτὸς ἀφέσεως ("year of release"), consistently tying the term to the "release" vocabulary. The Vulgate renders the same word as remissionem ("remission"), aligning with the LXX's semantic choice rather than a direct "liberty" sense. Both LXX and Vulgate render the closing distributive Hebrew construction ('ish...'ish...) using singular expressions (εἷς ἕκαστος / ἕκαστος; homo / unusquisque) before shifting to plural or second-person forms, matching the Hebrew's movement from individual to collective address.