Leviticus 25:12

Summary

Leviticus 25:12 declares that the yovel ("jubilee", H3104) year is qodesh ("holy", H6944G) for the community, and specifies that during it people are to eat only what comes directly min-hasadeh ("from the field", H4480A + H7704G) — its produce — rather than from stored harvests.

Key words

• yovel ("jubilee", H3104) — masculine singular noun naming the fiftieth-year institution; it is the subject of the clause.
• qodesh ("a holy thing", H6944G) — masculine singular noun functioning as a predicate nominative, describing the status assigned to the year.
• tihyeh ("it will be", H1961) — Qal imperfect, third person feminine singular, expressing a future/ongoing state; despite yovel being grammatically masculine, both the pronoun hi' (H1931, "she") and this verb are feminine, an agreement pattern visible only in the Hebrew.
• min ("from", H4480A) — preposition attached to hasadeh ("the field", H7704G), marking the field as the source of what may be eaten, restricting consumption to that origin.
• tevu'atah ("its produce", H8393) — feminine singular noun in construct form with a third-person feminine suffix ("her/its"), meaning "the produce of it," tying the object eaten back to the field just mentioned.

What the text says

The verse opens with the subordinating particle ki (H3588A, "for/that"), linking it to the preceding legal material as a justification. The core statement is built on two short nominal/verbal clauses: yovel hi' ("it [is] jubilee") and qodesh tihyeh lakhem ("holy it will be to you"), both using third-person feminine forms even though yovel itself is a masculine noun — a grammatical feature the English glosses do not preserve. The second half shifts to a second-person plural instruction: min-hasadeh tokhlu et-tevu'atah ("from the field you [pl.] will eat its produce"), using the Qal imperfect to'khlu (H0398) for an ongoing or repeated future action. The preposition min before hasadeh restricts the source of eating to the field directly, and the object marker 'et (H0853, untranslated) introduces tevu'atah, whose feminine suffix "-ah" links the produce back to the field as its source.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders yovel as ἀφέσεως σημασία ("a sign/token of release") rather than transliterating the term, shifting the noun's semantic field toward "release" instead of naming the jubilee institution directly. The Vulgate's clause "sed statim oblata comedetis" ("but you shall eat immediately what is offered") diverges structurally from the Hebrew "from the field you will eat its produce," introducing the notion of immediacy and "offering" not present in the Hebrew prepositional phrase min-hasadeh. The Spanish SBLIBRE adds "por sí mismo" ("by itself"), an interpretive expansion describing self-grown produce that is not explicit in the Hebrew words given.