Leviticus 25:14

Summary

Leviticus 25:14 establishes a condition regarding transactions between fellow community members: when selling or buying property, one party must not wrong the other. The verse uses paired legal language (selling/buying) followed by a prohibition against mistreatment.

Key words

• tim.ke.Ru ("you will sell", H4376) — qal imperfect, 2nd person masculine plural, describing an ongoing or future selling action addressed to the community collectively.
• 'a.mi.Te.kha ("your fellow citizen", H5997 + H9021) — construct noun with pronominal suffix, repeated in verse (lines 6 and 12) to frame both parties of the transaction as belonging to the same social category, "fellow" or "associate."
• ka.Noh ("you will buy", H7069) — qal infinitive absolute, a form that intensifies or emphasizes the verbal action of buying, paired grammatically with the finite verb tim.ke.Ru.
• to.Nu ("you maltreat", H3238) — hiphil (causative) imperfect, 2nd person masculine plural, from a root indicating oppression or wrongdoing; the causative stem suggests actively causing harm rather than passively experiencing it.
• 'a.Chi ("brother", H0251I) — construct noun with pronominal suffix (-o, "his"), used alongside 'ish ("each", H0376I) to form the distributive expression "each his brother," designating reciprocal relationship between community members.

What the text says

The verse opens with a conditional structure marked by khi- ("if", H3588A), governing two parallel verbal actions: tim.ke.Ru ("you will sell") and ka.Noh ("you will buy"). The second verb appears in the infinitive absolute form rather than as a fully conjugated verb, a grammatical construction that in Biblical Hebrew often intensifies or generalizes the action described — here functioning almost as a shorthand continuation of the conditional clause, covering both possible transaction directions (selling and buying).

The noun mi.Kar ("a thing sold", H4465) specifies that the object of the transaction is something sold, while the recipient or source of the transaction is identified twice as 'a.mi.Te.kha ("your fellow citizen", H5997), first as the one to whom something is sold (governed by the preposition la-, "to", H9005) and then as the one from whose hand (mi.Yad, H3027K construct) something is bought.

The prohibition itself uses 'al- ("may not", H0408) with the imperfect to.Nu ("you maltreat", H3238), a hiphil form indicating the subject causes distress or wrongdoing to another. The construction 'ish...'et-'a.Chi.v ("each...his brother") distributes the prohibition individually across the community — literally "a man his brother" — using the direct object marker 'et (H0853) to mark "brother" as the recipient of the potential mistreatment.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders 'a.mi.Te.kha ("your fellow citizen", H5997) as tō plēsion sou ("your neighbor"), and translates the prohibition with thlibetō ("let him oppress/afflict"), a term for pressure or affliction, where the Hebrew to.Nu (H3238) more specifically denotes causative wrongdoing or maltreatment. The Vulgate renders the same term as contristes ("you grieve/sadden"), emphasizing emotional distress, and additionally adds a clause not present in the Hebrew data given ("but according to the number of years of the jubilee you shall buy from him"), extending the verse's content beyond what the Hebrew word-by-word data shows.