Leviticus 25:16

Summary

The verse instructs that the sale price of land is to be calculated according to the number of years remaining until the jubilee: more years mean a higher price, fewer years a lower price, because what is actually being sold is a fixed number of harvests.

Key words

• pi ("mouth of", H6310K) — construct noun used idiomatically twice (le-fi rov, le-fi me'ot) to mean "according to the abundance/scarcity of," a figurative extension of "mouth" as "measure" or "proportion."
• tarbeh ("you will increase", H7235A) — hiphil (causative) imperfect: the buyer/seller causes the price to increase, not that the price grows by itself.
• tam'it ("you will make small", H4591) — hiphil imperfect, parallel and contrasting with tarbeh, causative "making small" of the price.
• mispar ("number of", H4557) — construct noun opening the final clause, shifting the basis of calculation from "years" (shanim) to "produce" (tevu'ot).
• mokher ("selling", H4376) — qal active participle, describing the seller as one continuously/currently "doing the selling," rather than a completed act.

What the text says

The sentence is built on two parallel clauses joined by u- ("and", H9002), each headed by the idiom le-fi ("according to the mouth of") plus a construct noun (rov, "abundance", H7230; me'ot, "smallness", H4591 as infinitive) governing ha-shanim ("the years", H8141). This creates a mirrored structure: "according to the abundance of the years you will increase" / "according to the smallness of the years you will make small," with the object in both cases being miknato ("its purchase price", H4736) plus the third-person suffix -o ("its", H9023). The verbs tarbeh and tam'it are both hiphil imperfects of the same semantic pair (increase/decrease), reinforcing the proportional logic through grammatical symmetry.

The third clause, introduced by ki ("for/that", H3588A), reframes the transaction: it is not the years themselves being sold, but mispar tevu'ot ("a number of produce/harvests", H4557 + H8393), a feminine plural noun. The subject hu ("he", H1931) is an explicit personal pronoun preceding the participle mokher ("selling", H4376), which as a participle expresses an ongoing state rather than a single completed sale — grammatically framing the seller as one continually "selling" the harvests rather than the land itself.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate's final clause, "tempus enim frugum vendet tibi" ("for the time of the fruits will sell to you"), makes tempus ("time") the grammatical subject, differing from the Hebrew, where hu ("he", H1931) — the seller — is the explicit subject of mokher ("selling", H4376). The LXX uses ἀποδώσεταί ("he will render/give back"), a different verb concept than the Hebrew participle "selling," though it preserves the third-person singular subject implicitly matching hu.