Leviticus 25:2

Summary

Yehovah instructs Moses to speak to the Israelites about a future situation: when they enter the land that is being given to them, the land itself is to observe a shabbat ("sabbath", H7676) for Yehovah. The verse sets up the condition (entering the land) and its consequence (the land's rest).

Key words

• da.Ber ("speak", H1696G) — piel imperative, an intensive command form directed at Moses ("you" masculine singular), opening the speech-act.
• tavo'u ("you will go/enter", H0935G) — qal imperfect, plural "you," marking a future/ongoing action tied to the conditional particle ki ("if/when", H3588A).
• noten ("[am] about to give", H5414G) — qal participle, masculine singular, describing Yehovah as the one continuously/presently giving, not a completed past act.
• shavtah ("it will cease/rest", H7673B) — qal sequential perfect, third person feminine singular, agreeing with ha'aretz ("the land", H0776G), the grammatical subject that performs the resting.
• shabbat ("a sabbath", H7676) — feminine singular noun, functioning here as an adverbial/cognate complement to shavtah, intensifying the verb's own root (root repetition: "the land shall rest a resting").

What the text says

The verse opens with two sequential command verbs: da.Ber ("speak", H1696G) in the piel imperative, followed by 'a.mar.Ta ("you will say", H0559) in the sequential perfect — a common Hebrew construction where an imperative is continued by a vav-consecutive perfect to form a chain of instruction ("speak... and [then] say"). This structure frames the entire verse as reported speech that Moses must deliver.

The conditional clause introduced by ki ("if/that", H3588A) with tavo'u ("you will go", H0935G) in the qal imperfect sets a future, general condition: entering the land. The land itself is qualified by the relative clause 'asher 'ani noten lakhem ("which I am giving to you"), where noten ("[am] about to give", H5414G) is a participle — grammatically presenting the giving as an ongoing or characteristic action of Yehovah rather than a single past event.

The consequence clause uses shavtah ("it will cease", H7673B), a qal sequential perfect continuing the verbal chain begun by the imperatives. Its subject is ha'aretz ("the land", H0776G), grammatically feminine, matching the verb's feminine form. The noun shabbat ("a sabbath", H7676) that follows shares the same root as the verb shavtah, producing an internal cognate construction: literally "the land shall rest a rest," with la-Yehovah ("to Yehovah", H3068G) marking the one to whom this rest is directed or dedicated.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the conditional ki ("if/that") as Ἐὰν ("if"), matching the Hebrew's conditional sense but shifting tavo'u into an aorist subjunctive (εἰσέλθητε). The Vulgate uses "Quando" ("when") rather than a conditional "if," slightly shifting the nuance from possibility to temporal certainty. The LXX also repeats the phrase "ἣν ἐγὼ δίδωμι ὑμῖν" ("which I give to you") a second time before the resting clause, a repetition not present in the Hebrew, where the giving-clause appears only once, attached to "the land" earlier in the verse.