Leviticus 25:20

Summary

Leviticus 25:20 anticipates a question the people might raise about the sabbatical year: what will they eat if they neither sow nor harvest during the seventh year. The verse is framed as a hypothetical objection introduced by a conditional clause.

Key words

• khi ("if", H3588A) — conditional particle opening the hypothetical scenario ("if you should say...").
• to.me.Ru ("you will say", H0559) — qal imperfect, 2nd person masculine plural, projecting a future/potential speech act by the community.
• no.Khal ("will we eat", H0398) — qal imperfect, 1st person plural, embedded within the quoted question itself.
• hen ("here!", H2005) — an interjection marking the rhetorical restatement of the problem, roughly "look" or "indeed," introducing the explanatory clause that follows.
• niz.Ra' ("we will sow", H2232) and ne.'e.Sof ("we will gather", H0622) — both qal imperfect, 1st person plural, paired negated verbs describing the absence of agricultural activity.

What the text says

The verse opens with ve-khi ("and if"), a conjunction plus conditional particle that sets up a hypothetical statement attributed to the people, introduced by to.me.Ru ("you will say"), a 2nd person plural imperfect verb. This structure frames what follows as a quoted question the audience might voice, rather than a direct narrative statement.

The quoted question itself begins with the interrogative mah ("what?", H4100) followed by no.Khal ("will we eat"), a 1st person plural imperfect verb, forming "what will we eat." This is anchored temporally by ba-shanah ha-shevi'it ("in the seventh year"), using the ordinal she.vi.'It ("seventh", H7637) with the definite article.

After the question, the particle hen ("here!" or "behold") introduces a second clause that restates the underlying problem: lo niz.Ra' ("we will not sow") and ve-lo ne.'e.Sof ("and we will not gather"), both negated qal imperfect verbs in first person plural. The final phrase et-tevu'atenu ("our produce") uses the construct noun te.vu.'a.Te ("produce", H8393) with the 1st person plural suffix nu ("our"), specifying what would not be gathered. The doubled negative construction (lo... ve-lo...) grammatically parallels the two agricultural actions — sowing and gathering — that would be absent that year.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew hen ("here!", an interjection) is rendered in the Greek (LXXSWETE) simply through the conditional ἐὰν μὴ ("if not"), folding the interjection into the conditional structure rather than preserving it as a separate exclamatory marker. The Vulgate similarly integrates it into a continuous conditional clause ("si non severimus... neque collegerimus"), without a distinct equivalent for hen. The BSB and SBLIBRE (Spanish) translations likewise omit any direct rendering of hen, presenting the entire verse as one flowing hypothetical question.