Leviticus 25:3

Summary

The verse instructs that for six years a field is to be sown and for six years a vineyard is to be pruned, with the produce gathered in. It establishes a six-year cycle of agricultural activity through a sequence of three verbs describing sowing, pruning, and harvesting.

Key words

• shesh ("six", H8337) — cardinal number in construct form, appearing twice to introduce each six-year period ("six of years").
• tizra' ("you will sow", H2232) — qal imperfect, second person masculine singular, expressing an ongoing or repeated future action tied to the field.
• tizmor ("you will prune", H2168) — qal imperfect, second person masculine singular, parallel in form to tizra', applied to the vineyard.
• 'asafta ("you will gather", H0622) — qal sequential perfect (vav-consecutive), which continues the action started by the two preceding imperfects, marking the harvest as the culminating act in the sequence.
• tevu'ata ("its produce", H8393) — feminine singular noun in construct with the pronominal suffix -ah ("its", H9024), referring back to the vineyard/field's yield.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence is built on a parallel structure: shesh shanim ("six years") + imperfect verb + object, repeated twice — once for the field (sadekha, "your field", H7704G with suffix H9021) and once for the vineyard (karmekha, "your vineyard", H3754 with suffix H9021). Both tizra' and tizmor are qal imperfects, a verbal form that in Biblical Hebrew often denotes future or habitual action, fitting the description of a recurring six-year agricultural pattern.

The third clause shifts verbal form: 'asafta is a sequential perfect (vav-consecutive perfect), a construction that continues the temporal or logical sequence established by the preceding imperfects. This grammatical shift signals that gathering the produce (tevu'atah, "its produce") is the resulting or continuing action that follows sowing and pruning, rather than a separate independent statement. The direct object marker 'et (H0853) before tevu'atah marks the produce as the grammatical object of 'asafta, though it has no independent gloss in translation.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the sequence with future indicative verbs (σπερεῖς, τεμεῖς, συνάξεις — "you will sow," "you will prune," "you will gather"), matching the Hebrew's sequence of action without reproducing the perfect/imperfect distinction. The Vulgate similarly uses future tense (seres, putabis, colliges), and the English BSB introduces "may sow" for the first verb, shifting from a straightforward future/directive into a permissive nuance not distinguished in the Hebrew verbal forms themselves.