Leviticus 25:30

Summary

The verse states the legal consequence when a house located within a walled city is not redeemed within one full year of its sale: ownership passes permanently to the buyer and his descendants, and unlike other property, it is not released back to the original owner at the jubilee.

Key words

• yigga'El ("it will be redeemed", H1350A) — niphal (passive) imperfect, indicating the house "is redeemed" by another's action, within a negated conditional ('im lo', "if not").
• meLot ("is completed", H4390) — qal infinitive construct after the preposition 'ad ("until"), marking the temporal boundary: "until the completing of."
• qam ("it will stand", H6965I) — qal sequential perfect (vav-consecutive), continuing the narrative logic from the prior conditional clause, describing the resulting legal state.
• tzemiTut ("perpetuity", H6783) — feminine singular noun with prefixed preposition la- ("to/for"), specifying the permanent duration of the transfer.
• doroTav ("his generations", H1755) — feminine plural noun in construct with a pronominal suffix, extending the ownership beyond the buyer to his lineage.
• yeTze' ("it will go out", H3318H) — qal imperfect, describing the house's non-release at the jubilee, negated by lo' ("not").

What the text says

The sentence opens with a conditional structure: ve-'im lo'-yigga'El ("and if it is not redeemed"), using the niphal form of ga'al to express that no redemption occurs before the deadline defined by 'ad meLot lo shanah temimah ("until the completing of a full year for it"). The infinitive meLot governs the temporal clause, and the adjective temimah ("complete") reinforces that a full, uninterrupted year must pass.

The apodosis begins with the vav-consecutive perfect ve-qam ("and it will stand/be established"), which grammatically continues the sequence begun by the conditional, marking the legal outcome. The subject is ha-Bayit ("the house"), qualified by two relative clauses introduced by 'asher ("which"): one locating it ba-'Ir ("in the city") and another specifying that this city possesses chomah ("a wall"). The phrase la-tzemiTut la-qoNeh ("to perpetuity, to the buyer") uses two parallel la- prefixes to indicate both the duration (permanent) and the beneficiary (the buyer), and this right extends le-doroTav ("to his generations"), a construct plural noun with suffix showing inherited possession. The final clause, lo' yeTze' ba-yoVel ("it will not go out in the jubilee"), uses the qal imperfect of yatza' ("to go out") to state that the house does not revert at the jubilee, distinguishing it from other property categories treated elsewhere in the chapter.

Differences between versions

The Vulgate renders lo' yeTze' ba-yoVel as "redimi non poterit, etiam in jubilæo" ("it cannot be redeemed, even in the jubilee"), framing the outcome as an impossibility of redemption, whereas the Hebrew yeTze' ("it will go out") speaks specifically of the house not being released/returned at the jubilee, a narrower legal action than redemption in general. The LXX's ἐν τῇ ἀφέσει ("in the release") corresponds more closely to the Hebrew's release-terminology than the Vulgate's redemption-terminology.