Leviticus 25:39

Summary

The verse opens the legal case of an Israelite who becomes impoverished and enters servitude to a fellow Israelite. It establishes a limit on how that person's labor may be treated: he must not be worked with the labor characteristic of a slave.

Key words

• yaMukh ("he will become impoverished", H4134) — qal imperfect, describing an ongoing or future economic decline, not a completed state.
• 'aChikha ("your brother", H0251I + H9021) — construct noun with pronominal suffix, identifying the subject specifically as a kinsman of the addressee, not a foreigner.
• nimkar ("he will sell himself" / "he will be sold", H4376) — niphal form, the passive/reflexive stem; the same consonantal root can express either "he is sold" (passive) or "he sells himself" (reflexive-permissive), and Hebrew grammar alone does not force one reading over the other.
• ta'aVod ("you will labor", H5647G) — qal imperfect negated by lo' ("not", H3808), forming a prohibition addressed to the person who now holds the impoverished brother.
• 'avodat 'aved ("labor of a slave", H5656G + H5650) — a construct chain: literally "service of a servant," where the second noun defines the category or quality of the first.

What the text says

The verse is built as a conditional (khi) clause followed by a main clause introduced by narrative vav. The protasis states two linked events: yaMukh ("he will become impoverished") describing the brother's condition, and nimkar ("he will sell himself" / "he will be sold") describing the resulting transaction. Because nimkar is niphal, Hebrew grammar leaves ambiguous whether the brother initiates the sale or is sold by another; the form covers both.

The apodosis shifts to direct address: lo' ta'aVod bo ("you will not labor by him"), using the second-person imperfect with negation to form an instruction rather than a simple future statement. The final phrase, the construct pair 'avodat 'aved ("labor of a slave"), does not name a type of work directly but qualifies the manner of labor — labor of the kind assigned to a 'eved ("slave", H5650). The construction restricts not the fact of labor but its category.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders nimkar with the passive πραθῇ ("he is sold"), narrowing the Hebrew niphal toward the passive sense, while the Vulgate's vendiderit se ("he shall have sold himself") and BSB's "sells himself" lean toward the reflexive sense. The Hebrew niphal itself does not specify which agent performs the sale. Additionally, where the Hebrew has the construct phrase 'avodat 'aved ("labor of a slave"), the LXX uses the genitive οἰκέτου ("of a household servant"), a term with a somewhat different domestic connotation than 'eved.