Leviticus 25:7

Summary

Leviticus 25:7 states that during the sabbatical year, all the produce that the land yields will serve as food for domestic livestock and for the wild animals living in the land. The verse completes the instruction of verses 5-6 about who may eat from the unharvested growth.

Key words

• behemtekha ("your livestock", H0929) — feminine singular construct noun with 2ms suffix; refers to domesticated animals, distinguished from the following term.
• chayah ("animal[s]", H2416C) — feminine singular noun with definite article (la-chayah, "the animal"); denotes wild, untamed creatures, forming a paired contrast with behemah.
• asher ("which", H0834A) — relative particle introducing a clause that specifies the wild animal is one "that is in your land," restricting the referent geographically.
• tihyeh ("it will be", H1961) — qal imperfect, 3rd person feminine singular; agrees grammatically with the feminine subject tevu'atah ("its produce"), not with the preceding prepositional phrases.
• le'ekhol ("to eat", H0398) — qal infinitive with preposition le, expressing purpose: the produce exists "for eating."

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence begins with two parallel prepositional phrases, both marked by le ("to/for"): li-vhemtekha ("for your livestock") and la-chayah asher be-artzekha ("for the wild animal that is in your land"). These phrases function as indirect objects placed before the main verb, a common Hebrew word order for emphasis. The grammatical subject of the sentence is not the animals but kol-tevu'atah ("all its produce"), a construct phrase meaning "all the yield of it" (the land), with the verb tihyeh ("it will be") agreeing in gender and number with this feminine subject.

The final element, le'ekhol ("to eat"), is an infinitive with le, indicating purpose or result: the produce "will be for eating." The sentence structure thus places the beneficiaries (livestock, wild animals) first, the available resource (produce) as the grammatical subject, and the function of that resource (to be eaten) last. The distinction between behemah (domestic) and chayah (wild) is maintained by two separate nouns rather than a single collective term.

Differences between versions

The LXX preserves the Hebrew's two-term distinction with plural nouns: κτήνεσιν ("livestock") and θηρίοις ("wild animals"), each modified by "yours" or "in your land" respectively. The Vulgate compresses this into "jumentis tuis et pecoribus" ("your beasts of burden and the flocks/animals"), a phrasing less clearly parallel to the Hebrew's behemah/chayah pairing and without an explicit spatial qualifier equivalent to asher be-artzekha ("that is in your land"). The BSB renders the final clause as an independent sentence ("All its growth may serve as food") rather than preserving the infinitive-of-purpose construction found in the Hebrew (le'ekhol, "for eating"), and adds a section heading ("The Year of Jubilee") not present in the Hebrew text.