1Yahweh spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai, saying,

2“Speak to the people of Israel and say to them, 'When you come into the land that I give you, then the land must be made to keep a Sabbath for Yahweh.

3You must plant your field for six years, and for six years you must prune your vineyard and gather the produce.

4But in the seventh year, a Sabbath of solemn rest for the land must be observed, a Sabbath for Yahweh. You must not plant your field or prune your vineyard.

5You must not conduct an organized harvest of whatever grows by itself, and you must not conduct an organized harvest of whatever grapes grow on your unpruned vines. This will be a year of solemn rest for the land.

6Whatever the unworked land grows during the Sabbath year will be food for you. You, your male and female servants, your hired servants and the foreigners who live with you may gather food,

7and your livestock and also wild animals may eat whatever the land produces.

8You must count off seven Sabbaths of years, that is, seven times seven years, so that there will be seven Sabbaths of years, totaling forty-nine years.

9Then you must blow a loud trumpet everywhere on the tenth day of the seventh month. On the Day of Atonement you must blow a trumpet throughout all your land.

10You must set apart the fiftieth year to Yahweh and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It will be a Jubilee for you, in which property and slaves must be returned to their families.

11The fiftieth year will be a Jubilee for you. You must not plant or conduct an organized harvest. Eat whatever grows by itself, and gather the grapes that grow on the unpruned vines.

12For it is a Jubilee, which will be holy for you. You must eat the produce that grows by itself out of the fields.

13You must return everyone to his own property in this year of Jubilee.

14If you sell any land to your neighbor or buy any land from your neighbor, you must not cheat or wrong each other.

15If you buy land from your neighbor, consider the number of years and crops that can be harvested until the next Jubilee. Your neighbor selling the land must consider that also.

16A larger number of years until the next Jubilee will increase the value of land, and a smaller number of years until the next Jubilee will decrease the value, because the number of harvests the land will produce for the new owner is related to the number of years before the next Jubilee.

17You must not cheat or wrong one another; instead, you must honor your God, for I am Yahweh your God.

18Therefore you must obey my decrees, keep my laws, and carry them out. Then you will live in the land in safety.

19The land will yield its produce, and you will eat your fill and live there in safety.

20You might say, “What will we eat during the seventh year? Look, we cannot plant or gather our produce.”

21I will command my blessing to come upon you in the sixth year, and it will produce harvest enough for three years.

22You will plant in the eighth year and continue to eat from the previous years' produce and the stored food. Until the harvest of the ninth year comes in, you will be able to eat from the provisions stored in the previous years.

23The land must not be sold to a new permanent owner, because the land is mine. You are all foreigners and temporary residents on my land.

24You must observe the right of redemption for all the land that you acquire; you must allow the land to be bought back by the family from whom you bought it.

25If your fellow Israelite became poor and for that reason sold some of his property, then his nearest relative may come and buy back the property that he sold to you.

26If a man has no relative to redeem his property, but if he has prospered and has the ability to redeem it,

27then he may calculate the years since the land was sold and repay the balance to the man to whom he sold it. Then he may return to his own property.

28But if he is not able to get the land back for himself, then the land he has sold will remain in the ownership of the one who bought it until the year of Jubilee. At the year of Jubilee, the land will be returned to the man who sold it, and the original owner will return to his property.

29If a man sells a house in a walled city, then he may buy it back within a whole year after it was sold. For a full year he will have the right of redemption.

30If the house is not redeemed within a full year, then the house in the walled city will become the permanent property of the buyer and his descendants. It is not to be returned in the year of Jubilee.

31But the houses of the villages that have no wall around them will be considered as the field of the land. They may be redeemed, and they must be returned during the year of Jubilee.

32However, the houses owned by the Levites in their cities may be redeemed at any time.

33If one of the Levites does not redeem a house he sold, then the house that was sold in the city where it is located must be returned in the year of Jubilee, for the houses of the cities of the Levites are their property among the people of Israel.

34But the fields around their cities may not be sold because they are the permanent property of the Levites.

35If your fellow countryman becomes poor, so that he can no longer provide for himself, then you must help him as you would help a foreigner or anyone else living as an outsider among you.

36Do not charge him interest or try to profit from him in any way, but honor your God so that your brother may keep living with you.

37You must not give him a loan of money and charge interest, nor sell him your food to earn a profit.

38I am Yahweh your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, in order that I might give you the land of Canaan, and that I might be your God.

39If your fellow countryman has become poor and sells himself to you, you must not make him work like a slave.

40Treat him as a hired servant. He must be like someone living temporarily with you. He will serve with you until the year of Jubilee.

41Then he will go away from you, he and his children with him, and he will return to his own family and to his fathers' property.

42For they are my servants whom I brought out of the land of Egypt. They will not be sold as slaves.

43You must not rule over them harshly, but you must honor your God.

44As for your male and female slaves, whom you can obtain from the nations who live around you, you may buy slaves from them.

45You may also buy slaves from the foreigners who are living among you, that is, from their families who are with you, children who have been born in your land. They may become your property.

46You may provide such slaves as an inheritance for your children after you, to hold as property, and make them slaves for life, but you must not rule over your brothers among the people of Israel with harshness.

47If a foreigner or someone living temporarily with you has become wealthy, and if one of your fellow Israelites has become poor and sells himself to that foreigner, or to someone in a foreigner's family,

48after your fellow Israelite has been bought, he may be bought back. Someone in his family may redeem him.

49It might be the person's uncle, or his uncle's son, who redeems him, or anyone who is his close relative from his family. Or, if he has become prosperous, he may redeem himself.

50He must bargain with the man who bought him; they must count the years from the year he sold himself to his purchaser until the year of Jubilee. The price of his redemption must be figured in keeping with the rate paid to a hired servant, for the number of years he might continue to work for the one who bought him.

51If there are still many years until the year of Jubilee, he must pay back as the price for his redemption an amount of money that is in proportion to the number of those years.

52If there are only a few years to the year of Jubilee, then he must bargain with his purchaser to reflect the number of years left before the year of Jubilee, and he must pay for his redemption in keeping with the number of years.

53He is to be treated like a man hired year by year. You must make sure he is not treated with harshness.

54If he is not redeemed by these means, then he must serve until the year of Jubilee, he and his children with him.

55To me the people of Israel are servants. They are my servants whom I brought out of the land of Egypt. I am Yahweh your God.'”