What Does Leviticus 25:6 Mean in the King James?
And the sabbath of the land shall be meat for you; for thee, and for thy servant, and for thy maid, and for thy hired servant, and for thy stranger that sojourneth with thee,
The analysis reads the King James wording.
King James Version The King James Version, first published in 1611. Selah Verse shows the standard text.
THE KEY
The land’s rest is not an empty pause: its yield becomes food shared across the household’s lines of status.
THE MEANING
The land’s rest is provision for you, reaching beyond the landholder to servants, hired workers, and the stranger living among you. What is not gathered through ordinary labor is still named as shared food.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
This undoes the belief that stopping work necessarily means losing provision: here, the land’s rest feeds people across household and social boundaries.
THE ROOT
שַׁבַּת
shabbat
GROWS FROM
שבת
cease, stop
The word for Sabbath grows from the root meaning to cease. Here that cessation is tied directly to food, revealing rest as a source of shared provision rather than merely an absence of work.
ALSO GROWS
vayishbot: A form of the same root, meaning to stop or rest.
וַיִּשְׁבֹּת
The root’s verbal form shows that Sabbath is an act of cessation, the same kind of pause the verse assigns to the land.
shabbaton: A related word for a Sabbath or complete rest.
שַׁבָּתוֹן
This branch makes the rest a defined condition, not simply unoccupied time; in this verse, that condition has a yield people can eat.
THE PATTERN
When ordinary control over a harvest is released, its provision reaches people with less secure access to food.
But the seventh year thou shalt let it rest and lie still; that the poor of thy people may eat: and what they leave the beasts of the field shall eat. In like manner thou shalt deal with thy vineyard, and with thy oliveyard.When thou cuttest down thine harvest in thy field, and hast forgot a sheaf in the field, thou shalt not go again to fetch it: it shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow: that the LORD thy God may bless thee in all the work of thine hands.And he said unto them, The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath:THE THREAD
But the seventh year thou shalt let it rest and lie still; that the poor of thy people may eat: and what they leave the beasts of the field shall eat. In like manner thou shalt deal with thy vineyard, and with thy oliveyard.Both verses join the land’s Sabbath to food: the same root, שבת (sh-b-t, cease or rest), names the cessation that makes the harvest available. Exodus makes the sharing especially visible by naming the poor and the animals who eat from what the land yields.
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