What Does Leviticus 25:20 Mean?
And if you say, What shall we eat in the seventh year? Look, we shall not sow, nor gather in what we bring in.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
And if ye shall say, What shall we eat the seventh year? behold, we shall not sow, nor gather in our increase:THE KEY
The fear is that when sowing and gathering stop, nothing can come in.
THE MEANING
This question lives wherever the familiar way of providing food pauses: if no seed goes in and no harvest is gathered, what is left to eat? The verse gives that fear concrete form, naming the work that stops and the yield that seems unable to arrive. “Increase” carries the sense of what comes in, so the worry is whether provision can still reach the reader when the familiar work pauses.
THE ROOT
תְּבוּאָה
tevu’ah
GROWS FROM
בוא
bo
to come, enter
“what we bring in” in this verse is tevu’ah. The word rendered “increase” is תְּבוּאָה (tevu’ah), meaning crop or yield, formed from בוא (bo), “to come, enter.” It frames harvest as what comes in; the anxiety appears when the reader assumes it can come only through what they sow and gather.
ALSO GROWS
bo: to come, enter
בּוֹא
The yield word grows from this movement of coming in, so “increase” carries the sense of arrival as well as crop.
mavo: entrance, entry
מָבוֹא
The same root describes a point of arrival, sharpening the sense of increase as what enters the household.
tevu’ah: produce, crop, yield
תְּבוּאָה
This is the verse’s “increase”: food understood as that which comes in from the field.
THE PATTERN
Fear treats a pause in sowing and gathering as a pause in provision, while scripture shows food arriving beyond ordinary production.
Then I will command my blessing upon you in the sixth year, and it shall make what it brings in for three years.And he bent you low, and made you hunger, and fed you with manna, which you had never perceived, nor had your fathers, so that he might make you perceive that humankind does not live by bread alone, but by every word that goes out from the mouth of the LORD does humankind live.So do not be pulled apart, saying, "What shall we eat?" Or, "What shall we drink?" Or, "With what shall we be wrapped?"THE THREAD
Look at the birds of the air, for they do not sow, nor reap, nor gather into storehouses; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much better than they?This verse names the same interruption: sowing stops, gathering stops, and yet feeding continues. The question in Leviticus feels like its unanswered edge; here, the pause in human work is not a pause in provision.
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