What Does Leviticus 25:24 Mean?
And in all the land of your holding you shall give the land a buying back.
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 in all the land of your possession ye shall grant a redemption for the land.THE KEY
Even the land in your possession is still owed redemption.
THE MEANING
The land you hold remains open to restoration; your possession does not close its way back. What is held by people still rests within a larger claim that allows it to be reclaimed.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The lie that what you possess is yours beyond every claim or return breaks here: even the land remains redeemable.
THE ROOT
גְּאֻלָּה
geʾullāh
GROWS FROM
גאל
to reclaim or redeem
“a buying back” in this verse is geʾullāh. The noun גְּאֻלָּה (geʾullāh, redemption) belongs to the root גאל (gāʾal, reclaim or redeem), which also names a גֹּאֵל (gōʾēl, redeemer or kinsman-reclaimer). The following verse gives this reclaiming a family form; here, restoration is owed to the land itself.
ALSO GROWS
gōʾēl: redeemer; kinsman-reclaimer
גֹּאֵל
This related word shows redemption as reclaiming what has passed out of a family’s holding.
gāʾal: to redeem or reclaim
גָּאַל
The verb makes redemption an act of bringing something back, the movement this verse keeps open for the land.
אֲחֻזָּה
ʾăḥuzzāh
GROWS FROM
אחז
to seize, grasp, or hold
The word translated possession grows from a root meaning to grasp or hold. Set beside redemption, it frames human possession as a real holding that still does not close off the land’s reclamation.
ALSO GROWS
ʾāḥaz: to seize or hold
אָחַז
The verb makes the grasp within “possession” visible.
ʾăḥuzzāh: possession, holding, or estate
אֲחֻזָּה
This related noun names the land as something held, while the verse still provides for its redemption.
THE PATTERN
Human possession does not cancel the Creator’s claim or creation’s path back to freedom.
The land shall not be sold for good, for the land is mine; for you are sojourners and those who settle beside me.A Psalm of David. The earth is the LORD's, and what fills it; the inhabited world, and those who settle in it.Because the creation itself will also be set free from the slavery of decay into the weighty freedom of the children of God.THE THREAD
If your brother totters and sells some of his holding, and his nearest blood-redeemer comes to him, then he shall buy back what his brother sold.The same root, גאל (gāʾal, reclaim or redeem), moves from the noun “redemption” here to a kinsperson’s act of redeeming a sold holding in the next verse. It makes the land’s return concrete: reclaiming happens through a living relationship.
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