What Does Leviticus 25:3 Mean?
Six years you shall sow your field, and six years you shall prune your vineyard, and gather in what it brings 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
Six years thou shalt sow thy field, and six years thou shalt prune thy vineyard, and gather in the fruit thereof;THE KEY
The root behind “sow” also names seed and offspring, so planting already carries the shape of a future yield.
THE MEANING
You are inside a rhythm where cultivation and yield belong together: seed enters the ground, the vineyard is tended, and its fruit is gathered in. What is planted now belongs to a living sequence that reaches toward a later harvest.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The belief that what disappears into the ground is simply lost gives way to a deeper pattern: sowing begins a yield that can later be gathered.
THE ROOT
תִּזְרַע
tizraʿ
GROWS FROM
ז־ר־ע
z-r-ʿ
To sow or scatter seed.
“sow” in this verse is tizraʿ. The same root names both the act of sowing and זֶרַע (zeraʿ), “seed” or “offspring.” The verse’s planting carries a future within it: the seed is also the beginning of what will come after.
ALSO GROWS
zeraʿ: Seed; offspring.
זֶרַע
The word links what is planted in the field with the next generation of life.
zeriʿah: Sowing; the act of planting seed.
זְרִיעָה
This noun from the same root keeps the act of sowing tied to the seed it sets in motion.
וְאָסַפְתָּ
veʾasaphta
GROWS FROM
א־ס־ף
ʾ-s-p
To gather or collect.
“gather in” in this verse is veʾasaphta. The verb for gathering the fruit belongs to a root that also names an ingathering and an assembly. The harvest is not only growth in the field; it is what gets gathered together.
ALSO GROWS
asif: Ingathering; harvest.
אָסִיף
This branch names the harvest season as a gathering, echoing the collected fruit in the verse.
asefah: Assembly; gathering.
אֲסֵפָה
The same root can gather people as well as produce, extending the verse’s image from fruit collected to things brought together.
THE PATTERN
What is sown unfolds toward a later gathering.
All the days of the earth, sowing and reaping, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not stop.Those who sow in tears reap in a ringing cry.Do not be led astray. God is not sneered at. For whatever a person sows, that also he reaps.THE THREAD
All the days of the earth, sowing and reaping, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not stop.“Seedtime” translates Hebrew זֶרַע (zeraʿ), “seed,” from the same ז־ר־ע root as “sow” in this verse. Genesis holds seedtime and harvest together in one recurring rhythm, opening the planting here toward its eventual gathering.
This reading is from Selah Verse.
You can read any verse this way in the app, keep it as a card, and send it on.
A Bible app where you send verses from your keyboard and in Messages, and every verse has a Deep Dive.
Does something in this reading look wrong? Tell us