What Does Leviticus 25:6 Mean?
The stopping of the land shall be food for you, and for your servant, and for your maid, and for your hired hand, and for the one who settles beside you.
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 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 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
“stopping” in this verse is shabbat. 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 in the seventh year you shall let it drop and leave it, that the poor of your people may eat, and what is left over the beasts of the field shall eat. Do the same with your vineyard and your olive grove.When you cut down your harvest in your field, and forget a sheaf in the field, you do not turn back to take hold of it. It is for the sojourner, for the fatherless, and for the widow, so that the LORD your God may bless you in all the making of your hands.He said to them, The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.THE THREAD
But in the seventh year you shall let it drop and leave it, that the poor of your people may eat, and what is left over the beasts of the field shall eat. Do the same with your vineyard and your olive grove.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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