The Open Hand Cannot Watch Only the Calendar

“Release” is shemittah, from shamat, to let drop. Exodus 23:11 used the verb of the land in the seventh year, left to rest and lie still; Deuteronomy extends the letting-go to debts. The same year is when the law is read aloud to all Israel at the feast of booths (31:10-11).

“Every creditor that lendeth ought” is literally every master of a loan of his hand, an awkward phrase for whoever holds a claim. “It is called” means it is proclaimed, publicly announced. Nehemiah’s community pledged to keep it: to leave the seventh year “and the exaction of every debt” (Nehemiah 10:31).

The foreigner is the nokhri, a trader passing through, not the resident stranger. His debts were commercial credit rather than loans to the poor, and 23:20 likewise allows interest from him. The contrast is with “thy brother”, the one whose need created the loan.

“Save when” is best read as nevertheless: there shall be no poor among you. The word here is evyon, the destitute. Acts 4:34 echoes the Greek of this verse in describing the first church at Jerusalem: “Neither was there any among them that lacked.”

The condition is total: not the release law alone, but “all these commandments”. The verb is doubled again, carefully hearken, hearing that becomes doing. The picture of a people without the destitute depends on the whole law being kept together.

The curse chapter reverses this line exactly: the stranger “shall lend to thee, and thou shalt not lend to him: he shall be the head, and thou shalt be the tail” (28:44). “Lend” here is avat, to lend on a pledge, the verb that returns in 15:8 and in the pledge laws of chapter 24.

“Harden” is ametz, the verb for courage that 3:28 and 31:6 use of Joshua: be of good courage. Here it would be courage turned against the poor, a heart made firm to refuse. “Shut thine hand” is qafats, to clench the fist.

“In that which he wanteth” is literally what he lacks. The Talmud (Ketubot 67b) read it to include what a man had lost as well as what he needed to live, and tells of Hillel buying a once-wealthy poor man a horse to ride and a servant to run before him.

An evil eye in Hebrew idiom is a stingy one (Proverbs 28:22), and Jesus uses the phrase that way: “Is thine eye evil, because I am good?” (Matthew 20:15). By Hillel’s day lenders did refuse loans before the seventh year, and he devised the prozbul, a court transfer of the debt, to keep credit flowing (Mishnah Shevi’it 10:3).

“Thine heart shall not be grieved” means let it not be grudging. Paul applies the same principle to the collection for Jerusalem: “not grudgingly, or of necessity: for God loveth a cheerful giver” (2 Corinthians 9:7). The verb is doubled once more, giving you shall give.

Three words for need: thy brother, thy poor, ani, the afflicted, and thy needy, evyon, the destitute. Each has the possessive “thy”, so the poor are named as belonging to the one who has more. “In thy land” locates them inside the inheritance, not beyond it.

“Be sold” can also be read as “sells himself”, a debtor entering service to clear what he owes. Exodus 21:2-11 frees the Hebrew man after six years but treats a daughter sold as a maidservant under different rules; Deuteronomy puts the Hebrew woman on the same footing as the man.

“Empty” is reqam, empty-handed, the word of Exodus 3:21: “when ye go, ye shall not go empty”, and Israel left Egypt loaded with silver, gold and raiment. The freed servant is to leave his master’s house the way Israel left Pharaoh’s. 16:16 uses the same word of pilgrims.

“Furnish him liberally” is ha’aneq ta’aniq, from anaq, the neck: hang it round his neck, load him like a necklace. The floor is the threshing floor, the winepress the vat: grain, wine and livestock, the three sources of a small farm’s living.

“Redeemed” is padah, the verb Exodus 21:8 uses of letting a maidservant be bought back. Israel was bought out of slavery; the master is told to treat his servant’s release as his own history repeated. “Therefore I command thee this thing to day” ties the law to that memory.

Exodus 21:5 has the servant say, “I love my master, my wife, and my children”, where the wife was given by the master and would stay with him. Deuteronomy drops the family and gives only the plain reason: he loves thee and thine house, “because he is well with thee”.

Exodus 21:6 has the ear pierced before ha’elohim, the judges or God, at the door or doorpost. Deuteronomy makes it a household act. The Talmud (Kiddushin 22b) asks why the ear: it heard at Sinai that Israel were God’s servants, and chose another master. “For ever” the rabbis limited to the jubilee.

“A double hired servant” is literally double the hire of a hireling. One suggestion reads it against Hammurabi’s law, which limited debt servitude to three years: six years is twice that. Another takes mishneh as equivalent to. Either way the master is told he has already been paid.

Firstlings belong to God because of the night the firstborn of Egypt died (Exodus 13:12-15). Leviticus 27:26 says no man may sanctify a firstling, since it is the LORD’s from birth; here “sanctify” means to treat it as what it already is.

“Year by year” was read by the rabbis as a limit: a firstling should be eaten within its first year rather than kept. The meal belongs to the owner’s household at the chosen place, like the tithe of 14:23.

Malachi 1:8 attacks exactly this: “if ye offer the blind for sacrifice, is it not evil? and if ye offer the lame and sick, is it not evil? offer it now unto thy governor.” Leviticus 22:20-24 lists the disqualifying defects in more detail.

The formula of 12:15 and 12:22 returns, and here it turns a holy animal into ordinary food because a defect has closed the altar to it. The Mishnah tractate Bekhorot catalogues the blemishes that do so, down to a split ear or a chipped tooth.

Blood poured out and covered was blood returned; blood left exposed accused. Ezekiel 24:7-8 charges Jerusalem that “she poured it not upon the ground, to cover it with dust”, so that it would cry out like Abel’s. Even a disqualified firstling’s blood is given back to the earth.