In all the land of your possession you shall grant a redemption for the land.
To return ancestral landholdings in the Jubilee year
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וּבְכֹל אֶרֶץ אֲחֻזַּתְכֶם גְּאֻלָּה תִּתְּנוּ לָאָרֶץ
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
היא שצונו לשוב הקרקעות כלם בשנה הזאת לאדוניהם ולצאת מתחת ידי הקונים בלא פדיון. והוא אמרו יתברך ובכל ארץ אחוזתכם גאולה תתנו לארץ, ובאר לנו שזאת הגאולה תהיה בשנה הזאת. והוא אמרו בשנת היובל הזאת. וכבר דקדק הכתוב במצותיה ובאר איך יהיה דינם מהמוכר והקונה כשירצה לפדות נחלתו הנמכרת קודם הגיע שנת היובל. ובאר עוד ואמר שהדין הזה מיוחד בקרקעות שהן חוץ לחומת המדינה ושהחצרות והבתים הבנויים בשדות אחר שאינם בנוים תוך החומה הרי דינם דין הפרדסים והגנות בשוה והם בתי החצרים שאמר בהם הכתוב על שדה הארץ יחשב. וכבר התבארו משפטי מצוה זו בערכין. והיא גם כן אינה נוהגת אלא בארץ ישראל ובזמן שהיובל נוהג. (בהר סיני, זרעים הלכות שמטה ויובל פ"י):
That is that He commanded us to return all the lands to their owners in this year, and that they go out from their buyers without [payment]. And that is His, may He be blessed, saying "And in all the land of your possession, you shall grant a redemption for the land" (Leviticus 25:24). And He explained to us that this redemption be in this year; and that is His saying, "In the year of this Jubilee" (Leviticus 25:13). And Scripture has already been exacting about its commandments and explained what the law would be like for the seller and the buyer, if [the seller] wants to redeem his inheritance - that was sold - before the Jubilee year. And it explained further and said that this law is particular to the lands that are outside the city wall; and that the law of the houses built in the fields is exactly [like] the law of the orchards and gardens - since they are not built within the wall. And these are the houses of the villages (chatzerim), about which Scripture said, "it shall be considered as a field of the land" (Leviticus 25:31). And the regulations of this commandment have already been explained in Arakhin. But it too is only practiced in the Land of Israel, and at the time when Jubilee is practiced. (See Parashat Behar; Mishneh Torah, Sabbatical Year and the Jubilee 10.)
Hebrew: Sefer HaMitzvot, Warsaw 1883 (public domain). English: Sefaria Edition, trans. Rabbi Francis Nataf, 2021 (CC0). Via Sefaria; translator’s footnotes omitted.
Literary form: a flat, unconditional command
Applicability
How the catalog describes where and when this commandment applies. These are independent descriptions, not a verdict on which laws still count.
- Binding in the land of Israel
Classical halakhic consequences
The consequences the classical halakhah attaches to this commandment, grouped by who imposes them. Where a category has none recorded, that absence is itself meaningful.
Imposed by a court
No court-imposed penalty is recorded.
At the hands of Heaven
No divinely-imposed consequence is recorded.
Ritual remedy
No ritual remedy is recorded.
How the streams of Judaism treat this commandment
The streams of Judaism read the same commandment differently — an ongoing plurality, not a ranking. Each position below is reported as the catalog records it; none is presented as the correct one.
- Orthodox Binding, with modification
- Conservative Kept as an ethical principle
- Reform Kept as an ethical principle
- Reconstructionist Kept as an ethical principle
- Karaite Kept as an ethical principle
24 of 613 commandments have been examined in depth so far — this one is queued.
How later traditions received this commandment
How later traditions read or reworked this commandment, each attributed to its own voice. The catalog’s own classification of each reception is shown as it records it, never adopted as GEBible’s.
Qumran (the Dead Sea Scrolls)
- 11QMelchizedek (11Q13) ii reinterpreted it
Philo of Alexandria
- De Specialibus Legibus 2.110-123 rationalized it
Josephus
- Ant. 3.282-285 rationalized it
The New Testament
- Luke 4:18-19 read it spiritually Jesus' citation of Isa 61:1-2 ('the acceptable year of the Lord') widely read as eschatological Jubilee imagery; no land-return statute affirmed
Beside the older legal codes of its world
The commandment set beside the ancient Near-Eastern legal collections scholars compare it to — a descriptive comparison, not a claim of dependence.
- edict of ammisaduqa royal mīšarum/andurārum debt-and-property remission edict Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §§1-22 Kraus, Königliche Verfügungen in altbabylonischer Zeit (1984); cf. Roth, Law Collections 2nd ed. (1997)
- code of hammurabi release of debt-pledged dependents after three years of service (a debt-release parallel to Lev 25:39-43, not the land-return statute itself) Relationship to the parallel: parallel with divergence §117 Roth, Law Collections 2nd ed. (1997)
Where this commandment meets modern human-rights frameworks
One modern normative lens, attributed to it — not GEBible’s assessment. Each row names the framework it measures against and the catalog’s own classification of the relation.
This framework catalogues tensions; it records agreement in only one of its entries. The near-total tension rate is the shape of the instrument, not a finding.
No tension with the catalogued modern frameworks is recorded here.