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That this precept is parallel with Exodus xxiii. 10, 11, is shown
by the word #m+h~; but this has a different meaning put upon it
which plainly is introduced as new. Here it is not landed property
that is being dealt with, but money, and what has to be
surrendered is not the interest of the debt merely (comparable to
the fruit of the soil), but the capital itself; the last clause
admits of no other construction, however unsuitable the regulation
may be. A step towards the sabbatical year is discernible in it,
in so far as the seventh year term is not a different one for each
individual debt according to the date when it was incurred (in
which case it might have been simply a period of prescription),
but is a uniform and common term publicly fixed: it is absolute,
not relative. But it does not embrace the whole seventh year,
it does not come in at the end of six years as in Exodus, but at
the end of seven; the surrender of the harvest demands the whole
year, the remission of debts, comparatively speaking, only a moment.
The sabbatical year is peculiar to the Priestly Code, or, to speak
more correctly, to that collection of laws incorporated and edited
by it, which lies at the basis of Leviticus xvii.
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