The Lord's Release ( la, remissionis Domini) is the title given by in the
Hebrew Bible
The Hebrew Bible or Tanakh (;"Tanach" '' debtors from their debts every seventh year within the seven-year agricultural cycle mandated by the
Torah
The Torah (; hbo, ''Tōrā'', "Instruction", "Teaching" or "Law") is the compilation of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, namely the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. In that sense, Torah means the ...
:
:”Every creditor who has lent anything to his neighbor shall release it”
The obligation only applied to the
Israelites
The Israelites (; , , ) were a group of Semitic-speaking tribes in the ancient Near East who, during the Iron Age, inhabited a part of Canaan.
The earliest recorded evidence of a people by the name of Israel appears in the Merneptah Stele o ...
living in the
Promised Land
The Promised Land ( he, הארץ המובטחת, translit.: ''ha'aretz hamuvtakhat''; ar, أرض الميعاد, translit.: ''ard al-mi'ad; also known as "The Land of Milk and Honey"'') is the land which, according to the Tanakh (the Hebrew ...
: it did not apply to foreigners. A similar obligation in relation to the release of Hebrew
slaves
Slavery and enslavement are both the state and the condition of being a slave—someone forbidden to quit one's service for an enslaver, and who is treated by the enslaver as property. Slavery typically involves slaves being made to perf ...
who have served in slavery for seven years is described in
The term "the LORD's release" is used in the
King James Version
The King James Version (KJV), also the King James Bible (KJB) and the Authorized Version, is an English translation of the Christian Bible for the Church of England, which was commissioned in 1604 and published in 1611, by sponsorship of K ...
of the Bible and in the
New King James Version
The New King James Version (NKJV) is an English translation of the Bible. The complete NKJV Bible was published in 1982 by Thomas Nelson, now HarperCollins. The NKJV is described by Thomas Nelson as being "scrupulously faithful to the origin ...
and
Revised Standard Version
The Revised Standard Version (RSV) is an English translation of the Bible published in 1952 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. This translation itself is a revision of the Amer ...
; other translations refer to the ''Year of Remission'' (
Wycliffe Bible
Wycliffe's Bible is the name now given to a group of Bible translations into Middle English that were made under the direction of English theologian John Wycliffe. They appeared over a period from approximately 1382 to 1395. These Bible translati ...
), the ''LORD's remission'' (
New American Standard Bible
The New American Standard Bible (NASB) is an English translation of the Bible. Published by the Lockman Foundation, the complete NASB was released in 1971. The NASB relies on recently published critical editions of the original Hebrew and Gre ...
) or ''Hashem’s Shemittah'' ( Orthodox Jewish Bible). Albert Barnes' ''Notes on the Bible'' states that although most texts say "it is called the LORD’s release", the meaning is more likely to be that "it is ''proclaimed'' to be the LORD's release".
The
Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary
The Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary refers to a biblical commentary entitled a ''Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible'', prepared by Robert Jamieson, Andrew Robert Fausset and David Brown and published in 1871; and ...
considered the release to be temporary: "Every creditor that lendeth ought unto his neighbour shall release it — not by an absolute discharge of the debt, but by passing over that year without exacting payment. The relief was temporary and peculiar to that year during which there was a total suspension of agricultural labor." Similarly, the seventeenth-century nonconformist Matthew Poole stated that the relief was temporary; you must "not absolutely and finally forgive it, but forbear it for that year". However, to theologian John Gill, the release was to be permanent: "it rather seems to be a full release, so as the payment of them might not be demanded, neither this year nor afterwards"Gill's Exposition of the Entire Bible on Deuteronomy 15, accessed 5 December 2015