Torah Reading for Behar

This is the straightforward meaning, enabling us to explain the verse in its proper context: It is warning about fraud, meaning that when you sell or buy land, you must determine how many years remain until the Jubilee year, and the seller must sell and the buyer must buy based on the number of years and crops the field is expected to produce until then, for ultimately, he will return the land to him in the Jubilee year. Thus, if there are only a few years until the Jubilee year, and he sells it for a high price, the purchaser will have been defrauded; and if there were many years until the Jubilee year, and thus the buyer ate the produce of many harvests, yet he bought it for a low price, the seller will have been defrauded. Therefore, it must be bought for a price prorated according to the available time-period, and this is what it says here: “He must sell you according to the number of years of crops,” i.e., you must sell it to him based on the number of years that it will remain in the possession of the buyer.

However, our rabbis 1 expounded: From here we derive the rule that one who sells his field is not permitted to redeem it within less than two years, as it must remain in the buyer’s possession for at least two years to the day. This applies even if those two years contain use of three crop-harvests, e.g., he sold it to him with its standing crop. The word שְׁנֵי, however, does not mean anything other than its plain sense (“years”), indicating that only the number of years that produced viable crops and not blasted crops is counted, and the minimum number of “years” (plural) is two.