the right or act of buying back family land or a relative that has been lost: redemption as a matter of clan law
In ancient Israel, land and people were meant to stay within the family. When debt forced someone to sell a field, or even to sell himself into service, the nearest relative had both the right and the duty to buy it back and keep it in the family. This noun is the name for that whole arrangement.
Its various shades are all angles on that one institution:
- the act of buying back
- the standing right or duty to do it
- the price it costs
- the window of time the right stays open
In one debated verse it even stretches to mean the relatives who together hold the right.
What the word never does is just as telling. It is never used of God rescuing his people, never of avenging a killing, and never in poetry or prayer. It stays inside the world of family property law. The soaring sense of redemption that many readers expect belongs instead to the related verb (גאל) and to the figure of the redeemer, not to this technical noun.
Nuances
Whether Ezekiel 11:15 reads "men of your redemption" (the kinsmen holding redemption rights) or should be emended to "men of your exile."
- majorityThe Masoretic Text stands: "men of your redemption," a unique collective sense in which the noun denotes the kin-group entitled to redeem; the harder reading is also the more pointed, since the following verses develop the theme of YHWH himself redeeming the ancestral land.; Moshe Greenberg, Ezekiel 1-20, Anchor Bible (1983); Walther Zimmerli, Ezekiel 1, Hermeneia (1979); Daniel I. Block, The Book of Ezekiel 1-24, NICOT (1997)
- minorityThe text should be emended to "men of your exile," reading the Septuagint's "captivity" and the Peshitta back into the Hebrew.; G. A. Cooke, The Book of Ezekiel, ICC (1936)