to let drop: to let something fall out of your hold, whether an object, a field left unworked, or a debt you stop collecting
The picture behind this verb is a hand that opens and lets what it was holding fall. That plain physical action is where every use begins, and the rest of its range grows out of it.
The same verb covers all of these:
- oxen letting the sacred chest slip as they pull the cart
- servants letting a queen drop from an upper window
- a farmer letting his field go unworked through the seventh year
- a lender letting his claim on a neighbor's debt fall away
- a nation letting go of the land it was given
What holds this range together is the letting go itself, not what happens next. The word says that the hand no longer holds, which is why one verb can be gentle when a field is left to rest and violent when a body hits the ground. Israel's seventh-year laws use it in both of its softer directions: the land is let go, and so is what a fellow Israelite owes. The noun for that seventh-year release (שְׁמִטָּה) is built on this verb and shows up only in Deuteronomy.
Jeremiah turns the picture around as a threat. The people who were commanded to let go of debts will themselves let go of the land God gave them, driven off it and made to serve their enemies.
Nuances
Whether the verb here describes the oxen letting the ark slip or the oxen stumbling.
- majorityThe oxen let the ark slip, with the ark as the unexpressed object, which matches the ordinary sense of the verb; 4QSamuel-a and the Greek support reading an object.; P. Kyle McCarter, II Samuel (Anchor Bible, 1984); Gary N. Knoppers, I Chronicles 10-29 (Anchor Bible, 2004)
- minorityThe oxen stumbled, a contextual rendering of the verb that leaves the ark out of its grammar.; A. A. Anderson, 2 Samuel (Word Biblical Commentary, 1989)
Disputed
Whether the seventh-year debt remission in Deuteronomy 15 is a new sense coined by Deuteronomy's authors out of the older fallow-year language of Exodus 23:11, or the codification of an already existing practice with Mesopotamian analogues.
- majorityDeuteronomy deliberately reuses the Covenant Code's verb for releasing the land and redeploys it for debt remission, coining the abstract noun in the process; the paradigm case of lemmatic reuse in service of legal innovation.; Bernard M. Levinson, Deuteronomy and the Hermeneutics of Legal Innovation (Oxford University Press, 1997); Jeffrey H. Tigay, Deuteronomy (JPS Torah Commentary, 1996)
- minorityThe debt release codifies an institution paralleling the Old Babylonian misarum and andurarum edicts, democratized from a royal prerogative into a fixed cycle imposed by God; reform rather than rhetorical invention.; Moshe Weinfeld, Social Justice in Ancient Israel and in the Ancient Near East (Magnes/Fortress, 1995); Gregory C. Chirichigno, Debt-Slavery in Israel and the Ancient Near East (JSOTSup 141, 1993); Raymond Westbrook, Property and the Family in Biblical Law (JSOTSup 113, 1991)
- minorityThe seventh-year release is a late Deuteronomistic literary construction rather than an inherited institution, since misarum had fallen out of technical use long before first-millennium Hebrew could have borrowed it.; N. P. Lemche, "The Manumission of Slaves: The Fallow Year, The Sabbatical Year, The Jobel Year", Vetus Testamentum 26 (1976) 38-59