The seventh
perek (=chapter) of
Masekhet Arakhin begins on today’s
daf (=page), and its focus is on someone who consecrates his ancestral field to the
Temple and desires to redeem it. The
Torah teaches that someone who consecrates a field that he inherited from his ancestors must redeem it by paying 50 silver
shekel for an area that is planted with a
homer of barley.
That is true, however, only when the person consecrates the field at the beginning of the 50-year
yovel (=Jubilee year) period and redeems it immediately. If, however, he leaves the field in the hands of the Temple treasury and comes to redeem it only in the middle of the
yovel period, then the amount of money that he pays will be based on that sum minus the appropriate percentage of that value per year. Since the full payment is 50
shekel for 49 years (given that the 50
thyear is the Jubilee year), the amount that is subtracted for each year is one
shekel and one
pondion (a
pondion is one-forty-eighth of a
shekel).
Thus, if someone would redeem a field which he had consecrated to the Temple immediately after the year of Jubilee, then he must redeem it by paying fifty shekel for every piece of a field sufficient for the sowing of a homer of barley, for every year of the next forty-nine years. If he fails to redeem it by then, the priests will come to possess it. Every year this sum is diminished by one forty-ninth of the fifty shekel, exactly one shekel and one pondion, the remaining pondionsbeing considered the exchange fee as the pondions are changed into shekels. The sum of redemption, then, consists of as many shekels and pondions as the number of years up to the next year of yovel.
The Mishnah teaches that there must be at least two years before the next year of yovel, because the Torah teaches “according to the years which remain unto the year of Jubilee,” and the minimum of ‘years’ is two. Hence, if there are not at least two years before that of yovel, the sum whereby the field is redeemed cannot be deducted from at all, and the owner must then pay the complete fifty shekels for every piece of field sufficient for the sowing of a homer of barley, whose sum is much more than the field’s crop, until the year of yovel, will be worth.