The Sabbath Year

The prescription to have a personal "Sabbath" for one day out of every seven is one of the most overlooked and misunderstood parts of Mosaic Law.  Assuming that the Bible prescribes that a specific day of the modern calendar be treated as a day of rest, most readers seem to completely miss the fact that verses like Leviticus 23:3 at most instruct people to hold one day out of every seven as a day of rest, which means that someone is not automatically sinning if they have their Sabbath on a different day of each consecutive week [1].  This is one of the most unheard of logical facts about the concept of the Sabbath as the Bible describes it.

The Sabbath is best known as a single day on which no unnecessary work is to be carried out--of course, if any activity that entails physical/professional labor was sinful on the Sabbath, then something like self-defense would be immoral (which is never true by the Bible's own standards in places like Exodus 22:2-3), as would the healings Jesus himself carried out on the Sabbath in Mark 3:1-6.  Most discussions about or references to the Sabbath have to do with the day.  However, Leviticus 25 calls for an entire Sabbath year to be held every seven years.  Like the day of rest, this year centers on rest.  In this case the rest is instead for land that would otherwise be farmed.

The Sabbath year is supposed to involve abstinence from planting or harvesting crops, but other year-long occupations would remain entirely valid as long as they are not practiced on individual Sabbath days.  It is not as if the Bible presents God as requiring that all people refrain from all physical labor for an entire calendar year (it is impossible to fully define what the Bible must mean when it calls for no "work" on the Sabbath, but there are at least a handful of Biblical examples of physical or professional work and logical extensions of those examples that would have to be exceptions within the Christian worldview).  The two types of Sabbaths have different scopes.

Nowhere does God prescribe capital punishment for failing to uphold the Sabbath year, which is a collective agricultural phenomenon that would span an entire society.  Not a single one of the 54 verses in Leviticus 25 addresses any sort of punishment for disregarding the Sabbath year.  Though even many Christians would object to the Bible's own capital punishment laws for disregarding the Sabbath day (Exodus 31:15), execution is reserved only for violation of the more well-known Sabbath command.  Subjective horror or dislike would not have anything to do with moral obligations either way.

The Sabbath year and day are not treated identically.  Some similarities overlap each category, like the fact that surplus resources can be accumulated in the six days or six years around the Sabbath of either kind.  In the words of Jesus, the Sabbath day is not prescribed as an oppressive thing (Mark 2:27), but as something intended to aid human flourishing.  The same would likely true of the Sabbath year, just with the additional aim of providing a time of rest for land.  Even for the entire year, eating whatever food the land itself naturally produces without farming is still nonsinful (Leviticus 25:7).  One of the key characteristics of both Sabbaths is an emphasis on rest for the sake of both reflecting on God and receiving the benefits of leisure.

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2020/08/the-pattern-of-sabbath.html