[1] During shmita, the land is left to lie fallow and all agricultural activity, including plowing, planting, pruning and harvesting, is forbidden by halakha (Jewish law).

Other cultivation techniques (such as watering, fertilizing, weeding, spraying, trimming and mowing) may be performed as a preventive measure only, not to improve the growth of trees or other plants.

Therefore, Isaiah was truly providing a sign to Hezekiah that God would save the city of Jerusalem, as explicitly stated, and not an injunction concerning the Sabbath (shmita) or jubilee (yovel) years, which are not mentioned at all in the passage.

Various attempts have been made to reconstruct when Sabbatical years actually fell using clues in the biblical text and events clearly dated in fixed historically understood calendars.

There are explicit mentions of a Sabbatical year found in Josephus, 1 Maccabees, and in various legal contracts from the time of Simon bar Kokhba.

[20] The rabbis of the Talmud and later times interpreted the shmita laws in various ways to ease the burden they created for farmers and the agricultural industry.

This approach potentially admits for some leniencies which would not be possible if the Shemitah were biblical in origin, including the aforementioned sale of the land of Israel.

Any naturally growing produce was not to be formally harvested, but could have been eaten by its owners,[24] as well as left to be taken by poor people, passing strangers, and beasts of the field.

Nonetheless, Rabbinic Judaism has developed Halakhic (religious legal) devices to be able to maintain a modern agricultural and commercial system while giving heed to the biblical injunctions.

According to di Trani, the fact that this produce was grown in Israel, even by non-Jews, gives it sanctity, and it must be treated in the special ways detailed above.

This opinion is now called Minhag Yerushalayim "the custom of Jerusalem", and was adopted by many Haredi families, by British Mandate Palestine, and by the Chief Rabbinate of Israel.

However, the rabbis of the Mishna and Jerusalem Talmud imposed rabbinic ordinances on harvesters to ensure an orderly and equitable process and to prevent a few individuals from taking everything.

[36] Rabbi Nathan ben Abraham permits the gathering of aftergrowths of mustard greens (Sinapis alba) during the Seventh Year.

[37] An ancient practice in the Land of Israel was to permit the gathering of spring onions which grew of themselves during the Seventh Year, after the first rains had fallen upon them and sprouted.

[31] In the late 19th century, in the early days of Zionism, Rabbi Yitzchak Elchanan Spektor came up with a halakhic means of allowing agriculture to continue during the shmita year.

Rabbi Kook explained in a lengthy responsum that the ideal is not to rely on the leniency of heter mechira, but rather to observe shmita according to all opinions.

Members of the community pay the beth din, but this payment represents only a contribution for services, and not a purchase or sale of the food.

Thus, under this approach, a legal arrangement is created whereby the crops themselves are never bought or sold, but rather people are merely paid for their labor and expenses in providing certain services.

According to the Chassidut, eating is not only a way to stay alive but even a necessity so that the soul can continue to be strongly inspired by the study of the Torah and the prayer that the Jew performs every day: this means that something material, the food - food can in fact be from the "mineral, vegetable or animal kingdoms" - becomes "sublimated" to enter the sacred area of devotional service to God.

Moses' words, which exemplify the power of the spirit of the tzaddik, bring Divine inspiration to all JewsShmita is therefore abundance of Nature until it becomes holy.

[44] In 2000, Sefardic Chief Rabbi Eliyahu Bakshi-Doron withdrew religious certification of the validity of permits for the sale of land to non-Jews during the shmita year following protests against his endorsement of the leniency by members of the Haredi community.

[45] During the 2007–2008 shmita, the Chief Rabbinate of Israel attempted to avoid taking a potentially divisive position on the dispute between Haredi and Modern Orthodox views about the correctness of the heter mechira leniency by ruling that local rabbis could make their own decisions about whether or not to accept this device as valid.

Based on a chronological study of Ezekiel 30:20-21, Nahum Sarna dated Zedekiah's emancipation proclamation to the year beginning in Tishri of 588 BCE.

This is in keeping with the statement in Seder Olam chapter 30, properly translated as discussed above, that put the burning of the First Temple, as well as the Second, in the "latter part" of a Sabbatical year.

The Seder Olam, in relating that Ezekiel's vision was at the beginning of a Jubilee, does not cite the part of Ezekiel 40:1 that says it was Rosh Hashanah and the tenth of the month, indicating that the fact that a Jubilee was commencing was based on historical remembrance, not on just the textual argument regarding Rosh Hashanah being on the tenth of the month.

Sabbatical years have been used to fix the exact time of historical events, as shown in traditional Jewish chronology, but which are rarely understood by modern chroniclers of ancient history.

[81] Zuckermann insisted that for Sabbatical years after the Babylonian exile "it is necessary to assume the commencement of a new starting-point, since the laws of Sabbatical years and Jubilees fell into disuse during the Babylonian captivity, when a foreign nation held possession of the land of Canaan ... We therefore cannot agree with chronologists who assume an unbroken continuity of septennial Sabbaths and Jubilees.

[84] The final text considered by Zuckermann was a passage in the Seder Olam that relates the destruction of the Second Temple to a Sabbatical year, an event that is known from secular history to have happened in the summer of 70 CE.

[93] According to the Geniza record, the earthquake occurred on 23 Shevat, 679 years after the destruction of the Second Temple; this is January 18, 749 CE in the Julian calendar.

The Jubilee and Sabbatical year provided a long-term means for dating events, a fact that must have become obvious soon after the legislation was put into effect.