While the land has its Sabbath, all the produce will be food equally for yourself and for your male and female servants, for your hired help and the tenants who live with you, and likewise for your livestock and the wild animals on your land.The Mishna establishes the rules for permissible and forbidden agricultural work during the seventh year and how the produce that grows during this year must be handled, in what the Mishna terms shmittat karka’in – respite of the Land – in accordance with the Torah’s requirements (Exodus 23:10–11, and Leviticus 25:2–7).

According to Torah law, four kinds of work are forbidden — sowing and reaping in the field and pruning trees and gathering their fruit.

This prohibition is called "tosefet shevi'it" (Hebrew: addition to or extension of the Sabbatical Year), and applies only when the Temple of Jerusalem stands.

[1][3][5] There are four specific commandments regarding the sanctity of the produce of the Sabbatical Year:[4] At the end of every seven-year period you shall have a relaxation of debts ... Every creditor shall release his claim on what he has loaned his neighbor; he shall not press his neighbor for payment.At the end of the seventh year, the Torah requires every creditor to discharge any personal loan made to a fellow Israelite in what is termed shmittat kesafim – release of debts – in accordance with Deuteronomy 15:1–10.

However, as economic life became more complex during the Second Temple period, debts incurred in business transactions belonged to a different category and could not fairly be cancelled.

Having mentioned that the sages are pleased with someone who repays a debt despite the Sabbatical year, the tractate concludes that the person who keeps their word and does not seek to evade a commitment, even though it was not legally binding, is honored.

[2][7] An overview of the topics of the chapters is as follows: The Tosefta describes how the produce of the Sabbatical year was stored in communal granaries, from which it was divided every Friday on the eve of the weekly Sabbath among all the families according to their need.

[1][2][7] According to the Roman-Jewish historian, Josephus, the Greek ruler Alexander the Great and the Roman emperor Julius Caesar both cancelled the usual taxes from the Jews in the Land of Israel during the Sabbatical year out of consideration for the agricultural inactivity and associated lack of income.

[2] Other Greek and Roman rulers of the Land of Israel were not as accommodating and the tractate therefore addresses these circumstances of hardship due to the demands of the ruling powers.