John Calvin Commentary Leviticus 25:20

"And if ye shall say, What shall we eat the seventh year? Behold, we shall not sow, nor gather in our increase;" — Leviticus 25:20 (ASV)

And if you shall say. Men will never be obedient to God’s precepts unless their distrust of Him is corrected, and they will always be ingenious in seizing pretexts for disobedience. The difficulty, however, in this matter was a specious excuse for the Jews; for famine might have destroyed them in these two years, since in the seventh year they neither sowed nor reaped, and for reaping they were obliged to wait until the end of the eighth year. Now, from where were they to get enough seed to sow after the land had rested for a whole year?

It is not without reason, then, that God delivers them from this doubt, promising them that He will give such abundance in the sixth year as will suffice for the two following ones. The phrase must be observed, that God would command His blessing in a special manner and beyond the usual course, so that the land would be two or three times more fertile. This suggests to us no ordinary ground for confidence in asking for our daily bread.

But this was a special promise that food would not fail the Jews on account of the Sabbatical year. God had already given a manifestation of this in the desert, when He supplied a double portion of manna to those who gathered it on the day before the Sabbath.

Nowadays, this inconvenience is avoided by the industry of farmers, who so divide their acres that the land need never lie fallow altogether, but one part can supply the deficiency of another. This distribution was not practiced by the Jews. Therefore, God relieved them from the fear of famine until the harvest of the eighth year; although He seems at the same time to accustom them to frugality, lest they waste in intemperance and luxury what He provided in sufficient abundance to last for two years.

To this precept He alludes when He declares by the Prophets that the land enjoyed her Sabbaths when it had expelled its inhabitants (2 Chronicles 36:21); for since they had polluted it by violating the Sabbath, so that it groaned as if under a heavy burden, He says that it will rest for a long continuous period to compensate for the labor of many years.