What is shmita, the sabbatical year in the Torah?

Shmita, meaning “release,” is the seventh year of a recurring seven-year cycle in which the Torah commands the land of Israel to lie fallow. Exodus 23:10–11 gives the earliest instruction: “Six years you shall sow your land and gather in its yield, but in the seventh you shall let it rest and lie fallow, that the poor among your people may eat.” Leviticus 25:1–7 extends the idea explicitly to the land's own rest, calling it “a sabbath of the LORD,” parallel to the weekly Sabbath but scaled up from a day to a year: for six years fields may be sown and vineyards pruned, but in the seventh, plowing, planting, and organized harvesting stop, and whatever grows on its own is left ownerless, available to the poor, travelers, and even animals equally with the landowner. Later tradition (recorded in the Mishnah and codified by Maimonides) added the release of most personal debts during the shmita year, based on Deuteronomy 15:1–2. The practice functions on two levels at once: agriculturally, it's a working fallow-land discipline that predates modern soil science by millennia; theologically, it's a periodic, structural admission that the land — and by extension the wealth it produces — belongs to God rather than to whoever is currently farming it, a claim the text states outright in Leviticus 25:23: “The land is Mine; you are but strangers and residents with Me.” Every seven years, ownership itself is interrupted on purpose.