The RELEASE — the cancelling of debts at the end of every seventh year, and the noun that gives Deuteronomy 15 its subject. ⭐ The family is tiny: searched consonantally across the whole Hebrew Bible the root shamat stands in ELEVEN verses and this noun in only FOUR — 15:1, 15:2, 15:9, and Deuteronomy 31:10, where the seven-yearly public reading of the law is dated to ‘the year of the release’. ⚠ Everywhere else the verb is PHYSICAL, and mostly violent: the oxen let the ark slip (2 Samuel 6:6, and word for word at 1 Chronicles 13:9), Jehu tells the eunuchs to throw Jezebel down from the window (2 Kings 9:33), and the judges of Psalm 141:6 are flung down the sides of a rock. The word for cancelling a debt is the word for letting something drop out of your hand. ⭐ Its one other Torah appearance releases a FIELD rather than a loan: Exodus 23:11 tells the seventh year to let the land drop and lie fallow, so that the needy of your people may eat. Deuteronomy keeps the clock and the needy, and moves the release from the field to the ledger. ⚠ The shelf renders it ‘release’ (KJV, ASV), ‘remission’ (Douay, and the Spanish remisión), ‘freedom’ (Geneva) and, most explicitly, ‘cancel debts’ (NIV) — which is what it means and not what it says. → first discussed at Deut 15:1