4. So, in the sabbath year of 610-609 B.C.E., what would it be fitting for Hebrew slave owners to do, but how did they give God added reason for punishing them?

⁴ So, in Jeremiah’s day, in that lunar sabbath year of 610-609 B.C.E., it was good in Jehovah’s eyes for slaveholding Jews to conclude a covenant before him in the temple at Jerusalem to let their Hebrew slaves go free. In spite of the international situation so threatening to Jerusalem, this was the obedient course for Jeremiah’s people to take. However, before that year of liberation ran out, those former slaveholders broke their solemn covenant and forced their former menservants and maidservants back into slavery. This displeased the covenant-keeping Jehovah and added another reason for him to punish them.​—Jer. 34:8-16.

And I will give the men sidestepping my covenant, in that they did not carry out the words of the covenant that they concluded before me with the calf that they cut in two that they might pass between its pieces;