וזה דבר השמטה, “this shall be the nature of the remission;” our sages in tractate Gittin, folio 37 state that this wording is the source of the rule that if a borrower comes to the lender in the sh’mittah year offering to pay back what he had borrowed, the lender has to decline by saying: “I remit the debt.” A similar rule applies to when a person guilty of having killed someone unintentionally comes to the gates of a city of refuge asking for entry he has to say: I have killed someone.” This too is derived from the wording: וזה דבר הרוצח, “this is the nature of the law concerning an unintentional killer;” (Compare Deuteronomy 19,4). The Jerusalem Talmud in tractate Makkot, chapter 2, halachah 6, adds that if someone had shown that he has complete mastery of one tract of the Talmud, and he is praised as if he had mastered two tractates, he is obliged to respond that he has mastered only a single tractate.

כי משנה שכר שכיר עבדך, “for he has worked for you twice as long as the wages that he received,“ a hired hand usually hires himself out for a period of three years. We know this from Isaiah 16,14: בשלש שנים כשני שכיר ונקלה כבוד מואב, “in three years, fixed like the years of a hired labourer, the glory of Moav shall shrink;” it follows that someone who has served his master for six years has actually served twice the length of a hired hand. The reason they hired such labourers for a period of three years was that if they had hired such a person for a term of a year or two years, sometimes the years are longer and sometimes they are shorter, depending it had more than one month of Adar. By making the term three years there could not be a dispute about how many days of labour this included.