free, freedom
Chofshi carries the weight of a specific kind of freedom: the freedom that comes from being released. Not freedom as a philosophical concept or an abstract ideal, but freedom as the felt experience of someone whose chains have just been removed. The word appears most often in legal contexts describing the release of a slave or a debt-prisoner. When a Hebrew servant finished six years of service, he went out chofshi, free and discharged from all obligation. The word is not simply about liberty in a general sense. It describes the moment of transition, the crossing of a threshold from bound to unbound.
Chofshi also carries an emotional undertone that English translations rarely capture. There is something almost startling about it. The released person does not gradually drift into freedom. He is declared free, sent out free, sent away with his status completely changed. Some lexicographers connect the root to the idea of being exempt, of having a legal obligation formally lifted. You were in a category, and now you are in a different category.
The Psalms reach for this word in one of the darkest places in all of Scripture. Psalm 88 uses chofshi to describe the dead: cut off, exempted from the land of the living, released from the community of those who praise God. That usage complicates and deepens the word. Freedom here is not always triumphant. It can describe desolation, severance, the terrible freedom of having nothing left to lose.
When Isaiah 58 and 61 use related language to describe the year of release, the word carries both dimensions: the joy of the liberated and the gravity of what it cost to make that liberation possible.
Most of us read the word 'free' in our Bibles and mentally fill in whatever freedom means to us today, autonomy, self-determination, the open road. I did this for years. I read 'he shall go out free' and pictured something like independence, a man setting his own course. But chofshi is not about self-determination. It is about debt discharged. It is about a legal declaration that changes your standing before another person. When you feel the weight of that, the gospel starts to sound different. You were not just liberated to do as you pleased. You were formally released from an obligation you could never have satisfied. Someone else settled the account. The freedom is real, but it came at a cost you did not pay.
Chofshi derives from the root חָפַשׁ (chafash), which carries the idea of searching out or spreading free. Some scholars connect it to an ancient Semitic root meaning to be loose or unbound. The related noun chufshah (חֻפְשָׁה) appears in Leviticus 19:20 and refers to the legal status of a freed slave. The word family clusters around legal release and formal discharge rather than inner psychological freedom.
Where chofshi appears in Scripture, and why each verse showcases it.
When you buy a Hebrew slave, he shall serve six years, and in the seventh he shall go out free, for nothing.
This is chofshi in its clearest legal setting. The phrase 'for nothing' reinforces that the release is complete, no residual debt, no remaining claim.
like one set loose among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave, like those whom you remember no more, for they are cut off from your hand.
The word translated 'set loose' is chofshi, and it forces the reader to sit with freedom as desolation, cut off from God's hand rather than held by it.
Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the straps of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?
The prophetic call to release the oppressed draws directly on the legal and relational weight of chofshi-language, connecting covenant obedience to literal human liberation.
The small and the great are there, and the slave is free from his master.
Job uses chofshi to describe death as the great equalizer, the only place where the slave's bound status is finally, irreversibly lifted.
If your brother, a Hebrew man or a Hebrew woman, is sold to you, he shall serve you six years, and in the seventh year you shall let him go free from you.
The repetition of chofshi here in the covenant law underscores that release is not a gift of the master's generosity but an obligation written into the structure of Israel's community life.
Words in the same semantic family.
Every video where Adam teaches on this word, in publication order.
This word is studied in depth in the following monthly Bible studies.