Then: while the Hebrew text has only the common conjunction usually translated “and,” most versions recognize that the context requires something stronger at this point. Good News Translation has “At that time,” referring to the Year of Restoration.

He and his children: the children are not necessarily slaves with their father. They may be children born during the time that the father was serving as a slave.

Go back to his own family: this does not simply indicate a change of address or a moving from one house to another. It involves the liberation from slavery (however benevolent that slavery may have been) and a return to the status of a free person. Compare verse 10.

Return to the possession of his fathers: the word fathers is to be understood in the more general sense of all those who have gone before in the family line. Hence Good News Translation has “ancestors.” The possession refers to the family property. New English Bible translates the last two phrases as “he shall … go back to his family and to his ancestral property.”

Quoted with permission from Péter-Contesse, René and Ellington, John. A Handbook on Leviticus. (UBS Helps for Translators). New York: UBS, 1990. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .