Because it is hard to assign ownership rights to what was gifted, it makes sense for the produce of what was gifted to be, for a time, relinquished of ownership rights.
The issue is not who should own the excess. That's the wrong question. The issue is how should the excess be owned.
The sabbatical year imposes a symmetry on both sides of the mundane/divine covenantal divide. In the year that God asserts His ownership of the land, Man acknowledges lack of ownership of the harvest.
The matter of just distribution is resolved not through redistribution but through a shift in the allocative mechanism.
The point is not to make the poor less poor. The point is to get rid of the unearned excess. It is not a matter of making the excess yes owned by the right (poor) people, it is a matter of making the excess not owned by anyone so that it is not stored but rather consumed.
The sabbatical year is a de-leveraging. It is a movement for the society out of the storage of assets and into the production of income.
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