My Neighbor's Landmark:
Short Studies in Bible Land Laws
by Frederick Verinder
Chapter 2: First Principles: "The Earth is The Lord's"
"Thy land which Thou hast given to Thy people for
an inheritance."— 1 Kings 8:36. |
§ 1. THE general principles upon which the Hebrew
Land Laws were based are absolutely fatal to the idea of private property
in land. It would be too little to say that land monopoly was treated with
great severity by the Law: the Law was expressly designed to make it impossible,
for the Lawgiver knew that there can be no social justice in a State while
what Herbert Spencer
called "the equal right to the use of the earth" is denied to its
members. |
| § 2. The keynote is struck in the very first sentence
of the Pentateuch. "In the beginning
God created
the heaven and the earth,"28 and is
frequently repeated elsewhere.29 "The sea is His, and He made it and His hands
formed the dry land."30 "The earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof; the
world and they that dwell therein. For He hath founded it upon the seas, and
established it upon the floods."31 "The
world is Mine, and the fulness thereof."32 "Thus saith the Lord, The heaven is
My throne, and the earth is My footstool … for all those things hath Mine
hand made."33 God Almighty is, therefore, by right of creation, the only landlord.
When the late Lord Salisbury attempted, in the House of Lords,34 to justify the
preferential claim of the landlord over all the other creditors of the farmer,
on the ground that "the
landlord furnishes the land" to the farmer, his statement would have been regarded
by the Hebrew Lawgiver as blasphemous, and would probably have been characterised
by the plain-speaking Amos in language to which most of our newspapers would
hesitate to accord the honor of a
verbatim report. |
28 Genesis 1:1; 24:3; Nehemiah
9:6; Psalm 102:25; 124:8; Isa 42:5; 45: 12; Jer. 10:12; Heb 1:10
29 It was evidently recognized as a distinctively Hebrew belief
(Jonah 1:9).
30 Psalm 95:5
31 Psalm 24:1, 2; cp 1 Co 10:26, 28
32 Psalm 1:12; cp 89: 11, 12; Ex 19:5
33 Isa. 66:1, 2
34 In 1885, Speech on the "British Agricultural Association Bill." The
Bill proposed "to enable a company of capitalists to lend money to the farmer
against his crop," the crop being ear-marked, as against other creditors,
for the repayment of the advance. "But it is to be noticed," said this
sturdy champion of landlordism, "that it is not proposed that he (the capitalist)
should stand before the landlord, because that would not be just. The landlord furnishes the land, and
the capitalist the capital, and it would not be fair that the capitalist
should come and thrust the landlord aside, and stand before him. The
landlord's interest is saved. He has an absolute veto on any proceedings
under this bill."
|
| § 3. For, while the class which the late Lord
Salisbury
so worthily represented seems to say, "The earth is the (land)lord's, and land
doth he 'furnish' to the farmer," the Biblical
reading is quite otherwise. "In the beginning God created the heaven and the
earth." Therefore "unto the Lord thy God belongeth the heaven, and the heaven
of heavens, the earth, with all that therein is."35 "The heaven, even the heavens,
are the Lord's; but the earth hath He given to the children of
men."36 |
35 Deut 10:14 R.V.; "heaven of heavens" = "the
highest heaven." Cp 2 Cor 12:2, where "the third heaven" probably
means the same thing.
36 Ps. 115:16.
|
| No phrase could possibly be wider in its application, or
more completely destructive of the claims of a landlord class to the monopoly
of God's earth, than the simple
words "children of men." Is there any man, woman or child who lives now, or who
ever has lived, or
who ever will live, who is not included among "the children of men?" No: Jew
or Greek, native or foreigner, black or white, lord or peasant,
rich or poor37 — all find, in this sweeping generalisation, the charter
of their birthright in the soil. The simple and unlettered field-worker, who
never heard of Herbert Spencer, may yet deduce from his Bible as good an argument
for the "equal right to the use of the
earth" as is to be found in Social Statics; and he will probably hold to it more
tenaciously than the "Perplexed Philosopher" did. |
37 ["This is the book of the generations of Adam," says the Bible;
and the Rabbis comment: "Not rich, nor poor, nor learned, nor unlearned,
nor great, no small, nor black, nor white, but MAN." Again, we
are told: "In the day that God created man," and the Hebr. sages explain: "God
fashioned Adam alone, from whom sprang the entire human race. Thus no
man can say, 'I am of a better or earlier stock.'" "And these are
the ordinances by which man shall live," enjoins the Bible; and the Talmud
asserts, "Not the king or prince, not the priest or Levite, but MAN. All
alike were formed in the image of God." -- S.] |
| "For thus saith the Lord that created the heavens; God Himself
that formed the earth and made it; He hath established it, He created it
not in vain, He formed it to be
inhabited: I am the Lord; and there is none else."38 So, in the Jewish
tradition of the beginnings of the human race, as in other early traditions,
the story begins with a man and a woman in a garden;39 with Land and Labor. It
is the will of God that man should satisfy his bodily needs by the exercise of
his labor upon the material which He
has so abundantly provided. "It is good and comely for one to eat and to drink,
and to enjoy the good of all his labor that he taketh under the sun all the days
of his life, which God giveth him; for it is his
portion"; "it is the gift of God."40 For man is so made, that he has nothing
but the land to live from, nothing but labor — his own or some
one else's — to live by. |
38 Isa. 45:18; cp 2 Esd. 6:55, 59.
39 Gen 2:8, 9, 15 "garden" (in LXX "paradise") is rather "park." The
corresponding Hebrew word is translated in Neh 2:8 [R.V.m] and Eccles
2:5 [R.V.]
40 Eccles. 3:13, 5:18. |
| "So God created man in His own image, … male and female
created He them. And God blesses them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful
and multiply, and replenish
the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish
of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth
upon the earth. … Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which
is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree; ... to you it shall be for
meat. … And God saw everything that He had made, and, behold, it was very
good."41 |
41 Gen 1:27-31; cp. 9:1-3; Ps. 8:6-8.
|
| But Adam was not the owner of the Garden of Eden; he only
had the use of it,
upon conditions. When those conditions were violated, "the Lord God sent him
forth from the Garden of Eden, to till the
ground whence he was taken," and to till it sorrowfully and in the sweat of his
face.42 |
42 Gen 3:17-19, 23. Cp. Verg. Georg
1:118-46 |
| § 4. If, therefore, God, the sole
Landowner, has given
the land to "the children of men" — i.e. to the whole human race in its
widest extension through time and space — it follows that no single generation,
still less any single individual, has absolute ownership in land. It is not the
right of property in
land, but the right to use land — limited by the equal right of every one
else, now and for ever, to use land — that God has given to man. No man
can claim land as "his very own," "to do as he likes with," e.g. to
sell. "The land shall not be sold for ever; for the land is mine; for ye are strangers
and sojourners with Me,"43 saith the Lord. No man could sell
land "for ever"44 for any man's interest in it was only a life-interest; a temporary
usufruct, and not a permanent, absolute ownership. It is only the interest of
the race that is perpetual. "The days of the life of man may be numbered; but
the days of Israel are
innumerable."45 For God has given the land — i.e., the use of it — not
to
any particular class or generation of men, but to all generations of
mankind. |
43 Lev. 25:23
44 R.V. gives "the land shall not be sold in perpetuity;" Vulg., "in
perpetuum;" Hebr., "to extinction" (so Oehler, Theology of the O.T., i. 348), "out and out." Maimonides
(Tractatus de juribus Anni Septimi 3t
Jubilaei; Maius' Lat. trans., 1708) translates: "Terram non vendito absolute." According
to Hebr. tradition, Abraham bouht land "out and out," from the Hittites,
for a family burying-place. The detailed account of this transaction
(Gen. 23) is interesting; note especially the lawyer-like precision with
which the subject of the purchase is specified (verses 17, 18) (49:29-32). Jacob
also bought land for a sanctuary (33:19, 20; Josh 24:32).
45 Ecclus.37:25 |
§ 5. Lastly, "the
profit
of the earth is for all;
the king himself is served by the field."46
|
46 Eccles. 5:9. So translated in both the current English
versions. But the R.V.m. gives as alternative readings: "But the
profit of a land every way is a king that maketh himself servant to the
field" (i.e., promotes the cultivation
of the land; or "is a king over the cultivated field." "A sort
of ancient claim that 'back to the land' is the only solution of the
social problem") Prof. G. Currie Martin). |
If these be, as I believe they are, the leading principles
of the ancient teaching
of "Moses and the Prophets" on the Land Question, the most surprising thing about
them is, perhaps, their modernity. The mode of their expression is of course,
always colored by the Theocratic perceptions of the Hebrew Commonwealth. But
when our own
great legal and constitutional authorities tell us
- that "all landlords are merely tenants in the eyes of the law;"47
- that "the idea of absolute ownership … is quite unknown to the English
law; no man is in law the absolute owner of lands, he can only hold an estate
in them";48
- that "the king, therefore, hath only absolutum et directum dominium. … A
subject hath only the usufruct, not the absolute property of the
soil";49
they are only expressing in different language the same ideas as are embodied
in the passages of Scripture above quoted. The theory of the old English law,
which vested the ownership of the land in the Crown, as the visible embodiment
of the claim of the whole
Nation, generation after generation, to "the land which the Lord their God hath
given them," resulted in exactly the same negation of private and individual
ownership of land as followed upon the Hebrew formula, "The earth is the Lord's;
the earth hath He given to the children of
men." For, as the last of the Theocratic Republicans told the
Israelites, "The Lord your God was your King."50 The highest interest in land
which a Hebrew could hold was a tenancy in capite from the Lord Jehovah, the unseen
King of Israel. There was no rent to pay, unless
the small offering of firstfruits — a basket of "the first of the first-fruits
of all the fruit of the earth"51 — be regarded as a sort
of
quit-rent, — a formal acknowledgement of Jehovah's absolutum et directum dominium. The Deuteronomic
edition of the Law does, in fact, prescribe a ritual for the offering of the
first-fruits, in which this view is clearly and
beautifully implied.52
|
47 Joshua Williams, On Real Property, Chapter 1.
48 ibid.
49 Blackstone
50 1 Samuel 12:12
51 Ex 22:29, 23:19, 24: 22, 26; Lev. 23:17; Num 15: 19-21; Deut
18:4; 2 Kings 4:42; Neh. 10:35, 37.
52 Deut. 26:1-11.
|
| So when Henry George, in drafting the first manifesto of
the first National Society for the propagation of his teachings, wrote53
that "no number of individuals can justly grant away the equal rights of
other individuals to land, and no generation can grant away the rights
of future generations," he was merely re-echoing, as he would have been
the first to admit, some of the most primitive doctrines on the Land Question.
For, in the youth of the world, when the relation of man to the earth on
which he lived was still simple and natural, was easier than it is now
for men to see the truth about the Land Question steadily, and to see it
whole. |
53 Manifesto of the English Land Restoration League
(now the English League for the Taxation of Land Values), 1884. The
League was founded in March, 1883. |
| Again, when the modern Land Reformer draws from his general
principles the practical deduction that the value of land should meet the
cost of the public expenses, he is only restating, in terms of modern conditions,
the truth that "the profit of the earth is for all; the king himself is
served by the field." |
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