Hebrew Land Laws

It is not the protection of property, but the protection of humanity, that is the aim of the Mosaic code. Its sanctions are not directed to securing the strong in heaping up wealth as much as to preventing the weak from being crowded to the wall.

— Henry George: Moses — Apostle of Freedom

Frederick Verinder: My Neighbor's Landmark: Short Studies in Bible Land Laws (1911), Chapter 1

No attempt is made in this little book to distinguish between the various literary "sources" of the Hebrew Land Laws. The material has been drawn freely from all of them. My present purpose is simply to disentangle from the best known of the extant Hebrew writings the main lines of Hebrew thought on the Land Question. The results are, on the whole, practically independent of the conclusions of the Higher Criticism; for while there may be differences of detail between (say) the Deuteronomic and the "Priestly" legislation, there is absolutely no difference in principle. The Torah or "Law" is, therefore, here taken in the form which it assumed when completely developed and fully committed to writing. "For," as is well said by two writers who may be thought to have pushed fearlessness of criticism almost to the point of rashness,

"even if the religious contents of parts of the Old Testament in their original form should turn out to be somewhat less rich and varied than is agreeable to traditional ideas, yet the text in its present form, even if not in the original, has an independent right of existence, and the interpretation put upon this text by Jewish and Christian students deserves the most respectful attention. The Old Testament was surely not a dead book to the Jews of the great post-exilic age, but was full of light, and susceptible of the most varied and edifying adaptations."

For "the Jewish law, if it is to be judged properly, must be judged as a whole, and not with exclusive reference to one of its parts. … In all its stages, the Mosaic law held before the eyes of Israel an ideal of duty to be observed, of laws to be obeyed, of principles to be maintained; it taught them that human nature needed to be restrained; it impressed upon them the necessity of discipline." ...

Whether Moses, during the educative and constructive period of the desert wandering, laid down the "Law" in detail as we now know it, or whether he merely sketched broad outlines, within which a long succession of later legislators and teachers supplied the details, matters little. The spirit and the groundwork of the Law is clearly Mosaic. In its differences from other ancient codes, no less than in its resemblances to them, it witnesses to an original which can only be accounted for on the assumption that Moses lived, and delivered the Hebrews from slavery, and laid the foundation of their national law; that he was "the ultimate founder of both the national and the religious life of Israel."

It is natural enough that Moses and the Prophets should have a good deal to say, and for us to hear, on the Land Question. For, so long as man remains a land animal, the Lawgiver and the Social Reformer cannot avoid the ever-pressing question of the relation of man to land. Like some other ancient peoples (and some modern "savages"), the Hebrews saw clearly truths about the Land Question which have become obscured to most of us by the complexities of our modern industrial system. It is, of course, obvious that the details of the land laws which Moses promulgated, and to which the Prophets appealed, cannot apply to a nation so differently circumstanced as our own. In considering the details, we must constantly bear in mind the circumstances of the time and place, and the history and condition of the people. "The precepts then uttered," said one of the early Fathers of the Church, in discussing certain provisions of the Mosaic law, "had reference to the weakness of them who were receiving the laws; since also to be worshipped with the vapor of sacrifice is very unworthy of God, just as to lisp is unworthy of a philosopher. Do not thou then require their excellency now, when their use is past; but then when the time was calling for them." But the principles which underlay those "precepts" are fundamental and immutable, because the relation of man to the land on which he lives and works is always and essentially the same. The earth is still what one of the Apocryphal writers called it, "the mother of all things." Land is still, as it was in the time of Moses, the home and the workshop of the human race, the reservoir from which human labor draws all the raw materials wherewith to satisfy its needs. "Land is perpetual man." "One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever." The Pentateuchal tradition recognises, in what has been described as a "first attempt at organic chemistry," as clearly as the modern scientist does, that even the materials of which the human body is composed are drawn from the land and finally return to it.

It is, therefore, to the underlying principles of the Hebrew social philosophy, other than to the details of Mosaic legislation, that this little work is designed to call attention. Modern writers on the Land Question — Gerrard Winstanley the Digger, Spence of Newcastle, John Locke, William Ogilvie of Pittensea, Patrick Edward Dove, Herbert Spencer (in his earlier phase), Alfred Russel Wallace, and, above all, Henry George — have, after all, only restated, and attempted to apply to modern social needs, principles which were enunciated by Moses and enforced by many later Hebrew teachers. Some of them would have readily admitted this: would, indeed, have gloried in it. It is not without significance that one of Henry George's most telling and popular lectures had as its subject, "Moses." The great Hebrew liberation could hardly have found in our time a more fitting and sympathetic exposition.

But, ancient as these principles are, the most characteristic of modern problems — problems of poverty amid increasing wealth, of housing, of unemployment — are compelling the attention of social reformers, more and more, to them. For, what we call the Land Question remains essentially the same under everchanging forms of social organisation. When "the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground," He so formed him that he could live only upon and from the land whence he came. It is true, now as always (as Sir William Petty long ago put it in an arresting sentence), that "Land is the mother and Labor is the father of all wealth." Many centuries earlier, the writer of one of the Hebrew "wisdom books" had, as we have already seen, proclaimed the same truth. ... Read the whole chapter.

Frederick Verinder: My Neighbor's Landmark: Short Studies in Bible Land Laws (1911) — Chapter 2: First Principles: "The Earth is The Lord's"

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.

The keynote is struck in the very first sentence of the Pentateuch. "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth," and is frequently repeated elsewhere. "The sea is His, and He made it and His hands formed the dry land." "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." "The world is Mine, and the fulness thereof." "Thus saith the Lord, The heaven is My throne, and the earth is My footstool … for all those things hath Mine hand made." God Almighty is, therefore, by right of creation, the only landlord. When the late Lord Salisbury attempted, in the House of Lords, 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.

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."

... Read the whole chapter, including footnotes

Frederick Verinder: My Neighbor's Landmark: Short Studies in Bible Land Laws (1911) — Chapter 3: The Meaning of the Landmark

§ 1. THE Hebrew history tells us that the Law was promulgated in the wilderness at a time when the Israelites had as yet no land of their own to dwell in. Their wanderings at last brought them to the borders of the land of Canaan, and within sight of the fulfilment of the promise made to the founder of their race, the Chaldæan sheikh, Abraham. But they found the country already in possession of a number of tribes — the oft-mentioned "Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, Jebusites," etc. — entrenched in their hill-fortresses. Moses was dead, having only seen the promised land from afar, from Mount Nebo. But Joshua, his appointed successor, led the nation in arms against the peoples of Canaan. The country to the east of the Jordan had, indeed, been already conquered, and allotted to the pastoral tribes of Reuben and Gad, and the "half-tribe" of Manasseh, on condition that the warriors of those tribes assisted the rest of the nation also to win its inheritance. Then followed a ruthless war of extermination against the peoples in possession. With a view to striking terror into their foes, Joshua took and burnt Jericho, utterly exterminating its inhabitants, and placing the rebuilding of the city under a ban. One after another, Canaanite strongholds were carried by assault, looted, and their inhabitants put to the sword. The Gibeonites, crafty in diplomacy, saved themselves from the general massacre by entrapping the Israelites into an alliance; but, although their lives were spared, their deceit was punished by reducing them to a servile condition. The remnant of the inhabitants, who could only be conquered gradually, were in later times "put to tribute."

§ 2. The Hebrew view of the war of conquest is well expressed by one of the later writers—

"For it was Thy will to destroy by the hands of our fathers both those old inhabitants of Thy holy land, whom Thou hatedst for doing most odious works of witchcrafts, and wicked sacrifices; and also those merciless murderers of children, and devourers of man's flesh, and the feasts of blood, with their priests out of the midst of their idolatrous crew, and the parents, that killed with their own hands souls destitute of help; that the land, which Thou esteemedst above all other, might receive a worthy colony of God's children."

§ 3. Not only the sacrifice of children, but also the degradation of both men and women, seem to have been inseparable from the obscene ritual with which the local Baals were worshipped. It is only when one realises that the sins which have linked the memory of Sodom and Gomorrah with undying infamy were part of the religious rites of the Hebrews' heretic neighbors, that it is possible to understand the savage hatred with which the Hebrew lawgivers and reformers assailed the idolatry which came so near, in their eyes, to being the unpardonable sin. It brought in its wake "red ruin and the breaking up of laws." It was more than a rival cult; it was the negation of moral and social order. There was no remedy for it but the extermination of all its professors. The Israelites conceived themselves as the instruments chosen and used by Jehovah to this end. "Conduct, character, is the one end of the Mosaic system. The heathen — the Canaanite nations especially — are punished not for false belief, but for vile actions."

But behind the mission, there always lurked the question, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? ["Who shall watch the watchers themselves?" ] The leaders of Hebrew thought had no hesitation as to the answer. It is one of the most insistent notes in Jewish literature. The Law which prescribed equal weights and measures for buying and selling between one citizen and another; which had only "one manner of law" for the home-born citizen and the alien immigrant; could not possibly fail, in a matter of such supreme importance, to apply the same law to the Israelite as to the Canaanite. If Israel polluted the land as his predecessors had done, his fate would be as theirs. The israelites may have been, at times, a little too conscious that they were "the salt of the earth." But there were always some among them who realised that "if the salt have lost his savor, it is thenceforth good for nothing but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men." The legislators, the chroniclers, the reformers and the poets of Israel tell their people, in passages far too numerous to be fully quoted or even referred to, that drought and dearth, disease and pestilence, civil war and the breaking-up of the national unity, defeat before invading enemies, and, finally, captivity and exile; the "four sore judgments" of Ezekiel — "the sword, and the famine, and the noisome beast, and the pestilence" — were God's appointed punishments for the Israelites, if they lapsed into the idolatry which was the butt of the bitterest satire of their religious and political teachers, or committed the social injustices against which the stern prohibitions of the Law and the Prophets were directed. ...

According to the Hebrew theory of land-holding, as we have seen, God was the only absolute Owner of land, while all God's children had equal rights in the use of it. "God, the King of the people, is the real proprietor of the land, and He gives it to the people only as beneficiaries." "What would now be called state-loan land, or royal-loan estates, was at that time regarded as being more directly Jehovah's estates, as hereditary land which the individual had on loan from Jehovah."

The method by which these principles were carried into practice was, of course, largely determined by the special circumstances and needs of an Eastern people, settling in a fertile land: "a good land and a large, a land flowing with milk and honey;" "a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and depths that spring out of valleys and hills; a land of wheat, and barley, and vines, and fig-trees, and pomegranates; a land of oil olive, and honey; a land wherein thou shalt eat bread without scarceness, thou shalt not back anything in it; a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills thou mayst dig brass."

The method, too, was strongly influenced by two great Hebrew conceptions: that of the family as the unit of the Nation; and that of the Nation itself as a larger family — the children of Abraham — closely bound together by a common descent and a common religion. "The land which the Lord thy God hath given thee" was not a mere façon de parler to the Hebrew; he conceived of his nation own race, "Israel," as a collectivity, almost as a personality. "When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and called My son out of Egypt." God had given the fertile land of Canaan to the whole Hebrew nation as a common heritage, in which every family of the commonwealth had equal rights.

The problem which the Mosaic Law set itself to solve was, therefore: How to secure, at least within the limits of the Hebrew Commonwealth, to each family and to every generation, the equal right to the use of "the land which the Lord their God had given them." The social organisation of the Hebrews was on such a primitive model that the problem was comparatively free from complications. They were almost entirely an agricultural and pastoral people; a republic of farmers and shepherds. After the conquest they dwelt in villages of tents: the "fenced cities" of the Canaanites which had been captured had been destroyed; many others were still in Canaanite hands: so that, in case of a Philistine or Midianite raid, the Israelites had to take refuge in caves or mountain fastnesses. ... Read the whole chapter, including footnotes

Frederick Verinder: My Neighbor's Landmark: Short Studies in Bible Land Laws (1911) — 4: The Year of Jubilee: Land and Liberty

§ 5. For once in every fifty years — which we may take roughly to represent a generation of Hebrew life — the original equal division of the land was restored. Whatever inequalities might have crept in, through the foolishness or improvidence of some, or through the selfishness or injustice of others, were redressed when, in the fiftieth year, "on the tenth day of the seventh month, in the day of atonement," the trumpet of the Jubilee sounded throughout all the land and proclaimed the national festival of Land and Liberty. "And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof; it shall be a jubilee to you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family."

139 The Book of Jubilees (second century B.C.) makes the Jubilee cycle one of forty-nine years. But according to Jos. (Antiq. iii. 12. 282), and most other authorities, it was the fiftieth year:. Ewald (Antiq., Engl. transl. of 3rd ed., pp. 374, 375) says that it included the last half of the 49th and the first half of the 50th year; and that it "naturally began with the preparatory day of the Autumn festival, after the year's harvest of every kind was complete."
140 Lev. 25:8-10. There is no definite historical record of the actual observance of the Year of jubilee. (But see Jewish Encyclopedia, x. 607, for the tradition of its observance before the captivity.) "On a close inspection nothing is more certain than that the idea of the Jubilee is the last ring of a chain which only attains in it the necessary conclusion, and that the history of the Jubilee, in spite of its at first seemingly strange aspect, was once for centuries a reality in the national life of Israel" (Ewald, Antiq. 378). "It is impossible to think that (as sometimes been supposed) the institution of the Jubillee is a mere paper-law -- a theoretical completion of the system of seven; at least as far as concerns the land (for the periodical redistribution of which there are... analogies in other nations) it must date from ancient times in Israel (Driver, Literature of the O.T., 7th ed. p. 57). Ezekiel (7:12, 13) mentions its non-observance as one of the signs that "the end is come" upon the nation for its abominable misdoings (7:2,3).

It is to be noted that the Hebrew's estate in land is always spoken of as his "possession" or his "inheritance," and never as his "ownership" or "property." Ewald seems to have expressed the distinction with exactness: —

"The existence of property is assumed by every system of legislation, even the earliest, because such a system can only follow on a long period of social development and exertion. But Jahveism assumes more than this. For, according to it, each of the tribes of Israel is to have its landed possessions, and each individual household in the tribe is to have its definite portion of the land belonging to the tribe, which is for ever to remain the inalienable heritage of this house and form the sure basis of all property."

The Hebrew did not own land. It was not "his own" to do as he liked with; "the land shall not be sold out and out;" it was only his to use, subject to the equal rights of every other Hebrew. He only enjoyed an interest in land, and, if he sold anything, he could only sell that interest. He could not sell the equal interest of his children or his children's children. The land of Canaan was, as it were, held from God on lease, by the families of Israel. At the end of every fifty years, all the leases fell in simultaneously, and God made a fresh grant of the land, for another fifty years, to all the families of His people, in equal shares as at the first. Hence the Hebrew who, voluntarily or through some compulsion, "sold his land," sold, not the ownership of the land, but the "fag-end of the lease" — till the next year of Jubilee. When the Jubilee proclamation again sounded from the sacred rams' horns, the land came back to his family, all contracts of sale to the contrary notwithstanding, and his children enjoyed the same advantage of a "fair start" as their father had had before them. ... Read the whole chapter, including footnotes

Frederick Verinder: My Neighbor's Landmark: Short Studies in Bible Land Laws (1911) —Chapter 5: Land, Labor and Learning

§ 2. In Egypt, the Israelites had suffered the bitterness of unremitting and hopeless toil. "The Egyptians made the children of Israel to serve with rigor: and they made their lives bitter with hard bondage, in mortar, and in brick, and in all manner of service in the field: all their service, wherein they made them serve, was with rigor." Moses sought to teach them the needful lesson that work and rest, each in its own time and in due proportion, were both sacred; good alike for master and servant, for man and beast. There was a danger, on the one hand, that long experience of grinding slavery might have reduced the Israelites to the wretched condition in which slum-children have sometimes been found in schools in London and New York of "not knowing how to play;" a danger, on the other hand, of a violent reaction against regular work, on the ground that all work was a form of slavery. Hence the obligation to observe the Sabbath as a weekly rest-day. It was at once a holy-day and a holiday. On it, agricultural labor and trading were specifically forbidden. But it was a feast, and not a fast; and, like all the national festivals, a time of "rejoicing" for all the members of the Hebrew household, a "delight," a day of "mirth." Its observance was secured by the strongest possible sanctions. Its benefits were extended alike to native and to foreign settler, to master and to slave, to man and to beast. The sabbatical law appealed to the religious sentiment, by connecting the weekly rest-day with the rest of God the Creator; to humanitarian sympathy; and to the traditions of the race. For here, as is so often the case in the Law, the remembrance of the deliverance from slavery is appealed to as the ground of right-doing. "Remember that thou wast a servant in the land of Egypt, and that the Lord thy God brought thee out thence through a mighty hand and by a stretched-out arm; therefore the Lord thy God commandeth thee to keep the Sabbath day." So important to the general welfare was the observance of this law considered, that the punishment for its infraction was death. ...

§ 6. To the average Englishman, who no longer keeps Saints' days, and who feverishly rushes through long railway journeys on four "Bank holidays" in the year, the idea of one year's rest in every seven from his ordinary occupations must seem an impossibly comic suggestion. And, besides, he will probably ask, what was the use of it? Let us see.

(a). The original division of the land secured to every Hebrew family the equal right of access to land. The Year of Jubilee was intended as one of the means for conserving that equal right from generation to generation. So far as it went, the Jubilee Law secured to each family in each generation the right of access, for labor use, to an approximately equal share of land.

But the Hebrew system of cultivation was very primitive. The plough was merely a big crooked stick attached to a wooden frame (I Kings 19:21), shod with a triangular piece of iron (1 Sam. 13:19-21; Isa. 2:4; Joel 3:10; Mic. 4:3). It was usually drawn by oxen, sometimes by asses, yoked together, the ploughman guiding the plough with one hand (Luke 9:62), and using the goad — an instrument like a spear and capable at need of being used as one (Judg. 3:31) — with the other.

The ploughing with such a light instrument was necessary shallow. There are but feeble traces of the systematic use of manure. The rotation of crops was almost certainly unknown. Had the Hebrew cultivator been allowed to keep on growing the same crop from year to year on the same land, without an intermission, there would always be a danger of exhausting even the fertile soil of Canaan, and of handing on to later generations a possession undiminished, indeed, in area, but of steadily decreasing productiveness. The Law therefore safeguarded the equal rights of future generations by enacting a periodical fallow. During one year in every seven, the soil, left to the influences of sun and frost, wind and rain, was to be allowed to "re-create" itself after six years' cropping, exactly as the tiller of the soil renewed his strength, after six days' work, by his Sabbath day's rest. "The seventh year thou shalt let the land rest and lie fallow." "It is a year of rest to the land."

§ 7. But, (b) while the main object of the Sabbath year was undoubtedly the protection of the land-rights of future generations, it was, by a statesman-like provision, made useful to the present generation also. It was to be a year of rest, truly, but not of idleness; a year of re-creation, not of mere cessation from work. It was only agricultural labor that was forbidden — ploughing, sowing, reaping, pruning, vintage. Other occupations were, undoubtedly, permitted, but the leisure from the ordinary work of the farm and vineyard was used, at least in part, for educational ends.

"Moses commanded them, saying, At the end of every seven years, in the solemnity of the year of release, in the feast of tabernacles, when all Israel is come to appear before the Lord thy God in the place which He shall choose, thou shalt read this law before all Israel in their hearing. Gather the people together, men and women, and children, and thy stranger that is within thy gates, that they may hear, and that they may learn, and fear the Lord your God, and observe to do all the words of this law; and that their children, which have not known anything, may hear, and learn to fear the Lord your God, as long as ye live in the land whither ye go over Jordan to possess it."

§ 8. To say that, in the seventh year, the Israelites attended a Bible class conducted by their clergy would be to use one of those dangerous phrases which completely misrepresent the facts of the case under the appearance of stating the bare, literal truth about them. It is true, of course, that the rolls of the "Laws of Moses" now form part of what we now call the Bible — the collection of ancient writings from which extracts are read in church services. The peculiar position so long assigned to these Hebrew writings in our own religion has prevented most Englishmen from realising what they meant to the Hebrews.

They were at once "sacred" and "secular." They assumed in every paragraph the existence of God; but He was a God who stood in direct, constant, and immediate relation to the life of the Nation "the God of thy fathers," "the Lord thy God which brought thee out of the house of bondage," the God who dwelt in the midst of Israel. Yet — not in spite of this, but because of it — the Hebrew writers hold, as strongly as any modern secularist, that "the affairs of this life and of this world demand, and will repay, our utmost care and attention." So completely free from any trace of "other-worldliness" is the Hebrew Torah, that a good bishop once deduced an argument in favor of the inspiration of the Pentateuch from the fact that it contains no reference to a life after death. The future life to which the Law points as the result and the reward of rightdoing is the ideal life of a free and industrious Commonwealth, in which every citizen, secure in the enjoyment of the produce of his labor, surrounded by stalwart sons and comely daughters, sits under his own vine and his own fig tree, none daring to make him afraid "in the land which the Lord thy God hath given thee."

The Law contained not only the elaborate ritual of the sacrifices and the liturgy of the Jewish religion, but the biographies of their national heroes, and the history of the Nation itself. The primitive science of the infant Commonwealth lay in it side by side with the laws of their minstrels and an outline of civil and criminal law. The same collection of documents which told them how the voice of God called upon Moses from the burning bush to organise a general strike against the Egyptian taskmasters, claimed also that the skill of the handicraftsman, no less than the wisdom of the legislator, was due to Divine inspiration. If the Law regulated with minute care the vestments of the high-priests, it was no less careful of the foods of the people. It prescribed in detail the lavish ornaments of the Tabernacle, the outward symbol of national unity, but it also told the citizen how to keep his person, his clothing, and his house clean and healthy. It insisted upon man's duty to God, but no less upon man's duty to his fellows. With a magnificent impartiality it denounced a curse upon the idolater, who rebelled against the majesty of the Most High, and upon the remover of the landmark, who invaded the equal right of his neighbor. The "statutes and judgments of Moses" were the Acts of the Parliament and the case-law of the Hebrew Commonwealth. Whole chapters in Numbers and Joshua are filled with dry lists of names, which were once full of the same kind of interest and significance to the Hebrew reader as Doomsday Book or the Census returns or Mr. Lloyd-George's Land Valuation have to students of English social history.

To the Hebrew, therefore, the study of "all the words of this Law," enjoined in every seventh year, and made possible by the just land system which the sabbatical institutions safeguarded, was, for his time and place, a liberal education. To place within the reach of the English worker, once in every seven years, a year's course at a university in science and law and literature and theology, would be something like the modern equivalent for one of the advantages which the sabbath year offered to the ancient Hebrew. Read the whole chapter, including footnotes

Frederick Verinder: My Neighbor's Landmark: Short Studies in Bible Land Laws (1911) — Chapter 6: Compensation

§ 4. The Hebrew laws applied to the special case of rights in land the spirit of those general maxims of English law which declare that no man ought to be enriched by another man's loss, or to obtain an advantage by his own wrong. To "set back" one's neighbor's landmark was a crime against God, Who had given him an equal right in the land, and against the neighbor, who was being robbed, of his just rights; a summa injuria against which the Law hurled a curse and the prophets denounced a Woe! Neither Lawgiver nor Prophet would have tolerated for a moment the notion that this invasion of a fundamental human right could only be rectified by awarding compensation to the invader. It was not in accordance with the ethical principles of Hebrew law that a man should be compensated when he ceased to profit by his own wrong at the expense of his fellow-citizen's rights. The housebreaker, the cattle-thief, the trespasser on another man's pasture, had to make, at the very least, full restitution to the man upon whom he had inflicted loss. Why should this principle cease to apply, or be actually reversed, when it was a question of depriving another of the right upon which his living and his liberty were dependent? It is only in modern England, after centuries of landlord usurpation, that such a perversion of ethical principle can be advocated. There is no trace of such a view in the O.T.

Nor in the New. We read that Zacchæus was "chief among the publicani" — a class of men who enriched themselves by unjust extortion (Luke 3:12, 13) under a vicious method of indirect taxation; "and he was rich." He came under the influence of Jesus. Then, immediately —

"Zacchæus stood, and said unto the Lord, Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor; and if have wrongfully exacted aught of any man, I restore fourfold. And Jesus said unto him, To-day is salvation come to this house" (Luke 19:1-10, R.V.).

His first Christian impulse was to make direct and generous restitution to those whom he knew he had wronged personally, and to make what general restitution he could to the unknown victims of the system by which he had unjustly become rich. Apparently it never occurred to this unsophisticated convert that "the poor" ought rather to compensate him for leaving off his profitable but wrongful exactions. ... Read the whole chapter, including footnotes

1. Land: The Hope of the Oppressed on Every Continent

At the start of the 1990s, while the Berlin Wall and the authoritarian regimes in Eastern Europe toppled, Latin American communities and clergy who were operating under the banner of liberation theology began throwing off the yoke of oppression.

The uprising of subjected peoples around the world lends immediacy to the search for genuine liberation. While many emphasize political matters, equally critical are the ethical and economic underpinnings of liberation. To ignore these will likely result in a tragic disillusionment for the people who have made the enormous sacrifices to chart new courses.

In How the Other Half Dies, Susan George wrote that "The most pressing cause of the abject poverty which millions of people in this world endure is that a mere 2.5% of landowners with more than 100 hectares control nearly three quarters of all the land in the world - with the top 0.23% controlling half." To recognize this social plague for what it is, and to avert a backlash of despair, requires a clear understanding of two great themes: the Promised Land and the Wasteland.

The Promised Land is the hope of the landless, literally, land, the gateway to opportunity. Abraham in Mesopotamia and the Israelites in bondage in Egypt so wished for their own land that they left homes and familiar surroundings and risked death to seek the distant place God had promised, a land rich in milk and honey, where a day's labor would put food on the table and allow their children to grow into adulthood. This exodus pattern has been repeated over and over, from the migrations of prehistory to the boat people of our day. For centuries, immigrants have poured into the Americas, looking for the inheritance denied to them in the Old World — their portion of land.

But the Promised Land is not so much a geographic place as it is a hope and a vision of a just social order. Modern society has many wondrous features, but it certainly is not the Promised Land in its full glory. Indeed, we are "modern captives" who sense the Promised Land as a primitive instinct, as a deep longing, and as a cry from the depths of our captivity that the world should be different.

All of us, no less than the Hebrews in Egypt, are captives of structures imposed upon us. To enslave people, today as three thousand years ago, is to rob them of the value of their labor. Millions of working people living in severe poverty are robbed of the fruits of their labor. Through various forms of exploitation, especially the monopolization of land rights, large segments of humanity are oppressed, dehumanized, held in bondage. One factor enabling governments to legalize land theft and lend respectability to exploitative landlordism is the general silence of religious and intellectual leaders about humanity's common rights to land.

We begin to penetrate and overcome this silence when we realize that the Wasteland is wasted land, unfulfilled potential, producing no "milk and honey." Speculators in both urban and rural areas hoard land on which the hungry, the homeless, and the jobless could feed, shelter, and employ themselves. Keeping valuable lands idle causes artificial shortages that drive up rents which poor people must pay for poor land. Land hoarding deserves much of the blame for creating the Wasteland: it forces people into the "desert." There, people find the oases controlled by more land monopolists who must be paid a ransom for access to nature's life-sustaining water. And as we will see, the primary focus of Biblical economic laws was the prevention of precisely this sort of usurpation of God's gifts to all creatures.

The midbar, the biblical Wasteland, is only part desert. It has towns and pastures, but it lacks the "fullness of life." This anomaly is mirrored in the modern Wasteland, crowded with factories, skyscrapers and mansions — along with ugly blight and squalid slums.

The point of departure of liberation theology is the recognition of the awful fact that millions lead subhuman lives. The rural landless seek refuge in cities, often becoming squatters in barrios or favelas with open sewage and no safe water supply. They may earn fifteen dollars a month if they find work at all. Children live in the streets and go to bed hungry. Illness and drought, and even complaining of their lot, may lead to premature death. And they can see the Mercedes behind the iron gates of walled mansions. (Ironically, mercedes is also a Spanish legal term denoting title to a large grant of land.) Like poor Lazarus in the parable of Jesus (Luke 16:19-31), they survive on the crumbs that fall from the rich man's table. When judgement comes to the rich man, he receives no mercy because he had shown none. ... Read the whole synopsis

Henry George: Moses — Apostle of Freedom (1878 speech, San Francisco)

Egypt was the mould of the Hebrew nation – the matrix, so to speak, in which a single family, or, at most, a small tribe grew to a people as numerous as the American people at the time of the Declaration of Independence. For four centuries, according to the Hebrew tradition – that is to say, for a period longer than America has been known to Europe – this growing people, becoming a patriarchal family from a roving, pastoral life, had been under the dominance of a highly developed and ancient civilisation, whose fixity is symbolised by monuments that rival in endurance the everlasting hills – a civilisation so ancient that the pyramids, as we now know, were hoary with centuries ere Abraham looked upon them.

No matter how clearly the descendants of the kinsfolk, who came into Egypt, at the invitation of the boy-slave become prime minister, maintained the distinction of race and the traditions of a freer life, they must have been powerfully affected by such a civilisation; and just as the Hebrews of today are Polish in Poland, German in Germany, and American in the United States, so, but far more clearly and strongly, the Hebrews of the Exodus must have been essentially Egyptian.

It is not remarkable, therefore, that the ancient Hebrew institutions show in so many points the influence of Egyptian ideas and customs. What is remarkable is the dissimilarity. To the unreflecting nothing may seem more natural than that a people, in turning their backs upon a land where they had been long oppressed, should discard its ideas and institutions. But the student of history, the observer of politics, knows that nothing is more unnatural. Habits of thought are even more tyrannous than habits of the body. They make for the masses of people a mental atmosphere out of which they can no more rise than out of the physical atmosphere. A people long used to despotism may rebel against a tyrant; they may break his statutes and repeal his laws, cover with odium that which he loved, and honour that which he hated; but they will hasten to set up another tyrant in his place. A people used to superstition may embrace a purer faith, but it will be only to degrade it to their old ideas. A people used to persecution may flee from it, but only to persecute in their turn when they get power.

For "institutions make men." And when amid a people used to institutions of one kind, we see suddenly arise institutions of an opposite kind, we know that behind them must be that active, that initiative force – the "men who in the beginnings make institutions."

This is what occurs in the Exodus. The striking differences between Egyptian and Hebrew polity are not of form, but of essence. The tendency of the one is to subordination and oppression; of the other to individual freedom. Strangest of recorded births! From out of the strongest and most splendid despotism of antiquity comes the freest republic. From between the paws of the rock-hewn Sphinx rises the genius of human liberty, and the trumpets of the Exodus throb with the defiant proclamation of the rights of humanity.

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The outlines that the record gives us of the character of Moses – the brief relations that wherever the Hebrew scriptures are read have hung the chambers of the imagination with vivid pictures – are in every way consistent with this idea. What we know of the life illustrates what we know of the work. What we know of the work illumines the life.

It was not an empire such as had reached full development in Egypt, or existed in rudimentary patriarchal form in the tribes around, that Moses aimed to found. Nor was it a republic where the freedom of the citizen rested on the servitude of the helot, and the individual was sacrificed to the state.

It was a commonwealth based upon the individual – a commonwealth whose ideal it was that every man should sit under his own vine and fig tree, with none to vex him or make him afraid. It was a commonwealth: in which none should be condemned to ceaseless toil; in which, for even the bond slave, there should be hope; and in which, for even the beast of burden, there should be rest. A commonwealth in which, in the absence of deep poverty, the many virtues that spring from personal independence should harden into a national character – a commonwealth in which the family affections might knit their tendrils around each member, binding with links stronger than steel the various parts into the living whole.

It is not the protection of property, but the protection of humanity, that is the aim of the Mosaic code. Its sanctions are not directed to securing the strong in heaping up wealth as much as to preventing the weak from being crowded to the wall. At every point it interposes its barriers to the selfish greed that, if left unchecked, will surely differentiate men into landlord and serf, capitalist and working person, millionaire and tramp, ruler and ruled. Its Sabbath day and Sabbath year secure, even to the lowliest, rest and leisure. With the blast of the Jubilee trumpets the slave goes free, the debt that cannot be paid is cancelled, and a re-division of the land secures again to the poorest their fair share in the bounty of the common Creator. The reaper must leave something for the gleaner; even the ox cannot be muzzled as he treadeth out the corn. Everywhere, in everything, the dominant idea is that of our homely phrase: "Live and let live!"

And the religion with which this civil policy is so closely intertwined exhibits kindred features – from the idea of the "brotherhood of man" springs the idea of the fatherhood of God. Though the forms may resemble those of Egypt, the spirit is that which Egypt had lost. Though a hereditary priesthood is retained, the law in its fullness is announced to all the people. Though the Egyptian rite of circumcision is preserved, and Egyptian symbols reappear in all the externals of worship, the tendency to take the type for the reality is sternly repressed. It is only when we think of the bulls and the hawks, of the deified cats, and sacred ichneumons of Egypt, that we realise the full meaning of the command: "Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image!"

And if we seek beneath form and symbol and command, the thought of which they are but the expression, we find that the great distinctive feature of the Hebrew religion, that which separates it by such a wide gulf from the religions amid which it grew up, is its utilitarianism, its recognition of divine law in human life. It asserts, not a God whose domain is confined to the far off beginning or the vague future, who is over and above and beyond humanity, but a God who in His inexorable laws is here and now; a God of the living as well as of the dead; a God of the market place as well as of the temple; a God whose judgments wait not another world for execution, but whose immutable decrees will, in this life, give happiness to the people that heed them and bring misery upon the people that forget them. Amid the forms of splendid degradation in which a once noble religion had in Egypt sunk to petrification, amid a social order in which the divine justice seemed to sleep – I AM was the truth that dawned upon Moses. And in his desert contemplation of nature’s flux and reflux, the death that bounds her life, the life she brings from death, always consuming yet never consumed – I AM was the message that fell upon his inner ear.

The absence in the Mosaic books of any reference to a future life is only intelligible by the prominence into which this truth is brought. Nothing could have been more familiar to the Hebrews of the Exodus than the doctrine of immortality. The continued existence of the soul, the judgment after death, the rewards and punishments of the future state, were the constant subjects of Egyptian thought and art. But a truth may be hidden or thrown into the background by the intensity with which another truth is grasped. ...

Trace to its roots the cause that is producing want in the midst of plenty, ignorance in the midst of intelligence, aristocracy in democracy, weakness in strength – that is giving to our civilisation a one-sided and unstable development – and you will find it something which this Hebrew statesman three thousand years ago perceived and guarded against.

Moses saw that the real cause of the enslavement of the masses of Egypt was – what has everywhere produced enslavement – the possession by a class of land upon which and from which the whole people must live. He saw that to permit in land the same unqualified private ownership that by natural right attaches to the things produced by labour, would be inevitably to separate the people into the very rich and the very poor, inevitably to enslave labour – to make the few the masters of the many, no matter what the political forms, to bring vice and degradation no matter what the religion.

And with the foresight of the philosophic statesman who legislates not for the need of a day, but for all the future, he sought, in ways suited to his times and conditions, to guard against this error.

Everywhere in the Mosaic institutions is the land treated as the gift of the Creator to His common creatures, which no one has the right to monopolise. Everywhere it is, not your estate, or your property, not the land which you bought, or the land which you conquered, but "the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee" – "the land which the Lord lendeth thee". And by practical legislation, by regulations to which he gave the highest sanctions, he tried to guard against the wrong that converted ancient civilisations into despotisms – the wrong that in after centuries ate out the heart of Rome, that produced the imbruting serfdom of Poland and the gaunt misery of Ireland, the wrong that is today filling American cities with idle men, and our virgin states with tramps.

He not only provided for a redistribution of the land among the people, and for making it fallow and common every seventh year, but by the institution of the Jubilee he provided for a redistribution of the land every fifty years, and made monopoly impossible.

I do not say that these institutions were, for their ultimate purpose, the best that might even then have been devised; but Moses had to work, as all great constructive statesmen have to work, with the tools that came to his hand, and upon materials as he found them. Still less do I mean to say that forms suitable for that time and people are suitable for every time and people. I ask, not veneration of the form, but recognition of the spirit.

Yet how common it is to venerate the form and to deny the spirit. There are many who believe that the Mosaic institutions were literally dictated by the Almighty, yet who would denounce as irreligious any application of their spirit to the present day. And yet today how much we owe to these institutions! This very day the only thing that stands between our working classes and ceaseless toil is one of these Mosaic institutions. ... Read the whole speech