Dividing the Land

At one time, re-dividing the land every fifty years was a very manageable way to maintain equality among all members of society, and it led to the first major middle-class society, with little or no poverty. How might we go about achieving the same thing today? There is a school of thought which says that it can be achieved through a particular tax reform.

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

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. ...

What the Israelites required, therefore, in order to embody in practice the general principle that God had given them equal rights to the use of the earth, was that the Law should secure them the right of equal access to the land of Canaan for the purpose of exercising their labor upon it. The land belonged in usufruct (subject to the sovereign rights of the unseen King) to the whole Nation; every family in the Commonwealth had equal rights in it. The natural and easy way for giving effect to those equal rights, under the circumstances of their time and place, was by an equal division of the land itself among all the families of Israel.

The process by which the division was to be carried out was prescribed beforehand by Moses. A census of the people, by tribes and families, was taken in the plains of Moab on the south-eastern border of the promised land. A body of representative men, specially selected — not unlike what we should now call a Royal Commission — was charged with the duty of dividing the land. It consisted of one representative from each tribe under the presidency of Joshua ben Nun and Eleazar the Priest. To secure fairness of division as between the tribes, the final apportionment was to be by lot. Every tribe, and every family in each tribe (Levi only excepted), had its proportionate share of the common heritage. "To many thou shalt give the more inheritance, and to few thou shalt give the less inheritance; to every one [of the tribal chiefs] shall his inheritance be given according to those that were numbered of him." Even in those early times, we find, in connection with the division of the land, a remarkable recognition of women's rights.

The records of the actual division in accordance with these "commandments and judgments of Moses" are to be found in the Book of Joshua. A commission of survey was appointed (three men from each tribe); a report was drawn up; and "Eleazar the priest, and Joshua the son of Nun, and the heads of the fathers of the tribes of the children of Israel divided [the land] for an inheritance by lot in Shiloh before the Lord, at the door of the tabernacle of the congregation. So they made an end of dividing the country."

§ 7. Josephus tells us that the land was not divided into equal areas, but according to its value for agricultural purposes; though whether he was preserving an ancient tradition or merely putting a probable gloss upon the existing record is not easy to determine. However, the passage is worth transcribing —

"So [Joshua] sent men to measure their country, and sent with them some geometricians, who could not easily fail of knowing the truth, on account of their skill in that art. He also gave them a charge to estimate the measure of that part of the land that was most fruitful, and what was not so good; for such is the nature of the land of Canaan, that one may see large plains, and such as are exceeding fit to produce fruit, which yet, if they were compared to other parts of the country, might be reckoned exceeding fruitful, yet if they be compared with the fields about Jericho, and to those that belong to Jerusalem, will appear to be of no account at all. And although it so falls out, that these people have but a very little of this sort of land, and that it is for the main mountainous also, yet does it not come behind other parts, on account of its exceeding goodness and beauty: for which reason Joshua thought the land for the tribes should be divided by estimation of its goodness, rather than the largeness of its measure, it often happening that one acre of some sort of land was equivalent to a thousand other acres"

§ 8. The boundaries of the family allotments were carefully marked, and the sanctity of those "landmarks" — the outward and visible signs of the equal right to the use of the earth — as protected by the public and solemn denunciation of a curse against him who should dishonestly tamper with them. The whole Nation was convened in solemn assembly on Mounts Gerizim and Ebal. To adopt the language of the modern newspaper, the Levites proposed to this mass meeting a series of resolutions, to which the people gave them unanimous assent. Those resolutions classed the removal of the landmark — the infringement of the equal right of access to land — with these social sins which bring a curse upon the Nation; with the sins which break up families, which reduce men to the level of the brute; with idolatry, adultery, and incest; with the perversion of justice, and treacherous murder, and the crime of the hired assassin. For, to the Hebrew, the landmark was a sacred symbol. But it was not the symbol of private "property" in land.

111 LANDMARK.-- An object such as a stone, a heap of stones, or a tree with a mark on its bark, intended to mark the limit of a field, a farm, or the property of an individual. In Palestine, these landmarks are scrupulously respected; and in passing along a road or pathway one may observe from time to time a stone placed by the edge of the field from which a shallow furrow has been ploughed, marking the limits of cultivation of neighboring proprietors. . . . In Egypt, the land had to be remeasured and allotted after each inundation of the Nile, and boundary-stones placed at the 'junction 'of two properties. A collection of such objects is to be seen in the Assyrian Room, British Museum." --Prof. Edwd. Hull in Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible, iii. 24. ...

"Selfishness," says a modern writer, referring to a similar but shorter passage in Isa. v. 8-10, "is the great sin in all ages and peoples. As soon as national institutions have awakened the sense of personality and the feeling of self-respect, the desire of accumulating wealth grows with them. And in no form is it more liable to abuse than in connection with possession of land. Men desire, by an almost universal instinct, to possess property in land. … Yet, since the land cannot be increased in quantity, its possession by one man is the exclusion of another, and the Hebrew laws endeavor to meet this difficulty by special provisions, the breach or evasion of which the prophet now denounces in His first 'woe' on the selfish landowner. He who can join house to house, and lay field to field, when he knows, and long has known, face to face, the very man, wife and child whom he has dispossessed, and can drive out by his own simple act his fellow-men to be desolate in their poverty, in order that he may be alone in his riches, may expect a punishment proportioned to his crime. Such men were the nobles of Judah and Israel throughout the land; and the prophet heard ringing in his ears, the declaration of Jehovah, the King of the land, that the great and fair palaces should become as desolate as the peasants' and yeomen's cottages which had made place for them: — the vineyard of ten acres shall yield but eight gallons of wine, and the cornfield shall give back but a tenth part of the seed sown in it." ... 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

§ 1. The equal division of the land gave to every family in the Commonwealth of Israel direct access to the soil. There was little room for the growth of involuntary poverty in a community whose Law did not permit the divorce of land from labor. "He that tilleth his land shall have plenty of bread," "shall be satisfied with bread." It is very significant that while Moses (no doubt "for the hardness of their hearts," Mark 10:5) did permit to the Hebrews a certain form of chattel-slavery — then probably universal among Eastern nations — though hedging it about with unusually stringent limitations, yet he prohibited absolutely that more insidious form of slavery, landlordism, which reduces men to subjection by monopolising the natural elements necessary to their existence. "The bread of the needy is their life: he that defraudeth him thereof is a man of blood. He that taketh away his neighbor's living slayeth him; and he that defraudeth the laborer of his hire is a bloodshedder."

§ 2. So far, then, as the first settlers in the land of Canaan were concerned, they all had a fair start. Wage slavery and undeserved poverty were unknown. The legislator was able to contemplate the possibility of an ideal state of society "when there shall be no poor among you; for the Lord shall greatly bless thee in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee for an inheritance to possess it"; but "only if thou carefully hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God, to observe to do all these commandments which I command thee this day." So long as the Law was kept, no Hebrew need toil for sweated wages for a brother Hebrew. By his own labor, under the Law which secured to him the equal right to the use of the earth, he could produce all that he needed, without being beholden to or controlled by any one else. Under such a Law, the worker's wages consisted of the whole of his product. He was not compelled to share what he produced either with a landlord or with an exploiter of labor. "Whoso keepeth the fig tree shall eat the fruit thereof?" "They shall build houses and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and eat the fruit of them. They shall not build, and another inhabit; they shall not plant, and another eat; for as the days of a tree are the days of My people, and Mine elect shall long enjoy the work of their hands. They shall not labor in vain, nor bring forth for trouble." "The husbandman that laboreth must be the first to partake of the fruits." "Who planteth a vineyard, and eateth not of the fruit thereof? or who feedeth a flock, and eateth not of the milk of the flock? . . For it is written in the Law of Moses, Thou shalt not muzzle the mouth of the ox that treadeth out the corn. Doth God take care for oxen? Or saith He it altogether for our sakes? For our sakes, no doubt, this is written that he that ploweth the land plow in hope; and that he that thresheth in hope should be partaker of his hope." ...

§ 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

§ 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."... Read the whole chapter, including footnotes

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

§ 1. ONE tribe out of all the tribes of Israel was set aside for the performance of important public functions. According to the Theocratic constitution of the Hebrew Commonwealth, the men of the tribe of Levi formed the Civil Service of the unseen King of Israel. In order to set them free for the performance of their duties, they were exempted from service in the citizen army, in which all the capable males of all the other tribes were liable to serve "from twenty years old and upwards, all that are able to go forth to war in Israel."

They were the servants of the Lord, and therefore of the Lord's people. Their duties are set forth with great minuteness. They chiefly centered round the one great public building of the nation, the dwelling-place of the Most High, the seat of the national worship, the symbol of the national unity, the central place of assembly for the people.

The Levites were solemnly set apart for their work, to which the prime of their lives was devoted. Their term of full service was from thirty to fifty years of age, apparently after a training of five years; and, when their time had expired, lighter duties were found for them. They were also the official preachers of the Law, and the custodians of the official copy of it. Those members of the tribe of Levi who claimed descent from Aaron formed, within the tribe, a special order with special functions — the priests. They were not only the national clergy — sacrificing, absolving, and blessing — but also the teachers of religion and law, administrators of justice, the medical officers of health and sanitary inspectors, charged with the duties of inspecting, isolating, and (after recovery) disinfecting persons suffering from certain contagious diseases, of disinfecting unclean garments and bedding, of inspecting, cleansing, or, if need be, demolishing infected dwellings; and so on. This mixture of "sacred" and "secular" functions is characteristic of a theory of government which, recognising no king but God, could draw no hard-and-fast line between the service of God and the service of humanity.

§ 2. If the Levites were to give their whole time and attention to the important public duties which have been hinted at above, it was clearly necessary that they should be set free from the necessity of earning their livelihood by ordinary agricultural labor, and that some other provision must be made for them. In order, therefore, that the ministrations of religion and the means of instruction might be brought within the reach of all the citizens, the Levites were provided with residences in forty-eight cities, assigned specially to them "with the suburbs thereof" — a certain amount of surrounding meadow-land for the pasturage of their cattle. These cities were to be taken in fair proportion from all the tribes. Thirteen of them were allotted to the priests. Six were appointed as "cities of refuge," to which "the slayer that killeth unawares and unwittingly" might flee in order to escape lynching and to secure a fair trial.

But it is plain that the provision of an official residence fell far short of what the Levite would have received had he been born into any other tribe. For the Levites had no part in the division of the land, although they obviously had the same "right to the use of the earth" as the other tribes. The families of eleven tribes divided among them land in which the families of twelve tribes had rights to equal shares. The excluded tribe was clearly entitled to compensation for the loss of rights of which, for reasons of public policy, it had been deprived. This compensation was given by means of the tithe. The tribes who had divided among themselves the Levites' share of the land, as well as their own, paid to the Levites one-tenth of the produce of the land, and the Levites in their turn, paid one-tenth of this tithe — "a tithe of the tithe" — to the Aaronic priesthood. ... Read the whole chapter, including footnotes

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

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!"

 

...

Yet the great concern of Moses was with the duty that lay plainly before him; the effort to lay the foundations of a social state in which deep poverty and degrading want should be unknown – where people released from the meaner struggles that waste human energy should have opportunity for intellectual and moral development.

Here stands out the greatness of the man. What was the wisdom and stretch of the forethought that in the desert sought to guard in advance against the dangers of a settled state, let the present speak!

In the full blaze of the nineteenth century, when every child in our schools may know as common truths things of which the Egyptian sages never dreamed; when the earth has been mapped and the stars have been weighed; when steam and electricity have been pressed into our service, and science is wresting from nature secret after secret – it is but natural to look back upon the wisdom of three thousand years ago as an adult looks back upon the learning of a child.

And yet, for all this wonderful increase of knowledge, for all this enormous gain of productive power, where is the country in the civilised world in which today there is not want and suffering – where the masses are not condemned to toil that gives no leisure, and all classes are not pursued by a greed of gain that makes life an ignoble struggle to get and to keep? Three thousands years of advances, and still the moan goes up: "They have made our lives bitter with hard bondage, in mortar and in brick, and in all manner of service!" Three thousand years of advances! and the piteous voices of little children are in the moan.

Standing as I stand, where modern ideas have had fullest, freest development; in the newest great city of the newest great nation; by the side of that ultimate sea, where ends the westward march of the race that has circled the globe, and farthest west meets east, the cool shades and sweet waters whose promise has so long lured us on seem dissolving into mocking mirage.

Over ocean wastes far wider than the Syrian desert we have sought our promised land – no narrow strip between the mountains and the sea, but a wide and virgin continent. Here, in greater freedom, with vaster knowledge and fuller experience, we are building up a nation that leads the van of modern progress. And yet while we prate of the rights of humanity there are already many among us thousands who find it difficult to assert the first of natural rights – the right to earn an honest living; thousands who from time to time must accept of degrading charity or starve.

We boast of equality before the law; yet notoriously justice is deaf to the call of those who have no gold and blind to the sin of those who have.

We pride ourselves upon our common schools; yet after our boys and girls are educated we vainly ask: "What shall we do with them?" And about our colleges children are growing up in vice and crime, because from their homes poverty has driven all refining influences. We pin our faith to universal suffrage; yet with all power in the hands of the people, the control of public affairs is passing into the hands of a class of professional politicians, and our governments are, in many cases, becoming but a means for robbery of the people.

We have prohibited hereditary distinctions, we have forbidden titles of nobility; yet there is growing up an aristocracy of wealth as powerful and merciless as any that ever held sway.

We progress and we progress; we girdle continents with iron roads and knit cities together with the mesh of telegraph wires; each day brings some new invention, each year marks a fresh advance – the power of production increased, and the avenues of exchange cleared and broadened. Yet the complaint of "hard times" is louder and louder; everywhere are people harassed by care, and haunted by the fear of want. With swift, steady strides and prodigious leaps, the power of human hands to satisfy human wants advances and advances, is multiplied and multiplied. Yet the struggle for mere existence is more and more intense, and human labour is becoming the cheapest of commodities. Beside glutted warehouses human beings grow faint with hunger and shiver with cold; under the shadow of churches festers the vice that is born of want.

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. ... Read the whole speech