Landmarks and Boundaries

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

IT is still, I believe, a popular superstition that, on the first day of Lent in each year, the Church of England invites her children to meet in their parish churches for the purpose of "cursing their neighbors." No one who is familiar with the Commination Service will need to be reminded that this is neither an accurate nor an adequate description of the "godly discipline of the Primitive Church," so far as it is somewhat mildly reflected in the special service appointed for the beginning of the season of spiritual spring-cleaning. The cheap and easy exercise of confessing other folk's sins comes too naturally to the ordinary man to need a special day to be set apart for it; he does it most days without the stimulus of a solemn exhortation.

What we are invited to do on Ash Wednesday is (not to utter a string of imprecations upon other "miserable sinners," who are not present to hear them; but) to note, for our own warning and betterment, a number of facts. The formula is not "cursed be," but "cursed is." We are asked to give our solemn assent to the proposition that there are certain offenses against morals that, in the very nature of things, carry with them a curse. The offenses which are specified are nearly all social sins — sins, which break up the sacred family life; sins, which destroy confidence between man and man; sins, which poison the fountain of justice; sins of taking a mean advantage of one's fellows; sins, which deny fundamental rights. The avowed purpose of the service which strikes the keynote of the Church's Lenten discipline is, that, being admonished by this terrible recital, we may "flee from such vices, for which we affirm with our own mouths the curse of God to be due."

Sermons and addresses on social subjects have, therefore, rightly had a notable prominence among Lenten observances for several years past. No such demonstration in favor of Social Reform has been seen in our time as would take place if, on any Ash Wednesday, all the people in every English parish should meet, and understandingly and unfeignedly give their assent to the series of "resolutions" which their parish priests are instructed to move in the parish assembly, and for which the people are asked to "vote" by saying, not "Aye," but "Amen."

In the very forefront of the catalogue of sins that bring a curse — in the same dreadful list as the "unmerciful, fornicators, and adulterers, covetous persons, idolaters, slanderers, drunkards, and extortioners" — stands this —

"Cursed is he that removeth his neighbor's landmark.
And the people shall answer and say, Amen."

... Read the whole chapter.

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.

Eighteen centuries earlier than Sir E. Strachey, another writer, a Jew, paraphrasing and annotating the Law of his Nation for the benefit of the Greeks, had thus summed up the matter —

"Let it not be esteemed lawful to remove boundaries, neither our own, nor of those with whom we are at peace. Have a care you do not take those landmarks away, which are, as it were, a divine and unshaken limitation of rights made by God Himself, to last for ever, since this going beyond limits, and gaining ground upon others, is the occasion of wars and seditions; for those that remove boundaries are not far off an attempt to subvert the laws."

...

It is plain that the method adopted in the Commonwealth of Israel for the practical assertion of the equal right to the use of the earth, however good for the time and place, could not possibly be followed in a modern State, with its complicated social organisation and its varied agricultural, mining, manufacturing and trading interests. But "God fulfils Himself in many ways," and it is quite possible to hold that the Mosaic Land Laws were absolutely right in principle, and also right in method for their own time; without holding it either necessary or desirable to graft the details of early Hebrew legislation on a later and alien Western civilisation. Just as we have long learnt to worship God without filling our churches with the reek of burning bullocks, so, in these latter days, we are learning how to make equal rights in land a reality without an equal division of the land itself. Although such a division is one of the possible ways of asserting the doctrine of equal rights, it ceases to be a convenient or even a just way as soon as civilisation passes beyond the pastoral and agricultural stage.

As we shall see later, the special position of the tribe of Levi in the Hebrew State led to the introduction, in their case, of a modification which directly suggests the method of modern Land Reform. Fortunately it is not even difficult to assert an equal and common right without physical division. If a father gives his children a cake, they naturally assert their equal rights by cutting it up into equal shares. But if he gives them a pony, they divide, not the pony, but the use of it. If he leaves them a house in equal shares, they may either share the occupancy of the house equally, or occupy the house unequally, according to the need of each for house-room, paying the rental into a common fund, from which each draws an equal share; or they may let the whole house to some one else and equally divide the rent.

A proposal to divide a railway — permanent way, buildings and rolling-stock — among the shareholders would meet with scanty favor at a shareholders' meeting: They know well that they divide the railway best by dividing its earnings in the form of dividend. So with the land. It is still true that all men have equal rights in land; it is the joint-stock property of the whole people; every citizen has one share in it. It is no longer true that all men require to use land in equal portions, and more than that every railway-shareholder travels an equal number of train-miles.

It is not true that equal portions of land, even if the land were so divided, are even approximately of equal value. Today when we measure land rather by value than by area, and then only a comparatively small percentage of the people is directly engaged in tilling the soil, the natural and easy and inevitable way of asserting our equal rights in the common heritage is to divide the value of the land (i.e. "economic rent"), by having it paid into a common fund, and by applying it to the common uses in which all can share. "The profit of the earth is for all," and it expresses itself in land value.

Sutherland clearances and Glenbeigh evictions are modern survivals of the primitive, brutal methods of a land-mark remover who does his business inartistically. These methods have become unpopular, because they allow the character and the results of the transaction to be seen in all their native horror, and because they have the damning defect of being not only brutal, but — unnecessary. The exact modern equivalent of the sin of "setting-back" one's neighbors' landmarks is a more subtle and therefore a more dangerous, because a less disgusting, thing. It is the private appropriation of the land value which the community creates. It is a sin which brings a brood of curses, both upon him who gains, and upon those who lose. It is a sin of which all of us, and not merely the landlords, need to be called upon to repent. For in a democratically governed country, with a wide (though not yet nearly wide enough) franchise, when wrong is done by law, the people who made the law, or who, having the power, neglect to repeal it, are as much responsible for the wrong done, as are those who profit by the law while it stands.

A large and increasing body of students of social questions are urging that the true key to Social Reform, the surest and safest foundation for Social Justice, lies in the application of the principles of the Old Testament to the modern Land Question, by the method advocated by Henry George; and that, under modern conditions, the first step towards reasserting the ancient and eternal truths which informed the Mosaic Land Laws must be the Taxation of Land Values. ... 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

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

B. The Effects of Land Monopoly

The denial of equal rights in land drives drives men to the least productive soil — produces poverty — hunger in the midst of plenty — homelessness — misery in overcrowded cities — crime — and black despair.

"There are that remove the landmarks;
They violently take away flocks and feed them.
They drive away the ass of the fatherless,
They take the widow's ox for a pledge.
They turn the needy out of the way:
The poor of the earth hide themselves together.
Behold, as wild asses in the desert
They go forth to their work, seeking diligently for meat;
The wilderness yieldeth them food for their children.
They cut their provender in the field;
And they glean the vintage of the wicked.
They lie all night naked without clothing,
And have no covering in the cold.
They are wet with the showers of the mountains,
And embrace the rock for want of a shelter.
There are that pluck the fatherless from the breast,
And [R.V.m.] take in pledge that which is on the poor:
So that they go about naked without clothing,
And being an-hungred they carry the sheaves;
They make oil within the walls of these men;
They tread their wine-presses, and suffer thirst.
From out of the populous city men groan,
And the soul of the wounded crieth out:
Yet God imputeth it not for folly.
These are of them that rebel against the light
They know not the ways thereof.
Nor abide in the paths thereof.
The murderer riseth with the light, he killeth the poor and needy;
And in the night he is as a thief.
The eye also of the adulterer waiteth for the twilight,
Saying, No eye shall see me:
And he disguiseth his face.
In the dark they dig through houses:
[R.V.m.] Which they had marked for themselves in the daytime;
They know not the light.
For the morning is to all of them as the shadow of death;
For they know the terrors of the shadow of death.
(Job 24:2-17 [RV.]). ... Read the whole appendix, including footnotes

9. Claiming the Promised Land: A New Jubilee for a New World

In the book of Joshua, we find that although the Promised Land is a gift from God, it is a gift that has to be claimed. Even before the actual conquest of the Promised Land, the Mosaic Law prescribed a method whereby possession of land was to be rendered pleasing in God's sight. The Canaanites' claim was forfeited by their idolatry, with human sacrifice and temple prostitution, and by their exploitive, monopolistic social order. By contrast, Israel, to make good its claim, had to institute a social order that would guard against the desecration, pollution, and injustices of which its predecessors were guilty, and would secure to each family and to every generation within the Hebrew commonwealth the equal right to the use of the land, of which the Lord was recognized as the sole absolute owner.

They began with a census of the tribes and families before the conquest (Num. 26:1-51). Every tribe, excepting Levi, and within each tribe every family, was to receive its proportionate share, according to size (Num. 26:55-56), and ultimately, to ensure fairness, by lot (Num. 34:16-29). The actual distribution, according to these provisions, was concluded at Shiloh (Josh. 19:51). According to ancient historian Josephus, the territory was not divided into shares of equal size but of equal agricultural value. The landmarks that protected these allotments were protected by the public and solemn denunciation of a curse against anyone who should dishonestly tamper with them (Deut. 27:11-16; 19:14).

As discovered again in our own century, it is easier to devise a one-time fair apportionment of land that it is to keep the system from falling apart. This is why the ancient law established the Jubilee year. At the end of every fifty years, any alienated lands — given away, sold, or lost from unpaid debts — would be restored to the original families. Temporary possessors were to be compensated for any unexhausted improvements they may have made on the land. Concentrated landownership, and the division of society into landed and landless classes, was thereby prevented from creeping into the system. The Jubilee effectively took the profit out of landholding as such, leaving no incentive for speculation. When it was observed — and historical records indicate that it was observed for long periods — the Jubilee system successfully removed the root cause of poverty from the Jewish society.

The influence of the Jubilee idea upon early Pennsylvania colonists is evidenced by the inscription on the Liberty Bell of the biblical words enjoining the Jubilee year: "Proclaim Liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof." (Lev. 25:10) The founder of Pennsylvania, William Penn, advocated that all men be "tenants to the public", and to defray public expenses instituted a tax on land.

Environmental concern also goes back to biblical land laws. To prevent the exhaustion of the soil, a periodic fallow was ordered. "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."

As noted, the tribe of Levi did not share in the equal division of the land, since it was charged with carrying out religious and public duties. Its members were entitled to an indemnity from the eleven tribes who received the land that otherwise would have gone to them. This indemnity was the tithe — one-tenth of the product from the land occupied by the eleven other tribes.

Here, in principle, is the formula for a just land system in almost any time or place. The compensation to the Levites maintained the substance of equal rights to land, alongside of and compatible with unequal physical division of the land itself. As Frederick Verinder pointed out in his book My Neighbour's Landmark, joint heirs of a house may share it equally by occupying it equally or unequally but "paying the rental into a common fund, from which each draws an equal share; or they may let the whole house to someone else and divide the rent equally." So it is with land. Sharing equally in the economic rent or value of land through the application of that value to common uses from which all benefit, renders private ownership and unequal partition of land morally and pragmatically benign.

The modern equivalent of removing one's neighbor's landmark is thus not the private ownership of land per se, but rather the private appropriation of land value. "The profit of the earth is for all" (Eccles. 5:9). The Old Testament ethic, to assure everyone the same natural opportunity, asserts that all people have an equal right to economic rent, and the Levite tithe demonstrates that the socialization of rent offsets the ethical and practical harm resulting from private land ownership. But there is another basis for its advocacy: Rent should be taken by society because it is a social product. Rent arises in large measure from two societal phenomena: the mere presence of population, and community activity in a particular area. More people means more demand for space on which to live and work. Community activities such as roads, schools, protection, parks, sewage, utilities and other public services, as well as the totality of private commercial and cultural operations, all make land more productive or desirable. It follows that a community which funds such improvements out of its rent fund will be provided with a stable and growing fund with which to maintain and improve them. And unlike conventional taxes, the collection of this fund will enhance, not penalize, the production of wealth.

Individuals, in their bare capacity as landowners, do nothing to produce land value. By withholding sites from use, whether for speculation or for other reasons, they may generate scarcity, artificially inflating rent, but this does not reflect any positive contribution to production on the part of landowners.

While land value is not the only type of unearned increment, unearned income resulting from such advantages as talent, genes or luck is not at the expense of others. Even Karl Marx admitted: "The monopoly of property in land is even the basis of the monopoly of capital." Marx could have — but did not — champion the abolition of land monopoly; instead he advocated its transfer from private into state hands. It was left to Henry George to expound how the universal principles of justice found in the Mosaic model could be applied to the modern age in all its economic aspects — rural and urban, agricultural and industrial, technologically undeveloped or advanced.

What George advocated was to leave land titles in private hands but to appropriate land rent via the existing machinery of property taxation. "I do not propose either to purchase or to confiscate private property in land. The first would be unjust; the second, needless....It is not necessary to confiscate land; it is only necessary to confiscate rent." No owner or tenant would be expropriated or evicted. No limit would be placed on the quantity of land one could hold, as long as the annual rent were paid.

Coordinately with the capture of rent as public revenue, taxes on products of human labor — improvements, personal property, services, commodities, wages, etc. — would be reduced and ultimately eliminated.

George considered his remedy no mere human contrivance. He saw the growth of land value and the easy means of equitably distributing it as an expression of benevolent supernatural design: "As civilization goes on... so do the common wants increase and so does the necessity for public revenue arise. And so in that value which attaches to land, not by reason of anything the individual does, but by reason of the growth of the community, is a provision intended — we may safely say intended — to meet that social want."

George's remedy goes a long way to stop current inequity and prevent future inequity. While past inequity, in the form of accumulations of capital based on previous land speculation and monopoly cannot be accurately redressed, these fortunes can be impelled to serve the needs of the public via investment in production, not by further investment in land speculation and monopoly.

Dependency theory, to the degree that it hits upon one of the causes of Third World poverty in exploitation by foreign investors, can find in George's land value tax the constructive practical approach it lacks. Neither erection of trade barriers nor legal restriction of foreign ownership is called for. As one Australian writer puts it:

(W)hen investors from one country buy property in other countries they are seeking site rent, which they hope to obtain directly from tenants, or indirectly by selling land in the future when the price or capital value has increased.... The site rent that is so attractive to overseas investors can be kept in the country quite easily — by shifting taxation from labor onto land."

Because George asserted, "We must make land common property," he is sometimes erroneously regarded as an advocate of land nationalization. But, as we have seen, he was nothing of the sort. The expropriation of land makes it practically impossible to fairly compensate people for the improvements to land, which are their legitimate property. George's system renders to the community what is due to the community, without doing any violence to the wealth that has been fairly earned by productive workers.

Common property in land is sometimes discredited by equation with what Garrett Hardin calls "The Tragedy of the Commons." Referring to the common lands that were a major English institution until the mid-nineteenth century, Hardin describes the tendency of individuals, each rationally pursuing self-interest, to overgraze, denude, and use the commons as a cesspool. That which belongs to everybody in this sense is, indeed, in danger of being valued and maintained by nobody.

The enclosure movement ultimately brought an end to this ecologically destructive process, but not without literally pushing people off the land, exacting a baneful price in human misery that might well be termed "The Tragedy of the Enclosures." George hit upon a way of securing the benefits of both commons and enclosures, while at the same time avoiding their evils. Land value taxation rectifies distribution so that all receive wealth in proportion to their contribution to its production. This liberates the economic system from exploiters who contribute little or nothing. Apportioning the wealth pie fairly increases the incentive to increase the size of the pie. The market becomes in practice what capitalist theory alleges it to be — a profoundly cooperative process of voluntary exchange of goods and services. Paradoxical though it may seem, the only way the individual may be assured what properly belongs to him or her is for society to take what properly belongs to it: The ideal of Jeffersonian individualism requires for its actualization the socialization of rent.

Just as Marxists err in insisting that everything be socialized, extreme capitalists err in insisting that everything (even public parks and forests!) be privatized. The middle way is to recognize society's claim to what nature and society create — the value of land and its rent — so that working people, including entrepreneurs, may claim their full share of what they create. In this balanced approach can be found the authentic verities respectively inherent in socialism and individualism.

... Read the whole synopsis