§ 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. ...
§ 4. The securing to all Englishmen of opportunity both
for work and leisure depends, not upon the literal application of part
of the letter of the Fourth Commandment to one day of the week, but upon
the
observance of the spirit of the Hebrew land laws with which all the sabbatical
institutions were originally so closely connected. The language of the
Law shows this connection quite clearly—
"When ye come into the land which I give you, then shall
the land keep a sabbath unto the Lord. Six years thou shalt sow thy field,
and six years
thou shalt prune thy vineyard, and gather in the fruit thereof; but in
the seventh year shall be a sabbath of rest unto the land, a sabbath for
the
Lord: thou shalt neither sow thy field nor prune thy vineyard.
"That which groweth of its own accord of thy harvest thou shalt not
reap, neither gather the grapes of thy vine undressed: for it is a year of
rest unto the land" (Lev. 25:1-7, 18-22).
The connection between Sabbath day and sabbath year is even more briefly
and forcibly expressed in the parallel phrases of Ex. 23:10-12 [R.V.]
* Six years thou shalt sow thy land, and shalt gather in the increase thereof;
* Six days thou shalt do thy work,
* but the seventh year thou shalt let it rest and lie fallow;
* and on the seventh day thou shalt rest:
* that the poor of thy people may eat: and what they leave the beast of the
field shall eat.
* that thine ox and thine ass may have rest, and the son of thy handmaid, and
the stranger, may be refreshed.
* In like manner thou shalt deal with thy vineyard, and with thy olive-yard.
...
§ 5. The seventh year was also called the year of release, "partly
because the land was "released" from cultivation, and partly because
there was then a general remittance of all debts due from one Hebrew to another,
and a manumission of all Hebrew bondservants. The war-cries of monopolists
against reform in modern times would have been treated with scanty respect
by Moses and the prophets. They recognised neither the right of the landlord
to "do what he liked with his own," nor the "sacredness of (private)
contract" made against public policy, nor the inalienable right of every
(white) man to "whop his own nigger," or to sweat his own wage-slave.
The Law aimed at making involuntary and undeserved poverty, as nearly as
might be, impossible. When and where, through the vices or frailty of human
nature,
it crept in, temporarily and in spite of the Law, the most careful provision
was made for mitigating its evils.
§ 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