Opportunities

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." ...

§ 6. It is plain that, under such a Law, the growth of a wealthy landlord class with large estates on the one hand, and of a landless pauper class on the other, were rendered alike impossible. Although there might be, and naturally would be, inequalities arising from varying degrees of industry, there would be no such extremes of poverty and riches as we are familiar with. The two idle classes — the wealthy idlers of the West end and the starving idlers of the East — which disgrace our modern "civilisation," could not coexist with the equality of opportunity secured by the Hebrew Law. The prayer of Agur, the son of Jakeh, perhaps represents the ideal of such a society. "Give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with food convenient for me; lest I be full and deny Thee, and say, Who is the Lord? or lest I be poor, and steal, and take the name of my God in vain." "The sleep of a laboring man is sweet, whether he eat little or much but the abundance of the rich will not suffer him to sleep. There is a sore evil which I have seen under the sun, namely, riches kept for the owners thereof to their hurt." A writer in the Book of Proverbs tells us that "much food is in the tilled land of the poor; but there is that is destroyed by reason of injustice," while Isaiah drives the lesson home by his description of the barrenness of the land under monopoly. "There is that withholdeth what is justly due, but it tendeth only to want. ... He that withholdeth corn [and, may we not add, he that withholdeth the land on which alone the corn can be grown], the people shall curse him" "As the partridge sitteth on eggs, and hatcheth them not; so he that getteth riches, and not by right, shall leave them in the midst of his days, and at his end shall be a fool." For "better is a little with righteousness than great revenues with injustice."

146 Le but principal de cette institution etait de maintenir autant de possible l'egalite primitive du partage des terres, de reparer les perturbations arrivees dans le courant de quarante-neuf ans, et de prevenir ainsi le complet et durable apprauvissement de certaines familles plus malheureuses que d'autres (Dict. Encycl. de la Theol. Catholique, s.v., Jubile). "With the consistent administration of this 1aw, a class wholly without property would have been impossible in Israel" (Oehler, Theol. of the O.T.,i. 348). Jahn (Biblical Archaeology) well describes the Jubilee as "a regulation which prevented the rich from coming into possession [by "free trade in land"] of large tracts of land, and then leasing them out in small parcels to the poor; a practice which anciently prevailed, and does to this day, in the East." [Heinrich Hein writes: Moses endeavored to bring property into harmony with morality, with the true law of reason, and this he accomplished by the introduction of the Year of Jubilee, in which alienated land that was inherited . . . fell back to the original owner, regardless of the manner in which it had been disposed of. This institution forms the most decided contrast to that "outlawry" with the Romans, where after the lapse of a certain time the actual possessor of a property could not be compelled by the legitimate owner to return the property, if he could not bring evidence to show that he had demanded restitution in due legal form. This last condition left the field open to every possible fraud, especially in a state where despotism and jurisprudence were in bloom, and where the lawful possessor had in his power all the means of intimidation, especially when confronted by the poor man who could not afford the expenses which a contest involved. The Roman was soldier and lawyer at the same time, and he knew how to defend with his glib tongue the property taken from others, often with the sword. --S.]. ... 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

§ 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. ... 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.

 

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