Private Property in Land

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

When we meet with a new interpreter, eager to impart a revelation, we set ourselves to challenge and compare his impassioned message with the ruling spirit of the age, the Zeitgeist, as the Germans call it. Thus when Mr. Verinder speaks of the land-usages and laws of our times, and sets against them the ancient orders and directions of the Pentateuch, we are aroused at once to question and to find out how this new view of possession and occupation fits in with the dominant thoughts of today. From these sacred books he builds a creed for working folk: that the earth is the Lord's, and that any occupier who claims more than the ancient Jubilee gave is a bold interloper; and he bases on these early Scriptural regulations a new brotherhood between the man of labor and the soil on which his sinews work.

There springs out of his argument another proof of the universal nature of the Bible. It is alike ancient and modern. He points out to us that private property in land is nothing but a survival of privileges won by the mailed fist. We know that the first settlement of the Jews in the land flowing with milk and honey was really a raid of moving "landgrabbers." After their bad times in Egypt, they fell on the natives of Palestine, drove them out, and took their place: as the missionaries of Jehovah they proclaimed that they had seized it for His use and in His Name; and they went on to show the world a better way of occupation, and a happier and more equable life. ... Read the whole preface

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

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 footnote

Frederick Verinder: My Neighbor's Landmark: Short Studies in Bible Land Laws (1911) — 7: Justice

§ 9. Justice or Equity is, therefore, the foundation of the law of social life, both in the Old Testament and in the New. What, then, follows as to the Land Question? Let the results of our inquiry into the teaching of the Law and the Prophets be briefly restated in the language of a modern philosopher.

"Equity," wrote Herbert Spencer in the middle of last century, "does not permit private property in land."

"The verdict given by pure equity … dictates the assertion, that the right of mankind at large to the earth's surface is still valid; all deeds, customs, and laws notwithstanding" (Social Statics, ix.§3).

"It is impossible to discover any mode in which land can become private property" (Ibid. § 4).

"The theory of the co-heirship of all men to the soil is consistent with the highest civilisation … however difficult it may be to embody that theory in fact, Equity sternly commands it to be done". (§ 10)

It is quite clear that there is no difference, except in literary form, between Spencer's conclusions, and those which have been deduced, in the foregoing chapters, from the writings of the Hebrew Lawgivers and Prophets. The famous ninth chapter of Social Statics might quite well be published, as the Church Catechism sometimes is, "with Scripture proofs."... Read the whole chapter, including footnotes