§ 1. THERE is not at first sight, a very obvious connection between
the observance of the Sabbath and the Land Question. But, as a matter of
fact, Hebrew national life was marked out by a great cycle of Sabbatical
periods, of which the Jubilee was, as it were, the culminating point. Every
seventh day was a Sabbath day. Every seventh year was a Sabbath year. When "seven
Sabbaths of years ...seven times seven years" had been kept, the
fiftieth year closing the cycle, was kept as the Year of Jubilee. The
whole series
of Sabbatical holidays were threaded on one string, and formed so many
links in the chain of a just agrarian system. ...
§ 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.
§ 3. Modern Sabbatarians, who, forgetting that "the Sabbath
was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath," seek to apply these
Jewish enactments to the first day of the week, are apt to overlook the
fact that the Fourth Commandment is as much a labor law as a rest law.
Its opening words are, "Six days shalt thou labor." Seven days'
idleness involves a much more frequent infraction of the command than seventh-day
work does. "God's covenant with us" said Rahbi Akiba, "included
work; for the command, 'Six days shalt thou work, and the seventh shalt
thou rest,' made the 'rest' conditional upon the 'work'." "The
principles of a true Sabbatarianism would necessitate the abolition alike
of overwork and of idleness, the extinction of all the idle classes — of
those who are idle (and rich) because they "need not work," as
well as of those who are idle (and poor) because they cannot get work to
do. The Church of England Catechism paraphrases the Fourth Commandment
in very general terms: "To serve Him truly all the days of my life." St.
Paul annotates it, from the Christian standpoint, in a very remarkable
passage —
"Now we command you, brethren, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ,
that ye withdraw yourselves from every brother that walketh disorderly,
and not after the tradition which he received of us. … For even when
we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither
should he eat. For we hear that there art some which walk among you disorderly,
working not at all, but are busybodies. Now them that are such we command
and exhort by our Lord Jesus Christ, that with quietness they work and
eat their own bread … and if any man obey not our word by this epistle,
note that man, and have no company with him, that he may be ashamed" (2
Thess. iii. 6, 10-14.)
§ 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.
...
§ 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
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!"
...
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 for every fifty
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.
I do not say that these institutions were, for their ultimate purpose,
the best that might even then have been devised; but Moses had to work,
as all great constructive statesmen have to work, with the tools that came
to his hand, and upon materials as he found them. Still less do I mean
to say that forms suitable for that time and people are suitable for every
time and people. I ask, not veneration of the form, but recognition of
the spirit.
Yet how common it is to venerate the form and to deny the spirit. There
are many who believe that the Mosaic institutions were literally dictated
by the Almighty, yet who would denounce as irreligious any application
of their spirit to the present day. And yet today how much we owe to these
institutions! This very day the only thing that stands between our working
classes and ceaseless toil is one of these Mosaic institutions.
Let the mistakes of those who think that "man was made for the Sabbath," rather
than "the Sabbath was made for man," be what they may; that there
is one day in the week that the working people may call their own, one
day in the week on which hammer is silent and loom stands idle, is due,
through Christianity, to Judaism – to the code promulgated in the
Sinaitic wilderness. ... Read the whole speech