Theft

Frederick Verinder: My Neighbor's Landmark: Short Studies in Bible Land Laws (1911) — Chapter 3: The Meaning of the Landmark

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) — 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." ... 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.

§ 5. After the return from the Exile, the great leader of the restored Israelites, Nehemiah, had to face a condition not unlike that of today. Landlordism had grown up. The people were in bondage, racked with usury, taxed on their daily food. It is refreshing to contrast the action of Nehemiah with the schemes of compensation to landlords which are advocated by some reformers today because of the supposed dishonesty of what they call "confiscation" — i.e. of the restoration to the people of their lost rights in the land, by putting into the fiscus, or public treasury, the values which the public creates.

Before a mass meeting of the landless and disinherited, Nehemiah addressed the "nobles and the rulers" who had profited by social injustice. He "set a great assembly against them," and called upon them to make immediate restitution. No offer of "compensation" is made on the one side, no demand for it on the other.

What would be the modern parallel to this? Is it quite mad to picture, say, an English Archbishop of Canterbury, Bible in hand like Nehemiah, "very angry," because he has heard the cry of the victims of injustice; setting a "great assembly" of landless citizens against the House of Lords, and enforcing a popular demand for the restoration to the people of their God-given rights in the land, without any compensation, except compensation to the plundered people for the exactions of indirect taxation? Mad enough, no doubt; for modern priests and prophets are not always built after Biblical models. ... Read the whole chapter, including footnotes

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

The setting up of a privileged class —

"He (the King) will take your fields, and your vineyards and your oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants. And He will take the tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards, and give them to his officers, and to his servants. And he will take your menservants, and your maidservants, and your goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his work. He will take the tenth of your sheep, and ye shall be his servants. And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king, which ye shall have chosen you" (1 Sam. 8:14-18; cp. Ezek. 46:16-18; Jer. 22:13-17, on which see above, Chap. 7 § 3).

"Thy princes are rebellious, and companions of thieves: every one loveth gifts [i.e. bribes], and followeth after rewards: they judge not the fatherless, neither does the cause of the widow come unto them. Therefore saith the Lord, the Lord of hosts, the mighty One of Israel, Ah, I will ease Me of Mine adversaries, and avenge Me of Mine enemies" (Isa. 1:23, 24). ...

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.]).

— brings evil upon the robbers, —

"Forasmuch therefore as ye trample upon the poor, and take exactions from him of wheat: ye have built houses of hewn stone, but ye shall not dwell in them; ye have planted pleasant vineyards, but ye shall not drink the wine thereof. For I know how manifold are your transgressions, and how mighty are your sins; ye that afflict the just, that take a bribe, and that turn aside the needy in the gate from their right" (Amos 5:11, 12 [R.V.]).

"And I will come near to you to judgment; and I will be a swift witness against the sorcerers, and against the adulterers, and against false swearers, and against those that oppress the hireling in his wages, the widow, and the fatherless, and that turn aside the stranger from his right, and fear not Me, saith the Lord of Hosts" (Mal. 3:5).

"Go to now, ye rich, weep and howl for your miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and your silver are rusted; and their rust shall be for a testimony against you, and shall eat your flesh as fire. Ye have laid up your treasure in the last days. Behold, the hire of the laborers who mowed your fields, which is if you kept back by fraud, crieth out: and the cries of them that reaped have entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth. Ye have lived delicately on the earth, and taken your pleasure; ye have nourished your hearts in a day of slaughter" (Jas. 5:1-5 [R.V.]; cp. Job 20; 1 Tim. 6:9, 10, 17). ...

D. The Coming Reign of Justice

With equal rights to land restored —

"Ye shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers; and ye shall be My people, and I will be your God" (Ezek. 36:28).

— men shall enjoy the produce of their labor.

"Then shall they dwell in their land that I have given to My servant Jacob. And they shall dwell safely therein, and shall build houses, and plant vineyards" (Ezek. 28:25, 26).

"The Lord hath sworn by His right hand, and by the arm of His strength, Surely I will no more give thy corn to be meat for thine enemies; and strangers shall not drink thy wine, for the which thou hast labored: but they that have garnered it shall eat it, and praise the Lord; and they that have gathered it shall drink it in the courts of My sanctuary" (Isa. 62: 8, 9 [R.V.]).

"And 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 shall be the days of My people, and My chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands. They shall not labor in vain, nor bring forth for calamity" (Isa. 65: 21-23 [RV.]).... Read the whole appendix, including footnotes

4. Life in the Wasteland: The Just Society vs. Baal Worship

Fertile ground for the emergence of liberation theology was provided by the clash of views over the role of politics in the Latin American Church in the first half of this century. One problem encountered was how to acknowledge God's sovereignty in history when the everyday world was structured in ways that seemed to deny it.

• Where could one find a divine presence in a civilization that, in so many ways, seemed so uncivilized?
• And was it up to individuals or governments to establish a reign of righteousness?

Leonardo Boff points to three models of the Church that have impacted on the liberation dialogue in Latin America.

• First, "the Church as City of God" holds that politics and government are essentially outside the realm of religion, which is for individual salvation.
• Second, "The Church as Mater et Magistra" sees the Church as educating and persuading political leaders to work for social betterment.
• Third, "The Church as Sacrament of Salvation" has the religious community opening itself to the world and actively collaborating with the state in uplifting the members of society.

Finding all three historical models of the Church wanting, Boff suggests a fourth, drawn from his experiences in the Brazilian basic ecclesial communities. This model, which can be called "The Church of People-hood and Justice for All," would be much more participatory, avoiding centralization and domination. Being democratic, it would emphasize the community more than the individual. Behind Boff's model is liberation theology's concern for the loss of "people-hood" in Latin America and in much of the world.

The new wave of Latin American theologians couple their critique of "individual Christianity" with an affirmation of the broader concept of being a "people of God." In the Bible, we are reminded, God has a chosen people. He loves the poor, oppressed, and landless — as a group. He hates the oppressors — as a group. It is the people who leave the Wasteland and enter the Promised Land. And although the generations had passed away, their children and grandchildren repeated the history of Egyptian oppression and God's salvation in the first person: "And the Egyptians treated us harshly, and afflicted us, and laid upon us hard bondage. Then we cried to the Lord... and the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand." (Deut. 26:5-10)

The Judeo-Christian meaning of liberation is clarified by some attention to Baal, the most active "foreign god" of the Canaanite pantheon. To the Canaanites, fertility depended upon sexual union between Baal and his sister and consort, Anath. Baal worship consisted in reenacting the mating of the gods in orgiastic rites with temple prostitutes. Beyond maintaining natural fertility and harmony, Baal religion was used by the aristocracy to uphold the social order. Canaanite tenants worked as dispossessed farmers on estates owned by magnates, the temple, and the king. They worshiped the landowners, the baals, who held dominion over both the land and the peasants themselves. Old Testament exhortations against Baalism emphasize the proper way to worship Yahweh: by acting with mercy and justice towards one's fellow humans.

Because justice does not prevail when some, like the baals, claim the land and its bounty while others are excluded from these privileges, Hosea denounces Israel for betraying its covenant to recognize God as the true owner of the earth. And Amos, referring to the greed for possessing the land and its fruits, said God is angered by those "who trample upon the needy, and bring the poor of the land to an end" (Amos 8:4). Amos' indictment of Israel mentions oppression of the poor and cultic prostitution as if they were one (Amos 2:6-8). This seems strange until one recognizes that the link between these two sins is a wrongful concept of land ownership. Recall that Baal-worship and its sexual rites glorified inequitable land possession and control. In the Prophets, the role of land is crucial in the divine providential scheme, and the flouting of just principles of land possession has grave consequences. Human beings are caretakers, not the owners, of God's creation.

Amos and Hosea underscored that being a caretaker of the earth, while defining people's relationship to the land, also defined people's relationship to one another. Being a caretaker meant loving justice and doing mercy, letting go of selfish possession and the desire for power over others by usurping their means of livelihood, and instead becoming, like God, compassionate. Consider what a revolutionary break this represents from Baal worship, which idolized control of the soil and deified the landowners!

... Read the whole synopsis