IV. Covenantal Acts
22 MUTUAL SELF-INTEREST: PRIESTS AND GLEANERS And when ye reap the harvest of your land, thou shalt not make clean riddance of the corners of thy field when thou reapest, neither shalt thou gather any gleaning of thy harvest: thou shalt leave them unto the poor, and to the stranger: I am the LORD your God (Lev. 23:22).
The gleaning statutes reflected the theocentric principle of God as the absolute owner of the land, who possessed the authority to set the terms of management for His "sharecroppers," the Israelites. This passage comes in between sections on two required national feasts: Pentecost or "weeks" (vv. 15-21) and Tabernacles or "booths" (vv. 34-43). Pentecost was the celebration of the harvest. It took place 50 ("pentekosté": fiftieth) days after Passover. As in all the other national festivals, sacrifices to God were required. What made this feast unique were two things: it was a one-day festival rather than a full week, and it mandated the use of leavened bread (v. 17).
Passover prohibited all leaven (Ex. 12:15). Leaven's symbolism of growth is the reason for both the prohibition and the subsequent requirement at Pentecost. It was Egypt's leaven that was prohibited at Passover: the covenantal necessity of ethical discontinuity with evil. It was Israel's leaven -- the product of the Promised Land -- that was mandated at Pentecost: the covenantal necessity of ethical continuity with righteousness.
Pentecost was understood by the rabbis as the anniversary of the giving of the Ten Commandments.(1) It was a third-month feast. The law was given to Moses in the third month (Ex. 19:1) on the third day of the week (Ex. 19:16). Tabernacles was a seventh-month feast (Lev. 23:24). It completed the annual cycles of three feasts. This structure parallels the week of purifications for the person who had come in contact with a dead body: third-day purification and seventh-day release (Num. 19:11-12).(2)
The Festival of Pentecost Pentecost was closely associated with the harvest.(3) It was a grain-related feast. The festival required the following: "Ye shall bring out of your habitations two wave loaves of two tenth deals: they shall be of fine flour; they shall be baken with leaven; they are the firstfruits unto the LORD" (v. 17). These loaves were separate representative offerings made by the priests. All of Pentecost's offerings had to take place on one day. To offer 1.2 million loaves of bread before (not on)(4) the altar in one day was not possible. Also, in addition to the loaves were required seven lambs, two rams, and a young bullock (v. 18), plus a goat kid and two more lambs (v. 19).(5) These animal sacrifices were corporate sacrifices. There is no way that these offerings were required from every family.
Edersheim says that the temple's doors were opened at midnight. The offerings had to be made before sunrise: the time of the mandatory morning offering.(6) Men were required to bring free will offerings (Deut. 16:10). Presumably, during the period from midnight to sunrise, they brought these offerings into the tabernacle or temple.
A family's main cost of the feast of Pentecost was not the value of the free will offering. It was the cost of the journey itself.
Gleaning, Again Leviticus 23:22 is a recapitulation of the gleaning law of Leviticus 19:9. The question is: Why did God here remind the Israelites of the land owners' responsibility to the landless poor, at the end of the passage that set forth the laws governing Pentecost ("weeks")? This question has baffled orthodox Bible commentators. S. H. Kellogg offers comments on Pentecost (vv. 15-21), but then skips verse 22 to begin commenting on the convocation of trumpets (vv. 23-25).(7) Andrew Bonar refers back to Leviticus 19:9 and concludes: "In this manner, love to man was taught in these thanksgiving feasts, at the very time that love to God who so kindly gave them their plenty was called forth and increased." He then goes on to offer an allegorical interpretation, with the gleaners as members of a remnant: gentiles in the Old Covenant, Jews in the New Covenant. "A feast is coming on that will unite Jew and Gentile in equal fulness."(8) But this does not explain why the gleaning law for the fields was repeated here, or perhaps more to the point, why it first appears in Leviticus 19:9 rather than here. Gordon Wenham thinks that the connection between Leviticus 19:9 and 23:22 may be the requirement to care for the poor: the Levites, the poor, and the stranger. There may be a link here: shared poverty.(9) But why should the Levites and priests have been poor? They received the tithes and sacrifices of the tribes. They could also own real estate in the cities. The commentators are confused about the reason behind the recapitulation.
There is a reason for this recapitulation: a shared economic link. There is also a reason for the confusion of the commentators. The reason is their lack of knowledge about, or interest in, economic theory. This lack of knowledge has left gaps in our understanding of biblical law.
Laws of Inheritance To begin to understand the relationship between the gleaning laws and the feasts, we first need to recognize that the land of Israel was an inheritance from God. Land ownership in Israel was part of the original spoils of war. Only those who fought the Canaanites could claim an inheritance in the land (Num. 32:16-23). Before the conquest began, God set forth the laws governing land ownership after Israel took possession. These laws were laws of landed inheritance. The Levitical priesthood possessed the authority to declare these laws and apply them to specific cases.
The special judicial status of the nation of Israel depended on the presence of an absolutely sovereign God (point one of the biblical covenant model).(10) The Levites and priests were God's primary representatives (point two)(11) because the priesthood had the primary responsibility of defending the moral purity of the land (point three).(12) The priests possessed only one final sanction: excommunication (point four).(13) They could disinherit covenant-breakers (point five).(14) Inheritance is the key to a proper understanding of the economic link between the priesthood and the gleaners. The poor had been temporarily disinherited by economic events or some other reason: no income from their family land. The Levites and priests had no landed inheritance in rural Israel; their inheritance was the tithe. Between the two groups there was a shared economic goal: the maintenance of income from rural land. The gleaners were poor; the Levites and priests did not want to become poor. The gleaners wanted a share of the crop; the Levites and priests wanted a share of the crop. Because of the structure of the laws governing gleaning, each group helped the other to achieve its economic goal.
Biblical law mandated gleaning in Israel. A land owner's refusal to honor the gleaning law, like his refusal to honor the tithe, was an excommunicable offense. The threat of this shared negative sanction -- reduced income -- is what linked the Levitical priesthood to the gleaners.
Economic Motivation The land owner sent his harvesting crew into the fields before the gleaners gained access. Gleaners got only the leftovers. Land owners were required by God's law to honor the laws of gleaning. They could not lawfully have their economic agents harvest the corners of the fields. That portion of the crop belonged by law to the gleaners. The poorest members of the able-bodied community had a legal right to this portion of the crop.
The question is: Which covenantal agency possessed lawful authority to enforce this law? Was it the State or the church? I have already announced my opinion: this legal right of the poor was not to be enforced by the State.(15) The State was not an agency of charity under the Old Covenant. It was an agency of compulsion: negative sanctions. It was not an agency authorized by God to bring positive sanctions. To gain ownership of assets, or the power to direct assets, necessary for bringing positive sanctions to one group, the State would have had to threaten negative sanctions against others. This was not allowed by God's law: the same laws had to apply equally to all residents of the nation (Ex. 12:49). Civil judges were not to discriminate between rich and poor (Lev. 19:15). The church, however, can lawfully bring positive sanctions as the agency of reconciliation -- man and nature's reconciliation to God -- and as an agency of healing: man and nature.
Self-Interest and Law Enforcement
My assertion of the designation of the priests as the enforcers of the gleaning law raises the question of economic motivation. While there may be individuals who at times place the interests of the community, or some segment of the community, above their own personal self-interest, no society can safely be constructed which relies exclusively on the widespread voluntary suppression of personal self-interest among those who are given monopolistic authority to impose negative sanctions on others. Liberty and justice require that the legal order acknowledge the fact that the personal self-interest of judges must be dealt with institutionally. Negative sanctions must be brought against those officials who make decisions that favor their interests at the expense of segments of the general public.
This institutional guideline is true for non-profit organizations, not just civil governments. I would not go so far as to say that it is equally true of priesthoods, since priesthoods formally are committed to a doctrine of sanctions beyond physical death, either a final judgment imposed by a divinity or the judgment of the impersonally applied moral laws of karma: an extension of the results of personal behavior through reincarnation. Thus, a priest may have a concept of personal self-interest that is longer or more apocalyptic than that adopted by a civil judge, or even more to the point, by a twentieth-century academic economist. But even non-profit organizations and priesthoods must acknowledge the potential conflict of interests between the power to impose negative sanctions and the public interest. Rewards and punishments must be built into the institutional system in order to reduce the profitable exploitation of such conflicts of interest, since the public interest will normally be sacrificed in these conflicts.
Public Choice Theory
In order to understand and then predict the decisions made by sanctioning agents, we need to consider the influence of self-interest. If we want to increase the likelihood that people will act in a particular way, we must see to it that they are rewarded for performing in the preferred way and punished for deviating. This includes government officials -- those who possess the right to impose sanctions. This was the insight by economist James Buchanan that won him a Nobel Prize in economics in 1986. Buchanan and his associate, legal theorist Gordon Tullock, pioneered a specialty in economics called public choice theory.(16) This economic approach to understanding institutions assumes that 1) all institutions, including political and judicial institutions, are the product of individual decisions, and 2) official decisions of organizations are based on the personal self-interest of those vested with the institutional authority to make them. In an introductory economics textbook committed to public choice theory, Gwartney and Stroup write: "The government is not a supraindividual that will always make decisions in the `public interest,' however that nebulous term might be defined. It is merely an institution through which individuals make collective decisions and through which they carry out activities collectively." They continue: "The basic postulate of all economics is that changes in expected costs and benefits will cause decision-makers to alter their actions in a predictable way. Specifically, as the personal costs of an event increase (and/or the benefits decline), decision-makers will be less likely to choose the event. As costs decline and benefits increase, the opposite tendency will be true. This postulate will be maintained throughout our analysis of market behavior. Similarly, it will be utilized to yield insight on the organization and functioning of the public sector."(17)
This insight on at least one set of human motivations governing institutional action -- costs and benefits -- must be respected by the social theorist. We must apply this insight to the behavior of those people who have been invested by God with covenantal authority. We therefore need to pursue the question of law-enforcement in Old Covenant Israel. If the Levites and priests were in fact the covenantal agents assigned by God to enforce the gleaning laws, then we should not expect God's law to rest on the assumption that the Levites and priests would normally carry out this assignment against their personal self-interest. We should expect rather to find judicial safeguards that protected their interests as they went about their judicial assignments. This is exactly what we find in the case of the gleaning laws.
How to Pay Judges Judges should not take bribes. "And thou shalt take no gift: for the gift blindeth the wise, and perverteth the words of the righteous" (Ex. 23:8). "Thou shalt not wrest judgment; thou shalt not respect persons, neither take a gift: for a gift doth blind the eyes of the wise, and pervert the words of the righteous" (Deut. 16:19). Judges should declare God's law and apply it to specific cases that come before them. This is a basic operating premise of biblical jurisprudence. The availability of personal gain is not to influence the judges' decisions. Having said this, we should also acknowledge the bribery law's economic corollary: judges should not suffer losses because of their decisions. Their decisions should not make them poorer. Thus, we conclude, judges' income should not be affected positively or adversely by their decisions. This is why they should be paid agreed-upon salaries by the sanctioning institution irrespective of their decisions for as long as they are employed by that institution. This rule governs both church and State.(18) This is also why they should not be allowed to judge cases in which they are uniquely in a position to gain or lose because of their decision.
The question then arises: Were the Levites and priests threatened economically by their honest enforcing of the gleaning law? If they did enforce it, did they or the priesthood in general risk a loss of income? Even more to the point, would their income automatically have been reduced? Specifically, did the enforcement of "gleaner's rights" reduce the priesthood's portion of the crop collected from the land owners? If their income would have been automatically reduced by their commitment to upholding the gleaning laws, then we must conclude one of two things: 1) Mosaic Covenant law rested on the assumption that judges would consistently hand down impartial decisions that were against their economic self-interest, or 2) the Levites and priests were not the authorized covenantal agents to enforce the gleaning laws.
Not a Threat
Leviticus 23:9-22 makes it clear that the Levites and priests were not threatened economically by the enforcement of the gleaning law. Their share of the crop during the two feasts was not reduced by whatever percentage was harvested by the gleaners. The land owner had to bring a specified quantity of the best of his crop as an offering to God, by way of the priesthood. This payment was owed to the Levites irrespective of the percentage of the crop harvested by the land owner's crew.
This payment was not part of the tithe; it was a separate offering. To understand the implications of this fact, consider the collecting of the tithe. Enforcing the gleaning law would not have threatened the church's income from tithes, since gleaners also owed a tithe, just as land owners did. A Levite's insistence that the gleaners be given access to the fields would not have threatened that portion of the tithe paid by gleaners. The gleaners would have understood to whom they owed the enforcement of this law. Furthermore, the Levite's enforcement of the gleaning law would have tended to ensure the collection of the tithe from the land owners. The requirement of gleaners on a farm created a class of outside agents who had knowledge of the size of the land owner's crop. This would have helped solve a fundamental problem for all agricultural tax collecting: cheating. Gleaners would have been potential monitors for the church's interests. Any land owner would have known this. In short, there was a meshing of economic interests between the Levites and honest gleaners in the case of tithe-collecting. The more gleaners in the fields, the more likelihood that two or more of them would have told the truth to the church's officers about the size of the crop.
Reducing the Costs of Monitoring Cheaters If a land owner did not allow any gleaners to glean, one or more of them could lawfully complain to the Levites. This would alert the Levites to the possibility of an infraction: if the land owner was willing to cheat God by cheating the gleaners, he was perhaps equally willing to cheat God by cheating the Levites of their tithe. The presence of gleaners meant the presence of monitoring agents whose self-interest coincided with the priesthood's self-interest.
These agents were not paid by the priesthood. This points to the priesthood as the authorized agency for enforcing the gleaning laws. Why not the local civil magistrate? Because the Levites received a greater percentage of the crop than a God-honoring civil magistrate would. The Levites lawfully received a full 10 percent of the increase in the crop; only a corrupt king would demand this much (I Sam. 8:15, 17). The Levites had to give only 10 percent to the priests, retaining 90 percent for themselves (Num. 18:26-28). There was no similar kingly guarantee for the percentage retained personally by local magistrates. Thus, local Levites had a far greater economic incentive under Mosaic law to monitor the output of the fields than the local civil magistrates did. The Levites had the greater economic incentive under biblical law to seek out zero-price agents to monitor the output of the farms. This incentive structure indicates that the church was where God lodged the judicial authority governing the gleaning law. The church could do very well -- collect the full tithe owed to it -- by doing good: defending the gleaners.
The recapitulation of the gleaning law in the section of Leviticus dealing with two fixed-payment grain offerings -- the firstfruits -- also points to the priesthood as the agency of enforcement for the gleaning law. The priests are identified in this passage as being guaranteed a fixed payment at the feasts, irrespective of the size of any farm's crop. As judges, their economic self-interest was in no way threatened by the gleaners. The Levites and priests could enforce the gleaning law without worrying that their very diligence would automatically reduce their income. The costs of the gleaning program would be borne by the land owners.
What we have here is a system of mutual self-interest between the priestly tribe and the gleaners. The Levites and priests gained allies among the gleaners during the season of the tithe -- zero-price (to the priestly tribe) monitors in the fields -- while being exposed to no economic threat from their allies during the seasons of the feasts. Simultaneously, the gleaners gained allies -- a priesthood with the power to excommunicate uncooperative land owners -- during the season of the tithe, while being exposed to no economic threat from their allies during the seasons of the feasts.
This mutually beneficial arrangement worked well in normal years. It broke down, however, during sabbatical years (Lev. 25:4-5, 20). In sabbatical years, the priesthood had a short-term financial interest in seeing a normal harvest rather than idle (resting) land. Priests and land owners did not acknowledge the long-term agricultural productivity benefits of resting the land one year in seven. Their shortened time perspective persuaded them not to honor the sabbatical year of rest for the land. This seems to me to be the most likely reason why the sabbatical year of rest for the land was not enforced in Israel for almost five centuries (II Chron. 36:21). The Levites defected. But it was the priesthood, not the State, that was to enforce the gleaning law.(19)
Church or State? The recapitulation of the gleaning law appears at the end of the passage that sets forth the laws governing a pair of mandatory agricultural payments to the Levites. This placement identifies the priesthood as the agency of enforcement of the gleaning law, not the State. The land owner was reminded by these laws that he owed God for his wealth. His payment to two groups was his public acknowledgment of his debt to God. These two groups were the priesthood (vv. 15-21) and the gleaners (v. 22).
Let us consider the other possibility: the State as the agency of enforcement. To argue this way is to argue that the State is an agency that lawfully imposes positive sanctions -- an error, biblically speaking. But I will not begin with this presumption. Instead, let us consider economic incentives for long-term obedience to this law and cooperation among all parties.
If the State had been the enforcing agency, this arrangement would have created specific incentives for both the land owners and the gleaners to use politics to defend their interests. To give the rural poor any benefits, the State would first have had to extract wealth from the land owners. The threat of violence would have been involved. This would have made adversaries of land owners and poor gleaners. It would have reduced the gleaning law to politics. A political struggle would have ensued, with control over the State as the target. The land owners probably would have won this contest.
A political battle would have been far less likely to ensue with the priesthood as the enforcing agency. No one except a member of the tribe of Levi could become a Levite or a priest. Thus, it was far more difficult for either land owners or gleaners to pressure the priesthood one way or the other. There was no way for either side to "buy into" the agency of enforcement if the priesthood had this authority. This made the politics of compulsory wealth redistribution far less likely to emerge over the gleaning issue.
The gleaning law was more likely to be honored if the priesthood enforced it. First, both the poor and the priesthood had lawful claims on a small portion of the production produced by the land owners' assets. This did not eliminate the State as a lawful claimant, and therefore as a potential enforcer, for the State could lawfully tax the net production of the land. But the church had a lawful claim to a larger portion than the State did: the tithe (I Sam. 8). It therefore had a greater economic incentive than the State did in serving as the defender of the gleaners. Why? Because the gleaners served as tithe-monitoring agents for the church. The church in turn served as the judicial defender of the gleaners. Both the church and the gleaners had mutual self-interest in the church's status as defender. Second, neither the priesthood nor the gleaners were threatened economically by each other. Positive benefits accrued to both groups through the arrangement, and there were no offsetting negative aspects. The likelihood of attaining honest judgment was therefore enhanced.
The civil magistrate might also have used gleaners as monitors. If the State taxed each group at the same rate, the gleaners had an incentive to report on the size of the crop to either enforcing agency, church or State. But which authority would the gleaners have trusted most: church or State? The State could more easily confiscate a person's inheritance, as Naboth learned (I Kings 21). The priesthood did not possess comparable power. Neither the land owner nor the gleaner had as much to fear from the priesthood as from the State. It was much more likely that each would cooperate with the Levite than turning such power over to the State.
This arrangement is additional evidence that the State was not an agency of compulsory charity under the Old Covenant. It was not authorized as an intermediary to collect taxes from one group in a program of wealth redistribution, nor was it to serve as an agency of enforcement for direct transfers of wealth from the rich to the poor. The poor in the community had a legal claim on a local land owner's leftover portion of a crop only as God's designated agents of collection; the agency of enforcement was the church. The appropriate negative sanction was therefore excommunication, not imprisonment or exile.
This is not to say that excommunication was the only negative sanction. Excommunication would necessarily have been followed by the civil disenfranchisement of the lawbreaker. Those outside the church covenant could not be citizens in Israel.(20) It would also have led to the loss of the family's landed inheritance for those heirs who refused to break publicly with the head of the household over the practice that had led to his excommunication. Covenantal death is both familial and civil.(21) Both State and family, as covenantal institutions, were required to support this decision by the Old Covenant church. The way that this support was demonstrated was for the State to remove all those under its jurisdiction and also the excommunicant's heirs from the threat of future negative judicial sanctions by the excommunicant. He could no longer serve as a civil judge or sit on a jury. His heirs could break with him publicly on the issue that led to his excommunication without suffering his negative sanction: disinheritance. Because excommunication was the church's announcement of his covenantal death, he no longer possessed an inheritance in the land to pass on.
Conclusion The gleaning law was recapitulated in this section because it follows the laws of the feasts. It points to the priests and Levites as the agents of enforcement. There was a mutually beneficial relationship between the priesthood and the gleaners. The gleaners could serve the Levites as monitors of the size of the land owner's crop. This assured the priesthood of getting a more honest tithe. The gleaners had to pay the tithe, but they had allies in the Levitical priesthood. Their priestly beneficiaries possessed the power of declaring a person excommunicate, including a cheating land owner or a land owner who refused to honor the gleaning law.
The arrangement was mutually beneficial. The priestly tribe had an incentive to see to it that gleaners received access to the leftovers of the crop, and the gleaners had an incentive to see to it that the local Levites were appraised of the size of the crop if cheating was going on. This mutually beneficial economic arrangement placed information boundaries around cheaters.
This arrangement also kept the State under appropriate boundaries. The local agents of enforcement, the priests, could not normally inherit rural land.(22) This reduced the threat of confiscation for both land owners and gleaners. It also tended to keep the politics of plunder at bay. With the priesthood as the agents of enforcement, no one was tempted to seek political power in order to increase his group's share of the plunder.
Summary This recapitulation of the gleaning law appears at the end of a passage regulating national feasts: firstfruits and weeks.
The priests and Levites declared the laws of inheritance in Israel.
The priests could excommunicate Israelites, thereby disinheriting them.
Inheritance is the key to a proper understanding of the link economic between priests and gleaners.
The poor had no income from their inheritance.
The Levites had no inheritance in rural land.
Both groups wanted to maintain their income from the land.
Each wanted a share of the crops.
The gleaning law provided a share of the crop to gleaners.
The church lawfully enforced this law, not the State.
The State does lawfully not provide positive sanctions from its tax-based income.
The church did bring positive sanctions from its members' assets.
Law enforcement must be based on self-interested enforcers.
To gain political freedom, the self-interest of judges must be appropriately channeled by law and economics.
Institutional sanctions are necessary to further the public interest.
Such sanctions are the academic specialty of public choice theory economists.
Judges should not take bribes.
Judges should not suffer losses because they declare and apply the law.
They are to be salaried.
Did the enforcement of "gleaner's rights" reduce the priesthood's portion of the crop?
The land owner had to bring a fixed portion of his crop to the feasts irrespective of how much was harvested.
This portion belonged to the Levites.
Gleaners knew who the enforcers were: Levites.
They would have known the size of the land owners' crops.
Gleaners monitored local land owners for the Levites.
The more gleaners who were in the fields, the more accurate the information available to the Levites.
The Levites therefore had economic self-interest in seeing that gleaners gained access to every field.
The Levites had greater incentive (90 percent retention of the tithe) to monitor agricultural output than the civil magistrate did.
Because they gained all of the feasts' special offerings, the gleaners' income was no threat to their income.
The Levites and the gleaners had mutual self-interest in policing the fields.
The Levites did lose in sabbatical years: the fields produced minimal output, and no systematic harvesting by land owners was legal.
The Levites had no immediate economic incentive to enforce the sabbatical year of rest; so, they defected.
If the State had been the enforcer of the gleaning law, there would have been a political battle to control access to civil office.
The Levites were immune from such political pressure; access to office was by birth in (or adoption by) a landless tribe.
This removed enforcement of the gleaning law from the politics of wealth redistribution.
Gleaners and Levites were allies, not potential adversaries, except in sabbatical years.
The State could be a coercive threat to gleaners and land owners alike.
Levites possessed no power of the sword: less of a coercive threat.
The gleaners as monitor had a greater incentive to cooperate with the Levites.
The Levites' threat was excommunication: loss of citizenship and loss of landed inheritance.
Excommunication means covenantal death.
Conclusion: the gleaning law is recapitulated in a section following the law of priestly offerings in order to emphasize the priests as the enforcers of the gleaning law.
Footnotes:
1. Alfred Edersheim, The Temple: Its Ministry and Services As They Were in the Time of Jesus Christ (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, [1874] 1983), p. 261.
2. James Jordan, The Law of the Covenant: An Exposition of Exodus 21-23 (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1984), p. 57.
3. Gordon J. Wenham, The Book of Leviticus (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1979), p. 304.
4. Leaven was not allowed on the altar (Lev. 2:11).
5. The Jews doubled the number of sacrifices by offering separately those required in Numbers 28:26, 27, 30 and Leviticus 23:18. On this point, Josephus' first-century observations and Maimonides' evaluation of rabbinical texts agree. "Pentecost," Cyclopaedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature, 12 vols., edited by John M'Clintock and James Strong, 12 vols. (New York: Harper & Bros., 1894), VIII, pp. 925-26.
6. Edersheim, Temple, p. 263.
7. S. H. Kellogg, The Book of Leviticus (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Klock & Klock, [1899] 1978), pp. 459-61.
8. Andrew Bonar, A Commentary on Leviticus (London: Banner of Truth, [1846] 1966), p. 411.
9. Wenham, Leviticus, p. 305.
10. Transcendence/presence. See Ray R. Sutton, That You May Prosper: Dominion By Covenant (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1992), ch. 1.
11. Hierarchy/representation. Ibid., ch. 2.
12. Ethics/boundaries. Ibid., ch. 3.
13. Oath/sanctions. Ibid., ch. 4.
14. Succession/inheritance. Ibid., ch. 5.
15. See above, Chapter 11, section on "A Lawful Claim: Moral or Legal?"
16. James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962). Tullock did not win the Nobel Prize with Buchanan in 1986, he believes, because he has never taken an economics course. I discussed this with him in 1988 at an Eris Society meeting in Aspen, Colorado.
17. James D. Gwartney and Richard Stroup, Economics: Private and Public Choice (2nd ed.; New York: Academic Press, 1980), p. 75.
18. The idea that a church member can legitimately reduce his tithe in retaliation against church officers is one of the most pernicious ideas in the modern church. This idea is the product of either of two errors. Error number one: a Christian can legitimately pay less than a tithe to God. Error number two: a Christian can lawfully pay less than a tithe to his local church if he redirects all or part of his tithe to another non-profit Christian agency. The former error is common to antinomian Christianity. See Gary North, Tools of Dominion: The Case Laws of Exodus (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), pp. 791-93; cf. North, Tithing and the Church (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), Pt. 1. The latter is most prominently defended by R. J. Rushdoony, who writes: "The tithe does not belong to the church or to any Christian agency, although it may be given to them. In whosoever hands it is, it belongs to the Lord. . . . Since the tithe is `holy unto the Lord', it is our duty as tithers to judge that church, mission group, or Christian agency which is most clearly `holy unto the Lord'." Rushdoony, "To Whom Do We Tithe?" in Rousas John Rushdoony and Edward A. Powell, Tithing and Dominion (Vallecito, California: Ross House, 1979), p. 30. For a critique of Rushdoony's views, see Appendix B, below: "Rushdoony on the Tithe: A Critique."
19. Gary North, Boundaries and Dominion: The Economics of Leviticus (computer edition; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), ch. 22, section on "Church or State?"
20. Gary North, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989), ch. 2: "Sanctuary and Suffrage."
21. On civil death, see North, Tools of Dominion, pp. 838-39. On familial death, see Ray R. Sutton, Second Chance: Biblical Blueprints for Divorce and Remarriage (Ft. Worth, Texas: Dominion Press, 1987).
22. For the two exceptions, see Leviticus 27:20-21. See Chapter 37, below.
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