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THE RIGHT OF REDEMPTION The land shall not be sold for ever: for the land is mine; for ye are strangers and sojourners with me. And in all the land of your possession ye shall grant a redemption for the land (Lev. 25:23-24).
We begin with a theocentric analysis of this passage. The prohibition against the permanent sale of rural land was connected to the nation's judicial status as strangers and sojourners with God. What did this mean? God began to dwell in the land of Israel when the conquest began, i.e., after the nation had crossed Canaan's border. This means that He lived among them judicially. He did not take up residence with them physically. His unique judicial presence in the land was marked physically by the presence of the two tablets of the law inside the Ark of the Covenant. Even this testimony had to be taken on faith; no one was allowed to look inside the Ark. When this law was violated by the men of Bethshemesh, God killed 50,070 of them (I Sam. 6:19). Negative corporate sanctions came immediately after God allowed the corporate infraction to take place.(1)
This law identified the Israelites as strangers and sojourners with God. The meaning here is "strangers from the world in the land." This was in contrast to strangers and sojourners who might come into the land. These would become strangers and sojourners in the land, but without God, i.e., not members of an Israelite family.
To be a stranger and sojourner with God under the Mosaic Covenant had a specific judicial meaning: one's heirs would inherit a portion of a particular plot of land in Israel. To inherit, a person had to be a member of an Israelite family that had participated in the conquest. The Israelites' righteous shedding of the blood of that generation of Canaanites had been a covenant sign for Israel. No one who was not biologically or judicially (through adoption) an heir to one of those families that had participated in that original ritual sacrifice could own rural land on a permanent basis in Israel until the law was changed by God after the exile (Ezek. 47:21-23).
The special judicial presence of God among them had been manifested historically to Israel by the genocide of the Canaanites. God had used His people -- a royal priesthood (Ex. 19:6) -- to bring negative historical sanctions against His enemies. They had served in a holy army. They had inherited the land of God's enemies. This was inheritance through corporate execution. Their landed inheritance began with their obedience in committing genocide.(2) It ended with their national disinheritance at the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70.
To be a covenantal stranger with God meant that you possessed legal title to a plot of land on a permanent basis. This land could not be permanently alienated. Title could not be legally transferred to another family by a leaseholder in any generation. God held original title; families held secondary title. This was a guarantee to Israel: for as long as the nation remained obedient to God, its original families would not be disinherited.
There was only one way for corporate disinheritance to take place: God's public execution of the nation of Israel. "And it shall be, if thou do at all forget the LORD thy God, and walk after other gods, and serve them, and worship them, I testify against you this day that ye shall surely perish. As the nations which the LORD destroyeth before your face, so shall ye perish; because ye would not be obedient unto the voice of the LORD your God" (Deut. 8:19-20). This took place at the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70.(3) The inheritance was transferred to another corporate people, just as Jesus had promised: "Therefore say I unto you, The kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof" (Matt. 21:43). This was God's act of covenantal execution, not literal execution.
Redemption on Demand Why would an Israelite have voluntarily leased out his land? The obvious reason was that the owner believed that he had better uses for the money than for the land. Perhaps he preferred to live in a city. Perhaps he was involved in commerce and wanted capital. Perhaps he was involved in some infraction that required an immediate payment to a victim.
An involuntary lease was used to raise money to pay off debts: victims of crimes or lenders in some business transaction in which the land had been used as collateral. The repayment of interest-free charitable loans was not governed by the jubilee law but by the more frequent sabbatical year law (Deut. 15:1-10). Charitable debts were cancelled every seventh year. But charitable loans were not collateralized by land; they were collateralized by the debtor's willingness to go into bondage for up to six years should he default.
The existence of an interest payment in a loan agreement identified the loan as non-charitable, non-compulsory, and therefore more risky for the debtor, for the sabbatical year of release (Deut. 15:7-10) did not apply to business loans. The man who began as a poor man when he borrowed money in an emergency did not put his land on the line, assuming that he still owned any land. In contrast, the man who became a poor man after going into debt in order to finance a business venture or a consumer purchase did have to forfeit his land if his land was the collateral he had agreed to provide the lender.
The jubilee law specified that in such instances, the collateral could be redeemed at any time. The lender who had repossessed the collateral of the family's inheritance was permitted to use it as a productive asset until one of two things took place: 1) the jubilee year began; 2) the poor man or his kinsman-redeemer paid back the principal.
If thy brother be waxen poor, and hath sold away some of his possession, and if any of his kin come to redeem it, then shall he redeem that which his brother sold. And if the man have none to redeem it, and himself be able to redeem it; Then let him count the years of the sale thereof, and restore the overplus unto the man to whom he sold it; that he may return unto his possession. But if he be not able to restore it to him, then that which is sold shall remain in the hand of him that hath bought it until the year of jubile: and in the jubile it shall go out, and he shall return unto his possession (Lev. 25:25-28).
The Kinsman-Redeemer The person who is identified in Leviticus 25 as the person with the authority to buy back a poor man's land is the kinsman (Lev. 25:25-26). The same root word in Hebrew is used for the verb for purchasing: "And if it be not redeemed within the space of a full year, then the house that is in the walled city shall be established for ever to him that bought it throughout his generations: it shall not go out in the jubile" (Lev. 25:30). "And if a man purchase of the Levites, then the house that was sold, and the city of his possession, shall go out in the year of jubile: for the houses of the cities of the Levites are their possession among the children of Israel" (Lev. 25:33).
The office of kinsman-redeemer was based on a messianic model: "Yea, all kings shall fall down before him: all nations shall serve him. For he shall deliver the needy when he crieth; the poor also, and him that hath no helper. He shall spare the poor and needy, and shall save the souls of the needy. He shall redeem their soul from deceit and violence: and precious shall their blood be in his sight" (Ps. 72:11-14). The kinsman-redeemer was the same office as the blood-avenger, the go'el (sometimes transliterated as ga'awl). "But if the man have no kinsman [go'el] to recompense the trespass unto, let the trespass be recompensed unto the LORD, even to the priest; beside the ram of the atonement, whereby an atonement shall be made for him" (Num. 5:8). "The revenger of blood [go'el] himself shall slay the murderer: when he meeteth him, he shall slay him" (Num. 35:19). God identified Himself as Israel's kinsman-redeemer: "Wherefore say unto the children of Israel, I am the LORD, and I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, and I will rid you out of their bondage, and I will redeem [go'el] you with a stretched out arm, and with great judgments" (Ex. 6:6).
The blood avenger was the nearest of kin. It was he who had the responsibility of pursuing and then slaying anyone suspected of having murdered his kinsman. The cities of refuge were built in order to provide a place for suspected murderers to flee. The city of refuge was a legal boundary into which the authority of a blood avenger from outside the city did not extend. "And they shall be unto you cities for refuge from the avenger; that the manslayer die not, until he stand before the congregation in judgment" (Num. 35:12). Outside the boundaries of a city of refuge, "The revenger of blood himself shall slay the murderer: when he meeteth him, he shall slay him" (Num. 35:19). After a trial in the city, a man convicted of murder (as distinguished from accidental manslaughter) was placed outside the city, to be executed by the blood avenger (Num. 35:25). A man convicted of accidental manslaughter could lawfully be killed by the blood-avenger at any time outside the city of refuge, until the high priest died. Here the language of release is the same as the language of the jubilee year: returning to the family's land: "Because he should have remained in the city of his refuge until the death of the high priest: but after the death of the high priest the slayer shall return into the land of his possession" (Num. 35:28).
In the captivity of Israel, God acted as their kinsman: "Go ye forth of Babylon, flee ye from the Chaldeans, with a voice of singing declare ye, tell this, utter it even to the end of the earth; say ye, The LORD hath redeemed his servant Jacob" (Isa. 48:20). In doing so, God acted as blood-avenger: "And I will feed them that oppress thee with their own flesh; and they shall be drunken with their own blood, as with sweet wine: and all flesh shall know that I the LORD am thy Saviour and thy Redeemer, the mighty One of Jacob" (Isa. 49:26).
Why Redeem Another Man's Land or Person?
The kinsman-redeemer was the agent authorized by God to buy back the property of a close relative. The question is: What was the benefit for him? Why would any relative do this? It would have been a major capital outlay unless the jubilee was near. David Daube has offered a plausible explanation: the kinsman-redeemer bought the use of the land for himself until the jubilee year or until his relative could purchase the land from him, whichever came first. In other words, the kinsman-redeemer became the new master of the property.(4)
It was also a benefit to the original owner when his kinsman-redeemer leased back the property. First, the land would probably be taken care of more carefully by a relative, i.e., there would be less "strip mining" of its productivity. Second, the kinsman-redeemer might be willing to allow him to work the land as a sharecropper. The original owner would come under the authority of a relative rather than a stranger. The relative might treat him better; he, in turn, would have family pressures on him to perform more efficiently as a caretaker. These are economic arguments. Third, the land would remain in the family -- an important aspect of family authority in Israel. This is a social factor rather than economic: a matter of status. It was an embarrassment for a family to have an insolvent member in its midst. This was a way for the family to demonstrate its willingness to "care for its own."
The text does not indicate that the land had to be returned immediately to the original owner. The economics of the case does indicate that without the kinsman-redeemer's right to use the land for his own benefit until either the jubilee or the land's redemption by the relative, there would have been little likelihood that this law would have been honored in practice.
The same principle of transferred authority applied also to the redemption of an Israelite brother from servitude in the household of a resident alien. "And if a sojourner or stranger wax rich by thee, and thy brother that dwelleth by him wax poor, and sell himself unto the stranger or sojourner by thee, or to the stock of the stranger's family: After that he is sold he may be redeemed again; one of his brethren may redeem him" (Lev. 25:47-48). Better to be a servant in the household of a relative than in the household of a foreigner. Better to be under the temporary authority of a covenant-keeper with sufficient money to redeem you than under the authority of a covenant-breaker. But the poverty-stricken man had still fallen into poverty. He was still stricken. The best way to return him to full productivity was to train him in the ways of productivity. The necessary hierarchy of master and servant was not broken by this form of redemption. The poor man still had to learn the techniques of serving the consumer. He needed an intermediary to teach him these techniques: his more prosperous kinsman-redeemer.
When God redeems us, He does not turn us loose to do whatever we want; He becomes our new master. The standard antinomian refrain -- "We're under grace, not law" -- is incorrect. Men in history are always under both grace and law. The question is: Which kind of grace and which kind of law? Every society has laws and sanctions. Non-biblical laws and sanctions are an aspect of common grace; biblical laws and sanctions are an aspect of special grace. Without grace, there would be social chaos: hell's down payment ("earnest") in history. If there were no predictable covenantal sanctions in history for obedience and disobedience, there could be no social predictability. We would then live in moral and social chaos. The greater the chaos, the less social order.
Man's autonomy is never a valid theoretical option. God remains the original owner of us and our property. This fact receives confirmation every time someone dies. The old question -- "How much did he leave behind?" -- is always answered: "All of it." Men are inescapably stewards of God's property.(5) The question is: Who should teach us the principles and practices of responsible stewardship? The jubilee law made this plain: the kinsman-redeemer, the Israelite family's agent of redemption and judgment. Only when the jubilee land laws ended with the establishment of a New Covenant did this system of family redemption and training end.
Walled Cities The law of redemption applied inside the walled cities of Israel in a different way: the seller or his kinsman had only one year to redeem a home (dwelling place). Once this year had passed, the buyer became a permanent owner. "And if a man sell a dwelling house in a walled city, then he may redeem it within a whole year after it is sold; within a full year may he redeem it. And if it be not redeemed within the space of a full year, then the house that is in the walled city shall be established for ever to him that bought it throughout his generations: it shall not go out in the jubile" (Lev. 25:29-30). Notice: this law applied only to homes. It did not apply to other kinds of urban real estate. Only a residence was protected by the year of grace. Title to other real estate passed at the time of sale. Title to urban real estate was alienable: for sale to aliens.
Outside the boundary of the wall, the Israelite's right of redemption was universal, bounded by a 50-year limit. "But the houses of the villages which have no wall round about them shall be counted as the fields of the country: they may be redeemed, and they shall go out in the jubile" (v. 31).
Was it legal for subsequent generations to build walls around unwalled cities? Yes. Would this new wall have changed the legal status of the heirs of the original families? No. An unwalled city of Joshua's day, with the exception of the cities of the Levites, came under the jubilee's rural land law. The inheritance left by the original generation could never be alienated by contract.(6) The inheritance could only be alienated by God, through corporate covenantal execution. So, a wall could be built for the sake of military defense, but this would not have changed the legal status of the heirs of the original families. No alteration of the inheritance of the original families was allowed; the defensive wall was not a judicial wall.
Citizenship could not be revoked for any reason other than excommunication. This means that the priests, through their delegated authority to the Levites, could alone revoke citizenship. This is the mark of a biblical civil order. The civil order does not autonomously establish or enforce the criteria of citizenship. Citizenship is creedal, and the church enforces the content of the creed. A biblical civil order cannot become autonomous; biblical political theory reflects this fact.
Who would have chosen to live in a walled city in the era of the conquest? Any Israelite family would have had the right to participate in the distribution of rural land. This would have been that family's permanent inheritance. The urban residents would then have been made up of the following: 1) land-owning Israelites who became absentee landlords; 2) permanent resident aliens who had been adopted into the tribe of a city; 3) permanent resident aliens who had not been adopted by an Israelite family or tribe; 4) traders who would reside there relatively briefly; 5) Levites who were not residents of a Levitical city; 6) soldiers or other officials from the central government; 7) Israelites who had been excommunicated (i.e., circumcised strangers: nokree); 8) convicted Israelite criminals who had been sold into servitude to someone in a walled city.(7)
One Year's Grace
The period of redemption was limited to one year. Why? Again, nothing explicit is said about this. We have to deduce reasons from our knowledge of the Bible and our knowledge of men's motivations.
The idea of a period of grace applied only to the seller of the house. It was the seller's interests that were defended by this law. The buyer remained uncertain for a year. He did not know if he could remain in his new house; it could be redeemed at any time. Perhaps he left his previous house empty, forfeiting rental income. Perhaps he subleased it to someone for a year. If the buyer of the new house was evicted before the sublease on his original residence had expired, he had to find temporary living quarters under difficult circumstances: rapid eviction. Such a threat of eviction would have raised the price of a move in pre-exilic Mosaic Israel. The more numerous the buyer's possessions, the more expensive the move. In the words of a modern proverb: "Two moves equals one fire." Each transfer of ownership of a house in a walled city would have tended to go to a richer person than the one who was selling it. Why? Because wealthy people could more easily have borne the risks of eviction. The existing owner probably had a greater "need to sell" than the buyer had a "need to buy."(8)
Why would anyone have sold? A business setback is one obvious reason, especially if the business involved debt. The Bible teaches that the debtor is servant to the lender: "The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender" (Prov. 22:7). The Bible discourages servitude, which is why the jubilee law existed: God's redemption of His servants as their kinsman-redeemer -- the owner of all the land -- by mandating their right to return to their ancestral plots.
In walled cities, however, this redemption process did not exist, except for the one-year grace period. In the case of loans collateralized by homes, there were greater incentives to lend in walled cities than in rural areas, and greater risks for borrowing. A person who took a loan secured by the collateral of his rural inheritance knew that the closer the year of jubilee came, the less he could expect to borrow against his collateral. The lender would lose whatever net income the land might produce in the year beyond the jubilee. He would be allowed to keep all of the triple crop in the sixth year, but in the seventh he could not farm it. In the eighth year, he lost it. In contrast, an urban dweller knew that if he went bankrupt, he would have only one year to raise enough cash to redeem his house. After that, it was lost forever unless he could persuade the buyer to sell it back -- unlikely at the price he had been paid: the value of the loan. Thus, his risk was comparatively much greater that he would lose his urban inheritance than his rural.
In walled cities, the Israelites would experience the continual temptations of debt: rich resident aliens enthusiastic to lend money, hoping that the debtor would default. This would be a comparatively easy way to buy up property in urban Israel. If the loan was repaid, the lender received his normal urban rate of return.(9) If the loan was not repaid, he received a revocable lease on the house plus the possibility of permanent possession one year after the original owner transferred title. This would have been the preferred way for wealthy aliens to give their heirs a permanent stake in Israelite society.
Any Israelite who borrowed significant sums on these terms would have been either a "high roller" -- a person willing to bear a lot of risk -- or a very present-oriented consumer, like the prodigal son in Jesus' parable. A very confident entrepreneur might think he had a unique opportunity, probably connected to an invention or trade. He might be willing to risk his inheritance for the capital to develop it. But a less risk-oriented person would have preferred invested capital -- selling a share of ownership -- to debt financing.
This limit of one year on the right to redeem an urban house would have channeled urban investment into higher-risk debt ventures or moderate-risk joint ventures. A resident alien (or anyone else) who was looking for a permanent home to buy in Israel would have sought out (advertised for) Israelites who were willing to accept debt financing for high-risk projects that other investors had already shunned. The lender's offer would have amounted to this: "Win, and I win with you; lose, and you're out in the cold. I won't be."
The Terms of Sale
The text does not speak of a deferred payment, i.e., a mortgage beyond one year. The right of redemption was one year. There is no indication that this means anything except one year from the time that the transfer of ownership took place. Ownership transfers with responsibility over the property. Ownership is a judicial concept: the identification of the legally responsible agent. The owner has the right to disown the property.
Could there have been home mortgages under such a legal system? Yes, but the original owner had only one year to reclaim his property unless the buyer subsequently defaulted on his payments. He would have had to repay to the new buyer whatever the new buyer had paid him during the interim. The purchaser had to forfeit the use of the item or money that he used to buy the house. This is what the seller owed him if the former wanted to reclaim the house. The buyer remained a renter for up to one year; his eviction through re-purchase was possible at any time. Under open competition, the lease payment would therefore have tended to equal the rate of interest/rent: whatever the lessor gained by occupying the house -- psychic income -- was offset by the payments he had made to the original owner. On the other side of the transaction, whatever the seller had gained from holding the assets used to purchase the house was paid for by his loss of control over the house.
A Stake in Society
No explicit reason is provided in the Bible to explain this judicial difference: wall vs. no wall. The judicial boundary established by the city's wall provided an exemption from the jubilee land law after 12 months.(10) Inheritance there was based on secondary purchase rather than original conquest. It was based on economics rather than ecclesiastical confession. This made possible a place for resident aliens or post-conquest converts to the faith to gain what is sometimes called a stake in society. A stake is a marker that establishes the edge of a boundary in land, but it is used here more broadly: a permanent residence or a permanent possession of value that is tied to a specific place. A stake in society is therefore a legal claim, something that at some price is worth defending, either in a court or on a battlefield.
Would resident aliens have been required to fight to defend the city? Not unless they were citizens. They did not possess membership in an Israelite family. The military numbering process would not have touched them (Ex. 30). Presumably they could volunteer, but only if they professed the required national confession of faith, the shema Israel: "Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD" (Deut. 6:4). There were many instances of foreign soldiers in Israel's holy army, Uriah the Hittite being the most famous. Citizenship was probably a reward granted to circumcised resident aliens who volunteered for military service. If you could be legally numbered, you were a citizen; conversely, if you could not legally be numbered, you were not a citizen.(11)
Was confession, circumcision, and eligibility for service in the Lord's army sufficient to establish an inheritable claim of citizenship? Yes. Was this citizenship inalienable? Yes. Citizenship was covenantal. Covenantal inheritance was by confession, circumcision, and eligibility to bring sanctions: as a holy warrior and therefore as a judge.(12) Once a citizen of Israel, a person could not become a bondservant under Mosaic law.
Post-Exilic Israel
This raises an extremely important point: the alteration of land ownership after the exile. Ezekiel prophesied that after Israel's return from exile, strangers in the land would participate in a second division of the land by lot. These strangers would gain permanent possession in the land. Strangers who resided within the jurisdiction of a particular tribe at the time of the reclaiming of the land by that tribe would become part of a new land allocation (Ezek. 47:21-23). They could not be disinherited. But if that was true, then they could not be enslaved.
There is no indication that the jubilee's heathen slave law was annulled after the exile. Jesus announced His ministry in terms of jubilee liberation (Luke 4:18-21). This assertion rested on the continuing authority of the jubilee slave law. That aspect of the jubilee was related to family inheritance, not the original distribution of land under Joshua. But a new land allocation would free participating heathen families from any threat of inter-generational bondage. Those who resided in the land at the time of the return could not lawfully be enslaved.
This was the source of the lawful continuing presence of Samaritans in the land. These foreigners had been brought into the Northern Kingdom by the Assyrians to replace the captive Israelites. The returning Israelites were not authorized to kill or exile these people. There would never again be a lawful program of genocide to establish original title in Israel. Rather, the resident alien at the return would receive an inheritable grant of rural land. The worship of Canaanite gods and religion never reappeared. The gods of Canaan had been gods of the land, meaning gods of the city-state. Those gods were no longer relevant in a nation under the authority of Medo-Persia, then Hellenism, and finally Rome. In contrast, Persian dualism, Hellenism, and Talmudism were not bound by geography. These became the main threats to biblical orthodoxy.
The returning Israelites took centuries to reconquer the land. The reconquest was never completed, nor was Mosaic civil authority ever re-established. The tribes did not re-establish their original borders, nor were they ever again totally free from foreign civil rule. But the Jews did come close to re-establishing their pre-exilic political power and national boundaries in the decades prior to Rome's invasion, which led non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine to welcome the Romans.(13) Because the physical boundaries of the Promised Land had been breached during the exile, never to be healed, and because the pre-exilic judicial boundaries were never again established, the original land distribution of the era of the conquest lost its judicial relevance. Israelite citizenship therefore lost most of its judicial relevance except during periods of civil revolt. Confession, circumcision, and adoption remained the basis of this much-reduced citizenship. God's holy army had ceased to exist.
Urban Citizenship
Ammonites and Moabites could become members of the congregation after 10 generations (Deut. 23:3). This was citizenship, for the same 10-generation limit applied also to Israelite bastards (Deut. 23:2). The question is: Where would these new citizens have exercised their judicial powers? I think it must have been inside walled cities. The cities were tribal affairs. They had been parcelled out to the tribes under Joshua (Josh. 13:23-32; 15). Citizenship in a city must have been tribal. But judges in cities probably resided in those cities. Local urban residents possessed knowledge of local affairs.
The question is: Was real estate ownership required to be an urban citizen? Did an urban resident lose his citizenship if he lost ownership of his home? That could happen in one year. Was the threat of disenfranchisement hanging over the head of every urban real estate owner who did not have an inheritance in rural Israel? The Bible does not say. Any answer is speculative. But since lawful participation in holy warfare seems to be the best way to define the mark of citizenship, my conclusion is that aliens could become eligible for citizenship as adopted members of the tribes governing walled cities. Citizenship did not require the ownership of a home in a walled city. Urban citizenship was by confession, circumcision, and eligibility for holy war. It was not based on landed inheritance.
For an alien to become a citizen in Israel meant that he became a free man. Israelites were not allowed to own Israelite slaves as inheritable property (Lev. 25:46b). By becoming a citizen, the alien permanently established his legal claim as an Israelite.
This raises the question of access to citizenship. Deuteronomy 23 is the main section dealing with this. The context is that of an outsider wanting in. Deuteronomy 23:1 lists the eunuch. I think this refers to a foreign eunuch, not an Israelite.(14) If an Israelite warrior, for example, received such an injury, was he expelled from the congregation? Did he cease to be an Israelite? Did he become a heathen subject to permanent bondage? This does not seem reasonable. The passage refers to outsiders wanting in, including bastards, i.e., outsiders to the covenantal family. The context is not of an insider who is being forced out. In any case, adoption into an Israelite family could always overcome this restriction.(15) Caleb, the son of a Kenizite (Num. 32:12), was surely a citizen. He must have been adopted into the tribe of Judah (Num. 13:6), the tribe of Jacob's messianic promise (Gen. 49:10).(16)
Circumcised resident aliens were not citizens unless they were eligible to serve in God's holy army: adoption into the tribe under whose authority they fought. They did not otherwise possess the legal right to impose judicial sanctions as judges in Israel. Only citizens possessed this right. In other words, resident aliens could never become citizens except by adoption: the implicit or explicit acceptance of military service. Urban adoption was tribal, not familistic.
Uriah was called a Hittite. This may have meant that he was not a third-generation circumcised resident, and therefore not normally eligible for citizenship. But he was a warrior in God's holy army. This indicates that the resident alien could become a citizen through military service in the defense of Israel during wartime, even if he was not a third or tenth generation circumcised resident. If a circumcised alien was willing to risk dying for God in defense of Israel's boundaries, and if his offer to serve was accepted by the military, this made him a citizen: a man with the right to the office of judge - a sanctions-bringer.
The Sociology of Home Ownership
Poor people rent; rich people own; middle-class people pay off mortgages. Economic freedom produces incentives for owners to build housing for poorer people to rent. Poor people rent new quarters when they grow richer. People move to better quarters when they grow richer. Only the richest sons of the richest families stay put, decade after decade. They move from their palatial summer homes to their palatial winter homes. They are mobile; ownership is not. Permanent landed estates are an important mark of "old money." The dispersal of landed estates in Europe in the twentieth century through the drastic taxation of large inheritances was an aspect of class warfare: the middle classes, in the name of the poorer classes, voted away the wealth of the landed classes, whose heirs could no longer afford to inherit.(17)
In walled cities, the kinds of people who would have wound up as owners of urban housing would have been the same kinds of people who own urban property today. Richer people would have been dominant home owners. That is, those who were the most productive people in the economy would have been most likely to buy a home and retain a stake in society. This property right, irrespective of family creed and ritual, to buy and inherit housing in Mosaic Israel's walled cities was an important way for Israel to attract and keep very productive people from abroad. It would have made Israel's walled cities centers of entrepreneurship and trade.
Turnover of ownership would initially have been much more rapid in walled cities than in rural settings or in unwalled cities. Nineteenth-century American capitalism's story of "poor man to rich man to poor man" in three generations would have been much more common in Israel's walled cities than outside them, at least until population growth shrank the size of the average farm.(18)
The walled cities of the Canaanite era became the walled cities of Israel. Which cities would have been the walled cities of Canaan? First, cities that housed cultures with military aspirations: city-state empires. Second, cities with wealth to protect from invasion: trade centers. Third, cities with unique religious icons or practices that served the needs of a particular region: religious centers. Walled cities would have tended to be cities on the crossroads of trade. Their architecture, water systems, and similar "infrastructure" would have been suited to trading centers. Thus, their character as crossroad cities would not have been radically altered by Israelite civilization. This means that walled cities would have become cosmopolitan: world (cosmos) cities (polis = city). This raises the question of citizenship. It also raises the question of pluralism.
Pluralism: Cultural, Not Judicial
The walled city would have been the preferred place of residence for wealthy aliens and wealthy covenant converts who were not heirs of the generation of the conquest. These cities would have been the centers of cosmopolitan life, where ideas and customs from outside the land would have intermingled. This means that the ideas and customs of a particular foreign god would always have had competition from people who had faith in other gods. This would have created a true cultural pluralism within the legal framework of a biblically covenanted community. The walled cities would have been testing areas -- social laboratories -- for many ideas and practices, but always within the judicial boundary of God's law.
These testing areas were sealed off judicially from the land outside their walls. This seal was not absolute. Resident aliens could lease agricultural property outside the walls, but they had no assurance of being able to renew these leases, nor could they pass on legal access to rural land to heirs. The jubilee was designed to cut short any attempt by foreigners to colonize the land of Israel. Even urban colonization would have been restricted to ideas and customs that were not in violation of the laws of God. Urban aliens were not citizens. They could not serve as judges.
Not being citizens, resident aliens could not impose judicial sanctions in Mosaic Israel. They could not lawfully seek converts to their imported religions. Only the non-confessional expressions of these imported religious worldviews were legal in the public square. This is why cultural pluralism is not the same as judicial pluralism. Cultural pluralism within a holy commonwealth is stripped of theological confession and judicial sanctions.
The modern humanist world has made politics formally as pluralistic as culture is. This has created a situation in which politics has become polytheistic.(19) Beginning at the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Western nations have imposed immigration barriers in order to keep out foreigners, for fear of losing both culture and politics to hordes of aliens. The expansion of the welfare State has made such restrictions even more important: keeping aliens away from the public treasuries. But "alien" is not defined covenantally; it is defined culturally. National boundaries become walls barring too great a disruption of the established culture, however pluralistic it may already be. Barbed wire has replaced theological confession as the preferred means of discouraging immigrants.
In Mosaic Israel, foreign culture was bounded by urban walls, physiological walls (circumcision), and confessional walls. When the law was enforced, immigrants from foreign cultures (plural) could not become threats to Israel. God's word alone had judicial authority, so imported cultures had to conform to the covenant. The ethical and judicial terms of the covenant became filtering devices for sifting through the wheat and the chaff in every cultural import. There was no need for immigration barriers. There is no evidence that such barriers ever existed. Mosaic law does not authorize them, precisely because it does not authorize political pluralism.
Lest we forget: the ultimate immigration barrier is abortion.
The Levites' Cities There was one additional aspect of the jubilee land law: Levitical cities. There were 48 of these cities, six of which were cities of refuge (Num. 35:6-7). "Notwithstanding the cities of the Levites, and the houses of the cities of their possession, may the Levites redeem at any time. And if a man purchase of the Levites, then the house that was sold, and the city of his possession, shall go out in the year of jubile: for the houses of the cities of the Levites are their possession among the children of Israel. But the field of the suburbs of their cities may not be sold; for it is their perpetual possession" (Lev. 25:32-34).
The Levites were therefore likely to be urban dwellers at any point in Israel's history. They could not become owners of rural land, which was the inheritance of other tribes.(20) Their presence in a region would have been concentrated in a local tribal city. At the same time, they were dispersed as a tribe throughout the land, just as their cities were. This kept all of the tribes in close proximity to specialists in covenantal law and ritual. This also kept the nation free from priestly attempts to centralize rural land ownership, except in periods in which the jubilee inheritance laws were not enforced. Even in such rebellious periods, there was always the possibility that some subsequent generation would enforce the law. Anti-jubilee legal title was always at risk.
A Nation of City Dwellers
The Levites would have been urban residents. They advised rural people, but they lived primarily in cities. Their "home base" was urban. This fact should tell the commentators something, but none of them ever mentions it. Israel's legal structure was designed to produce an urban society. Covenant-keeping would bring rapid population growth. In a growing economy, wealth is increasingly based on intellectual labor and creativity, not on raw materials.(21) As agriculture becomes more efficient, fewer people need to work the land, or can afford to. Thus, the structure of jubilee ownership led the Levites to live in cities, which is where a growing percentage of the population of covenant-keeping Israel was expected by God to dwell as time went on -- and outside the Promised Land, also in cities. The Levites would become the major urban real estate owners except in non-Levite walled cities. Most people would have to rent or lease housing from them.
Let us not mistake what this would have meant: the accumulation of urban wealth by one tribe. Urban wealth would increasingly have become the dominant form of wealth in a growing economy, as it is today. Unless Israel conquered new lands, Israelites had only four places to go if they wanted to escape rural life: the original walled cities, unwalled cities, Levitical cities, and other nations. They could not permanently own homes in unwalled cities: a disadvantage. In the original walled cities, the influence of the Levites as advisors would have been strong. In Levitical cities, they would have been the predominant home owners, renting space to poorer residents. Thus, the structure of land ownership favored the Levites above all other tribes in times of righteousness. They were the most mobile tribe, the most urban tribe, and the most educated tribe. They had the greatest number of personal contacts across the nation. They would steadily have become the dominant tribe and the wealthiest tribe in a covenantally faithful society.
Why did God subsidize the Levites in this way? One economic reason was the fact that the Levites had an incentive to make sure that the jubilee laws were enforced. They had the authority to excommunicate civil rulers who refused to enforce God's civil law. Levitical families would receive back their homes in the same year that the other tribes' families received back their lands. But did they do this? It seems more likely that they refused to pressure civil magistrates to enforce the jubilee. If they did refuse, there would have been a class of homeless Levites who had to rent housing in their own cities. This would have led to class division within the priestly tribe. If the civil authorities enforced the jubilee only in Levitical cities, there would have been widespread resentment among the other tribes.
Conclusion This law had to be temporary. The tribal structure was not designed to be permanent; its purpose would end after Shiloh (the Messiah) had come: a member of the tribe of Judah. When the redeemer came, the right of redemption would end. The ideal of the city of God would then replace the ideal of the land of God.
The structure of land ownership under the jubilee system was clearly a wineskin destined to be broken, either through God's blessing -- urbanization and/or the conquest of new lands -- or God's cursing: conquest by other lands and dispersion. The inheritance of Joshua's day would fade into insignificance: through urbanization; through the extension of the boundaries of Israel outward, beyond the original land grant and the jubilee law; or through emigration, either voluntary or forced. In any case, the importance of the right of redemption would fade.
The right of redemption meant different things to different people in ancient Israel. For the rural land owner, it meant that he could collateralize a business loan or lease his property without the risk of disinheriting his children. An urban home could become the property of the lender if the borrower defaulted. It could become part of the lender's permanent legacy to his children. Also, an urban house was located in a commercial center. The benefits of lending to the urban real estate owner were greater than lending to a rural family with the land as collateral. This meant that a rent-seeking lender might not lend him so much, or at so low an interest rate, as he would lend the home-owning resident of a walled city. The collateral value of a home in a walled city was probably greater than the collateralized value of a dozen acres in the country.
The resident of a walled city lived in an economically active trading center that was cosmopolitan. Resident aliens could buy permanent ownership of homes in such cities. They could even become citizens. The influence of resident aliens in Israel was concentrated here, for only here could they buy homes and pass them to their children. The buying and selling of homes would have concentrated home ownership into the hands of rich families irrespective of their religion. There would have been considerable turnover in ownership, with successful merchants buying or foreclosing on the homes of the less successful. It would have been difficult for any family residing in a walled city to retain ownership of a home through several generations. In other words, home ownership in a walled city in Israel was far more like the modern world than home ownership was elsewhere in Israel. As we have seen, a growing Israelite population would have pushed the population out of rural Israel and into walled cities or outside the nation.
For the Levite, the jubilee redemption law was limited to Levitical cities. This would have tended to tie Levitical families to certain cities. A Levite could also buy a permanent home in a walled city, although he had no competitive advantage over any other buyer. He had no inheritance in the land outside the cities. This structure of inheritance would have made the Levite primarily an urban figure. If the economy and the population grew, the Levites would become the principal Jewish home owners in Israel. But since God's law is not designed to favor one family over another, long-term, we can safely conclude that the jubilee inheritance laws were not designed to be permanent. They would end when the Kinsman-Redeemer finished His work. As it turned out, it was in His office of Blood-Avenger that He ended the jubilee laws: in A.D. 70.
Summary God dwelt in Israel judicially.
The Israelites dwelt with Him as strangers because they had participated in genocide: the shedding of Canaanite blood.
Landed inheritance was based on the original corporate execution.
Title to rural land could rarely be permanently transferred out of a specific family, and then only to a priest.
Disinheritance was by covenantal excommunication: either personally (by the priests) or corporately (by God).
This corporate excommunication -- covenantal execution -- took place in Israel in A.D. 70.
A man would lease out his land because he (or his victim in a crime) valued the cash more than the expected physical output of the land until the jubilee year.
Charitable loans were governed by the sabbatical year of release.
A man could redeem his collateral at any time.
The kinsman-redeemer (go'el) could redeem property for his relative.
This was the same office as the blood-avenger.
God acted as Israel's go'el.
It was a model of the messianic office.
The go'el probably had a financial interest in buying back the land of his relative: to gain control over the property.
This was beneficial for the original owner: greater care of his land, plus (possibly) a job as a sharecropper.
The land would remain inside the family.
The poor man, becoming a servant on his own land, would get training to become more successful: hierarchy.
Inside walled cities, the redemption law worked differently: one year to redeem a home (residence).
Urban dwellers were Israelite families, resident aliens, traders, Levites, soldiers or central government officers, excommunicated Israelites, and convicted criminals who had temporarily lost their land.
No reason is offered for the one-year period of grace.
The urban home buyer remained uncertain for a year.
A wealthy buyer could more easily have borne the risk of being evicted within the year.
A business setback would have been one reason for selling.
Mortgage loans could have been collateralized by a home in walled cities.
Such loans were high-risk loans for borrowers: no jubilee-year redemption.
Rich resident aliens were probably active lenders: hoping the owners would default.
This would have tended to keep interest rates lower in walled cities: more lenders, greater security of collateral.
Turnover of ownership would have been more rapid than in rural areas or in unwalled cities.
Canaan's walled cities would have become Israel's walled cities.
These would have been cities located on trade routes.
Homes could have been bought for cash or leased with an option to buy.
Redemption would normally have been in cash: whatever the buyer had paid during the year.
The resident alien could attain a stake in society: a home.
Resident aliens could not be compelled to defend the city militarily: no civil oath, i.e., no participation in the numbering of God's holy army.
They could volunteer.
Citizenship was based on being eligible for military numbering: adoption into an Israelite tribe.
The threat of excommunication was this: you could be sold into permanent slavery if you got into financial trouble.
Cities were cosmopolitan centers: cultural pluralism.
The cities were cultural testing laboratories.
These laboratories were sealed off judicially from the land outside the walls.
Foreign nations therefore could not hope to colonize Israel except by force.
Urban home owners would have been the most productive people in walled cities.
This was one of Israel's lures to successful foreigners involved in trade: the possibility of becoming home owners.
The 48 cities of the Levites were governed by a different rule from other cities: Levites could redeem their homes at any time.
Their homes were returned to them automatically in the jubilee year.
This enabled them to be dispersed throughout the nation.
All the tribes were to have access to legal specialists: the Levites.
The cities were to become population centers.
The structure of jubilee ownership favored the accumulation of wealth by the Levites in times of covenantal obedience.
The economics of home ownership favored the Levites' enforcement of the jubilee year.
Their failure to enforce it must have led to two classes of Levites: home owners and renters.
The jubilee law was not intended to be permanent: only until Shiloh (messiah) came (Judah's tribe).
Footnotes:
1. Had the first three or four people who looked inside the Ark immediately been stricken with leprosy, as Miriam was stricken in the wilderness (Num. 12:10), the infraction would have ceased.
2. None of this is visible in W. Brueggemann's book, The Land (London: SPCK, 1978). He writes the following: "But Israel's Torah is markedly uninterested in a religion of obedience as such. It is rather interested in care for land. . ." (p. 60). Thus, he interprets the Mosaic law's universally acknowledged concern for ethics as a concern for ecology. You would be hard-pressed to find any interpretation of the Pentateuch more bizarre and misleading than this one. Then he quotes Joshua 1:7-8, God's command to be strong and courageous in the conquest of the land. Concludes Brueggemann: "The rhetoric is peculiar because it is an imperative to martial bravery and courage. But what is asked is not courage to destroy enemies, but courage to keep Torah" (p. 60). It is not the Bible's rhetoric that is peculiar. What is peculiar is Prof. Brueggemann's hermeneutic.
3. David Chilton, The Days of Vengeance: An Exposition of the Book of Revelation (Ft. Worth, Texas: Dominion Press, 1987).
4. David Daube, The New Testament and Rabbinic Judaism (1956), p. 272, cited in Donald A. Leggett, The Levirate and Goel Institutions in the Old Testament: With Special Attention to Ruth (Cherry Hill, New Jersey: Mack, 1974), p. 93.
5. Remove God from theology, and death points to another principle of ownership: the land owns man. The land stays; men depart. Man becomes a steward for the land, not of the land. This is the view of the radical ecological activist groups.
6. Rabbinical opinion was that only the walled cities in the era of Joshua's conquest were exempted from the jubilee rural land law. Arakhin 9:6; The Mishnah, trans., Herbert Danby (New York: Oxford University Press, [1933] 1987), p. 553.
7. The Bible does not say whether convicted criminals were part of the jubilee land law's primary benefit: a judicial return to the family's land, i.e., liberation from bondage. This would have meant freedom for all criminals in the jubilee year. This, in turn, would have created a subsidy to crime as the jubilee year approached: a conviction would not have led to a high price for his sale into bondage, since the time of potential servitude was steadily shrinking. The victims would have been short-changed. Because God defends the victim, it seems safe to conclude that there were two exceptions to the jubilee law of liberation: the apostate who had forfeited his inheritance and the criminal who was still under the requirement to pay off his victims or the person who bought him, with the purchase price going to the victims. This conclusion follows from two general principles of biblical law: 1) God does not subsidize evil; 2) victim's rights. If this is correct, then the criminal who was released from bondage would have had to wait until the next jubilee year to reclaim his land.
8. The concept of need, beyond mere physical survival, should never be discussed apart from the question of price.
9. The rate of interest in walled cities would have tended to be lower than elsewhere in Israel: better collateral, with more rich people seeking to lend money.
10. Though not interest-free: see above. There is no escape from the phenomenon of interest: a discount of future goods as against those same goods in the present.
11. See Chapter 30, below, under the heading, "Holy War, Citizenship, and Liberty."
12. Deborah, a prophetess, also served as a judge (Jud. 4:4). She served functionally as a holy warrior: senior in command (Jud. 4:8). As the sanctions-bringer against Sisera, Jael also served as a holy warrior (v. 22). Neither was circumcised, but both were under legal authority of circumcised males: husbands.
13. The one city that refused to submit to the Jews was Pella. W. H. C. Frend, The Rise of Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), p. 19. It was to Pella, located beyond the Jordan, that the Jerusalem church supposedly fled just before the siege of the city by Rome in A.D. 69. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, III:V.
14. Rushdoony argues that it was an Israelite who became a eunuch. R. J. Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law (Nutley, New Jersey: Craig Press, 1973), p. 84.
15. The adoption of the Ethiopian eunuch -- a foreigner -- into the New Covenant church (Acts 8:26-40) is indicative of the law of adoption.
16. He may not have been adopted into a family. This took place prior to the conquest of Canaan, so the issue of family adoption and landed inheritance was not yet relevant.
17. In the late 1980's, I was told by a Scottish-American Jacobite (a defender of the English crown rights of the heir of James II, who fled in 1688) that members of every Jacobite family that retains control through the National Trust of a Scottish or English castle are expected to volunteer their services for two years to serve as residents of these castles to oversee the tourists. Any time a family member is not a resident, he said, the hated Windsor family inherits the castle.
18. Tocqueville commented on the United States in the 1830's: "But wealth circulates there with incredible rapidity, and experience shows that two successive generations seldom enjoy its favors." Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, edited by J. P. Mayer (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, [1835] 1966), I:3, p. 54.
19. Gary North, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989), Part 3.
20. Priests occasionally could. See chapter 37.
21. Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1981); Warren T. Brookes, The Economy in Mind (New York: Universe, 1982); E. Calvin Beisner, Prospects for Growth: A Biblical View of Population, Resources, and the Future (Westchester, Illinois: Crossway, 1990).
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