37 THE REDEMPTION-PRICE SYSTEM And if it be a beast, whereof men bring an offering unto the LORD, all that any man giveth of such unto the LORD shall be holy. He shall not alter it, nor change it, a good for a bad, or a bad for a good: and if he shall at all change beast for beast, then it and the exchange thereof shall be holy. And if it be any unclean beast, of which they do not offer a sacrifice unto the LORD, then he shall present the beast before the priest: And the priest shall value it, whether it be good or bad: as thou valuest it, who art the priest, so shall it be. But if he will at all redeem it, then he shall add a fifth part thereof unto thy estimation. And when a man shall sanctify his house to be holy unto the LORD, then the priest shall estimate it, whether it be good or bad: as the priest shall estimate it, so shall it stand. And if he that sanctified it will redeem his house, then he shall add the fifth part of the money of thy estimation unto it, and it shall be his (Lev. 27:9-15).
The theocentric meaning of this passage is simple: God is to be honored by sacrifice. A person could give an animal or a piece of real estate to God through the priesthood. If he changed his mind later and decided to buy it back, he paid a redemption fee of one-fifth above the estimated value of the gift. The recipient, the priest, made this original estimation. God was willing to allow men to change their minds regarding previous sacrifices, but not at zero price. Once offered as a sacrifice, the property did change ownership: from the original owner to the priest. Whatever benefits the owner received from making the sacrifice -- self-esteem, public acclaim, etc. -- were purchased upon redemption: an additional payment of one-fifth.
This passage deals with the re-purchase of animals and houses that had been given to priests either for ritual sacrifice or for resale by the priests. Later in this chapter, I will consider the third redemption payment: fields. In each case, the cash redemption price required an additional 20 percent payment.(1) This was what distinguished a redemption price from the previous passage's payment structure, which was not a redemption price but rather an entry fee into the tribe designated by God for holy service. The visible difference between the two forms of voluntary payment to the priesthood -- dedication and devotion -- was the presence of a penalty payment. The dedicated item did not become hormah: God's whole burnt offering. With dedication there was a possibility of economic redemption: de-sanctification.
Pricing and Penalties A beast was designated by its owner as a sacrifice. The owner brought it to the priest. The beast was then identified as having become holy (kodesh). To be holy is to be set apart judicially, i.e., sanctified (kawdash). But the degree of separation was less than in the case of an offering that was devoted to God: it did not come under the ban.
The priests were Israel's agents of formal sanctification. They possessed the authority to set apart certain beasts for sacrificial purposes. The individual could not sacrifice his animal on his own authority if he expected to establish it as a judicially valid offering; he had to bring it to the priests. This dependence on the priesthood to validate sacramental offerings to God reinforced the social and legal authority of the priesthood. This arrangement did not limit men's ability to make economically significant offerings to God, but such unsanctified offerings were not sacramental. Laymen could show good faith, but they did not have the power to invoke God's sanctions authoritatively.(2)
Once it had been dedicated -- sanctified -- the beast's owner had the right to change his mind about sacrificing this particular beast. For whatever reason, he could choose to spare the life of this animal. The priest would then estimate the value of this beast according to its market price. An additional 20 percent had to be paid by the owner: a redemption (buy-back) price. This specific redemption price is not established in the text, in contrast to verses 2-8, where specific prices are stated. This is because the prices for sacrificial animals were not judicial prices; they were market prices. They varied according to market conditions. The redemption price of an animal was tied to its market price. This was also the case in the price of a house dedicated to the temple (vv. 14-15).
The priest had the authority to fix the redemption prices of dedicated items (vv. 12, 15, 19) other than fields. If he set a price too high, the owner would not redeem the item. The priest would then wind up owning an asset worth only what the free market determined, when he could have had a market price plus 20 percent. He would thereby have forfeited the opportunity to enjoy what speculators call a quick turnaround. He was allowed to obtain the market price for the animal by selling it back, keeping the extra 20 percent for himself. The presence of the 20 percent payment kept the priest's pricing relatively honest, i.e., in close approximation to market prices. So, in this instance, the extra payment imposed in the redemption of sanctified items was not a penalty payment. It was more of a "keep the priests' redemption price valuations honest" payment. We should probably think of it as a transaction fee. The giver proved his dedication to God by dedicating the beast to a priest and then paying a 20 percent transaction fee in order to redeem it.
Priests and Fields The jubilee law applied to houses in the 48 cities of the Levites and to the common land surrounding them (Lev. 25:32-33; Num. 35:7). These homes could not be permanently alienated from the families of the Levites. "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" (Lev. 25:32-33). The jubilee law of inheritance applied to the Levites' homes in Levitical cities and to rural land in Israel. The Levites could not lawfully be excluded from their inheritance, but they were excluded from the other tribes' inheritance. To maintain their own inheritance, they had to defend the inheritance of the other tribal families. They had to preach the jubilee law. God gave them an inheritance in their cities; this served as an economic incentive for them to declare the jubilee year.
Priests could not normally own rural land; it was not part of their inheritance at the time of the conquest of Canaan. When enforced, the jubilee law made it impossible for the priesthood to extend its political influence into the other tribes apart from the exposition and application of the Mosaic law. The jubilee law was designed to keep a centralized ecclesiocracy from being formed. The jubilee land law was primarily a law of citizenship. It was designed to provide a permanent judicial veto for the tribes. The tribal system, when reinforced by the jubilee law, decentralized political power in Israel.
Levites could lease rural properties, however. They could also receive rural properties as gifts until the next jubilee year. They were not prohibited from subleasing these sanctified fields. These fields would have provided them with a stream of income. Within a predominantly rural economy, this stream of income might have been significant, depending on the size and productivity of the dedicated plots.
A Righteous Bribe to Unrighteous Priests
The jubilee law's restriction on Levitical ownership of rural land was not primarily economic. The jubilee law itself was not primarily economic; it was judicial: a mark of freeman status for the heirs of the conquest. But there were economic incentives tied to the preservation of political freedom. A small but relevant aspect of these incentives was the law of the unredeemed field. Priests could in rare instances become permanent owners of rural land when an owner or his heirs failed to redeem a reclaimed dedicated plot. But in order for this transfer of title to take place, the jubilee year first had to be declared publicly throughout the nation. "And if he will not redeem the field, or if he have sold the field to another man, it shall not be redeemed any more. But the field, when it goeth out in the jubile, shall be holy unto the LORD, as a field devoted; the possession thereof shall be the priest's" (Lev. 27:20-21).
The existence of a law that tied the jubilee year to a permanent transfer of rural land to priestly members of the tribe of Levi delivered an important tool of influence into the hands of covenant-keeping rural land owners. If covenant-keeping men suspected that the civil authorities and the priests had conspired to avoid proclaiming the approaching jubilee year, they had a way to encourage the ecclesiastical authorities to proclaim the jubilee year on time. All the land owners had to do was dedicate some fields to the priests and then reclaim the fields for themselves, refusing to redeem these fields with cash plus a 20 percent payment. To inherit these fields at the jubilee, the priests would have to proclaim the jubilee year. The Mosaic law therefore provided the other tribes with a legal way to bribe otherwise dishonest priests into covenant-keeping with respect to the proclamation of the jubilee year.(3) This was an expensive way to persuade priests to honor the jubilee year; effective bribes normally involve considerable losses. At least until the plots shrank in size and value through population growth, this transfer of land could be significant.
Establishing the Redemption Price The law governing sanctified fields provides one of the few cases of a specified price in the Mosaic law. This law identified a single crop as the economic measure: barley. This law applied to a single case: a field voluntarily dedicated to a priest.
And if a man shall sanctify unto the LORD some part of a field of his possession, then thy estimation shall be according to the seed thereof: an homer of barley seed shall be valued at fifty shekels of silver. If he sanctify his field from the year of jubile, according to thy estimation it shall stand. But if he sanctify his field after the jubile, then the priest shall reckon unto him the money according to the years that remain, even unto the year of the jubile, and it shall be abated from thy estimation. And if he that sanctified the field will in any wise redeem it, then he shall add the fifth part of the money of thy estimation unto it, and it shall be assured to him (Lev. 27:16-19).
What was the redemption price of a piece of land? If sanctified land had been treated as if it had been any other capital asset, the free market would have informed owners and priests of its value. But this unique case was not to be decided by an appeal to the free market. Instead, the calculation had to begin with an estimation of a quantity of barley seed. As we shall see, the appropriate unit of measurement to define the limits of a dedicated field was the field's output: one homer of barley seed per year. Nevertheless, the grammar of the text does not specify whether "seed" in this case law refers to input (seeds planted) or output (seeds harvested).(4) Because of input-output ratios, I accept the "output" interpretation (see below). Also, because prices are established in terms of the expected value of a resource factor's future output, I accept the output view's interpretation of "seed."
This case law specifies a particular crop: barley seed. It also specifies a unit of volume: homer (pronounced "khomer"). It refers to a unit of money: a shekel of silver. It refers to a number: 50. We must now seek to make sense of the passage: the redemption value of the land.
A Perplexing Translation
From Leviticus 27:2-8, we know that 50 shekels of silver represented a great deal of money. It was sufficient to serve as a major barrier against an adult male's entry into the tribe of Levi (Lev. 27:3).(5) Fifty shekels of silver bought an adult male slave in the ancient Near East.(6) The average wage of a worker was one shekel of silver per month.(7) We must bear this in mind as we study verse 16.
The literal Hebrew text of the pricing clause of verse 16 is somewhat obscure -- five nouns without a verb, plus a numerical adjective: homer barley seed fifty shekels silver. The standard interpretation of this clause links the price of a homer of barley to the jubilee year. The difficult question is this: To what does the phrase "fifty shekels silver" refer? There is a sharp division of opinion between translators and commentators. The translators link the 50 shekels to the unit of measurement: the price of one homer of barley seed. The commentators link the 50 shekels to the jubilee cycle: the combined prices of an annual homer of barley seed through the cycle.
I side with the commentators. Here is my reasoning. It has been estimated that in Mesopotamia, the familiar price of barley was one shekel of silver per homer.(8) Because the jubilee year occurred every fiftieth year, it is tempting to conclude that the text really means output (or perhaps input) per land unit of one homer of barley a year for 50 years. A homer is variously estimated at between 29 gallons and 59 gallons.(9) Wenham says that a field yielding (output) a homer of barley seed was valued at one shekel, or 50 shekels per jubilee period. Harrison takes the view that "seed" means input: "The land being vowed was valued by the priest in terms of the amount of seed required for sowing it annually, each homer of barley representing a price of fifty shekels for the forty-nine year period. This is comparable to Mesopotamian practices, where a homer of barley cost a shekel."(10) The comment by Rashi(11) is similar: ". . . an area requiring a Khor of barley seed . . . is redeemable by fifty shekels. . . ."(12) All agree: 50 shekels per jubilee cycle.
There is one minor problem with this interpretation: the maximum legal planting period was not 50 years or 49 years but 42 years. The seven sabbatical years were supposed to be honored. In the year prior to the sabbatical year of the jubilee year there would be a triple crop (Lev. 25:21), so the total output was the equivalent of 44 years of crops. If we figure from seed inputs, then the total is less: 42 years. The presumption has to be that a particular plot of ground that on average either can sustain (input view) a homer of barley seed or else can produce (output view) a homer of barley seed each year is to be valued at the beginning of the 49-year period at 50 shekels of silver. This seems to be a reasonable interpretation of the 50-shekel requirement.(13)
Output or Input?
My interpretation of the passage is that it refers to the crop's output of seeds rather than input of seeds. I begin with contemporary units of measurement. There are 8 gallons to the bushel. If the biblical homer was 59 gallons -- the high estimate -- this was about 7.3 bushels of barley. With modern agricultural techniques, an acre of land can produce up to 50 bushels of barley, or 6.8 homers.(14) In the Old Testament era, the land's output would have been far lower. At one-quarter of today's productivity, this would have been under 13 bushels per acre, or slightly under two homers. Using the high estimate of what a homer of barley was, we conclude that the land required to grow one homer was about half an acre. Using the lower estimate of 29 gallons per homer, or slightly over three bushels, this output would have required a quarter of an acre. For a small farm -- say, 10 acres -- this seems like a reasonably sized plot to dedicate to the priesthood.
If we are discussing seed inputs, a modern farmer can get almost a 20-to-one increase from seeds planted. This ratio of output to input would have been far less in ancient Israel, but still the amount of acreage necessary to seed (input) one homer of barley would have been quite small. It therefore seems more likely that the text refers to output rather than input: the land required to produce one homer of barley.
The Economics of the Translators' Version
Were the King James and other versions' translators correct? Does the reference to 50 shekels mean "50 shekels per homer" rather than "50 homers of barley per jubilee cycle," i.e., one shekel of silver times 50? If the translation is correct, this redemption price was astronomical: 50 times the average market price of a homer of barley, plus 20 percent. But this would have been only the beginning of the redemption burden. The field's potential output of barley per year was then multiplied by 44: the years of production remaining until the next jubilee year. So, the total number of homers of barley that a field could produce was multiplied by 44 years, and this gross output figure was then multiplied by 50 shekels. There was a prorated reduction in price in terms of the number of years remaining until the jubilee, but with these huge payments, such prorating would have been economically irrelevant to most Israelites.
What was the redemption payment all about? It covered the case of a person who had vowed to transfer a field or a field's output to a priest. At some point before the jubilee, the original owner decided to reclaim the field for himself. To do this lawfully, he had to pay a cash redemption price to the priest at the time of the reclaiming. If the formal redemption price was established at 50 shekels per homer of barley, as the familiar translations suggest, then the typical owner could afford to redeem his field only in the final sabbatical year before the jubilee, when the unseeded output of the field would be minimal, or in the jubilee year itself.(15) If he or his surviving heirs decided not to redeem it, his family lost the field forever. The translators' interpretation of the 50 shekels -- applying to a homer of barley -- would lead us to the conclusion that the details of the prorated redemption payment structure were merely symbolic, for almost no one could have afforded to redeem his field much before the jubilee year.
If the conventional translation is correct, we are led inexorably to this unpalatable conclusion: once the owner dedicated the field to the priesthood, he could not expect to redeem it until the jubilee year. The price would have been far too high. This seems to be too radical a requirement: a redemption price totally disconnected from the market price. Conclusion: the reference to 50 shekels of silver refers to the fixed judicial price of a field that would produce one homer of barley per season through the entire jubilee cycle. The closer to the jubilee year, the lower the field's remaining redemption price. In short, the redemption price of a field capable of producing one homer of barley per year was 50 shekels of silver at the beginning of the jubilee cycle, plus 20 percent.
My conclusion is that the commentators' conventional interpretation, not the translators' conventional translation, is correct: the prorated redemption price was one shekel of silver per year remaining until the jubilee year per homer-producing unit of land. This means that translators should abandon the familiar translation: "[a] homer [of] barley seed [shall be priced at] fifty shekels [of] silver." It should be translated as follows: "[A field producing a] homer [of] barley seed [per year shall be priced at] fifty shekels [of] silver [at the beginning of the jubilee cycle]." The problem is, such a translation imports so much interpretive material into the text that translators probably will never accept this translation. They will try to stick with the sparse Hebrew text as closely as possible. But when they do this, they destroy the economic relevance of the prorated land-redemption system. They create a text that misinterprets the law.
Priestly Inheritance We now return to the unique law governing the inheritance of rural land by priests: "And if he will not redeem the field, or if he have sold the field to another man, it shall not be redeemed any more. But the field, when it goeth out in the jubile, shall be holy unto the LORD, as a field devoted; the possession thereof shall be the priest's" (Lev. 27:20-21).
There were only two ways that a priest could acquire rural property in Israel. The first case is easy to understand: the land's owner had dedicated the field to the priesthood. He or his heirs then refused to pay the priest its output, year by year, and also refused to pay the redemption price. The priest's family automatically inherited it by default in the jubilee. On the other hand, if the priest took immediate control of the dedicated plot, working the land himself or leasing it out, the owner would automatically receive it back at the jubilee. Here was a risk for the owner. When the priests or their agents took immediate control over dedicated land, they had a short-term economic incentive not to declare the jubilee year. They might prefer to keep working these dedicated lands for themselves indefinitely. But they would incur a long-term economic penalty for such lawlessness: land owners would be unlikely in the future to dedicate land to the priesthood. The priesthood would also lose respect in the eyes of the nation.
The second case -- leased land -- is more difficult to understand. The passage is no longer clear to us grammatically. There are two ways of interpreting it. First, a man dedicated a field to a priest, but then he sold (leased long term) the field to another man. If we understand the economics of the dedicated field as a gift of the output of the field, with the owner of the field cultivating the land and giving the produce to the priest after each harvest, then the subsequent lease appears to be a case of a default on the original pledge. The defaulting individual had leased his pledged field to another man. This lease contract was honored by the priest, but in the year of the jubilee, the field reverted to the priest.
The second interpretation assumes that a man who had already leased out his land to another person then dedicated a plot of ground to the priest. The lessor's contract with the lessee was honored by the priest. The lessee was allowed to use the field during the years remaining until the jubilee, but then ownership was transferred permanently to the priest.
In both interpretations, the claim of the lessor (land owner) took immediate precedence over the claim of the priest, but the priest became a permanent beneficiary in the jubilee year. I think both interpretations are plausible, but the first one seems more plausible. The land owner indebted himself to the priest: an implicit promise to farm the property for the priest's benefit. He subsequently sought to escape this debt burden without paying the field's prorated redemption price (including the 20 percent penalty) before leasing the land to another person. The new penalty was the permanent forfeiture of the field. The original owner thereby disinherited his heirs of the value of this property. The heirs still owned the remaining (non-dedicated) fields, but the economic value of the judicially sanctified field had been permanently removed from them.
Disinherited Sons and Priestly Heirs The claims of the original owner were primary until the jubilee. He could evict a priest or the priest's agent from previously dedicated land. In times of famine, for example, an owner might decide to evict the priest or stop paying the priest the output of the dedicated field. But if, by the time of the jubilee, he had refused to redeem the land by the payment of one shekel of silver for every year of the eviction, plus 20 percent, he lost ownership of the land.
The priests had the possibility of inheriting rural land if the vow-designated land was not redeemed by the vow-taker. In such cases, the potential beneficiaries obviously had an economic incentive to oppose the debasement of the shekel (Isa. 1:22). A shekel of falling value would have made it less expensive for those who faced the permanent loss of their land to redeem it prior to the jubilee.
Would the owner of rural land ever have dedicated all of its output to a priest? Not unless he was willing to risk disinheriting his sons. If he was subsequently forced by economic pressures to reclaim the land's output, and then he or his sons failed to redeem the land at the mandatory price, plus 20 percent, all of his land would go to the priest in the jubilee year. Thus, there was an economic restraint on the over-commitment of land to the priesthood. The heirs of the conquest were to this degree protected. The only person who would have committed most or all of his land's output to a priest would have been a very rich absentee landlord who made his money in commerce. But to dedicate all of one's land in a grand display of wealth was risky. This person might subsequently fall into economic distress and be compelled to lease his property to another. The heirs of this individual would then have lost ownership of all the dedicated land. If their father had pledged all of their land, they would have lost their guaranteed status as freemen. Thus, the high risks of default would have tended to reduce the number of such large-scale pledges to priests.
Nevertheless, the possibility of disinheritance did exist. If a father was so distressed by the ethical rebellion of all of his sons, he had the ability to disinherit them. He could not disinherit one son among many in this way, but he could disinherit all of them. He could do this by dedicating all of his landed inheritance to a priest. He would then do one of two things: lease this land to someone else, or reclaim the land's output for himself. If his sons refused to redeem the land before the jubilee, or could not afford to, they lost their inheritance forever. The priest could not transfer the land back to the original owner. To do so would have meant disinheriting the tribe of Levi. The Mosaic law made no provision for such repatriation to the original owner's family. Once a piece of rural land passed into the possession of a priest, it had to remain there until he died. Then it passed to his nearest of kin. Unredeemed dedicated land became devoted land at the jubilee. It could never again lawfully leave the jurisdiction of the priesthood.
We have no historical example of this in Old Testament, but we have the archetype example in the New Testament: the transfer of title of the kingdom of God from the Jews to the church. How was this accomplished? First, Jesus announced that God the Father had promised the kingdom's inheritance to His new priesthood, the church. "Therefore I say 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 a formal announcement of God's dedication of the Promised Land. But such a transfer of ownership could be made only to a priest. Rural land could be lawfully transferred from the family of one tribe to the family of another tribe only in this unique case: the formal dedication of the land's output to a priest followed by a failure to deliver this output and a failure to redeem it.
This New Testament transfer of ownership was not to be to a single family of the priesthood; rather, it was made to a new nation. That nation is the church, which constitutes a new priesthood: a kingdom of priests (I Pet. 2:9). The representative priest of this nation of priests was the High Priest. The High Priest is Jesus Christ (Heb. 9). This public dedication was legally secured for the church by the death of Jesus Christ, i.e., the death of the Testator. "For a testament is of force after men are dead: otherwise it is of no strength at all while the testator liveth" (Heb. 9:17). The publicly visible evidence of the transfer of the High Priest's inheritance to His heirs came when the Holy Spirit fell on the church at Pentecost (Acts 2).
Old Covenant Israel had refused to honor this dedication. They crucified the new High Priest. They did not redeem the land. Prior to the next jubilee, the output of the land was not delivered to the new priests, nor was the mandatory 20 percent redemption payment. That is, the dedicated output of the land was not redeemed by the heirs whose legal title had been at risk. The Jews not only did not pay the new priesthood the mandatory redemption price of 20 percent; they persecuted the church. This secured the irrevocable transfer of the kingdom by the new priesthood.
When was the next jubilee year after the dedication? When did the transfer of legal title to the heirs of the High Priest take place? James Jordan's study of New Testament chronology dates Jesus' death in A.D. 30 (Jewish year: 3960). Paul was converted shortly thereafter, after Pentecost. The next year, Jordan concludes from his study of the calendar after the exiles' return from Medo-Persia, was the seventh sabbath year in the final jubilee cycle.(16) The jubilee came in 3962, the year that Paul's ministry to the gentiles began.(17) This, I conclude, was the date of the transfer to the church of legal title to the kingdom of God: the fulfillment of Jesus' prophecy in Matthew 21:43.
Old Covenant Israel's failure to redeem this dedicated land was God's means of disinheriting all of His rebellious Israelite sons. They could be legally disinherited only as a family unit; selective disinheritance by a father was not possible. So long as any of the family's land remained in the father's possession, all of his sons would have a piece of the inheritance. Disinheritance would not remove them from their tribe. Tribal membership secured their legal status as freemen. Thus, disinheritance was in this case economic, not judicial. The sons would have no lawful claim on any portion of the land. In A.D. 70, the self-disinherited sons of God were evicted by Rome from the temple. After Bar Kochba's rebellion of A.D. 133-35, they were evicted by Rome from the land. The diaspora began.
The idea so prevalent in modern fundamentalism that the modern State of Israel is in some way biblically entitled to God's original grant of land to Abraham, which was secured by Joshua during the conquest, is inescapably a denial of the authority and binding character of God's revealed law. The Old Covenant sons of God forfeited forever their legal title to the Promised Land and their guaranteed citizenship in the kingdom of God by their persecution of the New Covenant priests, the heirs of the dedication: the church. The covenantal heirs of these disinherited sons can reclaim their citizenship in the kingdom only as adopted sons, i.e., as members of God's New Covenant church. There can never be a repatriation of either the Promised Land or the kingdom of God to the Jews. Once a dedicated piece of land passed into the possession of a priest at the jubilee, there was only one way for it ever to be transferred back to the original owner. The original owner had to become a priest, and not merely a priest: the nearest of kin to the priest who had been given the land. He had to be adopted by that priest. Only through the death of this adopting kinsman-priest could the original owner legally regain possession of his former inheritance.
The Kinsman-High Priest made this offer of adoption to every Jew as well as to every gentile. "But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name" (John 1:12). He still makes it. There is no other way to secure a piece of the now-devoted inheritance in history, which is mandatory in order to secure it in eternity.
This means that the land comprising the modern State of Israel is not the Promised Land of the Old Covenant. It also has no judicial connection to the kingdom of God or any prophecy regarding this kingdom. The kingdom of God had been connected to the land prior to Jesus' ministry and death, but the legal transfer of the kingdom took place at the time of the final jubilee, when the Jews redeemed neither land nor kingdom from the church. God transferred to the church, the new priesthood, lawful title to the kingdom at the resurrection of Jesus (Matt. 28:18-20), but He allowed the Jews to stay in control over both the land and the temple until A.D. 70. When they failed to redeem the land from the church prior to the next (and final) jubilee, title automatically transferred to the new priesthood. The land ceased to have any covenantal relevance in A.D. 70, when it came under God's vengeance.(18)
Lessees: Exempt from Earthly Negative Sanctions It was not just the original land owner who had the option of rewarding the priests by a temporary donation of their land's net output. So could the person who had leased land from an original owner. But his situation was judicially unique: he was spared the 20 percent redemption penalty. "And if a man sanctify unto the LORD a field which he hath bought, which is not of the fields of his possession; Then the priest shall reckon unto him the worth of thy estimation, even unto the year of the jubile: and he shall give thine estimation in that day, as a holy thing unto the LORD" (Lev. 27:22-23). This law specified that the field would return to the original owner in the jubilee year (Lev. 27:24). The law protected the original land owner from the consequences of vow-breaking by the lessee.
To Protect the Priests
The lessee also escaped the penalty of disinheritance. A lessee who broke his vow of dedication and reclaimed the land was not threatened by the loss of the land in the jubilee. In fact, this law specifies no penalty at all. It does not state that the lessee must forfeit an equivalent quantity of his own land. This means that there was far greater likelihood that he would break his vow of dedication, compared to an original owner. The question arises: Why was the lessee exempt from the 20 percent penalty? If he was not subject to the threat of losing the dedicated land -- it was not his land -- then why wasn't the redemption penalty even greater than 20 percent? Why were no penalties imposed? The text does not say. We can only guess. Let us guess intelligently.
The lessee owed the original owner regular payments unless he had already paid the owner in advance. This placed him in a weaker economic position, other things being equal, than the original land owner. Either he bore greater contractual risk than an original owner would have borne or, if he had already paid the owner in advance, he had less cash available to redeem the land from the priest. Since the goal of a land-dedication vow was to reward the priests, excessive economic barriers to redemption would have been a disincentive for such vows. Thus, the priest bore greater risk of having his plans disrupted by a lessee than by an original owner. The lessee was more likely to reclaim the dedicated property than an original owner was.
If he paid no 20 percent penalty for breaking his vow to the priest, what would have protected the priests? They were protected by the inescapable phenomenon of interest. The present value of future goods is less than the present value of identical present goods. This discount is called the rate of interest.(19) The priest could lawfully demand an immediate cash payment of all the shekels remaining to be paid until the jubilee. But the present value of the money to be accrued in the future is less than the present value of the same number of monetary units paid today in cash. So, the lessee paid a penalty to the priest: the difference between the present value of the cash shekels and the present value of those shekels to come. This was not the 20 percent penalty, but it was nonetheless a penalty.(20)
The fact is, however, the law provided no explicit earthly negative sanctions for a priest to impose on a lessee who reclaimed previously dedicated land. The priest had to rely on the conscience of the lessee not to reclaim it. We see here that the long-term sanctity of the land as inheritance judicially outweighed the short-term sanctity of the land in priestly dedication. Only original owners could bring this unique sanction of disinheritance on their heirs.
A Judicial Price: Fixed by Law Why not use a free market price in establishing the redemption price of dedicated land? Why did the text specify a specific price and a specific crop? Samson Raphael Hirsch, the early nineteenth-century Orthodox Jewish commentator, offered this explanation: this case "was the one unique case, standing quite by itself, where a field could be sold and the purchase ultimately become permanent. Hence for buying back, for the redemption of such a field which could eventually become a permanent purchase there could be no market price ascertained, so that the fixing of a universal fixed value was a necessity."(21) I do not accept his explanation, but I do accept his identification of the uniqueness of this fixed price -- a non-market price.
When a specific price is established by the Mosaic law, it becomes a judicial price, not a market price. Hirsch acknowledged that this was not a market price. What is not plausible is his argument that the market price in this case would have been difficult to ascertain. At the beginning of a jubilee cycle, it would have been somewhat lower than the lease price.
There was another reason for a judicial price in this instance. The underlying problem was the threat of monopolistic exploitation by the priest -- the possible misuse of his authority to declare arbitrarily a redemption price. The judicial price of 50 shekels protected the original owner. It was the priest's responsibility in all the redemption cases to declare the price, to which a 20 percent payment was added. In this unique case, however, the priest was given an opportunity to take permanent possession of land belonging to a member of another tribe. The temptation to cheat would have been very high. If the priest deliberately set the price too high, the original owner or his heirs could not afford to redeem the field until the jubilee year or the sabbatical year immediately preceding it.(22) But economic conditions might change prior to the jubilee year. The head of the family might be tempted later to lease it out if he needed money. The family would then lose the property forever at the jubilee year. The terms of redemption were therefore specified by law so that there could be no doubt on the part of the field's redeemer or the civil and ecclesiastical authorities exactly what was owed by the redeemer.
Restricting the Accumulation of Priest-Owned Land In the European Middle Ages, deathbed transfers of land to the church were common. The church and especially its monastic orders accumulated huge tracts of land over the centuries as a result of these and other forms of land transfer.(23) In contrast, a deathbed legacy of land to the priesthood on a permanent basis was almost impossible to make in Israel. A dying man might dedicate a plot of land to a priest, but the man's heirs could redeem it early or else wait for the jubilee year. The only possible deathbed transfer that might permanently have alienated land was a deathbed legacy from an owner -- probably debt-ridden -- who had leased out his plot of land and who then dedicated it to a priest. This assumes that the second interpretation of the leased land default is correct, which I do not accept. But if that interpretation is correct, then economically incompetent men were the most likely sources of such permanent transfers of rural land in ancient Israel. But it was the wealthy medieval landowner, not the poor peasant, who was the source of deathbed legacies.
C. W. Previté-Orton has commented on the two-fold threat to the medieval church in the twelfth century: too many lax men joining the monastic orders and too much wealth donated to these orders. "The extraordinary growth of monasticism new and old in the century of Church reform undoubtedly brought too many into the cloister, whether as converts or oblates, who had no true or lasting vocation for the ascetic life; and the enormous landed wealth lavished on them by the laity, either in devotion or in fear of Judgment Day, proved a dangerous ally of laxity and degeneration."(24) This was not true in Mosaic Israel. First, the entry price system of Leviticus 27:2-8 reduced the likelihood of the influx of poor people into the tribe of Levi. Second, the jubilee law, when coupled with the price of 50 shekels per barley-producing land unit at the beginning of the jubilee cycle (Lev. 27:16) and the permanent transfer law of Leviticus 27:20-21, reduced the likelihood of deathbed transfers of land. Such a transfer was a penalty, not a righteous gift.
Conclusion The redemption price of dedicated rural land was a judicial price, not a market price. It was somewhat arbitrary, although not excessively so, given the conventional Mesopotamian price of one shekel of silver per homer of barley. It provided a rough means of estimating the redemption price of a piece of land.
The presence of a penalty payment of 20 percent identified as redemption prices three of the four prices in this passage: beasts, houses, and owner-dedicated fields.(25) These three penalty payments also served to keep the priests honest in making their estimation of the redemption price of any property. If the priests estimated the price above the market price, the potential redeemer would not buy it back, so the priest would forfeit the 20 percent bonus available to him.
The law governing the redemption of sanctified fields created a unique opportunity for the priests: the right to inherit rural land. If the sanctified plot was subsequently reclaimed by the owner but not redeemed, it became the inheritance of the priest in the jubilee year. This law served as the land owners' means of bribing a corrupt priesthood into announcing the jubilee year. The priests could not inherit unredeemed sanctified land unless they proclaimed the jubilee year. Set apart once by vow, the land could not be reclaimed -- de-sanctified -- by the vow-taking owner except by a cash redemption payment plus a 20 penalty.
This law placed a major restriction on the ability of a land owner to leave land to a priest. His heirs had the right to redeem the land. Thus, deathbed transfers of rural land were highly unlikely. The land owner would have had to sanctify the land on his deathbed without his heirs' paying an ever-smaller redemption price as the jubilee year approached.
Summary The redemption price of 20 percent applied to animals, houses, and fields -- dedicated items -- that had been given to a priest, i.e. sanctified.
A dedicated item could be de-sanctified through a redemption payment.
A dedicated beast did not come under the ban: hormah.
A priest sanctified the dedicated offering; the owner did not.
Such a sanctified offering was sacramental.
The redemption price in these three cases was a market-governed price.
There was economic pressure on the priest to avoid setting the redemption price too high: forfeited income.
The 20 percent penalty payment pressured the priests to keep redemption prices honest, i.e., in line with the market price.
The priests had no inheritance in rural Israel.
The jubilee land law was designed to prohibit the creation of an ecclesiastical-political State.
The jubilee land law was primarily a citizenship law.
Priests were allowed to lease rural land in Israel.
Priests could inherit unredeemed and dedicated rural land.
To claim their inheritance, they had to declare the jubilee year.
This made it possible for other tribes to bribe priests into declaring the jubilee year: dedicate plots of land and then fail to redeem them.
Because a priest was the potential heir of the field, the Mosaic law specified a fixed (judicial) redemption price.
The redemption price for dedicated fields was specified: 50 shekels of silver, plus 20 percent, at the beginning of the jubilee cycle for each field capable of producing one homer of barley per year.
The conventional translation is incorrect: the specified price of the barley was not 50 shekels of silver per homer.
The commentators are correct: the redemption price of a one-homer-per-year field was 50 shekels of silver at the beginning of a jubilee cycle.
A priest could inherit rural land 1) if the output of a dedicated field was retained by an owner who subsequently refused to redeem it at the jubilee, or 2) the owner leased the dedicated field to someone else, and then refused to redeem it.
A lessee could redeem his dedicated land by paying the full value of its redemption price in cash, but not the 20 percent penalty.
Priests were compensated by the difference between the value of the cash and the present (discounted) value of future income: the rate of interest.
There were no earthly sanctions for priests to impose on lessees who reclaimed dedicated land without paying a redemption price.
Deathbed legacies of land to the priesthood were almost impossible in Israel, for the heirs could normally redeem the land from the priests before the transfer was sealed at the jubilee.
Footnotes:
1. There was an exception, as we shall see: a lessee paid a cash redemption price but no 20 penalty.
2. One of the fundamental institutional differences between magical religion and biblical religion is seen in this distinction between sanctified offerings and unsanctified offerings. The person who invokes magic believes that his formal incantations and rituals allow him to manipulate supernatural power directly and authoritatively. Biblical religion denies such authority to all those who have not been anointed, either by birth or adoption (Old Covenant priesthood or prophetic anointing) or by the laying on of hands (New Covenant ministry-priesthood). The priest in the New Covenant does not offer a sacrifice to God (Heb. 9); rather, he offers to church members the sacramental means of covenant renewal: the Lord's Supper.
3. On the moral legitimacy of bribing corrupt judges, see Gary North, "In Defense of Biblical Bribery," in R. J. Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law (Nutley, New Jersey: Craig Press, 1973), Appendix 5. "A gift is as a precious stone in the eyes of him that hath it: whithersoever it turneth, it prospereth" (Prov. 17:8). "A gift in secret pacifieth anger: and a reward in the bosom strong wrath" (Prov. 21:14).
4. Some commentators believe that this referred to the amount of seed the field would produce (output view). Others think it means the amount of seed that a field would absorb (input view). Wenham, who follows R. de Vaux (Ancient Israel): "seed" refers to the field's output of barley seed, not its input of barley seed. Gordon J. Wenham, The Book of Leviticus (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1979), p. 340n. I agree with this view.
5. See Chapter 36.
6. Wenham, p. 338, citing I. Mendelsohn, Slavery In the Ancient Near East (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949), pp. 117ff.
7. Wenham, idem., citing Mendelsohn, ibid., p. 118.
8. Ibid., p. 340. Wenham cites R. P. Maloney, Catholic Biblical Quarterly (1974), pp. 4ff; P. Garelli and V. Nikiprowetsky, Le Proche-Orient Asiatique: Les Empires mésopotamiens, Israel (University of Paris, 1974), pp. 273-74, 285-86.
9. Ibid., p. 339.
10. R. K. Harrison, Leviticus: An Introduction and Commentary (Downers Grove, Illinois: Inter-Varsity Press, 1980), p. 237.
11. Rabbi Solomon (Shlomo) Yizchaki (1040-1105).
12. Chumash with Targum Onkelos, Haphtaroth and Rashi's Commentary, A. M. Silbermann and M. Rosenbaum, translators, 5 vols. (Jerusalem: Silbermann Family, [1934] 1985 [Jewish year: 5745]), III, p. 131b.
13. Reasonable as in "more reasonable than the alternative." The fact is, paying 50 shekels of silver in cash at the beginning of the jubilee cycle for 44 years of output meant paying far too much. The buyer-redeemer was forfeiting the interest that could have been earned. The market value of the final harvested homer of barley 48 years later was a small fraction of the value of a homer of barley at the beginning.
14. I say this on the authority of the highly efficient farmer who leases the ICE's farm in Maryland.
15. Legally, the crop could not be harvested. Probably this would have been interpreted as a crop of zero output. If the estimation was made in terms of barley seed used for planting, the price had to be zero, since it was illegal for anyone to plant in a sabbatical year or a jubilee year.
16. If Jordan is correct that Jesus was sacrificed in the year prior to the seventh sabbath, this would have been the year scheduled by God for the miraculous triple harvest. This was the year of the largest firstfruits offering, which was delivered to the priesthood at Pentecost.
17. Jordan, "Jubilee, Part 3," Biblical Chronology, V (April 1993), [p. 2]. See also, "Chronology of the Gospels," ibid, IV (Dec. 1993). Jordan's forthcoming book, The Date of Creation, will provide the evidence in an easily accessible source.
18. David Chilton, The Days of Vengeance: An Exposition of the Book of Revelation (Ft. Worth, Texas: Dominion Press, 1987).
19. Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1949), ch. 19.
20. Those who deny the universal phenomenon of time-preference (interest) will have to seek for another explanation of how the priests were protected from disruptions in their plans: forfeited vows by lessees.
21. Samson Raphael Hirsch, The Pentateuch: Leviticus (part II), translated by Isaac Levy (Gateshead, England: Judaica Press, 1989), p. 825.
22. In those two years, the input of the land was zero -- no seeding was legal -- and the output was not legal for harvesting. Thus, even a supposed 50-shekel per homer price would not have been a barrier to redemption. The legal market price of the crop was still zero.
23. Marc Bloch, Feudal Society (University of Chicago Press, [1940] 1961), pp. 208-9; R. W. Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1970), pp. 261-63.
24. C. W. Previté-Orton, The Shorter Cambridge Medieval History, 2 vols. (Cambridge: At the University Press, [1952] 1966), I, p. 506.
25. The fourth, exceptional price was the field dedicated by a leaseholder. He had to pay in cash the fixed shekel payments remaining on the property until the jubilee year, a price not discounted by the rate of interest.
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