V. Inheritance
24
THE SABBATICAL YEAR And the LORD spake unto Moses in mount Sinai, saying, Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, When ye come into the land which I give you, then shall the land keep a sabbath unto the LORD. Six years thou shalt sow thy field, and six years thou shalt prune thy vineyard, and gather in the fruit thereof; But in the seventh year shall be a sabbath of rest unto the land, a sabbath for the LORD: thou shalt neither sow thy field, nor prune thy vineyard. That which groweth of its own accord of thy harvest thou shalt not reap, neither gather the grapes of thy vine undressed: for it is a year of rest unto the land. And the sabbath of the land shall be meat for you; for thee, and for thy servant, and for thy maid, and for thy hired servant, and for thy stranger that sojourneth with thee, And for thy cattle, and for the beast that are in thy land, shall all the increase thereof be meat (Lev. 25:1-7).
This law is a recapitulation and extension of the sabbath laws of Exodus 23:10-12. It was not in origin a law of the jubilee, although it was tied to it; it was a law of the sabbath. This leads us to an important implication: the law of the jubilee was an extension of the sabbatical principle of rest. The sabbatical year law was primary; the jubilee land laws were secondary. The sabbatical year law was more fundamental than the jubilee land laws.
We begin our study of the jubilee laws with a consideration of the meaning of the sabbath: rest for land as well as for man. We need to discover the meaning of "rest" in the context of the sabbatical year. We also need to recognize that this law was a Mosaic land law: an aspect of the land as God's covenantal agent (Lev. 18:25, 28).
Sabbath and Capital Preservation The law of God is theocentric. Whatever secondary applications it may have, a law's primary application always relates to God. This law focused on the mandatory resting of the land of Israel, but its ultimate reference point was the sovereignty of the Creator God of the covenantal promise.
The Bible introduces the subject of the sabbath in relation to the story of the creation. God created the world in six days; then He rested (Ex. 20:11). Whenever the Israelites observed this law, they were acknowledging the sovereignty of God as both the Creator and the original owner. Bonar comments: "It has been well said that by the weekly Sabbath they owned that they themselves belonged to Jehovah, and by this seventh-year Sabbath they professed that their land was His, and they His tenants."(1)
God deals with men as an absentee landlord deals with leaseholders who use his property. He gave Adam an assignment; then He left the garden. This is a continuing theme in the Bible. The Book of Job pictures God as normally distant from man. Jesus used the theme of the absentee landlord in several of His parables. While God dwells in the midst of men judicially, especially during ecclesiastical feasts, He does not dwell in their midst physically. The dominion covenant (Gen. 1:26-28) is supposed to be fulfilled by men acting as responsible managers, not as supervised coolies in a field. The managerial model in the Bible is that of a sharecropper or tenant farmer who pays 10 percent of his net income to the landowner.
The Terms of the Lease
Leasing land is a very difficult proposition for a landlord. For an absentee landlord, it is even more difficult. The problem is to establish leasing terms that preserve economic incentives that achieve three goals: 1) keeping a competent lessee on the property by allowing him to maximize his income; 2) maintaining or increasing the capitalized value of the land; 3) maximizing the landlord's lease income. The absentee landlord must discover a way to achieve all three goals without a great expenditure on local monitors. Inexpensive monitors are valuable.
God established the laws governing the Promised Land because He delivered it into their hands. As its owner, He had the authority to establish the terms of the leasehold. If the people did not like the terms of the lease, they could live elsewhere. So, one foundation of this law is God's ownership. (The other foundation is the principle of sabbath rest.)
The terms of God's lease are generous to the lessee, who keeps nine-tenths of the net income of the operation. This is the principle of the tithe. The tithe is paid to God's designated agency of collection, the church.(2) The church acts as God's accountant and crop-collector. The payment of the tithe is a public acknowledgment by the lessees of God's ultimate ownership of the original capital: land (rent) plus labor (wages) over time (interest). This original grant of capital is also accurately described by John Locke's three-fold classification: life, liberty, and property.(3)
God's Land Grant
Consider the grant of capital in the form of developed land. God gave His people the Promised Land as their inheritance. This was an aspect of the promise given to Abraham (Gen. 15:13-16). Also included were existing houses and fields. "And I have given you a land for which ye did not labour, and cities which ye built not, and ye dwell in them; of the vineyards and oliveyards which ye planted not do ye eat" (Josh. 24:13). They inherited the capitalized value of the houses and planted fields of the Canaanites. The Canaanites had unknowingly served as stewards of the land, building up its value until the fourth generation after Israel's descent into Egypt (Gen. 15:16).
Having delivered a capital asset into their hands, God specified that they must, as a nation, rest the land every seventh year. This was to be a national year of rest. The law applied only to agricultural land. It did not restrict commerce, manufacturing, equipment repair, or anything except planting and harvesting by owners. Urban occupations were not under the terms of this law. This law granted a year of rest from field work to all those under the household authority of landowners, including hired servants.
The year of rest was an acknowledgment of the limits on man's knowledge. Man cannot know everything about the land. He therefore was not allowed to treat the land indefinitely as if it were a mine. The "mining" of the soil could go on for six years in seven, but not in the seventh year. He was not allowed to strip the soil of its productivity. The seventh year was a rest period for the land in the broadest sense, including worms, bugs, birds, weeds, and every other living creature that dwelled on or in the land. This would preserve the land's long-run value.
This limitation on the landowner's extraction of present income from the land was a means of preserving the capitalized value of the land over time. This placed a limit on both man's greed and ignorance. It forced the landowner to honor the future-orientation of God's covenant. It preserved the landed inheritance for future generations. God's sharecroppers in one generation were not allowed to undermine the future value of the land by overproduction in the present. God, as the land's ultimate owner, was thereby able to maintain a greater percentage of the land's original capitalized value.
The Israelites did not always enforce the provisions of the sabbath land law prior to the exile. In other words, they did not enforce the terms of the original lease. God allowed this infraction to continue for almost five centuries. Then He collected payment from a later generation. "And them that had escaped from the sword carried he away to Babylon; where they were servants to him and his sons until the reign of the kingdom of Persia: To fulfil the word of the LORD by the mouth of Jeremiah, until the land had enjoyed her sabbaths: for as long as she lay desolate she kept sabbath, to fulfil threescore and ten years" (II Chron. 36:20-21).(4) Two generations of sharecroppers then learned a judicial lesson in Babylon: God has a long memory for the details of His law. Those who violate it will eventually pay restitution to Him by paying restitution to their victims. In this case, they paid to the land, which rested.
A Year of Gleaning There appears a problem with the translation in the King James Version. Actually, there is no a problem, but there is a problem for interpreters who do not take the text literally. Verse 5 says: "That which groweth of its own accord of thy harvest thou shalt not reap, neither gather the grapes of thy vine undressed: for it is a year of rest unto the land." Conclusion: someone was prohibited from reaping the fields. The next two verses are translated as follows: "And the sabbath of the land shall be meat for you; for thee, and for thy servant, and for thy maid, and for thy hired servant, and for thy stranger that sojourneth with thee, And for thy cattle, and for the beast that are in thy land, shall all the increase thereof be meat" (vv. 6-7). Conclusion: the produce of the field served as food for someone. But if the increase is identified as meat (i.e., food),(5) then what about the prohibition? "That which groweth of its own accord of thy harvest thou shalt not reap, neither gather the grapes of thy vine undressed." How could the increase serve as food if the crop could not lawfully be harvested?
To solve this problem, the New American Standard Version inserts a word in verse 6: products. "And all of you shall have the sabbath products of the land for food. . . ." The Revised Standard Version translates it as follows: "The sabbath of the land shall provide food for you. . . ." None of this is satisfactory. Why not? Because the text of verse 5 is too specific: "That which groweth of its own accord of thy harvest thou shalt not reap, neither gather the grapes of thy vine undressed." Someone was prohibited from harvesting. The question is: Who?
The solution is found in the word thy. The law was addressed to landowners. It applied to those identified in verse 4: "Six years thou shalt sow thy field, and six years thou shalt prune thy vineyard, and gather in the fruit thereof." Those who owned the fields and vineyards were not allowed by God to reap them in the seventh year. This prohibition did not apply to their hired servants, strangers in the community, poor people, and the beasts of the field. "But the seventh year thou shalt let it rest and lie still; that the poor of thy people may eat: and what they leave the beasts of the field shall eat. In like manner thou shalt deal with thy vineyard, and with thy oliveyard" (Ex. 23:11). The prohibition did not apply to those who did not own the land.
What this law established was a year of unlimited gleaning. Hired harvesters were not allowed into the fields and vineyards as employees of the landowners. Instead, they were given free access as independent agents. On the one hand, landowners did not invest any money or time in seeding the fields, pruning the vineyards, or caring for the land. This cut their expenses in year six. On the other hand, they reaped no crops. The crops were reaped in year seven by non-owners. Like the leftovers that were collected by the gleaners annually, so were the crops that grew by themselves. The land's rest was specific: rest from the activities of its owners, not rest from harvesting by non-owners.
Independence
What was the point? Rushdoony argues that this law was not humanitarian, meaning (I give him the benefit of the doubt) uniquely humanitarian, because gleaners had access to the fields every year.(6) This interpretation is incorrect. This law was obviously a humanitarian law, for it singled out the poor and strangers. They would receive something from the landowner that otherwise would have been kept by him. A transfer of wealth was involved. The sabbatical land law was as much a humanitarian law as the annual gleaning law was. It treated the beasts of the fields as if they were gleaners. It treated them as servants on the weekly sabbath. In other words, the sabbatical rest forced landowners to let the land alone and allow human and animal gleaners into the fields. The landowners were not allowed to use land, man, or beast for their purposes. Non-owners were allowed by God to do whatever they wanted: to glean or not to glean. It was not that they were required to rest from self-employment as harvesters. They were not to be compelled by economic circumstances to work for landowners. God provided them with a source of income to offset the absence of wages. This was a compulsory wealth-redistribution program: from landowners to non-owners. The question is: Who imposed the negative sanctions? Answer: the Levites.(7)
In the sabbatical year, all charitable, morally obligatory, zero-interest loans had to be canceled (Deut. 15:1-7). This means that the debtor who had been forced to labor for another landowner because he had gone into debt and then had defaulted on this charitable loan had to be released from bondage. But this release from bondage did not relieve him from the personal economic necessity of participating in the harvesting of the crop of his former creditor and perhaps harvesting part of his own land's crop, which was also to lie fallow. He achieved his release from debt in a year of heavy national dependence on God. There was not supposed to be any planting in the season prior to the sabbatical year. The land was to receive its rest. So, the released debtor faced a problem: how to get enough to eat.
He would have faced high demand for food from the free market. If he could harvest anything, he could either consume it or sell it. He would possess a valuable asset -- food -- in a year of above-average scarcity. This was an advantage for him. But without the landowner to serve as his intermediary, the newly debt-free Israelite would begin to regain his confidence as a free man. He would be forced to learn marketing in the year that he would plant the eighth-year crop on his own land, except in jubilee "weeks," when the law also prohibited planting in the year after the sabbatical year. The year of his release from debt or even servitude would also be a difficult year economically. It was a year in which Israelites were supposed to rely on God's grace and their own previous thrift. This was why the newly resealed Israelite had to be liberally provided with food (Deut. 15:13-14): to get him through the sabbatical year. The fruit of his own field would belong to non-owning harvesters and beasts.
The sabbatical year was a system for forcing men to become self-consciously dependent on God's grace. Dependent on Him, they were to become dominion-minded. Subordinate to God, they were to become active toward the creation. This is the mandated hierarchical pattern for the dominion covenant: those meek before God will inherit the earth. The year of debt release was to be the year of open access to the fields for non-owners. It was a year of hard work for harvesters, for they harvested on their own and for their own. A new master told them to do this: the market.
If independent harvesters were given free access to the land's unassisted production one year in seven, they would have had an incentive to recommend land management practices that would maximize output in the seventh year: crop rotation, fertilization, irrigation, etc. This does not mean that landowners were required to follow the suggestions of the full-time harvesters, but to the extent that owners deferred to harvesters in gathering information and assessing its value, the sabbatical year law encouraged agricultural practices that did not strip the land of its long-run productivity. This law, when enforced, created a class of preferred workers who had an incentive to act as economic agents of the land, and therefore as economic agents of the future.
We do not know for certain whether the gleaners would have received more income as secondary harvesters in a year following an investment of capital or as primary harvesters in a year following an investment of zero. As I hope to show, it is quite likely that the total output of the fields was greater in a normal harvest year than in a sabbatical year.(8) What we do know is that when this law was enforced, the land received its rest, and the poor had access to the fields. God therefore placed self-interested monitors in the midst of the community. The question was: Would these monitors possess sufficient power or influence over landowners through the priesthood? The answer for 490 years: no.
The Pressure on Landowners to Save When the law was enforced, landowners had considerable economic incentive to plan for a year of no agricultural income. They had to save enough food to get them through the seventh year. They also had to realize that the seed corn of the sixth year would be needed at the end of the seventh year in order to provide a crop for the eighth year. This would have to be put aside late in year six to plant late in year seven. Owners had to plan and organize for six years to prepare for the sabbatical year. If they did not save enough food to get them through the sabbatical year, they would be tempted to eat their seed corn during the sabbatical year. They had to overcome this temptation. In short, they had to save.
Saving requires future-orientation. Without future-orientation, we would consume everything today. Societies and communities that are characterized by what Ludwig von Mises called high time-preference(9) are marked by low amounts of capital and low production. People in such societies value present goods over future goods so highly that they consume almost everything today. No society that is completely present-oriented could survive except through charity from outside. The harsh reality of the cursed effects of scarcity (Gen. 3:17-19) forces members of every society to plan for the future, to save some percentage of today's goods for tomorrow's needs and wants.
The law of the sabbatical year added another incentive to become more future-oriented. Those landowners who neglected to store food for a coming year of zero agricultural income would find themselves in a bind in the sabbatical year. They might be forced to borrow enough food to feed themselves. They would therefore become debt slaves. They might even be forced by a lease agreement to leave their farms until the next jubilee year. They might have to become landless wage earners or even gleaners. Someone who was more thrifty would then become the land's administrator. That is, in what was designed by God to be a year of release for Israel, improvident, present-oriented landowners would fall into poverty and servitude. This sabbatical system kept control of the land in the hands of future-oriented, efficient people.
The landowner had to forfeit income in the sabbatical year. Resting the land was mandatory. Was this a civil law? The text does not say. If it was -- and I presume that it was(10) -- the State was required by God to act as the land's agent. Owners were not allowed to oppress the land. So, this civil law suppressed a specific evil action: the exploitation of the land. It brought unspecified negative sanctions against evil-doers.(11) But there was another aspect of this law: mandatory gleaning. The landowner had to allow hired servants and poor people into his fields to glean in the sabbatical year. Was this a case of a civil law that imposed positive sanctions for one group at the expense of another? Was it a State-enforced welfare program?
To answer this question, we first need to determine if this law established a property right for the local poor. The fruit of the land was to become the property of the gleaners in the sabbatical year. Which local gleaners possessed an enforceable legal claim? The judicial problem -- which gleaners would be allowed into which fields -- still remained, as it did with everyday gleaning. The law did not give specific legal claims to specific gleaners. This indicates that the State was not the enforcing agency with respect to the gleaners, even though it was the enforcing agency with respect to the protection of the land. This was not a State welfare program.
What agency was to defend the claims of the gleaners? The priesthood. Priests had the authority to excommunicate landowners who refused to allow gleaners into the fields. Priests could lawfully bar covenant-breakers from the Passover. They policed the sacramental boundaries. The priests could serve as wealth-transfer agents in this case -- defenders of the poor. It was God's land, and He wanted His delegated owners to allow gleaners into His fields. Gleaners as a class had ecclesiastically enforceable legal claims to access to the unplanted, fallow land. But without local agents to enforce these legal claims, specific gleaners could not gain access to land owned by someone willing to break this law.
This law's effects were not entirely negative on landowners. First, the long-term productivity of the land was retained by the sabbatical year. Second, it did give landowners a year of rest. They could concentrate on other business ventures, perhaps even going on a missionary-trade journey. Third, it increased the economic pressure on landowners to exercise thrift in years one through six.
The discipline of thrift -- future-orientation -- is not natural to fallen man. It must be learned. Where it is learned, and where its requirements become habitual, the individual becomes the owner of a major capital asset. The psychology of thrift is a very valuable resource. In the category of "human resource" or "human capital," the habit of thrift rivals the importance of the famous Protestant work ethic. In fact, thrift is basic to this ethic. Max Weber wrote in 1905 regarding the Protestant ethic that "Old Testament morality was able to give a powerful impetus to that spirit of self-righteous and sober legality which was so characteristic of the worldly asceticism of this form of Protestantism."(12) Thrift has been a crucial aspect of this worldly asceticism, he wrote: "When the limitation of consumption is combined with this release of acquisitive activity, the inevitable practical result is obvious: accumulation of capital through ascetic compulsion to save."(13) The sabbatical land law pressured Israelite landowners to master the discipline of thrift.
The Threat of Debt In the seventh year, all charitable, zero-interest loans to poor Israelites became null and void (Deut. 15:1). Creditors could not legally collect from impoverished debtors. Meanwhile, the economy grew tight: reduced food production. Improvident landowners went looking for loans to get them through the year. There would have been greater-than-normal demand for interest-bearing loans, i.e., higher interest rates. This would have tended to squeeze the weakest borrowers out of the loan market. Lenders prefer to lend to those who are likely to repay. On the other hand, if an evil man wanted to trap a weak debtor in order to gain control over his labor if he defaulted, the year of national gleaning would have been an ideal time. The recently liberated debtors would have known this. Their memory of their previous bondage was to keep them from succumbing to this temptation. The poor had access to the untilled fields of the landowners. They were expected to take advantage of this unique situation and stay out of debt. They were not to "return to Egypt" by going into debt and risking another round of bondage.
Any landowner who had not planned carefully would face a crisis in year seven. Without sufficient thrift in the previous six years, he might have been forced to enter the debt market to save his business. But he would have come to a lender as a businessman, not as a poverty-stricken brother in the faith. There was no moral pressure on anyone to lend to him. Such moral compulsion to lend applied only to loans to the poor (Deut. 15:7-10). A land-secured loan threatened the borrower greatly: to default the loan meant the forced sale of his land until the loan was repaid or until the next jubilee year.
Lenders would have been more ready to lend to landowners than to most poor men: secure collateral. This gave landowners an advantage in the loan markets. But there was great risk for the debtor. There was also the embarrassment of having to mortgage the family's property. The present-oriented landowner would then face the need to repay the loan, making preparation for the next sabbatical year even more burdensome. The debt trap loomed much larger to the person who fell behind. This is the grim reality of debt.
The sabbatical year was therefore a major burden on landowners. There is little doubt that they would have preferred to avoid this burden. If this law was going to be enforced, there had to be an agency of enforcement that had an economic incentive to do so. Which agency was it? And why did it fail to enforce the law prior to the Babylonian exile?
The Defection of the Levites We know that this law was not enforced for centuries prior to the exile. Jeremiah identified their failure to honor the year of release as the cause of the exile: "At the end of seven years let ye go every man his brother an Hebrew, which hath been sold unto thee; and when he hath served thee six years, thou shalt let him go free from thee: but your fathers hearkened not unto me, neither inclined their ear" (Jer. 34:14).
The enforcing agents, the Levites (gleaning law) and civil magistrates (land law), did not assert their authority. Why not? We do not know. This may be one of those cases in which they had a short-term incentive not to enforce the law. In a normal year, they were entitled to tithes and taxes from landowners and gleaners. In a sabbatical year, only the gleaners paid. The landowners harvested nothing for their own account. Perhaps the collectors of tithes and taxes did not consider the soil's long-term output, allowing landowners to plant and harvest.
I conclude that the total output of the land in a normal year was greater than during a sabbatical year. Levites and civil magistrates received a larger tithe in non-sabbatical years. Thus, they had less short-term economic incentive to see that the sabbatical year law was enforced. They had to enforce the law because God required them to do so, not because they were paid to do so. The tribe of Levi was to cooperate with the local monitors: hired hands, the poor, and strangers. Levites were required to see to it that the sabbath year's gleaning law was enforced. They refused. They forfeited their position as sanctioning agents on this issue. As a result, the nation went into captivity. After their return, Israel honored this law (I Macc. 6:49, 53). Ezekiel had prophesied that heathen residents in the land would participate in a new allocation of land (Ezek. 47:21-23), but we do not know if the jubilee laws were honored.
The Poorest of the Poor
Which gleaners fared best? It is understandable that the hired harvesters were content with their arrangement during normal years. They were paid to work. They probably would have preferred to work for landowners in the sabbatical year had the owners planted the crops in year six. The poorer members of the community, however, probably fared better comparatively during the sabbatical years. Perhaps the total harvest going to them would have been larger in sabbatical years than with conventional gleaning in normal years, despite the fact that no one would have planted crops in year six. We cannot know for sure. What we do know is that this law was not enforced for half a millennium. The land was not given its rest.
There were no monitors in positions of authority with a clear-cut economic incentive to see that the law was enforced. Those who might have had this incentive would have been the poorest members of the community, or in the case of strangers, non-citizens: men with little authority. So, the law went unenforced until after the return from Babylon. Only after God had demonstrated that He would bring negative sanctions through a foreign invasion did Israel obey the law. In the days of the Maccabees, they still honored it (I Macc. 6:49, 53). It was their fear of God and His negative historical sanctions, not positive economic incentives, that changed their behavior.
In Search of an Explanation We now come to a comment made by Robert North, a liberal Jesuit scholar, whose voluminous study of the jubilee law is as unreadable as it is theologically perverse. He cites Germanic sources throughout, and he imports their presuppositions. He even invokes the classic assertion shared with equal enthusiasm by theological liberals and neo-evangelicals: the Bible is not a textbook of [ ]. "Though the Pentateuch was not meant as a textbook of economics, still if a universal fallow can be shown to have been economically impossible, then according to sound hermeneutic principles it is legitimate to seek some other explanation for the text."(14) He then cites a page and a half of Germans who have concluded that fallow land on a national basis could not have taken place in the same year. He adds that "a fallow without plowing would be useless and positively detrimental; . . ."(15) If this interpretation is correct, then God was clearly being a bit of a tyrant for having sent the heirs of these people into bondage for their having neglected to do what was not only economically impossible but agriculturally detrimental. This sounds like an unwise conclusion, even for a theologically liberal Jesuit.
He cites another German -- there are always plenty of German academics to cite in support of any argument -- that perhaps there was sufficient agricultural productivity for the Israelites to save enough food to feed themselves in the seventh year.(16) He then moves from a discussion of thrift to a discussion of the need for miraculous crop yields, either annually or in the sixth year, to produce this surplus.(17) He never says which theory he prefers.
The real goal of the sabbatical year, he says, was care for the poor. This means that a policy of rotating one-seventh of the crop would have met this criterion.(18) (This highly practical suggestion comes from a rarity in his text, an American scholar.) Of course, this would not include the number-one criterion of the text: a national year of rest. He admits as much: "Obviously our interpretation runs counter to the surface-sense of certain expressions of the sacred text, though for many of these we have already defended an acceptable alternative."(19) Conclusion: there was no true fallow; it was a rotating fallow.(20)
Modern Israel's Version of Obedience
The modern State of Israel pretends to honor this law, and has since the 1880's. Every seventh year, the farmland of the nation is transferred by the Minister of Internal Affairs to the Chief Rabbinate, which sells title to an anonymous gentile, usually an Arab, who retains formal ownership for one year. Then he sells it back. By Rabbinic law, he is outside the sabbatical year's requirements, so he does not enforce this law. He sells back the land to the Chief Rabbinate at the end of the sabbatical year, which in turn returns formal ownership to the de facto owners. "If we were to stop marketing our products to Europe even for one year, we'd be finished," according to the Director General of the Ministry of Agriculture.(21) Non-zionist Orthodox Jerwish rabbis refuse to go along, however, since by Jewish law, Jews are not allowed to sell land in Palestine to gentiles.(22) They organize special shops in sabbatical years that sell fruits and vegetables grown by Arabs on Arab land.(23)
(A similar strategy is used during Passover week. The law requires all leaven to be removed from every Jewish household. This makes it dicult for grain merchants. Solution: observant Jews sell all of these prohibited substances to the local rabbi, who sells them to the Chief Rabbinate, which sells them to a gentile for a week. Then he sells them back. By a special dispensation, these multiple sales are presumed to include the leavened substances of non-practicing Jews, too.)(24)
New Testament Applications The jubilee laws are important for Christians because of Jesus' first public announcement concerning the nature of His ministry:
And there was delivered unto him the book of the prophet Esaias. And when he had opened the book, he found the place where it was written, The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, To preach the acceptable year of the Lord. And he closed the book, and he gave it again to the minister, and sat down. And the eyes of all them that were in the synagogue were fastened on him. And he began to say unto them, This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears (Luke 4:17-21).
Jesus' application of Isaiah's language of liberation indicates that He saw His ministry as the fulfillment of the jubilee year. This is consistent with the New Testament's judicial theology of rest. Jesus' work in history is the judicial foundation of man's sabbatical rest; His kingdom is the definitive basis in history for man's future rest (Heb. 4:1-11).
There is a great deal of confusion in modern Christian circles, both fundamentalist and liberationist, regarding the applicability of the jubilee laws in the New Covenant era. Furthermore, Christians can gain little from a study of the rabbinical sources dealing with the jubilee, since very few of these texts deal in detail with these post-temple applications of the jubilee laws. There is no treatise on the jubilee in either the Mishna or the Talmud, perhaps because the rabbis considered the jubilee laws abrogated from the era of the Babylonian exile until the coming of the Messiah.(25) This is not to say that the Talmud does not mention the jubilee. It does. So did the Geonim, the principals of the Jewish academies in Babylonia in the medieval era. But the information they conveyed is not consistent.(26)
The question arises: Is the sabbatical year law still in force? This is another way of asking: What in the New Testament may have annulled it?
First, the model for the sabbatical year was the weekly sabbath: a day of rest at the end of the week. In the New Covenant, the locus of authority of sabbath enforcement has shifted from the State and church to the individual. This is the judicial basis for the annulment of the death penalty for violating the weekly sabbath (Ex. 31:14-15).(27)
Second, the law in Israel established a national sabbatical year governing both agriculture and charitable debt. This was possible to impose because the Israelites had entered the land as conquerors at a specific point in time. That historical starting point no longer exists.
The absence of a fixed sabbatical year could be changed today through civil legislation, but is there biblical justification for this? Only in the name of ecology. The individual is to enforce the weekly sabbath, not the State.(28) The same is true of any seventh-year sabbath. Is the individual still duty-bound by God to honor the sabbatical year? Does God threaten negative sanctions, corporate or individual, against those who refuse to honor its provisions? Or was the sabbatical year limited to the Mosaic Covenant?
Were the sabbatical year laws exclusively part of the jubilee system? No. The law was given first in Exodus 23:10-11. It was given primarily for the benefit of the poor in the land and secondarily for the beasts of the field (v. 11). The context was the sabbath in general (v. 12), not the jubilee system.
The identification of the beasts of the field as recipients of the benefit of rest leads to the broader question of just which beasts God has in mind. Did He mean domestic animals only? Or is the wild beast also included? What about the worm and the insect? This raises the whole issue of ecology.
Ecology
Man has creaturely limits on his knowledge. He is not omniscient, nor will he ever be. He can harm land through mono-crop agriculture and other techniques that can prove to be exploitative over time. Overuse of pesticides in modern times may prove to be a cause of major ecological damage. Scientists do not presently agree on this. Eventually, a majority of them may agree, although it may take a crisis to produce such agreement, or else generations of additional agricultural productivity. The question is: Is a compulsory year of rest for the sake of the land established by God's law? Should the State compel the owner of every farm, every garden, and every vineyard to cease cultivating his land one year in seven -- not necessarily all enterprises in the same year, but each enterprise one year in seven? Alternatively, should land-use enforcers be sent out to police every farm, determining that one-seventh of each plot under cultivation be left fallow each year?
The regulatory nightmare that would probably result from such an interpretation suggests an answer: no. But is the potential cost of regulation a sufficient reason for abandoning this law? No. There has to be a judicial reason for ignoring any of God's Old Covenant laws, not mere pragmatism or presumed convenience. The familiar refrain is not sufficient: "God's Old Testament laws applied only to an ancient agricultural economy." That is an invalid objection covenantally; it is also weak in this instance. This happens to be an agricultural law. If the law's primary goal was ecological -- rest for the creatures of the field and soil -- then the New Covenant can be said to have changed this law's validity only if it established a new relationship among God, man, and the land. Did it? Yes. The land ceased to be a judicial agent of God.
Sanctions and Sanctification
First, we have already considered one major change in relation to the land's function as a judicial agent for God. The Promised Land vomited out the Canaanites (Lev. 18:28). This judicial act is now performed by Jesus Christ (Rev. 3:16).(29) The land no longer serves as the judicial agent of God. Second, the curse of the land was definitively overcome by the New Covenant. Men are no longer polluted ritually by the land. This is why foot-washing is no longer ritually mandatory in the post-resurrection, post-temple era. Progressive sanctification, individually and corporately, steadily removes the restraints of the land's scarcity. This has been happening rapidly for at least two centuries. The price of agricultural commodities compared to the price of labor has steadily dropped as the free market economy has advanced.(30)
The exploitation of the land, net, may still be going on. We may be facing an agricultural calamity as a result of our techniques of agricultural production and land management. Or we may not. The ecological evidence is unclear; well-informed people can be found on both sides in this debate.(31) The price evidence, however, is clear: no agricultural calamity is foreseen by those whom we reward to forecast such possibilities. The industrial revolution has also been an agricultural revolution.(32)
The covenantally significant question is: Can we legitimately attribute a supposedly looming agricultural calamity to our failure to rest the land? Had we required a year of national rest for the land, would this have offset all the other commercial farming practices that supposedly erode the land's long-term productivity? There is no way to know. We are comparing a conjectural future (famine) with a conjectural past (the rate of land erosion under the sabbatical year). So, in order to understand the sabbatical land law in the Mosaic economy, we have to decide in terms of biblical judicial issues, not ecology.
This is not to say that resting the land will not prove to be a means of increasing long-term agricultural output, and therefore income, but the test must be profit and loss under free market conditions. The general law of the New Covenant sabbath must prevail: the decision of each individual landowner operating under the sovereign jurisdiction of his conscience. We dare not move from the annulled jubilee year laws to the sabbatical land law in New Covenant times, nor dare we move from the New Covenant sabbath to a national year of rest. This leaves the landowner in charge. Paul wrote: "One man esteemeth one day above another: another esteemeth every day alike. Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind. He that regardeth the day, regardeth it unto the Lord; and he that regardeth not the day, to the Lord he doth not regard it" (Rom. 14:5-6a). The same covenantal principle of individual jurisdiction also applies to the sabbatical year of rest.
Conclusion The judicial foundations of the sabbatical year of rest were two-fold: 1) the sabbath rest principle; 2) God's original ownership of the land. At the time of the conquest, God transferred control over the land to families that held legal title on a sharecropping basis, operating under specific terms of the original leasehold agreement. The lease provided a payment to God (the tithe), i.e., a high percentage return to God's authorized sharecropper-owners (90 percent before taxes), and a provision for the maintenance of the long-term capital value of the land (the sabbatical year). Those residents in Israel who did not own the land had legal title to the output of the land: unrestricted harvest in sabbatical years. This legal title was to be enforced by the Levites and priests, not the civil government.
The judicial issue of the sabbatical year was rest: rest for the land, hired workers, and animals. This also included release from the requirement to repay charitable debts (Deut. 15). By "rest," the law meant a respite for the landless from the requirement to work for the landed. This law governed agricultural land and those who worked it. There is nothing in the Bible to indicate that it governed any nonagricultural occupation.
This law pressured landowners to plan and save for the sabbatical year. They had to store up both food corn and seed corn. When this law was enforced, it forced them to develop the habit of thrift, i.e., future-orientation. The law also required landowners to forfeit the automatic (though not "natural") productivity of the land in the seventh year. The poor, the stranger, the eld animals, and the regular harvesters all had a legal claim on this production, if they were willing to do the work to glean it.
The Levites were the enforcers of this law as it applied to the gleaners' lawful access to the fruits of the land. The Levites refused. This indicates they had little or no short-term economic incentive to enforce it. This in turn indicates that their tithe income was greater when the land was planted and harvested. Finally, this indicates that there was less net agricultural output in the seventh year than in the other six.
This law was good for the land and all the creatures great and small that inhabited it. Owners were restrained in their use of God's land. Agricultural practices that overworked the land were restrained by this law. The land, as God's judicial agent, deserved its rest. This law mandated it. If this land-protecting aspect of the law was enforced by the State, as I believe it was, it rested on the legal status of the land as God's judicial agent, not on the State as an agency of wealth redistribution to the gleaners. This law is no longer in force in the New Testament era because the land ceased to be a covenantal agent in A.D. 71.
The sabbatical year law was enforced after the Babylonian exile (I Macc. 6:49, 53). The fear of God is a great incentive. During the exile, God had substituted His negative sanctions in history for the failure of the priesthood and the State to enforce the sabbatical year law. Exile was God's partial disinheritance of Israel. It warned Israel of comprehensive disinheritance, should the nation continue to rebel. The exile altered land tenure: a new distribution replaced the original distribution under Joshua. The exile severed the judicial link between each family's plot and the conquest generation. The jubilee land laws had been established by genocide, but genocide was neither authorized by God nor possible after the exile. The jubilee's heathen slave laws remained in force, but the residents who participated in any post-exilic distribution were to become immune to the threat of permanent servitude by Israelites
The sabbatical land law was an extension of the law of the sabbath. It was not a subset of the jubilee land laws; on the contrary, the jubilee land laws were temporary applications of the sabbath law's principle of rest. If there are any New Testament applications of the sabbatical year of rest for the land, they are based on ecology or the general authority of sabbath rules, not on the jubilee's military conquest. This transfers the locus of authority to the landowner: individual, not corporate.
Summary The jubilee laws begin with a consideration of the sabbath.
The sabbatical year of rest was more fundamental than the jubilee land laws.
The resting of the land is mandated in terms of God's creation (Ex. 20:11).
As the owner of the Promised Land, God had the authority to establish the leasehold arrangements.
Leasing land long-term requires a carefully designed leasehold arrangement.
An absentee landlord should design a contract that does not require expensive local monitoring on his part.
The Bible pictures God as an absentee landlord.
The dominion covenant does not treat men as supervised coolies in the field.
The lease is basically a sharecropping contract: 90 percent remains with the leaseholder.
The land was the inheritance of the Israelites (excluding Levites).
Agricultural land had to be rested every seventh year.
Planting late in year six and in year seven and field work by landowners and their agents in year seven were prohibited.
The sabbatical rest forced man to acknowledge limits on his knowledge: unknown consequences of overworking the land.
This law helped to preserve the land's productivity.
The Israelites did not enforce the law for 490 years prior to the exile.
God sent them into captivity in order to give the land its accumulated rest.
The landowners were prohibited from harvesting their land.
Non-household hired servants, the poor, and strangers were allowed to harvest whatever grew of its own accord.
Beasts were allowed to eat of the crop.
The sabbatical year was a year of unlimited gleaning; the whole field was considered as leftovers or corners.
This was a humanitarian law.
Hired servants and beasts were left alone in the sabbatical year: free from the authority of land-owning taskmasters.
Season-long gleaning replaced wages.
Newly debt-free servants had to learn marketing skills without the landowner as their intermediary.
They had to beware of falling into debt to men whose goal was to put them back into bondage.
Hired workers had an incentive to recommend and obey rules that would increase the land's fertility.
These workers acted as economic agents of the land and of the future.
They served as God's local monitors, but they possessed little authority.
This law created an incentive for landowners to save.
Saving requires future-orientation.
Landowners had to save if they were to survive the sabbatical year without going into debt.
The law was a form of compulsory wealth redistribution, to be enforced by the Levites.
Habits of thrift must be learned.
The psychology of thrift is a valuable resource.
Interest rates probably would have risen in sabbatical years.
This was a threat to improvident landowners and newly released bondservants.
The sabbatical land law was a major economic burden on landowners.
The Levites rebelled, refusing to enforce the law.
Levites had a financial incentive to ignore this law: reduced tithe income in the short run.
The total output of the unplanted land was less in sabbatical years.
Because the Levites defected, God sent the nation into captivity.
After the exile, Israel honored the seventh year.
The jubilee land laws ended forever with the exile, for exile severed the plots' judicial links with the conquest.
The jubilee's heathen slavery laws did not cease with the exile.
The language of jubilee liberation describes Jesus' ministry (Luke 4:17-21).
The New Testament has transferred the locus of authority to enforce the weekly sabbath to the individual.
The common national year of rest was based on Israel's conquest of the land.
There is no unified national or international church today, i.e., no agent of enforcement.
The sabbatical year laws originally were announced in Exodus 23:10-11.
Ecology is relevant: beasts of the field.
The New Testament changed man's relationship to the land.
The land is no longer God's judicial agent.
The land no longer pollutes man ritually; hence, no foot-washing.
The jubilee's sabbatical land law is no longer in force under the New Covenant.
No agricultural calamity seems imminent; agricultural prices continue to fall compared to wages (two centuries).
The ecological evidence on the land's erosion and productivity is mixed.
Societies must decide the sabbath-year issues in terms of biblical judicial issues, not ecology.
The individual conscience of the landowner should rule in this case, not church or State.
Footnotes:
1. Andrew Bonar, A Commentary on Leviticus (London: Banner of Truth Trust, [1846] 1966), p. 446.
2. Gary North, Tithing and the Church (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994).
3. He never used this phrase exactly as quoted. He wrote of property in general as "life, liberty, and estate." John Locke, Second Treatise on Government (1690), paragraph 87. He spoke of "life, liberty, or possession" in paragraph 137. Exactly one century later, Edmund Burke wrote of "property, liberty, and life." Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), paragraph 324. The U.S. Constitution adopted "life, liberty, or property" in Article V of the Bill of Rights (1791), and also in Article XIV:1 (1868).
4. By the time of Jeremiah, the Israelites had been in the Promised Land for almost eight centuries. Of this period, 490 years (70 x 7) had been spent without a sabbatical year. Jeremiah did not say when this period of law-breaking began. I presume that it began 490 years before the Babylonian captivity, i.e., sometime late in Saul's kingship. I am using James Jordan's chronology: "The Babylonian Connection," Biblical Chronology, II (Nov. 1990), p. 1: 3426 Anno Mundi = 586 B.C. The accession of Saul was 2909 AM. Jordan, "Chronologies and Kings (II)," ibid., III (Aug. 1991), p. 2. Computation: 586 + 490 = 1076 B.C., i.e., 3426 AM - 490 AM = 2936 AM. David came to the throne in 2949 AM, i.e., 1063 B.C.
5. The Hebrew words translated as "meat" in verses 6 and 7 both can be translated as "food."
6. R. J. Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law (Nutley, New Jersey: Craig Press, 1973), p. 140.
7. See below: "The Defection of the Levites."
8. See below, "The Defection of the Levites."
9. Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1949), pp. 485-90.
10. A civil law is justified biblically because God threatens a society with corporate negative sanctions for disobedience. These sanctions came: the Babylonian captivity.
11. One possible civil sanction: two years of rest for the land as the victim, i.e., double restitution.
12. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, [1905] 1958), p. 165.
13. Ibid., p. 172.
14. Robert North, Sociology of the Biblical Jubilee (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1954), p. 115.
15. Ibid., p. 116.
16. Ibid., p. 117.
17. Ibid., p. 118.
18. Ibid., p. 119.
19. Idem.
20. Ibid., p. 120.
21. Clyde Haberman, "The Rabbis' Almanack of Seventh-Year Farming," New York Times (Dec. 10, 1992). The year 1992 was the sixth year in the cycle.
22. Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thouand Years (Boulder, Colorado: Pluto Press, 1994), p. 43.
23. Ibid., p. 108, n. 17.
24. Ibid., p. 45.
25. This is the suggestion of Robert North, Sociology of the Biblical Jubilee, pp. 87-90.
26. A. Löwy, A Treatise on the Sabbatical Cycle and the Jubilee (New York: Hermon, [1866] 1974), pp. 3-4.
27. Gary North, The Sinai Strategy: Economics and the Ten Commandments (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1986), ch. 4.
28. Ibid., Appendix A: "The Economic Implications of the Sabbath."
29. See above, Chapter 17.
30. Julian L. Simon, The Ultimate Resource (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1981), ch. 1; Simon and Herman Kahn (eds.), The Resourceful Earth: A Response to `Global 2000' (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1984); E. Calvin Beisner, Prospects for Growth: A Biblical View of Population, Resources, and the Future (Westchester, Illinois: Crossway, 1990), ch. 7. Beisner has been hired by Simon to edit an updated version of The Resourceful Earth, but it is not yet available (mid-1994).
31. The erosion school is best represented in the United States by the tabloid Acres, USA; the conventional view by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and university agricultural schools.
32. If the nanotechnology revolution ever becomes a reality, as I believe it will, mankind's food supply will be able to be produced by microscopic machines using molecular raw materials. K. Eric Drexler, Engines of Creation (Garden City, New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1986). The debate over a looming agricultural productivity crisis will probably shift from the misuse of the land to the misuse of "free" resources, mainly moving fluids that cannot easily be assigned to owners.
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