25 BOUNDARIES OF THE JUBILEE LAND LAWS And thou shalt number seven sabbaths of years unto thee, seven times seven years; and the space of the seven sabbaths of years shall be unto thee forty and nine years. Then shalt thou cause the trumpet of the jubile to sound on the tenth day of the seventh month, in the day of atonement shall ye make the trumpet sound throughout all your land. And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubile unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family. A jubile shall that fiftieth year be unto you: ye shall not sow, neither reap that which groweth of itself in it, nor gather the grapes in it of thy vine undressed. For it is the jubile; it shall be holy unto you: ye shall eat the increase thereof out of the field. In the year of this jubile ye shall return every man unto his possession (Lev. 25:8-13).
The theocentric meaning of the jubilee law was God's ownership of both the land and the people. He reserved the right to dictate the terms of inheritance to the Israelites. This inheritance included rural land, heathen slaves, and homes owned by Levites in Levitical cities. It also included citizenship.
First, we begin with the problem of identifying the jubilee cycle. Rabbis from at least the completion of the Talmud (c. 500 A.D.) taught that the jubilee year was scheduled every fiftieth year.(1) Most Christians have agreed with this view through the centuries, but not all. A few have thought that the forty-ninthth year was counted as the fiftieth.(2) Among those commentators who accept the fiftieth year as the jubilee year, there has been debate over the first year in the next cycle. Most Jewish commentators have argued that the fifty-first year constituted the first year in the next cycle. This was the prevailing opinion of the contributors to the Talmud. Maimonides agreed.(3) Other Talmudic Jews have believed that the jubilee year itself counted as the first year.(4) There have been other theories held by a handful of scholars.(5)
The idea that the fiftieth year served as the first year in the next sabbath cycle suggests a parallel: the shift from the Old Covenant's seventh-day sabbath to the New Covenant's eighth-day sabbath, which itself served as the inauguration of a first-day sabbath, i.e., the shift from the Old Covenant's week (6-1) to the New Covenant's week (1-6).(6) Jesus' resurrection took place on the eighth day, i.e., the day after the Jewish sabbath, a sabbath that took place on the Sadducees' Passover that year.(7) Sunday is the first day of the week for most Christians: the symbolic equivalent of the eighth day. The theory of the fiftietth year as the first year in the next cycle is certainly appealing to the Christian (and also to the Talmud's Rabbi Jehudah),(8) but we cannot appeal to historical records of the jubilee as empirical tests of this theory because there is no biblical record or any other ancient contemporary record of Israel's ever having celebrated a jubilee year.(9)
The Timing of the Jubilee Second, we need to consider the timing of the day of jubilee. It is not generally recognized that there were two calendars in ancient Israel: priestly and kingly, sanctuary and land. They corresponded to the two shekels: sanctuary (Lev. 27:3, 25) and ordinary. Jordan believes that the two calendars corresponded to two separate government systems.(10) The religious year began in the spring: the first month, Nisan (Esth. 3:7), when Passover was celebrated (Ex. 12). The civil year began in the fall: on the first day the seventh month of the religious calendar (called Tishri in the Talmud).(11) This was marked by a day of sabbath rest (Lev. 23:24-25). Ten days later, the day of atonement took place (Lev. 23:27-28).(12) As we shall see, the jubilee was tied to the civil (land) year. This is why the jubilee was a predominantly civil event. It launched the next cycle of inheritance. This inheritance was predominately civil: a matter of citizenship. Those who were heirs of the generation of the conquest were citizens; the jubilee restored them to their judicial tokens of citizenship: their land. On the fifteenth day, the feast of booths or Tabernacles took place (Lev. 23:34-36, 39-43).
In the jubilee year, trumpets were to be blown throughout the land on the tenth day of the seventh month. This marked the great year of release. It was also a day of rest because it was the day of atonement (Lev. 23:28). The next day, men dwelling near the borders of Israel had to begin their walk to Jerusalem to celebrate Tabernacles (booths). In no more than four days, they had to complete their journey. This time requirement restrained any major extension of the geographical boundaries of Israel. On the day above all other days in Israel's life that was tied to geographical boundaries -- jubilee's day of landed inheritance -- the timing of the jubilee and Tabernacles established tight limits on the size of the nation. Israel could never become an expansionist territorial empire and still honor the day of atonement (rest), the jubilee year (inheritance), and the feast of Tabernacles (celebration). When the Israelites walked to Jerusalem in the jubilee year, all but the Levites went as rural land owners and citizens, even urban dwellers who had leased out their land to others. But they could never lawfully walk from an inheritance located very far from Jerusalem. If Israel ever became an empire, Israelites living near the outer boundaries would forfeit their inheritance in the original land.(13)
The Day of Atonement The year of jubilee was to begin on the day of atonement (yom kippur). The theological significance of this is readily apparent: the day of atonement was the day on which the people of Israel made a formal public acknowledgment of their dependence on the grace of God in escaping from God's required punishment for sin. There had to be an animal sacrifice as part of this formal worship ceremony. It was a day of affliction: death for an animal and public humility for the participants. No work was allowed on that day. The day of atonement was a day of rest -- the ultimate day of rest in ancient Israel, symbolizing covenant-keeping man's rest from the curse of sin. It was a day set apart for each person's examination of his legal state before God and the self-affliction of his soul.
For on that day shall the priest make an atonement for you, to cleanse you, that ye may be clean from all your sins before the LORD. It shall be a sabbath of rest unto you, and ye shall afflict your souls, by a statute for ever. And the priest, whom he shall anoint, and whom he shall consecrate to minister in the priest's office in his father's stead, shall make the atonement, and shall put on the linen clothes, even the holy garments: And he shall make an atonement for the holy sanctuary, and he shall make an atonement for the tabernacle of the congregation, and for the altar, and he shall make an atonement for the priests, and for all the people of the congregation. And this shall be an everlasting statute unto you, to make an atonement for the children of Israel for all their sins once a year. And he did as the LORD commanded Moses (Lev. 16:30-34).
Also on the tenth day of this seventh month there shall be a day of atonement: it shall be an holy convocation unto you; and ye shall afflict your souls, and offer an offering made by fire unto the LORD. And ye shall do no work in that same day: for it is a day of atonement, to make an atonement for you before the LORD your God. For whatsoever soul it be that shall not be afflicted in that same day, he shall be cut off from among his people. And whatsoever soul it be that doeth any work in that same day, the same soul will I destroy from among his people. Ye shall do no manner of work: it shall be a statute for ever throughout your generations in all your dwellings (Lev. 23:27-31).
Once each half century, the day of affliction was to become the day of liberation. The meaning of the Hebrew verb for "afflict" is submission or humility. An example of submission is found in the incident in which Hagar had fled from Sarai, and the angel then confronted her. "And the angel of the LORD said unto her, Return to thy mistress, and submit thyself under her hands" (Gen. 16:9). An example of humility is where God brought low the children of Israel in the wilderness period for their failure to submit to Him: "And thou shalt remember all the way which the LORD thy God led thee these forty years in the wilderness, to humble thee, and to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart, whether thou wouldest keep his commandments, or no. And he humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger, and fed thee with manna, which thou knewest not, neither did thy fathers know; that he might make thee know that man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the LORD doth man live" (Deut. 8:2-3). In both instances, the covenantal issue was covenantal subordination: point two of the biblical covenant model.(14)
The day of national liberation and family inheritance took place on the day of formal subordination to God. The imagery is obvious. Only through submission to God can man experience liberation. Autonomy is not liberation. This is why modern humanism's free market economic theory, which is both agnostic and individualistic, is not the source of the free society that its defenders proclaim. If we begin our economic analysis with the presupposition of the autonomous individual in an autonomous cosmos, we begin with a hypothesis that cannot lead to liberty and maintain it.
A Question of Subordination The year of jubilee began with the blowing of a trumpet, a trumpet announcing the day of atonement. The ram's horn, yobale (Josh. 6:4-5), is the origin of the English transliteration, jubilee (Lev. 25:10-13). The jubilee year followed a sabbatical year of rest for the land, a year in which the agricultural poor, the stranger, and the beasts of the field did not harvest the fields for the fields' owners; they worked for their own direct benefit.
The Hierarchy of God's Grace
The sabbatical year temporarily broke the economic hierarchy linking the agricultural employer, his employees, and the land. The sabbatical year was to be a year of release for employees from direct and personal economic subordination to employers. It was also to be a release for the land, which was not to be planted in the sixth year. The owner of the land, God, for one year transferred the fruit of His land to non-owners, i.e., a different set of sharecroppers who could lawfully retain 90 percent of whatever the land, under God's direct administration, might produce. They became dependent on God's grace rather than the owners' sowing of the fields and care of the land. Like the wilderness that had brought forth manna six days out of seven, so was the land of Israel to become in the sabbatical year: the visible arena of God's grace. God promised to bless Israel with an added measure of grace: the miraculous sixth-year crop, the "manna" preceding the jubilee year.(15)
The Hierarchy of Market Competition
Hierarchy is an inescapable concept. There is no escape from subordination. There can be movement from one form of subordination to another, but not its abolition. The market that governed the agricultural employee indirectly through the decisions of his employer six years out of seven would, in a sabbatical year, bring its pressures on him directly. His six years as a subordinate to land-owning masters were intended to prepare him for a year of service to an impersonal master: the competitive market. Consumers bring their judgment upon producers through the dual sanctions of profit and loss. The employee, when he became the master of his own production unit in the jubilee year, would have to learn to meet the demands of both nature (food for his family) and the market. He would find that he was still under authority. The system of sabbatical years was designed to give every landless field hand the opportunity to become familiar with this economic pressure. For one year in seven, he was to learn about subordination to the market.
Then, in the year following the seventh cycle of the sabbatical weeks of years, the landless employee was to receive his reward: the return of his landed inheritance in the jubilee. The day of atonement that began the jubilee year brought Israelites as individuals under the affliction of God: voluntary submission. It simultaneously released them from direct economic subordination. In that year, members of poor Israelite families repossessed their portion of the larger family unit's land. Having submitted to God, they would no longer have to submit to landed administrators. They would become landed administrators. They would then have to submit to consumers directly, without a land owner above them telling them what to do.
Dominion Through Subordination
The covenantal basis of dominion is formal, oath-bound subordination to God. The jubilee year began with the sound of a trumpet: the audible symbol of the final judgment. "In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed" (I Cor. 15:52). The day of atonement was to remind the Israelite nation of its unique corporate subordination to God. This ritual subordination was to serve as the foundation, both judicially and psychologically, of each Israelite's tasks of leadership. Humble before God, they were to be aggressive toward the world. This is the meaning of the New Testament statement, "Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth" (Matt. 5:5). They are meek before God, not meek before covenant-breaking men.(16) To be compelled to be meek before covenant-breaking men is evidence of God's temporary chastisement of His covenant people. It is to be forced to adhere to an illegitimate civil oath.(17)
On the day above all other days in which each Israelite publicly manifested his subordinate position before God, the day of atonement also served, twice per century, as the day of inheritance, the day on which a man's inheritance was returned to him. He would henceforth regain legal authority over a piece of land. He would then discover if he had the skills and foresight as an entrepreneur -- a future-predicting planner and executor of plans(18) -- to retain economic authority over it as an economic representative of God, his family, and the consumers in the marketplace.
Rest and Subordination
The meaning of sabbath rest is subordination. Man, a creature, had the whole creation delivered to him by God on the sixth day of the first week. Man was to exercise dominion under God: a subordinate who was created explicitly to rule. To acknowledge his subordinate position under God, he was supposed to rest on the seventh day of God's week, which was the first full day of man's week.(19) He rebelled instead. He illegitimately imitated God by prematurely grabbing for the robes of authority (Gen. 3:5). One aspect of Adam's curse was to have his day of rest postponed. This day of rest is definitively reached only through the New Covenant of Jesus Christ. "There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God. For he that is entered into his rest, he also hath ceased from his own works, as God did from his" (Heb. 4:9-10). Progressively, rest is attained through covenantal obedience to God: "Let us labour therefore to enter into that rest, lest any man fall after the same example of unbelief" (Heb. 4:11). This rest from all labor in history is attained only at death: "Rest in Peace," we write on tombstones. Those who die disinherited by God in history do rest from their labors, but they have no peace forever.
Because of the nature of Adam's transgression, the Mosaic Covenant established its mandatory sabbath day as day seven. Old Covenant man was allowed to rest only after his labors were finished for the week. "Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work. But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates" (Ex. 20:9-10). Even as he had to work for his dinner, Old Covenant man had to work for his rest. Having played the rebel in his quest to become as God, man was made to suffer the burden of cursed work before his day of rest. This had not been the original design for man's work week. The six-one pattern of work and rest was a curse, even though weekly rest was grace that man does not deserve. The one-six pattern was the original Edenic model. Man was designed to begin his week with celebration -- a covenant renewal meal -- and rest.
Adam rebelled against his assigned day of rest. The mark of covenant-breaking man is his assertion of primary sovereignty, meaning autonomy. God did not rest the first day. Imitating God, covenant-breaking refused to rest on his first day. Instead, he participated in a satanic communion meal at the forbidden tree.(20) Then he sewed fig leaves to cover himself. He became a tailor. Adam's denial of his need for a day of rest was a denial of his subordinate position, metaphysically and judicially, under God.
So it was in Mosaic Israel. To work on the day of atonement -- the day of man's required public acknowledgment of his subordination -- was suicidal. It called down the negative sanction of spiritual death, directly imposed by God. "And whatsoever soul it be that doeth any work in that same day, the same soul will I destroy from among his people" (Lev. 23:30). It was therefore an excommunicable offense: the loss of inheritance in the land and therefore also citizenship.
This is the judicial background of the year of jubilee. It was required to be held in the year following the seventh sabbatical year, i.e., year 50. The sabbatical year was a required year of rest for agricultural land. It came at the end of six years of harvesting. The year of jubilee followed the "sabbath" of a "week" of sabbath years. It constituted a second sabbath year: a double rest period. This was a double testimony to man's subordination to God.
The Spoils of War "In the year of this jubile ye shall return every man unto his possession" (Lev. 25:13). This provision applied to rural land. It did not apply to property in walled cities (Lev. 25:29-30). It did not apply to non-agricultural property.
What was the historical origin of this law? Judicially, it was an application of the Mosaic sabbath (Ex. 23:10-12). Historically, it was an aspect of the promised spoils of war. God offered land only to those families that would participate in the military conquest of Canaan. Families that refused to join the battle could not participate in the post-conquest distribution of land. This was never stated explicitly, but we can safely conclude that this was the case because of Joshua's dealing with the Reubenites, the Gadites, and half the tribe of Manasseh. These tribes had already inherited property outside the Promised Land, across the Jordan River. This inheritance was an aspect of the spoils of war. Moses had announced: "And when ye came unto this place, Sihon the king of Heshbon, and Og the king of Bashan, came out against us unto battle, and we smote them: And we took their land, and gave it for an inheritance unto the Reubenites, and to the Gadites, and to the half tribe of Manasseh" (Deut. 29:7-8). However, for them to inherit this recently promised land, Joshua insisted, they would have to fight the Canaanites alongside the other tribes, despite the fact that they had already fought Sihon and Og for their land, and Moses had passed title to them. In short, there would be no transfer of lawful title prior to the final battle. That is to say, there would be no rest for any until after the labor of war was over for all. What had been given to these tribes definitively could not be claimed by them finally until after the conquest was over.
Then Joshua commanded the officers of the people, saying, Pass through the host, and command the people, saying, Prepare you victuals; for within three days ye shall pass over this Jordan, to go in to possess the land, which the LORD your God giveth you to possess it. And to the Reubenites, and to the Gadites, and to half the tribe of Manasseh, spake Joshua, saying, Remember the word which Moses the servant of the LORD commanded you, saying, The LORD your God hath given you rest, and hath given you this land. Your wives, your little ones, and your cattle, shall remain in the land which Moses gave you on this side Jordan; but ye shall pass before your brethren armed, all the mighty men of valour, and help them; Until the LORD have given your brethren rest, as he hath given you, and they also have possessed the land which the LORD your God giveth them: then ye shall return unto the land of your possession, and enjoy it, which Moses the LORD'S servant gave you on this side Jordan toward the sunrising. And they answered Joshua, saying, All that thou commandest us we will do, and whithersoever thou sendest us, we will go. According as we hearkened unto Moses in all things, so will we hearken unto thee: only the LORD thy God be with thee, as he was with Moses (Josh. 1:10-17; emphasis added).
If militarily victorious tribes had to wait for the transfer of title to land already verbally promised -- land located across the Jordan and therefore not part of God's promise to Abraham -- then what of lawful title to land within the boundaries of the Jordan? Surely the basis of landed inheritance inside the Promised Land would also be based on military conquest. Yet it is unheard of for any commentator to discuss the jubilee year in terms of its historical basis: the distribution of spoils after the military conquest of Canaan.(21) This is why the jubilee inheritance laws are so frequently misinterpreted, including their various applications to areas completely outside of the jubilee land law's agricultural frame of reference.
Genocide and Burnt Offerings
For the Israelites to inherit the land, they were required to kill everyone who had previously occupied the land. "And thou shalt consume all the people which the LORD thy God shall deliver thee; thine eye shall have no pity upon them: neither shalt thou serve their gods; for that will be a snare unto thee" (Deut. 7:16a). Note that the key issue was theology: the gods of the land's previous owners. The people of Israel were to be kept away from these alien gods.
God required a bloody burnt sacrifice as the covenantal foundation of the national inheritance: the genocide of the residents of Jericho and the city's subsequent burning. This mandatory ritual sacrifice(22) was to be followed by the total annihilation of all other residents of the Promised Land. To the degree that the Israelites in any way pitied the existing inhabitants, they would thereby compromise their inheritance. They would have to share the land with others.
Recent commentators have attempted to apply the jubilee laws to the modern world as if these laws had not been grounded in genocide. The original promise had been given to Abraham, but it was conditional on the heirs' continuation of the ritual of circumcision: a bloody rite symbolizing the cutting off of a man's biological heirs.
Consider a rate of population growth of 3 percent per annum, which has been sustained by many agricultural nations in the twentieth century. This rate of increase would have doubled the size of the population in a quarter of a century.(23) By the first jubilee, the average farm would have been down to just under three acres (11 divided by 4). By the second jubilee, the average farm would have been under .7 acre. And so on.
This is why the generation of the conquest had to be circumcised before the conquest could begin (Josh. 5). Commentators who do not trace the origin of the jubilee to the Israelites' genocidal conquest of the land also refuse to discuss the jubilee in terms of the unique, one-time nature of the conquest and the subsequent distribution of military spoils. To discuss the jubilee laws without also discussing the God-mandated genocide that implemented these laws is the equivalent of discussing the Christian ideal of heaven without discussing the cross, hell, and the lake of fire. The legal issue is the same: eternal genocide and eternal burnt offerings -- not by covenant-breakers; rather, of covenant-breakers.(24)
Dominion, Ownership, and Rest Notice the phrase, "The LORD your God hath given you rest, and hath given you this land" (Josh. 1:13b). Rest was associated with lawful inheritance. These two and a half tribes had fought and won their land outside of the Promised Land, but they would now have to fight and win again in order to seal their lawful inheritance: "Until the LORD have given your brethren rest, as he hath given you" (Josh. 1:15a). To seal the tribal promise, there had to be a national victory. Only a comprehensive military victory would bring the nation the rest that would become the basis of tribal inheritance. Only on the basis of military peace can private property be secured. This is an eschatological reality: when the implements of war disappear, God's covenant people will then possess lawful title to their property in peace. This can come only when nations universally conform themselves to the terms of God's covenant law.
But in the last days it shall come to pass, that the mountain of the house of the LORD shall be established in the top of the mountains, and it shall be exalted above the hills; and people shall flow unto it. And many nations shall come, and say, Come, and let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, and to the house of the God of Jacob; and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths: for the law shall go forth of Zion, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem. And he shall judge among many people, and rebuke strong nations afar off; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid: for the mouth of the LORD of hosts hath spoken it (Mic. 4:1-4).
There are three primary goals of war: victory (dominion), spoils (inheritance), and peace (rest). The greatest of these is peace, if the peace is secured on God's terms. Permanent peace can be attained only when the law-order of the victors replaces the law-order of the losers. Victor's justice is the only form of justice after the war ends. But without a change in law, there has been no victory. There has only been assimilation by the defeated culture.(25) Legal scholar Harold Berman has put it well: without a change in law, there is no revolution, only a successful coup or rebellion.(26) It takes more than one generation to produce a genuine revolution, he says.(27) In Israel, it took two generations: the generation of the exodus, all but two of whom died in the wilderness, and the generation of the heirs, 40 years spent growing up in the wilderness. Because God ordered the total annihilation of the Canaanites, this revolution in law was not supposed to take another generation. Canaan could not be persuaded by the law, so it was to be destroyed by the law's designated sanctioning agent: the land itself, operating through the nation of Israel. God's grace to the Israelites mandated His wrath to the Canaanites.
All three goals -- victory, spoils, and peace -- were encapsulated in the conquest of Canaan. The conquest of Canaan did not rival the exodus as the archetype of God's dealings with His people, but it did govern that most crucial aspect of a rural civilization: the inheritance of land. The specific terms of land ownership and inheritance in Israel, which in turn established the judicial basis of citizenship, did not derive from the Old Covenant era prior to the exodus, but were announced after the exodus and were ratified in history by the conquest.
Berman quotes Goethe: a tradition cannot be inherited; it must be earned.(28) This was surely the case with Mosaic Israel. But before the promised Abrahamic inheritance could be delivered to the heirs -- the fourth generation -- there had to be an act of covenant renewal. The conquest was closely associated with point four: covenant renewal. The conquest began with the crossing of the Jordan (Josh. 4): a boundary violation. As had been true of Moses' crossing out of the wilderness into Egypt with his uncircumcised son (Ex. 4:24-26), this boundary violation required an act of covenant renewal. Like Moses' son, the sons of Israel had not been circumcised in the wilderness. There followed the mass circumcision at Gilgal (Josh. 5:2-8) and a Passover meal of the corn of Canaan (Josh. 5:11). The manna then ceased; the fruit of the land replaced it (Josh. 5:12).
James Jordan speculates that the entire period constituted a five-point covenantal sequence: 1) the sovereign call out of Egypt by God; 2) the establishment of a judicial hierarchy (Ex. 18), which constituted a judicial sanctuary; 3) the moral development of the inheriting generation for 40 years; 4) the conquest itself, which brought mass sanctions against the Canaanites; 5) the occupation of the land. Evidence for this is the close association of the conquest with the oath-signs of circumcision and Passover.
The Demographics of the Jubilee Inheritance Law The year of jubilee nullified all existing rural land lease contracts. On what legal basis? Assertion of original title. God, as the primary owner, transferred the leaseholds back to the heirs of the original conquering families. God, as the primary owner of the land, announced in advance of the conquest the terms of His leasehold contracts. These leases were to be periodically re-established with members of the families of the original invasion and conquest. There could be no other lawful basis of inheritance in the Promised Land. Eventually, a future generation of those families whose members were unwise enough not to honor these terms would find itself dispossessed through captivity (Lev. 26:33-35).
The terms of the leases created a monopoly of family ownership. No foreigner prior to the exile could ever hope to establish a landed inheritance outside of a walled city except by adoption into an Israelite family. This law tended to keep foreigners inside cities. They would have been restricted to such occupations as merchants, craftsmen, and bankers. They could become landed heirs outside the cities only through adoption by an existing Israelite family.(29) On the other hand, they themselves could become the inherited property of Israelites, for the jubilee land law established permanent, inter-generational chattel slavery for foreigners (Lev. 25:44-46). The jubilee laws therefore made it difficult for foreigners to achieve a permanent cultural presence in the land. It kept them as outsiders, except as temporary leaseholders, hired workers, slaves, and residents of walled cities.
Population Growth
Simultaneously, the jubilee inheritance law created demographic pressure for expansion beyond the boundaries of the Promised Land. No commentator ever discusses this obvious aspect of the jubilee. First, Mosaic law established the possibility of zero miscarriages: "There shall nothing cast their young, nor be barren, in thy land: the number of thy days I will fulfil" (Ex. 23:26). It therefore established the possibility of high birth rates. Second, it established the possibility of longer life spans: "Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee" (Ex. 20:12). Third, the law allowed the adoption by Israelites of circumcised foreigners, a practice that had taken place widely in Egypt before the persecutions began.(30) This was a covenantal formula for blessings that would produce "explosively" high population growth.(31) The rapid population growth they had experienced in Egypt, which had so terrified the Pharaoh of the oppression (Ex. 1:7-10), was the model.
When a high population growth rate is combined with a fixed supply of land, societies become progressively urbanized and progressively engaged in foreign trade. The model in the early modern period of Europe is the tiny nation of the Netherlands. The twentieth-century model is the even tinier nation of Hong Kong.(32) If residents of a small, formerly rural nation are unwilling to become urbanized, they must emigrate to less densely populated nations. The land at home fills up.
Small Farms and Large Families
In ancient Israel, the land was to be transferred back to the original families. The geographically bounded nation was small when they invaded, yet they came in with at least two million people. There were 601,730 adult males at the time of the conquest (Num. 26:51), plus 23,000 Levites (Num. 26:62). Since this was approximately the same number that had come out of Egypt (Ex. 12:37), there had been no population growth for 40 years. This meant that they were reproducing at the replacement rate level: 2.1 children per family. (Some children do not marry, which is why the replacement rate is not 2.0 children.) So, there must have been about 2.4 million people at the time of the exodus: two adult parents and about two children per family.(33)
They entered a land of about six and a half million acres.(34) This meant that the average family, had there been no cities, would have owned about 11 acres.(35) Not all of this land was arable. Some of it was taken up by cities, where the Levites lived. Over time, the number of acres per "nuclear" family unit(36) would have declined as population rose. If Israel had remained faithful to God's law, miscarriages would have ceased. The early Egypt-era rate of growth of Israelite nuclear families would have resumed. No nuclear family could have inherited more than a declining number of acres as time went on. Eventually, no farm would have been large enough to support all the heirs. This would have forced the creation of extended family agricultural corporations, with one or two nuclear families (or even foreign sharecroppers) running the farm in the name of the extended family's members, most of whom would have moved to cities or abroad. There would be no mass exodus back to the original family plots of the conquest era. Only moral rebellion could have kept the land of Israel sufficiently empty of residents to have allowed each family's return to the family plot.
Any discussion of this law as if it were a way to maintain small family farms must discuss in detail how very small these farms would have been within a century or two of rapid population growth. The point is, this law did not guarantee the continuation of agricultural life for a significant percentage of the population. There was no way for any law to assure such a way of life to a growing population in a very small nation. What the jubilee inheritance law did was to cut off all reasonable hope that a family had any economic future in farming, except in those periods in which the nation was in rebellion, when God would respond by sending plagues, famines, miscarriages, and other negative demographic sanctions. But in such deplorable ethical conditions, it would have been highly unlikely that the jubilee inheritance law would have been honored anyway. The system of covenantal law and covenantal sanctions in Mosaic Israel points to a conclusion that the commentators never mention: the anti-rural implications of the Mosaic law. It did not despise farming; it simply made clear that hardly anyone in a God-honoring society is expected to be a full-time farmer. The urban family garden, not the family farm, is the biblical ideal.(37)
Declining Per Capita Farm Income
The jubilee inheritance law was a way to guarantee every head of household a small and declining share of income from a family farm. Most heirs would have become urban residents in Israel or emigrants to other nations. The promise of God regarding population growth -- being fruitful and multiplying -- was a guarantee that covenantal faithfulness would lower the proportion of per capita family income derived from farming. The law made it plain to everyone except modern Bible commentators that if the nation's numbers grew as a result of God's blessing, Israelites could place little hope in the possibility of supporting themselves financially as farmers. Far from being a guarantor of egalitarianism, the jubilee inheritance law was a law forcing covenant-keeping people into the cities or out of the nation.
Real estate located inside walled cities did not come under this law. Neither did property owned or leased outside the boundaries of Israel. This law warned them that a covenantally faithful nation would become an urbanized nation and/or a nation of emigrants. The law made it plain that their lives as farmers could continue only if they were not faithful to God's law. If the nation remained primarily agricultural, this was God's visible curse against them.
The jubilee land inheritance law was designed to force the Israelites to plan for a very different future. They were to become city dwellers as a people within the Promised Land, and traders, bankers, and skilled manufacturers outside the land. There could be no legitimate hope in remaining farmers in the Promised Land. The boundaries of the land were fixed; their population size was not. There would eventually have to be expansion beyond the boundaries of Israel, and there would have to be a concentration of population in Israel's cities. Like the garden east of Eden, the family-owned farms of Israel would be temporary dwelling places of preliminary training for worldwide dominion. The faster the population grew, the faster their life as farmers and animal herders would disappear. What the West has experienced since the late eighteenth century is what God had in mind for Israel from the time of the conquest, namely, rapid growth -- of population, cities, specialization, manufacturing, trade, emigration, and per capita wealth. To the extent that they did not experience this, they would know that they were under God's national curse.
The jubilee inheritance law was designed to promote emigration out of Israel and urban occupations inside the land that relied on foreign trade. The rural land inheritance law promoted contact with foreigners. This was an aspect of the dominion covenant. It was to serve as a means of evangelism. The story of Israel, her laws, and her God was to spread abroad:
Behold, I have taught you statutes and judgments, even as the LORD my God commanded me, that ye should do so in the land whither ye go to possess it. Keep therefore and do them; for this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the nations, which shall hear all these statutes, and say, Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people. For what nation is there so great, who hath God so nigh unto them, as the LORD our God is in all things that we call upon him for? And what nation is there so great, that hath statutes and judgments so righteous as all this law, which I set before you this day? (Deut. 4:5-8).
The Blindness of the CommentatorsR. K. Harrison's comment on the jubilee inheritance law indicates his concern with what he supposes are its economic effects. He pays no attention to demographics and its effects, which is a common characteristic of virtually all commentators on this law. "An emphasis on humanitarianism and social justice is a pronounced feature of the legislation in this chapter, and it should be noted that the tenor of the laws pursued a middle course between the extremes of unrestricted capitalism and rampant communism."(38) A middle course between communism and capitalism? This misreading of the text is so total that it is difficult to understand how anyone who has read the Pentateuch could write it. So powerful has been the Fabian socialist ideal(39) of the so-called Keynesian "mixed economy" -- halfway between capitalism and communism, but with limits always set by the State -- that modern Bible commentators have read Fabianism's worldview into biblical texts. The condition of most intellectuals prior to the astounding overnight collapse of both Soviet Communism and socialist ideology in 1989 was well described in 1979 by historian Clarence Carson: the world in the grip of an idea.(40) That idea was either Keynesian economics or outright socialism. This outlook has colored even conservative biblical exegesis.
There was no possibility whatsoever of communism under the Mosaic Covenant. The jubilee laws were aimed at preserving private ownership, even including the private ownership of foreign-born slaves. There was no "middle course" between communism and capitalism, since communism was never an option. The ownership system was entirely capitalistic. God, the land's owner, from the beginning established leasehold arrangements with those who would occupy His land after the conquest. This is the essence of capitalism: a voluntary contract between owners and managers or tenants.
What Harrison might have written is that the law promoted a variety of rural familism. Yet even this minimal statement would have been true only when there was no population growth, i.e., only when the nation was under God's curse. Otherwise, the jubilee inheritance law made it clear that the only way for families to derive any meaningful economic benefit from their landed inheritance was to create some sort of corporate family ownership with delegated management -- something like the modern corporate farm. Farm income would have been in the form of dividend payments: a declining percentage of family income as the families grew in number and their income from non-farming sources increased. The terms of the jubilee rural land inheritance law destroyed any hope in rural landed wealth in a society marked by a growing population. Wealth would have to become increasingly urban in origin, derived from manufacturing, services, foreign trade, and all the other occupations of the modern, distinctly urban, distinctly capitalist world.
What is astounding to me is that I have yet to read another Bible commentator or historian of ancient Israel who mentions any of this. I am aware of no commentator who has gone to the passage that promises the elimination of miscarriages and then to the passages that promise long life spans in his attempt to calculate the demographic effects of a growing population on rural land tenure. The commentators have systematically ignored those biblical texts that relate to God's historical sanctions -- in this case the positive sanction of population growth. Only with their anti-covenantal blinders firmly attached do they begin making observations on the meaning and implications of the jubilee laws. This approach to Leviticus 25 is as common among conservative Bible commentators as among the liberals. The result has been the utter failure of the commentators to make sense of the jubilee.
The Myth of Jubilee Egalitarianism In the mid-1970's, Jeremy Rifkin and other humanist radicals organized the People's Bicentennial Commission. This organization was set up to take advantage of the national bicentennial celebration in the U.S. of the Declaration of Independence (1776). William Peltz, the Midwest regional coordinator of the Peoples Bicentennial Commission, at a meeting in Ann Arbor, Michigan, argued that conservative Christians could be turned into promoters of revolutionary politics if radicals would just show them that the Bible teaches revolution. Peltz cited Leviticus 25 as a key passage in promoting compulsory wealth redistribution.(41) This theme subsequently became popular among numerous radical Christian groups. It was promoted heavily in Ronald Sider's 1977 book, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, and also in Sojourners magazine. It has even become a familiar theme in certain fundamentalist groups.
Those who defend this interpretation have not understood that the jubilee was an aspect of military conquest, an economic incentive to fight that was given to each Hebrew family before Israel invaded Canaan. They also have not recognized that the jubilee was fulfilled in principle by Jesus (Luke 4) and abolished historically when Israel as a nation ceased to exist. But, most of all, they have not bothered to tell their followers that if Leviticus 25 is still morally and legally binding, then lifetime slavery is still morally and legally valid, for it is only in Leviticus 25 that the Hebrews were told that they could buy and enslave foreigners for life, and then enslave their heirs forever (Lev. 25:44-46).
Ron Sider wrote in 1977: "Leviticus 25 is one of the most radical texts in all of Scripture. At least it seems that way for people born in countries committed to laissez-faire economics. Every fifty years, God said, all land was to return to the original owners -- without compensation! . . . God therefore gave his people a law which would equalize land ownership every fifty years (Lev. 25:10-24)."(42) First, the law could not possibly have equalized land holdings; families are not all the same size. The larger the family was, the smaller the individual inheritance was. That Sider ignored this obvious implication of the jubilee law indicates how little attention he paid to the context or the text of this law. Second, like Harrison, Sider ignored the fact that this law did not equalize urban land ownership in walled cities, which is where most people would have been living in Israel after a few generations of population growth. Sider went on to note that landed wealth is basic to an agricultural economy. True, but covenantally irrelevant; Israel was not supposed to remain an agricultural economy. It was to become intensely urban. Sider wrote: "But the means of producing wealth were to be equalized regularly."(43) There were two exceptions to this law of equalization, however: in rural areas and in urban areas. He never mentioned either of these exceptions.
Then Sider got to the point: an attack on private, voluntary charity, and a defense of State-mandated wealth redistribution, which he called justice: "That this passage prescribes justice rather than haphazard handouts by wealthy philanthropists is extremely significant. The year of Jubilee envisages an institutionalized structure that affects everyone automatically. It is to be the poor person's right to receive back his inheritance at the time of the Jubilee. Returning the land is not a charitable courtesy that the wealthy may extend if they please."(44) He moved without a missing a beat from the jubilee law's narrow judicial category -- heirs of the families that had originally received the land as part of the military spoils system -- to the broad economic category of "the poor." He conveniently neglected to mention three groups -- permanent chattel slaves (Lev. 25:44-46), the urban poor, and poor strangers in the rural communities -- none of whom participated in the jubilee law's inheritance. If the goal was, as he has insisted, the care of the poor, why not all the poor? This points to Sider's problem: the jubilee's goal was not wealth-redistribution to the poor. Any explanation of the jubilee law in terms of care of the poor leads to a dead end. We can partially explain the sabbatical year in terms of care of the non-urban poor, but not the jubilee year.
Sider then moved from the historical and geographical boundaries of the Promised Land to the modern world. "Actually, it might not be a bad idea to try the Jubilee itself at least once. . . . We could select 1980 as the Jubilee year in order to give us a little time for the preliminary preparations. In 1980 all Christians worldwide would pool all their stocks, bonds, and income producing property and businesses and redistribute them equally."(45) This recommendation, understand, did not come from someone who owned any stocks, bonds, or income-producing property. It came from a tenured (no risk of being fired), salaried college professor with a pension plan. At worst, he would have had to forfeit his pension under his recommended plan to honor the jubilee year principle. At least he admitted: "There would undoubtedly be a certain amount of confusion and disruption." Such confusion of results would be the product of Sider's confusion of exegesis.
What he was advocating was the transfer of ownership of non-agricultural productive capital to pagans. Christians, he concluded, should surrender their legally valid claims over the productive resources of capitalism and become servants without claims: strangers in the land. This program of economic surrender to paganism, Sider argued, is an extension of the jubilee principle. But what was the jubilee principle, as described a few pages earlier by Sider? It was a legal prohibition against the permanent sale of a family's long-term capital to someone else, especially strangers (pagans) in the land. In other words, Sider's recommended modern application of the jubilee year principle would produce results exactly opposite of what he had described as the original jubilee year's goal. Yet Sider's book sold very well, and was widely acclaimed in academic Christian and neo-evangelical circles as a model of relevant Christian scholarship.
Sider's book initially appeared to be based on Mosaic law. This was an illusion. On the page following his suggested program of economic surrender to paganism, he wrote: "Still, I certainly do not think that the specific provisions of the year of Jubilee are binding today. Modern technological society is vastly different from rural Palestine. . . . We need methods appropriate to our own civilization. It is the basic principles, not the specific details, which are important and normative for Christians today."(46) This is the standard antinomian argument: the details of God's revealed law are irrelevant today; let us therefore glean and apply only the principles. But there is a major problem with this approach: Without our obedience to the specified details, how can we be confident that our application of the underlying principle is valid? How can we discover the underlying principle if we automatically toss out the specified applications? In short, what good are Bible's case laws without the actual cases? Paul argued that the case law prohibiting the muzzling of oxen while they labored in the field (Deut. 25:4) can be applied two ways: 1) the Christian has legitimate confidence in the positive outcome of his labors (I Cor. 9:9-10); 2) elders are deserving of double honor (I Tim. 5:17-18). He did not add, however, that since we now live under the New Covenant, we can lawfully muzzle our working oxen because we are bound only by the principles of the case laws, not the details thereof.
Aliens and Inalienable Land We can discover the fundamental jubilee principle by beginning with God's own statement regarding the reason for the jubilee law: "The land shall not be sold for ever: for the land is mine; for ye are strangers and sojourners with me" (Lev. 25:23). Problem: God owns all the earth, then and now. "For every beast of the forest is mine, and the cattle upon a thousand hills" (Ps. 50:10). Yet this very ownership of the world is what led to the special position of the land of Canaan and its conquerors: "Now therefore, if ye will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people: for all the earth is mine: And ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation. These are the words which thou shalt speak unto the children of Israel" (Ex. 19:5-6). It was the Israelites, and only the Israelites, who were to be owners of rural land in Israel -- not the immigrant stranger, and surely not the Canaanite.
Only the Israelites were strangers and sojourners with God. Therefore, for as long as God dwelled uniquely in the land, only His covenant people were allowed to remain agricultural owners. They would police the land's boundaries, keeping strangers out except on God's terms: inside walled cities, inside Israelite households as slaves, as leaseholders, and as free agricultural laborers. Far from being sojourners in the sense of "wanderers in the land," Israelites were to become the only permanent owners of rural land. They might be strangers and wanderers outside the Promised Land, but permanent owners inside. The Promised Land was to serve as "home base" in a worldwide program of trade and evangelism. To be a perfect stranger to the covenant-breaking world outside the geographical boundaries of Israel, one had to be: 1) a covenanted member of an Israelite family that had participated in the conquest, or 2) an adopted member of a walled city's tribe. This was the meaning of "strangers and sojourners with me": strangers to the world but perpetual land owners inside rural Israel. Then as now, the concept of stranger was an inescapable concept. A person was either a stranger with God or a stranger from God. The physical mark of circumcision and lawful inheritance inside Israel identified a man as being a stranger with God.
So, God set apart the Promised Land as His holy dwelling place. He sanctified it. He placed boundaries around it. Thus, the fundamental covenantal principle of the jubilee law was holiness: the separation of covenantally unequal people from each other.
The Principle of Inequality
God established His people as owners of the land through an historically and judicially unique program of genocide. The covenantal principle of the jubilee is simple: those who worshipped false gods within the geographical boundaries of Israel could not own agricultural land. The original Canaanites had to be killed, God insisted, while future immigrants from pagan nations would have to be confined geographically. For as long as they dwelt within the land's geographical boundaries under the terms of the original distribution, Israelites had to keep strangers from inheriting agricultural land.(47) Strangers could inherit houses only inside walled cities. The walls were symbols of the covenantal restraints on them. They could also lawfully be enslaved on a permanent basis if they ever sold themselves to an Israelite family. This means that the primary economic concern of the jubilee laws was not the equalization of property, or even equality of opportunity; it was, on the contrary, the establishment of the principle of inequality of opportunity for those outside the covenant.
The economic principle is clear: those who did not worship the God of the Bible, as well as the heirs of those who had not proven their devotion to God by participating in national genocide, had to be restricted economically (no landed inheritance) or geographically (inside walls). There was a corollary: the vast majority of the covenantally faithful nation would eventually move into walled cities, which would have made it less likely that strangers would become economically influential there. The fundamental economic principle of the jubilee laws was that those outside the covenants -- civil, familial, and ecclesiastical -- should be kept economically and numerically subordinate to those inside the covenants.(48) Does Sider regard these principles as morally binding today? I think not. (I also wonder if he believes that they were morally valid during the Mosaic era. I would like to see him write an article defending these principles as they applied in Mosaic Israel.) But this raises a fundamental question: How can we apply these jubilee principles in New Covenant times?
Citizenship Let me re-write Sider. "Leviticus 25 is one of the most radical texts in all of Scripture. At least it seems this way for people born in countries committed to pluralist democratic politics." In ancient Israel, citizenship was by formal covenant.(49) It was not by property ownership. The stranger could be circumcised, but he could not inherit rural land. He could therefore not become a judge in the Promised Land as a member of the congregation unless he was adopted into an Israelite tribe (walled city) or family. Only if adopted could he become eligible to serve in God's holy army, which was the mark of citizenship.
The strangers' economic and cultural influence was to be offset by a growing concentration of Israelites living in walled cities. The walled cities were places of refuge for immigrants (as cities become in nations that open their borders to immigrants), but walled cities were not to become strongholds of foreign influence, either political or economic. Any city in Israel that covenanted with a foreign god was to be totally destroyed (Deut. 13:12-17).
The interactions between foreign cultures (plural) and domestic culture (singular) would take place mainly in the walled cities of Israel and in the commercial cities of other societies. The kingdom (civilization) of God was to overwhelm the kingdoms of all other gods. Cities would be the places where the confrontation between God's kingdom and all others would take place. The jubilee inheritance law, when coupled with a rising Israelite population, insured that there would be a strong and growing presence of covenant-keepers in the walled cities of Israel.
Geographical Holiness Jesus spoke of a coming transfer of His kingdom: "Therefore say I unto you, The kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof" (Matt. 21:43). He spoke of new wine in old wineskins: "Neither do men put new wine into old bottles [askos: leather bag]: else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish: but they put new wine into new bottles, and both are preserved" (Matt. 9:17). The New Covenant would soon break the limits of the Old Covenant. The church would soon replace national Israel. This is why Paul speaks of the church as "the Israel of God" (Gal. 6:16).
With the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, the Promised Land lost the final remnants of its judicial holiness.(50) The land of Israel was no longer uniquely the place of God's residence. This change in covenantal administration had been made visible when the veil separating the holy of holies from the holy place was torn at the time of Christ's death. This destruction of the temple's physical barrier between man and God was immediately verified by the destruction of that most fundamental of all boundaries in history, the boundary of the grave. "Jesus, when he had cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost. And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent; And the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, And came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many" (Matt. 27:50-53).
This destruction of the key geographical boundary in Israel -- God's set-apart dwelling place in the temple -- led to the judicial destruction of the other geographical boundaries: Levitical cities vs. walled cities, walled cities vs. fields, Israel vs. the world. With the end of national Israel's covenantal holiness came the end of geographical Israel's holiness. This annulled the jubilee land laws. They had no further frame of reference. Any attempt to revive them is doomed: a theological dead end.
The Promise of Sanctuary The law required that "ye shall return every man to his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family" (Lev. 25:10b). This was why it was illegal to enslave an Israelite permanently. The family plots served as legal sanctuaries. An Israelite's legal claim to eventual freedom and his legal claim to landed inheritance were both aspects of the same covenantal grant. An Israelite could not legally alienate his freedom, his heirs' freedom, or his share in the land.(51) Civil freedom and rural land ownership were linked. Any unwillingness on the part of the civil magistrates to enforce the jubilee land laws was implicitly a denial of sanctuary to the heirs of the Abrahamic promise and also a denial of the original terms of the conquest.
The legal justification for the right of the Israelites to buy resident aliens on a permanent basis (Lev. 25:44-46) was the fact that resident aliens were not citizens of the commonwealth. They could not serve as civil judges or as warriors in God's holy army. They were outside the civil covenant. They were guaranteed sanctuary from pagan lands, but not sanctuary within the land. They could be sold into slavery to pay their debts, including especially debts to victims of their crimes.(52) Their heirs - the fruit of their loins - were sold with them.(53)
A family's original grant of land at the time of the conquest established a legal claim to sanctuary from permanent enslavement for its heirs. The land was holy, sanctified by God's presence. The Israelites were holy, sanctified by God's promise to Abraham and also by their obedience to the requirement of the covenant: circumcision.(54) The family plots were sanctuaries, sanctified by God's original ownership of the land and by the terms of his leasehold with Israel at the time of the conquest.
When Jesus declared the jubilee fulfilled by Him (Luke 4:18-21), He granted universal sanctuary. The land of Israel would no longer serve as a place of sanctuary in history, sanctified by the special presence of God. The kingdom of God has become the New Covenant's place of sanctuary -- not merely the institutional church, but the civilization of God. The whole world of paganism is required by God to seek sanctuary in Christ's church. This substitution of a new sanctuary annulled the jubilee land laws, and thereby also annulled the jubilee's permanent slave law.
The alternative to this interpretation of the New Covenant is the long-held defense of slavery made by Christian commentators. Their interpretation -- never explicit but necessarily implicit -- is that the annulment of the jubilee land laws did not also annul the slave law. This leads to the conclusion that God's law no longer makes provision for those seeking geographical sanctuary. In other words, when national Israel ceased to offer sanctuary to the lost or the righteous foreigner, geographical sanctuary ceased in history. The argument runs as follows: "The Israelites no longer possessed a guarantee of jubilee liberty; therefore, the liberty announced by Christ must have constituted the annulment of Mosaic liberty. God has annulled the land-sanctuary-liberty connection, but nothing has taken its place. Thus, slavery is validated as a universal institution."
The only New Testament-based alternative to this unpleasant interpretation is to conclude that liberty has been validated by the work of Jesus Christ, and the mark of this validation is the abolition of slavery in Christian nations. The church has never publicly acknowledged the abolitionist implications of Jesus' fulfillment of the jubilee law. His announcement was not, to my knowledge, ever cited by any abolitionist of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But after 1780, pressure to abolish slavery increased within many Anglo-Saxon Protestant churches located outside of the slave-owning regions. By the end of the 1880's, slavery had been abolished in the West.
Meanwhile, national sanctuaries for the oppressed and poor were opened: free emigration and immigration. But after World War I, this open access was steadily closed by legislation. Immigration barriers were erected everywhere. The modern passport is one of humanism's important covenantal marks: a progressive contraction of international sanctuaries. Political liberals as well as political conservatives have affirmed the legitimacy of these immigration barriers.(55) When nations are no longer covenantally Christian, i.e., when they adopt religious pluralism and other marks of citizenship besides church membership, and when they replace voluntary charity with welfare State entitlements, the Christian evangelist's call to the lost in the name of Christ steadily fades. "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest" is replaced by "Keep out those welfare-seeking bums!" Finally, when mandatory identification cards are issued by the State to every resident in order to "reduce welfare fraud," all remaining sanctuaries tend to disappear: in churches, regions, and families.
Citizenship and Land Ownership Under the initial distribution of the land under Joshua, no non-citizen could own rural land. Not every citizen had to own rural land -- most notably, a circumcised immigrant or his heir who was eligible to serve in the army -- but every rural land owner had to be a citizen. This law ended with the exile (Ezek. 47:21-23), when the land vomited out the Israelites.
Why should land ownership in any nation be limited to its citizens? If the uses of the land are under civil law -- and land can hardly be moved outside this jurisdiction -- then what does it matter who owns it? The rent will be the same, no matter who owns the property, since owners cannot unilaterally establish rent in a free market. Rent payments are established in terms of competition: owners vs. owners, renters vs. renters. I ask: What is the covenantal justification for civil restraints on real estate sales to foreigners? Land ownership confers no right to vote -- citizenship -- to owners. It therefore has nothing to do with the civil covenant. Restrictions on land sales to foreign residents constitute restrictions against the maximization of an existing land owner's wealth. Why should the civil government be given such control over the sale of land? It is not sufficient to cite the jubilee agricultural land laws; these laws applied only to land that had been transferred by God to the families that participated in the conquest of Canaan.
The idea that a person can somehow disinherit his heirs merely by exchanging land ownership for the ownership of money is a peculiar notion. It may be a valid concern in a statist society that places legal restrictions on the purchase of real estate -- "once sold, always sold" -- but in a free market social order, the idea is ridiculous. Such a view is culturally derived, not economically or judicially derived. Disinheritance is surely not limited to land ownership. Neither is inheritance. To imagine that the sale of land to another family or to a business, foreign or not, is somehow a means of disinheritance is to adopt a magical view of land. Such a view is not a New Covenant view, for the Mosaic covenant has been abrogated by the New Covenant.
There is nothing either covenantal or magical about land. The once-powerful myths of "blood and soil" -- pagan family myths and pagan agricultural myths, both of which are pagan fertility myths -- have long served as rival religions to Christianity. The Latin root word for pagan means villager. Rural areas were where the gospel met its greatest resistance from the beginning of the church. The most recent national revival of these dual myths took place in industrial Germany under Nazism: the work of a dictator who had self-consciously adopted the symbolism of soil and the occult as a tools of public mobilization.(56) One of the great benefits of free market capitalism and its consequent urbanization has been the cultural undermining of these fertility myths. In response, the defenders of the old pagan order openly reject the idea of progress as a rival and erroneous myth. This is consistent with ancient paganism's cyclical theory of time.
While there can be legitimate traditional or sentimental feelings about the land in some societies, these feelings possess no unique judicial authority in a private property-based social order.(57) As with any scarce economic resource, the land owner must meet the demands of the highest-bidding consumers or else suffer net economic losses (e.g., forfeited rent). Land ownership is unique only in land's physical immobility. Its uses are easier to control by law. Real estate is also less liquid economically than other assets, since extensive knowledge of a particular property's location and condition is required to assess its value.
Inheritance and Mobility
In a nation such as the United States, in which almost one-fifth of the population moves to new residences every year,(58) an attempt to defend restricted land ownership in terms of the Bible is most peculiar. Primogeniture (eldest son inherits the family's land) and entail (prohibition on sale of the family's land) were never major aspects of New England Puritanism and faded rapidly in the late eighteenth century in Virginia. While laws authorizing both practices were on the books in most of the American colonies up until the American Revolution (1776-83), there are few court records indicating that such laws were ever seriously enforced.(59) When enforced, these laws reduced the authority of parents to control their children, especially with respect to marriage.(60) Without the covenantal authority of tribal organizations to direct the line of inheritance, laws restricting the sale of land restrict both parental authority and social mobility. This restriction on social mobility was also present in Mosaic Israel, although population growth and urbanization would have overcome much of this restricted mobility. God placed these restrictions on landed inheritance for the sake of the promised messianic seed; in A.D. 70, God destroyed the tribes and abrogated the tribal land laws.
The dominion covenant requires mobility: the conquest of society by the gospel. The ownership of the world was transferred definitively to Jesus at Calvary, and from Him to His people in history. The spread of the gospel is God's authorized means of progressive conquest -- inheritance -- by His people. The idea of covenantally restricted land ownership is foreign to the idea of mobility (dominion) in New Testament times. The covenantal threat of land ownership by a foreigner no longer exists under biblical law. Only those nations, such as the United States, that perversely sanction citizenship based on residence or birth in the land are threatened by foreign-born owners of land. There is no covenantal or political threat whatsoever from ownership by foreign corporations.
The tremendous social and economic mobility offered by modern capitalism cannot be separated from the freedom to buy and sell land. A cry to limit land ownership to a nation's citizens, especially in a large country, indicates the degree to which voters are uninformed about 1) economic theory (rent), 2) economic facts (freedom of contract), and 3) social theory (social mobility). The cry to limit land ownership to citizens in the name of the jubilee adds ignorance about the Bible to the three other forms of ignorance.
Land Ownership by Foreigners: Then and Now One misguided idea that began to circulate in conservative American Christian circles in the late 1980's was the suggestion that citizens and corporations of a foreign nation should not be permitted to buy land in the United States. The theological defense of this suggestion has been an appeal to the jubilee land laws. The purchase of American land by foreigners has not been a problem, nor has it been much of a phenomenon, except possibly in Hawaii, where Japanese companies have bought land to build golf courses to be used only by Japanese players. Because a single golf course membership in the best club in Tokyo cost over $3 million in late 1989 (up from $769,000 in 1986),(61) plus $4,000 for a member to play one 18-hole game, it became cheaper for Japanese golfers to pool their funds, buy a Hawaiian golf course or build it, charter a jet over the weekend, fly to Hawaii, play two rounds, and fly home. But this "golfing invasion" hardly constituted a threat to American national interests. Tight money and a falling stock market in Japan ended such investments after 1989.
The most prominent American theologian to articulate this view of restricted land ownership is Rushdoony, who in most cases is a firm defender of property rights. But in the case of land ownership, he appeals back to the land laws of Mosaic Israel. He writes that "Scripture is very clear about the alien within the country; he must be treated the same as a covenant man, even if an unbeliever. As a believer, he is free to inter-marry with covenant families. The alien outside the covenant country has no property rights within the land. Ownership is a form of responsibility, and responsibility within the covenant land is to the covenant of God; hence, he cannot buy into the land. The first fruits of the earth, and the tithes on agricultural and commercial increase, belong to the Lord."(62) This was indeed true of agricultural land in Mosaic Israel, but the land laws of Mosaic Israel died with the transfer of God's kingdom to the church in A.D. 70. They were not resurrected. To argue otherwise is to allow the redistributionist jubilee theology of Ronald Sider to enter in through the back door, as well as Simon Legree: the re-introduction of inter-generational slavery (Lev. 25:44-46).
The primary legal issue for rural land ownership in Mosaic Israel was adoption, not confession. Both the confessing resident alien [geyr] and the non-confessing resident alien [nok-ree] could buy inheritable residential real estate inside walled cities. Confession had nothing to do with urban residential ownership. On the other hand, covenant-keeping converts to the faith had no access to rural land ownership apart from their adoption into a family of the conquest generation. The resident alien's orthodox confession had nothing to do with inalienable rural ownership except insofar as such confession was necessary for legal adoption into an Israelite family.
Rushdoony's comment on the lawfulness of land ownership by immigrants is even less accurate with respect to the post-exilic period. He does not mention the relevant passage, Ezekiel's prophecy of a new law that would prevail after their return to the land: "So shall ye divide this land unto you according to the tribes of Israel. And it shall come to pass, that ye shall divide it by lot for an inheritance unto you, and to the strangers that sojourn among you, which shall beget children among you: and they shall be unto you as born in the country among the children of Israel; they shall have inheritance with you among the tribes of Israel. And it shall come to pass, that in what tribe the stranger sojourneth, there shall ye give him his inheritance, saith the Lord GOD" (Ezek. 47:21-23). The prohibition against permanent rural land ownership by the circumcised resident alien ended after the exile. This had nothing to do with marriage to an Israelite. The circumcised stranger was the covenantally faithful resident alien [geyr], from whom it was illegal to take interest (Lev. 25:35-37), not the resident who was not part of the covenant [nok-ree], from whom it was legal to take interest (Deut. 23:20).
The civil enforcement of property rights to land in the New Covenant era has nothing to do with either theological confession or bodily residence. The jubilee land laws of Israel have all been annulled. They were never cross-boundary laws; they applied only to the land and heirs of the conquest. No judicial appeal to any of those laws is valid today. Those who appeal to them risk placing us in bondage: the revival of permanent chattel slavery or the imposition of permanent slavery to the messianic welfare State.
Conclusion The jubilee year began with the day of atonement. This was a day of public submission to God, invoking His grace: a positive sanction. The judicial issue of the day of atonement was man's subordination to God. There could be no profit-seeking work on that day. Men had to rest contentedly in God's grace.
The jubilee year was the culmination of the cycle of sabbatical years. Sabbatical years were mandated by God in order to train landless Israelites and poor strangers how to produce for a market. The Mosaic law identified harvesters as landless or impoverished people who worked as harvesters or gleaners in six years out of seven. In sabbatical years, they became dependent on whatever it was that God would allow the fields to produce apart from cultivation. In those years, harvesters learned to make decisions without a land owner or his supervisor ruling over them.
The jubilee inheritance law applied to rural land inside the boundaries of Israel. It did not apply to houses within the walled cities of the nation except Levitical cities (Lev. 25:32-33). It also did not apply to property outside the Promised Land. This law had been given to the people by God because He was the owner of the land (Lev. 25:23). It was part of the terms of God's lease under which they held rights of administration as sharecropping tenants, with 10 percent of any increase owed to God through the Levites and priests. It was also part of the spoils of war.
A Question of Sanctification
God is owner of all the earth, not just the Promised Land. Why did the jubilee laws not apply to all other nations? Because these laws applied only to His special dwelling place. They were an aspect of God's holiness, which is why the jubilee laws appear in Leviticus, the book of holiness. The Promised Land was to be kept holy: set apart judicially from all other nations. How? Initially, this separation began with God's promise to Abraham: definitive holiness, i.e., definitive sanctification.
The second phase of the process of separation began with the conquest: progressive holiness, i.e., progressive sanctification. God cleansed the land of His enemies by means of total war: the annihilation of His enemies. He required the extermination of the gods of Canaan by means of an original program of genocide. He promised to dwell in the land that contained the tabernacle and temple; He would not permit any other god to be worshipped publicly in Israel. Thus, the gods of the land had to be removed from public view. To achieve this initially, the Israelites were told by God to exterminate or drive out every person dwelling in the land. Only Rahab and her family would be allowed by God to escape this judgment, for she had established a pre-invasion covenant with God.(63)
Third, His holiness was to be defended by enforcing a law that kept post-conquest immigrants from ever owning property in Israel except inside Israel's walled cities. The families of the conquest received an inheritable lease that could not be alienated beyond 49 years. Later immigrants could sublease rural property if they were sufficiently productive, but they could not leave an inheritance beyond the jubilee year.
Fourth, God established a law that removed from the majority of the population any legitimate hope of remaining farmers in Israel if His blessings were forthcoming in response to their covenantal faithfulness as a nation. They surely knew that, as Israel's population expanded, no branch of any extended family could retain economic control over of a particular plot of rural land apart from the compliance of all the other members of the family, except perhaps as a small recreational property (a consumer good). If they wanted income from the land, they could attain it only through its productivity. Small, isolated plots are not very productive. If they wanted to maximize their passive income from their portion of the extended family's land, they would have to cooperate with other members of the extended family in selecting representative managers, either from within the extended family or from outside its legal boundaries. If any nuclear family unit wanted to farm all of the original "eleven acres" for the others, it would have to meet the competition of any other members of the extended family who might offer to serve as the family's representatives on the farm.
Fifth, wealthy immigrants and strangers in the land would have tended to dwell in walled cities, where they could own homes. This is where the population of the Israelites was intended by God to be channeled over time. This process was intended to keep strangers and foreigners from gaining too much influence in the cities. They would have been outnumbered by immigrants from rural areas.
Sixth, God kept the geographically dispersed family of the Levites from gaining political control through land purchases. Their cross-tribal boundary judicial influence had to be advisory. The jubilee land law made it impossible for Levites to centralize land ownership in Israel. They could only rarely inherit rural land (Lev. 27:20-21).(64) But to make sure that they would not abandon their support of the jubilee year because of their desire to inherit rural land, they were given jubilee privileges in the cities: reversion in the jubilee year (Lev. 25:32-33). When enforced, this aspect of the jubilee land laws would have tended to confine their political power to cities, but it also balanced the jubilee law's economic costs and benefits for them. Over time, their influence would grow with the population, as more people congregated in cities, assuming that they could find ways of maintaining the people's theological allegiance in a progressively urbanized culture. Ultimately, the cities would have become economically dominant, and therefore politically dominant, just as they have become all over the world in modern times. But the Levites were not supposed to centralize political and economic power during the rural phase of the Israelite kingdom.
The primary covenantal issue of the jubilee laws was holiness. The jubilee inheritance law had little or nothing to do with assuring economic equality, except in times of national covenantal cursing: stagnant population. The law had everything to do with the mandating of political and cultural inequality: giving a permanent head start to heirs of the conquest over immigrants, even those immigrants who became members of the covenant through circumcision, but not members of land-inheriting families. Only through adoption, either directly or through marriage (for females), could immigrants gain this advantage.
Summary The beginning of a jubilee cycle is difficult to identify: fiftieth year or 51st year. I believe it was in the fiftieth year.
There were two calendars in Israel: ecclesiastical and civil.
The Day of Atonement was jubilee day.
This day was tied to the beginning of the civil year.
It occurred five days before the feast of Tabernacles (booths).
The geographical boundaries of Israel were restricted to about a four-days' walk from the tabernacle-temple.
This prevented the creation of an empire.
The day of atonement was a day of affliction -- formal subordination -- to God.
It was a day of rest.
The day of national liberation took place on the day of subordination.
Autonomy is not liberation.
Modern free market economics begins with the presupposition of the individual's autonomy.
The sabbatical year removed the land owner from the hierarchy of access to the crops: God, land, harvesters.
The land became like the wilderness: the visible arena of God's grace.
The harvester was caught between the land and consumers without an intermediary: the land's owner.
In a pre-jubilee year, this experience was to prepare poor Israelites for their return to their inheritance.
In sabbatical years, the experience was to prepare poor indebted Israelites for a return, debt-free (Deut. 15:1-7), to their land.
The trumpet was symbolic of final judgment.
Sabbath rest is linked to subordination to God.
Working on the day of atonement brought disinheritance through excommunication.
The Israelites owned the land as the spoils of war.
The jubilee land laws were an aspect of total military conquest: genocide (burnt offerings).
Rest -- total victory -- is associated with inheritance: the jubilee land laws.
The goal of holy war is three-fold: victory (dominion), spoils (inheritance), and peace (rest).
A true revolution is not successful until the legal order is definitively changed.
This takes more than one generation.
The conquest began with a boundary violation: entry into the land (point three).
It was sealed with circumcision (point four).
The entire conquest era was a five-point covenant sequence.
The jubilee's nullification of leases was an assertion of original title: God's and the invading families' title.
This law pressured foreigners to dwell inside walled cities.
The shrinking size of landed inheritance in a growing population would have pushed Israelites into walled cities.
The original families owned on average eleven rural acres.
This means that the families of a faithful commonwealth had no long-term future in farming.
The urban garden, not the family farm, is the biblical ideal.
Emigration was also subsidized by the jubilee law.
The land's boundaries were fixed; the population was not.
Israel's political economy was capitalist, not communist.
American radicals, 1975-85, used the rhetoric of the jubilee to promote socialism and compulsory wealth redistribution.
The goal of the jubilee was not distributing wealth to the poor.
The number-one principle of the jubilee was to emphasize God's ownership of the rural land of Israel.
The eleven non-ecclesiastical tribes of Israelites were God's agents over the rural land.
The law was designed to keep foreigners out of the rural areas.
Being a stranger with God meant possessing rural land in Israel.
Being a stranger from God meant life outside of Israel or inside Israel's walled cities: boundaries.
The jubilee law was a separation law.
Foreign gods could not reign in rural Israel.
This manifested a principle of inequality.
Covenant-breakers were to be subordinate to covenant-keepers inside Israel's borders.
Inside the walls, Israelites were also to outnumber non-Israelites: urbanization and population growth.
After A.D. 70, Israel ceased to be God's dwelling place.
The land's boundary laws ceased to exist.
This began with the tearing of the temple's curtain at Jesus' death: no more separation of the holy of holies.
This was emphasized by Jesus' violation of the ultimate boundary in history: death.
Laws prohibiting foreigners from owning land in any nation are not based on the Bible.
There is not supposed to be anything covenantally unique about land ownership in the New Covenant era.
The biblical goal is mobility -- extending dominion -- not restrictive land ownership.
Israel's refusal to enforce the jubilee was in effect a denial of permanent sanctuary status to the sons of Abraham.
Jesus' fulfillment of the jubilee law meant that He granted universal sanctuary inside His church.
The church has replaced the land of Israel as the area of sanctuary for pagans to flee into.
Jesus annulled the jubilee laws governing slavery: household sanctuaries for pagans.
The church has never formally acknowledged this abolitionist aspect of His ministry.
Twentieth-century immigration restrictions have contracted the number of available modern sanctuaries.
Footnotes:
1. A. Löwy, A Treatise on the Sabbatical Cycle and the Jubilee (New York: Hermon, [1866] 1974), pp. 7-9. He cited numerous sources.
2. Ibid., pp. 9-10.
3. Ibid., pp. 10-11.
4. Ibid., p. 12.
5. Ibid., pp. 13-16.
6. Gary North, The Dominion Covenant: Genesis (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987), ch. 5: "God's Week and Man's Week."
7. Jesus celebrated Passover on Thursday evening, Nissan 14, the Pharisees' Passover, and was tried and crucified the next day. The Judean dating, used by the Sadducees, was different. They celebrated Passover beginning on Nissan 15 (Nissan 14, as calculated by the Sadducees), a sabbath night, so they refused to enter the Praetorium when they took Jesus before Pilate, lest they be defiled for Passover (John 18:28b). They called for the Romans to remove the dead bodies because the sabbath that year corresponded to the Judean Passover (John 19:31). On the distinction between the Pharisees' and the Sadducees' respective Passover dates, see Harold W. Hohner, Chronological Aspects of the Life of Christ (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 1977), ch. 4, especially the chart on page 89.
8. Löwy, Sabbatical Cycle, pp. 23-24.
9. Ibid., p. 19.
10. James Jordan, "Jubilee, Part 2," Biblical Chronology, V (March 1993), p. 1.
11. Rosh. Hash., 1:3; cited in "Month," Cyclopaedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature, edited by John M'Clintock and James Strong, 12 vols. (New York: Harper & Bros., 1876), IV, p. 547.
12. Jordan notes that the official first year of the reign of a king of Judah ran from the first day of the seventh month of the religious year to the last day of the sixth month of the next religious year.
13. The reader may think: "This is obvious. What is the big deal?" Try to find any commentary on Leviticus that discusses the relationship between the timing of the day of atonement-jubilee and the growth of empire. The silence of the commentators is testimony to their unwillingness to take the Bible's literal texts seriously (theological liberalism) or to take political theory seriously (theological conservatism).
14. Ray R. Sutton, That You May Prosper: Dominion By Covenant (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1992), ch. 2.
15. See Chapter 27.
16. Gary North, The Dominion Covenant: Genesis (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987), pp. 436-39.
17. Gary North, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989).
18. Ludwig von Mises, "Profit and Loss" (1951), in Planning For Freedom (4th ed.; South Holland, Illinois: Libertarian Press, 1980), ch. 9; Frank H. Knight, Risk, Uncertainty and Profit (New York: Harper Torchbooks, [1921] 1965). Cf. North, Dominion Covenant, ch. 23.
19. North, Dominion Covenant, ch. 5: "God's Week and Man's Week."
20. North, Dominion Covenant, p. 69.
21. Robert North's seemingly exhaustive and mentally exhausting study, Sociology of the Biblical Jubilee (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1954), is a good example of modern scholarship. Based on higher critical assumptions and methodology, it never mentions the jubilee in relation to the conquest of the land.
22. Achan and his entire family, including their animals, were executed for his having thwarted this required burnt offering. See Appendix A: "Sacrilege and Sanctions."
23. This is based on the "law of 73": divide the annual rate of growth into 73 in order to discover the doubling period.
24. Gary North, "Publisher's Epilogue," in David Chilton, The Great Tribulation (Ft. Worth, Texas: Dominion Press, 1987).
25. The classic examples of this in Western European history were the military victories by the Goths over Rome. The Goths were steadily assimilated both theologically and judicially by the Christian order that had prevailed in Rome.
26. Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 19-20.
27. Ibid., p. 20.
28. Ibid., p. 6.
29. This included adoption through marriage for women, as the cases of Rahab and Ruth indicate.
30. Gary North, Moses and Pharaoh: Dominion Religion vs. Power Religion (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1985), pp. 23-25.
31. Populations do not explode except when bombed. The language of modern growth theory has attached the metaphor of explosives to the metaphor of growth.
32. Alvin Rabushka, Hong Kong: A Study in Economic Freedom (University of Chicago Press, 1979).
33. North, Moses and Pharaoh, ch. 1.
34. The land was no more than 10,330 square miles. Barry J. Beitzel, The Moody Atlas of Bible Lands (Chicago: Moody Press, 1985), p. 25. There are 640 acres per square mile. This means 6,661,200 acres.
35. 6,661,200 acres divided by 601,730 families = 10.98 acres per family. This was comparable to the 4 to 15 acres owned by the average Roman farmer around 200 B.C. "Agriculture, history of," Software Toolworks Illustrated Encyclopedia (1990). This is Grolier's Encyclopedia on a CD-ROM disk.
36. Contrasted with the extended family.
37. When Wilhelm Röpke was visited by a free market economist, the visitor pointed to Röpke's traditional Swiss garden and said: "That is an inefficient way to produce food." Röpke's answer was classic: "It is an efficient way to produce men." I was told this story by Patrick Boarman, who studied under Röpke and translated his Economics of the Free Society (Chicago: Regnery, 1963) into English. I do not know if this visitor was Ludwig von Mises, as Russell Kirk claims it was in his Foreword to the re-issue of Röpke's 1942 book, The Social Crisis of Our Time (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction, 1992), p. ix.
38. R. K. Harrison, Leviticus: An Introduction and Commentary (Downers Grove, Illinois: Inter-Varsity Press, 1980), p. 229.
39. The most famous popular presentation of this ideal was made by British playwright George Bernard Shaw: The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (New York: Brentano's, 1928). The best critical histories of the movement are Margaret Patricia McCarren, Fabianism in the Political Life of Britain, 1919-1931 (Chicago: Heritage Foundation, 1954) and Rose L. Martin, Fabian Freeway: The High Road to Socialism in the U.S.A., 1884-1966 (Chicago: Heritage Foundation, 1966). This is a condensation of Sister McCarren's privately circulated manuscript, The Fabian Transmission Belt, which her ecclesiastical superiors ordered her to withdraw in the early 1960's. She is the daughter of U.S. Senator Pat McCarren, who headed the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee in the early 1950's.
40. Clarence Carson, The World in the Grip of an Idea (New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House, 1979). His book was based on articles he wrote for The Freeman (Dec. 1968-July 1969; Jan. 1977-Sept. 1979).
41. The Attempt to Steal the Bicentennial, The People's Bicentennial Commission, Hearings Before the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 94th Congress, Second Session (March 17 and 18, 1976), p. 36.
42. Ronald J. Sider, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger: A Biblical Study (Wheaton, Illinois: Inter-Varsity, 1977), p. 88. This book was co-published by the liberal Paulist Press (Roman Catholic). A second edition was published in 1984, one which promised on the cover to respond to Sider's critics. Inside, there was no reference to David Chilton's refutation, or to a dozen other published critics. Sider simply stonewalled; his influence began to disappear almost immediately.
43. Idem.
44. Ibid., p. 89.
45. Ibid., p. 93.
46. Ibid., p. 94.
47. This restriction ended after their return from exile (Ezek. 47:21-23). See below, "Land Ownership by Foreigners: Then and Now."
48. They were always subordinate politically: North, Political Polytheism, ch. 2: "Sanctuary and Suffrage."
49. Idem.
50. David Chilton, The Days of Vengeance: An Exposition of the Book of Revelation (Ft. Worth, Texas: Dominion Press, 1987).
51. The one exception involved the transfer of ownership to a priest (Lev. 27:20-21). See Chapter 37.
52. It was therefore very risky for foreigners to commit major crimes in Israel. Making restitution could lead to his children's permanent enslavement if the criminal could not buy his way out before he died.
53. Adult male children of pagans presumably were not sold into slavery with their parents. Neither were married daughters and aged parents. Adults had already established separate family jurisdictions. But those children who were still under the covenantal jurisdiction of alien parents went into bondage with them.
54. The promise was obviously conditional.
55. The ultimate immigration barrier is abortion.
56. Leni Riefanstahl's Nazi propaganda film, Triumph of the Will (1935), records the Nazi Party conference of 1933. The film has scenes of organized rural residents, spades used as symbols of the soil, and happy peasant types. On the occult, see Dusty Sklar, The Nazis and the Occult (New York: Dorset, 1977).
57. The agrarian worldview expressed in I'll Take My Stand, the 1930 manifesto written by a dozen Southern literary figures, remains personal sentiment or personal aesthetic taste unless backed up by civil law. If backed up by civil law, the manifesto means I'll Take My Stand Against Economic Freedom -- not just "yankee industrial capitalism," but the free market a social order. The paganism of the modern "deep ecology" movement is another extension of the myth of the soil. It is deeply hostile to science, progress, and economic freedom. Man's problem is not his environment, urban or rural; man's problem is sin. Delivery from sin is not through a change in the environment.
58. About 18 percent of the population moved residences, 1987-88: Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1990 (Washington, D.C.: Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 1990), Table 25.
59. Robert A. Nisbet, "The Social Impact of the Revolution," in America's Continuing Revolution: An Act of Conservation (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1975), p. 80. Nisbet regards the post-Revolution abolition of primogeniture and entail as symbolically important, not judicially important.
60. Edmund S. Morgan, Virginians at Home: Family Life in the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1952), pp. 34-35.
61. The Strait Times (Singapore) (Nov. 23, 1991). The price later fell to $2 million in 1991 as a result of the drop in Japanese real estate prices. This decline presumably has continued (1993).
62. R. J. Rushdoony, "Ownership," Position Paper, Chalcedon Report (April 1990), p. 17.
63. It is worth noting that members of Rahab's family never formally voiced their individual support of this covenant, but by remaining silent before she made it, when the civil authorities had questioned her regarding the spies (Josh. 2:3), they became lawful residents of Israel through their adherence to the external demands of Rahab's covenant. If they remained inside their section of the wall, despite the collapse of the remainder of the wall, they could remain in the Promised Land (2:19).
64. Chapter 37.
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