34 TITHES OF CELEBRATION Thou shalt truly tithe all the increase of thy seed, that the field bringeth forth year by year. And thou shalt eat before the LORD thy God, in the place which he shall choose to place his name there, the tithe of thy corn, of thy wine, and of thine oil, and the firstlings of thy herds and of thy flocks; that thou mayest learn to fear the LORD thy God always. And if the way be too long for thee, so that thou art not able to carry it; or if the place be too far from thee, which the LORD thy God shall choose to set his name there, when the LORD thy God hath blessed thee: Then shalt thou turn it into money, and bind up the money in thine hand, and shalt go unto the place which the LORD thy God shall choose: And thou shalt bestow that money for whatsoever thy soul lusteth after, for oxen, or for sheep, or for wine, or for strong drink, or for whatsoever thy soul desireth: and thou shalt eat there before the LORD thy God, and thou shalt rejoice, thou, and thine household, And the Levite that is within thy gates; thou shalt not forsake him; for he hath no part nor inheritance with thee. At the end of three years thou shalt bring forth all the tithe of thine increase the same year, and shalt lay it up within thy gates: And the Levite, (because he hath no part nor inheritance with thee,) and the stranger, and the fatherless, and the widow, which are within thy gates, shall come, and shall eat and be satisfied; that the LORD thy God may bless thee in all the work of thine hand which thou doest (Deut. 14:22-29).
The theocentric focus of this law is stated in the text: "that thou mayest learn to fear the LORD thy God always" (v. 23). Men fear nature, especially in agricultural societies. They seek ways to reduce this fear. "Save for a rainy day," we are told. We trust in our own devices. God told Israel that under His covenant, there would be plenty of sunny days ahead for covenant-keepers. He would provide the capital necessary to fund their celebrations. The discipline of tithing was to designed to acknowledge their fear of God and reduce their fear of nature and history. The tithes of celebration were especially useful in this regard. They were a form of holy wastefulness. This wastefulness included the consumption of intoxicating liquors.(1) It was "eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we live."
I have quoted the entire passage because there may be confusion if it is not seen as a unit. There is already sufficient confusion when it is seen as a unit. Sorting out the implications of Israel's system of tithes is a difficult process, as we shall see.
National and Local Festivals The initial tithe mentioned in this text was to be consumed by families and Levites at a central location. The central feasts were not tribal affairs. They were familistic, ecclesiastical, and national. Was this feast to be funded by a second tithe in addition to what was owed yearly to the Levites? The text indicates that it was. This tithe was used to fund the family's expenses at one of the three annual festivals, presumably Booths ("Tabernacles"), the post-harvest feast.
There was a second tithe of celebration: a third-year tithe. This festival took place locally. It substituted for the festival in Jerusalem. Levites were invited, but so were strangers, widows, and orphans. The presence of strangers indicates that was not an ecclesiastical festival. Was it civil? Or was it something else entirely? Until we know what agency enforced it -- which the text does not say -- we cannot be sure.
These tithes were imposed by God. If the nation obeyed Him and paid them, He promised to bless them (v. 29). The question is: Were these civil taxes? God did not threaten to impose negative corporate sanctions on Israel if the State refused to impose penalties for anyone's failure to tithe and participate in the festivals. Who, then, was the victim? For this to have been a matter of civil government, the invited attendees would have had to possess a lawful civil claim on other people's wealth. Not to have brought one's tithe to the festival would have been a matter of theft. There would have been some system of State-imposed restitution available to the victims. But the primary victims were the families that owed God the money. The lion's share of these expenditures was to be consumed by the actual wealth producers. The judicial problem here is to identify the earthly victims who could lawfully bring a lawsuit against the non-tithers. If these were widows, strangers, and orphans in general, how could they prove damages in particular? If this was impossible, on what judicial basis could the State have acted on their behalf to collect from non-tithers in general to allocate to specific claimants?
Celebration in Jerusalem
This law stated that a tithe on the land was to be eaten in a central city (v. 24). All land-owning and land-leasing Israelites were required to journey to Jerusalem, presumably at the post-harvest feast of Booths, in order to celebrate together. They had to bring a tithe of their crops, which they would consume at the feast. To avoid carrying heavy crops to a distant city, and also to allow them to eat other crops brought in from other regions, they were allowed to sell their crops in their home city and buy whatever they wanted in Jerusalem. Presumably, part of the tithe financed the journey. If not, then this was a truly heavy financial burden.
This celebration was to serve as a reminder that their wealth did not depend on their efforts alone. This additional tithe might otherwise have been invested, but it had to be consumed. Men were asked to place their faith in God more than in thrift. The celebration declared: "There's a lot more where that came from!"
This was a rural land-based tithe in addition to the normal tithe on all forms of net income. The tithe that applied to all income had to go to the Levites as their inheritance (Num. 18:21). It was not left in the hands of the people who had produced it. This Levitical tithe I refer to as the first tithe, following rabbinic tradition. It was Levi's inheritance. In contrast was the second tithe: the tithe of national celebration. While the Levite had to be invited by land-owning families to celebrate (v. 27), he was not entitled to all of it or even the bulk of it. This was not the case in the first tithe. Rabbis have concluded that this was a second tithe.(2)
The First Tithe This was the tithe owed to the Levites as the tribe without an inheritance in land. "But the tithes of the children of Israel, which they offer as an heave offering unto the LORD, I have given to the Levites to inherit: therefore I have said unto them, Among the children of Israel they shall have no inheritance" (Num. 18:24). It was owed to them because they had no landed inheritance in rural areas. Their legal claim on the income of others was based on their lack of any original claim on the land. All net income in the land, except for the income of priests and Levites when they serving the Lord in ecclesiastical callings, was subjected to the first tithe.(3)
The seventh year was a year of simultaneous debt release throughout the land (Deut. 15). In that year, the land was to lie fallow (Lev. 25:4-5). A tithe was owed on whatever grew of its own accord and was harvested. It was owed on new animals born during the year. It was owed by those who derived income from sources other than agriculture.
Any attempt to explain the tithes of celebration as substitutes for the first tithe is an argument in favor of the expropriation of the Levites' lawful inheritance. They had no inheritance in land, but they had a substitute inheritance: the tithe. To argue that these other tithes were substitutes is to argue that the Levites were disinherited by this law. They would have had to forfeit their income in order to make celebrations possible for land owners. Clearly, a tithe of celebration was an additional tithe. The questions are: Who had to pay it? Who enforced it?
The Second Tithe The second tithe was a tithe solely on agricultural output. The text is clear on this. "Thou shalt truly tithe all the increase of thy seed, that the field bringeth forth year by year. And thou shalt eat before the LORD thy God, in the place which he shall choose to place his name there, the tithe of thy corn, of thy wine, and of thine oil, and the firstlings of thy herds and of thy flocks. . . ." Those who lived in cities did not pay it. All income not derived from agriculture was exempt. Agricultural land owners paid the second tithe in five out of seven years.
The second tithe had to be consumed in the central city of worship. This is why the prohibition in Deuteronomy 12:17-18 against eating the tithe in one's own gates has to refer to the national tithe of celebration: "Thou mayest not eat within thy gates the tithe of thy corn, or of thy wine, or of thy oil, or the firstlings of thy herds or of thy flock, nor any of thy vows which thou vowest, nor thy freewill offerings, or heave offering of thine hand: But thou must eat them before the LORD thy God in the place which the LORD thy God shall choose, thou, and thy son, and thy daughter, and thy manservant, and thy maidservant, and the Levite that is within thy gates: and thou shalt rejoice before the LORD thy God in all that thou puttest thine hands unto."
If the central city was too far away for a family to carry the tithed goods, the family could sell the goods for money. This money had to be spent on food and drink at the celebration (v. 25). The rabbis concluded that these agricultural goods could be redeemed lawfully only by an added payment of one-fifth to the Levites.(4) This rule is not found this text. The rabbis appealed to what appear to be similar texts, such as this one: "And all the tithe of the land, whether of the seed of the land, or of the fruit of the tree, is the LORD'S: it is holy unto the LORD. And if a man will at all redeem ought of his tithes, he shall add thereto the fifth part thereof" (Lev. 27:30-31). The rabbis were incorrect. The law in Leviticus governed an item owed to God, such as an animal, that the family wanted to keep. For the privilege of buying back what was God's, the family paid a 20 percent premium to the Levite. This was money paid in lieu of his receiving the designated commodity. This was not the situation with the second-year tithe. There was no element of redemption in this tithe. This tithe was under the authority of the family, not the Levite. The family was not redeeming something that belonged to God. It was merely changing the form in which the tithe would be carried to Jerusalem.
The Levites had a claim to part of the second tithe: participation in meals. Strangers, widows, and orphans did not.
The Demand for Money
When widely obeyed, this law would have led to an increase in the demand for money locally in national festival years. The demand for money would have increased at a higher rate in regions farther away from the central city because of the higher transportation costs. The price of agricultural goods would have been lower than in Jerusalem in these distant areas, which is another way of saying that there was an increased demand for money locally. At the same time, demand for agricultural goods would have increased in the central city because travellers brought their money into the city to buy the food consumed during the celebration: "More money chasing fewer goods."
The fall in the price of agricultural goods in the outlying regions and the parallel rise in the money price of such goods in the central city would have produced profit opportunities for specialists in transportation. They would have been able to buy goods in the distant regions in order to move them to the central city and sell them to the attendees. They would have "bought low and sold high." Moving goods from places where they are in low demand to a place where they are in high demand is an important market service. Families would have estimated which was more profitable to them: carrying the bulky goods to Jerusalem vs. paying money for them there.
The Third Tithe This tithe was long ago called the third tithe (Tobit 1:8). Nevertheless, Jewish commentators have regarded the second and third tithes as one.(5) This interpretation is incorrect. There was a third tithe. It was different in at least two ways from the second tithe. First, the celebration was held locally. Second, non-citizens in the community were invited in to celebrate, not just the Levites. "At the end of three years thou shalt bring forth all the tithe of thine increase the same year, and shalt lay it up within thy gates: And the Levite, (because he hath no part nor inheritance with thee,) and the stranger, and the fatherless, and the widow, which are within thy gates, shall come, and shall eat and be satisfied; that the LORD thy God may bless thee in all the work of thine hand which thou doest" (vv. 28-29). This was a tithe of celebration, but it was communal rather than national. It was a tithe for the sake of the judicially dispossessed.
There may have been a third distinction having to do with the tax base: a tithe on any increase, not just agricultural. This depends on the meaning of this verse: "At the end of three years thou shalt bring forth all the tithe of thine increase the same year, and shalt lay it up within thy gates" (v. 28). If we interpret these words as governed by the context of the second tithe, then this was a substitute for the second tithe. But the substitution clearly was not strict. The festival was held locally. Local residents other than Levites were invited in. Town residents were more likely than not to be members of the same tribe as the rural land owners who lived in the surrounding area. I regard this celebration as tribal. It was not national.
The question arises: Did the tithe requirement apply to all income? If we see this tithe as primarily tribal, and if we also see the cities as part of the tribes' inheritance, then the tithe may have been required on all forms of net income. On the other hand, if this is interpreted within the context of the introductory verses, it applied only to agriculture.
This may seem like a small matter, but it is central to understanding welfare economics from the biblical perspective. If the tithes of celebration were tithes exclusively on the land, imposed because the land was not part of the Levites' original inheritance and from which they were excluded by law by the jubilee law, then the State may have had a legitimate role in enforcing these tithes. It was a matter of defending the original agreed-upon terms of the allocation of private property at the time of the conquest. But the celebration tithes were consumed mainly by the producers. The Levites had a claim only on a small portion of this wealth. Also, the third tithe went in part to subsidize attendance by non-Levites. On what legal basis did they possess a claim on the income of anyone else? What legal principle undergirded this law, assuming that this law mandated State wealth-redistribution? If the State was authorized to enforce the third tithe on land owners, then the Mosaic law did authorize coercive wealth-redistribution, although extremely small, in this instance.
The Judicially Defenseless
In the third year, the tithe of celebration was shared with those residents who were not eligible to be citizens in the local tribe. This tithe is generally referred to as the poor tithe, but a prosperous stranger or widow was also to be invited. The rabbinic assumption was that these four categories -- widows, orphans, strangers, and Levites -- would have been poor, but there is no reason to assume that Levites were poor.
The correct classification of these attendees is judicial, not economic. The stranger and the orphan (a minor) were not eligible to serve in the Lord's army. They could therefore not be citizens. The Levite had no inheritance in the land. He could not be a citizen in the tribe in which his city was located unless it was a Levitical city. He served in a separate military unit, one which defended the Ark of the Covenant.(6) The widow, though the head of a household, was not eligible to serve in the army. She was an heir only through her husband and her children when they reached adulthood. She could not hold civil office because she was not under the family authority of a man who was himself eligible to serve in the army and therefore as a judge.(7) While any of these guests at the festival may have been poor, the criterion for being invited to the festival was not their poverty. Rather, it was their lack of judicial standing as citizens eligible to hold civil office in the local tribe. Thus, to call this third-year tithe a poor tithe is incorrect, although Jewish tradition so labels it.
The Levites' Lawful Inheritance The Levites had no landed inheritance in Israel. The other tribes did. The tithe on the land was the Levites' inheritance.
This leads me to a conclusion: anything that undermined the tithe on the land undermined Levi's inheritance. If the interpretation of any Mosaic law led to the legalization of an exemption from any of the tithes, this interpretation had the economic effect of disinheriting Levi.
If those who enjoyed the fruit of the land could gain a competitive advantage over other land owners by legally refusing to pay their tithes, then the Levites would be steadily disinherited. If a leaseholder or land owner could legally have retained an extra 20 percent per year, six years out of seven, and use this money to invest in tools, seed, or whatever, stewardship over the land would have been exercised increasingly by non-tithers. This would have been true in the case of covenant-breaking Israelites as well as covenant-breaking resident aliens.
This leads to a very important conclusion, one which I had not seen before I began interpreting the laws governing the tithes of celebration. There was an implicit clause built into God's original grant of land: the primary tithe of the land belonged to Levi. This was Levi's inheritance. This clause guaranteed that Levi could not be disinherited by covenant-breakers who refused to pay their tithes on the land's produce. Because the other tribes inherited rural land, Levi inherited the first tithe on this land. Also, Levites lawfully participated in the tithes of celebration. This was a matter of civil law because it was a matter of tribal inheritance. It was not a matter of church-State relations.
The State enforces contracts. Under the Mosaic covenant prior to the exile, the appropriate civil sanction for refusing to pay tithes on the land must have been the disinheritance of the tithe-protester. This sanction was applied on the basis of Levi's lawful inheritance. It was not a civil enforcement of an ecclesiastical obligation. It was a civil enforcement of Levi's tribal inheritance. The judicial issue was Levi's inheritance, not the theological commitment of the land's steward. My conclusion is that the resident alien could lease rural land, but he had to pay the first tithe to the Levites. The original owner could not alienate -- literally -- Levi's inheritance by leasing his land to an alien. Levi had an enforceable legal claim on a portion of the output of the land.
This solves the problem of the first tithe. It does not solve the many problems of the second and third tithes.
Were the tithes of celebration part of Levi's inheritance? Part of these tithes was. The Levites had to be invited to the festivals. The legal question is this: Could the economic portion of this obligation have been met without the participation of the land's steward in the festival? That is, could he have paid the Levites a portion of these tithes, thereby fulfilling his obligation? The law does not say. We must guess. It is not an easy guess.
The Levites had a right to attend the celebrations, i.e., participation in the life of the nation, which included celebrations. Did this mean that the Levites had a right to celebrate in the presence of those who served as the land's stewards? Was there more to their claims beyond money for food? If we answer yes, then the non-Israelite lease holder or excommunicated Israelite had to attend the celebrations on threat of civil sanctions. What sanctions? The law does not say. Perhaps it was the forcible removal of the leaseholder from the property. If so, this would have been a very costly penalty, at least during Israel's agricultural phase.
Who was authorized to enforce the claims of the Levites? If this law was strictly ecclesiastical, then the Levites had this right: excommunication. This certainly would have been a self-interested enforcement system. The judges would have been the stated beneficiaries of the law. Did they possess this authority to judge in first-tithe cases? They shared this authority. The tithe was owed to them because they were the priestly tribe, and also because they had a legal claim based on their lack of landed inheritance. Both church and State were authorized by God to enforce the first tithe.
Then why not also the second and third tithes, at least with respect to participation by the Levites? There seems to be no good reason not to assume that this was the case. The problem comes with respect to institutionally enforceable claims by the other participants: widows, orphans and strangers. This raises the issue of Israel as a welfare State. Did the Mosaic civil law force one group of residents to finance annual festivals for others? It is not easy to make such a case based on the textual evidence here.
These were feasts to honor God: "that thou mayest learn to fear the LORD thy God always." They were feasts to which Levites had to be invited. Were they somehow exclusively civil and therefore compulsory? Only to the extent that the Levites possessed a civil legal claim on being invited to attend. At most, the civil character of these festivals, if any, would have authorized the State to enforce a claim on some food and drink -- hardly a major expense. The suggestion that the State had the authority to compel attendance at a religious festival is foreign to everything else we know of the Mosaic law. But if this was the case, we have problems: the resident alien and the excommunicated Israelite.
Alien Leaseholders It is clear from the text that the second tithe was a tithe on the produce of the land. This raises the question of the leaseholder. It was legal for an owner to lease his land to another person for up to 49 years -- until the jubilee (Lev. 25:10). The question arises: Could this leaseholder have been a resident alien? The Bible does not say. It was legal to lease out the land to another person (Lev. 25:25-28). It was also legal to sell oneself to a resident alien (Lev. 25:47-54). We must discover the answer by means of other principles of biblical law, as well as by their implications. What is said here of a resident alien is also true of an excommunicated Israelite.
Next, was a resident alien or an excommunicant required to pay any tithe of celebration? The text does not say. It would make the expositor's task much easier if it did.
The tithe of celebration was a tithe on the land's produce, year by year. Did the alien or excommunicant have to attend these festivals and spend his tithe? That is, did the State have the right to compel anyone to attend a festival? Clearly, the Levites did not possess such authority when dealing with an alien or an excommunicant. I can see nothing in the Mosaic law to indicate that the State possessed such authority.
Did the State or the church lawfully enforce these tithes? If it was only the church, then the church's threat of excommunication and, as a result, loss of citizenship held no terrors for a covenant-breaking resident alien. He was not a citizen. Then what was the meaningful sanction against him if he refused to pay this tithe? Could the State have forced the resident alien to leave the leased land? If so, was he entitled to a refund from the Israelite land owner whom he had paid? That would have placed a heavy burden on the land owner, who had put his money to other uses. If the owner was not liable, then removal from the land was a heavy economic burden on a family that refused to attend a festival. It would have amounted to confiscation of property on a huge scale. On whose behalf? To what victim had the alien owed the tithe? To God by way of himself, mainly. It does not seem biblical to argue that the State had any jurisdiction over the resident alien in this matter, with the possible exception of paying for a Levite's food and drink, who was owed support based on the original land distribution.
My conclusion is that no covenantal agency possessed the authority to enforce attendance or support by a resident alien or excommunicant, except for a small portion owed to Levites based on their right of inheritance. This conclusion, however, leads to an unexpected conclusion. If it was lawful for a resident alien or an excommunicant to avoid paying all tithes of celebration, he could operate with a much lower overhead than a covenant-keeping Israelite could. He could spend the money locally or else reinvest it. He would have been able to save up capital by avoiding the celebration. Over time, this would have given him a major advantage, as his extra returns compounded. The non-participating resident alien would have had an advantage over Israelites in bidding for control over the land. This would have tended to transfer stewardship over land to those who were not heirs of the conquest. They could have leased the land from Israelites, paid a token amount to finance food once a year for a local Levite, and invested the difference. Other things being equal, they would eventually have displaced the Israelites from agriculture. The Israelite land owners would have done well by leasing their land to aliens and excommunicants, but they would not have remained on the land.
So, if the tithe law was not enforced by the State, the celebration tithes would have tended to push tithe-paying Israelites off the land and into the cities, leaving non-tithing resident aliens and excommunicated Israelites in control of the land. Such people did take control of the land during Israel's exile, but this was understood a curse on Israel. Did the Mosaic law subsidize a result which was similar to the result of the captivity? Was land stewardship distributed in favor of covenant-breakers? This, surely, is an unexpected application of the Mosaic law -- the disinheritance of Israel!
Under such an interpretation, this tithing law was self-defeating. It was a tithe on agriculture only. Urban Israelites escaped it, and so could resident aliens who leased rural land for farming. Who, then, would pay it? A strange law, indeed!
Legal Discrimination?
An alternative to this interpretation is to deny that the resident alien or excommunicant had the right to lease land in Mosaic Israel, precisely because he could not be effectively pressured ecclesiastically to celebrate in Jerusalem. If any such a prohibition on land ownership had been enforced, there would have been costs imposed on Israel's economy. Owners would have received lower bids for leasing their land, since aliens and excommunicated Israelites would not have been allowed to bid. The land would not have been used by the most efficient producers. Of course, the tithes of celebration were not imposed for short-term efficiency's sake. They were imposed for God's sake.
The problem here is that a covenant-keeping resident alien would have been discriminated against by such a prohibition. Why shouldn't he have been allowed to act as a steward of the land? On what legal grounds could he have been excluded? Wasn't one law in Israel to govern all men (Ex. 12:49)? What was the covenantal basis of such an exception? Where was the justice of such an exclusion? The fact that some resident aliens might not pay the tithes of celebration was not much of a reason to exclude aliens in general from leasing agricultural land.
Who Enforced the Third-Year Tithe? This third tithe confuses things even more. Others besides Levites were to be invited in. Did the land owner owe them a place at his table, on threat of civil sanctions? Was the civil government the enforcing agent? If it was, then we have here an example of the welfare State in action. Unlike the Levites, these guests had no legal claim based on the original inheritance. If the State lawfully forced a recalcitrant land owner to invite them in, then they were not guests. They were welfare State clients. They were beneficiaries of State coercion. Did God mandate such a system in His law?
Then there is the question of who was required to pay? Was it every local Israelite or just local land users? On what legal basis would landless people in a town have owed the guests anything? Not by a distinction between original landed inheritance and the absence thereof. Urban land had not been part of the original inheritance that was excluded from the Levites. Levites lived in towns and could buy property. Were landless urban dwellers required to subsidize other landless urbanites, who had no civil claim on the output of non-rural property? Was this an incipient form of statist bread an circuses in the Mosaic law?
Difficult Choices Well, which is it? How was this law enforced? Here are the choices. First, the State compelled land owners and leaseholders to attend religious festivals on threat of losing their land or some other civil sanction. Second, the State compelled land owners and lease holders to provide free meals for an indeterminate number of strangers during third-year festivals, with double restitution to these unidentified victims if they refused to pay. Third, because the State could not legally compel payment of celebration tithes, it prohibited non-tithing resident aliens and excommunicants from leasing rural land, in order to avoid indirectly subsidizing non-tithers. Fourth, the State had no authority in this area; instead, the Levites lawfully enforced the celebration tithe laws. But because the Levites had this exclusively ecclesiastical authority, they had no way of enforcing these laws on resident aliens and excommunicants, i.e., they had no meaningful sanctions to impose. Therefore, because no covenantal institution possessed effective negative sanctions in this area, non-paying resident aliens and excommunicants would have gained a competitive advantage in agriculture and would have steadily displaced paying Israelites from the land. Because non-tithers would progressively dominate the land, and urban Israelites were not required to pay, this law had to become a dead letter. It was inherently unenforceable. If so, then why did God announce it?
Let us review the options in greater detail. Did the State impose attendance? If so, this law violated the biblical legal principle of victim's rights.(8) Who was the victim of a refusal to attend? To whom did the criminal owe restitution? To himself? This makes no sense. I prefer to stick with victim's rights. The State did not impose attendance.
Did the State compel wealth-redistribution? The feasts were by invitation only. In this sense, this law was like the gleaning law (Deut. 24:19-22). Those with assets -- land owners -- were required by God to invite others to share their wealth. But this was not a civil law. No bureaucrats provided the land owners with lists of those who had to be invited. Then who were the identifiable victims? Which uninvited strangers had a legal claim on which land owner's hospitality? Which widows? Which orphans? How did the judges allocate the percentage owed by land users to specific uninvited victims? How would such assessments have been determined without creating an arbitrary judicial system? This view of State power is so far removed from the Mosaic law that it, too, makes no sense.
Did the State prohibit resident aliens and excommunicants from leasing land -- not just nonpaying ones, but all of them? To allow only paying ones to lease land would have meant that the State had the power to compel attendance by removing nonpaying ones from the land. We are back to the first choice: State compulsion. So, did biblical law discriminate, on the basis of ecclesiastical membership, against would-be farmers? If so, Israel was not merely a theocracy; it was an ecclesiocracy. But the Mosaic law indicates that Israel was not an ecclesiocracy. Is this law an exception? This is possible, but I am unwilling to take this huge exegetical step. Surely such a view of this law's implications violates the principle of the rule of law.
This leave one final choice: this law was institutionally unenforceable. We must therefore accept its economic implication, namely, that non-tithers would have had a competitive advantage in farming. This would have moved non-tithers onto the land and tithers into the cities, where they would no longer have been required to pay celebration tithes.
Old Wineskins Built into the Mosaic land laws were at least two self-destruct clauses. This law was one of them. The other one was the jubilee land law. The jubilee law mandated that rural land be returned to the heirs of the conquest every half century. A growing population -- one of God's promises to Israel for obeying His law -- meant ever-smaller parcels of land. This in turn meant a declining share of family income derived from agricultural output.
This tithe law was a parallel law. Over time, the covenantal faithfulness of Israel would have reduced the value of any tithe on income from land. As time went by, no family could count on much help from its landed inheritance. Meanwhile, the costs of celebrating would have gone up. The larger the population, the more expensive festival rent rates in Jerusalem would have become: competitive bidding.
What this law did was to point ahead to a day when the old wineskins of the Mosaic land laws would be broken by the new wine of population growth. The Mosaic land laws were inherently anti-rural. They subsidized urbanization. This is not surprising. Biblical eschatology points to a city: Zion, the city of God (Zech. 8; Rev. 21; 22). Israel's land laws were designed to push Israelites off the land and into the cities. Eventually, these laws would have pushed them out of the nation. As I wrote in my commentary on Leviticus, "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 (Deut. 4:5-8)."(9)
The landed inheritance of Canaan was temporary. Men who paid careful attention to the Mosaic law would have seen that Israel was like Eden: a temporary training camp for worldwide dominion. The land of Israel was both a boot camp and headquarters. The diaspora was an inescapable concept for Israel. Either the nation would rebel against God, avoid population growth, and be carried into captivity, or else it would obey God, grow, and extend God's kingdom across the face of the earth. In either case, they could not remain bottled up inside Israel's geographical boundaries.
Israel chose the first approach, twice: pre-exilic and post-crucifixion. For that, she lost the inheritance (Matt. 21:43).
In between the conquest and the dispersion, what about the implicit subsidy to nonpaying resident aliens and excommunicants? Other things being equal, they would have inherited rural land -- not as owners but as actual users. But the per capita value of this landed inheritance would have fallen steadily in times of national obedience. Besides, other things are not equal. This law was given "that the LORD thy God may bless thee in all the work of thine hand which thou doest." Obedience to God would have brought national blessings. Even with growing festival nonparticipation in the countryside, the urban faithful would have continued to celebrate voluntarily with their growing nonagricultural incomes, leaving the nonparticipants to fall behind economically in the countryside.
New Testament Annulment The three temple-related annual festivals were aspects of Israel's land laws and seed laws. The national festivals maintained geographical and ritual unity among the geographically dispersed tribes. These mandated journeys to a central location reminded the tribes of the centrality of the temple-altar, the Ark of the Covenant, the tablets of the law, and the geographically dispersed tribe of Levites. These celebrations were times of common confession. There is no New Testament indication that any comparable national ceremony is to bind New Testament churches or residents of any covenanted Christian nation. The national feasts were tied explicitly to Jerusalem and the tabernacle; nothing like this geographical centrality exists under the New Covenant. The New Covenant substitutes the sacraments and decentralized worship for the temple festivals.
The third-year tithe of local celebration was not associated with the temple. It was a tribal affair. It involved a voluntary tax on the land and, if the inclusive language is taken literally, also on town residents. Those who were the contractual stewards of the land were required by God to pay both of these tithes, but no agency enforced this. One cost of leasing the land was participation in the festivals. But no one was forced by threat of formal sanctions to bear this cost.
Judicially, the second and third tithes were Mosaic land laws. The third tithe was also a seed law, having to do with the tribes. These laws were tied to the conquest of Canaan. They were annulled when Israel's unique status as owner of the Promised Land ceased. Israel's kingdom inheritance was transferred to the church (Matt. 21:43). These two tithes did not extend into the New Covenant. But as examples, they serve us well. Christmas is a common time of celebration in the West. The American tradition of feeding the homeless a turkey at Christmas bears a faint trace of the old Mosaic practice. But these common meals, while funded by the higher classes, have rarely been attended by them. There is no social mixing today of property owners, widows, orphans, and strangers. Something socially healing has been lost with the annulment of the older festival pattern.
Medieval Catholicism celebrated over one hundred holy days (holidays).(10) Spain had 150 saints days and festival days as late as 1620.(11) Beginning with Luther's recommendation, Protestants drastically reduced the number of such holidays.(12) This led to an increased number of work days in Protestant nations. It also led to a sabbatarian rest pattern of one day in seven. This development, when pursued consistently, very nearly destroyed the idea of a church calendar. Liturgical churches that are closer to the medieval pattern are more likely to pay attention to the church calendar; the Presbyterian and Anabaptist traditions do not. In Puritan Massachusetts in the mid-seventeenth century, it was illegal to celebrate Christmas. The government assessed a fine for any violation.(13) Religious celebrations are suspect in the Puritan tradition. In some instances today, Christmas and Easter are not celebrated by strict Presbyterians, although this is rare.(14)
With the rise of the trade union movement, the number of paid holidays increased. The number of religious holidays in Protestant nations is still small, usually consisting of Christmas eve and day, and Easter weekend. Christian celebrations today are generally confined to families and local churches. There is no equivalent of Mosaic Israel's compulsory national feast of celebration.
Conclusion Land owners voluntarily were told by God to set aside an extra ten percent of their net agricultural income in six years out of seven in order to fund the tithes of celebration. Five feasts were celebrated nationally and one locally. In the sabbatical year, land owners still had to attend feasts in Jerusalem, but they did not have to invite in strangers, widows, and Levites. Participation in these national feasts was to be financed by a special tithe on all rural land. Given the expenses and burdens of travel, it is likely that the feast of Booths served as the national tithe-feast. In the third year, however, rural land-owning families were required to allocate a tithe for a local celebration, inviting widows, orphans, strangers, and Levites to attend.
At these feasts, the head of a rural family was not to conserve funds. The family and its guests were required to consume the entire tithe. Nothing was to be held back. This was God's celebration. This freedom from economic restraints was manifested by the authorization of intoxicating drink as part of the national celebrations. This law countered excessive future-orientation. The future is in God's hands, just as the present is. The present has its lawful rewards. To "save for a rainy day" was legitimate in Mosaic Israel; on the other hand, never to acknowledge God's sunny days was illegitimate. As an ethical model, the Mosaic tithes of celebration are valid in the New Covenant.(15) They are not ecclesiastically mandatory, however. The first tithe was Levi's inheritance in lieu of land. It was imposed on all income in Israel. This inheritance was enforceable in a civil court. It was a tribal inheritance, not an ecclesiastical inheritance as such.(16) The civil sanction was not specified. Loss of citizenship was one possibility. Actual confiscation is another. The tithe today is not connected to the conquest generation's distribution of land. It is therefore no longer a civil matter.
What of the second and third tithes on the land? They, too, were part of God's requirements. But they were neither civil nor ecclesiastically enforced, with the possible exception of payment for Levites' meals.
Because of the economic burden of these laws, nonpaying resident aliens and excommunicants would have gained control over rural agricultural land, other things being equal. God's grace, however, does not make things equal. He promised to bless the nation if they obeyed. If rural renters had refused to pay but urban dwellers did pay, God would have honored the urban faithful. This is why there are limits to humanistic economic analysis. The economists do not see the covenantal structure of economics, including growth theory.
The value of the land's output in a family's budget would have fallen over time in a growing population. This meant that there would come a day when these festival laws would be annulled by God in order to meet the new environment: urban life, emigration, and falling income from small-scale agriculture. The celebration tithe laws were old wineskins: designed by God to be broken, either by apostate rural non-tithers or by successful covenant-keepers who went abroad and did not return to the annual festivals except on rare occasions.
Footnotes:
1. Strong drink was an intoxicant.
2. Herbert Danby, note to Maaser Sheni ("Second Tithe"), which is a section of the First Division, Zeraim ("Seeds"), The Mishnah (New York: Oxford University Press, [1933] 1987), p. 73n.
3. Gary North, Sanctions and Dominion: An Economic Commentary on Numbers (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1997), ch. 10.
4. Danby, op. cit., p. 73.
5. John Gill, An Exposition of the Old Testament, 4 vols. (London: Collingridge, [1763] 1852), I, p. 745. Gill had greater knowledge of the primary sources of early Judaism than any other Christian commentator, before or since. Alfred Edersheim, a convert from Judaism, knew the sources, but he did not write a Bible commentary.
6. North, Sanctions and Dominion, pp. 32-38.
7. I conclude that Deborah served as a judge because she was married and not a widow.
8. Gary North, Victim's Rights: The Biblical View of Civil Justice (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990).
9. Gary North, Leviticus: An Economic Commentary (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), p. 422.
10. Christopher Hill, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (2nd ed.; New York: Schocken, 1967), p. 146.
11. Ibid., p. 148.
12. Ibid., pp. 149-51.
13. May 11, 1659: Nathaniel B. Shurtleff (ed.), Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, 5 vols. (Boston: William White, Commonwealth Printer, 1853), V, p. 366.
14. In large congregations, such concern is absent. Preaching against Christmas is a sure way to shrink a congregation.
15. Perhaps the greatest piece of literature in the English language in defense of this ethical model is Charles Dickens' masterpiece, A Christmas Carol. It is surely the most popular, especially through a series of movies. I know of no other story that has been made more often into movies and television specials.
16. The New Covenant tithe is a Melchizedekan tithe, not a Levitical tithe (Heb. 7). Gary North, Tithing and the Church (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), p. 133. This is why the State cannot legitimately enforce it. It is the church's moral claim on God's covenant people, not a legal claim enforceable in a civil court.
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