26
OPEN FIELDS AT HARVEST TIME At that time Jesus went on the sabbath day through the corn; and his disciples were an hungred, and began to pluck the ears of corn, and to eat. But when the Pharisees saw it, they said unto him, Behold, thy disciples do that which is not lawful to do upon the sabbath day (Matt. 12:1-2).
The theocentric principle of this passage is stated clearly a few verses later: "For the Son of man is Lord even of the sabbath day" (Matt. 12:8). It is God and God's work that govern the sabbath and its judicial applications.
Common Property The Pharisees did not criticize the disciples for stealing. The Mosaic law exempted this activity from the laws of theft. "When thou comest into thy neighbour's vineyard, then thou mayest eat grapes thy fill at thine own pleasure; but thou shalt not put any in thy vessel. When thou comest into the standing corn of thy neighbour, then thou mayest pluck the ears with thine hand; but thou shalt not move a sickle unto thy neighbour's standing corn" (Deut. 23:24-25).
Because of the importance of this passage for a correct understanding of the Bible's view of private property, I am reprinting Chapter 57 of my commentary on Deuteronomy. Some readers may not have access to that book. I have reprinted the entire chapter.
* * * * * * * * * The theocentric principle undergirding this law is that God, as the owner of the creation, had the exclusive right to specify the terms of the leases which He offers to his stewards. His rural leasehold's contract announced to the land owner: "You do not possess absolute sovereignty over this land. Your neighbor has the right to pick a handful of corn or grapes from this field. Your right to exclude others by law or force is limited." In this sense, God delegated to a farmer's neighbors the right to enforce God's claim of exclusive control over a symbolic portion of every field. The land owner could not lawfully exclude God's delegated representatives from access to his crops. The fact that he could not lawfully exclude them testified to his lack of absolute sovereignty over his property.
In the garden of Eden, God placed a judicial boundary around one tree. This boundary was there to remind Adam that he could not legitimately assert control over the entire garden. Over most of it, Adam did exercise full authority. But over one small part, he did not. It was off-limits to him. Adam's acceptance of this limitation on his authority was basic to his continued residence in the garden. More than this: it was basic to his life. God interacted with man on a face-to-face basis in the garden. He no longer deals with man in this way. Instead, God has established a system of representative authority that substitutes for a verbal "no trespassing" sign around a designated tree. The neighbor is God's agent who comes into another man's field and announces, in effect: "This does not belong exclusively to you. As the original owner, God has a valid legal claim on it. So do I, as God's agent."
In this text, God forbade land owners from excluding visitors from their fields. A visitor had the right to pick something to eat during the harvest season. He lawfully reaped the fruits of another person's land, labor, and capital. The legal boundaries that delineated the ownership of a field did not restrict access by the visitor. The visitor had a legal claim on a small portion of the harvest. He had to appear in person to collect this portion. Put a different way, outsiders were co-owners of a portion of every field's pickable crop.
One question that I deal with later in this chapter is whether this law was a cross-boundary law rather than a seed law or land law.(1) If it was a cross-boundary law, then God was making this law universal in its jurisdiction. He was announcing this system of land tenure in His capacity as the owner of the whole earth, not just as the owner of the Promised Land.
Exclusion by Conquest The Israelites were about to inherit the Promised Land through military conquest. Their forthcoming inheritance would be based on the disinheritance of the Canaanites. The specified means of this transfer of ownership was to be genocide. It was not merely that the Canaanites were to be excluded from the land; they were to be excluded from history. More to the point, theologically speaking, their gods were to be excluded from history (Josh. 23:5-7).
The Israelites would soon enjoy a military victory after a generation of miraculous wandering in the wilderness (Deut. 8:4). There could be no legitimate doubt in the future that God had arranged this transfer of the inheritance. He was therefore the land's original owner. They would henceforth hold their land as sharecroppers: ten percent of the net increase in the crop was to go to God through the Levitical priesthood. This was Levi's inheritance (Num. 18:21).
Before the conquest began, God placed certain restrictions on the use of His holy land: the formal terms of the lease. As the owner of both the land and the people who occupied it, God's restrictions were designed to protect the long-term productivity of His assets. Yet He imposed these laws for their sakes, too. Land-owning Israelites had to rest the land every seventh year (Lev. 25:4). They had to allow poverty-stricken gleaners to come onto their land and pick up the leftovers of the crops (Lev. 19:9-10; 23:22; Deut. 24:21). This passage further erased the legal boundary between the land's owners and non-owners. Whatever a neighbor could pick and hold in his hands was his to take prior to the harvest. He had legal title to this share of his neighbor's crop. It did not belong to the land owner. Ownership of land, seeds, and prior labor did not entitle him to that portion of the crop which a neighbor could pick and hold in his hands. That is, his prior investment was not the legal basis of his ownership.
The conquest of Canaan was the legal basis of Israel's rural land ownership. Legal title in Israel had nothing to do with some hypothetical original owner who had gained legal title because he had mixed his labor with unowned land -- John Locke's theory of original ownership.(2) There had once been Canaanites in the land, whose legal title was visibly overturned by the conquest. The Canaanites were to be disinherited, Moses announced. They would not be allowed to inherit because they could not lawfully be neighbors. The conquest's dispossession of the gods of Canaan definitively overturned any theory of private ownership that rested on a story of man's original ownership based on his own labor. The kingdom grant preceded any man's work. The promise preceded the inheritance. In short, grace precedes law.
The neighbor in Mosaic Israel was a legal participant in the kingdom grant. He lived under the authority of God. His presence in the land helped to extend the kingdom in history. The land was being subdued by men who were willing to work under God's law. The exclusion of the Canaanites had been followed by the inclusion of the Israelites and even resident aliens. Canaan was more than Canaanites. It was also the land. The conquest of Canaan was more than a one-time military victory; it was a process. The fruits of the land belonged to all residents in the land. The bulk of these fruits belonged to land owners, but not all of the fruits.
In this sense, the resident who owned no land but who had legal access to the land was analogous to the beast that was employed to plow the land. "Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn" (Deut. 25:4). Although the neighbor was not employed by the land owner, he was part of the overall dominion process inside Israel. The fact that God had included him inside Canaan made it more difficult for those who served other gods to occupy the land. A man's access to the courts and to the fruits of the field gave him a stake in the land, something worth defending. Israel was no pluralistic democracy. It was a theocracy. No law but God's could lawfully be enforced by the State. Only God's name could be lawfully invoked publicly inside Israel's boundaries. By remaining inside the land, a resident was publicly acknowledging his allegiance to Israel's God rather than to another god. He was acknowledging God's legal claim on him. God in turn gave him a legal claim on a small portion of the output of the land.
Jesus and the Corn Verse 25 is the partial background for one of Jesus' more perplexing confrontations with the Pharisees. "And it came to pass on the second sabbath after the first, that he went through the corn fields; and his disciples plucked the ears of corn, and did eat, rubbing them in their hands. And certain of the Pharisees said unto them, Why do ye that which is not lawful to do on the sabbath days? And Jesus answering them said, Have ye not read so much as this, what David did, when himself was an hungred, and they which were with him; How he went into the house of God, and did take and eat the shewbread, and gave also to them that were with him; which it is not lawful to eat but for the priests alone? And he said unto them, That the Son of man is Lord also of the sabbath" (Luke 6:1-5).
The Pharisees did not accuse the disciples of theft; rather, they accused the disciples of not keeping the sabbath. Had the disciples been guilty of theft, their critics would have taken advantage of this opportunity to embarrass Jesus through His disciples' actions, which the disciples had done right in front of Him. The reason why they did not accuse the disciples of theft was that in terms of the Mosaic law, the disciples had not committed theft. Their infraction, according to the Pharisees, was picking corn on the sabbath. Picking corn was a form of work.
Jesus' response was to cite an obscure Old Testament incident: David's confiscation of the showbread. The circumstances surrounding that incident are even more perplexing to the commentators than Jesus' walk through the cornfield. David was fleeing from Saul. To preserve his life and the lives of his men, he lied to a priest and confiscated the showbread, which was always to be on the table of the Lord (Ex. 25:30).(3)
Then came David to Nob to Ahimelech the priest: and Ahimelech was afraid at the meeting of David, and said unto him, Why art thou alone, and no man with thee? And David said unto Ahimelech the priest, The king hath commanded me a business, and hath said unto me, Let no man know any thing of the business whereabout I send thee, and what I have commanded thee: and I have appointed my servants to such and such a place. Now therefore what is under thine hand? give me five loaves of bread in mine hand, or what there is present. And the priest answered David, and said, There is no common bread under mine hand, but there is hallowed bread; if the young men have kept themselves at least from women. And David answered the priest, and said unto him, Of a truth women have been kept from us about these three days, since I came out, and the vessels of the young men are holy, and the bread is in a manner common, yea, though it were sanctified this day in the vessel. So the priest gave him hallowed bread: for there was no bread there but the shewbread, that was taken from before the LORD, to put hot bread in the day when it was taken away (I Sam. 21:1-6).
Jesus was implying that David had not done anything wrong in this incident, either by lying to a priest about his mission or by taking what belonged to God. David invoked the status of his men as holy warriors on the king's official business, which was why the priest raised the issue of their contact with women. David's answer -- they had had no contact with women for three days -- pointed back to the three days of abstinence prior to the giving of the law at Sinai (Ex. 19:15). David, as God's anointed heir of the throne of Israel (I Sam. 16), possessed kingly authority. Jonathan, Saul's formally lawful heir, had just re-confirmed his inheritance-transferring oath with David (I Sam. 20:42).(4) Because of this oath, David had the authority to lie to a priest and to take the showbread for himself and his men, even though Saul was still on the throne. To preserve his life, and therefore his God-designated inheritance, David acted lawfully. David acted as Jacob had acted when he tricked Isaac into giving him the blessing which was lawfully his by revelation and voluntary transfer by Esau (Gen. 27).(5)
The priest told David that there was no common bread available. This indicates that this was a sabbath day: no cooking. There was no fresh bread or hot bread, which was why the showbread was still there: it had not been replaced by hot bread. So, David asked for holy bread on a sabbath. There was no question about it: he was asking for holy bread on a holy day in the name of the king. The priest gave it to him. On what legal basis? The text does not say, but David's invoking of Saul's authority indicates that a man on a king's mission possessed lawful authority to receive bread set aside for God if there was no other bread available. God had said, "thou shalt set upon the table shewbread before me alway" (Ex. 25:30). But this situation was an exception which the priest acknowledged as valid. The desire of the king's men superseded this ritual requirement.
Unlike Calvinist commentators,(6) the Pharisees did not criticize David's actions. Jesus cited this incident in defense of His own actions. He was thereby declaring His own kingly authority. As surely as David's anointing by Samuel on God's behalf had authorized him to deceive a priest and take the showbread on the sabbath, so had the Holy Spirit's anointing of Jesus authorized Him to have His disciples pick ears of corn on the sabbath. As surely as the king's men were authorized to eat the showbread on the sabbath, so were Christ's disciples authorized to eat raw corn on the sabbath. Jesus then took the matter a step further: He announced that He was Lord of the Mosaic sabbath. This meant that He was announcing more than kingly authority. He was declaring His messianic heirship at this point: the son of man, Lord of the Mosaic sabbath. If David, as the prophetically anointed but not-yet publicly sanctioned king of Israel, had possessed temporary authority over a priest for the sake of his lawful inheritance of the throne, far more did Jesus Christ, as messianic heir of the kingdom of God, possess authority over the sabbath in Israel.
One thing is certain: the judicial issue was not corn-stealing.
A Foretaste of Bread and Wine The visitor eats grapes in the vineyard, but he cannot lawfully carry them off his neighbor's property. He cannot make wine with what he eats. Neither can two hands full of corn make a loaf of bread. This case law does not open a neighbor's field to all those who seek a finished meal. A free sample of the raw materials of such a meal is offered to visitors, but not the feast itself. This is not a harvest in preparation for a feast; it is merely a symbol of a feast to come. To prepare a feast, productive and successful people must bring to the kitchen sufficient fruits of the field. The full blessings of God are displayed at a feast. This case law does not offer a feast to the visitor. It offers a full stomach to a person walking in a field, but not a feast in a home or communion hall. It offers sufficient food to a hungry man to quiet the rumblings of his stomach, but it does not provide the means of celebration. It offers a token of a future feast. It is symbolic of blessings to come, a down payment or earnest of a future feast.
Grapes and grain point to the sacramental nature of the coming feast: a communion meal. The two crops singled out in this law are corn (grain) and grapes. The disciples picked corn, not wheat. Corn can be eaten raw; wheat cannot. The fact that these two crops are the raw materials for bread and wine is not some random aspect of this case law. This law pointed forward to the communion feast of the New Covenant. The Mosaic Covenant was, in effect, the grain and grapes that pointed forward to the New Covenant's bread and wine. The New Covenant's bread and wine in turn point forward to the marriage supper of the lamb (Rev. 19:9). The communion table of God brings together people of a common confession and a common community who look forward to the eschatological consummation of the kingdom of God in history at the end of time. So it was also in Mosaic Israel. The eschatological aspect of the Book of Deuteronomy, as the Pentateuch's book of the inheritance, provides a framework for interpreting this case law.
God gives to every man in history a foretaste of a holy meal to come: common grace. Not every man accepts God's invitation. Not every man is given access to God's table, either in history or eternity. The fellowship of God is closed to outsiders by means of a common confession that restricts strangers from lawful access to the table. But a free foretaste of the bounty of God's table at the consummate marriage supper of the Lamb is given to all those who walk in the open field and pick a handful of corn. A handful of this bounty is the common blessing of all mankind. This is the doctrine of common grace.(7)
The visitor is not allowed to bring a vessel to gather up the bounty of his neighbor's field. Neither is the covenant-breaker allowed access to the Lord's Supper. The visitor is allowed access to the makings of bread and wine. Similarly, the covenant-breaker is allowed into the church to hear the message of redemption. He may gain great benefits from his presence in the congregation, or he may leave spiritually unfed. So it is with the visitor in the field. "I take no man's charity," says one visitor to a field. "Religion is a crutch," says a visitor to a church.(8) Such a willful rejection of either blessing indicates a spirit of autonomy, a lack of community spirit, and a lack of a shared environment.
Neighborhood and Neighborliness Grapes and corn remain ripe enough to eat in the field only for relatively short periods of time. Either they are not yet ripe or they have just been harvested. The neighbor in Israel was not allowed to bring a vessel to carry away the produce. The presumption was that the neighbor was visiting, became hungry, and ate his fill right there in the field. This is what Jesus' disciples did. The neighbor, unless very hungry, did not walk over to the neighbor's house three times a day to get a quick meal. He had his own crop to harvest. If he was landless, he might come into a field and eat. He could even bring his family. The landless person would have gained access to free food, but only briefly, during the harvest season.
The two crops explicitly eligible for picking were above-ground crops. This law did not authorize someone to dig a root crop out of the ground. The eligible food was there, as we say in English, "for the picking." Were these two crops symbolic for all picked crops, or did the law authorize only grapes and corn? I think the two crops were symbols of every crop that might appear on the table of a feast. This would have included fruit trees, vine-grown berries, but almost no bread grains besides corn. This meant that the hungry neighbor had a limited range of crops at his disposal.
If he was also a local farmer, then his own crop was similarly exposed. His concerted effort to harm a neighbor by a misuse of this law would have exposed him to a tit-for-tat response. If he used this law as a weapon, it could be used against him as a weapon.
The Neighbor
Who was the neighbor? The Hebrew word, rayah, is most commonly used to describe a close friend or someone in the neighborhood. "Neither shalt thou desire thy neighbour's wife, neither shalt thou covet thy neighbour's house, his field, or his manservant, or his maidservant, his ox, or his ass, or any thing that is thy neighbour's" (Deut. 5:21). It can be translated as friend. "If thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend, which is as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which thou hast not known, thou, nor thy fathers" (Deut. 13:6). It was a next-door neighbor: "Thou shalt not remove thy neighbour's landmark, which they of old time have set in thine inheritance, which thou shalt inherit in the land that the LORD thy God giveth thee to possess it" (Deut. 19:14).
But did it always mean this? In Jesus' answer to this question by the clever lawyer, He used the story of the Samaritan on a journey through Israel who helped a beaten man, in contrast to the priest and the Levite who ignored him (Luke 10). Jesus was arguing that ethics, not friendship, confession, or place of residence, defines the true neighbor. The Samaritan was the injured man's true neighbor because he helped him in his time of need. The lawyer did not disagree with Jesus' assessment. He understood that this interpretation was consistent with the intent of the Mosaic law. This means that a law-abiding man on the road in Mosaic Israel was a neighbor. The crop owner had to treat a man on a journey as if he were a local resident. This included even a foreigner.
The Greek word used to translate rayah in the Septuagint Greek translation of the Old Testament is pleision, which means "near, close by."(9) This indicates that the Jewish translators regarded the neighbor as a local resident. The neighbor was statistically most likely to be a fellow member of the tribe. Rural land could not be sold permanently. It could not be alienated: sold to an alien. The jubilee law regulated the inheritance of rural land (Lev. 25). This means that the neighbor in Mosaic Israel was statistically most likely a permanent resident of the community.
Nevertheless, this law opened the fields to people on a journey, just as the Samaritan was on a journey. As surely as the Samaritan was the injured man's neighbor, so was the land owner the hungry traveller's neighbor. This law was a reminder to the Israelites that God had been neighborly to them in their time of need. After the exile, such permanent geographical boundaries were maintained only if the occupying foreign army so decided. Jesus walked through the cornfield under Rome's civil authority, not Israel's.
Why would God have designated these two above-ground crops as open to neighborly picking? This law made neighbors co-owners of the fruits of a man's land, labor, and capital. The land owner was legally unable to protect his wealth from the grasping hands of non-owners. He was left without legal recourse. Why? What judicial principle undergirded this case law? What benefit to the community did this law bring which offset the negative effects of a limitation of the protection of private property? To answer this accurately, we must first determine whether this case law was a temporary law governing only Mosaic Israel or a permanent legal statute for all Trinitarian covenantal societies.
Seed Laws and Land Laws Seed laws and land laws were temporary statutes that applied only to Mosaic Israel. I have argued previously that the seed laws of the Mosaic covenant were tied to Jacob's messianic prophecy regarding Judah: "The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come; and unto him shall the gathering of the people be" (Gen. 49:10). Seed laws and land laws served as means of separating the tribes, thereby maintaining the continuity of each tribe until the fulfillment of Jacob's prophecy, which rested on tribal separation.(10) The jubilee inheritance laws were land laws that were designed by God to accomplish this task.
One aspect of tribal separation was the creation of a sense of unity and participation in a larger family unit. Members of each tribe were linked together as descendants of one of the patriarchs. There was an aspect of brotherliness within a tribe that was not shared across the tribe's boundaries. There is a social distinction between brotherhood and otherhood. Boundaries mark this distinction. The main boundary for Israel was circumcision, but tribal boundaries also had their separating and unifying effects.
By allowing the neighbor to pick mature fruit, the Mosaic law encouraged a sense of mutual solidarity. The local resident was entitled to reap the rewards of land and labor. The land belonged ultimately to God. It was a holy land, set apart by God for his historical purposes. To dwell in the land involved benefits and costs. One of the benefits was access to food, however temporary. The staff of life in effect was free. In harvest season, men in Israel would not die of starvation. But their source of sustenance was local: their neighbor's field. Would this have created animosity? Sometimes. Everything in a fallen world is capable of creating animosity. But what about the owner's sense of justice? It was his land, his effort, and his seeds that had made this wealth possible. Why should another man have lawful access to the fruits of his labor?
One possible answer ties this law to the Promised Land. Israel was a holy land that had been set aside by God through a program of partial genocide. (God had specified total genocide, but the Israelites had failed.) The land was exclusively God's. It was His dwelling place. He fed His people on His land. God, not their own efforts, was the source of their wealth (Deut. 8:17). Israel's holy status was still true in Jesus' day because of the temple and its sacrifices. But there is a problem with this explanation: strangers in Jesus' day dwelled in the land, and in fact ruled over the land. Furthermore, Jesus identified the Good Samaritan as a neighbor. The Samaritan therefore would have qualified as a man with lawful access to an Israelite's field. The Promised Land fails as the basis of this case law.
A second possible explanation is this: the tribes existed in order to complete God's plan for Israel. Local solidarity was important for maintaining the continuity of the tribes. Problem: this law was still in force in Jesus' day, yet the tribes no longer occupied the land as separate tribal units. The seed laws in this instance seem to have nothing to do with this case law.
Third, it could be argued that Israel was a holy army. An army does not operate in terms of the free market's principle of "high bid wins." In every military conflict in which a city is besieged, martial law replaces market contracts as the basis of feeding the population. The free market's principle of high bid wins is replaced by food rationing. Solidarity during wartime must not be undermined by a loss of morale. A nation's defenders are not all rich. The closer we get to the priestly function of ensuring life, the less applicable market pricing becomes. Problem: Israel was not a holy army after the exile. It was an occupied nation. Yet this case law was still in force. There was no discontinuity in this case between the Mosaic covenant and the post-exile covenant.
The Farmer and the Grocer The Mosaic law authorized a neighbor to pick grapes or corn from another man's field. It did not authorize a man to pick up a free piece of fruit from a grocer's table. What is the difference? What underlying moral or organizational principle enables us to distinguish between the two acts? In both cases, the "picker" wanted to eat a piece of fruit for free. He was not allowed to do this in the second case.
Let us consider the economic aspects of this law. Both the farmer and the grocer sought a positive return on their investments. The farmer planted seeds in the ground, nurtured the seedlings, and sold the crop to someone, possibly the grocer or his economic agent. The grocer made his money by purchasing a crop in bulk from the farmer or his economic agent, transporting it to a central location, and displaying it in a way pleasing to buyers. What was the differentiating factor? Time? Soil? Location? Money?
The difference seems to have been this: control over rural land. The farmer in Mosaic Israel worked the land. He cared for it directly. The grocer did not. The farmer profited directly from the output of this land. The grocer profited indirectly. The farmer had a unique stake in the land itself. The grocer did so only indirectly, insofar as food that was imported from abroad was much more expensive for him to buy, except in Mediterranean coastal areas and regions close to the borders of the nation. The distinction between grocers and land owners may also have had something to do with the jubilee land laws.(11) Rural land was governed by the jubilee law. Urban real estate was not. Unlike urban land, prior to the exile, rural land was the exclusive property of the heirs of the conquest, though not after the return (Ezek. 47:22-23).
Those who lived on the land and profited from it as farmers were required to share a portion of the land's productivity with others, as we have seen. To this extent, the fruit of the land was the inheritance of those who dwelled close by or who wandered by on a journey when the crop was ripe.(12) In this case, those farmers whose land was located close to highways would have had lower transportation costs but higher sharing costs. It is not hard to imagine that highway properties would have been ideal locations for general stores. Their produce was not subject to picking. For farmers whose inheritance bordered on highways, setting up a general store would have made good sense. During the feast of Firstfruits, they at least could have sold other items, such as wine, to accompany a free handful of corn. They could also have planted only root crops, which were not eligible for picking.
This law would have strengthened the sense of community in a society that was bound by a national covenant that was tied to land. Travel would have been less costly in harvest time. Also, the local poor would have had something to eat in the harvest -- a sense of participation in the blessings of God. A brief safety net was in place. To gain access to a full safety net -- a lawful bag in which to put the picked produce -- the poor had to work as gleaners.(13) While the State was not authorized to send crop collectors into the fields to collect food to redistribute to the poor, the Mosaic civil law did not enforce sanctions against those who came into a field to eat a handful of food. It was not legal for land owners to enforce physical sanctions against those who took advantage of this law. The civil law did not compel wealth redistribution in Mosaic Israel, but it defined the land owner's property rights in such a way that the State was prohibited from bringing negative sanctions against those who entered the field to pick a handful of the crop.
A Shared Environment Let us consider a difficult application of this case law. Did this law open every man's fields to wandering hordes during a famine? Times of famine have been times of great disruption of the social order. Wandering bands of hungry people fan out across the countryside. Whole populations move from region to region in search of food.(14) This happened repeatedly in Europe from the late medieval era until the late seventeenth century, and well into the twentieth century in Russia.(15) Similar famines have occurred in China in modern times.(16) Before the advent of modern capitalism, famines were a regular occurrence. Even within capitalist society, Ireland suffered a nearly decade-long famine in the 1840's. The absentee landlords in England did not foresee the threat to the potato crop posed by the blight at its first appearance in 1841. Over the next decade, these landlords paid for their lack of foresight with huge capital losses; a million Irish paid with their lives.
Are wandering strangers in search of food the judicial equivalent of a neighbor? Is a desperate family on the road in search of food entitled fill their stomachs with a farmer's corn or apples? If enough of these people were to show up at harvest time, their economic effect would be comparable to a swarm of locusts. Locusts in the Bible are seen as the judgment of God (Ex. 10:4-6; Deut. 28:38). The land owner planted a crop and cared for it in the expectation that his family would eat for another season. Was he now required to sit idly by and watch strangers consume his family's future? Was the State prohibited by this case law from defending his interests? If so, then what would be his incentive to go to the expense of planting and nurturing his next crop? Would he even survive to plant again? Was Israel's society benefited by opening the fields to all comers in every economic situation? Was the nation's future agricultural output threatened by a definition of "neighbor" that includes an open-ended number of strangers in search of free food?
The goal of this law was the preservation of community. Its context was a local neighborhood in which families share the same environment. A crop failure for one family was probably accompanied by a crop failure for all. They were all in the same boat. Mutual aid and comfort in times of adversity were likely in a community in which every person has a symbolic stake in the community's success. These people shared a common destiny. This law was an aspect of that common destiny.
As for the Samaritan in the parable, he was not on the road for the purpose of stripping fields along the way. The Samaritan assisted the beaten man; he did not eat the last grape on the man's vine. The Samaritan found an injured man on the road. They had both been on a journey. They shared a similar environment. They were both subject to the risks of travel. The threat of robbery threatened all men walking down that road. What had befallen the victim might have befallen the Samaritan. It might yet befall him. Perhaps the same band of robbers was still in the "neighborhood": the road to Jericho.
Men who share a common environment share common risks. When men who share common risks are voluntarily bound by a shared ethical system to help each other in bad times, a kind of social insurance policy goes into effect. Risks are pooled. The costs that would otherwise befall a victim are reduced by men's willingness to defray part of each other's burdens. But, unlike an insurance policy, there is no formal agreement, nor does the victim have any legal claim on the non-victim. The beaten man had no legal claim on the Samaritan, the Levite, or the priest. Two of the three went their way. They broke no civil law, but their act of deliberately passing by on the other side of the road revealed their lack of commitment to the principle of community: shared burdens and blessings.
The ethics of neighborliness is mutual sharing when the resources are available. The ethics of neighborliness did not mandate that the State remain inactive when hordes of men whose only goal is obtaining food sweep down on a rural community. The harvest was shared locally because men have struggled with the same obstacles to produce it. This law assumed a context of mutual obligations, not the asymmetric conditions in a famine, when the producers face an invasion from outside the community by those who did not share in the productive effort.
Community and Economy One of the favorite contrasts of sociologists is community vs. economy. The most famous example of this in sociological literature is Ferdinand Tönnies' Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887), which he wrote at age 32. In this pioneering work, the author contrasted the small, medieval-type village with the modern city. He argued that the demise of the personal relationships of village life has led to the impersonal rationalism and calculation of the modern city.(17) He used the now-familiar analogies of organic life and mechanical structure to describe these two forms of human association.(18) He viewed the family as the model or ideal type of Gemeinschaft.(19) The business firm, which is a voluntary association established for a limited, rational purpose (profit), would seem to serve well as a model for Gesellschaft.(20)
In American history, there have been few defenders of Gemeinschaft. Thomas Jefferson heralded the independent yeoman farmer, but Jefferson was no advocate of village life. A group of intellectuals and poets known as the Nashville agrarians in 1930 wrote a brief defense of southern agrarian life in contrast to modern urbanism, but they have long been regarded at best as regional utopians, even in the South.(21) Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were contemptuous of "the idiocy of rural life,"(22) and most commentators have agreed with them. Most commentators have been urban.
The movement of vast populations from the farms to cities has been a continuing phenomenon worldwide, beginning no later than the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century. The division of labor which was made possible by close contact in urban areas, the transportation revolution, the mechanization of agriculture, the revolution in electrical power, and government-funded road systems have combined to concentrate populations in vast urban complexes.
The Bible promotes both cultures. The farms of Israel were held together as a civilization by the Ark of the Covenant, which was housed in a city. The New Heaven and New Earth is described as a city in which the tree of life grows (Rev. 22:2). In the Old Covenant, the city was supported by the farms. In the New Covenant's imagery of the final state, the image is different: the city contains the tree. The tree feeds the inhabitants. The symbolism seems to be from farm to city. This was also the thrust of the jubilee legislation: ever-smaller farms for an ever-growing population.(23) Yet covenantally, an heir of the conquest always had his historical roots in the land. The land was his inheritance. His name was associated with the land.
This judicial link to the soil ended with the New Covenant. The land ceased to be a holy place after the fall of Jerusalem. But the imagery of the tree of life, like the imagery of bread and wine, ties members of the New Covenant community to the soil. The preference of suburban Americans for carefully mowed lawns, of Englishmen and Japanese for gardens, of the Swiss and Austrians for flowers growing in window gardens and for vegetable gardens all testify to man's desire to retain his links to the soil from which he came.
There is a story told about the German free market economist Wilhelm Röpke. He was living in Geneva at the time. He invited another free market economist (said by some to be his former teacher, Ludwig von Mises) to his home near Geneva. He kept a vegetable garden plot near his home. The visitor remarked that this was an inefficient way to produce food. He countered that it was an efficient way to produce happiness.(24)
The division of labor is a powerful social arrangement. Specialization increases our economic output as individuals. We can earn more money per hour by specializing than by performing low division of labor tasks. But we also increase our dependence on the social institutions that have promoted the division of labor. Above all, we increase our reliance on banks, transportation systems, and other arrangements run by computers. We have delivered our lives into the hands and minds of computer programmers. This has not been wise. The payments system is governed by the fractional reserve banking. This is risky. There is an economic case for investing in a lower division of labor lifestyle with a portion of our assets and our time.(25)
There is more to community than efficiency. Community is more than property rights. Community in Mosaic Israel was based on a series of covenants. The right of private property was defended by the commandment not to steal, but the definition of theft did not include eating from a neighbor's unharvested crop. This exception was unique to the land. It applied to a form of property that was not part of the free market system of buying and selling. God was uniquely the owner of the land in Mosaic Israel. He set different requirements for ownership of rural land. These rules were designed to provide a brief safety net in an area of the economy in which it was illegal to transfer family ownership down through the generations.
In the final analysis, this law was far more symbolic than economic, for the harvest time would not have lasted very long. The sense of community had to be preserved in a system that restricted buying and selling. Those who did not own the best land or even any land at all had a stake in the success of local land owners, despite the law's restrictions of the permanent sale of inherited property. This symbol of participation in the fruits of the land was important for a society whose members celebrated the fulfillment of God's prophecy regarding the inheritance of a Promised Land.
Has This Law Been Annulled? Is there any Mosaic covenantal principle whose annulment also annulled this law? We know that a similar law is still in force. Paul cited the law prohibiting the muzzling of the working ox, applying it to the payment of ministers. "Let the elders that rule well be counted worthy of double honour, especially they who labour in the word and doctrine. For the scripture saith, Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn. And, The labourer is worthy of his reward" (I Tim. 5:17-18). But this case law applied more generally to the Christian walk: "For it is written in the law of Moses, Thou shalt not muzzle the mouth of the ox that treadeth out the corn. Doth God take care for oxen? Or saith he it altogether for our sakes? For our sakes, no doubt, this is written: that he that ploweth should plow in hope; and that he that thresheth in hope should be partaker of his hope" (I Cor. 9:9-10). There is a down payment in history -- an earnest -- of the covenant-keeper's kingdom victory in eternity. This down payment is an aspect of the inheritance.
That in the dispensation of the fulness of times he might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven, and which are on earth; even in him: In whom also we have obtained an inheritance, being predestinated according to the purpose of him who worketh all things after the counsel of his own will: That we should be to the praise of his glory, who first trusted in Christ. In whom ye also trusted, after that ye heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation: in whom also after that ye believed, ye were sealed with that holy Spirit of promise, Which is the earnest of our inheritance until the redemption of the purchased possession, unto the praise of his glory (Eph. 1:10-14).
The tribal system was annulled in A.D. 70. Was this law exclusively tribal? The same kinds of psychological benefits seem to apply outside the tribal context: commitment to the community, a sense of participation in the blessings of this community, a willingness to defend it against invaders. What is missing today is Mosaic Israel's public exclusion of the names of other gods. A man's presence in the land does not, in and of itself, testify publicly to his willingness to serve under the law of God. The mobility of rival gods is like the mobility of the God of the Bible in the Old Covenant. The universality of their claims makes them different from the gods of the ancient Near East in Moses' day. To this extent, the situation has changed. But religions that claimed allegiance to universal gods appeared in the Near East and Far East at about the time of the Babylonian exile. Nevertheless, people in Israel in Jesus' day were still allowed to pick corn in their neighbors' fields.
This law seems to be a cross-boundary law. The neighbor, defined biblically, has a legal claim to a handful of any crop that he can pick, though not dig up. The biblical hermeneutical principle is that any Old Covenant law not annulled explicitly or implicitly by a New Covenant law is still valid (Mat. 5:17-19).(26) There seems to be no principle of judicial discontinuity that would annul this law.(27)
This law applies to rural land during the harvest season but before the harvest takes place. The goal of this law is to increase the sense of community. All of its members are supposed to know that they have a small stake -- a symbolic stake -- in the prosperity of the land. There seems to be no discontinuity between the two covenants with regard to this law. It was a theocratic law, but whenever a nation covenants with the Trinitarian God of the Bible, this law is still in force.
The modern world is politically polytheistic. It denies legitimacy to the principle of civil theocracy. It also passes legislation that excludes neighbors from any man's field. It then extends the principle of exclusion to the nation itself. It creates "no trespassing" boundaries around the nation. Access to a man's field is analogous to access to the nation; the modern State is consistent in this regard. Immigration legislation excludes outsiders because they may become a threat to a national covenant that is not confessional. Immigrants may gain the vote and use the State to redistribute wealth. The same kind of exclusivism operates in laws legalizing abortion, which is another barrier to entry into the land.
This law testifies against geographical exclusivism because it is part of a system of covenantal order that is confessionally exclusivist. Open borders are the rule for biblical theocracy: access to the visible kingdom of God in history. Here is the logic of "open borders openly arrived at." You may freely walk into a local church; therefore, you may also freely walk into the nation in which that church operates. Any Christian who promotes closed national borders is saying, in effect, "Until some church sends a missionary to your nation, or until your entire population has access to the Internet, you must content yourself with going to hell. Sorry about that."
The message of this law is clear: access to God's promised land is to be accompanied by access to the fields of the promised land at harvest time. This gives non-owners and non-citizens a stake in the maintenance of a biblically theocratic society. This law makes it clear that private property is not an absolute value in human society. Private property is an absolute right for God, as the boundary placed around the forbidden tree in Eden reveals; it is not, however, an absolute right for man. Nothing is an absolute right for man, for man is not absolute. This case law breaches the boundaries of rural land. Owners are not allowed to use force to exclude a neighbor from picking a handful of the crop to eat in the field. The State may not defend owners' legal title to this token portion of the crop. This means that they have no legal title to all of it. This is clearly a violation of libertarian definitions of private ownership. The Bible is not a libertarian document, any more than it is socialistic. It is a covenantal document. The neighbor has lawful access to what he can pick, but the State may not lawfully come in with vessels to pick crops in the name of the people (minus 50 percent for administration).
* * * * * * * * * Conclusion Jesus' answer to the Pharisees pointed to the sabbath principle as a means of liberating men. The disciples were hungry. Food was nearby. They could lawfully pick corn, but they did not cook it. They had to do some minimal work, but any food preparation activity is work. They were not violating the sabbath. They were walking and talking with the Lord of the sabbath. This was the top priority of the disciples.
The sabbath is not to be used as a means of interfering with recreation that leads to better knowledge of God's work. A stroll on the day of rest is legitimate. So is discussion of spiritual matters. So is food preparation that does not disrupt the day's pattern of rest. Man is not to become enmeshed in a formidable array of rules governing the day of rest. Men are to be liberated by the day of rest. They are not to be placed in such bondage that they cannot enjoy the day. The sabbath is liberation from work and liberation from fear. It is not to be turned a means of subjugation by means of a handbook of man-made restrictions.(28)
Footnotes:
1. On the difference, see Gary North, Leviticus: An Economic Commentary (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), pp. 637-45.
2. John Locke, On Civil Government: Second Treatise (1690), section 27.
3. There was not enough bread to save their lives from starvation. These loaves were not, in and of themselves, crucial for David's survival. But as one meal among many, the bread was part of a program of survival. These loaves might not be the last ones confiscated by David.
4. The original covenant had been marked by Jonathan's gift of his robe to David, symbolizing the robe of authority, as well as his sword (I Sam. 18:3-4).
5. Gary North, The Dominion Covenant: Genesis (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987), p. 19.
6. Puritan commentator Matthew Poole called David's lie to the priest a "plain lie." A Commentary on the Holy Bible, 3 vols. (London: Banner of Truth Trust, [1683] 1962), I, p. 565. John Gill, a Calvinistic Baptist and master of rabbinic literature, referred to David's lie as a "downright lie, and was aggravated by its being told only for the sake of getting a little food; and especially to a high priest, and at the tabernacle of God. . . . This shows the weakness of the best men, when left to themselves. . . ." John Gill, An Exposition of the Old Testament, 4 vols. (London: William Hill Collingridge, [1764] 1853), II, pp. 196-97. Neither commentator criticized David for taking the showbread on the sabbath, which was the judicial heart of the matter. Christ sanctioned this action retroactively, which puts Christian commentators in a bind. So, they focus instead on David's lie, just as commentators focus on Rahab's lie, while refusing to raise their voices in protest against the significant ethical issue: her treason. This is a common blindness among pietistic commentators: straining at ethical gnats and swallowing what appear to be ethical camels. Cf. Gary North, "In Defense of Biblical Bribery," in R. J. Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law (Nutley, New Jersey: Craig Press, 1973), especially pp. 838-42.
7. Gary North, Dominion and Common Grace: The Biblical Basis of Progress (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987).
8. A good reason for not passing a collection plate in church is that visitors may believe that a token payment will pay for "services rendered." So, for that matter, may non-tithing members.
9. Walter Bauer, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, trans. William F. Arndt and F. Wilbur Gingrich (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), p. 678.
10. Gary North, Leviticus: An Economic Commentary (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), pp. 207, 283, 556-57, 637-41.
11. As I shall argue below, I do not think this was covenantally relevant: "Has This Law Been Annulled?"
12. Passover was a pre-harvest feast. Booths (Ingathering/Tabernacles) was post-harvest. So, free produce would rarely have been on the vine or stalk when these two great marches took place. Pentecost was the time of firstfruits (Ex. 23:16). Any farmer who had not yet harvested his crop would have had to share it with travellers to the Firstfruits festival.
13. North, Leviticus, chaps. 11, 22.
14. For historical examples, see Pitirim A. Sorokin, Man and Society in Calamity (New York: Dutton, 1942), pp. 107-109.
15. For a list of dozens of these famines, see ibid., p. 132.
16. Pearl S. Buck's novel, The Good Earth (1931), tells this story.
17. He did not argue, as Marx and other sociologists and economists have argued, that it was the rise of capitalism that undermined the village life. Robert A. Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition (New York: Basic Books, 1966), p. 78.
18. Ferdinand Tönnies, Community & Society (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft) (New York: Harper Torchbooks, [1887] 1957), pp. 33-37.
19. Nisbet, Sociological Tradition, p. 75.
20. His theme -- the transition from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, from communalism to rationalism -- became an integrating theme in the works of the great German sociologist, Max Weber. Ibid., p. 79.
21. I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (Baton Rouge: University of Louisiana Press, [1930] 1977). Cf. Alexander Karanikas, Tillers of a Myth: Southern Agrarians as Social and Literary Critics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966).
22. Kark Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), in Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1976), 6, p. 488.
23. North, Leviticus, pp. 416-22.
24. Russell Kirk says that Röpke said it was Mises. In 1975, I heard the same story from another economist, Röpke's translator, Patrick Boarman. I do not recall that Mises was the target of the remark, but he may have been. See Kirk's 1992 Foreword to Wilhelm Roepke, The Social Crisis of Our Time (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction, [1942] 1992), p. ix.
25. This is why I moved my family out of a city of 75,000 people in 1997. I fear the effects of an international computer breakdown on the banking payments system (and everything else) in the year 2000. The fear of this threat could lead to bank runs in 1999, which would also threaten the payments system. But I was alone in 1997 and early 1998 in publicly predicting a social, economic, and political breakdown after 1999. We shall see soon enough if I am correct.
26. Greg L. Bahnsen, Theonomy in Christian Ethics (2nd ed.; Phillipsberg, New Jersey: Presbyterian and Reformed, [1977] 1984), ch. 2.
27. Because I see no judicial discontinuity between the covenants regarding this law, I conclude that the distinction between the grocer and the farmer was not based on the jubilee law, which has been annulled.
28. Gary North, The Sinai Strategy: Economics and the Ten Commandments (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1986), ch. 4.
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