Chapter #5 – The Jubilee and the Redemption of Debtors/Slaves:

God and/or Brother as Redeemer“Proclaim Liberty in the Land to All the Inhabitants” (Lev. 25:10)

A. The Jubilee System

Leviticus 25: The Three Stages of Accelerating Destitution and Three Forms of Brotherly Redemption

The Family Motif: Redeeming My Needy Brother

No Dead End Poverty: A Policy of Rehabilitation

No-Fault Insurance

A Grant, Rather Than a Favor: Biblical versus Roman Manumission

Brotherly Dignity in the Face of Economic Degradation

Ancient Near Eastern Misharum Reforms and Leviticus 25's Jubilee

B. Ideology and Utopia: Social Thought and the Jubilee

Jubilee – History, Nostalgia, or Social Critique?

The Utopian Role of Law

The Priestly Utopia: Jeffrey Fager

Restoration, Not Revolution: Walter Houston

The Rhetoric of Brotherhood versus the Rhetoric of the Market

Appendices:

In Need of Adoption by a “Big Brother": Reb Arye Levin in Jerusalem

Brotherhood without Regard for Color or Creed: “A Woman of Valor” – “She opens her hands to the poor” (Proverbs 31:20): Maya Bernstein’s Great-Grandmother

First Neighbors, Guild Brothers and Shul Mates

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Puritan Brotherhood and Sisterhood in Christ: The Model of Christian Interdependence

Political Democracy and the Biblical Jubilee:The Hebrew Republic and the Call for Redistribution of Land (England, the 1650s)

Henry George's Progress and Poverty and Moses’ Jubilee Legislation

"It is up to man to save man: the divine way of relieving misery is not through God's intervention. The true correlation between man and God depends on a relation of man to man in which man takes full responsibility, as if there were no God to count on.”

- Emmanuel Levinas, “Secularism and the Thought of Israel”i

“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”“I should have called it something you somehow haven’t to deserve.” - Robert Frost, “The Death of the Hired Man”

“To be alive is to be at risk. Even the most fortunate find themselves ill and too soon old, while fire, flood, disease, and random violence ravage those caught in their paths. Neither virtue nor foresight can effectively shield individuals from the fragility of the human body in a hostile world. Communities, in contrast, can do much to protect their members. They can guard, insure, inoculate, and nurse. They can supply work, food, shelter, and defense. The group can protect - or at least sustain - its members in ways unavailable to most people, because of its greater resources."ii - L. H. Lees, Solidarities of Strangers

“Proclaim liberty/dror throughout the land (Lev. 25:10) refers to the swallow – “like a bird migrating, like a dror (swallow) flies away” (Proverbs 28:2), for the swallow sings when free, but if in captivity will not eat until it dies.” - Abraham Ibn Ezra, Spanish commentator, 12th C.

“Gilad Schalit, the Israeli soldier kidnapped by Hamas in Gaza, was liberated from five years of imprisonment incommunicado, in a prisoner exchange in 2011. Upon his release, he was greeted by the blowing of the shofar, reminiscent of the Jubilee when the shofar proclaims the release of all slaves and their right to return home to their families.” (anonymous)

The Jubilee is the Bible’s most radical and comprehensive welfare program to solve the problem of poverty within a society of fellow citizens. Unlike the agricultural gifts, which at best can provide food maintenance for the landless, the Jubilee redistributes land to all citizens in equal parcels, adding equality as well as ongoing economic independence to its social goals. It is a “system” – a self-corrective system – which provides multiple mechanisms to retard the fall of citizens to landlessness and debtor slavery. It is, therefore, a “solution” to the problem of poverty, not merely a way to alleviate suffering or remove injustice and limit exploitation. It is important to note, however, that the Biblical description of the Jubilee system does not proclaim as its goal the eradication of poverty. In fact the poor are not mentioned even once in regard to the Jubilee. The Jubilee is about liberty, deror, about preventing or redressing the enslavement of one Hebrew by another that flows from their economic misfortunes and, hence, their dependence for life, for survival, on others. The truly poor – the female orphan, widow and resident alien without land rights – are excluded from its terminology and its mechanisms of rehabilitation.

Yet again perhaps liberty is not the highest goal of Leviticus 25, which also declares all Hebrews to be God’s slaves and all their land to be God’s inalienable possession on which their only standing

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is as serfs or tenant farmers. Brotherhood, rather than freedom of the individual, is the highest social ideal of the Jubilee’s liberty. A society of mutually helping, mutually “redeeming” brothers will aid one another economically, while seeking to “live with one’s brother” side by side. Those with economic advantages must foreswear the temptation to take advantage of their brother’s distress, thereby creating more permanent relations of mastery and dependence. This society has been ethically traumatized by the slave system they encountered in Egypt, entitled “the house of bondage” in the Ten Commandments (Ex. 20: 2). Here I refer not to the mistreatment of resident aliens – the Hebrews – but to the economic relationship between Egyptians as described when Joseph buys up all of Egypt as slaves to Pharaoh in exchange for feeding them during the seven years of famine. The issue in Leviticus 25 is not the personal narrative of the giver, but the the duties of society to their fellow economically stressed citizens in general, and the duties of brothers to their nearest of kin in particular. In detail this chapter explores the ideal image of human relations among citizens when viewed as brothers as well as the specific mechanisms of this unique agricultural society in remedying the situation of the failing farmer.

However, the Jubilee system has some glaring and instructive blind spots built in to its ideology and its “system.” Even its radical “solution” to poverty – re-allotment of land and manumission – offers no solution to impoverished resident aliens, who have no right to land and may become slaves – permanent possessions of the Hebrews – if their economic situation fails. Residents aliens must be satisfied with the mechanisms discussed above from other laws in the Torah such as the prohibition of illegal economic and judicial exploitation and the provision of subsistence foodstuffs from peah. Only Ezekiel’s redemptive vision of a new Israel returned from Babylonian exile is concerned with their plight and promises those ethnic outsiders an inheritance in a future and more inclusive re-allotment of all of the land of Israel after God’s next redemption of Israel. At that time, the Jubilee will encompass resident aliens (Ezekiel 47:22-23). While Egyptian bondage is central to the social and economic visions of Leviticus 25’s Jubilee, it is not the category of the bondage of Israel as resident aliens that guides its moral sensibility or its formal programs of relief.

In this chapter we consider three aspects of the Jubilee system: legal and economic mechanisms for aiding the poor, the social vision of relations between brothers, and the theological motifs that interact with the economic and social aspects. The most primary theological narrative is geulah, redemption.iii iv In the Torah God the Redeemer functions as the patron of God’s own people, as their redeemer from slavery, their closest kin, their blood brother and, when necessary, their avenger (Numbers 35:19), rather than as the Judge of the whole earth pursuing justice for all.1 Human brothers are expected to imitate God’s redemptive responsibility for their brothers’ economic and, hence, political and legal fate. Alongside that motif of God as redeemer and, hence, liberator who took Israel out of Egypt and liberates the Hebrews once every fifty years from debt slavery, there is a secondary theological motif in Leviticus 25 in which God is the master. As master, God is the "slave" owner of Israel, whom God has redeemed from Egyptian service for service to God. Those newly acquired slaves are brought to reside on, rather than own, God’s fiefdom – the land. For to Me the children of Israel are slaves, my slaves whom I took out of the land of Egypt (Leviticus 25: 55) and The land shall not be sold permanently for to Me belongs the land and because you are merely resident aliens with Me [on My land] (Leviticus 25:23). While this second motif does not directly undergird a social welfare policy, it does justify the prohibition 1 Two primary functions of the Biblical family relate to the protection of the individual. If one fails economically and is sold into slavery, the closest brother redeems him and his land. If one is killed, then one’s closest blood relative avenges that death. If one is kidnapped, then one’s relatives ransom or recapture him/her (as was done for Lot by Abraham and for Dina by her brothers). God is the guarantor of the carrying out of these functions and God fulfills them for the people as a whole (from Egypt) and for the orphans and strangers who lack family redeemers. These functions are gradually taken over in part by the state – first by the courts and, later, by tzedakah funds. In that sense the judges and tzedakah collectors are God's representatives redeeming God's people.

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of permanent land transfers that would otherwise lead to permanent socio-economic gaps between landowners and the landless agricultural proletariat.

In analyzing the ancient Jubilee we will, on one hand, compare it to ANE law codes and, on the other, follow into the present ways that modern social activists and Bible scholars have sought to derive principles from the Jubilee which are applicable to social policies of today. While many historians of the ancient world claim that the Jubilee legislation was never a social reality, even if that was the case that does not vitiate its contribution to social-economic thought about our society’s duties to the poor. Even if the Jubilee is not a historic instance, it still contributes to a utopian tradition that feeds our aspirations for what could be a future reality.

Since an overview of the Jubilee system is necessary for any analysis, we provide first a translation of Leviticus 25 provided by the greatest scholar of Leviticus, who was my neighbor in Jerusalem and a wonderful teacher, Jacob Milgrom. He divides the chapter into three progressive stages with changing remedial responses to the escalating economic distress of a fellow citizen/brother.

Leviticus 25: The Three Stages of Accelerating Destitution and Three Forms of Brotherly Redemption

Translated by Jacob Milgrom v

Stage One: Sold Land and Houses and Their Redemption25 When your brother (Israelite) becomes impoverished and has to sell part of his holding, his closest redeemer shall come and redeem the sold property of his brother. 26 If a man has no redeemer but prospers and acquires enough for his redemption, 27 he shall compute the years since its sale, refund the difference to the man to whom he sold it, and return to his holding. 28 If he does not acquire sufficient means to recover it, his sold property shall remain with its buyer until the jubilee year; it shall be released in the jubilee, and he shall return to his holding.

Stage Two: Lost Land35 If your brother declines, falls with you, you should hold him up (strengthen him) (as though he were) a resident alien, let him live with you.2

[But you are warned not to exploit that destitution with loans entailing usury]:36 Do not exact from him advance or accrued interest. Fear your God, and let your brother live with you. 37 Do not lend him money at advance interest, or lend him food at accrued interest. 38 I, YHWH, am your God, who freed you from the land of Egypt, to give you the land of Canaan, to be your God.

Stage Three: "Slavery"vi 39 If your brother, being (further) impoverished with you and is sold to you, do not make him work as a slave.....[Do not exploit that destitution with harsh treatment as if he were a slave]:46 As for your Israelite brothers, one brother to another, no one shall rule over the other with harshness [treating them as a slave]....

2 My one significant deviation from Milgrom's translation is that he translates hai imakh as "under your authority," as a legal dependent, while I translate it as "live with you," as your brother, as your family member living on your land with your extended clan. The Hebrew term appears to be neutral. In its context in some verses it does mean “under the authority” of the slave owner or employer of an indentured servant, as Milgrom has translated. However, it seems to me that here the text is trying to avoid such hierarchal terms, just as it insists on calling a "Hebrew slave" a brother even after he has been “sold” for a fixed number of years until the Jubilee.

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40 He shall remain with you as a resident hireling; he shall work with you until the jubilee year. 41 Then he and his children with him shall be released from you; he shall return to his kin group and return to his ancestral holding. 42 For they are my slaves, whom I freed from the land of Egypt; they shall not be sold as slaves are sold. 43 You shall not rule over him with harshness; you shall fear your God.

53 As a worker hired by the year shall he be with him, (however) he shall not rule over him with harshness in your sight.

Relief of Last Resort: Jubilee Liberation – Divine Redemption 54 If he has not been redeemed in any of these ways, he and his children with him shall go free in the jubilee year. 55 For it is to Me the Israelites are slaves. They are my slaves whom I freed from the land of Egypt. I am YHWH your God....

8 You shall count for yourself seven weeks of years-seven times seven years so that the period of seven weeks of years gives you (a total of) forty-nine years. 9 Then you shall sound the horn loud; in the seventh month, on the tenth day of the month - the Day of Purgation (Yom Kippur) - you shall have the horn sounded throughout your land, 10 and you shall sanctify the fiftieth year, proclaiming liberty/release (deror) throughout the land for all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee (yovel)vii for you, when each of you shall return to his holding and each of you shall return to his kin group.

Redemption of Property: The Basic Principle23 Furthermore, the land must not be sold beyond reclaim, for the land is mine; you are but resident aliens with me. 24 Therefore, throughout the land you hold, you must provide redemption for the land.

The Family Motif: Redeeming My Needy Brother

God, in the role of redeemer,viii is an extension of a human institution – the brother as go’el. The Biblical brother is expected to redeem his brother from debt,ix and, if necessary, from enslavement. For example, Judah offers to serve as slave in place of Benjamin, when the latter is to be enslaved for theft by the Egyptian vizier (Genesis 44:33). Boaz, a distant brother-redeemer of Ruth's deceased husband, offers to buy back the land of Naomi’s deceased sons, as well as to marry Ruth and provide an heir for the deceased, as a brother is expected to do in a levirate marriage.x Another responsibility of the redeemer is to avenge the spilled blood of one's brother, as done by Yoav, David's general, who avenges the killing of his younger brother, as is expected by the Torah.xi (

So too God’s redemption of Israel is understood in familial metaphors of obligation. Israel are the children of God’s beloved founding fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Hence God is obligated by his promise to redeem them from Egyptian slavery. God is also envisioned directly as the father of Israel, when Israel is described by God as Israel, my first born (Exodus 4:22-23) or as sons of God (Deuteronomy 14: 1-2). God’s fatherhood is sometimes described as a quasi-adoption, as in the verse that refers to Israel as God’s "people" (Exodus 6:7, see Psalm 2:7). God is also an avenging brother, so God must take vengeance on nations that spill Israel’s blood by spilling their blood. That is called “redemption” (geulah) by Isaiah, who envisions God’s vengeance on Edom, which he connects with the year of My geulah (Isaiah 63:1-9).

That redemptive responsibility is also invoked for orphans. God is expected to step in as a substitute “father- redeemer” when his people lacks a patron (We were orphans without a father - Lamentations 5:3, see Jeremiah 49:11). Since God is seen as the "redeeming father" of orphans in

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society, economic exploiters of the powerless must beware. Do not violate the permanent boundaries, do not enter the fields of orphans, for their redeemer is powerful and will sue their case against you (Proverbs 23:10-11). These powerful theological images reinforce the sacred moral responsibility of a human brother-as-redeemer.

Leviticus 25 systematizes this extended familial responsibility into a national social welfare system where everyone has a designated patron or brother redeemer and everyone “covers each other's back.” When your brother (Israelite) becomes impoverished (sinks) and has to sell part of his holding, his closest redeemer shall come and redeem the sold property of his brother. (Lev. 25:25). The family provides a safety net for those who are sinking (makh), for the nature of human life and economic life is that someone is always rising and someone is always falling.xii

Individual families – each with its own ancestral holding – are imagined as self-sufficient economic units dependent on their own labor and God's fructifying rain, rather than as competing with one another for resources in a market economy (as in Thomas Hobbes’ “war of all against all”). Yet they are not isolated socially or economically even though each one has a privately owned farm since they are embedded into extended family networks. The ethos of the family, both nuclear and extended, is different from that of the market society, in which distribution of goods is supposed to reflect the "just deserts" of an individual's talents and efforts. The family is a structure founded on the interdependence of unequal members who, nonetheless, see themselves as a whole. As David Novak explains in his book, Jewish Social Ethics:

“Family life includes members who are not productive by any measurable standard: the very young, the very old, the infirm, the handicapped, even the unborn. Their needs far outstrip their economic deserts. Because all of us are never totally assured of our own productivity, we desire family life, because the family is where we are accepted for what we are, rather than for what we make. Society, in any fully human sense, must be a balancing between the needs of the hearth and the deserts of the marketplace.”xiii

On one hand, Leviticus 25 describes isolated individual production and independent landownership units as an ideal social vision that when negatively affected by the market is to be restored on the Jubilee. On the other, it presents an ethos of interdependence, where brothers help one another without expectation of economic remuneration. In fact, theologically all the land is owned solely by God and so all human “ownership” is simply a temporary trust. Yet practically speaking the land of Israel is not administrated as a communally owned asset. Leviticus 25’s model differs from the Anglo-Saxon model of the commons in its laws,3 while still echoing many of its motifs in its theology. They both agree that the land is fundamentally inalienable. In the Jubilee system parcels of land are not owned collectively and nothing is illegal about market forces that lead to buying and

3 The “common,” as a modern concept promoted by such social reformers as Peter Barnes, is a defined set of assets that have three characteristics: (1) they are all gifts, which cannot be commodified, i.e. sold or access to them limited by fees; (2) they are all shared by the whole community, as opposed to being “enclosed” individually. Their ownership and access are inclusive, not exclusive; and (3) they are a trust for future generations that may be may be upgraded but not degraded. Examples of such “commons” include air, water, parks and the Internet. Eretz Yisrael and the Jewish people whom God redeemed from slavery are according to Leviticus 25 the property of God hence no one has absolute private rights to sell them. However, temporarily land is parceled out for private use of its crops until the Jubilee.

Historically in the Anglo-Saxon world certain lands like common grazing land or some forests for hunting were not owned privately. For example, the Boston Common was purchased by the town in 1634 for public militia training and public grazing of cattle. In England especially since the 16th C. the process of “enclosure” gradually ended the ancient system of farming in open fields without fences and without private owners. Under enclosure, such land is fenced (enclosed) and deeded or entitled to one or more owners.

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selling labor and land. Commodifying human labor and ancestral land tends over time to undermine broadly distributed private ownership of the means of production. Thus, the basic tension persists between the original division of land by lot under Moshe and the individual economic trajectories of each landowner over time. The increasingly differentiated economic situation of each individual and each family unit could lead to the "brothers" losing their sense of mutual equality and mutual interdependence. In that case brothers might well cease acting as redeemers one for another.

Leviticus 25’s narrative of property ownership and many other factors mitigate against a radically individualist understanding of landownership. First, the allotment of land to Israel as a nation and the Jubilee laws are part of a covenant between a collective and God ratified at Mount Sinai. Unusual in the Torah’s laws is the opening verses of Leviticus 25 - "God said to Moshe on Mount Sinai" (Leviticus 25:1). If those laws, especially the Sabbatical years, are not observed then Israel as a nation will be exiled from the land. The fate of Israel in the land depends on its collective obedience to God the Lawgiver (Lev. 26, especially 26:34). Second, private ownership of the land is redefined as mere tenancy on God's land. All are tenant farmersxiv whose status is that of resident aliens (ger v'toshav) and as servants or slaves or serfs of God (For it is to Me the Israelites are slaves - Leviticus 25:6, 55). Therefore God may order each farmer to stop working “his” land on the Sabbatical and Jubilee year and to open his fences and his produce to the foraging of all humans and animal alike (Lev. 25: 6-7,11-12).

Third, the good of the individual is subordinated to the good of the collective. All private gains in property ownership – land and slaves – are only considered as rentals or indentures, not transfers of title in ownership. Hence, they must all be returned at the end of the Jubilee. As long as the final land or slave deed is held by God, the ability of the owner/tenant to "alienate" i.e. to sell the land or to accumulate it permanently, is fundamentally limited. Thus, there develops a differentiated distribution of wealth after fifty years due to changes resulting from an individual’s luck, effort, and skill and the vagaries of an agricultural market society greatly dependent on weather. The effects of this unequal distribution of capital are mitigated by social legislation such as Sabbatical years that suspend active control of one's property and Jubilee years that redistribute wealth according to the principle of basic equality of landownership and freedom of all Hebrews. Periodic return to an equality of land-capital, the transience of economic advantages, and collective interdependence within the family, place the good of the whole above the merits and investment of the individuals.

Property relations function to maintain brotherhood as a rough ideal of social equality manifest in economic terms. Jewish society must not be rigidly divided by permanent barriers between classes – rich and poor, landowners and landless, masters and slaves. The brother, who when in debt sells himself into slavery, is never even called a Hebrew slave – eved ivri in Leviticus 25, unlike other law codes in the Torah (Ex. 21:1; Deut. 15:12). Why? Lest brothers lose their sense of solidarityxv

The most consistent ideological opposition to enclosure, that is privatization of public lands, was pursued by “The Diggers,” a group of Protestant English rebels who joined Oliver Cromwell’s overthrow of the king. Led by Gerrard Winstanley they proposed a more radically democratic agrarian revolution (1649). They took their inspiration for communal ownership from the early church (“The group of believers was one in mind and heart. No one said that any of his belongings was his own, but they all shared with one another everything they had." - Acts 4:32). Their nickname “Diggers” comes from their experiments in taking over land and declaring it open to anyone who wishes to dig and plant it in common. They subscribed to the common belief that the English people once held all their lands in common but when conquered by the Normans (1066) it was parceled out to nobility and later sold. From the conquest on, the Diggers argued, the "common people of England" had been robbed of their birthrights and exploited by a foreign ruling class. (see Wikipedia)

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and become reified in class distinctions that congeal into the terminology of master and slave that stigmatizes, alienates, and essentializes individual members of society. Economic “class” is meant to be a temporary status, not a basic classification of Hebrew brothers, while in a truly open market society economic gains may congeal into permanent landlessness and, then, slavery. Thus, schemes for aiding the needy must consider not only their individual wants but the building of solidarity among the whole body of citizens. Moral exhortation is inadequate to safeguard mutual responsibility without these laws which are designed to counterbalance the monopolistic tendencies of the market and the tendency to create a permanent underclass.

The equality of Jewish brotherhood is upheld at its most utopian when God the redeemer redistributes wealth so that all hold roughly same-sized plots of land. The equality among citizens is manifest in their permanent title to ancestral land, even when for economic reasons they do not actually control its use, and that land deed reinforces their equal standing in the political system. The gap between what one actually controls and what one theoretically owns is closed by God’s redemption on the Jubilee. However, the gap is also mitigated by the functioning of a human go’el in daily preventative or preemptive interventions. The day-to-day life of this society between the Jubilee recalibration of property distribution is not a Hobbesian dog-eat-dog world of isolated, competing individuals. Leviticus 25 envisions a society which is made up of a web of brothers related to one another in terms of mutual obligation to redeem one’s brother from economic hardships. Long before the Jubilee year the remedies for one’s needy brother are supposed to prevent a state of indebtedness from plaguing members of society or from further sinking individuals into a landless, debt-ridden slavery. That is the role of the go’el – the blood-relative redeemer. You should hold him up (strengthen him) (as though he were) a resident alien, let him live with you (Lev. 25:35). Even after further declines, there is an escalation of preventative intervention. Human redemption does not await a complete fall, but begins to prop up one’s faltering brothers economically. For example, one is commanded to “take in” the poor brother to one’s household/farm and by employing them on one’s land, by redeeming their foreclosed property or by helping them out of bondage when they have been sold as slaves to cover debts. Only when brothersxvi fail to redeem each other must God step in via legislation, once every 50 years, with a Proclamation of Emancipation to liberate all Hebrew slaves and lands by the force of the Jubilee.

The moral nexus of this brotherly aid to the needy is not tzedakah umishpat (universal justice) or rakhmanut (mercy), but the redemptive brotherhood that rescues one’s kin from slavery. Brotherly giving is not voluntary like hesed, but obligatory, intrinsically related to the term "brother." Brothers are not meant to be wholly selfless, but in doing their duty they know they are creating bonds of mutual aid that provide for a community based insurance policy4 where one helps one another and risk is spread over a whole nation of brothers. This web is, however, restricted to one’s Hebrew brothers – not all humans are brothers in this sense. Resident aliens (gerim), for example, are explicitly excluded. The “brother as goel” gives new meaning to Cain's rhetorical question – Am I my brother’s keeper? (Hashomer akhi anokhi) (Genesis 4: 9). For the responsibility to be a guardian means not only protection from external enemies but also aid when one’s own failures make one vulnerable. Brothers are mutual guarantors which is the rationale of responsibility articulated by Judah to his father when persuading his father to place his brother Benjamin’s well-

4 In 18th C. Germany a new form of Jewish tzedakah association was founded not merely to help the needy but to provide mutual aid to insure its paying members services in time of need. With payment of 4 marks per year from birth, a girl was guaranteed a dowry. In Prague a membership in the Bikur Holim (Visit the Sick) Society insured one of medical services from a doctor. Those services were called “not tzedakah, but a conditional right” (Y. Bergman, HaTzedakah, 120). In Europe many such health insurance cooperatives flourished in 18th- 19th C Europe as forerunners of the American HMO and group medical insurance.

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being in Judah’s hands: "I myself will be a surety (areiv) for him, you may hold me responsible," otherwise I will be "guilty (hatati)" (Gen. 43:9; see Gen. 44:32). This language is probably borrowed from the terminology of economic responsibility of guardianship, such as a shepherd’s responsibility for his flock to the owner of the livestock (Gen. 31:39). A “surety” is a kind of mortgage or collateral. Later the Rabbis will use that same term to describe the mutual surety or guarantee among Jews – kol Yisrael arevim zeh lazeh – "All Jews are co-guarantors for one another" (TB Shavuot 39a).

In American lore communal reciprocity in times of need falls not only on the ‘brother’ but on the ‘neighbor’ or the ‘Good Samaritan,’ especially on the frontier far from family. The Septuagint, later adopted as the Christian translation of the Hebrew as "love your neighbor as yourself" contributes to this change of focus. While in Hebrew the original term re’a refers generically to one's ‘fellow’ without geographic proximity implied and its synonyms in the same verses are ethnic - members of your people, your brother (Lev. 19:16-18) – not familial or biological.

In 1710 in the pamphlet Bonifacius ("Doing Good") Cotton Mather, the leading clergyman in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, summoned fellow citizens to the ideal of neighborliness by encouraging them to create voluntary associations in the service of social betterment to supplement the familial network:

"Neighbors, you stand Related unto One another; And you should be full of Devices, That all the Neighbors may have cause to be glad of your being in the Neighborhood."xvii

For Mather the neighborly responsibility of love your neighbor is particularized to the geographic neighbors in the new colony – far from extended family, far from the king, and far from other settlements. In Leviticus 25 brotherly responsibility is particularized to a proximate, first-degree relative within one’s people. Mather’s love of neighbor or the Torah’s responsibility for a brother is not purely altruistic and not merely a sentimental emotion but both are based on reciprocity and mutuality and demonstrated by concrete material assistance to those in need.

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No Dead End Poverty: A Policy of Rehabilitation

As opposed to the objective of the agricultural laws like peah and gleanings, the system of support for the needy in Leviticus 25 aims primarily not to provide maintenance but rehabilitation. Its goal is not merely to support the weak members of society, but to return them to productive existence. Maybe for that reason Leviticus 25 does not address the issues of the landless Levite, orphan, and widow. Those destitute persons cannot, for example, benefit readily from a rehabilitative programs such as providing capital, or granting a small business loan whose goal is to foster economic independence. Rather Leviticus 25 addresses those who can someday get their land and labor back and work their way out of poverty. If the brother cannot help, then the faltering farmer himself can perhaps pull himself up by himself and reclaim or repurchase his original land, as it says: If a man has no redeemer but prospers and acquires enough for his redemption (Lev. 25:26). The purchaser may not refuse to sell the land back to its original and permanent legal owner. S.R. Hirsch explains how the Jubilee and the right to immediate redemption of one’s land at the original price keeps poverty and landlessness a temporary phenomenon:

“Striking is the effect which the automatic reversion in the Jubilee of all landed property to the original owners or their heirs must have in the prevention of complete permanent poverty of some families by the side of overpowering accumulation of property in the hands of a few. Never can a clique of so called great landowners build itself up in the midst of a landless, and therefore dependent, pauperism when every fiftieth year the whole land reverts to its original division, and the richest goes back to the original acres of his heritage, and the poorest is given back the acres of his.

But even temporary impoverishment is protected against misusage by the avarice of the wealthy, by the Torah's great institution of geulah, [redemption by one’s closest brother]. Never can impoverished owners of land fall a prey to those who would use the need of the poor to speculate in real estate, where after two years, the seller or his relative, has the right to buy it back by repaying only the amount paid for it, and even deducting the value of the years it was in the possession of the buyer. The cheaper the buyer of a property has bought it, the less can he be sure of being able to keep it, the easier will it be for the seller to afford the sum necessary for its redemption, or far his relative to decide to redeem it. If a rich man really would like to have the field for as long as possible he would have to be careful not to bargain for the very lowest price, as it is only a high price which would render redemption difficult.” (S. R. Hirsch on Lev. 25:34)

In short, the system in Leviticus 25 offers a pattern for coherent and total overhaul of the economic system – not merely palliative loans or handouts. Sooner or later but assuredly it serves to bail out its citizens when necessary from the consequences of economic failure. It returns to them the capital and the freedom to become independent again. But in the meantime it designates a next of kin to tide over one’s temporarily needy brothers. All of this is done by a combination of private and public action. The private action is performed by one's nearest relative as the agent of redemption. The family is the most natural helping agent, not the government. The poor's blood brothers know the ones in need best; they presumably have a long term interest in their welfare and they can provide a complete network of support. In fact, the brother-redeemers can also expect reciprocity from those in distress if they succeed in the rehabilitative process.

The role of the brother-redeemer is not merely a utilitarian arrangement. It is not only a form of reciprocal insurance in time of trouble. It is not only a natural expression of brotherhood. It also contains, for Rav S. R. Hirsch, a higher purpose for human life that gives life meaning and demands that one learn the skills necessary to offer that help. S. R. Hirsch writes:

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“The Torah says: the life of your brother is with you (Lev. 25:36), i.e. the whole of the development of his life, the fulfillment of the mission of his life is closely bound up with you and yours. You are not there only for yourself, and you do not earn only for yourself. Although, in the first instance, you have to look after yourself in order to acquire the means which enable you to accomplish the mission in life which God has set for you, part of this mission in life is to acquire also the means which enable you to help the brother who is socially connected with you to achieve the mission of his life. What you earn you earn for yourself and for him. His life is bound up with you and with what you possess. This im = ‘with’ [from the life of your brother is with you] makes you into an am = nation.” (S.R. Hirsch, Commentary on Lev. 25:36)

The public action of redemption from permanent poverty is derived from the set of rules that limits absolute monopolies on property by requiring redistribution once every generation – 50 years. It also allows the fallen brother to escape slavery and reacquire his freedom, his capital, and his land at anytime that funds become available. The economic consequences of failure are in principle reversible, so a multi-generational culture of poverty and its resultant deep individual despair are avoidable. Hirsch sums up hopefully the purpose of this unique legislation: “Jubilee appears as the final salvation from poverty.”xviii

No-Fault Insurance

Unlike the prophetic critique of poverty (Amos, Isaiah) which excoriates the rich and powerful class as the “cause” of poverty and the unjust exploiters of the poor, Leviticus 25 sees economic failure as part of the normal course of economic life – a process of give and take that makes some temporarily richer and others poorer. That process characterizes the years between Sabbatical and Jubilee years. Inequalities that result are not understood as a product of injusticexix caused by the rich. The theme and terminology of exploitation is wholly absent here. So too the term tzedakah umishpat is not to be found here. The impoverished are not blamed as undeserving poor whose failure is due to lack of diligence or Divine punishment. Nor are the poor romanticized or pitied as victims of discrimination. They are full citizens, permanent property-holders and stake-holders in society, not marginalized resident aliens. Anyone can fall and anyone can be raised up and then end up helping others. There is no one to blame and no internal reformation of traits – either moral or economic – is called for. Therefore, aid to the needy cannot stigmatize them for it is a genuinely “no-fault” insurance policy.xx

Interestingly, the no-fault Jubilee system differs in its nonjudgmental tone from other ANE acts of liberation from slavery, debt, and imprisonment. Their declarations of misharum or dror entail political as well as economic reform and they contain stiff reprimands directed against those in power – officials and patricians – who have committed injustice to the needy (See the reforms of Nehemia 5 discussed below). Jacob Milgrom cites the earliest recorded example of such a jubilee-like reform and highlights its goal of righting injustices perpetrated by the state itself:

"Officials stole property and land from citizens, forced them to sell their houses, demanded exorbitant rates for essential services (e.g., sheep-shearing), and imposed unjust taxes for any economic activity, even for burial. Impoverished farmers and artisans became indentured servants; the blind, the widow, and the orphan were exploited.

[Nigirsu, the god of Lagash, commanded King Urukagina to correct these evils, so] "he (Urukagina) amnestied the ‘citizens’ [literally, "the sons"] of Lagash who (were imprisoned because of) the debts (which they) had incurred (or because of) the amounts (of grain claimed by the palace as its) due (or

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because of) the barley (claimed by the palace for its) stores, (or because of) theft (or) murder, and set them free. (King Urukagina of Lagash, 2370 B.C.E).” xxi xxii

By contrast, Leviticus 25 does not mention any political and economic crisis nor any malfeasance among the officials or the wealthy. The Jubilee system is cyclic, and it is completely no-fault in its socio-economic mechanisms, which provide compensation for individual losses without personal recriminations of the well-to-do or the poor themselves.xxiii

In considering the “no fault” redistribution of land in Leviticus 25, consider the case of the Hebrew slave in Deuteronomy 15:12-15 where each slave receives a grant of goods at the end of six years of indentured service. Here too rehabilitation and reintegration into society is the implicit goal of this social boon to the newly liberated slaves. Here again the Biblical model of Divine liberation from Egypt is invoked to justify the release by the Hebrew slave owners of human chattel. The owner makes a grant to the former Hebrew slave and provides some of the capital needed to start over his life as an independent self-supporting member of society.xxiv xxv

Interestingly, the rabbinic tradition identifies the grantee as a slave who has been at fault. He was sold into slavery for being a thief who could not repay the damages he caused, yet nevertheless the “guilty slave” is granted financial aid to start over. Rabbinic legal practice limited that gift to criminals who had been sold into slavery by the courts to pay off the property owners from whom they had stolen (Exodus 22:2, Sifra Behar; Maimonides Laws of Slaves 3:12), but ruled that it did not apply to Hebrews who chose voluntarily to sell themselves into slavery (Lev. 25: 39-40). In both cases the person who became a slave was needy, whether it led him to theft or to indenture himself, however, one who sold himself has already earned funds from which to build his own life after liberation. In effect he is simply a worker who has indentured himself for a salary. However the thief has been sold to pay for the damages caused by his theft, so he emerges from the six years of enslavement empty-handed. So, one commentatorxxvi suggests that the grant is an act of tzedakah for the destitute, newly freed thief who has no funds and also an act of compassion for the thief who feels the pain of having been sold against his will and having worked for no recompense, unlike the indentured servant.

One may test the limits of brotherly surety for economic distress when the brother is reckless. How far should this "no-fault insurance" extend? The Rabbis discuss the limits on no-fault tzedakah, as do the Muslims. The Mishna Gittin 4: rules that no one is obligated to redeem a Hebrew who sold himself into slavery to a pagan, even though the Torah commands us to redeem our brother who has fallen into debt and into slavery to a non-Jew (Lev. 25:47-48). The Talmud reports a case where Jews borrowed money from pagans and put up their freedom as collateral. When the Jews defaulted on the loans and the pagans came to enslave them as debtors, the Jews appealed to Rav Huna to bail them out. Rav Huna cited the Mishna that says: "one who sells himself and his sons to pagans is not to be redeemed." He ruled that there was no obligation to redeem them. His students challenged his ruling saying that Rav Huna had taught them the proviso of Rav Assi that one need not redeem a Hebrew who sold himself to idolaters “only if he sold himself once [and was redeemed], then sold himself a second time [and was redeemed], and then sold himself a third time.” Rav Huna agreed with them but noted that in this particular case he knew the slave had “a habit of selling himself to idolaters” (TB Gittin 46b). 5 The language of the Mishna and Rav Huna is ambiguous. It may mean not only

5 While the Torah commands the nearest relative to redeem the relative sold into slavery and his land, the Rabbis demanded far less. The relatives may at any time redeem the land or the slave, and the new owner or master may not object. But according to Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi, if the Hebrew slave sells himself voluntarily to a fellow Jew,

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that one is not obligated to redeem the recidivist who sells himself over and over to idolaters but that one is prohibited from redeeming them in order to teach them a lesson that there is a limit to no-fault tzedakah. However if the Jewish slave’s life was in danger, then it is still a mitzvah to redeem him.xxvii

Muslim law obligates Muslims to help redeem their religious brothers from slavery and from debt but not if the debts were incurred in illicit practices like gambling:

“The Qur'an says that forgiving debts is a form of zakat on the part of the lender (2:280). Debtors (gharimun) are eligible to receive zakat, whether they are poor or not, but only if the debt was incurred for legitimate reasons. For example, debts resulting from gambling or dealing in wine or pork - all forbidden activities according to Islamic law - would disqualify someone from receiving charitable assistance. However, if someone incurred disreputable debts but then sincerely repented, s/he was again eligible to receive zakat.” (Amy Singer, Charity in Islamic Societies, 51)

The Muslim law excluding the gambler from debt-relief through zakat funds reminds me of a unique contemporary dilemma of brotherly responsibility in the face of economic distress. My in-lawsxxviii told me a relevant tale of their family, the Fried family, from Hungary. Just before World War I the oldest brother was faced with a dilemma regarding taking responsibility for his irresponsible younger brother, who was an inveterate gambler. The eldest brother was a successful businessman who had developed a profitable wine-growing and wine-selling business. By contrast, his younger brother was known to avoid hard work but to engage in high-stakes gambling with powerful and dangerous professional gamblers. In a crucial game the younger brother put up as collateral his oldest brother's whole business and his vineyards – without consultation and without any deed of ownership. Then he lost it all. The older brother had to decide whether to bail out his brother from a potentially life-threatening debt or ignore his plight and teach him a lesson. The older brother chose to forfeit his business and moved to another city to start again from scratch.

then he may borrow funds to buy himself his freedom, but “the relatives do not have to redeem him” (Maimonides, Laws of Slaves 2:7; TB Gittin 46a). So too regarding redemption of one’s nearest of kin’s ancestral land, it is only optional - “if the relatives wish they redeem it” (Maimonides, Laws of Sabbatical and Jubilee 11:18). Obligatory redemption of one’s relative who sold himself into slavery applies only to cases where he sold himself into slavery to an idolater. However the Rabbis amended this law and exempted relatives from redeeming someone who repeatedly and intentionally sold himself to idolaters three times.

“One sold to a non-Jew, if his resources are inadequate to redeem himself, then his relatives must redeem him, and the closest relative comes first (Lev. 25:49) and the court coerces the relatives to redeem him lest he assimilate among the non-Jews [idolaters]. If they did not redeem him and he did not have resources to redeem himself, then it is mitzvah incumbent on every person in Israel to redeem him and then he goes free” (Maimonides, Laws of Slaves 2:7). “Even though he has acted improperly, it is still a mitzvah to redeem him lest he assimilate [as an idolater]” (Maimonides, Laws of Slaves 1:4).

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A Grant, Rather Than a Favor: Biblical versus Roman Manumission6

The Torah mandates the provision of grants to former slaves. In the case of the Jubilee (Leviticus 25), after fifty years land is given back to liberated Hebrew slaves – originally their own ancestral plot – and analogously in the case of an indentured servant (Deuteronomy 15:12-15), at the end of six years, produce is granted as a departure gift. Both grants are considered gifts and yet compulsory, just as the liberation itself of the slave upon completion of his term is legally required. The temporary master of the land or the body of a Jew must eventually be released both as a matter of law. The slave owes you nothing at the end of the servitude, but you the master “owe” the slave a portion of your produce with which God blessed you while your slave worked for you; the type and amount of what you give depends on the relative quantity of that blessing.xxix

In radical contrast to the Torah’s freeing of slaves, the Roman manumission of a slave is always a voluntary act of the master not required by the law or predetermined by a time-limited indentured service. The Roman-liberated slave even after manumission remains in permanent social dependence on his former master, despite the termination of a legal dependence. Such a subordinate relationship is the original meaning of the word "client." Roman hierarchal patronage contrasts starkly with the Biblical ideal of brotherhood. This is illustrated by the following account, which presents an eloquent account of Roman dependence:

“All an inferior could do was be `grateful', that is, he could remember, and hold himself in readiness to repay, forever. This made him, in the Roman lexicon, a client, whether so called or referred to by a euphemism (since the term cliens, or the suggestion that one had a patron, patronus, was considered degrading). Clientage should be considered a form of chronic (and sometimes hereditary) favour-debt, one in which the client could never, and was never expected to, repay the favours done him. This makes freeborn patronage/clientage identical in rationale to the clientage which existed between a freedman and his former master, by far the most common use of the terms. A slave's former owner enjoyed patronage-lifelong (indeed, heritable) and enforceable under the law-and the services which derived from it, because no favour a freedman could bestow could ever pay an adequate return for the master's favour of setting the slave free. Patronage, in the Roman sense, exists when true reciprocity of favours has ceased.”xxx

In contrast to this never ending debt to one’s master, Maimonides, rules that:

6 The concept of manumission according to the Muslim tradition is related to the Islamic pillar of zakat or charity. Zakat echoes the Biblical commandment to liberate slaves by redeeming them at full price from the master who bought them. Here it is institutionalized in the zakat system:"Sadaqat [better zakat?] shall go to the poor [fuqara'], the needy [masakin],? the workers who administer [zakat], those whose hearts have been reconciled [i.e., new or potential converts], those in bondage [i.e., to free slaves] and in debt, those [engaged] in the cause of God, and the wayfarer. Such is God's commandment. God is Omniscient, Most Wise." (Quran 9:60)

“A contracted slave is a slave who has an agreement with his master that upon paying the master an agreed amount, the slave will gain his freedom. Allah orders Muslims to give slaves who desire it a contract of liberation. Allah also commands Muslims to help slaves provide such contractual ransoms to their masters. Allah says, ‘If any slaves you own desire to make a contract to free themselves, write it far them if you know of good in them and give them some of the wealth Allah has given you’ (Quran 24:33). In other words, Allah also orders masters to help their own slaves pay their contractual sum. In addition to this, Allah assigns a share of zakat for this purpose. The second way of freeing slaves is to buy the slave outright with the proceeds of zakat and emancipate him or her. This can be done by the state, a zakat payer, or a group of zakat payers together.” (Yusuf al-Qardawi, Zakat, 392)

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“It is a mitzvah to tell the slave: ‘Go!’ When he leaves, even if the master has not said it explicitly, the slave goes free freely without needing a writ of manumission [and without debts to the master]. Even if the slave had been ill and the master had made large expenditures for him, the slave owes him nothing, for it says: he shall go free freely (hinam) (Exodus 21:2).” (Maimonides, Laws of Slaves 2:12)

In this context it is worth recalling the famous song first recorded in 1946 by American country singer Merle Travis about how coal miners7 who want to support themselves by their own labor paradoxically end up “working” themselves into greater debt the longer they accumulate debts working in the coal mining towns owned by the coal magnates:

You load sixteen tons, what do you get?Another day older and deeper in debt.Saint Peter, don't you call me, 'cause I can't go;I owe my soul to the company store.8

While one’s economic distress may require hard labor and even selling oneself into disadvantagous labor arrangements, the Torah seeks to guarantee that such abject slavery may not be permanently entangling. Indeed, at a predetermined time – the six-year or fifty-year mark – a slave may go free by right, without debt but with a grant of the master coming from a sense of gratitude for the blessings the slave has brought him and with a new stake that allows the former slave to avoid falling back into the same cycle.

Rav S. R. Hirsch (1808-1888) understands this ancient law about slavery to be a key to understanding the relationship between criminality and poverty. The Rabbis had identified the manumitted slave of Deuteronomy 15 with the thief who was caught but could not afford to compensate the owner for the stolen goods. Hirsch connects the case of the thief sold as a slave to the law concerning the grant upon releasing an indentured slave. From that he theorizes that the Torah is concerned with the rehabilitation for ex-convicts, and that its policy of their reintegration into society is guided by the empathetic insight that crime is often the result of dire necessity and lack of economic alternatives:

“The Jewish concept of human rights shows itself characteristically in the treatment of people who have fallen into the very lowest degree of social status by crime or misfortune. The laws given there are essentially complemented here in the spirit of the preceding general laws of tzedakah by the duty of making grant of manumission (Deut. 15:14). This constitutes the duty, at the return to freedom of one who had been forcibly deprived of it, when the legal period of his servitude has passed, not to allow him to leave the service empty-handed, but to fit him out with the means of gaining an honest and "blessed" livelihood. Especially as it

7 See in the appendix of this chapter a moving tale of such coal miners going on strike illegally in Evarts, KY, as retold by Maya Bernstein who heard the this tale recounted about her great-grandmother.8 “According to Travis, the line from the chorus "another day older and deeper in debt" was a phrase often used by his father, a coal miner himself. This and the line "I owe my soul to the company store" is a reference to the company system and its debt bondage. Under this system workers were not paid cash; rather they were paid with unexchangeable credit vouchers for goods at the company store, usually referred to as scrip. This made it impossible for workers to amass cash savings. Workers also usually lived in company-owned dormitories or houses, the rent for which was automatically deducted from their pay. In the United States the truck system and associated debt bondage persisted until the strikes of the newly-formed United Mine Workers and affiliated unions forced an end to such practices.” (Wikipedia).

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refers to the thief who has been condemned by the court to loss of freedom to pay back the value of what he has stolen, this duty completes the glorious picture of general considerate solicitude for human beings which the Divine Law extends even to criminals. The criminal who is without means and on that account has been sold to work off his debt of repayment of his theft in the temporary deprivation of his freedom is not to be returned to independence with empty hands. The duty of brotherly love makes it incumbent on his previous master to fit him out with a small provision of goads to enable him to earn an honest living.

So that under the regime of the Jewish duty of tzedakah any Jewish social community can indeed quietly say with all assurance: ‘in our midst no man can find himself driven to crime out of dire necessity.’ By the untiring working together of the public and private duties of benevolence the way to keeping and recovering an honest living is opened to everybody, and only the Jewish spirit of tzedakah can protect society from cases of utter destitution and criminals going to wrack and ruin.” (Samuel Raphael Hirsch, The Pentateuch, Deut.15:14).

In the spirit of the 19th C., when prison reform and public education were on the agenda of many religious and rationalist social activists, Hirsch shows a concern for reforming society as a whole, not just maintaining the needy. However, his motivation is not moralistic and he does not blame the poor, even the criminals. Rather he combines solicitude for their needs with concern for the welfare and functioning of a society of brotherly love. One might add that social alienation, when one is marginalized and excluded from the community, is also a cause of anti-social behavior, while the generosity of the grant accompanying manumission demonstrates good will for the success and reintegration of the now released offender.

Brotherly Dignity in the Face of Economic Degradation

“Since [the needy] are your brothers, how can you not have mercy on them, for human beings have mercy on their brothers, and if they ignore them it is as if they are not your brother, as if they have withdrawn from the community of Israel. For Israel is one people with one God...Hence in the word spelled ‘TZe-Da- Ka- H’ the letters are brothers [appearing consecutively in the order of the alphabet]: TZ and K, and D and H.” (Judah Loew, Maharal of Prague, Netiv HaTzedakah, Chapter 2)

While the redemption system of Leviticus 25 is chiefly focused on rehabilitation and secondarily on maintenance during times of distress, it also legislates rules about preserving what we would today call a modicum of “human” dignity during these transitional times when one is subject to an economic master. While in other places in the Torah this idea is implicit in our commonly shared image of God among human beings, in Leviticus 25 this is a special case of “brotherly dignity” that is to be protected. The word "brother" is also used in Deuteronomy, where it is forbidden to cause your brother to be shamed before your eyes even if he is being punished and made an example via a punishment designed to deter others from imitating his delinquent behavior. Hence the Torah forbids whipping a criminal more than 40 lashes for "your brother will be degraded before your eyes" (Deuteronomy 25:3). So too Leviticus 25 is very concerned that Hebrew brothers not be treated like slaves in dehumanizing ways in violation of brotherly relations. Brotherhood in Leviticus 25 means that one should treat one's Hebrew “slave” as a social equal, a brother rather than a slave.

Lev. 25: 39 If your brother, being (further) impoverished with you and is sold to you, do not make him work as a slave...

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42 For they are my slaves, whom I freed from the land of Egypt; they shall not be sold as slaves are sold. 43 You shall not rule over him with harshness; you shall fear your God.46 As for your Israelite brothers, one brother to another, no one shall rule over the other with harshness (b'ferakh).

53 As a worker hired by the year shall he be with him, (however) he shall not rule over him with harshness (b'ferakh) in your sight.

The concern for dignity of the Hebrew slave continues from the Bible to the Hellenist Jewish thinkers and the Rabbis, in direct opposition to Greek civilization's attitude to slaves. Plato advises the master "to treat his slaves well, not for their sake but for his own; but it would be foolish to treat them as free men for it would make them arrogant" (Laws 6.19). Aristotle holds that "a slave is an animated tool, and a tool is an inanimate slave, whence there is nothing in common" between master and slave.xxxi

However Ben Sirah (2nd C. BCE in Jerusalem) insists that there is much in common between slave and master: "If you have one slave, treat him like yourself... Relate to him as a brother" (Ben Sirah 33:31-32). Philo (1st C. Egyptian Jew and Greek-speaking philosopher) writes: "Do not harness him like an unreasoning animal, nor oppress him with weights too heavy and too numerous for his capacity, nor heap insults upon him, nor drag him down by threats and nuances into cruel despondency."xxxii The Rabbis sought to protect the slave from demeaning tasks that were considered in the Greco-Roman world precisely the task of slaves: "He [the Hebrew slave] should not have to carry his (the master's) things before him when going to the bath house, nor support him by his hips when ascending steps, nor wash his feet, nor tie his shoes, nor carry him in a litter, chair or sedan chair as slaves do."xxxiii

More radically, the Jewish sect called the Essenes (1st CE), who were a proto-communist spiritual community associated by some scholars with Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls, rejected slavery altogether because it desecrates brotherly solidarity:

"Not a single slave is to be found among them, but all are free . . . and they denounce the owners of slaves, not merely for their injustice in outraging the law of equality, but also for their impiety in annulling the statute of nature, who mother-like has born and reared all men alike and created them genuine brothers.” (Philo, Quod Omnis 79)

Unlike Leviticus 25, Philo believes that brotherly solidarity extends to all humanity for it is rooted in nature, not in the historical redemption of Israel from Egypt.

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Ancient Near Eastern Misharum Reforms and the Jubilee of Leviticus 25

The conceptual analysis of the law codes of the Ancient Near East [ANE] discovered in the late 19th

C. and the early 20th C. have much to illuminate the institution of Jubilee prescribed in the Torah. Moshe Weinfeld and Jacob Milgrom have demonstrated the significant overlap in substantive socio-economic reforms and terminology between the royal ideology so prevalent in the tzedakah umishpat tradition of the prophets and the redemptive model in Leviticus 25. Often when a great ruler of the Ancient Near East (ANE) xxxiv took power, he would declare a far reaching social-economic-legal gift of liberation to his less fortunate subjects. The term for this grant of exemption from obligations is misharam shakanum in Mesopotamiaxxxv (which recalls the Hebrew meisharim meaning “truth and justice”) or anduraram which is a cognate for the Hebrew dror, liberation (Leviticus 25: 10). In Sumer the parallel term ama-ra-gi means “return to one’s mother” which may be echoed in the Jubilee where a liberated slave "returns to his family and returns to the inheritance of his fathers" (Leviticus 25:41).9

It is essential to the ANE tradition in which the Torah finds its context that the monarch himself proclaim the economic reform, usually in the attendance of officials and the people and, sometimes, sworn with an oath, as a covenant or edict (Jeremiah 34: 8-17).xxxvi In the ANE in the Sumerian, Akkadian and Babylonian traditions, the misharum edicts demonstrate the king’s mandate to bring justice to the society which is his religious as well as political assignment. It was the duty of all Mesopotamian kings to establish (or re-establish) justice by promulgating decrees and publishing legal collections in order to deal with various social problems, including debt-slavery and land alienation.10 In the Biblical tradition the proclamation is not necessarily issued by the ruler, but the edict is publicly proclaimed as a “shmitah” or “dror.”xxxvii The message is broadcast by shofar on Yom Kippur (Lev 25:10; Isaiah 27:13) or by torch or banner in Mesopotamia. In the Rabbinic tradition the command to blow the shofar and release all land and slaves falls first on the court to make an official proclamation with legal force, but then each individual is commanded to blow the shofar and to affirm the release of slaves and lands they hold. Even those liberated participate in this declaration of liberation and return of each to their own home, family and lands by blowing the shofar individually. Maimonides summarizes:

“It is a mitzvah to blow the shofar on the tenth of the month Tishrei [Yom Kippur] in the Jubilee year. That mitzvah is initially assigned to the court ..But then each and every individual is obligated to blow the shofar as it says: you shall pass the shofar (Lev. 25:9)” (Laws of Sabbatical and Jubilee 10:5).

9 “We are told that each of the just shall have his home. Isn't the proletarian condition, the alienation of man, primarily the fact of having no home? Not to have a place of one’s own, not to have an interior is not truly to communicate with another, and thus to be a stranger to oneself and to the other… The triumph of the just is the possibility of a society in which everyone has his home, returns home and to himself, and sees the face of the other.” (Emmanuel Levinas, “Judaism and Revolution” in Nine Talmudic Readings, 107)

10 “By ordaining `justice' for the land, particularly at the opening of his reign, a king demonstrated his quality as a ruler according to the law (sar mesarim) ‘instituting the misharum for the god Samas who loves him' [Ammi-saduqa: I.3]. It is worth comparing the activity of these same kings in drawing up 'law-codes', whose primary purpose was to lay before the public, posterity, future kings and above all, the gods, evidence of the king's execution of his divinely ordained mandate: to have been the re'um (literally, a ‘shepherd' - a king who makes just laws) and the sar misarim.” (R. Westbrook , “Jubilee Laws,” ILR 6 1971, 218)

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The substantive measures to implement economic justice are common to the ANE and to ancient Israel. The content of the enactment of dror in Israel and in the ANE could include any or all of the following:

(a) liberation from debts (shmittah - Deuteronomy 15) and, hence, the liberation of land from liens and debt-slaves from masters, whom they were often serving to repay their debts.xxxviii

(b) liberation of a city, often a sacred city, from its taxes to the king, so that it can serve its gods in their local temples by service and by taxation.xxxix (c) liberation from prison or from exile as a political punishment, then a return to one’s family and one’s family holdings which may have been expropriated when the prisoner was convicted, as in the case of Navot (I Kings 21: 13-15).xl 11 (d) re-establishment of economic justice by the enforcement of fair prices and the guarantee of fair weights and measures (e) liberation is also about equality, as in Leviticus 25, where all Jews are brothers and so no one may rule over another as master does with a slave.xli

For example, in the ANE many loans were secured against property, so when one defaults on loan payments or agricultural rents their land may be confiscated. But if the monarch declared misharum on lands used as collateral, then these loans themselves were declared invalid and the loans were voided.

“Whoever has given barley or silver to an Akkadian or an Amorite as a loan ...his document is voided (literally, broken) because the king established misharum for the land; he may not collect the barley or silver on the basis of this document.” (MAL A #3)xlii

In the ANE debt-slaves, as opposed to chattel slaves, were not necessarily permanent property but they could be liberated since there was often a proviso for them to redeem themselves at a later time if they found resources to pay their old debts. The same right of retroactive redemption applied to selling one’s house. For example,

“If a man becomes impoverished (literally, ‘grows weak,’ from the root, enosh, mortal), and sells his house, the day the buyer sells, the owner of the house may redeem it.” (LE #39)

In case of a loan (hubulum) the debtor often used himself, his slaves, his wife and sons or his land as collateral during the period of loan or he transferred them in lieu of payment of the debt, including interest. But the enslavement or confiscation of land might not be permanent. The labor performed as a slave on the part of the debtor or his enslaved family in the household of the creditor or the produce of the land cultivated by the creditor might defray the debt incrementally until it was fully repaid. Creditors might also choose to have the debtor imprisoned in workhouses of the temple or state which owned or managed agricultural land. The court might also use enforced labor as a punishment for criminal activity. At some point the debtor might officially sell himself or his family permanently as chattel-slaves if the debtor admitted his inability to pay the debt and redeem his family or property.xliii

However in some cases in the ANE, after three years of service the debtor is released and the debt is considered paid. A similar law appears in Exodus 21 and Deuteronomy 15xliv.

11 “Dror is freedom (herut).” What does the term dror mean? Rashis says: That one may dwell (dar) in nay palce one wishes and one is not subject to the authority of others [slave master].” (Rashi on Lev. 25:10 based on Rabbi Yehuda in Sifra Behar 2:2)

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“If a debt has become due against a man and he has sold his wife, his son, or his daughter or bound them over into servitude for three years, they shall work in the household of the one who bought them or took them into servitude. In the fourth year their release shall be established.” (LH #117)xlv

Moshe Weinfeld suggests that when the Psalms of God's coronation speak of God’s reign bringing tzedakah umishpat, they are thinking of the economic reforms and amnesties on debt that ANE kings would grant upon taking their throne.xlvi Nevertheless, Leviticus 25 differs significantly from that royal model. Here the operative term is geulah, a redemption that belongs to a familial system with a brotherly goel, rather than a royal intervention from above. Even if the Jubilee geulah does involve God’s proclamation which echoes a royal decree, the key terms tzedakah umishpat or meisharim (Akkadian, misharum) are starkly missing in Leviticus 25. The term geulah takes us back to Israel’s redemption from Egypt. The unique Exodus motif of the children of Israel as former slaves has displaced the universalist motif of the royal ruler. Empathy and solidarity, rather than righteous indignation and the pursuit of justice, are the motivating emotions. In later texts, like second Isaiah, there is an overlap between Exodus redemption language and tzedakah umishpat terminology when Isaiah describes God's universal kingship, but the idea of universal judgment and even the term justice itself are wholly absent from Leviticus 25. Therefore, the differences between these narratives need to be examined.

There are further differences between the ANE’s misharum and the Jubilee cycle:

“The misharum decrees were issued unexpectedly, at irregular intervals, to be applied immediately, while the jubilee is to be observed at regular intervals, with the probable counter-productive effects that have frequently been suggested.

A royal decree is impersonal and enforced by royal officers; but the jubilee law is addressed to the nation in the second person and enforced solely by the covenantal justice of YHWH, as set out in Leviticus 26. But the effect of this is entirely retrospective: it is activated by the obedience or disobedience of Israel. As is usual in Pentateuchal legislation, nothing makes it clear whose responsibility it might be to implement such laws on behalf of the nation. The plain implication of the second-person formulation (both singular and plural) is that implementation was everyone's responsibility. The text projects a narrative ideal of justice rather than mandating a specific administrative procedure. We may say that the jubilee law is like a royal decree in its universal scope, but in effect it is rather different. It is a standard of justice, a call to do justice. Its object is not to administer but to persuade, and in its interpretation canons of rhetoric are more significant than those of law.” xlvii

Walter Houston attributes this same fundamental difference between the misharum and the whole approach of Leviticus 25 to much of the Torah. For the Torah the addressee of the law, the agent of social justice12 and social welfare, is Israel, while the misharum is a royal edict:

12 Walter Houston maps the ideologies of social justice in the Bible in terms of the presumed agent of social action to whom it appeals: (1) the monarch in the ANE’s royal tradition of tzedakah umishpat who redresses injustices, often economic, perpetrated on the weak, such that his chief field of action is judicial-political; (2) the people as a community exhorted by moral appeal, but also the well-to-do individual acting out of nobility of character;(3) Divine intervention, which is generally cataclysmic, by means of a natural catastrophe or by mean of imperial wars of conquest by appointed ministers of God’s punitive judgment. Afterwards, the possibility of a wholly new world of justice and peace emerge, generally under the guiding hand of a just, even messianic monarch appointed by God or under God’s direct rule. In fact, these agents of justice can function in all three roles - judicial, moral and military. For example, the monarch may intervene to judge the evildoers, including corrupt judges whether serving as a court of appeals, such as when King David responded to Nathan’s parable of the poor man whose lamb has been confiscated or as a

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“If the general assumption in the ANE, exemplified in Psalm 72 and messianic texts, was that the maintenance of `justice and righteousness' in society was the responsibility of the king, it is significant that [the Torah legislation and many of the prophets] refuse the assumption. ...The Torah, while barely acknowledging the possibility of monarchy, lays that responsibility on the people themselves.”xlviii

The prophets also call upon the people, not only the monarch, to reform their behavior and turn their hearts to the reformation of society, though they offer no mechanism for that change other than a change of heart among those who have the power, which they have been using to perpetrate injustice on the weak and therefore have the power to change that behavior. If the individual or the king or the people or plundering the world fail to heed the victim’s cry (ze’akah) for justice and the prophetic admonishment, then God will intervene in the role of supreme judge and head of the court of appeals or in the role of covenantal partner with Israel who sees Israel’s behavior as a violation of the covenant of Sinai. God may also bring redemption to Israel from persecution by a haughty superpower sponsored by a competing deity. Thus God re-establishes God’s Divine status and God proves himself loyal to a covenantal ally, Israel, that calls upon his promises of protection.

However Houston argues that the people rather than God or the monarch can be the agent of social action. The formulation of the law may assign the responsibility of justice to an individual or to a society as a whole:

“Most texts on this subject in the Torah make justice the individual's responsibility. A reading of the Pentateuch as a whole, however, shows that it does have a conception of Israel as a society which is expected to maintain justice between its members, and there are at least three texts that require nationwide action to rectify economic relationships, and therefore imply a concept of social justice in a narrower sense. These are the third-year tithe (Deut. 14.28-29), the seven-yearly remission of debts (Deut. 15:1-3), and the jubilee (Lev. 25.8-13). Yet none of these texts gives the responsibility for the enforcement of the measures to any specific authority. They are addressed simply to the nation as `you' (singular or plural).” xlix

In sum, the agent of liberation differs in the royalist ANE tradition of misharum and in the non-royalist formulation of the Biblical law of Jubilee. While in the Ten Commandments God took exclusive credit for taking out Israel from the house of bondage with a miraculous historical intervention, in Leviticus 25 God instructs the people as individual brothers to redeem one another on their own. Even on the Jubilee the declaration of “liberty” (dror) is to be proclaimed by the people presumably through its leadership. God does not say: “I proclaim,” but you – the people – “shall proclaim.” Israel are charged by God’s laws to redeem themselves from perennial economic distress.

military leader who saves the nation or the individual from the hands of oppressors. The king may also issue a cancellation of debts or a release of prisoners, as in the anduraru, and thus by administrative fiat he suspends normal property rights and judicial redress.

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B. Ideology and Utopia: Social Thought and the Jubilee

Jubilee – History, Nostalgia, Social Critique, or Utopian Thinking?

Often the possible relevance of Biblical preaching and legislation about social justice and economic reform is dismissed out of hand as anachronistic. After all the structure of modern society, especially one which is governed as a democracy and regulated by an industrial or post-industrial capitalism, is so profoundly different from a tribal agricultural society. Another reason to disregard any utility to the Torah’s social legislation is argued on the grounds that it never was put into practice and may well be written as a nostalgic retrojection from the exilic period back on to the era of David’s dynasty or even back to the tribal era. These responses are particularly strident when pronounced about the far-reaching Jubilee system.

Three groups of scholarly responses have been marshaled to reply to this later challenge. The Bible scholar Enrique Nardoni names them: (1) the nostalgic conservatives; (2) the pragmatic royalist reformers, and (3) the utopian social critics:

(1) “The first group holds that the social and economic atmosphere in which the jubilee would have had a practical application can be reconstructed in a primitive agrarian economy in which, for reasons of insolvency, one could lose one's property, and even run the risk of being reduced to slavery. The function of the law of the jubilee was to restore the original situation, returning the field to its first owner and emancipating the slave. Its purpose was to safeguard the family.”l

In the chapter 7, “The Triple Shabbat”, we will cite Ellen Davis and Wendell Berry on the close ties between contemporary agrarian social philosophy and the Torah and prophets in their critique of proto-capitalist monarchic society.

(2) “The second group of scholars looks for parallels in the ancient Near East in order to prove the historical probability of the Jubilee. These scholars see in the practice of the misharum and andurarum of the ANE an excellent parallel. Cancellation of debts, emancipation of slaves, and restitution of fields to their original owners all happened in the ANE. But these were not events that were fixed ahead of time by law; rather, they occurred at the beginning of the reign of a monarch, and they periodically recurred during a given regime. They entirely depended, however, on the will of the king. They were sporadic measures that addressed a given situation, lacking any force of law for the future. The biblical Jubilee does not depend, however, on the benevolence of the ruler; it is an institution, permanently established by God, which should apply in a recurrent, continuous, universal, and simultaneous form among the chosen people.” li

In the previous sections of this chapter we followed Moshe Weinfeld and Jacob Milgrom in viewing the Jubilee not as a wholly wild-eyed prophetic dream but rather an idealized version of something that occurred historically on a sporadic basis at the initiative of reform-minded monarchs throughout the ANE not unlike what occurred under the local ruler, the reform-minded Nehemia, Persian governor of Judea.

(3) “The third group thinks that the law of the Jubilee is a late and idealistic expression of a measure that was never put into practice. Rather, its objective was to maintain an ideal of social justice that served to shape the society of the future. The law of Jubilee presupposes an experience of disappointment with the conduct of the Israelite kings. From the eighth

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century onward these kings favored the concept of land as merchandise over and against the concept of land as right of inheritance. The kings aided the division of the land into large estates, a policy which caused farmworkers to become increasingly impoverished and which attracted the denunciation of the prophets.” lii

While the law of Jubilee might be understood as a form of “nostalgia for a presumed socio-economic equality of the tribal period,” its function is prospective as “an ideal destined to motivate society to work for a better life so that each individual might have an honorable existence with a guaranteed minimum of economic means.”liii

In the continuation of this chapter we will examine the utopian analysis of the Jubilee. However the tradition of writing utopias, while intentionally different from the description of existing social and legal reality, are designed to illuminate and often challenge “what is” with “what could be.” Perhaps for that very reason the utopian rhetoric of Leviticus 25 may succeed in generating “principles” that may be illuminating not only to past realities but also to modern visions for a more egalitarian society. That is for the reader to judge. While ancient Biblical socio-economic mechanisms cannot easily be transferred to a modern economy or society, the perhaps the rhetoric of Jubilee and its method for mobilizing moral support for its utopia and for the social solidarity required are still relevant today. “Utopia” (a neo-Greek word coined by Thomas Moore in 1516) has an ambiguous relationship to political-economic social reality. Political reality, as Polybius taught, is in a constant process of growth and corruption or decay. However, utopia provides a key to stasis, to a harmonious stability that balances each movement with a countermovement.

On the negative side, for the good of the system such stability usually requires some authoritarianism that limits individual freedom of choice – whether by controlling the economy (as in the Jubilee) or by censoring disruptive knowledge or imagination (as in the Soviet Union or Plato’s The Republic), or by enslaving all those who lack the philosopher king’s knowledge. Utopia may signify either U-topia , i.e., no-place or Eu-topia, good place. Furthermore, the good may ironically be coercive or bad and the good may be no-where possible, a chimera, as implied by U-topia. In any case, utopians may help us to imagine alternative worlds whose principles can aid us in our social experimentation. In this sense, the utopian approach is messianic in that it stretches what we believe is possible beyond what we tend to accept as the natural limits of reality.

The Utopian Role of Law

The law of the Jubilee functions in a utopian fashion to provide us with an alternate image of the world and to use that new standard to judge the present and to motivate change. That is how Walter Houston envisages the role of the law of Jubilee when he compares it to its analogue in Ezekiel’s messianic vision of land redistribution, an act that is designed to correct the injustice done to the landless ger, the ethnically foreign resident alien.13

13 The Amharic term “falasha” applied by Ethiopian Christians to Ethiopian Beta Yisrael (Jews) is often explained as a term for the status of those legally prohibited from owning land. One historical hypothesis says that when the Christian kings of Ethiopia in the 14th -15th C. conquered an independent regional Jewish kingdom in Gondar, they disenfranchised the Jews both politically and economically. During the reign of Emperor Yeshaq (1414–1429), he invaded the Jewish kingdom, annexed it and began to exert religious pressure. He reduced the Jews' social status below that of Christians and forced the Jews to convert or lose their land. It would be given away as rist, a type of land qualification that rendered it forever inheritable by the recipient and not transferable by the Emperor. Yeshaq decreed on the Jews that: “He who is baptized in the Christian religion may inherit the land of his father,

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Walter Houston notes the characteristic feature of the prophetic critique of social injustice in Ezekiel’s prophesy of future redemption. In his allegory of the flock and the shepherds Ezekiel distinguishes between the rich and the poor by labeling them as the unjust and the just:

“The lost I will seek, and the strayed I will bring back, and the wounded I will bind up, and the sick I will heal, but the fat and the strong I will destroy; I will shepherd them in justice (mishpat).” (Ezek. 34.16)

God “will judge between sheep and sheep” under the staff of `David' the shepherd (Ezek. 34.23). Honest weights and measures (Ezek. 45.10-12) will prevent the economic exploitation condemned by Amos.

There will be a new Jubilee (in the year of release- dror - Ezek. 46.17). The land and its distribution will be based on social justice and will, therefore, include the resident aliens (gerim) who had been left out in Lev. 25 land distribution.liv Houston highlights this revision of the past:

“Ezekiel 47.22-23 takes a step seen in no other Old Testament text: the gerim are given land holdings among the tribes, treated as if they were natives. If this were ever implemented, it would eliminate the gerim as victims of oppression at a stroke, by giving them a secure footing in the community.” lv

In this utopian scheme are embedded some practical instructions on justice and the avoidance of oppression. For example, the princes are granted a generous portion within the landlvi so that they will not be tempted to sin. My princes' shall not exploit (ynh) my people any longer: they shall let the house of Israel have the land according to their tribes (Ezek. 45.8b). Walter Houston hears “a clear warning against the practices of expropriation alluded to in I Sam. 8.14 in the prophetic warning: Cease your evictions of my people. Enough, princes of Israel! Remove violence and oppression (hamas v shod) and execute justice and righteousness (Ezek. 45.9).lvii

The Biblical law of Jubilee is utopian in three positive senses:

(1) The Jubilee is a paradigm of principles of justice, rather than day-to-day legislation or positive law that is required for judicial practice. In fact, such is what many scholars think Hammurabi’s “Code” and the Torah’s laws were meant to be – not a code of law at all:

“The purpose of the [casuistic law, as in Exod. 21.2-22.17] is that of the Mesopotamian codes. ...It has become clear that in general judges did not make reference to the codes in deciding cases, and neither in the Bible nor elsewhere are [they] required to follow any written text as their authority. ...The codes [of Mesopotamia and the Torah] constitute a scientific description of justice as a political ideal, and, as published by the king [or God], they are a demonstration of his justice.”lviii

(2) “Commandments give moral teaching.” Their literary formulations serve to promote moral education by the way they exhort the people. Law is part of the covenantal ideology of

otherwise let him be a Falāsī.” This may have been the origin for the term ‘Falasha’ (falāšā, ‘wanderer,’ or ‘landless person’). This term is considered derogatory by Ethiopian Jews. (see Steve Kaplan cited in Wkipedia). The ability to own land is a characteristic difference between a citizen, ezrah, and a resident alien in many traditional land based agricultural societies.

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the Torah. Both the sermonic speeches that fill Deuteronomy and the laws present “an aspirational rather than a concrete program of reform.”lix

“The rhetorical aim of the Torah is to persuade those who hear it and identify themselves as Israel that YHWH is their God and they are the people of YHWH, committed by covenant to take the instruction [Torah] as determinative for their life as a people. This is the sense in which the Torah may be understood as `law', although it is not law in the sense in which that word is normally understood, as the utterance of a political authority who can enforce it judicially.

The Torah did come to be used judicially, but it is not well suited for the purpose and always required interpretation and supplementation. The authority under which the Torah is given is that of YHWH, and it is YHWH who takes the place of the political authority that might be expected to issue and enforce law.” lx

If the Torah were designed to guide judges and rulers, it would be directed to them. But it actually addresses the community and the individual:

“[The Torah] is a divine covenant law, not political law, the law of a polity. It represents the standards to which the people as a whole and every individual is supposed to be committed. Thus, although there may have been efforts, more or less successful, to enforce particular provisions, every member of the covenant people was in principle understood to be responsible for exercising that justice and righteousness that the Torah demands and the covenant commits them to... if I am right in defining the function of the Torah as covenant law as a depiction of the righteousness asked of the covenant people rather than law to be enforced by human authority.” lxi

The process of Biblical democratization now extends from royal image to the royal mandate to pursue justice. While ANE monarchs are the only humans who bear the deity’s image and claim to be the deity’s sons, in the Torah each and every human being possesses the image of God (Gen. 1:26-28) and all Israel are “children of God” (Deut. 14:1). So too while only the ANE monarch, like Hammurabi, is charged by the deity to rule the world justly, for the Torah each individual is called upon to pursue justice. Further each and every member of society in the most inclusive sense is an active partner in the covenant with God both in its making (Deut. 29:9-14) and in its execution. This is the reason that the Hebrew grammatical form of direct address, “you shall” is in the second person singular in most of the mitzvot, including in the Decalogue. This is the reason that each individual must pledge allegiance at the renewed covenant in Deuteronomy where men and women, elders and children, citizens and resident aliens, and even lowly water carriers are ordered to show up. Israel is commanded as a people composed of individuals who are in a covenantal relation with one another and who are ethnic brothers descended from common ancestors who received God’s promises. For these reasons, each member of the people, as well as the people as a whole, must both urge obedience on their fellows and, together, carry out the communal mitzvot.

(3) Finally the Jubilee laws are a form of utopian social critique in the sense delineated by Karl Mannheim in his book Utopia and Ideology. They provide a standard of justice by which to evaluate society, an inspirational vision of how the whole society should be transformed, and a practical paradigm , like a working model of a building or machine to be built, so one may imagine concretely how this plan could be implemented based on existing building blocks of its societal traditions. As Michael Walzer says in his book, Interpretation and Social Criticism, the prophetic social critique is not based on a fantastic private invention of what ought to be. It does not claim its authority from reason or revelation. Rather it is an extrapolation that reworks

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traditional ideas, language, and practices to which the prophets’ audience are already committed by their identity and language.

Mannheim and Houston highlight their view of utopian social critique as follows:

“The critique of current injustice is balanced by a vision of society as it should and could, in other circumstances, be justly ordered. For Karl Mannheim warns us that it is always those whose interest is in the maintenance of the existing social order who define what is impracticable in `the real world'--i.e. their own social world - and what is therefore utopian. But what is unachievable in a particular world order is only `relative utopia' confused with 'absolute utopia' by those whose world is bounded by the existing conditions.”lxii

“At a deeper level these visions speak of what is achievable...It is only a utopia that can show us our true desires and our true possibilities. ...To dismiss them all is to show that we still take oppression for granted as something natural, that it does not anger or disturb us. These visions came to people who were angered and disturbed by oppression. They all come from books which also condemn current historical oppression.” lxiii

“This book [Deuteronomy] is a utopian text addressed in the first place to citizens of the late monarchy... They are encouraged to regard themselves as the chosen and holy people of YHWH, and to transform their society into one which better reflects YHWH's intention for their life. In Mannheim's terms, it is utopian rather than ideological: it does not justify the status quo, which was quite different, but aims at its transformation.” lxiv

Houston’s utopian hypothesis, as he knows, is radically at odds with Ezra and the whole rabbinic tradition that treats these laws as binding – together with the Oral tradition that is assumed to have accompanied them to make them applicable. These laws were to be enforced by the leadership – political (Ezra, Nehemia, the high priests of the Second Temple, and the ideal king) and judicial (the scribes and, later, the Rabbis). However, this rabbinic view in no way contradicts Houston’s insistence that the most powerful force for maintaining the covenant is the moral-religious force of education – the appeal to live up to the Jews’ own identity as people of the covenant. Houston finds a distinction in the Torah between laws that are meant to be practiced and are binding, like those dealing with kashrut and with monetary damages, and those that can only be utopian, like the Jubilee.

Still I would like to register a reservation about Houston’s utopian approach to Biblical legislation. It is highly speculative - lacking in adequate evidence - to decide which of these ancient laws is straightforwardly historical (i.e. descriptive and prescriptive for their society) and which merely utopian flights of religious fancy. Historians must be careful not to dismiss the whole Torah as a utopian projection on the past. If they do choose such wholesale skepticism of the Torah, then they are left with no literary evidence of legal traditions practiced in the Biblical era. In my judgment it seems reasonable to assume there must have been some continuity – both in Mesopotamia and in ancient Israel – between the general law codes and actual legal practice. I suggest that the persuasive power of the Biblical law codes, especially the Jubilee, is the way they combine both laws that were implemented in tribal Israel which were presumably displaced by the Israelite monarchy and institutions described elsewhere in the ANE which were associated with the monarchy itself, for example, the misharum. The school of thought of Leviticus 25 then recalls, borrows, interpolates and extrapolates in interpreting these legal traditions and produces a new programmatic synthesis. Thus the Jubilee may be understood both as a restorative and realistic utopia. It is meant to be taken seriously enough that a ruler or a people would be inspired to try it out and revive a failing society.

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The Priestly Utopia: Jeffrey Fager

Jeffrey Fagerlxv also applies Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia in interpreting the role of the Jubilee laws in the Bible. Fager understands them not as a legislative program but as a symbolic presentation of the world. They reflect the worldview of an elite, of the priestly intelligentsia, understood as the authors of Leviticus 25, who imagine a coherent and concrete picture of the interrelationship of land, time, God and people. What this elite does is to synthesize two different understandings of this symbolic interrelationship. On one hand, there is a tribal system of kinship, land and redemption where individuals webbed in families maintain their ancestral lands as their own despite the demands of the monarch or the market economy (Navot, Ahab, Jezebel and Elijah in I Kings 21). That becomes embodied by the notion of perennial return of the Hebrew slave and land back to the family. On the other side, there is a sacral system which applies most directly to the priests who have no land of their own since they are cultic servants/slaves belonging to God. That becomes embodied by the notion that all Jews are merely slaves working on God’s land. By overlaying these two powerful religious and social visions Leviticus 25 generates a powerful concept. Each (non-priestly and levitical) citizen is both a secure landowner and a wholly dependent, landless slave simultaneously.

Fager singles out six aspects of the Jubilee’s message: First, the Jubilee opposes “latifundism” – the growth of large estates owned by the wealthy and often politically privileged by absorbing small independent family farms and turning the former farmers into serfs or migrant workers or even slaves.

“To occur, there must be little or no restraint on the ability of individuals to buy land perma-nently and bequeath it to successive generations. The existence of a periodic reform as described by the jubilee clearly prevents any such growth. If an individual has prospered and is able to `buy' the land of a neighbor, the jubilee sets a limit on the existence of the extended farm; the joining of small farms into larger estates can exist no longer than fifty years.”

Second, the Jubilee attaches the people to the land.

“The jubilee is not a general notion of egalitarianism, but it declares that this person, who is a member of this family, has a right to occupy and reap the produce from this land. The very specificity of the attachment reinforces the urgency of the proper distribution of the land. This concrete attachment binds persons to the land in a way that implies the importance of the land for the people - people and land belong together. In an agrarian society, the most important means of survival is access to land on which to live and grow food.”

Third, the Jubilee tradition reinforces the “economic viability of individuals,” each of whom has a particular claim to a particular piece of property, and yet is interwoven into a supportive clan.

“The jubilee does not abandon the individual to the general welfare of the corporate body. Each individual family is an important economic unit that ought to have its integrity as a viable body maintained. The jubilee attempts to guard every individual family's right to their own land.”

Fourth is familial solidarity.

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“The laws calling for the redemption of land or person declare that people are responsible for the basic welfare of members of their family. Again, the specificity of the regulations, describing which family members are responsible for the redemption, moves the concept of family solidarity from the realm of abstraction to that of concrete action expressing the principle of communal responsibility. The jubilee does include broader and more general admonitions for all Israelites to protect the dignity of all other Israelites - poor Israelites are not to be charged interest on loans, and Israelites are not to be sold as slaves but hired as free laborers and treated well. All of this is stated without a word of judgment concerning the individual in poverty. Whether a person became poor because of crop failure, financial mistakes, imprudence, incompetence or laziness, the community is responsible for keeping that person from falling into a state of abject poverty and the indignity of slavery.”

Fifth, economics is not a private or secular matter, but a central concern of the covenant with God. Yochanan Muffs notes that uniquely in the Book of Leviticus the laws of Sabbatical and Jubilee open with a prologue that they were given directly at Mount Sinai as if this body of law were a parallel to the covenant at Sinai. Similar themes to those of the Ten Commandments are rehearsed. The chapter opens with its own Shabbat commandment: “Adonai spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai: Speak to the people of Israel and say to them: When you enter the land that I have given you. The land shall observe a Shabbat to Adonai” (Lev. 25:1-2). In the continuation the Jubilee laws refer back to God’s role in the Exodus, as does the opening of the Ten Commandments, where God liberates Israel from slavery in Egypt. Here God liberates the Hebrews and their land on the Jubilee. However, Leviticus 25 has a new theological theme as well: God as redeemer from Egypt also “owns” the people as God’s “slaves” but their task is not menial but to serve God (Lev. 25: 55). By being God’s servants one maintains one’s dignity and equality, so God’s service has nothing to do with Egyptian slavery.

In that spirit Jeffrey Fager continues:

“The priests were self-conscious in their expression of the theological nature of the land tenure issue; the belief that land tenure was a matter of divine concern was a deep part of the priestly world-view. For the priests, Yahweh was the sovereign of all the world and all matters within the world, and they used the jubilee to indicate that this was also the case with land ownership; therefore, the jubilee as we have it before us denies the compartmentalization of the world. The jubilee repudiates the human tendency to divide sacred and profane realms within life so that parts of a person's or society's existence are matters of indifference to the deity. The jubilee declares that what some consider `private' transactions do fall under the rule of God. In particular, persons' access to the means of survival – land - is watched over by God, and the maintenance of proper access for everyone is a religious obligation, not a matter of social choice or even economic expediency.”

“Finally, the priests added the sense that proper land distribution was integral to an orderly world - a crucial component of the cosmic order which must be maintained to avoid chaos, of which the exile was a glimpse (Leviticus 26). Ultimately, an unequal distribution of land among the people is not only a matter of injustice, it threatens the survival of the whole community by bringing about the destruction of the framework upon which life itself can continue to exist.”

Therefore, as befits the new Sinai covenant proclaimed in Leviticus 25, the Jubilee laws are followed by dire warnings and curses for those who disobey: Your land shall not produce (Lev. 26:20); I will make your land desolate (Lev. 26:32); For the land shall be forsaken of them making up for its sabbatical years by being desolate of them (Lev. 26: 43). While the curses here pertain specifically to the violation of the Sabbatical years and only to the loss of

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the Israel-land connection, Fager takes this threat more broadly. It is a violation of the covenant of the sabbatical-jubilee complex of laws as a whole and a warning about cosmic chaos.

Restoration, Not Revolution: Walter Houston

The British Protestant scholar and social activist, Walter Houston, seeks to apply the vision of justice in Leviticus 25 to the issues of Third World economies and their fight against globalization. He is opposed not only to capitalism’s homogenization of the world, but also to the export of liberal values and leftwing revolutionary justice. Houston agrees with Jeffery Fager that the Jubilee is founded on a notion of cosmic order. According to Houston, the monarchic mandate to maintain justice has as its goal the restoration of cosmic order, not an idealistic utopia.

“First, the proper ordering of society is to be found in the past. In this belief Leviticus is at one with the ANE generally, but it expresses the idea in a way distinctive of the Old Testament. The assumption by which it is guided is that when the Israelites entered Canaan, they received just allocations of land; but the misfortunes of some and the advantage taken of them by others will lead inevitably to the loss of this original just ordering. The task of the lawgiver is to ensure that this original justice is restored.” lxvi

“When God is said to `judge' the world, this implies the restoration of a cosmic model of order and harmony, resulting in or inclusive of peace and prosperity (shalom); this is a concept common to the whole ANE, and is made concrete in the widespread myths of the ruling god's defeat of chaos, represented as a monster such as a dragon.” lxvii

“This is not a progressive belief, but a conservative one: justice is not a thing of the future to be striven towards by eliminating the distortions and abuses of the past, as French revolutionaries and Marxists believed, but is to be found by rescuing the old order from the encroachments of modernity, from the dynamic forces of the market and capital accumulation. It is not necessary to this belief that the old just order should really have existed, needless to say.”

Justice is the aim of the Jubilee, but an abstract justice devoid of local notions of what is right and good. Ancient justice is substantively different from revolutionary universalism:

“Secondly, the system values the attachment of the rural population to the soil, and not just of the population generally to the soil in general, but of this man or family to this piece of ground. `Everyone shall return to his own possession'; Naboth refuses Ahab's offer of another vineyard better than his own, because his own belonged to his ancestors. .... But valuing the individual's possession of his own plot on behalf of his family is not the same thing as believing that the individual has an indefeasible property right, including the right of alienation that the community ought not to interfere with. On the contrary, the text denies this in its theory of divine ownership, and specifically denies that anyone can acquire property rights over land other than their ancestral land.

Thirdly, it is in keeping with the particularity of this attachment that poor relief is envisaged as taking place through [their families’ initiative] rather than through a state or even a locally organized system. ...The biblical writers would find the impersonality of our system intolerable. In biblical thought there is always a particular person whose responsibility it is to keep another particular person from starving. This finds concrete expression in the designation of the fellow-Israelite as `your brother'; but more narrowly, the right of redemption gives not merely a right but

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a responsibility to the family, acting through the next of kin, to relieve a person in particular circumstances of distress.

Fourthly, these particularities in the concept of justice exclude any abstract egalitarianism. The sons of Israel are a community of equals, and none of them is permitted to acquire overwhelming wealth or power over the others; but it is does not occur to Hebrew writers to present equality of income or capital as a good. It is better for Nabot to retain the land of his fathers, however wretched it might be and however many mouths he has to feed, rather than having the land constantly re-divided for the sake of equality.”

Liberty is also different from the modern conception of it. “Proclaiming liberty” in the Jubilee laws is not about self-determination:

“What of the idea of dror, ‘liberty’ as it is often translated, which is to be `proclaimed to all the inhabitants of the land' (Lev. 25.10)? We have found it before in the contexts of release from slavery (Jeremiah 34) or from deportation (Isa. 61.1). It is not a right of self-determination as we conceive liberty, but is an event of deliverance from subservience to take one's place in this community of equals.”

The ancient conception of liberty has nothing to do with the libertarian notion of absolute property rights, but rather represents a liberty of mutual recognition and reciprocity within a system of equals.

“Finally, the statement of YHWH's ownership of the land in Lev. 25.23 is the ultimate moral basis of the Jubilee legislation, ‘the cornerstone of the jubilee.’ And along with this principle go the theological motive clauses which declare that the Israelites, whom YHWH delivered from Egypt and to whom he gave the land of Canaan, belong to him: they are my slaves, whom I brought up from the land of Egypt (Lev. 25.42, 55)… No one can acquire absolute rights over YHWH's land or YHWH's people.” lxviii

Houston indicates how this ancient social vision might illuminate the crisis in the Third World.

“Does the jubilee deserve its status as an icon of justice? ...What might it mean to us in ours? Its values present a significant challenge to the present-day domination of the globalized market system. Some of them tie in very closely with the world-view of many Third World countries today - the attachment of families to their land, the preference for personal models of justice, the alien nature of Enlightenment models of liberty and equality.

The most difficult questions are raised by precisely these positive aspects. The tendency of the market to deepen inequalities is challenged by the principle which Leviticus inherits from the misharum tradition, that such processes can be halted or put into reverse. The attraction of the jubilee for the debt remission campaign which took the name ‘Jubilee 2000’ was its promise of a new start unencumbered by debts, in full possession of one's land and person, just as severely indebted countries dream of a new start free of debt and unencumbered by structural adjustment programmes and the stranglehold of the multinationals. The jubilee suggests that it is possible to go back to the time before such evils overtook them: returning is after all its leitmotif.

The deepest value of the symbol lies in the assertion: The land shall not be subject to sale in perpetuity, since the earth is mine' (Lev. 25.23). The most crying need of our world at the present day is for the humble acknowledgement that human beings have no right to absolute possession of the earth or any part of it to do with as they wish: it belongs to a higher purpose.” lxix

The Rhetoric of Brotherhood versus the Rhetoric of the Market

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Walter Houston believes that the struggle to control the market mentality depends on mobilizing the kind of moral and social solidarity that the Torah seeks to develop in its listeners.

“The French revolution proclaimed as its goal `liberty, equality and fraternity'. The history of the last two hundred years has been largely one of the promotion, by rival political forces, of liberty and equality. Fraternity tends to be forgotten, yet one might argue that it is the glue without which the other two must inevitably fall apart and appear to be rivals.” lxx “The cry of liberty (`choice') must result in increasing inequality, unless we deepen the sense of solidarity, which has been eroded. We need to learn that we belong together. We could do worse than learn it from Deuteronomy.”lxxi

The rhetoric of Deuteronomy 15, as well as of Leviticus 25, (with their unusually numerous repetition of the word “brother”) seek to elevate Israel’s notion of brotherly solidarity – more so than other legal texts in Exodus and Leviticus that prefer terms like re’ekha, neighbor. Leviticus 25 speaks of both closer and more distant brothers, while Deuteronomy 15 speaks of all Israel as brothers in a proto-national sense. It is the appeal to solidarity that makes the laws presented in these Biblical sections function even though they require individuals to act against their so-called rational, market-oriented best interests. Deuteronomy 15 constructs its “imagined community” by using the term brother (ethnicity), by making ethical demands for mutual aid among brothers, and by fostering a willingness to forgo economic rights.

“Deuteronomy 15 is intending to depict the relationship between members of the national community as if it were an extended family or clan; indeed, it rather tends to confirm it. The text uses language which recalls the requirements of clan redemption (Lev. 25.25). ... But it extends and deepens the import of the language of `brotherhood' in two ways: by extending its range to the nation as a whole, and by implicitly pleading that `brothers,' whatever their degree of blood relationship, should genuinely act like brothers: that is, with generosity, not with hard-heartedness.” lxxii

“Deuteronomy's appeals are not simply appeals to individual generosity. When they are read in context we see that they are attempts to re-create a sense of community. The appeal to brotherly generosity is bound up with the inadequacy of legal changes to achieve a real change in social relationships. Was this just a failure in the specific measures offered? Does it not rather reflect a general problem in achieving and preserving social justice? The problem is this: that legal and institutional changes, even revolutionary ones, are not enough by themselves. They must be accompanied by the personal and communal commitment to their intention that Deuteronomy calls for. And that can only be achieved by moral education, by the influence of a recognized moral tradition.lxxiii Whatever the inadequacies of Deuteronomy's institutional contribution, its renewal of the sense of community of Israelite rural society in a national urban context is a profound contribution to the kind of moral tradition that any society aiming to be just requires; and it is there waiting to be picked up by anyone -- social critic, reformer, revolutionary-bold enough to take it seriously.....The `brotherly' ethos inculcated by the text at a deeper level became the distinctive ideology both of Judaism as a religious community and of the early Christian community.”lxxiv

As we saw above, in Deuteronomy 15 the master is called upon to release his slave at the end of six years with no compunction and to give him a grant which will stake him to a new life. In this context] the Torah employs a rich rhetoric of solidarity between members of different classes – free and slave – within a single society of fraternity:

“Guy Lasserre points out that the master is called on not just to change his practice, but `to redefine his concept of himself, of his property, of his relations with his slaves, of his past and of his future'! Also implied here may be an appeal to the imitation of God. The God whom the master

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serves is one who releases slaves! How can the servant of this God do less with his own servant? In this section, in an even more marked way than with the year of release, the institutional structure of dependency is retained, but the expectation is that it will be transformed by a new understanding of social relationships. There is again a hidden contradiction: the institution of debt-bondage is not abolished, yet to take the meaning of the rhetoric seriously is to see that there cannot be masters and slaves within a family of brothers." lxxv

Leviticus 25 makes a more radical break with class and economic stratification than does Deuteronomy 15, which still uses the term “slave.” Leviticus 25 has the following vision:

“An essentially classless society, where among Israelites impoverishment and inequality are temporary accidents arising from the changes and chances of harsh physical conditions. If this type of society is presupposed, there is no reason why people should not behave in the ways that the text demands.... The conviction of the jubilee's impracticality mainly depends on classical economics' construct of the rational subject who always behaves so as to maximize material benefit. Such a person would certainly not buy a 50-year lease for the price of even 42 crops, or lend his feckless neighbour food for a year at zero interest.

But the rational subject does not exist: he (he always is a he) is a fantasy of Enlightenment individualism. Real people are motivated by a range of considerations, and especially by what is accepted as the done thing in their society and by the need to maintain the social relationships which are important to them and therefore as much in their interests as material profit. Given a society where the dominant sentiment was a conviction of the equal value of all members, it would not be inconceivable for people to act in accordance with that, even against their material interests.” lxxvi

Thus, Walter Houston dismisses the simplistic distinction between utopian and realistic societies. He notes that utopias are dismissed by “realists” who reduce their understanding of human behavior to individualist materialistic self-interest, which they honorifically dub “rationality.” In contrast, Houston believes that when people act out their solidarity and, therefore, benefit from mutuality, then they will be able more easily to forgo their rights and behave magnanimously.

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Conclusion: The Jubilee System and Reflections on its Relevance for Contemporary Dilemmas of the Welfare State

In conclusion, the Jubilee model is the Bible’s most complex and most comprehensive of systems for aiding the needy. It is founded, like the peah system, on God as the Giver of the land. But its concern is not with maintenance of the inveterate poor – stranger, orphan and widow – but with the rehabilitation of the landowning brothers who are the backbone of the society and the economy. It disregards the power and culture differentials between rich and inveterate poor, rulers and powerless, members of family and family-less, slaves and masters, which aroused the prophetic righteous indignation. For that reason neither the orphan, widow, Levite and stranger, nor the monarch, judges and patricians of society are its addressees. Nor are justice, mercy and empathy its central values. Rather it is based on mutual self-interest and natural brotherly solidarity within each family. That is the natural rationale for these brothers/citizens to bail out those fellow citizens and landowners who find themselves in temporary financial distress.

Leviticus 25 does not theorize about the origins of poverty but apparently poverty is not an individual’s moral problem requiring character education. Nor is poverty a result of a class of rich exploiters, so it does not require internal reform or moral repentance by the rich and powerful, as the prophets demanded. That some people become poor is endemic but not an acute problem. It is a neutral, blameless phenomenon that is natural in the statistical distribution of individual fates in an agricultural society. According to Leviticus 25 poverty is not typical of a particular class in society, and there is no culture of poverty, rather one can expect individuals to be mobile – rising and falling in any market economy. The system seeks to soften those radical transitions and to enable the fallen to start over, while not letting the prosperous lord over the needy and make their advantage a permanent one. The system needs constant readjustments and a 50 year overhaul and tune-up, but radical reform is not necessary.

Therefore, the Jubilee and the brother-redeemer provide a no-fault insurance policy funded and administrated by landowning clan members who serve as each other's safety net. In the most extreme case God redeems debt-slaves and their lands and returns them to their families, but even without that revolution, society as band of brothers, through its social organization in kin-groups, produces a society of equal opportunity and periodic second chances. With responsible brothers, the unsuccessful farmer gets many second chances and, when it is necessary, is maintained so that he can subsist as a worker on his nearest relative's farm until the Jubilee. One can always redeem one's own land at any time, so no sale is final.

This well-oiled system of mutual support has self-corrective economic mechanisms of equilibrium. Therefore Leviticus 25 does not consist of a bundle of emergency reforms like the New Deal or the ANE’s misharum. Nor is it similar to L.B. Johnson’s War on Poverty aimed at the destitute on the margins of an otherwise prosperous society in leaderless neighborhoods with a multi-generational culture of poverty. Rather Leviticus 25 assumes a web of strong kinship groups that must extend a helping hand to meet individual crises caused by the ups and downs of individuals that threaten the economic solvency of the productive class of landowning citizens. A downward spiral is not inevitable or unstoppable, but when it occurs it will not be inherited by the next generation because by then the land will be redistributed.

In all these features of mutual help Leviticus 25 is a conservative policy. But it has a most startling mechanism in its Jubilee redistribution of land capital. It presumes the mythic starting point of just, that is, egalitarian distribution of wealth, is the Divinely sanctioned lottery of Moses and

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Joshua to make sure each family gets a roughly equal piece of agricultural capital – land – and that rough equality is recalibrated every fifty years. Personal wealth is not redistributed, but everyone receives basic capital –land – in roughly equivalent amounts. No one guarantees success in business, which depends on individual industry and talent, but at least once a generation there is a “second chance.” Thus, poverty is not inherited and cannot ossify into a stratified society of fixed classes. Thus – at least for Jews, not resident aliens – the society established after Israel’s liberation from Egypt cannot deteriorate into a new Israelite house of bondage with ethnic brothers ruling over one another harshly, as if they were not part of the same people with the same history and the same God. The sacred status of the holy land as God's fiefdom prevents the monopolization of the land by successful entrepreneurs. While leaving individuals to pursue their economic activities freely for 50 years, this Biblical chapter legally limits the long term negative effects of the free market accumulation that may lead to monopolization of all capital as well as political accumulation of power in a tyrannical class system of Hebrew masters and Hebrew slaves.

Let us see how contemporary welfare terminology illuminates the Jubilee’s redistribution of land – basic capital –to each citizen regardless of his/her poverty. In contemporary parlance one might think to call the Jubilee an example of “universal basic services” like free health care or free parks and municipal services. It would then be contrasted with selective aid from the government for the poor only, such as welfare subsidies. The latter term is fitting for rabbinic tzedakah system which offers no free municipal services and provides tzedakah for the poor alone based on need. Its focus is on maintenance as in the tithes and peah model.lxxvii Yet, the Jubilee is not about universal services to all citizens as their right. It does not include the widow, orphan and resident alien in its benefits and does not partake of the welfare state ethos of social citizenship that guarantees to each individual basic benefits. Rather it is about empowerment to those capable of regaining economic independence and becoming productive farmers again. The ideology and method of providing land to everyone is most comparable to Maimonides’ highest level of tzedakah (a job, a partnership, an investment or a grant). It is designed to enhance simultaneously, on a society-wide basis, equality of opportunity for productivity and industry.lxxviii lxxix It is not about equal services to all citizens. Here neighbors and brothers ought to help someone up or prevent them from falling but their task is not primarily to satisfy the needs of their sinking brothers, so much as “strengthening” them to stand on their own by giving them back their land and the freedom of their own labor. They are providing opportunities and resources but the needy must take the initiative to capitalize on them and help redeem themselves.

Today the redistribution of capital often means not land but other forms of capital. The government resources for this redistribution of capital can be collected from the wealthy into a superfund by progressive taxation and by estate taxes that limit generation to generation accumulation and transfer of capital. If the Jubilee every 50 years functions as a society-wide leveling of the playing field, then free education in an economy where education is the key to productivity can serve the same function. When properly implemented, free education gives the members of the new generation a more equal starting point in economic competition than they would have had without it. The seminal American public educator Horace Mann said: "Education is the great equalizer of the conditions of man – the balance wheel of the social machinery."lxxx However, in the United States, for example, where funding for schools is by district and the poor people live in poor districts, children have poorly funded educations, and the so-called redistribution of educational capital for the new generation is woefully unequal.

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Even when educational opportunities are more equal, one also needs financial capital to rise. Free-loan societies and GI or Israeli soldier grants14 enable one to start a business and increase capital. Highly progressive taxes and especially stiff death taxes may also function on an individual level to provide partial economic leveling from one generation to the next. These taxes are similar to the Jubilee system which took away from rich landowners all the land they had succeeded in buying up from failing farmers over fifty years and then gave it back to everyone who had lost it. It also stripped the rich of all the accumulated slave labor they had purchased legitimately and by virtue of which they could work all that excess land. In short, the Jubilee system is not about universal services or maintenance but about empowermentlxxxi. It is intended to maximize the involvement of

14 In the United States the GI Bill of Rights provides subsidies to military veterans. So too in Israel soldiers receive a significant grant upon completion of duty calculated per month for service, greater for combat soldiers. The grant is $5,000 for education, or for buying an apartment or for starting a business; and a tax exemption for three years on one’s income up to $2,000 a month.

i Unforeseen History, 117ii "But should they do so? If the, answer is yes, who should receive the benefit of communal protection? And what should they be protected against? These questions have been posed repeatedly as societies have struggled to draw a boundary between communal and individual needs and public and private resources. There has been no single answer given, no universal solution to the conflicting claims of self, family, and community. Indeed, the major political philosophies current since the Enlightenment have suggested quite different answers, although all have acknowledged the responsibility of the state to provide some minimal level of services and protection for citizens.” (L. H. Lees, Solidarities of Strangers, 1)iiiSee Jeremiah Untermann, " God as Redeemer," 399-405.Thanks are due for his helpful comments on this chapter. iv Moshe Weinfeld argues that even though the terminology of tzedakah umishpat is not found in Leviticus 25, the term dror and the substantive socio-economic reforms mentioned in parallel ancient Near Eastern royal edicts show that this is the same motif. Though this thesis is very likely correct historically for our focus on the narrative logic of giving it is important to appreciate the difference between the universalist motif of the just ruler and the motif of ethnic solidarity among brothers rooted in the Exodus experience.v Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus, Anchor Bible, 2146 ff, reprinted by permission of the author, may his memory be for a blessing. vi “Slavery” is italicized in this subheading, since Leviticus 25 is careful never to use that pejorative term.vii The meaning of the term yovel according to the contemporary scholars reflects the same range of options raised by traditional commentators cited above. See G. Chirichigno, Debt-Slavery, 313-316.viii See Jeremy Untermann, "Redemption" in the Anchor Bible Dictionary (vol. 5, 650-654).ix Note that in Leviticus 25:35-37, the decline of one's brother is followed by a warning not to charge interest, which seems to presuppose that the brother redeemer will be offering a loan to his destitute brother. If your brother declines, falls - with you, you should hold him up (strengthen him) (as though he were) a resident alien, let him live with you. Do not exact from him advance or accrued interest. Fear your God, and let your brother live with you. Do not lend him money at advance interest, or lend him food at accrued interest. x Ruth 3:12-13; 4:1-10; Deut. 25: 5-10xi Numbers 35:33-34: II Samuel 3:27xii The metaphor of impoverishment in Leviticus 25 is that of declining or going downhill - Lev. 25: 25,35, 39xiii David Novack, Jewish Social Ethic, 208xiv "Even the poor living off tzedakah should give tzedakah. Whether rich or poor one should give tzedakah according to one's capability to show one is subject to God like a "rentier" (tenant farmer or serf), paying one coin or half per week regularly without exception to show one is a “slave/servant” to God and what one pays is one's atonement" (Sefer Hasidim #61)xv In Kol Dodi Dofek Rabbi J.B. Soloveitchik calls this brit goral – the covenant of common fate.xvi In the late 19th C. and early 20th C., when mass immigration brought 2,000,000 Eastern European Jews to America, they often formed a Landsmanschaft based on common origin in a city or geographical area, in Yiddish "Land." They shared funds without charging interest and helped each other bring over relatives from the Old Country and shared in the work and cost of putting on a wedding. This is modern descendant of the goel system of the Leviticus 25. For example, the Chevrah (Chebrah) Poel Zedek Anschei Illia (CPZAI, later also known as the Forsyth Street shul) was founded in the 1880s. The Chevrah was founded by a small group of immigrants from the shtetl of Illia, in the province of Vilna, Lithuania. These landsleit longed for a taste of home in the midst of a foreign land. They decided to form a chevrah in order to have a place to pray together and meet with their fellow

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as many citizens as possible in a productive application of their individual human labor to their provisionally distributed capital and thereby produce more wealth for themselves and for all.

Finally, as Walter Houston has elaborated so eloquently, the most important contribution of the Jubilee system and its concept of redemptive brotherhood is its rhetorical power to generate the sense of fraternity necessary to counterbalance the ideology of individualistic market capitalism which lacks the necessary social solidarity to motivate those who have to redistribute part of their wealth.

Maurice Godlier makes this point in anthropological terms when he distinguishes between a purely “contractual market society” that has no fixed points where anything can be bought or

countrymen, to help each other, and to hear news from the old home. The Chevrah was at the peak of its existence at its fortieth anniversary in 1924. At that time it sponsored a variety of activities and services including the Illiar Relief Fund, a Chevrah Kadisha, Chevrah Mishnayos, Gemilus Chesed [free loan] fund, and sick benefits. The Chevrah also contributed financially to many Jewish causes. It had a constitution. So it functioned as something between urban tzedakah of the Mishna and Biblical (Lev 25) brotherhood model, but was constructed on the basis of former neighborhood affinity in the land of origin. xvii Cited in A. Kass, Giving Well, xvxviii S.R. Hirsch, Commentary on Lev. 25:39 xix Nahum Sarna and Moshe Weinfeld explain that the cancellation of debts and the liberation of slaves were undertaken in ANE societies by reformist monarchs from time to time in the name of the anduraru (whose root is identical with the Biblical dror) or the term misharum (like the Hebrew maisharim for justice) which describes the cancellation of debts probably at regular intervals by the Babylonian king on their New Year’s on 1 Nisan. Sarna suggests that every seven years in the month of Tishrei the debts were cancelled and as a result most of the slaves were liberated since most Hebrew slavery in Israel derived from debt including thieves who in lieu of repaying trhe victim became their slaves which is also a form of deb-slavery. Thus every seven years rather than every fifty there was a proclamation of emancipation. This helped right a unbalanced society that had lost solidarity among its members since some people had become totally dependent on others. The Torah envisions this process occurring regularly as a cyclic rehabilitation of the original socio-economic equality of Israel. The original moment of equal distribution of land is attributed to Joshua who is following Moshe’s instructions for a Divinely guided lottery designed to give each as much as their family size required. This division of land is intended to contrast with the hierarchy of ancient Egypt, the “house of bondage” for most Egyptians, not only for the Jews.xx

xxi Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus, 2167-8xxii Solon, ruler of Athens (638 BC – 558 BC), an Athenian statesman, lawmaker, and poet: “I also restored to freedom those who here at home had been subjected to the shameful servitude and trembled before the moods of their masters.” (fragment 24.13-15, Aristotle’s Athenian Polity 12) (Milgrom, Leviticus, 2242) The Greek men of Lipar divided the land of the islands into holdings which could be transferred for a period of 20 years. Thereafter these holdings retuned to their former status. (p. 2242) In Egypt Ptolemy V Epiphanes bestowed the following boons on his people: remission of debts to the Crown, release of persons in prison and under indictment, and release of rebels and return of their property (Rosetta Stone, IL19-20). (Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus, 2167-8)xxiii The Geulah system of Leviticus 25 might be compared to and contrasted with Social Security. The brotherly network is universal for all Jews, while Social Security insures American citizens or residents only when they have been employed and have paid into the insurance for 40 quarters. Leviticus 25 provides personal support via a particular relative assigned to each who will then reciprocate when they can, while Social Security decreases family responsibility by taking out a potion of one's earnings to save for a "rainy day" – pension, disability or death benefits for the surviving spouse. Neither Leviticus 25 nor Social Security seeks to redistribute all wealth to achieve equality for all citizens, though they do redistribute wealth favoring the less self-sufficient up to certain minimum and the wealthier employees have a cap on their benefits. Thus Social Security gives minimum payments to lower paid workers even if they have earned less money by taking it from wealthier contributors. Social Security tax is a progressive tax but only up to an upper cap so that the earnings of very wealthy employees above the cap and non-employment earnings such as stocks are not part of the Social Security kitty. Unlike Social Security benefits, Biblical aid from one's brother still “smacks” of charity and undignified dependence. But at least the dependent brother knows that in the past or future he may be on the giving end. The Sabbatical cancellation of debts and the Jubilee return of land and the release from bonded labor are automatic operations that involve no shame, in contrast to the American bankruptcy laws that leave one with a bad credit rating after dismissing one's debts. Both the

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sold and a mixed “symbolic economy” in which some things can never be permanently alienated – like land or human freedom of each individual. Those fixed points ensure an enduring identity to individuals and societies:

“Human society drew on two sources for its emergence: contractual exchange, and non-contractual transmission, on the other... Thus there are always things in the human social domain which are not governed by contract, which are not negotiable, which are located outside or beyond the domain of reciprocity.” lxxxii

“No society, no identity can survive over time and provide a foundation for the individuals or groups that make up a society if there are no fixed points, realities that are exempted (provisionally but lastingly) from the exchange of gifts or from trade.”lxxxiii lxxxiv

“Here as elsewhere there are some things which must be kept and not given. These things that are kept - valuables, talismans, knowledge, rites - affirm deep-seated identities and their continuity over time. Furthermore they affirm the existence of differences of identity between individuals, between the groups which make up a society or which want to situate themselves respectively.” lxxxv

As Leviticus 25 declares: The land must not be sold beyond reclaim, for the land is Mine; you are but resident aliens with Me. Therefore, throughout the land you hold, you must provide redemption for the land. (Lev. 25:23-24)

In a democracy one’s political freedom is the bedrock of their equality and independence. But an economic base is just as integral. Guaranteeing social benefits is a step in that direction. But the Jubilee system focuses not on providing benefits but resources as capital for generating one’s own self-reliance. In Leviticus 25 the inalienability of the landlxxxvi and of the individual’s freedom is the source of the citizen’s permanent identity, integrity, security, equality and freedom. It should be stressed that Jubilee legislation is not merely the expression of an ideal. It is a proactive mitzvah requiring brothers to help one another redeem themselves and their land from the predatory processes of the free market. Therefore brotherly responsibility combines independence with interdependence in a way that insures an opportunity for profound economic freedom.

Biblical support by one's brother and Social Security are obligatory, not voluntary insurance, and they both create a mutual interest in responsibility of one citizen to another for otherwise the insurance program will not work (for example, Social Security might go broke). Both systems are paternalistic , that is someone takes care of you – whether you like it or not. Social Security deductions are laid aside for one's retirement whether or not one wants to save or not. However the two differ in that the Jubilee offers a new start, new capital, which Social Security does not offer. Therefore, Social Security does not help the economy or, for example, the disabled worker to return to profitable employment. (See an insightful comparison of these systems in Daniel Schiff, "Alleviating Poverty: A Halakhic View of Social Security within a Modern Welfare State" in Walter, Poverty).

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Appendices:

In Need of Adoption by a “Big Brother": Reb Arye Levin in Jerusalem

Brotherhood without Regard for Color or Creed: “A Woman of Valor” – “She opens her hands to the poor” (Proverbs 31:20): Maya Bernstein’s Great-Grandmother

First Neighbors, Guild Brothers and Shul Mates

Puritan Brotherhood and Sisterhood in Christ: The Model of Christian Interdependence

Political Democracy and the Biblical Jubilee:The Hebrew Republic and the Call for Redistribution of Land (England, the 1650s)

Henry George's Progress and Poverty and Moses’ Jubilee Legislation

Appendix: In Need of Adoption by a “Big Brother": Reb Arye Levin in Jerusalem

Leviticus 25 develops the concept of a “guardian brother” that is central to Biblical narratives like those of Cain and Joseph and to Biblical family law, such as the levirate marriage, into a well-defined economic function bearing practical moral responsibility. That same principle functioned informally, but with the same ethos, many generations later during the great immigration of 2,000,000 Russian Jews to the United States between 1882 and 1914. Families served as economic blood brothers for their members or “brothers” from their village, shtetl, or land of origin. Landsmannschaftn (associations of immigrant Jews from the same geographical areas), often offered interest- free loans to fellows in need. The Lower East Side of Manhattan manifested this model of brotherly redemption in the early 20th C. Joseph Telushkin recounts a characteristic example in his practiced eloquence in storytelling:

“Many Jewish immigrants [in the Lower East Side at the turn of the 20th century] were desperate to bring over their families from Russia and deprived themselves of basic necessities. In Anzia Yezierska's story "Brothers," the hero, a man named Moishe tries to save money to buy ship tickets for his mother and two brothers: "Moisheh the Schnorrer they call him. He washes himself his own shirts and sews together the holes from his socks to save a penny. He cooks himself his own meat once a week for Sabbath, and the rest of the time it's cabbage and potatoes or bread and herring. And the herring that he buys are the squashed and smashed ones from the bottom of the barrel. And the bread he gets is so old that he's got to break it with a hammer."lxxxvii

“A real life character like this was Abe Sarnoff, father of David Sarnoff, the legendary founder of RCA. During his first years in America, Abe Sarnoff starved himself while working as a housepainter in order to send for is wife and children. By the time they arrived, he was bedridden and he remained so. David developed a successful newspaper route, sang in a synagogue choir, picked up an extra dollar or two singing at weddings and bar mitzvahs, and by thirteen supported the entire family.”lxxxviii

However, one feels compelled to ask what do those without families do? Many Biblical laws such as peah and the forgotten sheaf (Dt. 24:17-22) offer maintenance relief for the orphan, widow,

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Levite and ger who are impoverished permanently because they are landless. They are landless, however, because they are family-less in a hereditary agricultural society. Who can offer them the rehabilitative aid offered in Leviticus 25 to help brothers get back on their feet on their own farms? Surprisingly in Leviticus 25, orphan, widow, Levite, and ger play no role and no one redeems them for the Jubilee model is only about helping landowners retrieve land they once owned.

In other Biblical texts we find the role of surrogate parent or avenging brother attributed to God, who fills the lacuna of the lack of a father for the orphan or of a patron for the widow, in order to defend their rights and to redeem them "Father of orphans and judge of widows is God in the Divine domicile" (Psalm 68:6). The Rabbis formalized this surrogate familial role in the following way.

xxiv Some commentators see this law as explicating, after the fact, the moral logic of God ordering Israel on their way out of Egypt to “borrow” from the Egyptians gold, silver and dresses (Exodus 12: 33-36) in what is functionally a grant to their now liberated slaves. xxv Maimonides, following Rabbi Shimon (TB Kiddushin 17a), rules that the grant must be from “things that have the power of blessing in them” (Maimonides Laws of Slaves 3:14)– that is, animals and plants that reproduce naturally because the point of the grant is to make the former slave self-supporting, though this may just be a literalist reading of the verse that says that the grant is “from the flock, the threshing floor, and the vat which Adonai your God has blessed you” (Deut. 15:13).xxvi Hamishne LaMelekh on Maimonides, Laws of Slaves 3:12 cited in Torah Temima (Dt. 15:14) #48 cited by Daniel Sperber, Netivot Pesika, 148 fn. 226xxvii Arukh HaShulkhan Y.D. 252:12xxviii Lynn Pollack, personal communicationxxix Maimonides, Laws of Slaves 3:14xxx J.E. Lendon, e Empire of Honor, 67 xxxi Aristotle, Ethic. Nic. 8.11; cf. Politics 1.3-6xxxii Plato, Laws 2.83xxxiii Mekhilta. Mishpatim, Nezikin 1; Siphra Behar 7:2xxxiv This same type of monarch-initiated reform was also found in ancient Egypt, Assyria, and ancient Greece. In the Hellenistic period this was called philanthropy. xxxv Jeffries Hamilton says Misharum edicts are royal proclamations releasing debts – private and public, such as taxes, that usually appear in first year of king’s reign. They are found as early as third millennium BCE in Ur, but chiefly in second millennium under the old Babylonian kings. Andurarum acts also signify release but most especially release of slaves or release from other obligations, such as debts that often lead to debt slavery. Thus, liberation accompanies cancellation of the original debt. (J. Hamilton, 48-49, 53-54).xxxvi In Nuzi the edict was proclaimed in the temple city by the king in the month of Nisanxxxvii Deut. 15:2; Lev. 25:10; Jeremiah 34:8; Isaiah 61:1-2xxxviii Leviticus 25; King Zedekiah in Jeremiah 34:8 frees slaves; this may have occurred in the Sabbatical year or perhaps Jubilee year; Nehemia 5 cancels debts and forbids further enslavement of Jews for debt). xxxix The assumption is that one’s original status in this sacred temple city was as slave of the local deity. The city and its inhabitants are said to be free, which means free from the king’s taxation and free to serve their gods. For the Mesopotamians serving gods means literally doing physical labor to provide the food of the gods and their temples just as defined in Enuma Elish that the gods were liberated from labor by creating human beings to be their slaves and to supply their food, the sacrifices. But in Leviticus 25 God liberates us from human servitude to return to our own land and serve our own families even though the rationale is that we are God’s slaves –not slaves to humans. Thus liberation from human masters is understood as returning to one’s God. Ancient Near Eastern documents of manumission use phrases that mean one is "liberated to serve one’s god." xl This might apply to an individual or to a whole nation, especially in the era of Assyria or Babylonia, with mass national expulsions from one’s native land. So, for example, Cyrus king of Persia reversed that exile for Judeans with his declaration of dror. Thus, tzedakah umishpat is a form of geulah, redemption to our original state of freedom, of family, of landowning, of native land, of direct relationship to God’s service.

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"If one dies and left heirs …who are minors, then one must appoint an epitropos (appointee, guardian) to care for their portion of the inheritance until the minor grows up. However, if the deceased did not appoint one, then the court is obligated to establish an epitropos …For the court is the "father of orphans" (Maimonides, Laws of Inheritance 10:5)

Thus the halakha strove to fill the economic role of responsible brother. For emotional and social support the 20th C. American organizations Big Brother and Big Sister try to fill that gap with volunteers. In addition, those without family need an advocate for their rights. This need is repeatedly mentioned in the Torah and, when necessary, this role is played by God (Do not violate the permanent boundaries, do not enter the fields of orphans, for their Redeemer is powerful and will sue their case against you – Proverbs 23:10-11). The following two anecdotes show how

xli That is what the democratic leader of Syracuse declared upon taking the throne after the dictator in 356 BCE. He redistributed lands and houses and declared that this equality is the basis of freedom, just as slavery begins with the poverty of the landless.xlii Gregory Chirichigno, Debt-Slavery, 274xliii Gregory Chirichigno, Debt-Slavery, 61-77)xliv In the judgment of Gregory Chirichigno Deut. 15 and Exodus 21 are speaking of the release of debtor-family members held by creditors in lieu of the repayment of loans. The release occurs after six years from the beginning of their service, not on the Sabbatical year as a general release. However, a misharum-like edict of Jubilee would cancel the continued service of these indentured servants. As in the Ancient Near East these temporary debtor slaves were usually citizens, as opposed to chattel slaves, who were usually foreign in origin.Chirichigno argues that Leviticus 25, Exodus 21 and Deuteronomy 15 are not contradictory and do not reflect later reforms of earlier laws. In all of them the Hebrew slave is liberated after six years of actual service – not on the Sabbatical year. According to Lev. 25 the Jubilee release, like the misharum, will liberate the Hebrew debtor-slave from the debt and the service even within the six year period and the slave and his family may buy their freedom and their land back at any time before the Jubilee. (Gregory Chirichigno, Debt-Slavery,345- 353)xlv Gregory Chirichigno, Debt-Slavery, 67xlvi Moshe Weinfeld in his book, Tzedakah uMishpat, shows that God brings justice to his worldly kingdom at three stages of the Divine reign, when God’s reign is established or renewed, just as ancient Near Eastern kings often promulgated these socio-economic reforms as they took their thrones. (1) At creation God establishes His reign over the cosmos with tzedakah umishpat (Psalms 96:10; 93; 33:5-6; 89:3), as sung in the Kabbalat Shabbat service weekly when Jews celebrate the Creation as God’s enthronement. (2) At the Exodus when God liberates his people from slavery and grants them a legal system and, thus, becomes their king. Liberation is both political and economic. (Exodus 20:2 and Deut. 33:4-5) (3) At the final redemption of the whole earth the world will be liberated and God will be the acknowledged as the king bringing justice (Psalms 67:5; 75:3; 96:11: 98:7-9; Isaiah 2:1-4; 5:15-16; 11:4)xlvii W. Houston, Contending, 193xlviii W. Houston, Contending, 161xlix W. Houston, Contending, 169l “One of the criticisms of this theory is that it attributes the institution of the Jubilee to the period of the occupation of the land despite the fact that there is no documentation of any sort to support this view. There is no mention of the Jubilee in the historical or prophetic books.” (E. Nardoni, Rise Up, 87-89)li E. Nardoni, Rise Up, 87-89lii E. Nardoni, Rise Up, 87-89liii E. Nardoni, Rise Up, 87-89liv Ezek. 45.1-12; 46.16-18; and 47.13-48.35. Ezek. 44.28-31lv Walter Houston, Contending for Justice: Ideologies and Theologies of Social Justice in the Old Testament (2006), 165-166lvi Ezek. 45.7-8a; 46:16-18; 48.21-2lvii Walter Houston, Contending for Justice: Ideologies and Theologies of Social Justice in the Old Testament (2006), 165-166lviii W. Houston, Contending, 171lix W. Houston, Contending, 175lx W. Houston, Contending, 171

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necessary a big brother-advocate is for protecting family-less people who cannot defend themselves.

Reb Arye Levin was the self-appointed chaplain or rabbi of prisoners and of people who were physically or mentally ill in Jerusalem (20th century). He knew how important it was to have a blood relative as a redeemer and protector. His grandson Rabbi Benjamin Levine recalled a relevant incident: Once my father was walking with my grandfather Reb Arye, when a man approached and asked: ‘How is your relative who suffers from mental illness feeling?’ Reb Arye replied: ‘Thank you for asking. He is fine.’ Afterwards his son was puzzled and asked Reb Arye: ‘What relative do we have in a mental institution?’ Reb Arye explained. ‘Once I visited the local home for the mentally deranged in order to give them some emotional support. I walked through the cells and noticed one particular patient visibly more neglected than all the others. He was

lxi W. Houston, Contending, 172lxii Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (1938), 177lxiii W. Houston, Contending, 168-169lxiv W. Houston, Contending, 176lxv Jeffrey Fager, Land Tenure, 112- 115lxvi W. Houston, Contending, 201lxvii “These myths were told in Israel and are referred to in much poetic theology (e.g. Job 9.13; Ps. 74.12-14; 89.9-10 (Heb. 10-11); Isa. 27.1; 51.9). According to H.H. Schmid, the Hebrew name for cosmic order is sedaqa, righteousness'; and central to this model of order (Psalm 82) is the maintenance of justice within society and the absence of oppression.” (W. Houston, Contending, 206)lxviii W. Houston, Contending, 201-202lxix W. Houston, Contending, 203lxx W. Houston, Contending, 189 lxxi W. Houston, Contending, 190 lxxii W. Houston, Contending, 184lxxiii Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism, 40-42 lxxiv W. Houston, Contending, 188-189 lxxv W. Houston, Contending, 188 lxxvi W. Houston, Contending, 196 lxxvii Rechnitz, Ido, “Universal versus Selective Welfare” in I. Brenner, On Economy, 325lxxviii Yoav Rubin has written insightfully that such capital distributions are an extension of equality before the law guaranteed in the Torah’s rule: “Like a citizen among you, shall the resident alien ger residing with you be and you shall have love for him as for you” (Leviticus 19:34). Thus all landless people – gerim – shall receive the basic capital necessary for their full participation in society as matter of right. lxxix Rubin, Yoav, “Shmitah, Yovel and Estate Tax,” in I. Brenner, On Economy, 268lxxx In the UK it is only in 1870 that universal free and compulsory elementary schools begin to function. In Uruguay, once it gained its independence, free public education – now extending to the university – was the foundation of the new society. Under the influence of José Pedro Varela, whose writings convinced the government to pass the 1877 Law of Common Education, Uruguay pioneered universal, free, and compulsory primary education in the Americas The model adopted for public schools was taken from the French system and a centralized, nationwide system was established.lxxxi Rubin, Yoav, “Shmitah, Yovel and Estate Tax,” in Itamar Brenner, On Economy, 268lxxxii Maurice Godelier, The Enigma of the Gift, 36lxxxiii See Annette Weiner, Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-while-Giving (1994)lxxxiv Maurice Godelier, The Enigma of the Gift, 8lxxxv Godelier, The Enigma of the Gift, 33lxxxvi All countries before the 19th C, not just ancient Israel had rules for inalienability of land or the privilege or repurchase. (Manuel de Etnographie, 179)lxxxvii Quoted by Jonathan Sarna, The American Jewish Experience, 104lxxxviii Joseph Telushikin, The Golden Land, 14

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covered with bruises. Why, I asked the nurse, was this man, unlike all the others, so bruised? She said that since he had no relatives to visit him, the other patients knew he was fair game to attack whenever they felt like it. No relative would ever complain and demand he be treated with respect. ‘It was then,’ said Reb Arye, ‘that I told everyone, especially the director and the nurses, that this poor man was our relative. Thereafter I visit him regularly and make sure that he is well-cared for.’

In a similar situation Reb Arye once noticed a corpse being removed from the Jerusalem hospital Shaarei Tzedek without any relatives to receive the body and accompany it to burial. Then Reb Arye asked the attendants to wait, while he began a lengthy eulogy over the body. Seeing the famous Reb Arye, many passersby stopped to listen and appreciate what a special person had died.lxxxix In fact, of course, Reb Arye was not related to the deceased but he stepped in and assumed the role of family member.

Appendix: Brotherhood Without Regard for Color or Creed:“A Woman of Valor” – “She opens her hands to the poor”- Maya Bernstein’s Great-Grandmother

My grandmother, Freda Miriam Appleman Aranoff, still has traces of her southern accent. It’s very faint now, but she’s fond of telling us the story from when she was a teenager, a few years before she moved to Brooklyn with her family, from Evarts Kentucky, in Harlan County, thick in the heart of mining country.

Harlan County, 1920. Mining territory, with two opposing camps: the coal miners, and the mine owners. The miners were basically enslaved to the owners of the mines. They worked hard physical labor, day in, day out, and were paid in Scrip – the mine owner’s version of money, a cheap paper certificate that could be exchanged for food only in the Company Store, owned, of course, by the mine-owners. The coal company had its own police force, which was used to keep union organizers out of the coal camps, and to intimidate the miners who tried to join the union.

It was 1932, in the midst of the Great Depression, and the miners in Evarts went on strike. They wanted to be unionized, and they refused to work until they were granted that right. The owners of the mine, like the Bible’s Pharaoh, had hearts as hard as stone, that hardened at each request made by the miners– they would let the miners starve to death rather than allow them to join the union, and gain their freedom. The town was basically at war. Bullets flying in the streets, riots and vandalism abounding.

By this time, Savta, my great-grandmother, and her husband had four children, and they had opened a clothing store, and were making a living. Savta baked her own bread each week, and the family ate fruits and vegetables and grains – they still kept strictly kosher. Twice a year, they could afford a chicken, which was ritually slaughtered according to Jewish law, and sent to them from Cincinnati, Ohio. They were extremely well respected in Evarts. Savta’s husband was famous throughout the county for his honesty and kindness, and had even been asked to be a member of the town court. He refused – he didn’t want to make decisions that would affect people’s personal lives – but the judge said to him, “Mr. Appleman, if you were to be tried,

lxxxix Similarly, Rabbi Eliezer ben Yaacov once seated himself in a less honorable place than a blind person who came to town . Then people said: This must mean the stranger must be a great man, so they honored him and gave him generous financial support (Jerusalem Talmud Peah 8:8/9)

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wouldn’t you want a fair trial?” “Yes, of course,” he answered, “Then you will sit on this court,” the judge said, “for you are a fair and honest man.” And he did.

[In his action one might be reminded of an echo of the verse Proverbs 31:23 from Eishet Hayil (“the woman of valor”) that reads: Her husband is well-known, sitting in the city’s courts of judgment.]

A Car Load of Flour

The couple had been saving up money over the years to buy a car, and finally had saved enough - $5000 dollars – a fortune. But people around them were starving. Children did not have shoes on their feet. They were not political people, but they could not live surrounded by such poverty, without doing what they could to help. And so in the spring of 1932, they opened a soup kitchen, and put an ad in the paper, which read: “LOOK! In accordance with the Jewish custom to remember the needy during the Passover Season, Mr. and Mrs. Harry Appleman will give away, on Friday, April 17, at the Evarts depot, A Car Load of Flour. The flour will be given away as long as it will last. A 24-pound bag to a family. All needy from Evarts and surroundings are welcome, regardless of Color and Creed.”

They spent every last penny on flour – flour! And they gave out bag after bag after bag. There was such joy in the town. The joy of giving and receiving with honor – the joy that transcends color and creed, that transcends the particular, and enters the realm of the universal – the realm of the human. This had such an impact on the people of the town, that years later, when my grandmother visited the town with her siblings, she was amazed to find that young boys in Evarts, Kentucky were named “Harry Appleman,” after her father.

The coal company wasn’t happy, though. They bombed the soup kitchen in the middle of the night, sent bullets flying through the windows of the house, and then came to indict my grandfather for criminal syndicalism – supporting the miners and aiding their strike against the Company. Savta went to court the next day, to defend her husband. Savta explained:

“The Jews have a holiday that is Passover. And on that holiday, whoever is hungry must be fed, even if he is a stranger. We were taking no sides, this way or that, in the strike, but when people are hungry, should it be said to them: no you are strikers, and we can give you nothing to eat? There were so many children that had no bread…”

The case made its way all the way to Governor Chandler of Kentucky, who called Savta a “woman of valor,” and said that hers was the testimony of “a good and truthful woman.” But at the time, the Company Store owners continued to shoot through their windows, and the entire family escaped to West Virginia in the middle of the night, eventually making their way north to Brooklyn.xc

Appendix: First Neighbors, Guild Brothers and “Shul” Mates

The Neighborly Duty in the Netherlands:Will You be My First, Second, or Third Neighbor?

xc Maya Bernstein in A Day Apart: Shabbat at Home, edited by Noam Zion, 66

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In Leviticus 25 the social safety network is structured by proximity of blood kinship. “The redeemer (goel) who is closest to you” bails out his “brother”, in the extended sense of family, from impoverishment, and from the sale of his ancestral land or his sale into slavery to cover debt. This is a personal obligation in the agricultural, tribal, and ancestral system that guarantees the one who fulfills the duty his own redeemer in a time of need.

In addition to kin support systems many societies have developed non-biological "brother redeemers." In the medieval towns, "guild brothers" who share a profession played that role. In many shuls synagogue members fill that role of "nearest of kin." In early modern European farming communities the geographically "nearest neighbor" replaced the nearest kin for economic and social support.

The vestiges of a modern European analogy are to be found in rural Netherlands, at least in the Achterhoek area near Eibergen, where my wife’s family lived for 150 years. While visiting the Calvinist righteous gentiles who saved her family during the Holocaust by hiding them in their farmhouse, I learned that their willingness to help a neighbor in need was not only ingrained in their Bible-based culture15 and reinforced by Church teachings, but was also established as a formalized system of mutual help among farmers.

Two 75 year old farmers reported that it was customary that among farmers the nearest neighbor was usually asked to be the “first neighbor” and ones located a bit farther geographically were asked to be the second or third neighbor. In addition there was “the neighbor in case of death.” While one could theoretically refuse the request to be a “first neighbor,” it was considered socially unacceptable to do so. The system was called “the neighbor’s duty,” suggesting this was not a matter of altruism nor modeled on the good Samaritan of the New Testament, who helped an utter stranger on the road. The duties of the first neighbor included helping with household tasks like cooking, sewing, and spinning, when the wife was sick or had died, and helping run the farm – milking, plowing etc. – when the male farmer was ill or he had died. For example, the son of the righteous gentiles reported that he once lived for six months at his neighbor’s farm taking care of the farm chores after the neighbor died, even though at that time he had his own wife and three children to support. The second and third neighbors functioned as substitutes to back up the first neighbor or as support staff when the tasks were too burdensome for the first neighbor. In the case of death the “neighbor in time of death” would have a coffin made and would take the deceased to the cemetery on his wagon. He needed to have two horses and wagon to be asked to fulfill this function. The first neighbor was expected to go around personally first thing in the morning after a death and inform all the relatives of the deceased before the church bells rang at 10 a.m. for Protestants or 11 a.m. for Catholics to announce the death to the community. For special wedding anniversaries, such as the 25th, the first neighbor took responsibility for decorating the farmer’s home. Under no circumstances were the neighbors in need to respond with profuse thanks or payment or even the gift of a bottle of wine to their first neighbor who had put the neighbor’s farm chores ahead of his own. He has simply done his duty, the right thing.

Our 75 year old informants report that they are still socially obligated by this system though not for their grown children since the social welfare state in the Netherlands has taken over many of these responsibilities via unemployment, sickness, and funeral insurance. In general this system’s terminology suggests it is based on the Biblical “love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18). It is not restricted to fellow Church members nor does it include family. Nor is it directly based on reciprocity since a person may not be the “first neighbor” for his “first neighbor.” In a limited sense,

15 For example, the story of Lot taking in strangers was discussed at their table while the Nazis were unsuccessfully searching their home for hidden Jews and resistance fighters in March, 1945.

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a contemporary American analogy would be the choice of a legal guardian to care for one’s children should both parents die suddenly while their children are still minors. However, in the latter case family members or friends may be chosen without regard for geographical proximity and there is no formalized hierarchy of responsibility.

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Appendix: The Medieval Brotherhood of Mutual Self-Help: Guilds, Confraternity, and the Origin of the “Shul”

In medieval Catholic Europe we find attempts in towns to reproduce the webs of brothers typical of ancient agricultural Israel. For example, collective acts of charity were exercised by guilds. Guilds regulated trade for its members, provided occasions for conviviality and, in many cases, in addition to supplying a form of insurance for the here and now by its mutual-aid provisions, also rendered a kind of ‘insurance’ for the hereafter, by giving to the poor – so that moral credit for charity might affect one’s fate in the afterlife. Northern and central Italy were particularly prosperous in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. There confraternities also operated as neighborhood associations to provide aid to the needy and for members to refine their piety and good works:

“The confraternities provided dowries for poor girls, helped finance large civic and religious celebrations, gave alms to the poor, founded hospitals, and built lodging for the poor. At times, they could really make a difference in the lives of the indigent: The brotherhood of San Michele in Florence provided meals three or four times a week for 5,000-7,000 paupers.”xci

The famous Berlin rabbi, Joachim Prinz suggests that this medieval voluntary guild or confraternity provides a model for the “shul” community:

“The Roman population consisted largely of old families which had stayed on for centuries. The city was divided geographically into thirteen districts and economically in accordance with the ancient system of guilds. The guild, one of the earliest forms of protection, served roughly as equivalents to today’s trade unions, providing sick benefits, burial, a guild cemetery and trade agreements. These groups of artisans and professions were self-perpetuating social entities, with fathers training their sons in the old family trade and marriages staying very much within the group.

These scholae had their counterpart in the scholae peregrinorum, the guilds of the ‘wayfarers.’ Wayfarers is indeed a rather strange term to describe groups which had lived in Rome for generations – some of them, the Jews for instance, having resided there since the days of Roman antiquity, but the term conveys the fact that each of these groups, although indistinguishable in dress, speech, habit and political allegiance from the other Romans, preserved its ethnic identity as well as its relations to a country other than Italy. Thus there were separate scholae for Greeks, Anglo-Saxons, Franks, Lombards, Frieses, Syrians, Egyptians and of course, Jews, and each of these groups lived in its own “neighborhood.” It might be well to point out that the popular name ‘shul’ for an Orthodox Jewish synagogue is a late reminder of the term schola and has nothing to do with the Yiddish or German word for ‘school’ (Schule).” xcii

In the same spirit of the guild in 19th C. England, “there was a thriving network of mutual-aid societies; with millions of members, they provided many services, including pensions. As a result of increasing longevity of its members toward the end of the nineteenth century, the mutual-aid societies faced a crisis – the income they had generated from their members was insufficient to cover the pension payments. The treasuries of the societies were headed toward bankruptcy; thus, state intervention in pensions became desirable. And the mutual aid societies, which previously had prided themselves on workers' self-sufficiency, no longer opposed state action.” xciii Today state-sponsored pension plans, such as Social Security in the United States, grew out of these mutual aid societies with their religious and professional roots.

xci William Cohen, “Epilogue” in L. Friedman Charity, 386xcii Joachim Prinz, Popes from the Ghettoxciii William Cohen, “Epilogue” in L. Friedman Charity, 404

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Appendix: Puritan Brotherhood and Sisterhood in Christ: The Model of Christian Interdependence

For traditional Christians charity is often seen as a way to earn merit for the world to come. But the Calvinists, with their belief in predestination of the saved, did not believe that people could change their destiny by their actions or, even if they could, a belief in justification by one’s works was considered to be both heretical and a false motivation for charity. According to Calvinism, one should live a Christian life not as a means to an end but as a goal in itself. Following the ideal of the Swiss John Calvin, the Puritans believed that all their roles – whether as merchants, mothers, teachers, or rulers – were callings or vocations. These roles did not related to one’s individual journey/life but to one’s place in service of the brotherhood of the Christian community. The ultimate goal was heavenly salvation for the few who were chosen but the proximate goal was to embody the Kingdom of God in the earthly form of a Christian commonwealth which required that each person serve the community. Thus, American Protestant communities built their frontier communities on ‘charity’ in the sense of mutual support, not aid for the destitute. This was not concern or love for the pauper or the stranger but literally love for the neighbor within your community. This was Christian brotherhood like that ascribed by the Gospel of John to Jesus’ disciples.

Robert Gross explicates the origins of colonial American benevolence in terms of the Puritan ideal of charity:

“Charity governed the practice of benevolence from the beginnings of English settlement in the seventeenth century down through the Revolution and Constitution. Although it was carried on in every colony, the tradition is epitomized by the New England Puritans. John Winthrop gave the best statement of that ideal in the lay sermon he preached on the eve of departure for Massachusetts Bay in 1630. Now known as ‘A Model of Christian Charity,’ the document has become a classic in American history, for it is here that Winthrop declares the purpose of the Puritan colony to be the establishment of a ‘City upon a Hill.’ That image, taken from Matthew 5:14, conjured up not a physical place but rather a spiritual Ideal. It embodied a godly community, overflowing in ‘charity.’” xciv

“In Winthrop’s evangelical view, the Puritans would not only love and assist one another but also do so for the right reasons. They would rise above the petty calculations and narrow self-interest that so often drive human cooperation. Even the divine command to ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’ was insufficient motivation. In Winthrop's vision, the faithful were inspired by divine grace. Imbued with gospel love, all the participants in the Bay Colony - the investors in England, the settlers about to embark on the Arbella, the advance party already established on Cape Ann - would regard one another as brothers and sisters in Christ. They were to "delight in eache other, make others Condicions our owne reioyce together, mourne together, labour, and suffer together, allwayes haveing before our eyes our Commission and Community in the worke, our Community as members of the same body...." This is a spirit of mutual sacrifice in the name of Christ: "wee must be knitt together in this worke as one man, wee must entertaine each other in brother Affeccion, wee must be willing to abridge our selves of our superfluities, for the supply of others necessities.”

In “On Christian Charity,” John Winthrop preached (1630) brotherly affection based not on common blood but on common Christian faith and on a common project. Brotherhood is egalitarian and it subverts any hierarchy of honor:

“We are knit ... together in the bond of brotherly affection....It appears plainly that no man is made more honorable than another or more wealthy, etc., out of any particular and singular respect to himself,

xciv Robert Gross, “Giving in America” in L. Friedman, Charity, 32-34

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but for the glory of his creator and the common good of the creature, man. We are therefore commanded to love our neighbors as ourselves.”

“This law requires two things: first, that every man afford his help to another in every want and distress; secondly, that he perform this out of the same affection which makes him careful of his own good according to that of our savior: Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you (Matthew: 12). As members of the same body, we must delight in each other, make others' conditions as our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together."

“The benevolent impulse proceeds from the recognition that we are all connected to one another as part of God's creation. Even our accumulated wealth is God's gift, not our own achievement, and therefore is to be shared freely with God's other creatures.” xcv

Charity took many forms other than alms:

“The Puritans revived the larger meanings of caritas or Christian love. It could take many forms and inspire diverse sorts. It could be simply a gift of ‘good advice, a kind word, or an exhortation to piety,’ offered by anybody to a neighbor in need. A poor man could be just as charitable as a rich one. Such Christian charity had the potential to be a revolutionary force for equality, and some sects in the Reformation tried to take it in that direction - not the Puritans.

“Winthrop's vision of charity was premised on the existence of inequality; differences and distinctions among men were immutable parts of the divine order. Indeed, such diversity was essential to God's benevolent design: it simultaneously expressed the plenitude of His power as Creator and drove the creatures of His making to depend on one another. As Winthrop put it:

‘God almightie in his most holy and wise providence hath soe disposed of the Condicion of mankinde, as in all times some must be rich, some poore, some highe and eminent in power and dignitie; others meane and in subieccion.’

“In that condition, they must work together to get by.” xcvi

Interdependence in the Puritan social ethic resonates with the Biblical Jubilee model of brothers who help each other and serve as surety for each other’s misfortunes. It too looked inward to its members, not outsiders. It also provided a kind of personal redeemer for the needy, but unlike the Bible it was not the closest blood brother, but a nearby neighbor.

“Every community established in the Bay Colony was obligated to take care of its own legal inhabitants. When individuals or families fell in need, they could make a rightful claim on the collectivity for relief. In New England, that entity was the town, an innovative institution of local self-governance devised by the Puritans in the New World.

Aid to the needy was direct, personal, concrete. Upon hearing about an individual or family in distress, local authorities, usually called ‘overseers’ of the poor, visited the persons, inspected their circumstances, searched for relatives or employers to help out, and - if nobody else could be found - supplied the assistance required. There were no general allotments of money to be spent as indigents desired. Instead, the poor were given appropriate quantities of food and drink - so many pounds of beef or pecks of corn, drams of rum and ounces of tea - and equivalent supplies of clothing, firewood, and other goods. This was a contribution that followed the [socialist] formula quite literally: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.

xcv Elizabeth M. Lynn, "Fourth Philanthropic Response” in Amy Kass, Perfect Gift, 409 xcvi Robert Gross, “Giving in America” in L. Friedman, Charity, 32-34, 56

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Nor was there any separation between the needy and the rest of the community. In most places, there were no formal institutions - no poorhouses, hospitals, or asylums - in which to control and to segregate the dependent and the deviant. Normally, people were cared for in families, either their own or the households of others. As with foster care today, the neighbors took in the aged, the sick, the orphaned, the indigent, and the helpless, and supplied their necessities at town expense. They also imposed discipline on the unruly: it was not uncommon for towns to subject drunkards and even common criminals to the constraints of family. That was charity, too, provided for the individual’s good.

Care of the sick, disabled, and indigent, along with supervision of both children and elders, operated through a similar combination of domestic self-sufficiency and interdependence. The family served as a welfare institution, both for its own members and for others in the neighborhood. Because the duties of motherhood were routinely shared, children called most of the adult women familiar to them ‘mother.’ Neighbors felt responsible for the sick and poor, not simply because compassion was a Christian virtue and not only because sufferings of one's neighbors were so present and unavoidable, but also because failure to take care of others produced ill will and resulted in lack of assistance when the donor, in turn, needed help.”xcvii

The colonial American Christian brotherhood and the Jubilee brotherhood – without forgetting their differences – is summed up by Robert Gross: “The family served as a welfare institution, both for its own members and for others in the neighborhood.”

Appendix: Political Democracy and the Biblical Jubilee:The Hebrew Republic and the Call for Redistribution of Land (England, 1650s)

Eric Nelson in The Hebrew Republic traces the way the Biblical notion of the Jubilee in its Maimonideanxcviii interpretation had a major impact on the demand of civic republicans in England in the 1650s for agrarian reform and redistribution of lands in a more egalitarian fashion. While the English liberals and the Renaissance republicans sought to protect private property, the Protestant republicans of the 17th C. insisted that land should be redistributed in order to assure an economic base for a more stable and more democratic republic. In those days the most important English republican radical was James Harrington, who relied on the research of the Dutch hebraicist Cunaeus, author of De republica Hebraeorum (1617) – The Republic of the Hebrews. Cunaeus praised the Jubilee as a product of the Divine legislator and treated the Bible for the first time as a source for Constitutional thought. The Bible’s role in constitutional as well as military thought of the 17th and 18th centuries was particularly crucial first for the Netherlands and, then, for the British Protestants who overthrew the English monarchy. Both the Dutch and English Republics needed a source of authority independent of monarchial tradition.

For Cunaeus the Jubilee ensured that "all were equally provided for; which is the prime care of good Governours in every Common-wealth.” Further, as Eric Nelson notes, the Jubilee had the effect of securing peace and good order, in that "had every one made that his own upon which he first set his foot, quarrels and commotions among the people must needs have followed: for so it usually comes to pass; whilst every one seeks to get and appropriate to himself what was common, Peace is lost."

xcvii Robert Gross, “Giving in America”, 32-34, 56xcviii Cunaeus, De republica Hebraeorum, cites the "great writer, Rabbi Moses Ben Maimon, he that in his divine work entitled Mishneh Torah hath happily collected all the Talmudicall doctrine except the trifles, an Author above our highest commendation." (Cited in Eric Nelson in The Hebrew Republic, 76)

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“Moses [seeking in his Jubilee laws] not only to order things at present, but for the future ages too, brought in a certain Law providing that the wealth of some might not tend to the oppression of the rest; nor the people change their course, and turn their minds from their innocent labours to any new and strange employment. This was the Agrarian Law; a Law, whereby all possessors of Land were kept from transferring the full right and dominion of it unto any other person, by sale or other contract whatsoever: For, both they that on constraint of poverty had sold their Land, had a right granted them to redeem it at any time; and they that did not redeem it, receiv'd it freely again, by this Law, at the solemn feast of Jubily.” (De republica Hebraeorum)xcix

"Certainly, it was of great concernment to the Common-wealth, as before we noted, that the avarice of a few should not invade the possessions distributed with so fair equality. It is not unusuall with rich men to thrust the poor out of his inheritance, and deprive him of necessaries, whilst they enlarge their own estate superfluously."

Further Cunaeus considers how this equal distribution of wealth can reinforce the political stability of republic:

“[Inequality] “produceth often a change of Government: For, the truth is, That Common-wealth is full of enemies, wherein the people, many of them having lost their antient possessions, with restless desires aspire to a better fortune. These men, weary of the present, study alterations, and stay no longer, than they needs must, in an unpleasing condition." (De republica Hebraeorum)c

The English republican reformer James Harrington called for extensive redistribution of agricultural lands in his The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656).

“According to his proposed agrarian law, the largest lawful estate should yield no more than £2,000 per annum; no citizen is allowed to purchase additional land if doing so would raise his annual revenue above that threshold. Large fortunes are to be broken up by requiring the relatively equal division of estates among children, and dowries are restricted to the value of £1500. All those found to have acquired properties exceeding the legal limit must forfeit the excess to the state.” (The Commonwealth of Oceana)ci

Harrington drew his authority from the Israelite commonwealth, “made by an infallible legislator, even God himself." This line of thought that already appears in Plato’s The Republic actually highlights some of the key motifs in civic republicanism which are concerned with social harmony and stability of the constitution. Civil war is the result of extremes of poverty and wealth in which one polis is divided against itself as “a city of the poor and a city of the rich.”cii Thus, English civic republicans seek equalization of property to stabile equalization of political rights and to avoid political corruption. They seek justice in the Platonic sense of harmony, not distributive justice in the modern sense of social justice. ciii

Eric Nelson explains the connection between republicanism, that is the commonwealth, and land distribution in Harrington’s thought. “The most important principle to be derived from the experience of the ancients is that of the ‘balance.’”

xcix Cited in Eric Nelson in The Hebrew Republic, 76c Cited in Eric Nelson, 77ci Cited in Eric Nelson, 79cii The Republic 422e-423aciii Samuel Fleischacker, A Short History of Distributive Justice, 42

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“The distribution of land determines the distribution of power: if one person owns the preponderance of the land in a given territory, the result is monarchy; if a few own it, we have aristocracy; if ‘the whole people be landlords,’ it is a commonwealth. When a particular territory has a government that corresponds to its distribution of land, it exists in peace; when the two are mismatched, the territory suffers calamity and civil war. No regime can long survive unless it enacts laws that ‘fix’ the balance so as to provide a stable foundation for its future.” civ

"This kind of law fixing the balance in lands is called agrarian, and was first introduced by God himself, who divided the land of Canaan unto his people by lots, and is of such virtue that, whenever it hath held, that government hath not altered, except by consent.... God, in ordaining this balance, intended popular government."

"The balance of Oceana is exactly calculated unto the most approved way, and the clearest footsteps of God in the whole history of the Bible; and whereas the jubilee was a law instituted for preservation of the popular balance from alteration, so is the agrarian of Oceana." (Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana)cv

In his book The Art of Lawgiving (1659), Harrington notes that he has studied "the whole stream of Jewish writers and Talmudists (who should have had some knowledge in of their own commonwealth)." Thus he can say authoritatively that the Biblical world offers a model for a republican commonwealth. “In my book I call the government whereupon we are disputing the commonwealth of Israel; I am the first that ever called it so.”cvi

“For if the Israelites, though their democraticall balance, being fixed by their agrarian, stood firm, be yet found to have elected kings, it was because, their territory lying open, they were perpetually invaded, and being perpetually invaded turned themselves to anything which, through the want of experience, they thought might be a remedy; whence their mistake in election of their kings (under whom they gained nothing but to the contrary lost all they had acquired by their commonwealth, both estates and liberties) is not only apparent, but without parallel."cvii

Lack of economic balance of land ownership among the people, as in ancient Egypt, causes the corrupt concentration of power in the hands of the monarchy supported by the aristocracy. Thus Israel’s Jubilee is an economic bulwark against the return to the Egyptian system from which Israel suffered:

“The over-balance of land, three to one or thereabouts, in one man against the whole people, createth absolute monarchy, as when Joseph had purchased all the lands of the Egyptians for Pharaoh. The constitution of a people in which, and like cases, is capable of entire servitude. Buy us and our land for bread, and we and our land will be servants unto Pharaoh. The over-balance of land, unto the like proportion, in the few against the whole people createth aristocracy, or regulated monarchy, as of late in England; and hereupon saith Samuel unto the people of Israel when they would have a king: He will take your fields, even the best of them, and give them unto his ser-vants.”cviii

The Jubilee laws show how deeply economics and politics are integrated so that the Jubilee cannot be reduced to a welfare mechanism for the needy. It is rather a key to an egalitarian

civ Eric Nelson, HE, 79cv Cited in Eric Nelson, HE, 80cvi J. Harrington, Political Works, 373cvii J. Harrington, PW, 201cviii J. Harrington, PW, 604

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brotherhood absolutely opposed to the economic-political system of ancient Egypt. While in Egypt religion reinforces tyranny, in Leviticus 25 God who owns all Hebrews and all lands as an absolute monarch prevents any human beings from owning another Hebrew or from owning anymore than his equal portion of the land. Thus, monarchy is opposed by denying the economic basis of the king as a possible massive landowner with the power to requisition people and property for his own ambitions. In conclusion, the constitutional perspective on the Hebrew Jubilee inspired the radical Protestant republican tradition in the 17th C.

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Appendix: Henry George's Progress and Poverty and Moses’ Jubilee Legislation

Henry George was inspired by the biblical Moses and the Jubilee system to propose a land value tax called “the single tax” in order to reclaim unused land from the aristocrats and make it available to the whole society. He wrote of Moses:

“The great concern of Moses was to lay the foundation of a social state in which deep poverty and degrading want should be unknown.” (1899)

George (1839- 1897) was a British writer, politician and political economist who formulated a philosophy and economic ideology known as Georgism, which holds that everyone owns what he or she creates, but that everything found in nature, most importantly land, belongs equally to all humanity. His book, Progress and Poverty, was widely read during the years 1880 – 1882 when it sold over 100,000 copies, and it created a powerful political challenge to the monopolistic aristocratic land owners of Britain as well as inspired the platform of the presidential candidate, William Jennings Bryan, in the United States.

“Henry George held that the unearned increment of the landlord was responsible for the poverty of the masses. As soon as practicable, he argued, the land must be made common property, while in the interim a single tax should be imposed upon land values.”cix

In his book he writes that human beings can change their fate and resolve the problem of poverty by the power of legislation. cx In that sense he saw himself as a follower of Moses who promoted a new economic system by changing the notion of ownership of the land from a purely private one to a shared one.

George’s analysis of the aspirations of Biblical social legislation still ring true as we have seen above:

“It was not an empire such as had reached full development in Egypt that Moses aimed to found. It was a commonwealth based upon the individual - a commonwealth whose ideal it was that every man shall sit under his own vine and fig tree with none to vex him or make him afraid; a commonwealth in which none should be condemned to ceaseless toil; in which, for even the bond slave, there should be hope; in which, for even the beast of burden, there should be rest. A commonwealth in which, in the absence of deep poverty, the manly virtues that spring from personal independence should harden into a national character - a commonwealth in which the family affections might knit their tendrils around each member, binding with links - stronger than steel - the various parts into the living whole .

It is not the protection of property, but the protection of humanity, that is the aim of the Mosaic code. Its sanctions are not directed to securing the strong in heaping up wealth so much as to preventing the weak from being crowded to the wall. At every point it interposes its barriers to the selfish greed that, if left unchecked, will surely differentiate men into landlord and serf, capitalist and workman, millionaire and tramp, ruler and ruled .

cix Gareth Stedman Jones, An End to Poverty? 208-209 cx “Social development is governed neither by a Special Providence nor by a merciless fate, but by a law at once unchangeable and beneficent; when we see that human will is the great factor, and that taking men in the aggregate, their condition is as they make it; we see that economic and moral law are essentially one.” (George, Progress and Poverty, 1879, 560)

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Its Sabbath day and Sabbath year secure, even to the lowliest, rest and leisure. With the blast of the jubilee trumpets the slave goes free, the debt that cannot be paid is cancelled, and a re-division of the land secures again to the poorest his fair share in the bounty of the common, Creator. The reaper must leave something for the gleaner; even the ox cannot be muzzled as he treadeth out the corn. Everywhere, in everything, the dominant idea is that of our homely phrase – ‘Live and let live!’....

From the idea of the brotherhood of man springs the idea of the fatherhood of God.... A god who in his inexorable laws is here and now; a God of the living as well as the dead; a God of the marketplace as well as the temple; a God whose judgments wait not another world for execution, but whose immutable decrees will, in this life, give happiness to the people that heed them and bring misery upon the people who forget them.....

The great concern of Moses was with the duty that lay plainly before him: the effort to lay the foundations of a social state in which deep poverty and degrading want should be unknown - where men released from the meaner struggles that waste human energy should have opportunity for intellectual and moral development.” (Henry George, Moses)

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