Politics and Economy in the Old Testament

“Fundamental to Jacksonville University’s mission is support for an environment where divergent ideas, theories, and philosophies can be openly exchanged and rigorously evaluated. Consistent with these principles and the concept of Academic Freedom, this course may involve the discussion of ideas that you find uncomfortable, disagreeable, or even offensive. These ideas are intended to be presented in an impartial manner, they are not intended to persuade and are not an endorsement of what you should personally believe.”

This concise guide is intended as an introductory resource. The questions posed are not central to the debates in this course, but rather serve as basic points of departure. I seek to present the material with objectivity, while acknowledging that the approach is not, and cannot be, neutral. Prof. Jorge Majfud.

Table of Contents

Questions ↑

1. How does Samuel’s warning compare to the Mandate of Heaven? Which is more critical of power and why?
2. Naboth refused to sell his vineyard for a fair market value. Was he an obstacle to progress or standing up for a principle? What would a modern economist say? What would a peasant say?
3. Would periodic cancellation of debts be compatible with modern credit economies? What would happen if it were not?
4. Why did the scribes of Jerusalem, so close to the court and to the temple, collect such critical material about kings?
5. Who are the widow, orphan, and stranger in your society today?

Note ↑

This chapter belongs to a course on the history of political and economic ideas. As in the previous chapters, the purpose is not to defend or attack a religious tradition but to read it as what it also is: a political archive. The Hebrew Bible is a library written, edited and rewritten over almost a thousand years, by priests, scribes, court historians, exiles and dissidents. It contains contradictions because it contains a long argument. That argument, among other things, is about who should hold power, who should own the land, and what a society owes to those who own nothing. The reader will notice that the author does not pretend to stand nowhere. Neutrality before power is also a position. But the effort here is to let the texts speak in their own terms, with their violence and their hopes, before asking what they still have to say to us.

Introduction: Who is the true king? ↑

“Hear this, O ye that swallow up the needy, even to make the poor of the land to fail… making the ephah small, and the shekel great, and falsifying the balances by deceit? That we may buy the poor for silver, and the needy for a pair of shoes…” Amos 8:4–6

In the previous chapter we discussed the clever invention of the Zhou Dynasty to justify their conquest of the Shang Dynasty: Heaven bestows the mandate to rule but also can take it away. Therefore, power is legitimate as long as it serves. Every government is, in principle, on probation.

At the same time, the small people of shepherds and farmers, the Hebrews, somewhere between Egypt and Mesopotamia, the two great empires of the ancient world, developed a more radical idea. Who is to rule? No one, for only God is king. Human beings can be judges, elders, leaders in time of war, but no man can be king over other men.

In Egypt, the pharaoh was a god; in other places, the son of a god. In Mesopotamia, the kings received their laws from the gods. This is how the stele of Hammurabi, King of Babylon, was depicted: Shamash, the god of justice, is seated and Hammurabi, King of Babylon, is standing before him. The sacred legitimized the palace in Egypt, Assyria and Babylon. In Israel, however, the sacred judged the palace.

This is the very text which was later used for centuries to justify the divine right of kings. The text, however, was written in large part as a critique of kings. Although the Israelites would later have their own monarchy, a temple, and court priests, in the sacred books of the people there is an old suspicion of the king as a taker of sons, daughters, fields, and the tenth of the harvest. In the end, the king takes the Israelites as his servants.

This chapter is organized around three threads: the political thread of the covenant as a pact between God and a people; the prophetic thread of men and women who confronted kings on the basis of a higher law; and the economic thread of a series of laws on land, debt, and the poor which read today like an early program against the concentration of wealth.

Key terms and central problems ↑

Central problems ↑

1. Theocracy or anti-monarchy? God is king, and so the priests rule in His place; or God is king, and so no human being can have absolute power.
2. Utopia or legislation? Did the Jubilee ever become law? Or was it just a memory or a protest against the concentration of land in the hands of the few?
3. Universal or tribal ethics? The ban on interest applies to Israelites but not to foreigners. However, the commandment to protect the stranger is repeated more often than almost any other commandment. Is there a contradiction here, or is there a moral consistency in development?
4. Violence of text: The same texts which protect the widow and the stranger are also the ones that narrate the conquest of land and the destruction of cities.
5. Who wrote it? For whom? Many of the texts we have been reading were edited by the scribes of Jerusalem, i.e. by the circle of the temple and the court. That the critique of kings could have been preserved in these archives is a historical fact that needs to be explained.
6. The prophet’s legitimacy. If a king can claim to speak for God, and a prophet can claim the same, who decides? The Bible itself knows false prophets, many of them on the payroll of the palace.

Historical background ↑

The biblical account and the archaeological evidence do not always agree. One can try to hold both in view. According to the text, the Hebrews were the descendants of Abraham who migrated to Egypt where they became slaves. Under Moses they were led out of Egypt and given the law at Sinai. They then conquered Canaan under the leadership of Joshua. Most historians would say today that the emergence of Israel was a much more complex and less heroic process than that described in the biblical account. It would seem that the Hebrews were the small agricultural villages in the highlands of Canaan that emerged around 1200-1000 BCE. They were populated in part by people who had left the city-states of the plains and the Canaanite kings and the Egyptian governors who extracted tribute from the peasants.

This is a well-known hypothesis about early Israel, developed in the 1960s and 1970s by scholars such as George Mendenhall and Norman Gottwald, who saw early Israel as a kind of peasant withdrawal from the urban order of the Bronze Age. Although this strong form of the hypothesis is not accepted by everyone, it does explain something about the Israelite memory of themselves: that they were a people who had come out of slavery, and that the founding myth of their society was not that of the victory of a king but of the escape of the oppressed from the “the house of bondage.” This is the way the Ten Commandments begin: with a liberation, not with a cosmology.

The main periods can be summarized as follows:

1: The tribal period (1200-1020 BC). A loose confederation of clans, without capital, standing army or central taxation. Leaders arise in crises: the judges, such as Deborah, Gideon and Samson.

2: The united monarchy (1020-930 BC). Saul, David and Solomon. The extent of this kingdom is debated by archaeologists, but the biblical memory associates it with a capital, a temple, a court, forced labor and heavy taxes.

3: The divided kingdoms (930-722/586 BCE). Israel in the north, with Samaria as capital, is conquered by the Assyrians in 722 BCE. Judah in the south, with Jerusalem as capital, is conquered by the Babylonians in 586 BCE. This is the age of the great writing prophets: Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Micah, Jeremiah.

4: The period of Exile and return (586-c. 400 BCE). There was no king and no temple, so the elite were taken into exile in Babylon. There they reorganized themselves around the written law, much of the Torah being written in this period.

A political reading of the historical books will therefore take account of the fact that the Deuteronomic critique of monarchy (in Deuteronomy, as well as in the books of Samuel) was written by people who knew what kings did and how they brought their kingdoms to an end. Thus, the Hebrew scribes look back on the earlier tribal society as a model of a society without masters, which they idealize, but in so doing they also give a diagnosis of their own present.

4. The covenant: a constitution before constitutions ↑

Israel took the ancient Near Eastern form of a treaty between a great king and his vassals and did something completely unexpected with it. In such a treaty, there is a preamble, a historical account of the favors the great king has done for the vassal, a list of the vassal’s obligations, and blessings for the vassal’s loyalty and curses for his betrayal. The Hittite treaties of the second millennium BCE are classic examples of this form.

This has enormous consequences for Israel’s political structure. If the people are bound to God directly as a sovereign, then no king, no priest, no judge can claim to own them. They can at best be administrators of a pact that they did not sign as owners of the people. The covenant is not something that descends from the palace to the people; rather it is read before the people and they respond: “All that the Lord hath said will we do” (Exodus 24:7). The ceremony resembles less a coronation than an assembly ratifying a constitution.

We can summarize the political logic of the covenant in five principles:

1: Sovereignty belongs to God alone.

2: The law precedes the ruler. The Torah was given before there was a king in Israel. If there is a king, he finds the law already written.

3. The covenant is made with the whole people. It is not with the elites but with the poor as well as the stranger.

4: The terms of the covenant are conditional upon the Israelites’ loyalty to the terms. Blessings are given for loyalty and curses are brought upon the Israelites for betrayal of the covenant.

Memory is a political obligation. Remember that thou wast a servant in the land of Egypt: the experience of oppression is the ground of the law.

The judges: leadership without dynasty ↑

Book of Judges, the seventh book of the Old Testament, describes a society without a center. According to this narrative, when enemies attack, the spirit of God falls on the most unlikely person, a woman, a younger son, a man of no rank, and he leads the tribes to fight the enemies. After the war they returns to his private life. There is no succession, no tax, no king’s palace.

Perhaps the most eloquent example is that of Gideon’s refusal of power. After his victory over the Midianites the people of Israel ask him to be their king. He says to them: “I will not rule over you, neither shall my son rule over you: the Lord shall rule over you” (Judges 8:23).

Here we can distinguish between three answers to the same question: (1) in Egypt the king is a god; (2) in Mesopotamia and China the king is representative of the gods or of Heaven; (3) for the Hebrews of the tribal period God alone is king and no man may rule on His behalf.

Nevertheless, Abimelech, Gideon’s son, was not so modest. He killed seventy of his brothers and made himself king in Shechem. Only one of his brothers, Jotham, survived. He climbed up to Mount Gerizim and told the people of Shechem a story. The trees of the world wanted to find a king for themselves. They first went to the olive tree but it said: ‘My oil is too precious for me to give up in order to rule over the other trees.’ Then they went to the fig tree but it said: ‘My figs are too sweet for me to give up in order to rule over the other trees.’ Finally they went to the vine but it said: ‘My wine is too precious for me to give up in order to rule over the other trees.’ Then they went to the bramble, the thorn bush, which produced nothing. It said: ‘Come, sit in my shadow. If not, then fire will come out of the bramble and consume the cedars of Lebanon.’

In other words, those who produce useful things have no time to govern. Those who produce nothing are drawn to the exercise of power and offer to rule, promising to provide a shade that they do not have, but threatening fire.

Samuel’s warning ↑

The elders of Israel are tired of corrupt judges and Philistines attacking them. They ask Samuel to give them a king to judge them like all the other nations. Samuel is not pleased with this request but God tells him, “They have not rejected you but they have rejected me that I should not reign over them.” He then gives Samuel instructions to warn the people about the kind of king they will have.

In the following, 1 Samuel 8:11-18 is presented in almost full length as one of the most lucid critiques of the state in ancient literature.

He will take your sons, and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and some shall run before his chariots… And he will take your daughters to be confectionaries, and to be cooks, and to be bakers. And he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants. And he will take the tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards, and give to his officers, and to his servants… He will take the tenth of your sheep: and ye shall be his servants. And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you; and the Lord will not hear you in that day.

The repeat of the verb “will take” is used here to emphasize the repetitiveness of this act. This is the nature of the institution of the king that Samuel describes. He is not describing a tyrant by accident but by the nature of the institution. He conscripts young men, makes their daughters into servants in his house, takes the best of the land and gives it to his servants, levies a tax of ten percent on the people, and reduces free men to servitude. Here is a picture of the tributary state as seen in Egypt, the Canaanite cities, and in Israel in the time of Solomon with his forced labor and twelve administrative districts for feeding his court.

The people’s reply: “Nay; but we will have a king over us; that we also may be like all the nations.” It’s not just a desire for security but also for normality. To be like everyone else. Each generation makes this request of God in its own language.

Deuteronomy 17: the king under the law ↑

Even if monarchy is to be, it can be limited. Deuteronomy, a book of the Torah, composed most likely in the 7th century BC during the reforms of King Josiah, contains the only law of the king in the whole of the Torah (17:14–20). This law is short and very strict.

1: He must be chosen from among your brethren; thou mayest not set a stranger over thee.

2: The king shall not multiply horses to himself (by raising a great army of chariots), nor cause the people to return to Egypt to buy horses.

3: He shall not multiply wives, that is, he shall not build alliances and harems in the manner of foreign courts.

4: He shall not greatly multiply silver and gold.

5: He shall write for himself a copy of this law and read it all the days of his life so that his heart shall not be lifted up above his brethren.

In contrast to the Code of Hammurabi where the king is presented as the chosen shepherd of the gods to bring justice to the people, in Deuteronomy the law sets the limits on the king. Although this is not modern constitutionalism, it is one of its ancestors and in the 17th century many English and Dutch writers used these verses to argue that kings too are subject to the law.

Prophets against social injustices↑

Every ancient court had its prophets, its diviners and its astrologers. These men would read the entrails of animals or study the movements of the stars in order to inform the king of the will of the gods. As often as not, that will was exactly what the king wanted. Israel had such men too, but the Bible calls them for what they were: false prophets (1 Kings 22). There were four hundred of them around King Ahab when he died in battle, assuring him of victory.

What is remarkable about the Hebrew tradition is that the words of prophets were preserved and made sacred by the people, even when those words were at odds with the rich, the king and his court. A Confucian scholar could speak truth to power, remonstrating with the emperor, even if it cost him his life. But he spoke from within the bureaucracy. The Hebrew prophet, on the other hand, was an outsider —a shepherd, a farmer, with no office— who came to the gate of the city or to the court of the temple to speak what no one wanted to hear.

Nathan and David: «Thou art the man» ↑

David is the ideal king of the biblical memory, the poet, the founder of the dynasty from which the Messiah would come. And yet the text does not spare him. He sees Bathsheba bathing, takes her, and when she becomes pregnant, he arranges for her husband, Uriah, a foreign soldier loyal to him, to die in battle.

The prophet Nathan didn’t accuse King David of anything. Instead, he told him a story about two men in a certain city. One was very rich and had many flocks. The other was very poor and had but one small ewe lamb. He had raised it as if it were his own daughter. He fed it from his table and it slept in his arms. When a traveler came to the rich man’s house, he didn’t want to kill any of his many sheep, so he went and took the poor man’s only ewe lamb and killed it for the traveler’s food. King David was very angry when he heard the story and said, “The man who did this deserves to die.” Nathan replied, “Thou art the man” (2 Samuel 12:7).

This is a beautiful scene of political theory: the king is judge, and the prophet is the king’s judge. He applies the law that the king applies to others. No one is above the king’s law. And what is most remarkable about this scene: the humiliation of the founding king of Israel is seen as a good thing.

Elijah and Naboth’s vineyard ↑

Elijah’s story about property also involves a King of Israel, in this case King Ahab, who wants the vineyard of his neighbor, Naboth, next to the palace of Ahab in order to create a vegetable garden for the king. Ahab offers to pay for the vineyard or to trade for a better one, in order to create the vegetable garden. However, Naboth refuses the offer, stating, “The Lord forbid it me, that I should give the inheritance of my fathers unto thee” (1 Kings 21:3).

Naboth does not try to drive a hard bargain with Ahab for the price of the land. It is not property to be sold at a price. It is the nahalah, the inheritance which God had given to the ancestors of Naboth. This land is not his to sell. So Ahab goes to bed, in a bad mood, but not intending to do anything wrong. His wife, the Phoenician princess Jezebel, however, is not a woman to be deterred from getting what she wants by the laws of Israel. She sends out letters in Ahab’s name, and then brings about a trial on false charges, with two false witnesses, in order to have Naboth put to death for blasphemy. After he is killed, the vineyard of Naboth becomes the property of the crown.

The whole thing is done within the law. There are judges, witnesses, and a verdict. This is what the state can do to someone, even if it is wrong, using the procedures of the state to hide the injustice. Elijah sees right through it all. He confronts Ahab in the vineyard of the dead man. He says, “Hast thou killed, and also taken possession?”

Amos: the shepherd of Tekoa ↑

The time of Jeroboam II, king of the northern kingdom of Israel in the 8th century BCE, was a time of great prosperity. There were winter houses and summer houses. People slept on beds of ivory and drank wine from bowls. But at the same time small farmers were losing their land to debt and the courts were for sale. Into this world came Amos, a herdsman and a dresser of sycamore figs from Judah. He insisted that he was not a professional prophet. I was no prophet, neither was I a prophet’s son.

Most of Amos’ words are violent and almost always directed against the rich of his day. He lists the sins of those who sell the righteous for silver and the poor for a pair of shoes. He lists the sins of those who trample upon the poor. He lists the sins of the wealthy women of Samaria, calling them kine of Bashan, fat cows, which oppress the poor, which crush the needy, which say to their masters, Bring, and let us drink. He also lists the sins of the merchants who wait impatiently for the end of the Sabbath in order to sell again with false scales.

In his denunciation of the worship of the official religion, Amos says, “I hate, I despise your feast days… Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs… But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream” (Amos 5:21–24). The priest of the official sanctuary in Bethel, Amaziah, reports Amos to the king for conspiracy and orders him to return to Judah to prophesy there. This sanctuary was the king’s chapel and the king’s court. The official religion belongs to the king. The prophetic religion belongs to no one.

Micah, Isaiah, Jeremiah ↑

The message of Amos is also that of other prophets. Micah, a peasant from the lowlands of Israel, attacks those who covet fields and take them by violence and houses and take them away (Micah 2:2). Even the aristocratic prophet Isaiah of Jerusalem, close to the court, curses those who join house to house and lay field to field until there is no place left on earth and they are alone in the midst of the earth (Isaiah 5:8).

About a century later, the prophet Jeremiah told the king of Judah, Jehoiakim, who was building himself a palace with cedar panels, made by unpaid laborers, that his father Josiah had been a true king because he had judged the cause of the poor and the needy. And he added: “Was not this to know me? Saith the Lord” (Jeremiah 22:16). To know God is to do justice to the poor. Theology is transformed into ethics, and ethics into politics.

But they paid for their words. Jeremiah was beaten, put in stocks and thrown into a cistern full of mud. Uriah son of Shemaiah, who prophesied the same as Jeremiah, was pursued by the king to Egypt, where he was brought back and killed. Power always knows how to deal with critics. But what is uncommon is that the critics win the archives.

The economy of the covenant ↑

«The land shall not be sold for ever: for the land is mine; for ye are strangers and sojourners with me.» Leviticus 25:23

Israel’s political theology holds that God alone is king. Israel’s economic theology holds that God alone is the owner of the world. Therefore, no human being can claim absolute and permanent dominion over other human beings or over things. Men are tenants, administrators, and strangers and sojourners (Leviticus 25:23). Even the Israelite on his own land is a guest.

These principles were translated into a series of laws scattered throughout Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy. The focus of these laws is not economic growth or efficiency but rather the prevention of a slow and gradual process that leads to the degradation of a free family into debt, loss of land, sale of children into slavery, and finally, work as hired hands on the very land that had been their own.

Land held in trust ↑

The distribution of the Canaanites’ land described in the book of Joshua is an ideal distribution among the tribes, clans, and families. Each family’s portion, or nahalah, can be leased out, mortgaged, or even temporarily given to another, but it cannot be sold forever. If a family is so poor that it is forced to sell, the nearest relative, or go’el (redeemer), has the right and the obligation to buy the land back. The story of Ruth, one of the most beautiful in the Bible, centers around the principle of redemption. Boaz redeems the land of Elimelech and marries Ruth, a widow and a foreigner from Moab, in order to keep the name of the dead from being cut off from his inheritance.

In contrast to modern concepts of property, which in Roman law were called dominium and in the liberal tradition are seen as natural rights, biblical property is essentially stewardship. It is owned by families across generations and ultimately by God. A dramatic example of this principle is Naboth’s refusal to sell his vineyard to King Ahab (1 Kings 21).

The Sabbath and the Sabbath year ↑

This text describes the Weekly Sabbath in terms of its Economic context and as such, it is the First Labor Law in history. Deuteronomy provides a clear explanation for this law: «you, your son, your daughter, your servant, your maidservant, your ox, your donkey, and the stranger within your gates, that thy manservant and thy maidservant may rest as well as thou» (Deuteronomy 5:14). Additionally, Deuteronomy adds the justification for this law: «remember that thou wast a servant in the land of Egypt.» A people that had been slaves of a regime of unending production was forbidden to repeat that regime with others. Even the animals have a right to rest.

The pattern of the seventh day was also used for the seventh year. The land is to be left fallow for a year and whatever grows there is to be left for the poor and the wild animals (Exodus 23:10–11). In Deuteronomy 15, the legislator stipulates that every creditor that lendeth ought unto his neighbour shall release it in the seventh year. Hebrew servants who had sold themselves into slavery for debt were to be freed after six years, and the master was to furnish them liberally from his flock, his threshing floor and his winepress, and not send them away empty-handed.

The legislator anticipated the natural human reaction of people not lending because they were going to be unable to collect the debt in the seventh year. Therefore, the legislator warned against this in the subsequent verses: “Beware that there be not a thought in thy wicked heart, saying, ‘The seventh year, the year of release, is at hand;’ and thine eye be evil against thy poor brother, and thou givest him nought” (15:9). This is the legislator warning against the cold reasoning of the creditor.

This chapter contains a seeming contradiction between v. 4 and v. 11. There shall be no poor among you (v. 4) versus the poor shall never cease out of the land (v. 11). Both are true. The first verse states the ideal situation, the second verse states the reality of human behavior that makes the legislation necessary. Poverty is not a natural condition of human life, but it also is not something that will disappear on its own. It must be undone again and again.

The Jubilee: An Ancient Reset of Debt and Acumulation ↑

The most radical institution in the Torah is the Jubilee, outlined in Leviticus 25. After seven Sabbath years (i.e. forty-nine years), on the Day of Atonement, the trumpet, the shofar, is sounded throughout the land, and the fiftieth year is proclaimed as a year of liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof (Lev. 25:10). In this year every family is to return to its own inheritance. All lands sold during the previous fifty years are to revert to their original owners. Bonded workers are to return to their clans.

The Jubilee did not forbid the buying and selling of land; on the contrary, such activity was permitted, but in reality what was being sold was the number of harvests until the next Jubilee, and the price had to reflect this. What the Jubilee did prevent was the permanent accumulation of land by a few, and the development of a hereditary class of landless people. Each generation in effect started from a similar point; wealth could increase, but it could not be turned into a dynasty of property.

The question remains: was the Jubilee ever applied? Historians generally conclude that it was not, at least on a systematic basis. There are no records of a Jubilee being celebrated in Israel as a whole, and the prophets in many instances accused the rich of the very things that the Jubilee was intended to prevent. We have already referred to the instance in Jeremiah 34 in which slaves were released from bondage in Jerusalem during the Babylonian siege, but as soon as the danger was past the owners revoked their release. But the fact that a law was not applied does not mean that it was of no value. In the ancient Near East, kings from time to time canceled the debts of their subjects, in acts of royal grace known as misharum and andurarum. In Israel, however, such cancellation was removed from the king’s discretion and placed in the calendar as a fixed obligation. No king granted or denied the Jubilee.

Gleaning, interest, and the protected ones ↑

In addition to the annual cycle of the covenant economy, there are daily practices that are revealing of the heart of the community.

1: Gleaning. “Thou shalt leave them for the poor and stranger” (Leviticus 19:9–10). The owner of the field must not harvest the corners of his field nor return to gather a forgotten sheaf nor strip the vineyard down to the last grape. The poor and the stranger are to glean what the owner has left. They do not receive handouts from the owner of the field. They have a right to gather what they can of the owner’s harvest with their own hands. Ruth gleaning in the fields of Boaz is the classic example of this.

2: Interest. “If thou lend money to any of my people that is poor by thee, thou shalt not be to him as an usurer, neither shalt thou lay upon him usury” (Exodus 22:25). The covenant economy prohibits charging interest on loans to fellow members of the community of poor people. In a subsistence economy such loans would be for emergencies such as a crop failure or illness of a work animal, and to charge interest on such loans would be to profit from the misfortune of a neighbor. Deuteronomy, however, permits the charging of interest to foreigners, thus distinguishing between the community’s internal economy and its external trade. This exception would have a long and checkered history in medieval Europe.

3: Pledging. You may not take a poor man’s cloak in pledge and keep it until he pays his debt. If you take a poor man’s cloak as a guarantee for his debt, you must give it back to him before sunset, “for that is his covering only … wherein shall he sleep?” (Exodus 22:26–27). You may not take a millstone in pledge, for that is a man’s life. The creditor may not enter the debtor’s house to take the pledge; he must wait outside for the debtor to bring it to him.

4: Wages. “Thou shalt not oppress an hired servant that is poor and needy … At his day thou shalt give him his hire, neither shall the sun go down upon it” (Deuteronomy 24:14–15).

There is also a triad that runs through the whole of the law on economic matters: the widow, the orphan and the stranger. These are the people without a man and without land in a patriarchal and agrarian society, i.e. without protection. The law places them under God’s direct care: “Ye shall not afflict any widow, or fatherless child. If thou afflict them in any wise, and they cry at all unto me, I will surely hear their cry; and my wrath shall wax hot” (Exodus 22:22–24). The stranger receives a special argument, drawn again from memory: Ye shall love the stranger: “Ye shall love the stranger: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Deuteronomy 10:19). It is the only group that the law commands not only to protect but to love.

Thus the covenant economy is measured not by the magnificence of its architecture nor by the size of its harvests but by the condition of the most destitute. A society can be rich and unjust. Usually, however, it is rich because it is unjust.

Legacy and echoes ↑

Ideas never die with the society that gave them birth. At times they can go into hibernation for centuries only to be awakened by some person opening an old book during a time of crisis, and finding just the right tool to use in his struggle. This is the story of the political ideas contained in the Hebrew Bible. It is the story of both awakenings, and also of appropriations of the ideas by those who were criticized by those same texts.

1: The Great Inversion. For more than a thousand years, Christians in Europe interpreted the Old Testament primarily through the lens of Saul’s and David’s anointing. Kings were anointed with oil as the kings of Israel were, and the concept of the Divine Right of Kings used those images to make the king untouchable. When (if) Samuel’s warning was read, it was read as a description of what a king was entitled to take. Here the text suffered what all critical texts suffer when they become official: it was domesticated. The prophet was placed in the cathedral, and the cathedral was placed next to the palace.

3: The Republican Rediscovery. During the 16th and 17th centuries, the Protestant return to reading the Bible, and Christian scholars studying Hebrew, led to new ways of reading the Bible. Many European thinkers came to view ancient Israel as a model republic where God was sovereign and land was fairly distributed, as argued by the political theorist Eric Nelson in The Hebrew Republic. John Milton invoked Samuel against Charles I. James Harrington proposed agrarian laws limiting land ownership, inspired in part by the Jubilee. In 1776, Thomas Paine (who was certainly not a pious believer) devoted several pages of Common Sense to 1 Samuel 8 in order to persuade American colonists that monarchy was, according to scripture, a sin. The Liberty Bell in Philadelphia bears an inscription from Leviticus 25:10, the Jubilee verse: «Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.» Abolitionists would later interpret it as a command to free slaves. The Jubilee, which had restored land and freedom, became a symbol of a freedom that the founders did not extend to everyone.

4: Exodus as Revolution. Michael Walzer, in Exodus and Revolution, demonstrated how the story of the departure from Egypt became the model narrative of radical politics in the West: oppression, liberation, a long march through the desert, a covenant, a promised land. English Puritans; African-American slaves singing «Go Down, Moses»; the civil rights movement; Latin American Liberation Theology; all told their own story in terms of Exodus. When Martin Luther King Jr., said in Washington in 1963 that he would not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream, he was quoting Amos (the shepherd of Tekoa) almost twenty-eight centuries later.

5: Liberation Theology. In Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s, theologians such as Gustavo Gutiérrez read the prophets and Exodus from the standpoint of the poor of the continent. The «preferential option for the poor» was not a product of Marxism (as its critics claimed), but a reinterpretation of Amos, Micah and Deuteronomy. The response of the powerful was little different than that of King Jehoiakim to the prophet Uriah: many priests, catechists and peasants were persecuted and killed (among them Archbishop Óscar Romero in El Salvador in 1980 shot while saying Mass). Once again, the archive survived its critics.

6: Debt and the Jubilee. The economic laws of the covenant also had a long life. The prohibition of interest was debated for centuries in Christian and Islamic law, and the Deuteronomic distinction between brother and stranger (as shown by sociologist Benjamin Nelson) was at the center of the long medieval debate about usury and of the transition from tribal brotherhood to universal otherness in modern capitalism. In the nineteenth century, American economist Henry George saw in the Mosaic land laws an argument against private monopoly of land. And in the 1990s, the Jubilee 2000 campaign (encouraged by Pope John Paul II’s call for debt relief in the year 2000), mobilized millions of people to demand cancellation of external debt of poorest countries. Part of that debt was indeed cancelled — not out of royal grace, but because an old idea had returned to the streets.

A Comparison with China. It is worth closing this section by returning to the previous chapter. The Mandate of Heaven and the covenant share the intuition that power is conditional — that it must answer to something higher than itself. However, there are differences. In China, Heaven speaks through results: floods, famines, rebellions indicate that mandate has been lost, and successful rebel becomes (after the fact) legitimate ruler. In Israel, God speaks through a written law and through prophets (before catastrophe), and critic does not need to win to be right. Confucianism trained officials to correct Emperor from within. Hebrew tradition (in its prophetic strand) produced outsider who speaks without permission. Both traditions (each in its way) left to their heirs dangerous question: what happens when those who govern betray purpose for which they govern?

Closing: the stranger at the gate ↑

The Hebrew Bible as a political and economic archive contains the following:

1: A theory of sovereignty: God alone is King; the king is secondary, contingent and answerable to others.

2: The state is an extractive institution. This insight is formulated with extreme clarity in the warning of Samuel: the king will take.

3. The law of the king includes several restrictions on the king, such as that he must be subject to written law, may not acquire horses, wives or gold in order to become king, and must be a brother among brothers.

4. Prophets without office challenge kings and priests, and their words are written down as sacred text, as opposed to the words of the court.

5. An economic order designed to prevent permanent land concentration and the hereditary slavery of the poor through debt, such as the ownership of land as a trust, the Sabbath, the 7th year release, the Jubilee, the right of gleaning for the poor, the ban on interest to the poor.

6. The moral criterion for judging any society: how the widow, the orphan and the stranger are treated.

None of this is to say that ancient Israel was a just society. Its kings, its rich and its priests broke its laws. The texts also contain reports of wars of conquest, of exclusions of people, of cruelty. But this is the case for every civilization. What is unusual is that this civilization wrote down its most severe self-criticisms and even preserved them as the word of God.

Today the gods of the world have changed their names. They are now called the market, growth, security, the nation. Their temples are now located in banks and in headquarters of multinationals. Their court prophets can be found on television, in the press and on the Internet. They explain to us every day why the rich must become richer, why the poor must become even poorer, why we must pay our debts even if we die, why the stranger at the gate must be feared as an enemy. Samuel’s warning is still valid today. So is Jotham’s fable. Those who do not produce anything still offer us their shade, even if they can only be threatened with fire.

The previous chapter ended with a question: the Mandate of Heaven asks who deserves to rule, and whether those who rule still deserve it. The covenant, on the other hand, asks something else, something perhaps even more uncomfortable: what power has done with the land, with the debt, with the poor, with the foreigner. And it answers with a memory that every people, sooner or later, prefers to forget: you were strangers.in the land of Egypt.

The Old Testament also emphasizes caring for the poor. It is not an innovation of the Hebrews. Ur-Nammu, Hammurabi and others had promised the widow and the orphan protection from the powerful. The New Testament would go even further than the Hebrew text. The poor are not mentioned in passing in the prologue of a royal code of law. They are the central concern of the law. What did “the poor” mean in the historical context of the text?

In addition to lack of money, the Hebrew word ani means afflicted and humbled, i.e. the poor are the suffering and the oppressed by the powerful. As we have seen in the previous chapter, the oldest word for freedom in the world of civilization was the Sumerian amargi, freedom from debts. Long before freedom became a philosophical and politicval concept, freedom was very concrete: freedom from the life-long debt of another.

Summary ↑

The Forgotten Commandments ↑

While most people can recite the Ten Commandments by heart, there are many other commandments that are repeated over and over again in the Torah, and then quietly set aside by most people as if they had never existed.

Do not charge interest to the poor. “If thou lend money to any of my people that is poor by thee, thou shalt not be to him as an usurer” (Exodus 22:25). For a thousand years the Church called it a sin. Today we call it the financial system.

Cancel debts every seven years. “At the end of every seven years thou shalt make a release” (Deuteronomy 15:1). Today the poor countries of the world are being forced to pay off the debts of their grandparents.

Do not sell the land forever. “The land shall not be sold for ever: for the land is mine” (Leviticus 25:23). Today land is bought by investment funds that will never set foot on it.

Leave the edges of the field for the poor. “Thou shalt not wholly reap the corners of thy field” (Leviticus 19:9). In the Bible this wasn’t even charity. It was the right of the poor. Today supermarkets lock their dumpsters.

Pay the worker before sunset. “At his day thou shalt give him his hire, neither shall the sun go down upon it” (Deuteronomy 24:15). Today wage theft costs workers billions every year.

Give back the poor man’s cloak. If a poor man pledged his cloak, the creditor had to return it before nightfall, “for that is his covering only… wherein shall he sleep?” (Exodus 22:27). Today people are evicted in winter.

Let the king not multiply gold. “Neither shall he greatly multiply to himself silver and gold” (Deuteronomy 17:17). Today we measure leaders by their fortunes.

Love the stranger. “Love ye therefore the stranger: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Deuteronomy 10:19). Of all the commandments, it may be the most often repeated in the Torah. It may also be the most forgotten by those who quote the Bible the loudest.

These laws have not been repealed. We have simply ignored them. Of the whole Torah we have chosen to keep the laws about other people’s bodies, very little about our wealth.

Perhaps that’s what history does with every radical text: it builds a temple around it so that no one has to read it again.

Back to courses: Syllabi

Related topics

• Introduction. What is an ideology?
• Mesopotamia and Egypt: The Birth of the State
• Ancient China: The Mandate of Heaven and the Hundred Schools
• The Islamic World and Ancient Africa
• Middle Ages in Europe
• The Renaissance
• The Classical World: Ancient Greece