Читать книгу On Earth as It Is in Heaven - Eric Atcheson - Страница 9

CHAPTER 2

The Divine Economy in the Law and the Prophets

One of the more common questions I get asked when I meet someone for the first time is “When did you know you wanted to be a pastor?” I am sure people in other professions get asked the same thing. People appreciate being asked about their passions, and a job that a person enjoys can be one such passion. The most straightforward answer I can give is the story of my telling my aunt at a family get-together when I was nine or ten that I thought I wanted to be a biblical prophet when I grew up.

Seriously.

As I grew older and read my Bible more, I began to realize that being a biblical prophet had some serious drawbacks: the hair-shirt dress code, the locusts-and-honey diet, and the unfortunate tendency to be executed rather than simply fired from your employment when you upset others.

When I was ordained for ministry by my hometown region in the Disciples of Christ, that same aunt asked me if I remembered the conversation many years before. I had. She had as well. Being able to share in that memory, years and years later, is something I continue to cherish.

Through my religious studies—four years of college and six years of seminary—I learned that the prophetic spirit in the Hebrew Bible (or the Tanakh, in Hebrew) was not limited to the fifteen books named for the prophets. Concern for the economic as well as spiritual wellbeing of God’s children is paramount across the Tanakh.

All of the contributors to the Tanakh ought to be considered prophets. In ancient Israel, prophets functioned as divine spokespeople, intermediaries between God and the nation.1 But, in the post-Jeremiah exilic era of ancient Israel’s history, the prophetic tradition fell into disrepute, and was replaced by retinues of royal advisors.2 Postexilic prophets such as Malachi would likely have prophesied outside the king’s palace, in stark contrast to prophets like Jeremiah, who had substantial interaction with various court officials. But even when a prophet was attached to the royal court, such as Jeremiah, their concern for the working poor remained evident.

Two common denominators of the Tanakh passages chosen for this chapter are a focus on economic justice and fairness, and an uncommon rarity in much of Christian preaching and teaching. The passages gleaned using this criteria are not an exhaustive list. I hope you will take some of the tools and ideas here and apply them to other passages.

I should also add that I would love nothing more than for Christians to shed some of the overly simple lenses through which we often view the Hebrew Bible, particularly the “Jesus is all over the Tanakh” lens and the “Because of Jesus, we aren’t bound by the Tanakh” lens. This approach of (mis)using Jesus to diminish the Tanakh does a disservice to both Christianity, which still retains the Tanakh as a part of our sacred texts, and Judaism, which is fundamentally informed by the Tanakh, but interprets it differently than most Christians. Repairing Christianity’s exegetical relationship with the Hebrew Bible and its ecumenical relationship with Judaism are moral imperatives which undergird this chapter, and I would be remiss for not mentioning their importance. Judaism has a rich tradition of economic and social justice in its own right, and Christianity can learn from it.

Joseph Saves—and Subjugates—Egypt(Genesis 47:13–26)

The people said, “You’ve saved our lives. If you wish, we will be Pharaoh’s slaves.” (47:25)

The Joseph saga has been told and retold across entertainment, from a stage musical (Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat), an animated musical (Joseph: King of Dreams), and, naturally, a VeggieTales episode (“The Ballad of Little Joe”). All of these share some constants in the story: Joseph’s traumatic betrayal at the hands of his jealous brothers, his accurate interpretation of peoples’ dreams, his ascension to the position of viceroy over all of Egypt as it prepares for the seven-year famine, and his eventual reconciliation with his repentant family.

What is typically not included in these retellings, for rather obvious reasons, is Joseph’s management of the seven-year famine, detailed in Genesis 47:13–26. The famine-struck Egyptians grew increasingly desperate, and they began selling off their assets to Joseph in exchange for grain—first silver, then their livestock, and eventually themselves. The people came to Joseph and offered their land and themselves as sharecroppers, to keep from starving. Joseph agreed and provided seed for the people to work the land that now belonged to the crown, in exchange for a 20 percent cut of the grain. The people agreed to become Pharaoh’s slaves, and Joseph formalized their agreement into law.

You can see why that part never made it into the movies and musicals. It would not appeal to a modern audience to depict the story’s protagonist enslaving the nation he had been entrusted with, yet it is an accurate assessment of what happened. Even after seminary, I had not given serious consideration to this passage until it was brought up by a guest speaker at a Lenten lecture series I helped to organize some years ago. Joseph’s story is one that is often told through a particular lens, whether from the pulpit or on the stage.

If we see Joseph’s saga as only a story of familial and individual redemption, and disregard the economic and human implications of a people being willing to accept enslavement to survive a seven-year famine, then we do not fully grasp the story.

To see Joseph as a benevolent dictator after his rise to second-in-command in Egypt, fits with the plucky underdog protagonist persona most often presented. He overcame kidnapping, human trafficking, enslavement, and incarceration under false pretenses to rule over one of the most powerful nations at the time. It is the sort of stuff the myth of American individualism thrives on. While the individual and family dynamics of the story matter, they were never the only point. Genesis depicts a Faustian bargain the people of Egypt strike to save their lives, if not their autonomy and dignity.

Bear in mind that farming in the ancient Near East offered nothing near the yield of modern agriculture, in which a relatively small portion of the populace feeds everyone else. Even in the fertile Nile valley, subsistence-level farming was the order of the day. A 20 percent tax-in-kind would have eaten up what little surpluses many farmers would have been able to produce. While they may have grown accustomed to paying the tax during the seven years of plenty, when that 20 percent was saved for the famine, it would have been extremely difficult to try to do so during a famine.

Additionally, the farmers’ land no longer belonged to them, but to the Egyptian throne. They could not use it as collateral, and they could not pass it down to their children as an inheritance. In the span of a few years, they went from being relatively independent farmers to being serfs, controlled by the crown and sharecropping to stave off starvation. Though relinquishing ownership of their land may have saved their lives, it came at a devastating economic cost.

Joseph’s actions were exploitive, not heroic. They were shrewd, yes, and certainly effective, but exploitative nonetheless. “You have saved our lives,” the farmers said. Perhaps, but that is all that Joseph has left them with. They had become Pharaoh’s de facto slaves. Their exclamation should perhaps be read as acceptance of a status already reached than as an expression of gratitude.

The Year of Jubilee (Leviticus 25:8–55)

You will make the fiftieth year holy, proclaiming freedom throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It will be a Jubilee year for you: each of you must return to your family property and to your extended family. (25:10)

Levitical law gets a bad rap—and I would say unfortunately so—directly because of the public witness of Christians. I do not say that to make light of the ways in which, say, Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 have been taken out of context by Christians for decades and subsequently weaponized against LGBTQ people. Rather, I say this precisely because such approaches to Leviticus—and to the Tanakh more broadly—have made many Christian interpretations of Levitical law woefully shallow and explicitly harmful to a great many people, LGBTQ persons among them.

Taking Leviticus out of its context cuts in the other direction as well—just as verses like 18:22 and 20:13 are taken to be literally true by homophobic and transphobic Christians, so too is pretty much the rest of Leviticus consigned to the Christian Bible study scrap heap with nary an ounce of consideration of the book’s context and aims. This is genuinely a tragedy; a religion whose founder and namesake declared the Levitical law “You must love your neighbor as yourself” from 19:18 to be one of the two most important commandments ought to have a far deeper understanding and respect for the context of that commandment.

So, let us try—for a few pages, at least—to do justice to the context of a seminal Levitical mandate: the Year of Jubilee.

The need for restoration often centers around the number seven in the Tanakh. The seventh day is kept as Sabbath, a holy day of rest. The seventh year is when slaves must be offered their freedom.3 Leviticus 25 sets aside the seventh year for the land to have its own rest from its agricultural labors, and the fiftieth year was to be consecrated as a Year of Jubilee, because it comes after seven groups of seven years. During a Year of Jubilee: outstanding debts were to be forgiven, slaves and prisoners were to be released, and all land was to be returned to its original holders. It was a societal clean slate, meant to avoid the cyclical poverty.

The return of land to its original occupants was not included by happenstance. A crucial characteristic of life under the kings of Israel and Judah was the growth of a landed gentry, an elite minority that possessed the lion’s share of resources and land, in contrast to most people, who lived on a subsistence level or were enslaved. The economic disparity had the potential to destabilize the economy of ancient Israel. The word choices in Leviticus 25 suggest the Year of Jubilee was included as a sort of failsafe against such economic instability. Tanakh commentator Baruch J. Schwartz notes that the Hebrew term deror, which can be translated as “freedom” (Common English Bible) or “liberty” (New Revised Standard Version), is related to a “term known from Mesopotamia, where it indicates the general release proclaimed occasionally by kings in order to create or restore economic stability.”4

That concentrating wealth and land in the hands of too few people is inherently destabilizing was evident to the composers and compilers of the Tanakh, but is too often disregarded by people of faith in the twenty-first-century United States. For freedom and liberty to be tangible, economic stability for all the people is vital.

Our collective memory may be short, but, thankfully, the memory of scripture is more long-lasting. We have seen a number of attempts to recreate an economic Jubilee that includes the forgiveness of debts and the restoration of assets. Organizations like R.I.P. Medical Debt, which was started by former debt collectors who had a change of heart and began working to forgive debts rather than collect on them, have partnered with people as famous as John Oliver of Last Week Tonight and as humble as a psychoanalyst and a retired chemist to purchase household debts for pennies on the dollar and forgive them.5

Pathway Church in Wichita, Kansas, where I was born, offered a congregational template for Jubilee by buying and then forgiving $2.2 million of medical debts for roughly sixteen hundred people as a part of their Easter 2019 celebration.6 Such a good work may be doable for a megachurch with Pathway’s resources, but what about smaller congregations that may struggle simply to keep the lights on? A step in the right direction would be to understand the Year of Jubilee as not a one-off, but a system intended to occur regularly. The Year of Jubilee was designed not so one isolated generation, but so that all generations, would experience liberation from the bondage of financial insecurity.

The Year of Jubilee is framed in Leviticus 25 not only a forgiveness of debts but also a release of slaves and indentured servants, and a return of land to its original holders. Land could likewise be lost to indebtedness by being put up as collateral or violently confiscated. Because of this, our modern efforts to recreate this biblical mandate are mostly piecemeal. But discussion of a wider Jubilee that values financial security for families across generations must be on the table in parish halls and city halls alike.

The story of Naboth’s vineyard in 1 Kings 21 is a biblical case study on the importance of maintaining family land. King Ahab coveted the vineyard, which was adjacent to the palace. Ahab offered to replace Naboth’s vineyard, or to buy it outright, but Naboth replied, “Lord forbid that I give you my family inheritance!” He characterized the vineyard not as his, but as his family’s, handed down from generation to generation, which fits with the understanding throughout the Tanakh of land belonging not to individuals, but families, and, ultimately, on loan from God who created it to begin with. Ahab was willing to do whatever it took to get the vineyard. He cast aside the precepts of Leviticus 25 and the Year of Jubilee to satisfy his selfish wants and desires, and God, through the prophet Elijah, condemned him for it. Many commentators agree that there is no ironclad evidence that the Year of Jubilee was practiced widespread in ancient Israel, and it is easy to see why: it directly inhibits the large-scale accumulation of land and wealth, which defined the ruling elite class.

Today, adherence to the spirit of the Year of Jubilee represents a direct threat to the economic interests of the One Percent. The forgiveness of debts represents a direct threat to many predatory pursuits, from payday lending to subprime mortgages. And implementation of the mandate to return land to its original holders would entail the removal of the United States as we understand it in deference to the indigenous peoples of North America. Even if we are not among the One Percent, we still benefit from centuries of wealth redistribution away from certain peoples and toward others.

This landed gentry in ancient Israel emerged over centuries despite the mandate of the Year of Jubilee. With the concentration of land in the hands of a select few rather than the original families, ancient Israel gradually shifted from a subsistence-based economy to a market economy, with disastrous results for the commoners. Tanakh scholar D.N. Premnath observes, “With the rise of market economy . . . Labor, which was once considered as a social obligation, becomes a commodity, an abstract quantity to be offered for sale in the market.”7 Eventually, the kings of Israel and Judah conscripted labor for their various projects, cutting out the sale of labor in the market altogether.

The Rise and Fall of a Kingdom’s Chief SlaveOverseer (1 Kings 11–12)

Now Jeroboam was a strong and honorable man. Solomon saw how well this youth did his work. So he appointed him over all the work gang of Joseph’s house. (11:28)

At first glance, the story of Jeroboam’s revolt against Solomon’s son and heir Rehoboam may appear to be a tale of palace intrigue and eventual idolatry, with the upstart Jeroboam becoming king, crafting two golden calves to present to his northern kingdom of Israel as their new gods, and being condemned by an anonymous prophet for doing so. Jeroboam was not just any upstart, though. He had been identified as a young man for his gifts and talents and went on to serve as the unified kingdom’s head of forced labor. He fell out of favor with Solomon when the prophet Ahijah prophesied that Jeroboam would inherit ten of the twelve tribes of Israel as king. After Solomon attempted to have Jeroboam assassinated, Jeroboam fled to Egypt and remained there until Solomon died.

This forced labor that Jeroboam oversaw grew out of families losing their ancestral land from the families that would otherwise keep and utilize it for their own livelihoods. Though the Year of Jubilee was designed to prevent such a land grab, land theft was repeatedly and systemically used by Hebrew kings as a way to create a supply of forced labor for the wealthy elite. This conscripted workforce was called the corvee. Solomon began utilizing the corvee for his building projects, including the first Jerusalem temple. The corvee functioned as a means for “the state’s dominant class (to) provide for its security and luxury . . . (Meanwhile) agricultural production suffers because the peasants expend their energies in military service and forced labor.”8

By instituting the corvee, Solomon added to the stratification of wealth that had taken place through the concentration of landed wealth in a small economic and political elite. Once permanently separated from their familial land, the only remaining means to generate their own income for a peasant was their labor. When Rehoboam took the throne of Judah, he made the corvée even weightier and more painful on those conscripted to work than it already had been under his father, Solomon. As far as Solomon had fallen in God’s sight by the end of his reign, Rehoboam was determined to fall even farther.