Property
in Persons: Re-reading Scriptural Economics
Robert Gibbs
University of Toronto
Lev 25:35 If your brother grows poor and his hand falters with you, you shall
support him, as though he is a resident alien, so that he shall live with you.
36 Do not take interest and profit, but
fear your God, that your brother may live with you.
37 You shall not give him money for
interest nor shall you give him your food for profit.
38 I, YHWH, am your God, and I brought you
out of the land of Egypt to give to you the land of Canaan to be
your God.
39 And if your brother grows poor with you
and sells himself to you, do not work him in the work of a worker.
40 As a hired hand and as a resident alien
he shall be with you; until the year of the jubilee he shall serve with you.
41 And then he will go away from being with
you; he and his children with him. He will return to his family; he will return
to the holding of his fathers.
42 Because they are my servants, the ones
that I brought forth from the land of Egypt. They
shall not be sold for sale as slaves.
43 You shall not have dominion over him with
harshness, but you shall fear your God (Lev 25).
This piece of Biblical law is remarkable
for its vision of justice and its intervention against a likely familiar kind
of social oppression. I am not a Biblical scholar and cannot hope to engage in
the rigorous historical and philological work that characterizes their work. I
will, for the time being, ignore the inter-texts, the other texts in the Torah
that prohibit taking interest and deal with the question of slavery within the
community. I am a philosopher. My reading will focus on the ethics of the way
that work and property relate to each other in this text, and particularly the
repetitive insistence on a theological reality—one not removed from the
question of work at all. While I am interested in the economics and the
historical questions about economics, I will engage in a specifically
philosophical interpretation: one that considers responsibility and
temporality. Near the end of the paper I will briefly look to Weber, Marx, and
Hermann Cohen to consider the heritage of this particular legal practice. Part
of what matters most here is this question of how to read a legal text, and I
offer a specific approach, one that we may wish to discuss further as a group.
Let me begin with a bit of simple lexical
work, in order to construct a plain-reading of this text. There seem to be two
general groups of people: brothers and resident aliens. Brothers
are associated in the language of families, fathers, or clans and they each
have their own holdings. Like most texts in the Torah, this is a text with
exclusive gender, where the actors are all men and the kinship groupings are
named for males as well. The brother here is not limited to my own blood
family, but extends to anyone who is in the group—ethnic or perhaps even
religious, or some other social grouping. The ger toshav, resident alien
appears to be not members of the group but people who live amongst the family.
(In the following verses, it turns out that they can be bought and sold.) So
the first thing we see is that brothers has a limited extension, but
does go beyond ouruseasthe
nuclear and even the extended family. The notion of prohibiting slavery and
interest is, therefore, constructed with an other outside, who lives amongst
us.
There is a clear prohibition on interest in
two forms here (taking a bite, or an origination fee, and securing profit).
With money, the implication is that one might lend and hold some in reserve;
with food (grain), one would stipulate a return exceeding what was lent. These
are prohibited in relation to the brother (the main group—if you like, the
Israelites). The problem is that someone who is broke is the one who has to
borrow, and if you charge interest in either form, that person is likely to
stay locked in poverty and in need. This is not at first glance an economy with
investment capital, but one where subsistence on the land is the key question.
Moreover, in this first context the loan is
required to support him. There is a responsibility to not let him fall into
irremediable poverty. The prohibition has to do with not taking advantage of
his need—and this is because he is a brother, someone who should live with you.
Responsibility is an expression of social solidarity, but it does not involve a
gift; rather a loan. There is no implication that you are not entitled to your
holding, only that you must help your fellow back on his feet.
This prohibition is then followed by a more
dire situation, where a person needs not just goods, but has sold himself. And
at this point we are facing a lexical overdetermination. The root for work, Ayin,
bet, dalet, is linked to labour, service, and also slavery. One is a serf
or servant of another; one works for another—it is a social relation, and it
does not seem to be opposed to autonomous independence. The Israelites were
slaves in Egypt, and are now slaves of God (42). The verse that most plays on this
is (39): the injunction not to work him with the worker's work, which is also
enslave him with the slavery of a slave or the servitude of a serf. This one
word carries varying nuances in different contexts—the key is for whom one is
working/enslaved/serving. And the conditions of labour relate to the form of
the relation of working for another. Hence there is a class of hired hands,
people who work for a wage, even if in a continual state. Slavery seems to be a
working without wage. Another contrast is that a slave is a possession; they
are sold (42). But it is unclear whether the hired hand is also not sold (39),
but not sold as a slave.
Here, in the excerpt of my choice, is a
requirement of support and two different prohibitions: 1) taking interest from
a poor brother, and 2) enslaving your brother. One of the clear claims is that
the indentured or hired hand relation is one with a fixed limit (less than 50
years), and that it ends with a going forth for the brother, a going back to
his familial holding. This redistribution to the ancestral holdings is the
characteristic of the Jubilee year, and it reflects the core view of Justice in
Leviticus: each man on his own familial holding. Ironically to us, this vision
of distributive justice is actually better grasped as simply a mode of
corrective justice—giving back to each their own, and not making new
assignments of goods. Moreover, it has that strongly individuated notion of
property and of economics. Going forth from the house of slavery (my master as
my brother) is just enough.
Before we can interrogate better the
relation of these two prohibitions, we must also note that each is punctuated
and motivated by a theological claim. It is the same historical claim: that God
brought the Israelites (the addressees of this law) out of Egypt. In
the first case (38), we have the clear purpose: to give this land to you.
Hence, the issue of interest focuses on the holdings of land. Landed property
is the goal of the exodus, and a constitutive part of the relation to God. But
in the second (42) we have a stronger claim. By bringing forth, God has
established property rights in the people—they belong to God. They are not to
be sold as slaves (although they may be as indentured servants) because who
would have the right to sell such a person? Only God. God has purchased the
people through the redemptive act (as in redeeming a pledge), but that means
that a brother cannot buy another—or at least cannot sell another.[1]
A genuine possibility here is that everyone
is someone's servant. If I work, I work for another. When I work on my own
holding and don't borrow money or grain, I still have this holding because God
brought me out of Egypt to work this land, and I still serve God. If I lose my holding, and
must borrow or even sell myself, then no brother can regard me as his property
(a saleable good, a thing), because even if he now has my work, I am indentured
or hired—and God still has right to me. The notion that I could become the
property of my brother, working like a slave, is a violation of the prior claim
of God. This has a significant twist, however, because the core of my service
to God is living on my holding and not depending on my brothers. Working, as it
were, for myself. So the vision of justice is one in which a person is not
simply autonomous, but has a kind of economic independence grounded in a
radical dependence on a transcendent God. Not quite transcendental, because
there are duties to this God, agricultural and economic ones, and not just
private devotion. Theologically viewed, work is for each to serve God, and to
do it without the use of another as a tool for that service.
One might, however, have to insert into
this claim the correction of the landless Levites, and the priests, who live
off the labour of the people on their individual holdings. Just how that
subordination and free-loading ruling class structure fits into the image of
justice articulated here is less clear. This text does not interpret the
specific physical labour of these non-landed clans; although they clearly are
not allowed to enslave the other Israelites, nor do the people serve the
priests, but rather each serves God, if differently. But while the central
image is of each on their own holding, there is this complexity of those
without holdings.
Perhaps more significant is that the texts
points to a responsibility not merely not to take advantage of the brother, but
indeed, to aid him. If the ideal of justice is each on his own holding, the
responsibility to help each other marks a kind of solidarity. Not what one
might call a social or communal vision—but, rather, one of supporting him in
his poverty, taking him in, and also of not letting one's brother languish in
slavery. In verse 25, a responsibility is articulated to redeem land of your
brother if he has fallen into debt. The Torah text is edited to include the
different interpretations of the limitations on slavery and taking interest,
and we are isolating only one voice here, one that is more centred on the land
and less centred on liberating the slave. But that voice is one which
emphasizes the need for each to serve God on his own holding.
But I also wish to see the plot of the
these two pieces: from not taking interest to not holding the impoverished as
slave, but only a hired worker or indentured servant [and look at Kiddushin 20a
for the narrative of R. Josebar
Hanina]. The first kind of narrative we might tell is that of someone whose
crops fail, and so must borrow grain for seed. He has little to offer as
security, as collateral. His word is thus only secured by his own body. He
proffers himself as a security against his loan. His neighbour lends him grain
to grow crops on his own land—something like a mortgage. In Act I we see the
poor man living like a labourer on his own land, trying to work his way to
regain the divine lease (what looks to us like ownership). Then, Act II,
through chance or fault, his crops fail again. Now the loan comes due, cash is
demanded, and he must forfeit his freedom, his body. Now he is moved off his
land, which is appropriated altogether and he is bound to another and that
other's land. Our text comes to interrupt this narrative, twice. If interest is
permitted, then no one could ever escape the situation of Act I—whatever he
gains from his crops, he will still need to borrow again. Interest keeps him
poor and dependent on the other.
But the intervention in Act II puts a limit
on the terms of alienating oneself. Because the brother belongs to God, he
cannot be forced to become a slave, a saleable property. To treat him like a
wage-labourer, with a fixed term of indentured service is to recognize that
like the land, the worker belongs to God. The limitation on having property in
persons is that the person belongs to God, not to either himself or to another.
Thus wage-labour (which I will use as a short-hand for that other kind of
relation) is like rental of a person, or the right to usufruct, and the wage
expresses that the property remains God's, remains inalienable. Even the man
cannot sell himself in the strongest sense. In Act II, the person does lose his
independence and his own labour, but not his future. Indeed, one could actually
argue that the core of slavery and being sold as property is that there is no
future for the slave.
One who will go forth has a future
redemption. The thing has no future, except its use. The question that we seem
to insist on is whether the future of the man on his holding is his own or
is it ultimately bound to God, and so that he is never his own. If we take
that second option, we are then reading this insistence on wage-labour as a
different kind of servitude, one where there is a future relation to God, a
redemption from servitude to men.
Another aside is required here, because in
verses preceding our drama, are the requirements for redeeming the land, and
letting it lay fallow in the seventh year. Indeed, the text proclaims in God's
voice:
You shall not sell the land with final
sale, because the land is Mine; because you are resident aliens with me. In all
the land of your holdings, you must give redemption to the land. (25: 23-24)
Land is also redeemable, and cannot be
sold. Neither land (as indicated vaguely also in our Act I), nor brothers (Act
II) are saleable, because God's ownership secures the ultimate right of
property. Here again we are facing the question of the future—God's ownership
seems to express a temporality and in its own way a temporariness of human
relations. To have a future is not to be autonomous, but it is also not to have
your future foreclosed. The promise of going out fixes a limit on belonging to
another, on being stuck working for another. The warrant for the going out of
the Jubilee is the going out from Egypt—a
motion that redeems in the key sense of holding open the future for us.
Responsibility is thus a series of requirements and prohibitions that hold open
your brother's future. Theology enters here as a more radical and inalienable
mode of the future—but ethics is enacted in a series of legal requirements that
institute justice by setting limits to the capturing of the other's future.
Let me pause for a moment to discuss the
method of this reading of the text in terms of the future. If we contrasted the
reading I have proposed with the work of Marx and of Weber, we would see (I
hope) that I have learned a great deal from both Weber's Agrarian Sociology
of Ancient Civilization[2],
and Marx's Kapital. Weber's interest is to generate a typology of
different kinds of society structured around their economies. Weber
distinguishes a set of types, including one he called the aristocratic city
state, and its central economic structure was debt-slavery (p.71). He notices that there is no evidence
of communal ownership (135) and takes note of the provisions we have been
exploring. While he can pause and notice that the Sabbath cannot be reduced to
a socio-economically motivated enactment, his vision is an attempt to situate Israel
and its text into an economic context.
Similarly, we can easily construe Marx's
reading, given his reading of pre-capitalistic economy. His concerns are also
about debt-slavery, but he can draw the line through this ancient economy
forward to wage-slavery in the capitalist economy.[3] Marx is interested in how wages can be linked
through indentured service back to debt-slavery, for his goal is a critique of
economy. Too rigorous a historian, part of his goal is to show us that the
change in economic systems obscures the more fundamental relation of
oppression. The appearance of a fair wage for fair work, and of individual
autonomous contracting workers, belies the alienation of their labour power,
indeed, most of all, of their time.
If we add, then, one more voice, that of
Hermann Cohen, a Jewish philosopher, we find him challenging our reading and
advancing his own ethical socialism and demand for social justice at just the
point where the text hovers:
Also in money traffic the equality of law
is extended to the stranger, at least in principle:
"If your brother grows poor and his hand
falters with you, you shall support him, as though he is a resident alien, so
thathe shall live with you.
Do not take interest and profit, but fear
your God, that your brother may live with you" (Lev 25, 35ff).
In the following verses there is again a
reference to the exodus from Egypt.
But here the most remarkable thing happens: the stranger-sojourner too
is called brother; and it is
commanded that his life be preserved. Almost more important than the
prohibition of taking interest from the stranger is this recognition of him as brother.[4]
The context and the question for Cohen is
how to expand the familial grouping (brother) step-wise to universality. The
step-wise is through neighbours, through a 'you,' for whom I am responsible.
But Cohen fights against one of the currents in Jewish tradition by emphasizing
that the neighbour need not be a Jew, not limited to an identity group. While we would read this as a
concession about the poor brother, that he becomes indentured but not enslaved,
Cohen pushes the other way: if servitude on his own land is like a resident alien, then being a resident alien
is also like a brother. What
stops the fall of the brother into slavery also raises the resident alien out
of it. And that elevation of the resident alien is a decisive transformation of
justice in society.
Indeed, if we pause for a moment, we can
see that this elevation points to a motion that is contrary to the Marxist
history—preventing the brother from losing his land and himself yields greater
protection to everyone living in the society. Capitalist wage slavery might not
be the only descendant of this crisis with debt-slavery. For Cohen, there is
clearly an ethical socialist frame-work possible, where labor is not alienated,
but where profit is shared, and each belongs to each other, grounded in a
universal morality. Thus we can view this same text as an ur-text for the
development either of social solidarity and an ethical socialism [Cohen] or a
proto-form of the lurking slavery within a capitalist wage system [Marx].
So in this conflict where are we? In the
midst of a text that opens up yet another dimension, as well as the options
that are already developed. Let me suggest that we cannot reach a decisive
evaluation of this text for the history of economic justice. But we can find
some philosophical clues into the injustice that is slavery and taking
interest. The most important clue is the notion of the future. Wages are in
themselves a payment for our time. But slavery also involves compensation for
our time (housing, food, clothing). Our initial notion of freedom mistakes the
gap between slavery and paid labor—and both seem distinct from working for
oneself. This text represents all work as a relation to an other, and indeed,
points to a limitation on how we can be assigned to work for other human
beings. God enters in here to un-ground our freedom, to show that we belong
neither to other people nor even to ourselves—and that our land, too, belongs
to others.
The decisive question is the interruption
of our work—the promise that the present arrangement is not permanent.To regain a future after the Jubilee is to
have a claim to the future that no cleverness of my brother and no foolishness
of my own can disrupt. But to read this text this way is to opt for a specific
ethical and philosophical way of reading. Not so much formal as concrete and
metaphysical, but not simply ahistorical.
And if there is one more issue to raise
here, it of course points to other texts. For in the first instance, within
Torah there are other texts about slavery and interest, texts which provide
other theologies and other ethical readings of the questions at issue. But here
we are in a room where each of these three traditions meet. The negotiation of
economic justice through a series of legal institutions, institutions that
transform our experience of time, is not simply shared across the traditions.
Nor is the vision of economic justice identical. But in translating this text
into an ethics of time and responsibility for each other, we join others in
this room. Perhaps our traditions are also only holdings, not truly our own,
but only relations with the others we join here, and ultimately each has a
holding only on lease from God. Would that be a good image of the economy of
scriptural reasoning?
ENDNOTES
[1] (This reminds one,
of course, of the story of Joseph and his brothers. They sold him, as a slave!)
[2] Max Weber, The
Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations, trans. by R. I Frank, London: Verso, 1998
(1909).
[3] Karl Marx, Capital, III, ed by
Frederick Engels, New York: International Publishers, 1984 (1894). See Chapter 36.
[4] Hermann Cohen, Religion
of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism, trans. by Simon Kaplan, Atlanta: Scholars
Press, 1995 (1918), 125-126 (translation altered).
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