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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