God is a Capitalist

by Roger McKinney

  Not to do wrong in buying or selling (Lev. 25:14).

  Not to remove landmarks (property boundaries) (Deut. 19:14).

  Not to swear falsely in denial of another's property rights (Lev. 19:11).

  Not to deny falsely another's property rights (Lev. 19:11).

  Not to steal personal property (Lev. 19:11).

  To restore that which one took by robbery (Lev. 5:23).

  To return lost property (Deut. 22:1).

  Not to pretend not to have seen lost property, to avoid the obligation to return it (Deut. 22:3)

  The Torah holds individual property rights in such high regard that it forbade Israelis in the Tenth Commandment from even thinking about taking the property of others, “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor,” (Exodus 20:17) which is repeated in Deuteronomy 5:21 as “You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife. You shall not set your desire on your neighbor’s house or land, his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.” All of these are negative commands, which if converted to positive statements would say something like, “Respect the private property of others. I have made it sacred.”

  In the New Testament, Jesus taught that a man who looks at another woman in order to lust after her has committed adultery already in his heart, referring to the seventh commandment, and to hate a brother is the heart attitude of murder, referring to the sixth commandment. Following Jesus’ example, one could argue that coveting is the spiritual equivalent of theft.

  The state did not issue property rights according to the Torah. That would express property as understood by Egyptians where the pharaoh granted rights to the use of property. In the Torah, God owned everything but gave property rights to humanity through his creation of man in his image and likeness and by giving him dominion over the earth. The Law of Moses further delineates God’s vision of property by making it specific to individuals and forbidding even the thought of taking another’s property illegally.

  Today, people might argue that democracy has given the state the authority to take the property of citizens for whatever use the majority deems necessary. (I realize the U.S. does not have a pure democracy and is a republic instead. Still, I use the term democracy because most writers refer to our system of government as a democracy.) After all, the state gets its legitimacy from the will of the majority of voters in modern political philosophy. But the Bible makes it clear that states can be as guilty of theft as individuals. When the leaders of Israel demanded that the prophet Samuel install a king so that Israel could be like the other nations, including Egypt, God permitted it, not as a blessing, but as punishment. Then he warned them of the consequences:

  These will be the rights of the king who is to reign over you. He will take your sons and assign them to his chariotry and cavalry, and they will run in front of his chariot. He will use them as leaders of a thousand and leaders of fifty; he will make them plough his ploughland and harvest his harvest and make his weapons of war and the gear for his chariots. He will also take your daughters as perfumers, cooks, and bakers. He will take the best of your fields, of your vineyards and olive groves and give them to his officials. He will tithe your crops and vineyards to provide for his eunuchs and his officials. He will take the best of your manservants and maidservants, of your cattle and your donkeys, and make them work for him. He will tithe your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. When that day comes, you will cry out on account of the king you have chosen for yourselves, but on that day God will not answer you. (I Samuel 8:11-18)

  God did not give the kings the right to take the people’s property. He merely described the vast extent of the theft and violence that kings would commit. God allowed the people of Israel to have the desire of their wicked hearts for a king as punishment, as Paul wrote in Romans 1:28: “Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done.” Often, God judged rebellious people by letting them have their way and that is what he did with ancient Israel. He allowed the king to steal the property and the young people of families for his own pleasure. It should not have surprised the Israelis that a king like other nations would act like those other kings and abuse the people in the many ways as kings have done throughout the centuries. In addition to leading the people into idolatry, many of the condemnations by the prophets of the leadership of Israel refer to the abuse of the poor by the nobility who stole their land and enslaved their young people.

  God knew that Israel would one day rebel against him and choose a king, so he limited the power of the king in Deuternomy 17: 15-17:

  You shall surely set a king over you whom the Lord your God chooses, one from among your countrymen you shall set as king over yourselves; you may not put a foreigner over yourselves who is not your countryman. Moreover, he shall not multiply horses for himself, nor shall he cause the people to return to Egypt to multiply horses, since the Lord has said to you, “You shall never again return that way.” He shall not multiply wives for himself, or else his heart will turn away; nor shall he greatly increase silver and gold for himself.…

  He forbade the king from collecting horses, because God hated war and wanted his people to be peace loving. He knew that his people would prosper only in peace time and that war destroys wealth as well as killing many young men. The prohibition against wives probably referred to treaties with pagan nations in which the rulers exchanged wives to help guarantee the treaty would be followed. The danger in a king increasing his personal holdings of gold and silver came from the power he had to tax the people that always became oppressive. The fact that God interpreted the demand for a king as rebellion against him and his rule suggests that God anticipated the hard heartedness of the Israeli people and made provision for it, even as he provided for divorce.

  In the Gospels, some Pharisees asked Jesus if it was lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason (Matthew 19:1-8). Jesus said no, so later his disciples asked him why Moses commanded that husbands give their wives a certificate of divorce. Jesus answered “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning.” In a similar way, God never intended Israel to have a king, but he knew the rebellious nature of his people and tried to limit the damage that kings could inflict by setting strict boundaries for the actions of a king. But Israeli citizens refused to enforce God’s limits on the king just as they had refused God as king.

  On the other hand, the king passage in Deuteronomy might be looking forward to the Messiah. After all, David wrote of the Messiah that he would be the Son of God in Psalm 110:1: “The LORD says to my lord: ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet.’” God was the king of Israel under the judges so only his Son could inherit the throne. The human kings beginning with Saul were impostors and usurpers, which could provide an alternate explanation for God’s anger when Israel demanded a king who had no right to the throne.

  The kings in Israel ruled with as much legitimacy as today’s democracies because God allowed them to rule, yet God never granted kings the right to take the property of others. In the same way, the state created through democracy has no right to violate God’s laws any more than private individuals or the kings of Israel. Man may create democracies and have politicians pass laws, but a body of law higher than any man-made laws has always existed, God’s law, often referred to as natural law. Man-made law should never contradict God’s laws, but it usually does.

  Modern Christians should keep in mind that God never created a democracy even though he could have. People created parliaments in order to curb the power of tyrannical kings. Once the people had stripped monarchs of all their power, they gave those same abusive powers to the state in democracies. But democracies can be as tyrannical
as kings. Testimony to that can be found in the treatment by the United States of the people who were first slaves then “free” black people until civil rights law; the abuse of native tribal peoples who suffered ethnic cleansing east of the Mississippi River in the nineteenth century and frequently outright murder; and treatment of Japanese citizens during World War II who were imprisoned because of their heritage. Also, consider the income tax rate which has at times reached 90 percent, and the total taxes paid by U.S. citizens, state, local and federal, which consumes about 45 percent of gross domestic product.

  God went farther than just general commands about property by giving specific instances of how property should be protected. Stealing can take many forms, and we are commanded to take positive action against it in some cases. God commands the use of fair weights and measures in Deuteronomy 25:15 and elsewhere. We are also told to care for and return found property, in Deuteronomy 22:1-4. Exodus 22 deals with a number of issues, including rules that apply to livestock. The passage requires restitution if an animal wanders off and grazes in someone else’s field. This reads more like a penalty rather than a regulation, but the concept here is that private property is to be protected and any extension consistent with that is acceptable. We see the same thing in Exodus 23, where God commanded people to return a lost animal (verse four) and help a struggling animal (verse five) even if belongs to an enemy. Employees are to be paid promptly (Leviticus 19) and fairly (Malachi chapter 3). And God prohibited judges from favoring the poor in Leviticus.

  Moses left the general impression that property is sacred. By extension, markets must be free because markets are where people acquire and dispose of property. Without freedom to dispose of property, property doesn’t exist. After Israel chose a king, it took about 2,500 years to recover that wisdom.

  Jubilee

  Jim Wallis, editor-in-chief of Sojourner Magazine and a devout socialist began his lead article, “Seattle: Changing the Rules,” in the March-April 2000 issue of Sojourners magazine with this:

  From the pulpit, I looked out over the standing room only crowd and could feel the electric excitement in Seattle’s St. James Cathedral. It was Sunday night, just before the week of scheduled protests that would rock the World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting and the world. We were all gathered for a religious service organized by Jubilee 2000, the grassroots campaign to cancel the debt of the world’s poorest countries. Just before I preached, a text was read from Leviticus 25, which proclaims the biblical Jubilee—a periodic economic redistribution in which slaves are set free, land is returned, and debts are forgiven. Jubilee is a call for a regular "leveling" of things, given the human tendency toward over-accumulation by some while others lose ground. The Bible doesn’t propose any blueprint for an economic system, but rather insists that all human economic arrangements be subject to the demands of God’s justice, that great gaps be avoided or rectified, and the poor are not left behind. As I listened to the prophetic scripture being read, I marveled at how it was being used that night—as a relevant contribution to a public discussion on the rules of global trade!

  Many theologians throughout history have taken the Biblical concept of Jubilee as justification for the state to control markets, ensure an equal distribution of wealth in the nation and provide debt relief. Jubilee 2000 expanded the concept to include debt relief for poor countries who had borrowed from rich nations but were struggling to repay the loans. The fact that the leaders of most of those poor countries were ruthless, corrupt dictators who stole most of the borrowed funds or wasted them on luxurious living did not matter to Jubilee 2000. Laying aside the undeniable fact that God did not create a state capable of such redistribution of wealth, since all he allowed were courts, and the fact that Jubilee fell under the poor laws that were not enforceable by the courts, any reading of the passages on Jubilee demonstrate that Wallis’ interpretation is superficial at best. Let’s look closer. Jubilee appears in Leviticus chapter 25, the main points of which are the following:

  1) If an Israeli farmer sold his land at any time, ownership would return to the original owner established by Joshua in the first distribution of land regardless of how many people had owned the land between the sale and Jubilee.

  2) If the owner had donated the land to the temple, it did not return to the original owner and if the temple sold the land it returned to the temple at Jubilee.

  3) Houses on farm land were treated like the land, but houses in towns were not. They could be sold permanently, although the seller had one year to reconsider.

  4) All Jewish slaves were released, but not non-Jewish slaves.

  5) Jubilee occurred every 50 years beginning with the establishment of the Israeli nation, not with the sale of the land.

  6) The seller of farm land prorated the sale price according to the value of the number of harvests remaining until Jubilee.

  Now consider the historical context, as any good interpreter should. Banks did not exist. Poor people borrowed from the rich, who usually set interest rates very high. In most poor nations today farmers do not have access to bank credit at market rates and so must borrow from wealthy individuals who act like loan sharks. The interest rate is so high as to make it impossible to pay off the loan and the collateral required for the loan covers far more than the amount of the loan. The unscrupulous rich use such loans to steal land from poor farmers, as did the nobility in Israel under the rule of kings. That is the reason God prohibited usury in the Bible. He required loans to the poor to be made without interest. Competition among banks today keeps interest rates low and people borrow to invest in businesses or buy long term capital goods such as cars and houses. The prohibition of usury today would apply most closely to pay day loans to poor people.

  Usually, farmers would have to borrow money from the rich only in the event of a drought, during which they would obviously have no income. Keep in mind that God had promised the land would never have droughts as long as the people followed him. Droughts were one of God’s judgments against a rebellious people. For a farmer to be unable to repay a loan, some disaster must have happened as a result of rebellion against God by the nation and forced him to borrow money. Then more disaster happened so that he could not repay the loan. The farm would have served as collateral for the loan, but the lender would not get to keep the farm permanently. He could keep it only until Jubilee.

  So the sale of the land was a last resort for a poor farmer to repay his loans. The farmer did not escape from the loan, as Wallis and the supporters of Jubilee 2000 imagined. His sale of the farm land paid the loan. The lender kept the proceeds from the harvests until Jubilee then gave the land back to the farmer, as verses 25-26 prove: “Corresponding to the number of years after the Jubilee you shall buy from your friend; he is to sell to you according to the number of years of crops. In proportion to the extent of the years you shall increase its price and in proportion to the fewness of the years you shall diminish its price; for it is the number of crops he is selling to you.” [emphasis added] Jubilee was a celebration of the burning of the home mortgage, not the equivalent of modern bankruptcy in which the court frees the borrower of all his debt. The same was true of the seven year limit on slavery for Israelis. The period of enslavement, which was more like the Western practice of indentured servitude than slavery in the U.S. before the civil war, paid off the family’s debt, after which the family was free to leave.

  The prospect of an approaching Jubilee limited how much a lender could recoup from a farmer for a loan. For example, say ten years remained until Jubilee and the average harvest could be sold for say 2,000 shekels of silver. The lender would realize that he could collect no more in future harvests from the borrower than 20,000 shekels, assuming he would observe the prohibition of charging interest to the poor. In reality, Jubilee set an upper limit on the amount a money lender would loan to the poor and a limit on what the poor could borrow. With forty-nine years to go, a poor farmer could borrow far more than one with just five years lef
t to Jubilee. Jubilee did not remove the burden of debt from borrowers.

  What about improvement to the land a purchaser may have made during the intervening years? If those improvements defaulted to the original owner along with the land, Jubilee would discourage new owners from making any improvements and diminish the harvests. The Torah anticipated that problem and requires the original owner to compensate the interim owner who made the improvements for the remaining financial value, not the original cost of improvements.

  A closer inspection, Jubilee fails as a tool for wealth redistribution or reductions in income inequality. But a further problem afflicts those who insist it was: even in Moses’ day, farmers could not farm without significant investments in capital. The capital necessary for farming in a way that would allow the farmer to support a family included at least a pair of oxen, a yoke and a plow, seed and money to live on until the harvest. Even as late at AD 1600, those amounted to a significant investment for most farmers. Without charity, the farmer would have to borrow the funds to purchase that capital and begin the cycle of land sale followed by Jubilee again.

  God promised the Israelis that poverty would not exist among their brothers as long as they followed his laws because he guaranteed the rains necessary for good harvests and he would keep away the locusts. Farmers usually became poor because of droughts or plagues of locusts that destroyed crops as a result of God’s judgments. But God also knew that Israelis would rebel against him; Moses told them so in several places. So God provided means of recovery from poverty. If a farmer fell short of what he needed to feed his family or plant a crop he could borrow at no interest or sell a part of his land. A kinsman could help him by redeeming the land, or buying it back.