Biblical Equity
"You shall proclaim liberty throughout the land for all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you: each of you shall return to your holding.” - Leviticus 25:10
“Six years you will sow your field and six years you will prune your vineyard and gather in the yield. And in the seventh year the land shall have a Sabbath of complete rest, a Sabbath of God: you shall not sow your field or prune your vineyard. You shall not reap the aftergrowth of your harvest or gather the grapes of your untrimmed vines: it shall be a year of complete rest for the land. But you may eat whatever the land during its Sabbath will produce—you, your male and female slaves, the hired and bound laborers who live with you, and your cattle and the beasts in your land may eat all its yield. You shall count off seven weeks of years—seven times seven years—so that the period of seven weeks of years gives you a total of forty-nine years. Then you shall sound the horn loudly. In the seventh month, on the tenth day of the month—the Day of Atonement—you shall have the horn sounded throughout your land and you shall hallow the fiftieth year. You shall proclaim liberty throughout the land for all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you: each of you shall return to your holding and each of you shall return to your family.” - Leviticus 25:3-10
Equity seems of late to be a word written everywhere. It’s easy to find in the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” statements issued by many companies, schools and governments. Its meaning, however, is less clear. Is it “consistent and systematic fair, just, and impartial treatment of all individuals” or “when all groups” achieve an equal outcome?
There is a power in the word equity that derives from business ownership and its similarity to the word equality. Though the word’s persistent use as a weapon helps obscure its meaning, it conjures a feeling of solution to injustice – whether because the gap between the rich and the poor is too vast to be defensible, or because some have not enough while others have too much, and the cause for these discrepancies is at best opaque.
Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks once noted that it was the agricultural revolution that first allowed for the rigid, hierarchical societies that created the ziggurats of Mesopotamia and the pyramids of Egypt, the architecture of which expressed the then-new human idea that some were born or destined to a station dramatically higher than others. That past is less distant than we realize. No one, as John Kennedy once said, “can fully grasp how far and how fast we have come” in the intervening years. Perhaps this is why fights over access, property, resources and opportunity sit at the top of our politics, as does a romantic belief in a society uncorrupted by class division. The modern state’s attempts to level the human condition through things like unemployment insurance or social security are therefore at base an expression of a continuing collective struggle to live in a new and odd world where some have much while others have little.
It’s a concern shared by the Bible. This is usually found in prophetic exhortations to protect the widow and the orphan and rarely articulated as what could be thought of as modern economic policy. But in Leviticus 25:3-10 the text could not be more direct or explicit.
The basic premise: every seventh year economic activity – which in the time of the Bible meant agriculture - is to cease. Lands go untended, and the grapes, wheat and other crops that naturally grow can be eaten by anyone, not only the land owner, who is forbidden from harvesting them. Every fiftieth year – the year following a cycle of seven spans of seven years – the owner loses title even to the land itself, which must be redeemed and returned to its original owner.
About these rules, Adin Steinsaltz wrote,
“This would prevent a few rich and powerful individuals and families quickly amassing all the available real estate while reducing everyone else to a state of destitution. The Biblical law that in the Jubilee Year all land returns to its original owners serves as a barrier against the permanent division of society into classes.”
Though other ancient civilizations are known to have employed similar rules, it’s hard to know whether or not ancient Israel ever observed these commands to let land lie every seventh year and return to its original owner every fiftieth year. And it is easy as a modern to dismiss them as at best unrealistic, and think instead of our contemporary technocratic solutions as the only possible remedy to the problem of inequality.
Yet we would do well to see what this law preserves, as well as what it upends. For the dramatic reversals of the Sabbatical years are surrounded by six years when the accumulation of wealth is largely unchecked. And the Jubilee comes but twice a century, granting lifetimes to be lived when its consequences will be little felt.
The consequence? The prosperity generating mechanisms of the market are left almost wholly intact while the stratification of social class those same factors generate is regularly obliterated. The chance, hard work, laziness, good and bad luck, wisdom, or foolishness that catapults some to the top and others to the bottom of the economic order during non-Sabbatical years are upended often enough to keep alive both hope of a rebirth and the awareness of the possibility of a reversal for those who most need it. This ameliorates the social problems that develop in societies that allow class divisions to harden over generations, yet still unlocks the wealth created by free exchange that has in just the past two hundred years reduced poverty from the majority to the minority condition of humanity even while global population exploded. (By 2018 less than 10% of the world’s population lived in poverty outside of sub-Saharan Africa, where the proportion had been reduced to 37%. Everywhere today extreme poverty is tantalizingly close to elimination.)
It seems wildly unrealistic to consider the Biblical model as a template for modern government, if only because it has so little chance of becoming a reality. But this command was written in the book that tells the improbable story of a people who were saved from slavery to be formed into a nation capable of conquering a land, by a God who gave them that book to teach them to be a light for nations to teach them how their Creator wanted them to live. Whether it is Moses taken from the water, Jacob released by Esau, Joseph surviving slavery to become second only to Pharoah, Sarah having her first child in old age, or ancient Israel’s victory over Egypt at the sea, probability has little to do with it.
The Bible presents us all with a straightforward challenge posed as a question: will you do what is right however improbable the right is? Even when I show you the truth of My way? God continues to await our response.