Morality & Money
What can the '7th Year Jubilee' & other ancient rules teach us?
PART 3 OF A SERIES
By David Jones
As Polonius told his son in Hamlet, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” Shakespeare had a finely tuned sensibility toward Biblical morality which he embedded in his plays, although it is not always appreciated by modern literary critics. Perhaps this explains why most people do not remember what else Polonius said.
“For loan oft loses both itself and friend, and borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.”
A modern translation: When you lend money, you often lose friends. When you borrow money, you often lose your will to keep on keeping on.
Enshrined in Mosaic law, and regulating Jewish economic life for centuries afterward, were prohibitions against usury, the lending of money at interest. In today’s terms we tend to think of usury (if we think of it at all) as “exorbitant” interest. Not the children of Israel. It was a violation of the moral code if you sought any interest from a loan to another citizen of Israel.
The laws of ancient Israel were enlightened - in the truest sense of the Word - in the way the laws protected the future prosperity of citizens. Not only were there prohibitions on charging interest, there was a time limit declared on holding a man to his debt. The mechanism in which this was to be done was called the “Seventh Year Jubilee.” Detailed in the Book of Leviticus, 25th chapter, let’s see some of its provisions:
1) A year of rest for the land. “The Lord said to Moses on Mount Sinai, “Speak to the Israelites and tell them: When you enter the land that I am giving you, let the land, too, keep a Sabbath for the Lord. For six years you may sow your field, and for six years prune your vineyard, gathering in their produce. But during the seventh year the land shall have a complete rest, a Sabbath for the Lord, when you may neither show your field nor prune your vineyard.”
2) Farm land sold by an Israelite eventually must be returned to its original keeper. “When one of your countrymen is reduced to poverty and has to sell some of his property, his closest relative, who has the right to redeem it, may go and buy back what his kinsman has sold. If, however, the man has no relative to redeem his land, but later on acquires sufficient means to buy it back in his own name, he shall make a deduction from the price in proportion to the number of years since the sale, and then pay back the balance to the one to whom he sold it, so that he may thus regain his property.”
But what is decreed next is unparalleled in ancient social justice doctrine.
“But if he does not acquire sufficient means to buy back his land, what he has sold shall remain in the possession of the purchaser until the Jubilee, when it must be released and returned to its original owner.”
The same rule applied to homes in villages that had no walls. These were considered to be connected to the surrounding farmland, thus the requirement for restitution in the jubilee prevailed. However, residences in “walled cities” were exempt from the restoration requirement. (An analysis of this rule could require its own article.)
3) God required compassion and justice toward one’s fellow citizens.
“When one of your fellow countrymen is reduced to poverty and is unable to hold out beside you, extend to him the privileges of an alien or a tenant, so that he may continue to live with you. Do not exact interest from your countryman either in money or in kind, but out of fear of God let him live with you. You are to lend him neither money at interest nor food at profit.”
The explanation is that in becoming God’s chosen people, they now lived in a special covenant relationship with Him and one another. This gave them special privileges and responsibilities.
You could hire a countryman to work for you, but you could not enslave them, for as God explained, “Since those whom I brought out of the land of Egypt are servants of mine, they shall not be sold as slaves to any man. Do not lord I over them harshly, but stand in fear of your God.”
If a child of Israel was forced into slavery by a non-Israelite, it was the duty of his kinsmen to see that he was “bought back.” For as the last sentence in chapter 25 clearly states, “For to me the Israelites belong as servants; they are
servants of mine, because I brought them out of the land of Egypt, I, the LORD, your God.
Modern readers of the scriptures might
think it strange that it was okay for Israelites to take as slaves those who were Gentiles. It was part of the unfolding of a divine plan in which God’s laws of social justice and covenant family would be expanded to the rest of the
human race, as per the promises to the patriarch Abraham.
But first the children of Israel had to learn that ignoring the rules of worship and justice would bring about the discipline of separation and suffering. Thus we saw the rejection of the time of the judges, the coming of the earthly kingdom and its fracturing in just a few short years; the strife between kinsmen of Israel and Judah, the worshipping of idols and the evil sacrifices to demonic gods, the profanation of the Temple and the eventual destruction of both Israel and Judah, the Israelites scattered and in exile.
Eventually the people would be restored to the land but the keeping of the laws were not as diligently pursued, the prohibitions became less strict and the less religious and scrupulous devised new techniques to get around the bothersome land and money regulations handed down by God.
Thus, for instance, we see the rise in “money-changers” who found creative ways to use “exchange rates” between Roman coin and Temple coin to enhance profits. (This practice led to another dramatic moment in literature, as Jesus drives the money-changers out of the Temple declaring that they had turned His Father’s house into an outdoor market. Some translations include the phrase “a den of thieves.”)
Jesus came to restore God’s covenant with humankind, to write God’s laws “on our hearts” instead of on stone tablets. Through Christ’s suffering, death and resurrection every member of the human race is offered the Kingdom of Heaven, the acceptance of which requires acknowledgement and a change of heart in the here and now. Acceptance of membership in this new family, this Church that Jesus speaks of, means that we give up the freedom to continue in sin, but happily agree to become the dedicated servants of the Living God.
This means that I shall love the Lord, my God, with all my heart, and all my soul, and all my might, and I shall love my neighbor as myself. It means to love my enemies and do good to those who persecute me. It means to turn the other cheek, hand over the extra coat to another who has none, and to be prepared to meet Jesus in the lives of all those less fortunate than myself.
(And Jesus reminds us, in the 25th chapter of Matthew, that none of these requirements is optional).
It is at this transition point where we will return to our original narrative.
In previous articles we have discussed how citizens in our modern civilization are manipulated into disobeying God’s laws because of the desire for material goods, especially the violation of the commandment to keep the Sabbath holy. We also discussed how the concept of slavery has evolved so that we might not recognize it when the product of our toil - most of us call it our income - is wholly owned and controlled by someone else.
We promised you some specifics on debt slavery.
Are you a debt slave?
Do you have more house than you can pay for? (Translated: Are your mortgage payments taking so much of your monthly income that you have no margin for error when it comes to such things as car breakdowns, emergency medical bills, or any other unforeseen expense?)
Did you finance your home with an Adjustable Rate Mortgage or with one of the new “interest only” options?
Do you have a second (or even a third) mortgage on your home?
Do you have more than a couple of credit cards, and are they at or near their maximum?
Do you switch credit card companies
frequently so that you can transfer balances in order to avoid “paying the piper”?
Do you usually make the minimum payments due on your credit cards, or not much more than that?
Do you replace your automobiles within three years of purchasing them new, always with financing?
If you answer “yes” to even just two or more of these questions you can consider yourself a slave to debt.
If it’s any comfort - and it should not be - you are not alone. Millions of people, perhaps even most Americans, find themselves in the same predicament. As we enter 2006, with prices of all necessary commodities like energy, housing and food rising, and incomes disproportionately lagging behind, the issue of debt slavery is taking on serious new overtones.
Consider that for the calendar year 2005, somewhere between 27 percent and 50 percent of all mortgages that originated in the United States were “interest only.”
An “interest only” mortgage is one in which the purchaser agrees to pay only the interest on a mortgage loan for a set period of time, usually 3-, 5- or 10-years. At that point the payments are adjusted upward to allow reduction of principle. But this means the buyer builds no equity during this initial period other than that which might be produced by a rising real estate market. (The property could become more valuable than the loan.)
Apparently many Americans have been lured by the combination of lower payments and the prospect of letting the market help “adjust” the mortgage with a refinance somewhere down the road. It’s all highly speculative and poses no small danger to the purchaser and the lender.
One danger is that many analysts believe that the United States is somewhere near the end of a real estate “bubble” in which housing prices, inflated far beyond their real value, will start to come down. Some in the real estate and lending industries scoff at the notion, but historically there are precedents for housing booms that go bust. Just ask anyone who lived in Oklahoma and Texas after the oil-bust of the 1980s. There were many homes whose values declined, and many a savings and loan (S&L) found that it had “bad paper” on its hands. Many S&Ls went broke too, partly for this reason. Yet these loans were mostly the safe, traditional fixed-rate mortgages.
There is nothing conservative or secure about interest-only products, and what protections exist benefit the lender, not the borrower. The lending institution holds all the cards. You, the purchaser, have just agreed to part with a portion of your productive wages for a period of time with absolutely no guarantee of gain. You are gambling everything on a rising market. If the market tumbles, or interest rates rise, you may be left with less than nothing.
Less than nothing is not surplus. It is not profit. It is a greater debt. This is unwise from a worldly standpoint. It is even more unwise from a spiritual standpoint.
Consider how you would answer these questions:
Does your financial status discourage you from contributing as much time, talent and treasure as you would like to your church or to charities you favor?
Have you ever had a relative or a close friend who was having serious financial trouble, and you were unable to help?
Do you believe that the way in which you handle your financial life provides a shining example of economic and social justice to your family members and friends, especially to your children?
These are tough questions if you are honest with yourself. and that includes all of us. Most of us fail to live up to our Christian obligations as children of the new covenant with God. That does not mean that we should not try.
In our final installment, we will take a look ahead to see why now might be the best time possible to do something about the way we live our financial lives, in order to improve our spirituality.
FOR EXTRA CREDIT: READING ASSIGNMENT -- U.S. consumers reeling from higher debt burden!
