Justice for the Poor?

Social Justice in the Old Testament in Concept and Practice

Walter J. Houston

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781532646003
  9781532646010
• eBook ISBN:
  9781532646027
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

Can the Old Testament help us in keeping the excesses of capitalism in check? How can a book that goes on about "justice and righteousness," but says "there will always be poor people in the land" and accepts slavery have anything to say to us about social justice? Did kings of Israel draft their subjects--and which subjects--for forced labor? What does it mean when the Psalms say God is coming to judge the world? Is charity justice?--or is justice more than charity? Does Genesis give us the right to use the earth and its creatures as we like? These are some of the questions that Walter Houston asks, and tries to answer, in this book of essays from his work over the last twenty-five years.

Chapter 1

“Justice and Right”

Biblical Ethics and the Regulation of Capitalism

(2015)

Capitalism Regulated and Unregulated

It has long been recognized that the constant tendency of industrial capitalism, if unrestrained and unregulated, is to enable the enrichment of the capitalist through the impoverishment of those who provide labor to the enterprise. Marx thought that this would lead to a crisis for capitalism in that workers would be increasingly unable to afford the goods that they themselves had made. This has not happened for a number of reasons, among them being that capitalism has needed to operate restrained by the collective action of the workforce in their unions and regulated in a variety of directions by the power of the state. The capitalist system that outperformed the socialist economy of Eastern Europe between the Second World War and the fall of the Berlin Wall was far from a pure unmixed capitalism. Most advanced countries included an extensive public sector and a welfare system and had pay and conditions regulated by the state; however, they depended heavily on cheap imports produced by impoverished workers in the so-called Third World.

But modern globalized and increasingly unregulated capitalism has increased inequality dramatically both on the national and the global level. Absolute poverty has not necessarily grown worse (although in some places it has), it is rather that the relationships between people in different economic circumstances, different classes, and different countries have become more openly exploitative. It is difficult to be unaware that our pensions and our T-shirts are bought at the expense of poorly paid and poorly protected workers in other parts of the world; or that our offices are cleaned and our sandwiches sold by an army of underpaid part-time workers, many of them immigrants; and that many of their employers are hugely wealthy.

The question arises: what kind of regulation does this system demand? That depends on what the aims of the regulator are, whether to achieve greater efficiency, to eliminate fraud and corruption, to ease the alleged burden of red tape, or perhaps to encourage investment. The choice of such aims is an ethical choice. One of the mystifications thrown up on this subject is the pretense that such decisions are purely practical, and even unavoidable. Those of us of a certain age in the UK may remember TINA, “there is no alternative” to the neo-liberal reforms introduced under the Thatcher government; a rhetorical topos (also used more recently) that concealed the fact that policy-makers were choosing between alternatives, and doing so according to specific ethical beliefs. Policy choices can and should be assessed ethically.

The Old Testament as an Ethical Source

In this paper I shall describe one of the sources of Christian thought on social ethics, showing that it does have relevance to the issue of policy in a capitalist economy. That source is the Bible, and specifically the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible. I am not assuming that Christian thought is to be derived exclusively from the Bible, nor that everything found in the Bible on this subject is to be accepted. I am assuming at least that Christians will want to take much of it seriously, and also hoping that non-Christians will find it of interest and worthy of reflection. There are of course immense differences between the society and economy of ancient Israel and that of modern capitalist countries. In particular, nothing like modern capitalism existed: wealth was accumulated for conspicuous consumption and for storage, not normally for productive investment.1 For some, this puts the Bible entirely out of court as a serious source for ethics in the modern world. See, for example, Cyril Rodd’s Glimpses of a Strange Land, whose title sums up his view of Old Testament ethics. However, philosophers as well as theologians go on reading old texts and finding value in them. Consider, for example, Michael Sandel’s use of Aristotle in a popular work on justice.2 How is this possible?

J. W. Rogerson argues that “while many of the Bible’s precepts cannot be applied directly to today’s world . . . a process of moral discernment and action within them can be recognized.” This process of discernment, he suggests, is the example to be followed by modern readers, rather than the individual commands.3 For example, Deut 15:12–18, directing slaves to be released after six years, which interpreted literally might be thought of as authorizing the institution of slavery, exemplifies what Rogerson calls a “structure of grace,” that “allows graciousness and compassion to function in human relationship” and implicitly condemns slavery.4

Hans-Georg Gadamer offers his concept of the “merging of horizons.”5 The reading and understanding of a work of the past, especially if the reader stands in the same tradition, involves the reader in seeing the world within the horizon of that work, so that its horizon and the reader’s perspective merge. The value of this idea is that it enables an understanding of how readers naturally pick up ideas and carry them forward into their own horizon, by grasping what is the same within the two horizons in the midst of the obvious differences. In my own discussions of the issue, I have emphasized the ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: “Justice and Right”
• Chapter 2: “You Shall Open Your Hand to Your Needy Brother”
• Chapter 3: The King’s Preferential Option for the Poor
• Chapter 4: What’s Just about the Jubilee?
• Chapter 5: The Role of the Poor in Proverbs
• Chapter 6: Was There a Social Crisis in the Eighth Century?
• Chapter 7: Exit the Oppressed Peasant?
• Chapter 8: Corvée in the Kingdom of Israel
• Chapter 9: The Scribe and His Class
• Chapter 10: Doing Justice
• Chapter 11: The Psalms of YHWH’s Kingship
• Chapter 12: “To Share Your Bread with the Hungry”
• Chapter 13: Justice and Violence in the Priestly Utopia
• Bibliography