The Bible and the 'Holy Poor'

From the Tanakh to Les Misérables

David Aberbach

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351369800
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

The Hebrew Bible is the main legislative and literary influence on European Poor Law and on literature on poverty and the poor. No extant literature from the ancient world placed more importance upon social welfare and the duty of the better-off toward the poor. It is the founding text for liberation movements.

This book assesses why the Bible is so unambiguously positive in its view of the poor, unlike most later literary and legislative works. It seeks to understand what historical circumstances brought about this elevated perception of the poor, by exploring the clash of ideals and realities in the depiction of the poor in the Hebrew Bible and in European culture. Most legal and literary portrayals of the poor tend to be critical, associating the poor with laziness, crime or fraud: why is this not the case in the Bible? Most societies have tended to accept poverty as a natural condition, but not the Bible. The idea of ending poverty starts in the Bible – the Psalms above all inspired a daily struggle to limit the gap between rich and poor. Much of the Bible sees life - most unusually in the history of civilizations - through the eyes of the poor. The book argues that the popular appeal of the Bible in largely impoverished societies lies in its persistent relevance to, and support of, the poor. Yet, in many ways, biblical teachings were incompatible with social and political circumstances centuries and millennia later.

Written in a clear, accessible style, the book shows how the Hebrew Bible, in its legislation and impassioned prophetic poetry, inspired the battle to 'make poverty history', to give dignity and hope to the poor and fight inequality. It will appeal to students and scholars of Jewish Studies, the Bible and Comparative Literature, and Development Studies.

1 Biblical law and the poor

Biblical laws on the poor are simple and clear, evidently the fruit of centuries of harsh experience: good governance above all, based on justice, with kindness and good-neighborliness on the local level; observance of the agricultural laws (Leviticus 19:9–10, Deuteronomy 14:28–15:11), tithes and charity, the Sabbath, Shemitah – i.e. abstinence from working the land on the seventh year, ‘that the poor of the people may eat’ (Exodus 23: 10–11),¹ the produce being left to the poor; and the Yovel (Jubilee), every fiftieth year (the seventh seventh year) when slaves were freed, debts were waived, and land reverted to its original owner (Leviticus 25: 39f.). The laws never changed, for they were sanctified by divine authority and their inclusion in Holy Scripture. Yet, the stress in the Bible of a long history of chronic transgressions of the nominally monotheist kingdoms, does not arouse confidence that the laws were uniformly and consistently observed.² Defeat and exile are often blamed on injustices perpetrated against the poor.³

The Bible in the vernacular provided models of directness and clarity of expression among the working classes.⁴ Once the common people could read the Bible in their own speech, they could see for themselves that the Bible, unlike much Poor Law, was on their side. There were particular laws and customs, relating to tithes and agriculture, which directly affected them. In England, for example, ‘Old Testament precedent had much to do with the adoption of tithes. By the end of the seventh century a tenth of the corn produce was regarded as a reasonable contribution to the Church’.⁵ By the time of Ethelred (late 10th–early 11th century), prior to the Norman conquest, there was a clear division in the distribution of the tithe: a third each for the ministry, for repairs, and for the poor.⁶ A Christian society was to be judged ideally by its compassion and care for the poor and downtrodden, the widow, orphan and stranger. Biblical laws on the poor transformed the sense of being outcast into universal sympathy: the orphan would feel less vulnerable, the widow less grief, the stranger less of an alien; and all would worry less about going to bed hungry.

The Bible aims to deliver the poor from the worst of their miseries through a fourfold defence: 1) in general, personal almsgiving, and kindness to those in need; 2) in rural areas, rights on produce in local fields; 3) on the national level, protection of the poor by the Temple priesthood in Jerusalem, who received a tenth of the produce and distributed from that to the poor; 4) on a universal level, the poor had an essential place in the morality of obedience to divine will, not just in law but as a behavioral extension of the natural world in which poetic metaphor is presented as the literal truth of a world permeated with the divine: the sun shines with righteousness, the earth is fertile with truth, rivers flow with justice, and seas thunder with the might of divine law.⁷ In such a world, it is a sin to regard the poor as an excrescence, rather, as the embodiment of human weakness and need for God’s blessings. To love God is to love God’s creations – including the poor. Human charity is the faint shadow of imitatio dei alongside the mighty divine charity of life. Or, as Marina, the old nurse in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, puts it: ‘We’re all spongers. We all live off God.’

Among key passages illustrating these principles, laws and customs that influenced Christian and Muslim views of charity, are the following:

When you reap, do not cut the corner of your field, nor gather the ears of corn which drop at the time of reaping. Do not pick the leftover grapes, nor gather the grapes which fall at picking-time. Leave them for the poor and the stranger.

(Leviticus 19: 9–10)⁸

If your brother becomes poor, you must support him as though he were a stranger or settler, and allow him to live with you. Take no interest from him, and you will fear the Lord, and your brother will live with you … If your brother becomes poor and is sold to you as a slave, you must let him go at the Jubilee.

(Leviticus 25: 35f.)⁹

Every three years you should pile one tenth of your harvest by the gate. And the Levite, as he has no land, and the stranger, and the orphan, and the widow shall come and eat and be satisfied … After six years, creditors must write off debts … there shall be no needy person among you … you must not be hard-hearted and tight-fisted, but lend your poor brother what he needs. Don’t let the mean thought cross your mind that the seventh year is near, don’t be stingy; you must not give your brother nothing. He will cry against you to God, and you will have a sin.¹⁰ You must give him, and don’t feel bad when you do because God will bless you in everything you do. For the poor shall never cease from the land.¹¹ Therefore I command you: open your hand to your brother, to your poor in your land.

(Deuteronomy 14: 28–15: 11)¹²

Six years plant seeds and gather the produce and on the seventh year leave the land alone for the poor to eat the produce thereof …

(Exodus 23: 10–11)¹³

No man may take millstones as a pledge, for he takes the man’s source of livelihood … When you lend something to your fellow man you must not enter his house to take his pledge. You must stand outside and the man will fetch the pledge out to you. And if he is poor and gives his garment as a pledge, you must not keep the garment overnight. You must return the garment before sunset so that he can sleep in it, and he will bless you, and it will be righteousness (tzedakah) before the Lord your God.

(Deuteronomy 24:6, 10–13)¹⁴

Familiarity with biblical laws on the poor could be assumed among writers until the modern age. In Shakespeare’s As You Like It, which dates from the same time as the English Poor Law of 1598, the shepherd Silvius expresses his love for the shepherdess Phebe in agricultural imagery of poverty and gleaning, echoing biblical poor law:

So holy and so perfect is my love,

And I in such a poverty of grace,

That I shall think it a most plenteous crop

To glean the broken ears after the man

That the main harvest reaps. Loose now and then

A scatt’red smile, and that I’ll live upon.

III v 99–104

Shakespeare, his roots in the settled rural world of Warwickshire, evidently knew the biblical law that farmers must leave the poor and the stranger the corners of their fields and the ears of corn which drop at reaping as well as grapes left on the vine or fallen at picking-time (Leviticus Ch. 19): Phebe’s smiles are a ‘plenteous crop’ gleaned by Silvius in his love for her. Many in Shakespeare’s first audiences in the 1590s would have known this biblical law; some, having lived in the countryside where famine was frequent, might even have been its beneficiaries. Biblical sympathy for the poor penetrated very deep into Western literature. Shakespeare communicates this sympathy in King Lear, where the former king rejected by his daughters is reduced to the conditions of a beggar huddling exposed at night on a stormy heath; and he recognizes for the first time how vulnerable his subjects are: ‘I have ta’en too little care of this!’ Wordsworth follows Shakespeare in his Bible-based feeling for the poor: ‘the extremes of poverty and riches have a necessary tendency to corrupt the human heart’.¹⁵ In his autobiographical poem, The Prelude, begun at a time of increasing poverty in England, Wordsworth describes his visit to France in 1792 where he passed a cold and hungry child on the road. To undo such injustice the Revolution was necessary, and at this moment he felt:

That a benignant spirit was abroad

Which might not be withstood, that poverty

Abject as this would in a little time

Be found no more, that we should see the earth

Unthwarted in her wish to recompense

The meek, the lowly, patient child of toil … ¹⁶

Keats, in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, written a decade and a half before the New Poor Law of 1834, alludes to the scene in the book of Ruth in which the poor are allowed to glean in the fields. He could still count on his readers, living at the last moment before industry overtook agriculture, to know what he heard in the song of the nightingale:

that found a path

Through the sad heart of Ruth, when sick for home,

She stood in tears amid the alien corn.

For centuries, the biblical spirit persisted in traditional attitudes toward the poor, as the historian Dorothy Marshall wrote: ‘Most farmers allowed poor women to glean in the fields once the crop had been carried. It was a custom as old as the story of Naomi and Ruth’.¹⁷

Notes

1 The Shemitah was analogous to the Sabbath, itself a memorial to the creation of the world, when God rested on the seventh day (see Chapter 8, note 13). This belief had the practical benefit of letting the poor, especially slaves, rest from their labor and eat freely from the produce of the seventh year. Maltreatment of the poor results from failure to observe the commandments relating to the Sabbath and the seventh year, which is among reasons for exile (Leviticus 26: 34–5, 43; Jeremiah 17: 27; Ezekiel 20: 12f.; II Chronicles 36: 31). Though the practices of Shemitah and the Yovel (Jubilee) have lapsed, the Sabbath has proved enduring as the pyramids. During the French Revolution, the government tried and failed to institute a day of rest of one in ten days; and the Soviet Union, similarly committed to a secular atheist ideology, tried and failed to create a seven-day work week after the 1917 Revolution.

2 For evidence in the Bible of failure to keep biblical laws, see Chapter 5.

3 On the immoral behavior and punishment of the rich, leading to national calamity, see, for example, Isaiah 5: 8–9; Jeremiah 5: 27–9; Micah 2: 2; 3: 2–3. Still, in moments of defeat and exile – in the late 8th century BCE and the early 6th century BCE – which the prophets interpret as punishment for national sin, rich and poor alike are accused of collective guilt (e.g. Isaiah 9: 16; Jeremiah 5: 3–5; 6: 13). Even taken as an exaggeration, the prophetic denunciation of a people steeped in idolatry, in every town, under every tree (Jeremiah 2: 20, 28), must have been directed mostly against the poor; yet the poor as a class are not blamed, whereas the rich are blamed, as is the nation as a whole. For an attempt to explain why, see the end of this book.

4 Orwell, in ‘Politics and the English Language’ (1945), uses the King James translation of the Hebrew Bible as a model to illustrate the difference between good and bad English.

5 Loyn (1986: 255).

6 Ibid., 256.

7 Malachi (3: 20), Psalms (85: 12; 93: 4–5), Amos (5: 24).

8 The poor and the stranger are allowed to eat in the vineyard and field, but they must not carry away grapes in a container, or cut the corn with a sickle (Leviticus 23: 26). This law is unusual in the Bible in suggesting that the poor might behave inconsiderately; yet no example is given of the abuse of any of the laws regarding the poor.

9 The ‘great Jubilee’, in which bond-servants and debt-slaves were freed and land and houses previously sold were returned to their original owners, is a recurrent motif in English religious history (Hill 1993: 66–7).

10 In the Midrash, this passage (Deuteronomy 15: 9) is taken to mean that Israel’s oppression by the gentiles will be avenged by the poor (Leviticus Rabbah 34), an interpretation with no biblical authority.

11 The idea that poverty is unceasing, implying acceptance, in Deuteronomy 15: 11, is quoted in the Gospels (Matthew 26: 11, John 12: 8). The contrad...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Biblical law and the poor
• 2. Inequality and the Bible
• 3. The Bible and the poor
• 4. The Bible and European Poor Law
• 5. How closely were laws on the poor observed in the biblical age?
• 6. Subversion of the social order in the Hebrew Bible
• 7. The Bible and poverty: a contrast with ancient Greece and Rome
• 8. The Bible, the poor and Christian Europe
• 9. Ancient prophets, modern economists
• 10. The superior status of the poor in the Hebrew Bible
• 11. The decline of the ‘holy poor’ in Rabbinic Judaism
• 12. The Bible and Christian views of the poor
• 13. The 16th-century turn against the ‘Apostolic Poor’
• 14. Vernacular Scripture, the Reformation and the poor
• 15. The Bible and literary compassion for the poor
• 16. On the ‘false’ poor
• 17. Mendele and the damned poor
• 18. Why are there no deceitful poor in the Bible?
• Bibliography
• Index