Social Justice and the Hebrew Bible, Volume Two

Gottwald

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781498292191
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

CONTENTSPART 1: THE ORIGINS OF ANCIENT ISRAELEarly Israel as an Anti-Imperial CommunityThe Origins of Israel as a TextualModels for Envisioning Early IsraelTriumphalist versus Anti-Triumphalist Versions of Early Israel: A Response to Articles by Lemche and DeverHistorical Description versus Historical Representation and SymbolThe Interplay of Religion and Ethnicity in Ancient IsraelProto-Globalization and Proto-Secularization in Ancient IsraelRevisiting the Tribes of Yahweh after Twenty-five YearsPART 2: THE POLITICS OF ANCIENT ISRAELReligion and Politics: Early Israel and JudaismThe Puzzling Politics of Ancient IsraelThe Role of Biblical Politics in Contextual TheologiesPART 3: REVIEW AND REFLECTIONSForward to Jeremy Young, The Violence of God and the War on TerrorReflections on R. S. Sugirtharajah's Asian Biblical Hermeneutics and Postcolonialism. Contesting the Interpretations and The Bible and the Third Way: Precolonial, Colonial and Postcolonial EncountersReview of Stephen L. Cook, The Social Roots of Biblical YahwismReview of Marty E. Stevens, Temples, Tithes, and Taxes: The Temple and the Economic Life of Ancient IsraelReview of Philip R. Davies, The Origins of Biblical IsraelPanel Presentation on Joshua A. Berman, Created Equal: How the Bible Broke with Ancient Political Thought

Part One

The Origins of Ancient Israel

1

Early Israel as an Anti-Imperial Community

Abstract

Israel emerged in opposition to the exploitative political economies of Egypt and Canaanite city-states. The exodus story serves as a metaphor for Israel’s anti-imperialism rather than an historically accurate recollection. Similarly, the conquest narrative metaphorically expresses Israel’s autonomy. Israel’s animosity toward central governments can be discerned in stories of bungling kings (e.g., Josh 2:1–4; Judg 1:5–7; 3:5–25), Jotham’s fable (Judg 9:7–15), and an Israelite peasant victory over Canaanite kings (Judges 4–5). Archaeological excavations indicate a local economy without large-scale production or surpluses transferred to a central power. The monarchy implemented the tribute economy of the empires, but Israel’s early communitarian ethos informed the prophetic critique of the monarchy and ultimately enabled the community to survive centuries of foreign domination and diaspora. Hermeneutically, the United States most resembles the major empires (e.g., Assyria), not Israel and Judah, while Cuba, Nicaragua, and West Bank Palestinians most resemble ancient Israel.

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Early Israel was born as an anti-imperial resistance movement that broke away from Egyptian and Canaanite domination and took the shape of a self-ruled community of free peasants. This often overlooked revolutionary origin of Israel is a story that can be told by spelling out the sharp contrast between the vaunted empires of antiquity and the sovereign tribal life of early Israel, characterized by its unrelenting determination to provide dignity and livelihood for all members of the community. So let the story unfold.

The Political Economy of Ancient Near Eastern Empires

Empires, ancient and modern, share the common feature of being systems of domination imposed parasitically on subject peoples. There are, however, major differences in the forms that empires have taken over time. The major distinction between ancient and modern empires is in the mode of production. Production in antiquity was pre-capitalist (or at most in some situations, proto-capitalist). The power system was bipolar: a powerful centralized state (such as Egypt, Assyria, and Babylonia) that dominated vast stretches of land made up largely of villages engaged in agriculture and animal breeding. These villages contained up to 98% of the populace. There was nothing approximating our notion of “a middle class.” Rich and poor lay “cheek by jowl” without any mediating buffer.

Empires were built as the more powerful states conquered other lands and imposed costly tribute in the form of precious metals, luxury goods, and agricultural produce. This tended to create a two-tier tributary system. For example, when the Assyrian emperors conquered the monarchies of Israel and Judah, they demanded tribute. Israelite monarchs were hard driven to raise the tribute. Since in an agrarian society the primary source of wealth was the peasantry, the recourse of kings was to increase the tax burden laid on their own subjects in order to cover both ongoing national expenses and the tribute due to the empire. Already hard-pressed peasants were abruptly required to yield tribute to two regimes, both their native rulers and the Assyrian overlord. This was “double taxation” with a vengeance.

A closer look at the socioeconomic disparities in these empires reveals a ruling class that drew its wealth from the labor products of peasants and herders, craftsmen and traders. This wealth funded a lavish lifestyle for the ruling class and its priests, scribes, and bureaucrats; provided for architectural investments in palaces, temples, fortifications, and other monuments; and at the same time mounted an army that could defend or expand the imperial conquests. A circle of merchants and absentee landlords, not technically a part of government, enjoyed state support and collaboration. To be a part of this ruling class establishment was to enjoy a comfortable and prosperous standard of living without the need to engage in any productive labor on behalf of society and to entertain no obligation to those they ruled other than to assure that their underlings were able to produce sufficient wealth to sustain them in their privilege.

Even in the necessity of maintaining a healthy peasant populace, ruling classes sometimes failed when their harsh rule drained the energy and morale of the populace, thereby contributing to the collapse of their regimes. As one reads Hosea, Jeremiah, and 2 Kings, it seems likely that the fall both of the northern and southern kingdoms (Israel and Judah alike) was facilitated in part by the exhaustion of its peoples, oppressed not only by the Neo-Assyrians and Neo-Babylonians, but by their own leadership.

The life circumstances of those outside the ruling establishment were separated from their masters by an immense gulf. To be sure, the state granted “use ownership” of the land to the peasants, but it retained entitlement to tax the villages, first in the form of payments in kind and second in the form of conscription of labor for public works or military service. Often the tax quota was laid on an entire village and the local officials had to raise the demanded amount. Internal corruption occurred when taxgatherers and village headmen took possession of goods and produce over and above the quota assigned them by the central government.

Many peasants, already living on the margin of subsistence in the semi-arid Near Eastern environment, were further impoverished and driven into debt by these harsh annual exactions. They had little choice but to take out loans at staggering interest rates offered by a moneylending class of merchants and absentee landlords. The debtor was obligated to pay back the value of the loan out of the forthcoming harvest, plus the “value added” interest. Repayment of loans depended on prosperous harvests, which often failed due to drought, floods, disease, and the ravages of warfare. Foreclosure on debts could force peasants into debt servitude, one-sided client relationships with their patron loan-givers, or outright loss of land that turned them into daylaborers or beggars. The claims that small cultivators might entertain against the wealthy loan sharks got little hearing in a court system rife with bribery.

The onerous taxes and the unjust loans combined to form a “double whammy” from which there was little hope of escape. The rulers of state and empire cared for their hard-working subjects only to the extent that they be kept alive to keep on laboring for “god and king.” Indeed, religion was the capstone in the authority system of ancient empires. Rulers served at the pleasure of the gods. Obedience to the gods necessitated obedience to rulers and their designated authority figures. The rationale for imperial domination was a religious rationale. Ideology, understood as the justification for power relationships, “explains” how and why “things are as they are.” The justification would run something like this, “You want to stay in good graces with the gods, to be delivered of disease and death? Pay heed! You will merit divine favor and protection only if you obey and serve the king and his minions, for it is they whom the gods have appointed as their agents on earth!” Indeed, in the Egyptian mode of religious ideology, the pharaoh was actually conceived as divine when representing the gods in ceremonial functions. In short, “sacrifices” to the gods called for their unquestioned counterpart in “sacrifices” to the power-holders.

Although those ancient conditions are not in all particulars precisely like those today, differing principally due to greatly advanced technology and the formal separation of politics and economics under capitalism, the political economies of many third world countries exhibit abusive and degrading features very much like those of the ancient tributary system. Just as ancient imperial regimes siphoned off the produce of distant peasant villages to support the lavish lifestyle and monuments of the court, so today’s multi-national conglomerates divert resources from small cultivators, artisans, and working people to the profits of agribusiness, energy, and finance corporations.

These glaring parallels between ancient and modern political economies help to explain why Bible readers in third world countries and among the working class in the west, are often much quicker to grasp the stark realities of biblical economics than those of us in more protected economic environments where inequities and hardships are masked and often denied. This also helps to explain why “uneducated” third world peasants and workers can grasp the claims of social and economic justice as advanced in Latin American, South African, and related liberation theologies. In stark contrast, these liberating theologies, palpable to the poor, continue to baffle a large number of first world intellectuals who put up an enormous resistance and denial to the state of economic and social suffering imposed by the wielders of wealth and power in today’s world.

For Jews and Christians who regularly read, teach, and preach the Hebrew Bible, the tributary political economy described above should be no surprise. Torah, prophets, psalms, and wisdom literature teem with the symptoms of economic destitution; suborning of the justice system; social, political, and even religious leaders indifferent to or complicit in the system of oppression. The Torah legislates against many socioeconomic injustices. The prophets castigate the country’s leaders for countenancing or participating in the rape of the rural populace. The psalms express the heartfelt pain of victims who find their only recourse in appeals to God. The wisdom literature bewails an unjust world in which power and status so often accrue to those who wrong others.

Despite all this textual evidence, it is a common strategy of Bible readers to view these ills as the personal failings of people that could be corrected if they individually had a change of heart. There is gross failure to recognize that deplorable injustices were deeply embedded in the very structure of the ancient Near Eastern political economy. These injustices often escape the eye of the Bible reader, the religious educator, and the preacher. It is sobering, for example, to realize that leaders of “strong” ancient Near Eastern states and empires were totally dependent for their very existence on oppressing their subjects. Since they produced no wealth of their own, these rulers could not have survived without sucking up the wealth of their populace.

Moreover, Bible readers often fail to consider the particular circumstances of political economies in ancient Israel, easily falling subject to mistaken readings of texts. For instance, the reading of Deuteronomy 15 is regularly perverted by highlighting “the poor will never cease out of the land” (v. 11) to the neglect of the accompanying dictum, “but there will be no poor among you” (v. 4). Far from justifying poverty as a virtual natural phenomenon, the text is clearly saying that there will always be people who fall into poverty, but they must be cared for by an open-handed and open-hearted community (vv. 7–10).

What tends to be overlooked by Bible readers is that the social, economic, political, and religious abuses relentlessly condemned in biblical texts are in large measure a byproduct of the tributary political economy in which Israelites over their long history fully participated once they adopted kingship under David and Solomon. Repeatedly subject to parasitic kings, landlords, and merchants in their midst and also to the incursions of empire from Assyria, Egypt, Babylonia, and Persia, it is remarkable that the utopian hope for a just society should have persisted among them. Given Israel’s immersion in tributary political economies, both native and foreign, it is indeed a marvel that so much of its literature is adamantly critical of the effects of the tributary system and hopeful of a liberative form of communal life.

Of course, it is obvious that strands of biblical literature are supportive of the tributary system, and even celebrate it, principally the texts that praise the just rule of kings, in sharp contrast to the dismal record of kingship recounted in the books of Kings. It is also probable ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Part One: The Origins of Ancient Israel
• Part Two: The Politics of Ancient Israel
• Part Three: Reviews and Reflections
• Acknowledgments