Ideology, Class, and the Hebrew Bible

Gottwald

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781498290593
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

This brief volume brings together three of Norman Gottwald's classic essays that address issues of social class and ideology as they pertain to the interpretation of the biblical documents. The small format makes them useful for classroom and small-group use, providing definitions, theoretical concerns, and applications to specific texts. The author has been a leader in the social-scientific analysis of the Bible for almost fifty years.ContentsSocial Class as an Analytic and Hermeneutical Category in Biblical StudiesSocial Class and Ideology in Isaiah 40-55: An Eagletonian ReadingIdeology and Ideologies in Israelite Prophecy

1

Social Class as an Analytic and Hermeneutical Category in Biblical Studies

Abstract

Social classes exist whenever one social group is able to appropriate a part of the surplus labor product of other groups. During the two centuries before the rise of monarchy, Israel practiced a communitarian mode of production; during the monarchic period, shifting balances of power in the dominant elites meant that they exploited their subjects: both native and foreign rulers as well as domestic landholders and merchants. In the light of the above considerations, three groups of biblical texts are analyzed: narrative (1 Kings 11–12, the secession of the northern tribes; 2 Kings 22–23, the reform of Josiah), poetic speech (Isa 5:1–7, on the ruination of the vineyard; Deutero-Isaiah on the leadership of restored Judah, and the parables of Jesus).

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It has long been recognized that differentials in wealth and power figure prominently in biblical texts and traditions. Although the presence of the rich and the powerful within the Bible—shadowed by their poor and powerless counterparts—is widely noted and commented on, the formative dynamics and far-reaching effects of grossly unequal concentrations of wealth and power have seldom been conceptualized in a fashion empirical and systematic enough to yield sustained exegetical and hermeneutical insights.

This theoretical lag in analyzing and explaining wealth and power in the Bible follows from three sources that reinforce one another. The first is the traditional hegemony of religious and theological categories in biblical studies, which stubbornly resists sociology as a threat to the religious integrity and authority of Scripture. The second source is the controversy within the social sciences themselves over whether wealth and power should be understood principally along structural-functional or conflictual lines (Giddens and Held, eds. 1982). The third source is the embedment of biblical studies in a pervasive capitalist ethos that blunts or denies the existence of significant structural divisions in society. Together these factors discourage and inhibit efforts to understand wealth and power in the Bible as historically generated and reproduced phenomena. Extremes of wealth and power tend to make their appearance in biblical studies—as in popular opinion about contemporary society—as if they are given “facts of nature,” requiring no further explanation. The customary strategies are to view inequalities in wealth and power as the result either of random idiosyncratic personal differences of ability or industry, on the one hand, or the inordinate greed and moral corruption of particular individuals, on the other (DeMott 1992). The key analytic tool that could cut through our shallow positivism and moralism about wealth and power in biblical societies is the concept of social class.

What Is Social Class?

In my judgment, the most illuminating way to understand wealth and power in the Bible—as in all societies—is to understand the relation of groups of people to the process of production of basic goods, which generates and replenishes human society in the perpetual flow of daily life. Social classes may be said to exist whenever one social group is able to appropriate a part of the surplus labor product of other groups. In such a situation of exploitation, wealth and power accrue disproportionately to those who are able to claim and dispose of what others produce. Those who have this power of economic disposal tend also to have political predominance and ideological hegemony.

On this understanding, it is to be emphasized that social class is a dynamic relational term. Social production brings people together and, amid their interaction, the criterion that establishes the presence of social class is whether or not there are those who can dispose of the production of others de jure or de facto. At base, then, when class is operative there are two classes conjoined in distinctive ways that are mutually conditioning: the exploiters and the exploited, the dominators and the dominated, the ideologically superior and the ideologically inferior. In practice, however, the exploiters and the exploited are usually diversified in sub-classes or class fractions, chiefly according to the degree and manner in which surplus labor value is extracted and distributed in the society. Sub-class differentiation among exploiters and exploited may produce all manner of political coalitions and ideological alignments from situation to situation. Classes are less to be thought of as strata laid down in layers, one on top of the other, than as contending forces in a common field of ever-shifting action seeking to secure their vital interests as they understand them, the dominant class clearly being “one up” in its command over surplus labor value, political power, and ideological supremacy.

The degree to which people in similar or related positions relative to production are conscious of their commonality and pursue joint action differs markedly from society to society and over time within any single society. Classes may be more or less economically, politically, or ideologically active on their own behalf. Action based on common interests may enlist few, many, or most members of a class. The goals pursued may be narrower or broader. The important thing in class analysis is to look for how the social relations of production create groups who participate differentially in goods, services, and ideas, and then to examine how they interact in maintaining and advancing their interests. In short, always to ask some version of Gerhard Lenski’s deceptively simple-looking question, “Who Gets What and Why?” (Lenski 1966; title of chapter 1). This kind of analysis, while conceptually applicable to all class societies, yields diverse configurations over space and time, no two of which are exactly alike. Consequently, social class analysis is eminently compatible with historical methodology that respects change and variety in the human story.1

Social Class in Biblical Societies

What then are the social classes disclosed in the Bible, and how does a recognition of these classes contribute to literary and historical exegesis?

The productive processes that generate wealth and power in the biblical world centered on land and were precapitalist. The vast majority of people produced food and other life necessities from the earth, working in household or village teams. Since technology and transport were not sufficiently developed to create a large consumer market for manufactured goods, the route to concentrating wealth and power in such circumstances was to gain control over agrarian and pastoral products, which the appropriators could themselves consume or assign to retainers at their discretion or convert into other valuables through trade and acquisition of land. This had been achieved in the ancient Near East by the so-called dawn of civilization, distinguished by the emergence of strong centralized states that siphoned off agrarian and pastoral surpluses through taxation, spawned landholding and merchant groups who profited from peasant indebtedness and high-level international trade, and engaged in warfare and conquest of neighboring lands.

This has been called a Tributary Mode of Production (hereafter TMP) in that, while leaving the work relations of the great majority of people largely unchanged, it laid heavy tribute on the fruits of their labor (Amin 1980:46–70).2 Developments in the western Mediterranean and Aegean areas appear to have been broadly similar to those in the immediate biblical world, although by Greco-Roman times slave labor began to produce the critical mass of surplus labor value. Nonetheless, tributary relations of production imposed on the agrarian multitudes continued among much of the populace dominated by Rome, since in the long run slave production did not prove successful in agriculture. Private ownership of immovable property was also legally enshrined in the classical world on a scale and with a rigor unfamiliar to the ancient Near East, but it appears that, even under Roman rule, Jewish Palestine continued to follow the traditional pattern of customary use holdings that could be lost over time through indebtedness.

The social classes visible in biblical societies may be phrased in such a way as to take account of Israel’s history in all periods, within which we can identify shifts in the class configurations that were integral to changing economic, political, and ideological developments.3

A Synchronic Social Class Typology

On the one hand, the dominant tribute-imposing class consisted of the political elite—native and/or foreign—and their administrative, religious, and military retainers, together with the landholding, merchant, and small manufacturing elites who benefited from state power. All these subsections of the dominant class extracted—or attempted to extract—surplus from the mass of agrarian and pastoral producers, as well as other smaller occupational groups (named below). This extraction of surplus was accomplished by a variety of mechanisms, including imperial tribute, domestic taxation, commercial imposts, corvée, slave labor, rent, or debt servicing.

On the other hand, the dominated tribute-bearing class consisted of peasants, pastoralists, artisans, priests, slaves, and unskilled workers—all those who did not draw surplus from any other workers but who were structurally subject to their own surplus being taken by members of the dominant class, or who were themselves dependent wage laborers.

Weakness in the dominant class, coupled with resistance or avoidance strategies by the dominated, could reduce the intensity of the exploitation and even, on rare occasions, open up a brief period of relief from all—or most—surplus extraction. Normally this temporary relief was no more than a precarious transition between the fall of one group of exploiters and the rise of another. The peculiarity of earliest Israel is that it enjoyed the longest stretch of tribute-free communal life known to us from any ancient Near Eastern sources.

Diachronic Social Class Developments

Communitarian mode of production. In pre-state Israel we meet the anomaly of a period of about two centuries when the grip of Canaanite city-state tributary control over the mountainous hinterland was broken and the previously dominated agrarian and pastoral populace was largely free of surplus extraction. The primary productive units were extended or multifamily households, linked in lineages or protective associations and in tribes. In these farming-herding households, which in some cases included indebted or indentured servants and resident aliens, men and women divided certain tasks and shared others. All members of the household enjoyed the fruit of their arduous collective labor. There remain still unresolved questions about the status and extent of indebted laborers and about the role of chiefs in this society, and exactly how to conceptualize them in relation to class.4

In contrast to the Tributary Mode of Production, we might appropriately say that tribal Israel practiced a Household Mode of Production. I prefer, however, to speak of a Communitarian Mode of Production (hereafter CMP), because the success of this tribute-free venture hinged on broad alliances among free producers, formed at the intertribal level, to defend themselves militarily and to grant communally legitimated use holdings to the respective households who assisted one another in aspects of agrarian labor and in the granting of aid to households in need. This was a very particular kind of equality among households, not to be confused with strict equivalence in family organization, size of holdings, or amount of production, and, in particular, not to be understood along the lines of modern individualistic notions of egalitarianism developed since the French Revolution and predicated on doctrines of inalienable human rights. Thus, all attempts to evaluate this Communitarian Mode of Production by modern egalitarian criteria, whether of democracy, anarchism, socialism, or feminism, will inevitably falsify the historically specific situation of early Israel,5 whereas anthropological analogies of confederated pre-state societies offer more illuminating comparison. Nonetheless, on balance, the CMP p...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Social Class as an Analytic and Hermeneutical Category in Biblical Studies
• Chapter 2: Social Class and Ideology in Isaiah 40–55
• Chapter 3: Ideology and Ideologies in Israelite Prophecy