Inheritance and Dominion: An Economic Commentary on Deuteronomy

About the Author Gary North is the author of over 40 books. He is the founder of the Institute for Christian Economics. His books have been translated into Russian, Spanish, and Korean. His favorite reply to his critics is, “You can’t beat something with nothing.”

One Generation Cannot Complete the Kingdom of God

Inheritance and Dominion

his statement is obvious. The Church of Jesus Christ has been laboring for almost two thousand years to extend the kingdom of God in history. Today’s Church is the heir of all the efforts, miracles, and legacies that have preceded it. Each generation inherits something from the previous generations. Each generation leaves a legacy to the next. Generation by generation, God’s kingdom is extended by His Church. The basis of this improvement and growth over time is inheritance. Today’s generation of Christians is heir to all the accumulated legacies of past generations. There is succession in history—succession by covenant. Know therefore that the LORD thy God, he is God, the faithful God, which keepeth covenant and mercy with them that love him and keep his commandments to a thousand generations; And repayeth them that hate him to their face, to destroy them: he will not be slack to him that hateth him, he will repay him to his face. Thou shalt therefore keep the commandments, and the statutes, and the judgments, which I command thee this day, to do them. (Deuteronomy 7:9-11)

an economic commentary on Deuteronomy

The Book of Deuteronomy is the fifth book of the five books of Moses, which we call the Pentateuch. It is the book of inheritance. Moses read the law of God to the generation that would inherit the land of Canaan, the fourth generation of the Israelites’ sojourn in Egypt, just as God had promised Abraham (Genesis 15:16). Then, under Joshua, the men of the fourth generation were circumcised, after they had come into the Promised Land (Joshua 5:7). On this judicial basis, they inherited the land. The Pentateuch is structured in terms of the five-point covenant model: transcendence (God the Creator), hierarchy (God the Liberator), ethics (God the Law-Giver), oath (God the Sanctions-Bringer), and succession (God the Deliverer). The Book of Deuteronomy, like the Book of Exodus and the Book of Leviticus, is also structured by this five-point model. Deuteronomy is the book of Israel’s inheritance. Israel’s covenantal succession from Abraham to Joshua was confirmed historically by God through the defeat of the Canaanites in the Book of Joshua. But Moses formally passed on this inheritance before he died. Deuteronomy is Moses’ recapitulation of the law. By means of their adherence to God’s law, he said, the Israelites could maintain the kingdom grant established by God with Abraham. But they would lose their landed inheritance through disobedience, to be restored only after a period of captivity in a foreign land (Deut. 30:1-5). Deuteronomy’s message is clear: grace precedes law, but God’s revealed law is the basis of maintaining the kingdom grant. Transgress this law, and the expansion of God’s kingdom in history will suffer a setback for one or more generations. The kingdom inheritance is reduced by God’s negative sanctions in history (Deut. 28:15-66). But this inheritance is never permanently lost. It compounds over time. The compounding process—growth—is the basis of the triumph of the kingdom in history.

and Dominion

not want to surrender power.The second group does not want to abandon the fruits of the intellectual, emotional, and economic investment it made by accepting the methodology and most of the conclusions of humanistic higher education. This commentary series challenges the legitimacy of the corrupt bargain made between humanistcertified Christian scholars and those who certified them: the surrender of education, and therefore everything the humanist academy claims to speak to authoritatively, to those who say that the God of the Bible and His revelation are irrelevant to formal education. Christian scholars, in their professional work, have preferred to bow to the god of the academy rather than bow to the law of God. This has been going on from the day that philosophical defenders of the Christian faith first invoked Greek philosophy as the basis of their defense. In short, it is an ancient tradition. It is time to call a halt to it. Because this is an economic commentary, it is narrowly focused.The entire series on the Pentateuch was designed from the beginning as a model for other academic disciplines in the social sciences. The Bible speaks to the fundamental issues of every generation, and it speaks specifically. Every academic discipline must be restructured in terms of the Bible. This project demonstrates that such a reconstruction is possible.

North

and Dominion an economic commentary on Deuteronomy

Gary North

completes Gary North’s economic commentary on the Pentateuch, which he began writing in 1973. This seven-volume set lays the exegetical groundwork for the development of an explicitly biblical economics, which must begin with the doctrine of the covenant—specifically, the covenant’s five-point structure. The Book of Deuteronomy is an unknown book among Christians in the pews. Deuteronomy is not read today.There is a reason for this: Deuteronomy lays down the law. So does the Book of Exodus, but Exodus contains a lot of historical information. Pastors can preach from it without touching on biblical law and its continuing authority. Leviticus has a lot of law in it, but there is so much material on the sacrifices and the ceremonies that pastors can preach on Leviticus’ many “types” of this or that New Testament theme. They can avoid the law. Like Exodus, Numbers has historical information in it. Not so with Deuteronomy. From its opening section to the end, Deuteronomy lays down the law. This is why pastors avoid this book like the plague of biblical leprosy. On every page, it proclaims, “trust and obey, for there’s no other way.” Protestants sing these words, but they do not believe them. They proclaim: “We’re under grace, not law!” They are wrong. They are under humanist civil courts and humanist lawyers. They will remain in this condition of bondage until they discover an explicitly biblical answer to this question: “If not biblical law, then what?” The Pentateuch sets forth laws which, when obeyed, make socialism impossible to establish. They also make the Keynesian “mixed economy” impossible to establish. Yet other biblical laws make the modern libertarian society impossible to establish. Thus, the suggestion that biblical law remains authoritative today is resisted fiercely by the powers that be. The kingdom of God must replace the kingdom of Satan in history, which is the kingdom of selfproclaimed autonomous man. Part of this replacement process is the reconstruction of all modern academic disciplines in terms of the Bible. Any attempt to do this is resisted strongly by two groups: non-Christian scholars and Christian scholars. The first group does continued on back flap…

Inheritance and Dominion

Books by Gary North Marx’s Religion of Revolution (1968) [1989] An Introduction to Christian Economics (1973) Puritan Economic Experiments (1974) [1988] How You Can Profit From The Coming Price Controls (1974, 1976, 1977, 1978) Unconditional Surrender (1981, 1988, 1994) Successful Investing in an Age of Envy (1981) The Dominion Covenant: Genesis (1982, 1987) Government by Emergency (1983) [1991] Last Train Out (1983) Backward, Christian Soldiers? (1984) 75 Bible Questions Your Instructors Pray You Won’t Ask (1984) [1988, 1996] Coined Freedom (1984) Moses and Pharaoh (1985) The Sinai Strategy (1986) Conspiracy: A Biblical View (1986) [1996] Honest Money (1986) Fighting Chance (1986), with Arthur Robinson Unholy Spirits (1986) [1988] [1994] Dominion and Common Grace (1987) Inherit the Earth (1987) Liberating Planet Earth (1987) Healer of the Nations (1987) The Pirate Economy (1987) Is the World Running Down? (1988) When Justice Is Aborted (1989) Political Polytheism (1989) The Hoax of Higher Criticism (1990) Tools of Dominion: The Case Laws of Exodus (1990) Victim’s Rights (1990) Judeo-Christian Tradition (1990) Westminster’s Confession (1991) Christian Reconstruction (1991), with Gary DeMar The Coase Theorem (1992) Politically Incorrect (1993) Salvation Through Inflation (1993) Rapture Fever (1993) Tithing and the Church (1994) Leviticus: An Economic Commentary (1994) Baptized Patriarchalism (1995) Lone Gunners for Jesus (1995) Crossed Fingers: How the Liberals Captured the Presbyterian Church (1996) Sanctions and Dominion: An Economic Commentary on Numbers (1997)

INHERITANCE AND DOMINION An Economic Commentary on Deuteronomy

Gary North

Institute for Christian Economics Tyler, Texas

Copyright, Gary North, 1999 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data North, Gary. Inheritance and dominion : an economic commentary on Deuteronomy / Gary North. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-930464-78-8 (hc.) 1. Dominion theology. 2. Bible O.T. Deuteronomy Criticism, interpretation, etc. 3. Economics—Religious aspects—Christianity. 4. Inheritance (Christian theology) I. Title. BT82.25.N674 1999 222’.15077–DC21 99-19743 CIP

Institute for Christian Economics P.O. Box 8000 Tyler, TX 75711

This book is dedicated to my wife Sharon Rose North who persuaded me to begin my Pentateuch commentaries in 1973.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Forward . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . i Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Part I: Transcendence/Presence (1:1–5) 1. A Transcendent Yet Present God . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Part 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

II: Hierarchy/Representation (1:6–4:49) A Delayed Inheritance. . . . . . . . . . . Delegated Authority and Social Order . . The Face of Man. . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bureaucratic Counsel . . . . . . . . . . . The Skills of Foreign Trade . . . . . . . . Transferring the Inheritance. . . . . . . . Evangelism Through Law . . . . . . . . . Hear, Fear, and Testify . . . . . . . . . . Removing the Inheritance . . . . . . . . .

Part 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

III: Ethics/Boundaries (5–26) Judicial Continuity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sabbath and Liberation . . . . . . . . . . . . Law and Sanctions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Wealth of Nations . . . . . . . . . . . . . Law and Inheritance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Genocide and Inheritance . . . . . . . . . . . By Law or By Promise? . . . . . . . . . . . . Miracles, Entropy, and Social Theory . . . . . Chastening and Inheritance . . . . . . . . . . Overcoming Poverty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Covenantal Ideal of Economic Growth . . Disinheriting the Heirs . . . . . . . . . . . . . Overcoming the Visible Odds . . . . . . . . . Inheritance, Servitude, and Sonship . . . . . . Sonship, Inheritance, and Immigration . . . . Oath, Sanctions, and Inheritance . . . . . . . Rain and Inheritance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Law, Sanctions, and Inheritance . . . . . . . . Common Grace and Legitimate Inheritance . Communal Meals and National Incorporation Disinheriting Canaan’s Gods . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

18 31 39 47 58 65 72 84 96

108 116 125 132 144 159 180 189 207 213 221 245 257 277 285 300 307 317 329 348 358

Table of Contents (continued) 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. Part 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

The Lure of Magic: Something for Nothing . Commerce and Covenant . . . . . . . . . . Tithes of Celebration . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Charitable Loan . . . . . . . . . . . . . Consuming Capital in Good Faith . . . . . . Individual Blessing and National Feasting . . Casuistry and Inheritance . . . . . . . . . . Israel’s Supreme Court . . . . . . . . . . . . Boundaries on Kingship . . . . . . . . . . . Levitical Inheritance Through Separation . . Landmarks and Social Cooperation . . . . . The Penalty for Perjury. . . . . . . . . . . . A Hierarchy of Commitments . . . . . . . . A Few Good Men . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Limits to Empire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fruit Trees as Covenantal Testimonies . . . Double Portion, Double Burden . . . . . . . Executing a Rebellious Son . . . . . . . . . Lost and Found . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nature’s Roots and Fruits . . . . . . . . . . The Rooftop Railing Law . . . . . . . . . . Laws Prohibiting Mixtures . . . . . . . . . . The Fugitive Slave Law . . . . . . . . . . . Usury Authorized . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Vows, Contracts, and Productivity . . . . . . Free for the Picking. . . . . . . . . . . . . . Collateral, Servitude, and Dignity . . . . . . Wages and Oppression . . . . . . . . . . . . Gleaning: Charitable Inefficiency . . . . . . Unmuzzling the Working Ox . . . . . . . . Levirate Marriage and Family Name . . . . Just Weights and Justice . . . . . . . . . . . The Firstfruits Offering: A Token Payment . Positive Confession and Corporate Sanctions IV: Oath/Sanctions (27–30) Landmark and Curse . . . . . . . . . . . . Objective Wealth and Historical Progress . The Covenant of Prosperity . . . . . . . . Captivity and Restoration . . . . . . . . . Life and Dominion . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

373 386 398 418 430 438 445 460 477 494 504 514 529 537 545 563 574 587 608 622 629 638 649 658 670 682 703 720 729 745 757 774 808 814

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

820 824 841 846 852

Table of Contents (continued) Part V: Succession/Inheritance (31–33) 71. Courage and Dominion . . . . . . 72. Law and Liberty . . . . . . . . . . 73. A Song of Near-Disinheritance. . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

858 865 874 877

Appendix A – Modern Economics as a Form of Magic . . . 891 Appendix B – Individualism, Holism, and Covenantalism . 909 Appendix C – Syncretism, Pluralism, and Empire . . . . . . 922 Appendix D – The Demographics of American Judaism: A Study in Disinheritance . . . . . . . . . . 937 Appendix E – Free Market Capitalism . . . . . . . . . . . . 956 Appendix F – The Economic Re-Education of Ronald J. Sider . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 993 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1010

FOREWORD Foreward And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the lesh. Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil (Eccl. 12:12-14).

The Book of Deuteronomy is an unknown book among Christians in the pews. Two weeks before I completed the inal draft of this book, I heard a sermon on the ninth commandment. The pastor cited Deuteronomy 19, the section dealing with the penalty for false witness. The woman next to me whispered to me, “Where is Deuteronomy?” She is a dedicated Christian lady and a teacher in an adult Sunday School. She had just completed a summer school course at a fundamentalist seminary. For her, Deuteronomy is a closed book, a lost book. She is not alone. Deuteronomy is not read because Deuteronomy lays down the law. So does the Book of Exodus, but Exodus contains a lot of historical information in it. Pastors can preach from it without touching on biblical law. Leviticus has a lot of law in it, but there is so much material on the sacriices and the ceremonies that pastors can preach on Leviticus’ many “types” of this or that New Testament theme. They can avoid the law. Like Exodus, Numbers has historical information in it. Not so with Deuteronomy. From its opening section to the end, Deuteronomy lays down the law. This is why pastors avoid this book like the plague of biblical leprosy. On every page, it proclaims, “trust and obey, for there’s no other way.” Protestants sing

i

ii

DEUTERONOMY

these words, but they do not believe them. They proclaim: “We’re under grace, not law!” They are wrong. They are under humanist civil courts and humanist lawyers. They will remain in this condition of bondage until they discover an explicitly biblical answer to this question: “If not biblical law, then what?”

The Economics of the Pentateuch I began this economic commentary on the Bible in the spring of 1973. In August of 1977, I went into high gear: ten hours a week, 50 weeks a year. I am writing this on September 2, 1997. I have invested slightly over 10,000 hours in this writing project since 1977. With the completion of the Pentateuch, I have reached the end of phase one of this project. No one before me had bothered to write an economic commentary of the Pentateuch. A major reason for this neglect is that there has never been any demand for such a Bible-based study. The economists are operational atheists, and so are the Christians. Both groups search for social truths through supposedly neutral reason. I wrote this commentary, above all, because I was curious about what God’s law says about economics. I had to do the exegetical work to ind out, since no one else ever had. I learn best by research and writing. It took a large investment of time for me to ind out. Was it worth it? To me personally? No. “Curiosity wore out the cat.” But lots of projects that are necessary for Christian dominion are not worth it for those who do them. Writing this commentary is my calling, not my occupation. It is the most important project I can do in which I would be most dijcult to replace. I don’t get paid in money for doing it. On the contrary, I have to work an extra ten or more hours a week to produce the materials that generate the donations that inance the publication of this commentary. Why do I think this commentary is important? Six reasons. First, it is important for God’s people to understand what the Bible has to say in every area of life. The church cannot bring an efective covenant lawsuit against society if its members do not know what the Bible says is wrong, legally and morally, with every area of society. Sin reigns wherever God’s law doesn’t. To reduce sin, we must extend the rule of God’s law. God’s law is as comprehensive as sin. When empowered by the Holy Spirit, Christians can use the law to overcome progressively the rule of sin in every nook and cranny in which it reigns. God’s law is Christendom’s tool of dominion.

Foreward

iii

Oops. There I go again, using a naughty word: Christendom. Protestants for over a century have not used it in public except as a pejorative. Christendom implies that the city of God can have visible manifestations in history — in the church (“well of course”), the family (“OK, we can accept that”), and the State (“Wait a minute — that sounds like theocracy to us!”). I could ask the typical Christian: Is there sin in personal life — personal self-government? His answer: “Yes.” What is the solution? Answer: “God’s grace and God’s . . . uh, hmmm; oh, yes, God’s principles!” (This sounds a lot safer theologically than God’s law.) What about sin in the church — church government? What is the solution? “God’s grace and God’s principles!” What about sin in the family — family government? Solution? “God’s grace and God’s principles!” What about the State — civil government? “Democracy and natural law!” A second reason why this commentary is important is that there is a relationship between corporate obedience to God’s law and corporate success in history. This relationship is denied by antitheonomists, most notably Meredith G. Kline. My goal is to persuade Christians to begin obeying God’s Bible-revealed law in preparation for preaching it, imposing it, and beneiting from it. Third, I want this economic commentary to serve as a model for other practical and theoretical Bible commentaries in the social sciences. Fourth, I am tired of hearing the Christian scholar’s familiar slogan, “The Bible isn’t a textbook in [academic discipline],” the discipline in which he was formally certiied by humanists in some institution of higher learning, and for which is a mouthpiece for a baptized version of humanism’s conclusions. The Bible is indeed not a textbook. But it does provide the governing interpretation and many facts necessary for writing accurate textbooks. Fifth, I want to write a textbook someday on Christian economics as a irst step in restructuring the Christian curriculum. To do thus, I irst must know what the Bible says about economics. The Pentateuch was the place to start: the law.

iv

DEUTERONOMY

Time for a Change There is a sixth reason. I am convinced that P. A. Sorokin was correct a generation ago: the West is facing a monumental breakdown.1 We live in a culture which rests on the humanistic presupposition that anything that cannot be touched, measured, or manipulated by scientiic techniques is not socially relevant. Sorokin called it sensate culture. No society can survive indeinitely that holds such a view, he said. He believed that Western culture is facing a complete breakdown. So do I. He wrote his prediction in 1941. We are now a lot closer to the breakdown than we were back then — morally, iscally, and above all, technically. I refer to the Year 2000 problem, also known as the Millennium Bug: the inability of mainframe computers to recognize 00 as 2000 when they roll over in the year 2000. They have not been programmed to recognize the irst two digits of the century: 19 or 20. We are, in fact, only months away from that day of reckoning. The world’s division of labor will collapse if there is a breakdown in the means of payment: bank money. If this happens, there will be a worldwide disaster. In the aftermath of that disaster, not to mention during it, Christians will be among the local competitors for social and political inluence. They are not ready for this huge increase of responsibility, but it is coming anyway. After the crisis period ceases to be life-threatening, I expect theonomy to receive a hearing among Christians, who will be facing that ancient political problem: “You can’t beat something with nothing.” The civilizational vacuum caused by the Year 2000 breakdown — if it hits with society-shattering force, as I expect it will — will create new demand for solutions. With demand there will come supply. I now possess a monopoly: an economic commentary on the Pentateuch. Maybe I can at long last generate a some demand at something above zero price. Maybe its publication will no longer demand subsidies from ICE’s supporters. But without fractional reserve banking and today’s high-tech division of labor, meeting this demand will not be easy. Here is the looming social problem, in the words of real estate master Jack Miller: “Voters will call for a man on a white horse, and

1. Pitirim A. Sorokin, The Crisis of Our Age (Oxford, England: Oneworld, [1941] 1992).

Foreward

v

there are a lot of guys out there with brown horses and whitewash.” To distinguish accurately between white horses and whitewashed horses, you need to have a model for white horses (Rev. 19:14). The Bible provides this model. The problem is, this model is found mainly in the Old Testament. Christians today prefer men on brown horses to the Old Testament.

A Weak Reed Christians prefer amuent bondage under free market humanism to searching for an alternative, for they recognize where the answer will lead: either to their belated acceptance of Christian theocracy or their belated public acceptance of the legitimacy of some other theocracy. Christians want to believe that they can avoid theocracy. They can’t. Theocracy (theos = God; kratos = rule) is an inescapable concept. It is never a question of theocracy vs. no theocracy. It is a question of which God rules. That which a society believes is its source of law is its operational god.2 Christians do not want to admit this fact of political life, either to the public or to themselves. It embarrasses them. Typical are the views of Dr. Ralph Reed, an articulate, 36-year-old political technician who built Pat Robertson’s political training organization, Christian Coalition, until 1997, when he resigned to become an independent political consultant. To him, politics is a profession. He walked away from considerable inluence in the national media, which he enjoyed solely because he ran a national organization that in 1994 had over a million people in its computerized data base, which generated donations of $20 million a year3 — in short, a major political force. He has not been heard from since. I doubt that he will be. Before he decided that running individual political campaigns for money is a far better use of his time than shaping and articulating the political agenda of millions of American evangelicals — a conclusion I wholeheartedly agree with, given his views of what constitutes legitimate political compromise — he wrote Active Faith (1996). It was published by the Free Press, a secular international book 2. R. J. Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law (Nutley, New Jersey: Craig Press, 1973), p. 5. 3. Ralph Reed, After the Revolution: How the Christian Coalition is Impacting America (Dallas: Word, 1996), p. 200. For future reference, gold was at $350/ounce in this period.

vi

DEUTERONOMY

publisher owned by the huge Simon & Schuster publishing company. He received that book contract because he possessed a great deal of national inluence. A year after its publication, he possesses almost none. I bought the book in a used book store in September, 1997, for half price.

Clinton, Yes; Rushdoony, No In that book, he speciically attacked Christian Reconstruction. He did so within the context of his defense of President Clinton: “I oppose President Clinton’s policies. But I do not despise him. Nor do I despise Mrs. Clinton, who has come under a blizzard of attacks in recent times. If Bill Clinton is a sinner, then he is no worse or less than you or me.”4 This statement placed him in the camp of the loyal opposition. This is where a day-to-day political operative always has to be. But for a man living just before a time of monumental change — possibly civilizational change — to become a member of the loyal opposition is to betray the future on behalf of the present. It means tinkering with peripheral issues at a time when shaping the future requires a principled break with the present order. Political operatives exchange inluence in the future for inluence in the present. They are paid to do that. Their creed is: “Business almost as usual.” Dr. Reed has done well what he has been paid to do: keep the deck chairs of the Titanic neatly arranged in a group efort with Mr. Clinton. He gives no indication that he believes the ship of state is sinking. He remains optimistic. He is wrong. It is surely sinking. Above all, it is sinking morally. It is therefore only a matter of time before it sinks visibly, just as the Soviet Union sank, overnight, in August of 1991. In the 1980’s, the West’s politicians bet on the success of Gorbachev’s reforms and his political survival. They lost this bet. Dr. Reed is making a similar bet regarding the future of American politics. Christian Reconstructionists are on the other side of this bet. Almost no one else is — surely not in the Christian community. We are not on this side of the bet based on our interest in politics as such. We are on the other side because of our conviction that God will establish His kingdom in history, which includes politics. God says of the power of every covenant-breaking social order, contrary to 4. Ralph Reed, Active Faith: How Christians Are Changing the Soul of American Politics (New York: Free Press, 1996), p. 261.

Foreward

vii

political operatives in every generation: “I will overturn, overturn, overturn, it: and it shall be no more, until he come whose right it is; and I will give it him” (Ezek 21:27). Dr. Reed wrote in 1996: “Some of the harshest criticisms of Clinton have come from the ‘Christian nation’ or Reconstructionist community, which argues that the purpose of Christian political involvement should be to legislate biblical law. Some of the more unyielding elements even advocate legislating the ancient Jewish law laid out in the Old Testament: stoning adulterers, executing homosexuals, even mandating dietary laws.”5 Unyielding elements? Unyielding to what? To President Clinton? Most of the Reconstructionist authors I know ignore the man and his wife. We are not all that interested in politics. I have written far more in criticism of George Bush’s New World Order rhetoric than I have written about Bill Clinton. Both Rushdoony and I publicly opposed Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 1991. It is also worth noting that I do not remember seeing Mr. Reed take on Mr. Bush’s New World Order rhetoric in print, although this may be because I have not spent much time reading things written by Mr. Reed. I am aware of no Christian Reconstructionist who believes that the State should enforce the Mosaic dietary laws. Rushdoony personally adheres to the dietary laws, and he has written, possibly, up to a total of three whole pages on this topic, scattered among his tens of thousands of pages of books and articles. He has never called for the State to enforce them. Dr. Reed may or may not understand this. Either he has misunderstood Rushdoony’s position on the dietary laws, or else he is cynically misrepresenting it. In either case, he has called his own would-be scholarship into question.

Faking It Academically Next, he misinformed his readers about Reconstructionism’s eschatology. He described it as premillennial. Here, he moved from merely misleading rhetoric to good, old fashioned ignorance of the position of those whom he criticized. He hasn’t a clue that he is dealing with postmillennialists — something that, by this stage, I should imagine that everyone else who knows anything about Reconstructionism understands. “Led by R. J. Rushdoony, a theologian who serves as 5. Idem.

viii

DEUTERONOMY

the intellectual fountainhead of the movement, they believe that the primary objective of Christian activism should be to perfect society so that it is ready when Christ returns for His millennial reign.”6 On the contrary, we teach that the progressively righteous society is the millennial kingdom made visible in history. Christ reigns in history through His people, not in person. This is the traditional postmillennial argument — nothing unique here — but Dr. Reed is oblivious to it. Yet he speaks as if he were a master of Reconstruction’s literature. By now, I suppose I should be used to this treatment. Our critics are legion. In most cases, they are not scholars. They do not know how to debate in public. They do not have the training or the inclination to engage in scholarly debate. But Ralph Reed earned a Ph.D. in history at an academically rigorous institution, Emory University, one of the most liberal universities in the United States. Had handed in an equally unsupported critique of some liberal igure or movement to one of his liberal professors, he would have received an F. “Don’t submit your right-wing fundamentalist tirades in my class, sir. This is not scholarship; this is character assassination, and shoddy scholarship, too.” Obviously, Dr. Reed did not do this when his liberal professors were grading him. He survived. But once out from under their control, he has reverted to form. He is a political operative with footnotes — although not enough of them. His main professional concern is neither theology nor truth; it is politics. The basic rule of scholarship is that you must understand your opponent’s position and summarize it accurately before you attack it. The humanists are way ahead of most Christians in matters academic. Christians too often ignore the rules of honest criticism. This leaves them vulnerable to rebuttals such as this one. They wind up looking like dolts, with or without Ph.D.’s. While we Reconstructionists are often highly critical of other intellectual positions, no one has ever accused us of not providing the footnotes that prove that our targeted victims have written exactly what we say they have written. Dr. Reed has abandoned both his humanist training and the ninth commandment here. He ofers not a single footnote in his attack on Christian Reconstruction. He does not understand our position, yet he writes authoritatively as though he has mastered it. He 6. Ibid., pp. 261–6 2.

Foreward

ix

dismisses it without understanding it, except for its current political liabilities, which he does not mention. It is just as well that he has disappeared from public view. For sincere but uninformed Christians to follow a man who conducts himself in public in this manner would be a blot on the church. Christ deserves better.

“Moses Was a Tyrant” Dr. Reed is shocked — shocked! — at Christian Reconstructionism’s hostile attitude toward taxpayer-funded education. “Many reject school choice and eforts to reform public education as short-sighted and self-defeating. Instead, they call for the eventual elimination of public schools.”7 He has that right. Oppose the public schools? Opposed to the idea that education can ever be religiously neutral? Can such things be? Dr. Reed can see clearly where this is leading: to tyranny. Reconstruction promotes the tyranny of parents’ control over their own children’s education through direct parental control over its funding. He might well have added that we also promote the same negative view of State-funded retirement programs and State-funded medicine. Dr. Reed understands exactly what this means in the late 1990’s: lost elections. And so, he writes, “Reconstructionism is an authoritarian ideology that threatens the most basic civil liberties of a free society.”8 Yes, it does: the civil liberty to steal by means of the ballot box, which is modern politics’ most cherished principle. Let us be quite clear about his position. Dr. Reed is arguing that the God of the Old Testament laid down as mandatory an authoritarian system of civil laws which “threatens the most basic civil liberties of a free society.” He is not saying that Christian Reconstructionists have misinterpreted Old Testament law. On the contrary, he is saying that we have promoted, as he so delicately puts it, “the ancient Jewish law laid out in the Old Testament.” Because of our deviant practice in this regard, he insists, the pro-family movement “must unequivocally dissociate itself from Reconstructionism and other eforts to use the government to impose biblical law through political action. It must irmly and openly exclude the

7. Ibid., p. 262. 8. Idem.

x

DEUTERONOMY

triumphant and authoritarian elements from the new theology of Christian political involvement.”9 Triumphant politics. Imagine that! Christian Reconstructionists actually believe that the purpose of political action is — you won’t believe this — victory! They believe that civil laws cannot be religiously neutral, and that — you won’t believe this, either — religious neutrality is a myth. They believe, fantastic as it seems, that when Jesus said, “He that is not with me is against me; and he that gathereth not with me scattereth abroad” (Matt. 12:30), He was including civil law. Dr. Reed has now disappeared from public view. I suppose that he is out there somewhere, trying to line up some non-triumphalist Christian politician to pay him a bundle of money to design a campaign to reform public education. No doubt Dr. Reed thinks that all it will take to please God in the political realm is a national Christian political campaign based on the slogan, “Back to religious neutrality: Equal time for Satan!” No more of that Old Testament stuf. God was all wrong back then. God used to be the promoter of “an authoritarian ideology that threatens the most basic civil liberties of a free society,” but no longer. God has changed His mind. He has come to his senses. Dr. Reed and his political peers applaud God. God now has their full approval. This no doubt is a great comfort to God. Please do not imagine that I am contemptuous of Dr. Reed. That would be like being contemptuous of an unhousebroken St. Bernard puppy that has just relieved itself on the living room carpet. The puppy did not know what else to do when nature called. Nature called the puppy in the same way that natural law theory called Dr. Reed, and the results are analogous. Dr. Reed does not know any better: he has a Ph.D. from Emory University. The average carpet owner knows enough to clean up puppy’s pile, but only after rubbing the puppy’s nose in it, so that he will not do it again. That is what I am doing here with Dr. Reed. Actually, Dr. Reed has done my educational work for me. He used Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition to persuade millions of American evangelicals to get involved in politics. He trained hundreds of thousands of them. These shock troops are now ready for action. Meanwhile, their trainer has disappeared, just in time for a worldwide crisis: in economics, politics, and legitimacy. 9. Idem.

Foreward

xi

The day of reckoning is looming. In its aftermath, Dr. Reed’s loyal oppositionist views will be abandoned as naive, deeply compromised, and no longer relevant. Christian activists will be compelled by the crisis to ask themselves: “If not biblical law, then what?” In the early 1990’s, Dr. Reed softened up the evangelicals for Christian Reconstructionism, just as Dr. Ron Sider softened them up in the late 1970’s. All it will take to complete the transition is a worldwide economic crisis that takes place on Mr. Clinton’s duty watch. This event has literally been programmed for us. Dr. Reed was a minor igure, at best, in his brief days of public notoriety. He had inluence only because Pat Robertson hired him. On his own authority, almost no one would ever have heard of him, as is the case today. I have devoted this much space on him, not because his views of Christian Reconstruction amounted to anything important, but because his kind of compromise is dangerous to God’s kingdom in times of major crisis. Christians are supposed to understand their times. We have limited resources. We cannot ight every battle. We must select our battles accordingly. To regard political tinkering and the working out of marginal political compromises as a legitimate substitute for prophetic confrontation at a turning point in history is a great mistake. It is the mistake of substituting the peripheral concerns of the leeting present for the future of God’s kingdom in history. I pray that you will not make this mistake.

When Establishments Fall Phase two of Christian Reconstructionism will soon begin. Its theoretical framework is now basically complete. It is almost time for making preliminary local applications. It is time to say forthrightly, “No more loyal Christian opposition.” Why? Because there will soon be no more opposition to be loyal to. The present Establishment is about to sufer a mortal blow. Today’s loyal Christian opposition will be interred alongside the humanists’ civil order after a joint funeral service. RIP. We have seen this before. The early church in Jerusalem was part of the loyal opposition. Not that Jesus Christ had been loyal. He had been disloyal. The Establishment cruciied Him for His disloyalty. He had told them plainly, “Therefore say I unto you, The kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof” (Matt. 21:43). But it took the Jerusalem church from the stoning of Stephen until Nero’s persecutions in A.D. 64 to

xii

DEUTERONOMY

break with the Jewish political Establishment. The Christians inally left Jerusalem permanently shortly after Nero’s death in A.D. 68, or so church tradition says. Then, in A.D. 70, the Jewish political Establishment fell to pagan Rome’s Establishment. Rome’s army destroyed Jerusalem. Never again would the church be in loyal opposition to the Jewish political Establishment. That Establishment was gone. If this be triumphalism, make the best of it.

Conclusion I began writing this commentary when Dr. Reed was 12 years old. I think it will still be read in a hundred years, though not read by many. Its longevity is made easier to secure because there is one advantage that commentaries possess over other books: they help pastors interpret dijcult Bible passages. The Pentateuch has many dijcult passages. This book is long because it is a Bible commentary relating to a specialized area. A standard Bible commentary comments — or should — on every passage. It cannot include much information on any one passage. This commentary is diferent. It is designed to convey extensive knowledge about a few verses that relate to the topic at hand: economics. The reader is seeking more information per passage than a standard commentary can provide. This book can be read cover to cover, but it is designed to be read one chapter at a time. I assume that a pastor who is preaching on one passage wants information on this passage and no other, for today. The same is true of a reader who reads a passage and wants to see if it has any economic implications. This is the reason why the book is repetitive. I assume that most people will not read it straight through, and even if they do, they will forget what I say about a speciic passage. They will come back to the book, if at all, for clariication regarding one passage. A topical Bible commentary should meet the needs of readers who are seeking clariication, one passage at a time. I have spent over 10,000 hours trying to clear up a few of these passages. I have scheduled another 7,500 hours or so. Let me say this: after the irst 7,500 hours, it starts getting easier. I ofer this as encouragement to all those who would like to imitate my eforts. I also ofer a warning: those who continue to insist that “there’s no such thing as Christian economics” have their work cut out for them.

PREFACE Preface And the LORD heard the voice of your words, and was wroth, and sware, saying, Surely there shall not one of these men of this evil generation see that good land, which I sware to give unto your fathers, Save Caleb the son of Jephunneh; he shall see it, and to him will I give the land that he hath trodden upon, and to his children, because he hath wholly followed the LORD. Also the LORD was angry with me for your sakes, saying, Thou also shalt not go in thither. But Joshua the son of Nun, which standeth before thee, he shall go in thither: encourage him: for he shall cause Israel to inherit it. Moreover your little ones, which ye said should be a prey, and your children, which in that day had no knowledge between good and evil, they shall go in thither, and unto them will I give it, and they shall possess it (Deut. 1:34B39).

The language of inheritance appears early in the Book of Deuteronomy. Inheritance is the integrating theme of the entire book, as I shall argue in this commentary. The reader is hereby warned: if, after reading this commentary, you ind that you agree with my thesis that the primary theme of the book is inheritance, then you should be more willing to accept my thesis that the Pentateuch is structured in terms of the ive-point biblical covenant model.1 Inheritance is a matter of ownership. Economics is also a matter of ownership. Ownership is covenantal. This commentary series, which I have worked on since 1973, is called An Economic Commentary on the Bible. It is the thesis of this series that both economic 1. On the ive points, see Ray R. Sutton, That You May Prosper: Dominion By Covenant (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1992). The irst edition of this book was published in 1987.

xiii

xiv

DEUTERONOMY

theory and practice are inherently covenantal. I titled the irst volume, The Dominion Covenant: Genesis. I argued there that God’s covenant with Adam (Gen. 1:26B28) deines mankind. This thesis has led me to argue that the fundamental economic issue is not scarcity, contrary to virtually all economics textbooks. The fundamental economic issue is ownership. The issue of ownership is always covenantal. The legal question, “Who owns this?” is more fundamental than the economists’ initial question: “Why do I have to pay something to obtain this?”

Scarcity Humanistic economists begin their analyses with the question of scarcity. They do so because of their quest for epistemological neutrality. They seek to begin with a common-ground observation about the external world that is universally acknowledged and therefore epistemologically neutral. They seek to avoid any appeal to theology or other obviously value-laden presuppositions. But the issue of scarcity is not epistemologically neutral. It is heavily valueladen. But it is far easier to conceal this fact than to conceal the more obviously value-laden doctrine of original ownership. When would-be autonomous man begins his discussion of economics apart from any consideration of the twin doctrines of creation and providence, he has assumed as incontrovertible what he needs irst to prove, namely, that the creation is an autonomous “given” and that man is an autonomous “given.” Far from being neutral, this presupposition of man’s autonomy is an act of theft. It is an application of the serpent’s rhetorical question: “Hath God said?” (Gen. 3:1). The methodological individualist begins with the presupposition of each man’s ownership of his own person.2 If followed to its logical conclusion, this presupposition legalizes attempted suicide. It does not deal with the issue of what adult children owe to their parents, whose time and efort allowed them to survive. It treats the individual as if there were no legal bonds of the family – a corporate institution with claims on the individual. Are these claims morally

2. Murray N. Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State: A Treatise on Economic Principles (Auburn, Alabama: Mises Institute, [1962] 1993), p. 78.

Preface

xv

and legally valid? Morally neutral economic theory cannot say. So, methodological individualists ignore the problem. Even at best, this presupposition of self-ownership does not solve the question of ownership of anything other than one’s own person. How is ownership lawfully established over anything else? On the one hand, is ownership established by a person’s verbal declaration?3 If so, then what happens when one person’s declaration extends across a boundary that was established by some other person’s declaration? Who decides which declaration’s claim is superior? By what standard? On the other hand, is ownership established, as 4 John Locke argued, by mixing one’s labor with the soil? What kind of labor? How much soil? This “soil” is representative soil, not literal soil. It is symbolic soil. The word assumes the prior existence of some sort of moral and legal order. The methodological collectivist assumes that society’s claims of ownership are prior to the individual’s. But what is society? Are we speaking of the State, i.e., civil government, when we say the word “society”? Which State? What is it that establishes the prior jurisdiction of this or that agency called the State? What if there are competing jurisdictions of various States? Whose jurisdiction is superior? By what standard?

Scarcity Is a Covenantal Sanction Sanctions are fourth on the list in the Bible’s ive-point covenant model: transcendence, hierarchy, ethics, oath, and succession. As applied to economic theory, these ive points are: primary ownership, delegated ownership, boundary lines, scarcity, and inheritance. Scarcity in the modern economic deinition – “at zero price, there is greater demand than supply” – is the result of God’s curse on the earth in response to Adam’s rebellion (Gen. 3:17B19). If this is the case, then we should conclude that a reduction of scarcity, i.e., economic growth, is the result both of Jesus Christ’s legal status as God’s covenantally representative agent and His work of redemption through God’s imposition of negative sanctions at Calvary. The negative sanctions of Calvary were soon overcome in 3. This was the position of libertarian anarchist Robert LeFevre. 4. This was Rothbard’s position: idem. See Locke, Of Civil Government: Second Treatise (1690), Chapter V, “On Property,” sections 27B28, 36.

xvi

DEUTERONOMY

history by Christ’s bodily resurrection and His ascension. These were divine positive sanctions that have enabled man’s overcoming of the curse on the earth through economic growth. Humanistic economists do not look at economic theory in this way.

Original Sovereignty Economists should begin the study of economics with a question: Who is originally sovereign? The Bible’s answer is clear: God. He created the world. He therefore possesses original jurisdiction. Through the rebellious actions of the serpent, Eve, and Adam, Satan gained subordinate control over the earth. Adam, as God’s supreme covenantal agent, had the authority to decide which sovereign he would serve. By disobeying God, he transferred allegiance to Satan. This was an act of covenant-breaking. It was also a representative act: he did this in the name of his heirs. Those heirs of Adam who remain outside of God’s covenant of redemption necessarily deny the ownership claims of God. It is covenant-keeping man’s God-given assignment to extend the kingdom of God in history, reclaiming territory that was lost by Adam’s transfer of covenantal allegiance. This reclaiming of the earth is a two-fold activity: fulilling the original dominion covenant (Gen. 1:26B28) and reclaiming the lost inheritance from covenant-breakers. The exodus, which disinherited Egypt, was followed by Israel’s ratiication of the Mosaic covenant. A generation later, the conquest of Canaan extended God’s kingdom in history by disinheriting the Canaanites. This process of extending the kingdom is a process of disinheritance/inheritance. Ultimately, it is Satan who is being disinherited in history. When his covenantal subordinates are disinherited, he is disinherited. To argue otherwise is to argue that Adam’s transfer to Satan of his subordinate ownership of the kingdom is a permanent condition in history. It is to argue that Jesus Christ’s redemption of men in history and the Great Commission itself (Matt. 28:18B20) – reclaiming the world by means of the Holy Spirit-empowered gospel of redemption (buying-back) – will produce only a series of Christian oases in a permanent desert of Satanism. It is to argue that biblical eschatology is not an aspect of the ifth point of the biblical covenant model: inheritance and disinheritance. It is to argue against the Book of Deuteronomy as the Pentateuch’s book of guaranteed inheritance, to argue that the Pentateuch is not structured in terms of the biblical covenant model. Those who

Preface

xvii

argue this way now face a lengthy refutation: An Economic Commentary on the Bible. We shall see how the critics respond, now that my commentary on the Pentateuch is completed. After seventeen years of “no comment” by the theological critics – humanistic economists do not go even this far – I think it is safe to say that “no comment” will indeinitely remain their most carefully constructed response.

The Structure of the Pentateuch Inheritance and Dominion is the culmination of my two-fold, multi-volume assertion that the biblical covenant model has ive points, and that the Pentateuch is structured in terms of the biblical covenant model. I did not understand this when I began writing this series. I discovered it only in late 1985, when Ray Sutton irst presented his covenant model in a series of Wednesday evening Bible studies. I have argued for this position in detail in my “General Introduction to The Dominion Covenant (1987),” published in the second edition of The Dominion Covenant: Genesis.5 The biblical covenant model has ive parts: the transcendence/presence of God; man’s hierarchy/authority under God; ethics/law as the basis of covenantkeeping man’s dominion in history, i.e., the extension of the boundaries of God’s kingdom; oath/sanctions as the basis of cause and efect in history; and succession in history through corporate covenant renewal. If this argument is correct, then the ifth book of the Pentateuch should match the ifth point of the covenant: inheritance/ disinheritance, a two-fold process in history which mirrors the dual covenantal sanctions of blessing and cursing. Let us survey briely the primary integrating theme of each of the Pentateuch’s ive books. Genesis reveals the absolute sovereignty of God in creating the world and sustaining it in history. Exodus reveals the deliverance of Israel in history by this sovereign God, who requires His people to covenant with Him as His lawful subjects (Ex. 19). Leviticus reveals the law of God for Mosaic Israel: the stipulations of Israel’s national existence as a covenantal unit. Numbers reveals God’s corporate sanctions in history: against Israel in the wilderness because of unbelief, and against the Amorites outside the borders of Canaan in the months preceding the invasion of Canaan. 5. Gary North, The Dominion Covenant: Genesis (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987), pp. ixBxiv.

xviii

DEUTERONOMY

Deuteronomy is the book of inheritance through covenant renewal, revealing the imminent fulillment of the promised Abrahamic inheritance, which involved the disinheritance of the Canaanites. Let us not mince words: a crucial ethical theme of Deuteronomy is the moral necessity of genocide. “And thou shalt consume all the people which the LORD thy God shall deliver thee; thine eye shall have no pity upon them: neither shalt thou serve their gods; for that will be a snare unto thee” (Deut. 7:16). Israel’s defeat of Sihon outside the boundaries of the Promised Land served as the model – the covenantal down payment – for all of Canaan: “And we took all his cities at that time, and utterly destroyed the men, and the women, and the little ones, of every city, we left none to remain” (Deut. 2:34). The inheritance by Israel mandated the disinheritance of the Amorites.

Eschatology and Inheritance This theme of inheritance/disinheritance is basic to covenantal progression in history: the growth of the kingdom of God at the expense of the kingdom of Satan. In this sense, covenantal conlict is what economists call a zero-sum game: the winner’s gains come at the expense of the loser. Because of God’s common grace,6 this is not always true in history, although it was surely required by God to be the case during the conquest of Canaan. It is always true in eternity.7 This covenantal fact of life and death raises the issue of eschatology. The theological doctrine known as eschatology – the doctrine of the last things is point five of the biblical covenant model. It cannot 6. Gary North, Dominion and Common Grace: The Biblical Basis of Progress (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987). 7. Because of God’s common grace, covenant-keepers can benefit in history from the blessings that God pours out on covenant-breakers. These blessings in history make the covenant-breaker’s eternity of torment that much more horrifying. Having received more in history, he comes under greater eternal condemnation. “But he that knew not, and did commit things worthy of stripes, shall be beaten with few stripes. For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more” (Luke 12:48). In both the Old Testament and the New Testament, we learn that we are to do good to God’s enemies, so that He can pour coals of ire on their heads. “If thine enemy be hungry, give him bread to eat; and if he be thirsty, give him water to drink: For thou shalt heap coals of fire upon his head, and the LORD shall reward thee” (Prov. 25:21B22). “Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the LORD. Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink: for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of ire on his head” (Rom. 12:19B20).

Preface

xix

be separated from a theory of history, because eschatology is also the doctrine of whatever precedes the last things. It is, in this sense, the doctrine of the next-to-last things. Because there are three rival theories of biblical eschatology – amillennialism, premillennialism, and postmillennialism – each has a diferent conception of the nextto-last things. Each theory has its own conception of social theory, i.e., social cause and efect. Biblical eschatology is the story of the replacement of Satan’s stolen kingdom by God’s kingdom. The question that divides theologians is this: To what extent is this process of replacement revealed in history? Is history an earnest – a down payment – on the eternity to come? Is there more or less continuity between history and eternity? Do the wheat or the tares progressively dominate as history unfolds? Amillennialism insists that history is a reverse foretaste of eternity: the righteous get weaker, and the unrighteous get stronger. Premillennialism teaches the same with regard to the era prior to Christ’s bodily return and His imposition of a comprehensive international bureaucracy, stafed by Christians, for a thousand years. Postmillennialism insists that covenantal history is the story of lawful inheritance, secured by the death of the lawful Heir who thereby becomes the Testator (Heb. 9:16B17). Eschatology is therefore also the story of disinheritance in history: covenant-keepers’ reclaiming of the stolen legacy from covenant-breakers. Righteousness will replace unrighteousness as the next-to-the-last things unfold.

The Fourth Generation The key verse governing the inheritance of the land of Canaan by Israel is Genesis 15:16: “But in the fourth generation they shall come hither again: for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full.” The four generations that dwelt in Egypt were the sons of Jacob, Jochebed’s (Num. 26:59), Moses’, and Joshua’s. It was under Joshua’s leadership that his generation and their children invaded Canaan. Joshua was the representative leader. A theological question arises: Was God’s promise to Abraham conditional or unconditional? Was it dependent on what Abraham and his heirs would do (conditional), or was it a prophecy that could not be thwarted by anything that man would do (unconditional)? For that matter, is it legitimate even to distinguish between the two? The traditional theological answer to this question is that the Abrahamic promise was unconditional. This answer invokes Paul’s

xx

DEUTERONOMY

arguments in Galatians 3. “And this I say, that the covenant, that was conirmed before of God in Christ, the law, which was four hundred and thirty years after, cannot disannul, that it should make the promise of none efect. For if the inheritance be of the law, it is no more of promise: but God gave it to Abraham by promise. Wherefore then serveth the law? It was added because of transgressions, till the seed should come to whom the promise was made; and it was ordained by angels in the hand of a mediator” (Gal. 3:17B19). Paul here was speaking of the Mosaic law, but theologians have extended his line of argumentation to the context of the Abrahamic promise regarding Canaan. To argue that a promise is unconditional is to argue for God’s predestination. The theologian announces: “God’s promise to Abraham was a prophecy.” Yet this statement begs the question. Is biblical prophecy at least sometimes conditional? For example, Jonah prophesied that Nineveh would be destroyed in 40 days, yet Nineveh escaped this curse through repentance. Was God’s promise to Abraham that sort of prophecy, i.e., conditional on the ethical response of those who heard it? Speciically, could the third generation have inherited Canaan, had the word of God been mixed with faith? “For unto us was the gospel preached, as well as unto them: but the word preached did not proit them, not being mixed with faith in them that heard it” (Heb. 4:2).

The Doctrine of Predestination God’s absolute predestination is central to the doctrine of the unconditional promise. God promised Abraham that the fourth generation would inherit. This can mean only one thing: they were predestined to inherit. It was not merely statistically likely that they would inherit; they would surely inherit. Yet the males born in the wilderness were not circumcised. They were circumcised in a mass ritual procedure at Gilgal after they had crossed the Jordan and were inside Canaan’s boundaries (Josh. 5:4). To inherit, they had to be lawful heirs. The mark of Abrahamic heirship was circumcision. “And ye shall circumcise the lesh of your foreskin; and it shall be a token of the covenant betwixt me and you” (Gen. 17:11). Circumcision was the covenant sign. So, in order to fulill the Abrahamic promise, the Israelites had to perform a mandatory work. This means that the Abrahamic promise was conditional on works, yet at the same time, it could not be thwarted, for the inheritance by the fourth generation

Preface

xxi

was predestined. This is the age-old issue of promise vs. works, unconditional promise vs. conditional promise. Ephesians 2:8B10 solves this theological dilemma: not only are covenant-keepers predestined to eternal life, they are predestined to temporal good works. “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.” A covenantal promise is therefore ethically conditional – the mandatory performance of good works – yet it is also operationally unconditional, for these good works are part of the predestined inheritance itself. Protestant fundamentalists quote Ephesians 2:8B9: grace. Roman Catholics are more likely to quote Ephesians 2:10: works. Theonomists quote the entire passage, which includes the phrase, “which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them,” i.e., predestination. The Epistle to the Hebrews ties the doctrine of predestined good works to the ethically conditional nature of the Abrahamic promise. Hebrews 3 and 4 discuss the sabbatical rest which God gives to His people. The Israelites of Moses’ generation did not enter into the rest – Canaan – which God had ofered to them. The author cited Psalm 95: “Harden not your heart, as in the provocation, and as in the day of temptation in the wilderness: When your fathers tempted me, proved me, and saw my work. Forty years long was I grieved with this generation, and said, It is a people that do err in their heart, and they have not known my ways: Unto whom I sware in my wrath that they should not enter into my rest” (Ps. 95:8B11; cf. Heb. 3:8B11). This means that God made a legitimate ofer to the third generation: immediate inheritance. Moses made this plain in his recapitulation of the events immediately following the exodus. And I commanded you at that time all the things which ye should do. And when we departed from Horeb, we went through all that great and terrible wilderness, which ye saw by the way of the mountain of the Amorites, as the LORD our God commanded us; and we came to Kadeshbarnea. And I said unto you, Ye are come unto the mountain of the Amorites, which the LORD our God doth give unto us. Behold, the LORD thy God hath set the land before thee: go up and possess it, as the LORD God of thy fathers hath said unto thee; fear not, neither be discouraged. . . . Notwithstanding ye would not go up, but rebelled against the commandment of the L ORD your God: And ye murmured in your tents, and said,

xxii

DEUTERONOMY

Because the LORD hated us, he hath brought us forth out of the land of Egypt, to deliver us into the hand of the Amorites, to destroy us. Whither shall we go up? our brethren have discouraged our heart, saying, The people is greater and taller than we; the cities are great and walled up to heaven; and moreover we have seen the sons of the Anakims there. Then I said unto you, Dread not, neither be afraid of them. The LORD your God which goeth before you, he shall ight for you, according to all that he did for you in Egypt before your eyes; And in the wilderness, where thou hast seen how that the LORD thy God bare thee, as a man doth bear his son, in all the way that ye went, until ye came into this place. Yet in this thing ye did not believe the LORD your God, Who went in the way before you, to search you out a place to pitch your tents in, in ire by night, to shew you by what way ye should go, and in a cloud by day. And the LORD heard the voice of your words, and was wroth, and sware, saying, Surely there shall not one of these men of this evil generation see that good land, which I sware to give unto your fathers, Save Caleb the son of Jephunneh; he shall see it, and to him will I give the land that he hath trodden upon, and to his children, because he hath wholly followed the LORD (Deut. 1:18–21; 26–36).

How can we solve this seeming theological anomaly? God’s promise was given to the fourth generation, yet He commanded the third generation to begin the invasion of Canaan, promising to go before them, leading them to victory, just as He had done in Egypt and the Red Sea. The fulillment of the Abrahamic promise by the fourth generation was historically conditional, i.e., dependent on the faithlessness of the third generation. The beginning of the solution to this theological dilemma is found in Hebrews: “For we which have believed do enter into rest, as he said, As I have sworn in my wrath, if they shall enter into my rest: although the works were inished from the foundation of the world” (Heb. 4:3). These words are unmistakably clear: “although the works were inished from the foundation of the world.” This language – “before the foundation of the world” – is found in the biblical passage which, more than any other, teaches the doctrine of predestination, the irst chapter of Paul’s epistle to the church at Ephesus. Paul wrote: Blessed be the God and Father of our LORD Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ: According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love: Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will, To the praise of the glory of his

Preface

xxiii

grace, wherein he hath made us accepted in the beloved . . . . In whom also we have obtained an inheritance, being predestinated according to the purpose of him who worketh all things after the counsel of his own will: That we should be to the praise of his glory, who irst trusted in Christ. In whom ye also trusted, after that ye heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation: in whom also after that ye believed, ye were sealed with that holy Spirit of promise, Which is the earnest of our inheritance until the redemption of the purchased possession, unto the praise of his glory (Eph. 1:3B6, 11B14).

The Three-Fold Theme of Grace Predestination, adoption, and inheritance: here is the three-fold theme of God’s special grace to His people in history. This is not a two-fold theme – adoption and inheritance – contrary to Arminians and other defenders of the doctrine of man’s free will. Adoption in Christ is the only judicially valid basis of any man’s claim to his share of the inheritance of God’s kingdom, both in history and eternity. Paul teaches that every redeemed person’s adoption by God in history has been predestined before the foundation of the world. The three-fold theme of predestination, adoption (judicial sonship), and inheritance is the theme of the Book of Deuteronomy. God, in His absolute sovereignty, predestined the fourth generation after Abraham to inherit the Promised Land. Moses spoke the words recorded in Deuteronomy to the representatives of the fourth generation, just prior to Israel’s inheritance of the land under Joshua. Similarly, God has predestined individual Christians to eternal salvation, which is their lawful inheritance through judicial adoption into God’s redeemed family. Paul’s words are clear: we have obtained in history a down payment or “earnest” of this eternal inheritance. “Ye were sealed with that holy Spirit of promise, Which is the earnest of our inheritance until the redemption of the purchased possession, unto the praise of his glory” (v. 13b, 14). The Greek word translated here as “purchased possession” is elsewhere translated as “saving,” as in “the saving of the soul” (Heb. 10:39). The Greek word that Paul used for “inheritance” is the same one that Stephen used to identify God’s promise of Canaan to Abraham: “And he gave him none inheritance in it, no, not so much as to set his foot on: yet he promised that he would give it to him for a possession, and to his seed after him, when as yet he had no child” (Acts 7:5). Paul used this language of the seed, which alone lawfully

xxiv

DEUTERONOMY

inherits, in order to identify those who are adopted by God the Father through Christ’s sacriicial work of redemption: “And if ye be Christ’s, then are ye Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise” (Gal. 3:29). Paul insisted in his letter to the Ephesians that this eternal and historical inheritance of the kingdom of God is an inheritance of righteousness only for those who are themselves righteous. “For this ye know, that no whoremonger, nor unclean person, nor covetous man, who is an idolater, hath any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God” (Eph. 5:5). This kingdom inheritance comes exclusively through God’s grace. Nevertheless, Paul was quite clear on an equally important point: the earthly good works that are mandatory in the life of the true heir are as predestined as the adoption itself.

Imputation The basis of the theological reconciliation of grace and good works, or unconditional election and conditional inheritance, is the doctrine of imputation. Participation in both of the two kingdoms in history, Satan’s and Christ’s, is representational as well as individual. The sin of Adam is imputed to covenant-breaking man. “Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned: For until the law sin was in the world: but sin is not imputed when there is no law. Nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam’s transgression, who is the igure of him that was to come” (Rom. 5:12B14). There was a law that condemned all men to death: God’s command to Adam not to eat of the forbidden tree. Adam’s heirs did not commit this sin individually, but they all committed it representatively through their father, Adam. So, death reigned from Adam to Moses. The fact that Adam’s heirs did not (and could not – no tree) commit Adam’s speciic sin made no diference in the question of life and death. They all committed it. Adam’s representative act condemned all of his heirs. The proof of this, Paul argued, is that they all died. The law was still in force – not the Mosaic law but the Edenic law. The sanction of death still ruled. This judicial imputation of Adam’s sin is the historical starting point of biblical covenant theology. To escape God’s declaration of “Guilty!” to Adam, and thereby to Adam’s heirs, a person must come under God’s declaration of “Not guilty!” to Jesus Christ and

Preface

xxv

His heirs. Adam’s sin is the judicial basis of the imputation of disinherited sonship to Adam’s heirs. Jesus Christ’s perfect humanity (though not His divinity) is the judicial basis of the imputation of adopted sonship to Christ’s heirs. “And not as it was by one that sinned, so is the gift: for the judgment was by one to condemnation, but the free gift is of many ofences unto justiication. For if by one man’s ofence death reigned by one; much more they which receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness shall reign in life by one, Jesus Christ” (Rom. 5:16B17).

The Imputation of Righteous Works Let us consider this theological doctrine from another angle: the imputation of Christ’s good works. As surely as Christ met the comprehensive demands of God’s law, so also do all those people to whom His perfection is imputed by God. Christ’s imputed perfection is deinitive. At the moment of their regeneration, people receive Christ’s perfection judicially through grace. Then they are required to strive in this life to meet Jesus’ standard of moral perfection. “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect” (Matt. 5:48). This condition of perfection is achieved by covenant-keepers only in the world beyond history. But the goal of perfection is still our mandatory standard, “Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ” (Eph. 4:13). Both conditions are true of covenant-keeping men in history: perfection and imperfection. First, imperfection: “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us” (I John 1:8B10). This condition relates to progressive sanctiication in history. Second, perfection: “Little children, let no man deceive you: he that doeth righteousness is righteous, even as he is righteous. He that committeth sin is of the devil; for the devil sinneth from the beginning. For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil. Whosoever is born of God doth not commit sin; for his seed remaineth in him: and he cannot sin, because he is born of God” (I John 3:7B9). In the day of inal judgment, God looks at Christ’s perfection in history, not our sins in history.

xxvi

DEUTERONOMY

The redeemed person’s moral condition, deinitively and inally, is representatively perfect: sin-free. This is because of the representative imputation of Christ’s perfection. But the redeemed person’s life in history is a progressive overcoming of sin, which is always present. The doctrine of imputation is the theological basis of reconciling God’s conditional and unconditional promises. An unconditional promise rests on the predestinating work of God in history to bring the recipients of the promise to that degree of moral perfection and judicial righteousness required to obtain the promise. No promise is devoid of stipulations. The covenantal question is this: Who lawfully performs these stipulations on behalf of the heirs? Paul provided the answer in Galatians 3. His message in Galatians 3 is that the promise is more fundamental than the law. Yet the promise was not in opposition to the law, nor was the law absent from the conditional terms of the promise. And this I say, that the covenant, that was conirmed before of God in Christ, the law, which was four hundred and thirty years after, cannot disannul, that it should make the promise of none efect. For if the inheritance be of the law, it is no more of promise: but God gave it to Abraham by promise. Wherefore then serveth the law? It was added because of transgressions, till the seed should come to whom the promise was made; and it was ordained by angels in the hand of a mediator. Now a mediator is not a mediator of one, but God is one. Is the law then against the promises of God? God forbid: for if there had been a law given which could have given life, verily righteousness should have been by the law (Gal. 3:17B21).

Did the Israelites have to be circumcised in order to inherit the land? Yes. To become an heir of God’s promise to Abraham’s seed, you had to be circumcised. Yet the promise to Abraham was nonetheless unconditional. How could it be both? Because of Christ’s work as the judicial representative of all redeemed men. The promise to Abraham – and through him, to his heirs – was always conditional on Jesus Christ’s fulilling of God’s law in history. This is why Paul invoked an otherwise peculiar grammatical argument: “Now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made. He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ” (Gal. 3:16). God’s promise to Abraham was unconditional for the fourth generation only because this promise was conditional on the historical work of Jesus Christ as redeemed mankind’s judicial representative. Had Jesus’ perfectly obedient life not been predestined by God before the

Preface

xxvii

foundation of the world, there would have been no judicial basis of redemption, and therefore no unconditional promises in history. The only promise that would have been fulilled in history would have been God’s promise to Adam: “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” (Gen. 2:17).

The Hatred of God’s Law By linking covenant-keeping with God’s blessings in history, and covenant-breaking with God’s curses in history, the theonomist challenges just about everybody. Not only does he challenge all other religions, including humanism, he also challenges premillennialists and amillennialists. There can be no escape from this confrontation. The doctrine of eschatology (point ive) raises the issue of historical sanctions (point four). These, in turn, raise the issue of biblical law (point three). The consistent theonomist insists that biblical law, God’s predictable historical sanctions, and eschatology are “a package deal,” to use modern American slang. They are unbreakably interlocked. Defenders of non-theonomic views of eschatology are not always consistent in their rejection of this package. A few of them may not openly reject theonomy’s insistence on the covenantal continuity of biblical law and God’s visible, predictable, corporate historical sanctions, although most of them do. Their rejection of postmillennialism eventually leads most of them to reject theonomy’s view of law and sanctions. Modern Christians are generally opposed to biblical law. This is one reason why they are opposed to postmillennialism. Instead of rejecting biblical law on the basis of their anti-postmillennialism, many of them are anti-postmillennial because of their rejection of the continuing authority of biblical law and its mandated civil sanctions. For these critics, the Book of Deuteronomy is an ofense. When pushed to state their views, they come out against Deuteronomy. The size of this commentary indicates why they are so hostile to Deuteronomy: Deuteronomy contains the most comprehensive presentation of God’s law. A good example of this hostility appears in a critique of my 1984 essay on the free market economy and the Mosaic law.8 I have spent

8. I have reprinted this essay as Appendix E.

xxviii

DEUTERONOMY

my career arguing that the Bible’s covenantal law-order, when obeyed, must produce a free market economy. Critics of the free market within Christian circles are upset with this argument. Christians who received graduate education in the social sciences in secular universities9 prior to about 1980 are almost universally skeptical of the free market. When they are faced with the teachings of the Old Testament regarding the mandatory nature of private property and a highly limited civil government (I Sam. 8:15, 17), their reaction is not to abandon their commitment to socialism or the mixed economy. Rather, they openly reject the Old Testament. For example, William Diehl, a defender of economist John Maynard Keynes’ defense of the civil government-guided economy, responded as follows to my brief theonomic defense of the free market: “That the author is strong on ‘biblical law’ is apparent. The essay provides us with thirty-nine Old Testament citations, of which twenty-three are from the book of Deuteronomy. Alongside these imposing Old Testament references the reader is given only nine New Testament citations, of which only four come from the mouth of Jesus. Notwithstanding one of North’s concluding statements that we need ‘faith in Jesus Christ,’ this essay might more properly be entitled ‘Poverty and Wealth according to Deuteronomy.’ The teachings and parables of Jesus are rich with references to wealth, poverty and justice. Why has the author chosen to ignore these? Can it be that the words of the Master are an embarrassment to the advocates of a free-market system?”10 I reply that the words of the Master are also the words of the Book of Deuteronomy. To imply otherwise is to imply that Marcion’s second-century defense of a two-gods authorship of the Bible is orthodox. Marcion’s position was unorthodox then, and it still is. Was Deuteronomy revealed by some other god than the God of the Bible? No. So, Mr. Diehl was indulging in rhetoric. When rhetoric undermines orthodoxy, it should be sacrifced for the sake of orthodoxy. I ask: What is wrong with Deuteronomy’s discussion of the causes of wealth and poverty? God should not be placed in the

9. This means every graduate liberal arts program except at unaccredited Bob Jones University. 10. William E. Diehl, “A Guided-Market Response,” in Robert Clouse (ed.), Wealth and Poverty: Four Christian Views of Economics (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1984), p. 66.

Preface

xxix

dock just because Deuteronomy does not conform to the incoherent speculations in Mr. Keynes’ General Theory. Is there evidence that God’s commandments in Deuteronomy were annulled by the New Covenant? Some commandments have been annulled, such as the law of genocidal annihilation. That was a one-time event. It is the job of the expositor to examine which Mosaic laws have carried over into the New Covenant and which have not. But for a critic of the free market order, or any other aspect or social product of Deuteronomy, blithely to dismiss Deuteronomy’s authority over him and his academic speculations without showing what has been annulled and why, is to play with ire. Modern man arrogates to himself the right to pick and choose from God’s revelation, a practice which Rushdoony calls the smorgasbord approach to the Bible. Modern academic evangelicals come in the name of the latest humanist fad, indulging in the rhetoric of contempt for God’s law. Joseph Sobran, a Roman Catholic columnist with a gift for the English language, once wrote that he would rather belong to a church that is 5,000 years behind the times than one that is hujng and pujng to keep up with the spirit of the age. Put another way, better Eastern Orthodoxy than the World Council of Churches. Better the Athanasian Creed than the Social Gospel. Mr. Diehl’s rhetoric implies that what Jesus taught was in opposition to what Deuteronomy teaches. This needs to be proven, not merely stated. But because Mr. Diehl’s rhetorical response is all that is left for a critic of the free market order who comes in the name of Christ, I have decided to move to the Gospels when I complete this commentary on Deuteronomy. With thousands of pages of commentary on the Pentateuch behind me, I can now safely move to the New Testament. I have proven my point with respect to the Pentateuch. God’s law provides the legal framework for a free market social order and undermines the theory of socialism. Until at least one critic of the free market produces a comparably detailed commentary on the economics of the Pentateuch, readers of my multivolume series should withhold judgment regarding the standard replies by Christian defenders of socialism and the mixed economy: 1) the Bible does not ofer a blueprint for economics; and/or 2) the Bible is opposed to the free market. Assertions without proof are merely rhetoric. To my critics, I will say it one more time: You can’t beat something with nothing.

xxx

DEUTERONOMY

Deinitions Throughout this book, I refer to the theocentric foundations of the laws. I begin my study of a law with an implied question: Why did God give it? I begin to search out my answer with a brief discussion of God in His relation to the creation. This is a basic principle of biblical hermeneutics that I did not employ prior to Tools of Dominion (1990). I also employ the terms land law, seed law, and cross-boundary law. I came up with this classiication in my commentary on Leviticus. A land law refers to a law that was binding exclusively inside the Promised Land. A seed law had to do with the preservation of the tribes as separate entities. A cross-boundary law was one that applied both inside and outside of the Promised Land. It is still binding unless annulled by the New Covenant.

Conclusion Deuteronomy is the Pentateuch’s book of inheritance/disinheritance. Its theme is three-fold: predestination, adopted sonship, and inheritance. The fourth generation after the descent into Egypt would surely inherit. This had been predestined by God. This inheritance was nonetheless ethically conditional: primarily dependent on Jesus Christ’s representative perfect work and secondarily dependent on Joshua’s decision to circumcise the nation at Gilgal (Josh. 5:3). To maintain this inheritance – the kingdom grant – Israel would have to obey God’s law. Disobedience would produce disinheritance, which Jesus announced to the religious leaders of Israel: “Therefore say I unto you, The kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof” (Matt. 21:43). The adopted Israelite heirs were inally replaced in A.D. 70 by gentile adopted heirs. “But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name” (John 1:12). Deuteronomy ofers the basics of biblical economics. The economics it teaches is free market economics. This is why Christian economists of the socialist or Keynesian persuasion do not spend a lot of time commenting on the details of Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy is an afront to their economics.

INTRODUCTION Introduction These be the words which Moses spake unto all Israel on this side Jordan in the wilderness, in the plain over against the Red sea, between Paran, and Tophel, and Laban, and Hazeroth, and Dizahab (Deut. 1:1).

The Hebrew words that begin this book of the Bible, ‘eleh dabarim or devarim, mean simply “these words.” But this is not the name which has come down through time to Jews and gentiles. Deuteronomy is the book’s commonly accepted title. Deuteronomy is an Anglicized derivative from the Greek: second (deutero) law (nomos). It comes from the Septuagint’s1 rendering in Greek of the words mishneh torah,2 or copy of the law. “And it shall be, when he sitteth upon the throne of his kingdom, that he shall write him a copy of this law in a book out of that which is before the priests the Levites” (Deut. 17:18).3 What were the words of Moses? A recapitulation of God’s law. This is why the laws of Deuteronomy repeat so many of the laws of Leviticus, e.g., Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28. This recapitulation of the law was preparatory to national covenant renewal at Gilgal (Josh. 5).The generation born in the wilderness had not visibly covenanted with God: no circumcision. Most – probably all – of the members of the exodus generation except Moses were dead by now.4 Aaron died (Num. 20:28) just prior to the wars against King 1. The Septuagint translation of the Old Testament into Greek: second century B.C. 2. The title of Maimonides’ twelfth-century commentary on the law, written from 1177 to 1187. It ills 14 volumes in the Yale University Press edition, The Code of Maimonides. 3. New Bible Dictionary (2nd ed.; Wheaton, Illinois: Tyndale House, 1982), p. 280. 4. The exception was Caleb (Deut. 1:36).

1

2

DEUTERONOMY

Arad, King Og, and King Sihon (Num. 21). It was time for national covenant renewal, which had to precede national covenantal inheritance. Deuteronomy presents the judicial basis and promise of this inheritance. This presentation of the law was made “on this side of Jordan in the wilderness.” This is an inaccurate translation. The Hebrew word translated “this side” should be translated “opposite side,” i.e., east of the Jordan or across the Jordan. The King James translators sometimes translated ayber as “other side.”5 Moses died on the wilderness side of the Jordan. Yet the context of this passage indicates that the word should be translated “other side.” If Moses wrote these words, he must have been writing from the perspective of the nation after it had crossed the Jordan. He was on the other side of Jordan when he wrote of the other side as the other side. That is, he wrote Deuteronomy as if he were writing to people settled in Canaan. He was writing in the conidence that Israel would be successful in the conquest of the land. He was writing to those who had already inherited. The future-orientation of the Book of Deuteronomy begins in its irst sentence.

Higher Critics and Their Baptized Agents Higher critics of the Bible argue that Moses did not write these words. These words were supposedly written centuries later by some ecclesiastical oicial inside the land. That is to say, higher critics implicitly argue that the Book of Deuteronomy is a pack of lies written by one or more forgers.6 But, being mild-mannered academics as well as wolves in sheep’s clothing, they do not use such words as lies, forgers, and deception. They prefer such sophisticated terms as myths, redactors, and weltanschauung. 5. “And they came to the threshingloor of Atad, which is beyond Jordan, and there they mourned with a great and very sore lamentation: and he made a mourning for his father seven days” (Gen. 50:10). “From thence they removed, and pitched on the other side of Arnon, which is in the wilderness that cometh out of the coasts of the Amorites: for Arnon is the border of Moab, between Moab and the Amorites” (Num. 21:13). Yet in one case the word is translated both ways in one verse: “For we will not inherit with them on yonder side Jordan, or forward; because our inheritance is fallen to us on this side Jordan eastward” (Num. 32:19). 6. Gary North, Boundaries and Dominion: The Economics of Leviticus (computer edition; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), Appendix J: “Conspiracy, Forgery, and Higher Criticism.”

Introduction

3

One argument against the higher critics is the integration of the ive books of Moses. The Pentateuch is a remarkable structure. How did hordes of redactors re-write the Pentateuch, line by line, without undermining the integration of the ive books? How was it that this structure, which generations of higher critics failed to perceive, was understood by each of the redactors? How was it that generations of tiny revisions maintained this structure, which was invisible to academic specialists – even Germans! – until the work of George Mendenhall in the mid-1950’s? The Pentateuch is structured in terms of a covenant. The ive books of Moses parallel the ive-point biblical covenant model.7 8 This model deines covenant theology. This ive-point structure is clearest in the Book of Deuteronomy: transcendence (1:1B5); hierarchy (1:6B4:49); ethics (5B26); sanctions (27B30); and continuity (31B34).9 Jordan divides the book into ive parts: 1) steward as vice-gerent, 2) new cosmos,10 3) Moses’ sermon on the Ten Commandments, 4) implementation, and 5) succession.11 This ive-point model also governs the structure of Exodus12 and Leviticus,13 as well as the Ten Commandments14 and the ive sacriices of Leviticus.15 This covenantal structure was common to Hittite treaties in the second millennium, B.C. This was Mendenhall’s point and Kline’s. If the Book of Deuteronomy was put into its inal form in, say, the 7. Gary North, The Dominion Covenant: Genesis (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987), General Introduction; Gary North, Leviticus: An Economic Commentary (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), Preface. 8. Gary North, Tools of Dominion: The Case Laws of Exodus (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), pp. 72B75. 9. This is Sutton’s version of Meredith Kline’s proposed structure. Meredith G. Kline, Treaty of the Great King: The Covenant Structure of Deuteronomy: Studies and Commentary (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1963), pp. 48B49; Ray R. Sutton, That You May Prosper: Dominion By Covenant (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1992), pp. 21, 41, 59, 77, 96. 10. Two sets of ive points each (1:6B46; 2:1B4:40). 11. James B. Jordan, Covenant Sequence in Leviticus and Deuteronomy (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989), ch. 4. 12. Sovereign God (1B17), judicial appeals courts (18), laws (21B23:13), oath (23B24), and inheritance (25B40). North, Tools of Dominion, p. 93. 13. Sacriices (1B7), priestly cleansing (8B16), laws of separation (17B22), covenant-renewal festivals and covenant-breaking acts (23B24), and inheritance (25B27). North, Leviticus, pp. 44B45. 14. Gary North, The Sinai Strategy: Economics and the Ten Commandments (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1986), pp. xivBxxii. 15. North, Leviticus, pp. xlixBliv.

4

DEUTERONOMY

seventh century B.C., how was it that it was structured in terms of a treaty structure in wide use almost a thousand years earlier? Despite this obvious problem, professedly conservative Bible commentaries still promote some version of higher criticism. The New Bible Dictionary, co-published by InterVarsity Press in England and Tyndale House in the United States, asserts: “But none of these statements permits the conclusion that Deuteronomy as we have it today came completely, or even in large measure, from Moses himself. One has to allow for editorial activity and adaptations of original Mosaic material to a later age.”16 Let us translate this into non-Ph.D. English: “One has to allow for post-Mosaic forgeries by non-inspired charlatans who adapted the original Mosaic material to the interests, information, and perspectives of their age, fooling the likes of you, my academically uncertiied Christian reader, generation after generation.” The author says as much: “However, it became necessary in new situations to represent the words of Moses and to show their relevance for a new day.”17 Then he escalates his rhetoric: “While there seems little reason to deny that a substantial part [which part?] of Deuteronomy was in existence some centuries [how many?] before the seventh century BC, it is not possible [for humanist-certiied Christian scholars] to say how much of it comprises the ipsissima verba of Moses himself.”18 How impressive: ipsissima verba. I would call his language struttissima verba. “Hey, all you untrained bumpkins out there who still believe in the inspired word of God, who still believe in the words of Jesus, which identiied the author of the law as Moses. You don’t have a Ph.D. issued by some secular university. You poor, pathetic people are struggling to earn a living, while we Christian academics live of of your tithes, your oferings, or maybe even your taxes through a tax-funded university faculty. Personally, I live of of public tax money. See what we can do! We can undermine your faith at your expense. We can toss around Latin phrases. I guess that shows you what we are.” Yes, it does. And also what they believe: “Hath God said?” Those thoughtful people who, in a century or a millennium from now, may relect on why the twentieth century was almost devoid of

16. New Bible Dictionary, p. 283. 17. Idem. 18. Ibid., p. 284.

Introduction

5

Bible commentaries that were conident in the cultural relevance of the Bible, or in principles drawn from the Bible, or in the probable success of the gospel in transforming culture, need only consider the emasculating efects of such prevarications as we ind in The New Bible Dictionary, written for educated laymen by humanist-trained and humanist-certiied academic evangelicals. Cautious Christian authors refuse to use words that relect what they are really saying. Forgers in retrospect become “editors.” Revisions made centuries later by these clever and unscrupulous forgers become “relevance for a new day.” The verbal, plenary inspiration of the Bible becomes a mish-mash of “fragments.” The Bible as delivered to the saints becomes a grab-bag of updates, revisions, and improvements on the revealed word of God. The timeless authority of the Bible is jettisoned for the timely authority of academic relevance. The word of man triumphs in history, revision by revision, leaving saints in every age without an inspired anchor linking heaven and earth, eternity and time. Man is thereby unchained covenantally, which is what covenant-breaking man since Adam has wanted to be. Twentieth-century evangelical churches are deeply compromised with modern pagan culture, rarely more visibly or more dangerously than in the Christian college and seminary classroom.

Sanctions and Inheritance/Disinheritance The promised negative sanction against the generation of the exodus had been imposed by God: they would not enter the Promised Land (Num. 14:23). This exclusion was a secondary form of disinheritance. The primary form was genocide. This is what God had initially threatened. “I will smite them with the pestilence, and disinherit them, and will make of thee a greater nation and mightier than they” (Num. 14:12). Moses countered this with the ultimate prayer: an appeal to God’s reputation. And Moses said unto the LORD, Then the Egyptians shall hear it, (for thou broughtest up this people in thy might from among them;) And they will tell it to the inhabitants of this land: for they have heard that thou LORD art among this people, that thou LORD art seen face to face, and that thy cloud standeth over them, and that thou goest before them, by daytime in a pillar of a cloud, and in a pillar of ire by night. Now if thou shalt kill all this people as one man, then the nations which have heard the fame of thee will speak, saying, Because the LORD was not able to bring this people into the

6

DEUTERONOMY

land which he sware unto them, therefore he hath slain them in the wilderness (Num. 14:13B16).

Inheritance can be secured in one of two ways: disinheritance or adoption. Either God displaces the present owners and transfers ownership to His people, or else He incorporates them into His people through adoption, which then secures the inheritance. There is no third way. Inheritance and disinheritance are two sides of the same coin. They are an aspect of God’s sanctions, positive and negative, in eternity but also in history. Sihon’s resistance to Israel was part of this preliminary process of inheritance/disinheritance. “But Sihon king of Heshbon would not let us pass by him: for the LORD thy God hardened his spirit, and made his heart obstinate, that he might deliver him into thy hand, as appeareth this day. And the LORD said unto me, Behold, I have begun to give Sihon and his land before thee: begin to possess, that thou mayest inherit his land. Then Sihon came out against us, he and all his people, to ight at Jahaz. And the LORD our God delivered him before us; and we smote him, and his sons, and all his people. And we took all his cities at that time, and utterly destroyed the men, and the women, and the little ones, of every city, we left none to remain: Only the cattle we took for a prey unto ourselves, and the spoil of the cities which we took” (Deut. 2:30–35). This was a system of dispossession: “And because he loved thy fathers, therefore he chose their seed after them, and brought thee out in his sight with his mighty power out of Egypt; To drive out nations from before thee greater and mightier than thou art, to bring thee in, to give thee their land for an inheritance, as it is this day. Know therefore this day, and consider it in thine heart, that the LORD he is God in heaven above, and upon the earth beneath: there is none else. Thou shalt keep therefore his statutes, and his commandments, which I command thee this day, that it may go well with thee, and with thy children after thee, and that thou mayest prolong thy days upon the earth, which the LORD thy God giveth thee, for ever” (Deut. 4:37–40). This dispossession was supposed to be total: “But of the cities of these people, which the LORD thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth: But thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites; as the LORD thy God hath commanded thee” (Deut. 20:16–17).

Introduction

7

The Book of Deuteronomy is the Pentateuch’s book of inheritance. It follows the Pentateuch’s book of sanctions, Numbers. The account of the preliminary dispossession on the wilderness side of the Jordan is found in Numbers 21. The signiicance of this initial warfare was announced by Moses to the generation of the conquest. Moses framed his discussion of the events of Numbers 21 in terms of God’s program of inheritance/disinheritance.

Social Theory and Eschatology The ifth point of the biblical covenant model is succession. 20 The ifth point is judicially connected to the fourth: sanctions. Corporate sanctions are applied by God in history in terms of point 21 three: law. Any discussion of biblical law that ignores corporate sanctions and succession is incomplete. Any discussion that selfconsciously separates them is incorrect. Succession is an aspect of eschatology. The eschatological question regarding history is this: Who shall inherit the earth? The Bible is clear: covenant-keepers. 19

His soul shall dwell at ease; and his seed shall inherit the earth (Ps. 25:13). For evildoers shall be cut of: but those that wait upon the LORD, they shall inherit the earth (Ps. 37:9). But the meek shall inherit the earth; and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace (Ps. 37:11). For such as be blessed of him shall inherit the earth; and they that be cursed of him shall be cut of (Ps. 37:22). Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth (Matt. 5:5).

This eschatological outlook is denied by premillennialists and amillennialists. This is why they have a major problem with the Book of Deuteronomy, the premier book of inheritance in the Old 19. Sutton, That You May Prosper, ch. 5. 20. Ibid., ch. 4. 21. Ibid., ch. 3.

8

DEUTERONOMY

Testament. To deal with this book, they have to argue that the corrosive efects of sin always lead men to break the covenant and lose the inheritance. This is why covenant-keepers supposedly will not inherit the earth. The problem with this argument is two-fold: 1) it necessarily makes covenant-breakers the inheritors, thereby denying the plain teaching of Scripture; 2) it relegates the New Testament doctrines of the bodily resurrection and ascension of Christ to the realm of eschatological adiaphora – things indiferent to the faith.

Dispensationalism It should come as no surprise that C. I. Scoield ofered fewer notes to the Book of Deuteronomy than to any other book in the Pentateuch: a grand total of three. Not until we reach Deuteronomy 16 do we ind a Scoield note, and this is a brief one on the feasts of Israel.22 The next one appears in chapter 28, a one-sentence note describing chapters 28B29 as part of chapter 30’s “Palestinian Covenant.”23 The third note is attached to Deuteronomy 30:3, a description of the seven-part “Palestinian Covenant.” Scoield said that Israel “has never as yet taken the land under the unconditional Abrahamic Covenant, nor has it ever possessed the whole land . . .”24 This note implies the necessity of a future restoration of the nation of Israel to the land of Palestine. I have dealt with the supposed unconditionality of the Abrahamic promise of the land.25 The relevant point here is Scoield’s silence on the ethical terms of the Mosaic covenant and their judicial connection to the New Testament, including corporate sanctions and inheritance. He moved from the Palestinian Covenant’s conditions back to the Abrahamic covenant’s supposed lack of conditions, ignoring both the issue of circumcision as a condition of inheritance and the question of predictable covenantal sanctions in New Covenant history. He also removed the question of eschatological inheritance from the realm of law and historical sanctions. His theology moves the question of inheritance from conditionality to unconditionality, i.e., from corporate covenantal obedience as the 22. 23. 24. 25.

Scoield Reference Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 1909), p. 234n. Ibid., p. 245n. Ibid., p. 250. Preface, above, and Chapter 17, below.

Introduction

9

basis of inheritance in history to corporate covenantal disinheritance: the church’s removal from history by the pre-tribulation Rapture and its replacement as God’s heir in history by a Jewish millennial church. The New Scoield Reference Bible (1967) did add a few more notes to Deuteronomy, but all but one of them avoided any discussion of God’s law, His corporate sanctions in history, and inheritance/disinheritance. This exception supports my point. It added material to Scoield’s note to Deuteronomy 30:3 on the Palestinian Covenant. “No passage of Scripture has found fuller conirmation in the events of history than Dt. 28B30. In A.D. 70 the Jewish nation was scattered throughout the world because of disobedience and rejection of Christ. In world-wide dispersion they have experienced exactly the punishments foretold by Moses.” Here the editors implicitly admitted that the Mosaic covenant is still in efect in New Testament times: its negative sanction of dispersion has been applied in New Testament history. This was a remarkable admission theologically: the assertion of covenantal continuity from Moses down to the modern state of Israel. But this Mosaic sanction is said to apply to Jews; there was no mention of Christians in the note. This aspect of covenantal continuity is not much emphasized by dispensational theologians, for obvious reasons: the camel’s nose of covenantal continuity is now inside the tent of New Testament history. Dispensational theology’s “Great Parenthesis,” known as the Church Age, is apparently not completely parenthetical, covenantally speaking. If this covenantal continuity is still in efect today, then there will presumably be a restoration of the Mosaic law during the Millennial Age. The editors hint obliquely at this possibility: “In the twentieth century initial steps toward a restoration of the exiled people to their homeland have been seen.”26 If this negative corporate sanction is still being applied to the Jews in a predictable fashion – indeed, the most predictable corporate sanction in history – then there is no reason to believe that the Mosaic covenant governing the Jewish Millennial Church will be revoked at that late date. For some unstated reason, God is still enforcing His negative corporate sanction on lo-ami (not His people) during the period of their not being His people, while refusing to 26. The New Scoield Reference Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 251n.

10

DEUTERONOMY

bring positive corporate sanctions to His people in the Church Age. God’s predictable negative corporate sanction curses the Jews, but His corporate sanctions are inoperable one way or the other for Christians. This peculiar system of Church Age sanctions – “heads, Jews lose, but Christians don’t win; tails, covenant-breakers win” – leaves covenant-breakers as the heirs during the Church Age. This necessarily relegates both Jews and Christians to the fringes of social discourse. According to dispensational theology, Jews and Christians have nothing covenantally relevant to say about God’s law and corporate sanctions during the Church Age. Covenant-breakers heartily agree, and then enthusiastically seek to disinherit Jews and Christians culturally whenever the latter seek to act in the name of God’s revealed law. Dispensational theology is self-consciously based on an eschatology: the disinheritance of Christians and Jews during the Church Age. That is to say, dispensationalism is a Church Age eschatology of inheritance by covenant-breakers. Dispensationalism denies the existence of covenant sanctions in the Church Age, except insofar as such sanctions are exclusively negative and condemn Jews. Because dispensationalism is a theology of corporate inheritance and disinheritance apart from predictable covenantal sanctions, its advocates have no way to construct an explicitly biblical social theory during the Church Age. They deny the existence of any connection between the church’s covenantal obedience and its prophesied inheritance in history. They in fact deny that the New Testament church has any connection with the Mosaic covenant’s conditionality and Old Testament prophecies regarding inheritance in history. In this regard, dispensationalism, historic premillennialism, and amillennialism, are all agreed, which is why none of them has been able to develop an explicitly biblical social theory.27 This has been the theological foundation of what I have called the pietist-humanist alliance.28 Dispensational theology can be traced back to 1830. Since 1830, there has not been a single published dispensational book on Christian social theory. The dispensational movement has been 27. Gary North, Millennialism and Social Theory (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990). 28. For a detailed study of this alliance, see Gary North, Crossed Fingers: How the Liberals Captured the Presbyterian Church (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1995), Part 3.

Introduction

11

systematically silent on Christianity’s social and political responsibilities in the New Testament era. Also, there have been no books describing any judicial continuity between the gentile church’s covenantal responsibilities and the millennial Jewish church’s covenantal responsibilities. There has been no book-length discussion regarding any judicial continuity between the Church Age and the Millennial Age. In short, dispensationalism has been silent in the area of social theory. This is not an accident or an oversight on the part of dispensationalists. This is the inevitable result of the radical judicial discontinuities that are basic to dispensational theology: Mosaic law, New Testament law, and millennial law. This is why, in the words of dispensational defender Tommy Ice, “Premillennialists have always been involved in the present world. And basically, they have picked up on the ethical positions of their contemporaries.”29

Conclusion Deuteronomy recapitulated God’s law in preparation for Israel’s national covenant renewal through circumcision (Josh. 5). Moses looked forward to Israel’s conquest of Canaan. The law would provide the judicial basis for Israel’s maintaining the kingdom grant. The Pentateuch is structured in terms of the ive points of the covenant. This fact testiies against higher critics who would deny the Mosaic authorship. The Pentateuch’s structure compares with the treaties of kings of the second millennium B.C. It was written in that era. The ifth point of the covenant is inheritance/disinheritance. This is the primary theme of Deuteronomy. The book is inherently postmillennial. Dispensationalism denies this, of course. But by acknowledging that Jews after A.D. 70 have been under the covenant’s negative sanctions, the editors of the New Scoield Reference Bible thereby acknowledged covenantal continuity, Old Testament to New Testament. But by ignoring the continuity of the covenant with respect to the church, they placed Christians under the rule of covenant-breakers. Neither the Jews nor the Christians are the 29. Tommy Ice, response in a 1988 debate: Ice and Dave Hunt vs. Gary North and Gary DeMar. Cited in Gary DeMar, The Debate Over Christian Reconstruction (Atlanta, Georgia: American Vision Press, 1988), p. 185.

12

DEUTERONOMY

recipients of corporate covenant blessings this side of the millennium. The cultural pessimism of dispensationalism is inescapable. It ofers no cultural hope for the Church Age, so it places no value on the development of biblical social theory. In contrast, theonomic postmillennialism ofers both hope for the church and incentives for those Christians who would develop an explicitly biblical social theory. Deuteronomy, more than any other book in the Bible, ofers the judicial content of such a reconstruction.

Part I: Transcendence/Presence (1:1–5)

1 A TRANSCENDENT YETPresent PRESENT A Transcendent Yet God GOD These be the words which Moses spake unto all Israel on this side Jordan in the wilderness, in the plain over against the Red sea, between Paran, and Tophel, and Laban, and Hazeroth, and Dizahab. (There are eleven days’ journey from Horeb by the way of mount Seir unto Kadeshbarnea.) And it came to pass in the fortieth year, in the eleventh month, on the irst day of the month, that Moses spake unto the children of Israel, according unto all that the LORD had given him in commandment unto them; After he had slain Sihon the king of the Amorites, which dwelt in Heshbon, and Og the king of Bashan, which dwelt at Astaroth in Edrei: On this side Jordan, in the land of Moab, began Moses to declare this law. . . (Deut. 1:1–5).

By the time of the opening words of the Book of Deuteronomy, all the ighting men of the generation of the exodus were dead. In his recapitulation of the story of the wilderness, Moses said: “So it came to pass, when all the men of war were consumed and dead from among the people. . .” (Deut. 2:16). Then Moses re-told the story of the defeat of Sihon (vv. 26–35). This event had taken place before Deuteronomy’s narrative began (Num. 21:21–26). The death of the exodus generation points to the covenantal issue of inheritance. Deuteronomy is the Pentateuch’s book of inheritance. Inheritance is point ive of the biblical covenant model. The death of the exodus generation had prepared the nation of Israel for the long-promised inheritance: “But in the fourth generation they shall come hither again: for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full” (Gen. 15:16). Meredith Kline identiies this introductory passage as the preamble of the covenant or treaty between God and Israel. “Ancient

13

14

DEUTERONOMY

suzerainty treaties began with a preamble in which the speaker, the one who was declaring his lordship and demanding the vassal’s allegiance, identiied himself.” Deuteronomy’s opening words, “these are the words,” were common in extra-biblical treaties.1 Who, then, was the sovereign? Was it Moses himself, as Jordan argues?2 Or was it God?

Moses the Mediator These opening words reveal that Moses spoke them. The question is: In what capacity? It had to be as a delegated agent. “Moses spake unto the children of Israel, according unto all that the LORD had given him in commandment unto them; After he had slain Sihon the king of the Amorites. . .” (vv. 3b–4a). Who had achieved the victory over Sihon? God: the same God who had sustained them in the wilderness for four decades. The implication was that God is sovereign over all earthly kings, even as Moses was sovereign over Israel’s civil rulers (Deut. 1:13–18). God was also present with the Israelites, delivering their enemies into their hands – as present as Moses had been in rendering civil judgment (Ex. 18). That is, God is above mankind, yet He is specially present with His chosen people. This makes God diferent from both the god of deism and the god of animism. The god of deism is too distant from his creation to inluence it. His lack of immanence destroys his sovereignty. His personalism is limited; it applies only to his own being. The world is impersonal. English Deists may never have argued this way, since they were heavily inluenced by Christianity, but this is the theoretical meaning of deism. The god that made the cosmic clock no longer interferes with it. At most, he tinkers at the edges of creation. In contrast, the god of animism is a part of the creation and is therefore unable to inluence it as a sovereign master. He is immersed in it. He cannot remove himself from it in order to command it. His lack of transcendence destroys his sovereignty. His personalism is limited; he shares it with the world he did not make. 1. Meredith G. Kline, Treaty of the Great King: The Covenant Structure of Deuteronomy: Studies and Commentary (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1963), p. 50. 2. James B. Jordan, Covenant Sequence in Leviticus and Deuteronomy (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989), p. 58.

A Transcendent Yet Present God

15

The God of the Bible is sovereign over the world because He made it out of nothing. He is present with the world because He providentially sustains it. The world is personal because God is personal. It does not share in God’s being, but it relects His being. “For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse” (Rom. 1:20). The Bible teaches cosmic personalism.3

Mediation This passage resembles part two of the biblical covenant model, which Kline calls historical prologue.4 Yet Kline lists it as part one: “Preamble: Covenant Mediator.”5 Mediator implies hierarchy; hierarchy is also point two of the biblical covenant model.6 Why, then, do both Kline and Sutton designate this brief section as part one? If this is merely for the sake of argument, to make the Book of Deuteronomy it the ive-point covenant model, then the power of their argument is weakened. This is a question regarding the Person who is represented by the mediator. God revealed Himself to Old Covenant people through prophets; Moses was the greatest of these prophets.7 The words of Moses His servant could be trusted, and had to be obeyed, because God is above men, and He brings judgments in history in terms of His Bible-revealed law. The law-giver is God, the sanctions-bringer. Sihon and Og learned the hard way that God is totally sovereign. To present Himself to the generation of the conquest, God announced His law and sanctions through Moses. The announcement of God’s law and God’s sanctions points back to the giving of the law in Exodus. Exodus is the second book of the Pentateuch. It corresponds to the second point of the covenant. Kline calls point two “historical prologue.” 8 Moses subsequently

3. Gary North, The Dominion Covenant: Genesis (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987), ch. 1. 4. Ibid., p. 52. 5. Ibid., p. 50. 6. Ray R. Sutton, That You May Prosper: Dominion By Covenant (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1992), ch. 2. 7. Ibid., ch. 1. John the Baptist was his equal (Matt. 11:11). 8. Meredith G. Kline, Treaty of the Great King: The Covenant Structure of Deuteronomy: Studies and Commentary (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1963), p. 52.

16

DEUTERONOMY

recapitulated in Deuteronomy the story of God’s dealings with Israel for 40 years in the wilderness (1:6–4:49). God is the God of history because He is ruler over history: hierarchy. He brings His word to pass. In the Book of Genesis, He revealed Himself as the Creator. In Genesis, He presented an account in the irst chapter in terms of what He repeatedly said: “Let there be,” and the immediate results of His words in history. When God presented Himself in the Old Covenant, He did so, not by announcing a theological proposition, but by declaring what He has done in history. He named Himself: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). Then He gave a detailed account of His acts. Similarly, we read in the opening passage in Deuteronomy, “Moses spake unto the children of Israel, according unto all that the LORD had given him in commandment unto them” (v. 3b). Who is the Lord? The Person who only recently had destroyed Sihon and Og (v. 4), the Person whose law Moses was about to reveal.

Four Decades The Book of Deuteronomy begins six months after Aaron died, in the eleventh month (Deut. 1:3). This marked the end of the wilderness period. Miriam had died in the irst month (Num. 20:1). The irst month of which year? It had to be the fortieth year. Numbers 20 begins with the death of Miriam and closes with the death of Aaron (v. 28). Aaron died at age 123 (Num. 33:39) in the fortieth year after the exodus: “And Aaron the priest went up into mount Hor at the commandment of the LORD, and died there, in the fortieth year after the children of Israel were come out of the land of Egypt, in the irst day of the ifth month” (Num. 33:38). The phrase, “the irst day of the ifth month,” refers to Aaron’s death. It cannot refer to the exodus itself, which took place on the fourteenth day of the irst month: Passover (Ex. 12:18). Deuteronomy (“second law”) announces the terms of the covenant. It is the second reading of the law. Why a second reading? Because this was preparatory to an act of covenant renewal. The fourth generation after the journey into Egypt (Gen. 15:16) was about to experience corporate covenant renewal. This took place inside the Promised Land at Gilgal: mass circumcision (Josh. 5:5). Before they were told by Joshua to participate in this act of covenant renewal, the generation of the conquest was required to hear the law read in public.

A Transcendent Yet Present God

17

It was not just that they had to hear the law. They also had to be reminded of the deliverance of Israel out of Egypt (Deut. 4:20, 34, 37), as well as God’s miraculous preservation of Israel in the wilderness (Deut. 8:3–4). The law of God and the nation’s deliverance by God were linked: “These are the testimonies, and the statutes, and the judgments, which Moses spake unto the children of Israel, after they came forth out of Egypt” (Deut. 4:45). Because the deliverance and preservation of Israel in the wilderness were clearly miraculous events, the God who performed these miracles is above history: transcendent. But because He spoke through Moses, God was also present with His people. His transcendence in no way undermines His immanence – immanence in the sense of presence. He is not part of the creation, but He is present with His people.9

Conclusion The opening passage in Deuteronomy identiies Moses as the spokesman for the God who had delivered Israel and had also defeated two great Canaanite kings. Then begins a presentation of this sovereign King’s law. But before this law was announced by God’s prophet, the Israelites had to be reminded of the power of God in history. God’s law is not some sort of natural law order that was part of the cosmos and therefore not distinguishable from the cosmos. It is not a system of impersonal law. It is the law of the God who is sovereign over history. To persuade the Israelites that He could deliver the longexpected inheritance into their hands, God spoke through Moses. He spoke of His demonstrated power over two Canaanitic kings. He spoke also of His law. As sovereign over history, God is the sanctions-bringer in history. He delivers His promised inheritance in history. He announced His law through Moses after He had slain Sihon and Og. First had come the display of His power; then came the revelation of His law. He possessed the authority to impose His law because He is sovereign over history.

9. Jesus Christ was God incarnate in history. This is the ultimate manifestation of both presence and immanence. God was in the world but not of it. In His capacity as perfect man, He was of the world. In His capacity as God, He was not.

Part II: Hierarchy/Representation (1:6–4:49)

2 A DELAYED A DelayedINHERITANCE Inheritance The LORD our God spake unto us in Horeb, saying, Ye have dwelt long enough in this mount: Turn you, and take your journey, and go to the mount of the Amorites, and unto all the places nigh thereunto, in the plain, in the hills, and in the vale, and in the south, and by the sea side, to the land of the Canaanites, and unto Lebanon, unto the great river, the river Euphrates. Behold, I have set the land before you: go in and possess the land which the LORD sware unto your fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to give unto them and to their seed after them (Deut. 1:6–8).

The theocentric focus of this command is stewardship-ownership. Stewardship is the representative control over an asset on someone else’s behalf. It implies hierarchical authority: owner > steward > asset. This transfer of ownership of the Promised Land was legally grounded in God’s oath to Abraham, which He had renewed with Isaac and Jacob. The third generation had refused to obey this command. This led to the wilderness wanderings. Moses began his exposition of God’s dealings with the exodus generation with a discussion of the dominion assignment given to the nation at Horeb. The historical context of this assignment had been a miracle, followed by a rebellion, followed by another miracle. This was clearly a land law. It governed the conquest of Canaan. The irst miracle was the manna (Ex. 16). The nation would receive free food six days a week. This did not satisfy them. They also wanted water. The manner of their complaint constituted their rebellion. This was followed by the second miracle. And all the congregation of the children of Israel journeyed from the wilderness of Sin, after their journeys, according to the commandment of the LORD, and pitched in Rephidim: and there was no water for the people

18

A Delayed Inheritance

19

to drink. Wherefore the people did chide with Moses, and said, Give us water that we may drink. And Moses said unto them, Why chide ye with me? wherefore do ye tempt the LORD? And the people thirsted there for water; and the people murmured against Moses, and said, Wherefore is this that thou hast brought us up out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and our cattle with thirst? And Moses cried unto the LORD, saying, What shall I do unto this people? they be almost ready to stone me. And the LORD said unto Moses, Go on before the people, and take with thee of the elders of Israel; and thy rod, wherewith thou smotest the river, take in thine hand, and go. Behold, I will stand before thee there upon the rock in Horeb; and thou shalt smite the rock, and there shall come water out of it, that the people may drink. And Moses did so in the sight of the elders of Israel. And he called the name of the place Massah, and Meribah, because of the chiding of the children of Israel, and because they tempted the LORD, saying, Is the LORD among us, or not? (Ex. 17:1–7).

Moses then told the story of his establishment of the civil hierarchy, with himself as the supreme judge over Israel (Deut. 1:12–17). This incident is presented in Exodus 18. In between was the battle against Amalek, where Moses sent Joshua into battle while he himself stood on a nearby hill. Moses raised his hands above his head, and Israel prevailed. But when his arms grew weary, he let them down, and Amalek prevailed. Aaron and Hur then held Moses’ hands high, and Israel prevailed (Ex. 17:8–13). In that battle, Israel was victorious. This was the third miracle.

Israel’s Refusal to Fight For a younger generation that knew these stories, Moses’ words suggested what lay ahead: warfare. Joshua would be leading the nation into battle, his reward from God because of his courageous recommendation a generation earlier. Their parents had been told by God at the time of that earlier battle with Amalek that it was time to conquer Canaan. Their parents had not accepted this assignment. The three miracles – manna, water out of a rock, and military victory through Moses’ raised hands – had not persuaded them that Moses’ leadership could be relied on, that he had a unique position as God’s spokesman. They did not believe Moses because they did not believe God. Moses then reminded them of God’s repetition of the command to conquer the land. This took place at another mountain, the mountain of the Amorites (Deut. 1:19). “And I said unto you, Ye are

20

DEUTERONOMY

come unto the mountain of the Amorites, which the LORD our God doth give unto us. Behold, the LORD thy God hath set the land before thee: go up and possess it, as the LORD God of thy fathers hath said unto thee; fear not, neither be discouraged” (vv. 20–21). Moses was speaking to the generation of the conquest; the ighting men were all dead (v. 2:16). Nevertheless, he spoke of his having spoken to “you.” He reminded them of their parents’ decision not to accept the words of Joshua and Caleb (vv. 22–25). He applied their rebellion to their children because it was a covenantally representative act. “Notwithstanding ye would not go up, but rebelled against the commandment of the LORD your God: And ye murmured in your tents, and said, Because the LORD hated us, he hath brought us forth out of the land of Egypt, to deliver us into the hand of the Amorites, to destroy us” (vv. 26–27). Their parents had refused to listen to Moses. “Then I said unto you, Dread not, neither be afraid of them. The LORD your God which goeth before you, he shall ight for you, according to all that he did for you in Egypt before your eyes; And in the wilderness, where thou hast seen how that the LORD thy God bare thee, as a man doth bear his son, in all the way that ye went, until ye came into this place. Yet in this thing ye did not believe the LORD your God, Who went in the way before you, to search you out a place to pitch your tents in, in ire by night, to shew you by what way ye should go, and in a cloud by day” (vv. 29–33). It was at this point that God had disinherited the exodus generation: “And the LORD heard the voice of your words, and was wroth, and sware, saying, Surely there shall not one of these men of this evil generation see that good land, which I sware to give unto your fathers” (vv. 34–35). Had the sins of the fathers condemned the sons? Moses would later reveal this law: “The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin” (Deut. 24:16). Yet the sons had wandered with their fathers for up to 40 years. Their inheritance had been delayed. The efects of their fathers’ sin had been borne in part by the sons. There is covenantal representation in history. There is hierarchy. Their parents had been in authority. They had made a bad decision that afected their children. The children had participated in the sins of their fathers in the same way that they had participated in the sin of Adam. Covenantal continuity in history is based on covenantal representation. Sons inherit from fathers; they also participate in the sins of

A Delayed Inheritance

21

their fathers, which can be seen in the size and timing of the inheritance. Moses reminded them of the two exceptions to the curse: Caleb (v. 36) and Joshua. “But Joshua the son of Nun, which standeth before thee, he shall go in thither: encourage him: for he shall cause Israel to inherit it” (v. 38). For four decades, Moses had encouraged Joshua. Now the time had arrived; Joshua’s time had come. It would be his assignment to cause Israel to inherit the Promised Land. The children of the exodus generation would gain what their parents had forfeited. The day of inheritance was imminent. Their parents had rebelled by attacking the Amorites. As predicted, Israel lost that battle (vv. 41–44). From that point until the recent victories over Arad, Sihon, Og, and Moab-Midian, Israel was not allowed to ight. Israel was not entitled to the lands of Edom and Moab (Deut. 2:5, 9). They had to buy whatever they wanted: “Ye shall buy meat of them for money, that ye may eat; and ye shall also buy water of them for money, that ye may drink” (v. 6). They had forfeited their inheritance; so, God refused to allow them to engage in military conquest. If they would not ight to inherit Canaan, they would not be allowed to ight to inherit other nations’ inheritances.

Compound Growth The conquest of Canaan was a unique event. The land had been assigned to Israel in Abraham’s day. But there was a time limit on the fulillment of this promise: four generations. “But in the fourth generation they shall come hither again: for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full” (Gen. 15:16). God had commanded the third generation of Israelites to conquer Canaan. He commanded them to do what He had prophesied to Abraham would not take place: conquest by the third generation. How was this possible? I have dealt with this question in my commentary on Numbers. I wrote, The third generation was called upon by God to conquer the Canaanites immediately after the exodus. “And I said unto you, Ye are come unto the mountain of the Amorites, which the LORD our God doth give unto us. Behold, the LORD thy God hath set the land before thee: go up and possess it, as the LORD God of thy fathers hath said unto thee; fear not, neither be discouraged” (Deut. 1:20–21). Yet the fourth generation was the promised heir (Gen. 15:16). How could God require the third generation to conquer Canaan?

22

DEUTERONOMY

This military conquest could have been achieved by the third generation’s transfer of title to the inheritance to the fourth generation immediately following the exodus. This could have been achieved judicially by a transfer of military authority to the fourth generation, which was represented by Joshua and Caleb. These two men spoke for the fourth generation and its interests: immediate invasion. The other ten spies spoke for the third generation. Had the third generation’s representatives accepted the testimony of Joshua and Caleb, and had they been willing to transfer military leadership to Joshua and Caleb, Israel would have entered Canaan as the conqueror a generation early. The judicial issue, and therefore the prophetic issue, was representation. Which generation’s representatives would represent all of Israel in the imposition of corporate sanctions? The answer of the third generation: “Ours.” This decision, publicly manifested by the congregation’s attempt to stone Joshua and Caleb (Num. 14:10), sealed their doom. They would all die in the wilderness (Num. 14:33).1

The exodus generation’s sin in rejecting God’s command had condemned them to wandering. The Amorites, i.e., the residents of Canaan and the immediate surrounding areas – Arad, Sihon, and Og– were given extra time by God to work out the implications of their respective faiths. They were allowed to develop their rule in certain city-states. They had an important purpose in covenant history. They became negative examples for Israel: how not to worship and live. This leads me to a conclusion: sin compounds over time. It gets worse. It feeds on itself, building to a crescendo. The Amorites were illing up their cup of iniquity. In this sense, there is a kind of positive de-sanctiication that parallels positive sanctiication. Evil grows to the point where God will tolerate it no longer. Then He cuts it short. They were building up an economic inheritance for the fourth generation of Israelites. “And it shall be, when the LORD thy God shall have brought thee into the land which he sware unto thy fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give thee great and goodly cities, which thou buildedst not, And houses full of all good things, which thou illedst not, and wells digged, which thou diggedst not, vineyards and olive trees, which thou plantedst not; when thou shalt have eaten and be full. . .” (Deut. 6:10–11). Nevertheless, Canaan’s 1. Gary North, Sanctions and Dominion: An Economic Commentary on Numbers (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1996), p. 139.

A Delayed Inheritance

23

spiritual inheritance was an abomination. Israel would inherit the former but was forbidden to claim the latter. How could this be? If Canaan’s spiritual inheritance was abominable, why not also the economic results of that inheritance? If the spiritual roots were perverse, why not also the fruits? How could an evil tree produce good fruit? “For a good tree bringeth not forth corrupt fruit; neither doth a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit” (Luke 6:43). This is the question of common grace.2

Common Grace and Inheritance Because man is made in the image of God, he cannot avoid certain common beliefs and evaluations. “Drop dead!” is a universally recognized negative phrase, just as “O, king, live forever” was a common term of respect in many ancient kingdoms, even though 3 obviously impossible to fulill in history. Certain features of life are almost universally accepted as being desirable. Wealth is one of them, though not necessarily great wealth, which most men and societies acknowledge brings with it unpleasant consequences. Good health is another. Nowhere is there anyone who would deny the truth of North’s universally preferable trade-of: “It is better to be rich and healthy than it is to be poor and sick.” (Of course, this must be qualiied by the economist’s ceteris paribus: other things remaining equal.) God makes health a universal goal for mankind. Sickness is universally regarded as a curse. There is no church ritual for anointing someone with oil in order to make him sick. There are common features of life that everyone acknowledges as preferable. People seek to attain these preferred conditions of life. Men possess commonly agreed-upon goals: wealth in general, health in general. This is an aspect of common grace. It makes economic cooperation possible among men of all religious and philosophical views. Common grace is why the eforts of Canaanites in building up their farms and vineyards produced an inheritance for Israel. The question is: How? How did morally corrupt people achieve these positive economic results? The answer is common grace. Men 2. Gary North, Dominion and Common Grace: The Biblical Basis of Progress (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987). 3. I Kings 1:31; Nehemiah 2:3; Daniel 2:4; 3:9; 5:10; 6:6, 21.

24

DEUTERONOMY

agree on the desirability of certain results. This does not validate their logic or other culturally derived methods of coming to conclusions. It does not validate their worship of idols in seeking God’s favor. But it does mean that there must be a common acceptance of certain principles of action in order for individuals to prosper. One of these principles is thrift. Men through hard experience are taught to “save something for a rainy day.” They are told: “waste not, want not.” They learn that “a penny saved is a penny earned.”4 They learn not to eat their seed corn. Another principle is hard work. Men labor to subdue the earth in order that the earth might bring forth its fruits. The earth blooms because men work hard over time to convert the ground into something desirable.

Covenantal Limits to Growth The life spans of men are shorter in the post-lood world than they were before. Moses wrote: “The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut of, and we ly away” (Ps. 90:10). There are limits to the growth of capital under the authority of any individual. For the compounding process in the broadest sense to continue, he must ind associates who share his vision and skills, so that he may make them heirs by leaving his capital to them. By shortening men’s life spans, God made the inheritancedisinheritance factor predominant in the building of His kingdom. If men lived as long as Methuselah, there would have been only one-tenth of the number of generations. The compounding process of evil would not have been undermined nearly so efectively as it has been by the multiplying of generations. The godly inheritance compounds through the generations through the church. It cannot compound long term through either the family or the State. The family inheritance is too easily dissipated through bad marriages, broken covenants, or unmotivated heirs, while the State is not creative. No institution matches the church for long-term compounding: succession. By shortening men’s lives, God has subsidized the church’s advantage until such time as Christians are in a majority. 4. Assuming a rate of zero income taxation. In high income tax brackets, a penny saved is 1.4 pennies earned.

A Delayed Inheritance

25

The Bible’s system of covenant sanctions is clear: covenantkeepers inherit; covenant-breakers do not. Covenant-breakers are eventually disinherited by covenant-keepers. “A good man leaveth an inheritance to his children’s children: and the wealth of the sinner is laid up for the just” (Prov. 13:22). This transfer of inheritance was by war in the case of the Canaanites. But after this, Israel was to extend its process of progressive inheritance through disinheritance by economic means. One of the means of extending their dominion was extending credit. “For the LORD thy God blesseth thee, as he promised thee: and thou shalt lend unto many nations, but thou shalt not borrow; and thou shalt reign over many nations, but they shall not reign over thee” (Deut. 15:6). Their possession of wealth would multiply at the expense of covenant-breakers. And the LORD shall make thee plenteous in goods, in the fruit of thy body, and in the fruit of thy cattle, and in the fruit of thy ground, in the land which the LORD sware unto thy fathers to give thee. The LORD shall open unto thee his good treasure, the heaven to give the rain unto thy land in his season, and to bless all the work of thine hand: and thou shalt lend unto many nations, and thou shalt not borrow. And the LORD shall make thee the head, and not the tail; and thou shalt be above only, and thou shalt not be beneath; if that thou hearken unto the commandments of the LORD thy God, which I command thee this day, to observe and to do them: And thou shalt not go aside from any of the words which I command thee this day, to the right hand, or to the left, to go after other gods to serve them (Deut. 28:11–14).

Nevertheless, covenant-breakers were not to be forced to borrow. Then how was it that their progressive disinheritance by Israel would be accomplished voluntarily? Why would they go into debt to Israel? For the same reason and in the same way that Esau was willing to sell his inheritance to Jacob (Gen. 25:30–33). Esau was more present-oriented than Jacob was. He valued present gratiication more highly than Jacob did. Jacob was willing to give red pottage to Esau in exchange for Esau’s future birthright. A voluntary exchange became possible because the two men had diferent time perspectives. Jacob was upper class; Esau was lower class.5

5. Gary North, The Dominion Covenant: Genesis (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987), ch. 18.

26

DEUTERONOMY

So, there are limits to growth for the covenant-breaker. The ultimate limit is eschatological: the inal judgment. God will bring to a close the conlict between covenant-keepers and covenantbreakers. But prior to this eschatologically representative event, God disinherits those who hate Him. He allows covenant-breaking societies to compound their sin and their wealth for a few generations, but He allows covenant-keepers to multiply their righteousness and wealth for many generations. “Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments” (Ex. 20:5–6). This does not mean thousands of people; it means thousands of generations. The literalism of “thousands of generations” would mean at least 80,000 years (40 x 2 x 1000). I believe this language is symbolic; it means until the end of time.6 A lengthy passage later in Moses’ monologue makes this time perspective clearer. First comes God’s covenant promise. Next comes God’s fulillment of the promise by giving victory to His people. This should produce in them ever-greater covenantal obedience, which in turn will produce ever-greater blessings. This is the compounding process, and it is tied to corporate obedience. The compounding process is covenantal. But because the LORD loved you, and because he would keep the oath which he had sworn unto your fathers, hath the LORD brought you out with a mighty hand, and redeemed you out of the house of bondmen, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt. Know therefore that the LORD thy God, he is God, the faithful God, which keepeth covenant and mercy with them 7 that love him and keep his commandments to a thousand generations; And repayeth them that hate him to their face, to destroy them: he will not

6. Here is one reason why I believe this. Our memories are limited. We cannot recall more than a tiny fraction of our own lives. In studying the records of history, we can discover and then summarize only a few representative fragments. We remember far less than we read. So, if mankind survives for tens of millennia, men in the future will ind it impossible to master the covenantal past, even when they live long lives (Isa. 65:17B20). The longer the race survives, the less we can understand of man’s history. We become overwhelmed by its complexity and diversity. 7. Here, only a thousand generations are mentioned, not thousands. The language of thousands of generations is symbolic.

A Delayed Inheritance

27

be slack to him that hateth him, he will repay him to his face. Thou shalt therefore keep the commandments, and the statutes, and the judgments, which I command thee this day, to do them. Wherefore it shall come to pass, if ye hearken to these judgments, and keep, and do them, that the LORD thy God shall keep unto thee the covenant and the mercy which he sware unto thy fathers: And he will love thee, and bless thee, and multiply thee: he will also bless the fruit of thy womb, and the fruit of thy land, thy corn, and thy wine, and thine oil, the increase of thy kine, and the locks of thy sheep, in the land which he sware unto thy fathers to give thee. Thou shalt be blessed above all people: there shall not be male or female barren among you, or among your cattle. And the LORD will take away from thee all sickness, and will put none of the evil diseases of Egypt, which thou knowest, upon thee; but will lay them upon all them that hate thee. And thou shalt consume all the people which the LORD thy God shall deliver thee; thine eye shall have no pity upon them: neither shalt thou serve their gods; for that will be a snare unto thee. If thou shalt say in thine heart, These nations are more than I; how can I dispossess them? Thou shalt not be afraid of them: but shalt well remember what the LORD thy God did unto Pharaoh, and unto all Egypt (Deut. 7:8–18).

The covenant-breaking society can experience long-term growth. But the long-term growth of a covenant-breaking society is vastly shorter than the long-term growth open to a covenant-keeping society. The compounding process in any ield produces accelerating growth. When you re-invest the earnings, and these investments also participate in the compounding process, the numbers get astronomical very fast. The higher the rate of growth, the faster the things being compounded reach high numbers. What God was telling Israel was that covenantal obedience produces growth. Growth produces victory. No matter how low the rate of growth, if the compounding process can go on long enough, it will engulf the world. It will reach environmental limits of growth. This is God’s way of pointing to the end of time. There are environmental limits to growth. The world is not ininite. There is just so much “stuf” to inherit. There is also a temporal limit to growth: the inal judgment. The existence of compound growth for covenant-keepers points to the inal victory in time of God’s kingdom. It also points to the disinheritance of Satan’s kingdom in history.

28

DEUTERONOMY

Cutting Of Growth The key to the compounding is continual reinvestment. It does not matter how low the rate of growth is; if this growth continues through time long enough, it will eventually swallow up everything in the environment that feeds it. This is the message of Aesop’s fable of the tortoise and the hare. The hare achieves a rapid conquest over space, but he does not sustain it. The tortoise can achieve only a slow conquest of space, but he never quits moving forward. The tortoise eventually overtakes the sleeping hare. “Slowly but surely” is a familiar folk phrase that illustrates this principle of comparative growth. So is “steady as you go.” God cuts of the growth of covenant-breaking societies. They grow only until their iniquity becomes full. Then they either fall or are converted to faith in God. Their growth ceases if they continue to reject God. They experience setbacks. Meanwhile, the compounding process goes on for covenant-keeping societies. Even if it is cut of temporarily, it returns. The church is the heir of this covenantal promise. It survives all setbacks. Its growth may slow down for a time. Covenant-breaking organizations and even whole societies may outrun the church for a time. But the church is never stopped. It is like the tortoise in the fable. Biblical principles of limited civil government, free trade, thrift, and freedom of contract produce compound economic growth. As the West has applied these principles, it has grown rich.8 All other social orders have fallen behind the West in this regard. The lure of wealth is universal. The West’s principles of economics are now being adopted by societies in Asia. The economic results of this adoption have been spectacular since the end of World War II. But these principles of economic development have been secularized by their expositors. These principles have been explained as contract-based, not covenant-based. No sovereign, personal God is said to sustain the growth process. In fact, economists have been more ready than any other academic group to dismiss God as irrelevant to theory. They were the irst academic profession to secularize their discussions: in the late seventeenth century.9 8. Nathan Rosenberg and L. E. Birdzell, Jr., How the West Grew Rich: The Economic Transformation of the Industrial World (New York: Basic Books, 1986). 9. William Letwin, The Origins of Scientiic Economics (Cambridge, Massachusetts: M.I.T. Press, 1963), ch. 6.

A Delayed Inheritance

29

The growth of economic output has led to the growth of population. All over the non-industrial world, populations are growing as never before in man’s history. In the wealthy West, however, reproduction rates are falling. Were it not for immigration, these rates would be much lower. So, we see the covenantal realm of Satan expanding. The West has generally abandoned Christianity, and the Third World has yet to adopt it. The growth in the number of covenant-breakers is dwaring the growth of covenant-keepers. This has put the church on the defensive. If widespread revival does not come before the end of time, and if compound economic growth nevertheless continues, then the covenantal social theory implied by the Book of Deuteronomy can be said to have been annulled at some time prior to the twentieth century, presumably by the New Covenant. If Mosaic social theory is no longer in efect, then there can be no social theory that is explicitly based on the Bible. If there is no predictability between corporate covenant-breaking and God’s corporate negative sanctions, then biblical social theory is not possible. This would place Christians at the mercy of covenant-breaking social philosophers. The wisdom of covenant-breaking man would triumph: one or another of the competing, irreconcilable systems of social cause and efect. Christians would be asked to baptize the reigning social theories of their nation. No doubt they would do so; they have done so ever since the days of the early church, when Christian apologists adopted Greek categories of philosophy in the name of Christ.10 But this would not solve the problem of discovering what God has spoken authoritatively in New Covenant history.

Conclusion When God’s people refuse to seek His wisdom and obey His word, they forfeit many opportunities. This was true in the wilderness era. It is equally true in the modern world. When God’s law is not honored by God’s people, they always ind themselves progressively enslaved by covenant-breakers: psychologically, philosophically, culturally, economically, and politically. God prophesied this, too (Deut. 28:15–20). This corporate cursing cuts of the growth 10. Cornelius Van Til, A Christian Theory of Knowledge (Nutley, New Jersey: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1969), Part IV: “The Church Fathers.”

30

DEUTERONOMY

process. If corporate blessing were never restored, covenantbreakers would be given equal footing with God’s people. But this cutting of of God’s people is always temporary (Deut. 4:25–31). Even though one generation may forfeit great opportunities, a subsequent generation can make up for lost time. Succession covers a multitude of losses. The goal, then, is to train up the next generation, provide it with capital, and keep the compounding process alive. As the capital base of money, talent, wisdom, and experience continues to grow, the society can live of the “interest.” That is, subsequent generations are not required to save as religiously. As time goes on, the investment begins to sustain more and more projects. Dominion is extended because of the covenant community’s access to a huge capital base. It can aford to make some mistakes. It need not guard its wealth so closely. But it must not live exclusively on accumulated capital. Each generation must leave its legacy to the next. Each generation should leave God’s covenant society a little richer. Biblical society is value-added society. The exodus generation had refused to honor the compounding process. They had forfeited its opportunity to inherit through Joshua’s leadership. They had held on tightly to power and authority by refusing to surrender the inheritance to the fourth generation after the spies’ return from the Promised Land. The third generation could have inherited through the military leadership of Joshua, but they refused. Thus, they broke the compounding process. They wandered in the wilderness until all of them died except Joshua and Caleb. Then the compounding process could begin again, and with an enlarged capital base: the wealth of Canaan.

3 DELEGATED AUTHORITY AND SOCIAL Delegated Authority and Social Order ORDER And I spake unto you at that time, saying, I am not able to bear you myself alone: The LORD your God hath multiplied you, and, behold, ye are this day as the stars of heaven for multitude. (The LORD God of your fathers make you a thousand times so many more as ye are, and bless you, as he hath promised you!) How can I myself alone bear your cumbrance, and your burden, and your strife? Take you wise men, and understanding, and known among your tribes, and I will make them rulers over you (Deut. 1:9–13).

The theocentric focus of this law is God’s delegation of judicial authority to men. Unlike God, no man is omniscient. Men must create alternatives to omniscient judgment. Moses had been burdened with the task of rendering judgment to all the people prior to Exodus 18. But he could not govern as the patriarchs had governed. There were too many Israelites. Israel needed a judicial hierarchy. While this law resembled a seed law in the sense that it derived from the fulilled promise of seed to Abraham, it in fact was a cross-boundary law that applies to every commonwealth larger than an extended family. The problem of the division of judicial labor is to be solved by the creation of a hierarchical appeals court. Here Moses reminded the conquest generation of the nation’s irst major crisis of authority. Exodus 18 records the event in detail. A long line of disputants formed outside Moses’ tent every day. “And it came to pass on the morrow, that Moses sat to judge the people: and the people stood by Moses from the morning unto the evening” (Ex. 18:13). His father-in-law warned him that the magnitude of this burden as a judge would overwhelm Moses as well as the people. “Thou wilt surely wear away, both thou, and this people

31

32

DEUTERONOMY

that is with thee: for this thing is too heavy for thee; thou art not able to perform it thyself alone” (v. 18). He counselled Moses to establish a hierarchical chain of command. There would be judges of tens, ifties, hundreds, and thousands (v. 21): 60,000, 12,000, 6,000, and 600, or 78,600 judges.1 These judges were untrained and untried. They could provide only imperfect justice, but they could do this on a systematic basis, day in and day out. This was better for Israel than the perfect justice provided by Moses, since to gain access to this justice, men would spend their days waiting in line. The value of their time was greater than the cost of imperfect justice.2 Moses agreed to accept Jethro’s suggestion. He must have recognized the truth of Jethro’s warning. There was not enough time and not enough Moses to provide justice to the entire nation. The burden of delayed justice would oppress the people. Meanwhile, Moses would waste away. And after he was dead, where would the people receive justice? Who would then render perfect justice? Better to train up a generation of judges in preparation for the transition. Better to establish a tradition of imperfect judges rendering imperfect justice on a widespread basis. Swift imperfect State justice is preferable to delayed perfect justice.

The Decision to Delegate One of the most precious of scarce economic resources is managerial talent. It commands a high price in a competitive, growing economy. No one knows how to mass produce it. There are so many competing management training systems available that no one knows which one is most efective. In diferent kinds of businesses, diferent management skills seem to be required. So, because the supply of efective managers is limited, they command a high price. Societies seek substitutes for management talent, such as compensation by commission (self-motivation) and new computerized techniques for handling information. 1. This was Rashi’s eleventh-century estimate: Rabbi Solomon (Shlomo) Yizchaki. Rashi, Chumash with Targum Onkelos, Haphtaroth and Rashi’s Commentary, A. M. Silbermann and M. Rosenbaum, translators, 5 vols. (Jerusalem: Silbermann Family, [1934] 1985 [Jewish year: 5745]), II, p. 95. 2. Gary North, Moses and Pharaoh: Dominion Religion vs. Power Religion (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1985), ch. 19.

Delegated Authority and Social Order

33

The creative person usually inds it dijcult to delegate all but the simplest tasks. He does not trust his subordinates’ eforts. He may be willing to delegate to those who have special information in areas he is unfamiliar with, but the more talented he is in several areas, the less willing he is to delegate. The division of labor is hampered by those who refuse to delegate. The English economist David Ricardo ofered an example of two producers, one of whom is more productive than his trading partner in producing a particular product. Because his skill is even greater in producing some other product, which commands a higher price, which his trading partner wants to buy, he should allow the trading partner to produce the irst product and then trade for it. Similarly, a soldier who can shoot straight when under ire, but who also types fast, should concentrate on his unique advantage: shooting. There are more skilled typists than skilled shooters. Their value to an army is less than the value of straight-shooting, front-line soldiers. Even if the typist is a less-skilled typist than the straight-shooter is, the army could be overrun if the men on the front lines cannot shoot straight. That semi-skilled typist should be recruited from a pool of men who cannot shoot straight under ire. The general who stafs his headquarters with near-sighted men who are skilled managers would be wise to delegate management to them. His job is to design better battle plans than the enemy general does. Only if the task of the senior commander is to hold together skilled generals who are in competition with each other should he be known for his management skills. In efect, the delegator is asking his subordinates to trade with him. They will provide certain forms of output within the company; he will provide other forms. His job is to put together a team whose combined output is greater than the sum of the individual parts of that team would have been, had he not organized it. If he is successful, he multiplies his eforts. He gains the output of others in a combined efort.

Multiplication and Authority Moses ofered a prayer of blessing in the middle of his exposition on the hierarchy of civil authority. The King James translators placed this prayer in parentheses. “(The LORD God of your fathers make you a thousand times so many more as ye are, and bless you, as he hath promised you!)” (v. 11). He had just told them that God

34

DEUTERONOMY

had already multiplied their numbers. They had witnessed this growth. Now, he prayed for more. This is the dominion impulse. It involves the multiplication of all assets, including population.3 He immediately asked the proper question: How could he bear the burden on him as the supreme civil judge? He saw clearly that as the number of people multiplied, the number of disputes would multiply. It is likely that the number of disputes would rise even faster than the number of people. Without imposing new rules of behavior, doubling the number of people in a room will more than double the noise, as people talk louder to overcome the noise of additional people talking. The same is true of lawsuits in a litigious society. Moses had understood that the blessing of additional people would soon become a curse if the judicial order were not restructured. Jethro ofered the solution: a series of appeals courts. Any growing organization faces a similar problem. As the number of details increases, there must be institutional alterations to keep the details from overwhelming the system. A well-designed system must either ind ways of standardizing ways of dealing with these details or else ind ways of resisting growth. For example, a company that pursues growth must avoid the temptation to tinker with the structure of the irm in order to deal uniquely with lots of unique problems in unique ways. It must devise standard ways to deal with unique problems. If it tries to deal with too many unique problems, its ability to grow will be thwarted. It will become bogged down in details. It must treat unique problems as parts of larger aggregates to which familiar rules apply. It must smooth over the small distinctions. This is especially true of a price-competitive irm that seeks growth through cost-cutting and mass production. Similarly, a civil government must resist the temptation to solve every social problem, review every case, and establish case law precedents by creating solutions to dijcult and non-standard disputes. “Hard cases make bad law” is an ancient saying in the common law tradition. There must be an increase in authority as complexity increases. The question is this: Where should this increase take place? At the top of the social system or the bottom? The traditional socialist 3. North, Moses and Pharaoh, ch. 1.

Delegated Authority and Social Order

35

argument is that increasing social complexity requires more central4 ization and more planning at the top. Government must assert its authority, central government above all. This argument was challenged by Hayek in the late 1930’s and 1940’s: as societies grow more complex, he argued, they must decentralize. Central planners do not possess sujcient knowledge to micro-manage a growing economy. Social complexity is too great. The only source of knowledge sujcient to manage this growing complexity is the free market, with its price system, its sanctions (proit and loss), its specialization of knowledge, and its decentralized power.5 Because God is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent, complexity is not a threat to Him. He can decentralize authority to man without any fear of losing His sovereignty. The same pattern is mandated for man: the willingness to decentralize, to delegate authority. By delegating authority, men reap the beneits of the division of labor. Others are given opportunities to serve in a leadership capacity. The talents of more men are called forth by a system of rules that allows those with skills to rise in the hierarchy. Second, there are multiple hierarchies in a biblical society. There is no unitary system of authority which grants all the favors and garnishes all the acclaim. There are many areas of service and many chains of command. The civil hierarchy is severely limited by biblical law in what it can lawfully do. It can suppress public evil through the imposition of negative sanctions. But this leaves open many other areas of productivity, power, and honor within a biblical society. Thus, by limiting the power of civil government as well as its jurisdiction, biblical law creates the judicial basis of a society that can grow in complexity without mandating the concentration of power to preserve social order. In fact, an increase in social order should accompany the multiplication of wealth, numbers, and knowledge. What creates social disorder is sin and its outward manifestations,

4. The classic statement of this position is Chapter 3 of Frederick Engels’ Socialism: Utopian and Scientiic (1882). This chapter irst appeared in Engels’ Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science (1878), Part III, Chapter II. See Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1987), vol. 25, pp. 254–71. 5. F. A. Hayek, “Economics and Knowledge” (1937); “The Use of Knowledge in Society” (1945); reprinted in Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order (University of Chicago Press, 1948), chaps. 2, 4.

36

DEUTERONOMY

not complexity as such. If the increasing complexity of society is the result of voluntary human action under God’s law – self-government under God – then it is not a threat to social order. On the contrary, this complexity is a blessing for the social order. When each man can ind his unique area of maximum service – to God and man – social order lourishes. The extension of the division of labor allows men to match their highly specialized productive talents with consumer demand. The multiplication of producers extends each man’s authority by narrowing his area of service. This increase in authority is the outcome of his increased productivity. He has access to additional capital because investors shift their investments from less productive workers to more productive workers. It is not necessary for the State to centralize its authority in a doomed quest for greater social order. If it does, there will be a decrease in social order. When men complain that “things are getting too complicated these days,” they mean that they are having trouble keeping up with social change. Their surroundings are changing fast. Yet every man loves to discover an opportunity to better himself that had not existed before. But every new opportunity adds to the complexity of society. With every new opportunity comes the potential for a better world. The fact is, a member of some primitive tribe can learn to operate an electric light switch as efortlessly and as absent-mindedly as any modern man does, and in just as few tries. Within a few months, he will want his own motorbike. Complexity comes in deceptively simple steps. If some people want simplicity, they can buy it. The Amish live simple lives, but most people think the price is too high: eighthgrade educations, no automobiles, no computers, no electricity (except in the barn), and, above all, no buttons or zippers. The visible mark of the true “plain person” is hook and loop clothing. The visible mark of heresy is the button and eye. A zipper indicates full-scale apostasy. And so it should, for the zipper is one of modern man’s most amazing little technologies, so simple by most men’s standards that they pay no attention to it. Yet who can explain it? Like a sewing machine’s stitch, the zipper is incomprehensible to most people. Dedicated resistance to zippers must mark the anti-complexity worldview of the Amish: the temptation of the seemingly simple and cheap device that opens the door to complexity on a scale that no previous civilization could have imagined. To

Delegated Authority and Social Order

37

the Amish, a zipper is as welcome as it would have been to the high priest of Israel, had one been installed on the veil of the temple. When sin multiplies, however, an increase in State authority may be called for. This extension of authority should not be centralized. The threat to liberty of central authority is too great. Even with God’s agent Moses as the supreme civil judge, Jethro warned that Israel would sufer. Moses possessed too much authority. Better to decentralize State authority to untrained judges than to concentrate authority in one man. Such centralized authority will undermine freedom, reduce complexity, reduce the division of labor, and cut short the multiplication of wealth. Men will stand in long lines seeking justice rather than getting on with living.

Conclusion Moses had to delegate authority in order to save himself and the nation from exhaustion. The complexity of a large society overwhelms the best eforts of the best men at the top to deal with the inevitable disputes that arise among men. The solution is judicial decentralization and the delegation of judicial authority. This brings forth new knowledge that would not have manifested itself in a system of concentrated political power. But how are disputes to be handled? By a ixed law, a predictable legal order, and self-government. Biblical social order begins with grace. The civil manifestation of this grace is God’s revealed law. “Wherefore the law is holy, and the commandment holy, and just, and good” (Rom. 7:12). “For we know that the law is spiritual: but I am carnal, sold under sin” (Rom. 7:14). To deal with the multiplication of disputes, society requires the multiplication of judges, not all of whom are civil magistrates. A society that seeks multiplication as well as the concentration of political power will ind that these goals are unattainable, long term. The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 is the most graphic proof of this in modern times, and perhaps in all history: an enormous empire, based on the concentration of power, simply collapsed in a period of three days, at the cost of only three lives. The Soviet Union had strangled itself in bureaucracy and misinformation, and had lost the will to resist, let alone expand. The top-down hierarchy of the centrally planned economy becomes unproductive and socially brittle. A biblically structured social order reveals a multiplicity of hierarchies, each with its own jurisdiction, none with inal earthly

38

DEUTERONOMY

jurisdiction, all governed by God’s Bible-revealed law. There must be ordained judges in a series of appeals courts, both civil and ecclesiastical. Voters in both church and State must retain the authority to revoke the ordination of these judges. Where the voters’ authority is absent, in either church or State, the institutional supreme court inevitably becomes a legislative body. It asserts some form of divine right theory: the denial of any earthly appeal beyond the court’s authority.6

6. Gary North, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989), ch. 10.

4 THE OFMan MAN TheFACE Face of Ye shall not respect persons in judgment; but ye shall hear the small as well as the great; ye shall not be afraid of the face of man; for the judgment is God’s: and the cause that is too hard for you, bring it unto me, and I will hear it (Deut. 1:17).

Men are to fear God more than they fear men. Moses warned judges not to fear any man to the point of rendering false judgment in God’s name. He who is ordained by law to speak as God’s judicial representative must speak an honest word. This is the basis of the overriding principle of biblical law: the rule of law. “One law shall be to him that is homeborn, and unto the stranger that sojourneth among you” (Ex. 12:49).1 The corollary to the rule of law is the principle found in this verse: no respect of persons. This law is repeated throughout Scripture. There is a theocentric framework for this law: God as supreme judge. “For there is no respect of persons with God” (Rom. 2:11). “And, ye masters, do the same things unto them, forbearing threatening: knowing that your Master also is in heaven; neither is there respect of persons with him” (Eph. 6:9). “And if ye call on the Father, who without respect of persons judgeth according to every man’s work, pass the time of your sojourning here in fear” (I Pet. 1:17). The warning is clear: “But if ye have respect to persons, ye commit sin, and are convinced of the law as transgressors” (James 2:9). Judges must render impartial judgment in God’s name, on His authority.

1. Gary North, Moses and Pharaoh: Dominion Religion vs. Power Religion (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1985), ch. 14.

39

40

DEUTERONOMY

This was not a seed law or a land law. It was a cross-boundary law – perhaps the cross-boundary law: the rule of God’s law. The governing principle of biblical civil justice is victim’s rights.2 To achieve the rule of law in speciic case law applications, the judge must protect the victim. The judge must declare his judgment in terms of God’s law and the evidence in front of the court. Nothing must interfere with his declaration: not bribes, not favoritism, and not fear of repercussions. “Ye shall not be afraid of the face of man; for the judgment is God’s.”

Fear: An Inescapable Concept The civil judge hands down judgment in God’s name. He acts as a representative of God, declaring God’s judgment in history. This is what makes a civil judge a minister of God. Men are to fear him because of his ojce as God’s judicial representative. “For he is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil” (Rom. 13:4). Men must fear God. The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. The Old Testament declares this repeatedly. “And the spirit of the LORD shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the LORD” (Isa. 11:2).3 Men will either fear God or fear some aspect of the creation. They will either begin with God’s wisdom or man’s wisdom, but the beginning of wisdom is fear. The man who fears nothing is a fool. He has not understood the threat of God’s eternal negative sanctions. “And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matt. 10:28). The judge is cautioned not to fear the face of man. This language is obviously symbolic. No one fears the face of man. Men fear the vengeful impulses which lie behind grim faces. “But unto Cain and to his ofering he had not respect. And Cain was very wroth, and his countenance fell” (Gen. 4:5). Cain’s face foretold trouble to come 2. Gary North, Victim’s Rights: The Biblical View of Civil Justice (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990). 3. Job 28:28. Psalms 111:10. Proverbs 1:7; 9:10; 15:33.

The Face of Man

41

for Abel. No judge is to fear such a face. He is to fear God and hell, not those standing before the bar of justice. Unrighteous men are to fear a righteous judge. “For he is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil” (Rom. 13:4). In a perverse society under the rule of evil men, a righteous judge must live under the threat of negative sanctions.

Time Perspective and Sanctions Basic to all human action is the concept of time preference. We act in the present. We are responsible in the present. We consider the future in making our decisions in the present, but we value the present more than we do the future. We apply a discount to the future. Economists call this discount the rate of interest. People vary with respect to their assessment of the importance of the future. Some people are more future-oriented than others. They understand that success in the future is heavily dependent on actions taken in the present. They are willing to sacriice present enjoyment for the sake of future enjoyment. They will save money at a much lower rate of interest compared to the rate which must be ofered to a present-oriented person in order to persuade him to save. Edward Banield has deined class position in terms of time perspective. An upper-class person is more future-oriented than a middle-class person, who is in turn more future-oriented than a lower-class person.4 An upper-class person may not have more money early in life than a middle-class person – a medical student, for example – but over time his devotion to thrift and hard work will normally produce personal wealth. This insight regarding time perspective has implications for law enforcement, especially sanctions. If a person is extremely presentoriented, he cares little about the distant consequences of his actions. He discounts the future pain so heavily that present enjoyment looms far larger in his decision-making. Even if he thinks he may be caught, tried, convicted, and sentenced, he dismisses the end result as relatively meaningless. He subordinates then to now. 4. Edward Banield, The Unheavenly City: The Nature and Future of Our Urban Crisis (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), ch. 3.

42

DEUTERONOMY

Because God’s law must be implemented without respect to persons, both the present-oriented person and the future-oriented person face the same civil sanctions. The existence of time preference tells us that a greater number of present-oriented people will commit crimes than future-oriented people. They fear the future less. The threatened civil sanctions do not appear equally threatening. Economic theory tells us that when the price of anything is lowered, more of it will be demanded. The price of criminal behavior is perceived to be lower by a present-oriented person than by a futureoriented person.

Capital Punishment To deal with extreme present-orientation, God’s law establishes the sanction of execution. The magnitude and permanence of this negative sanction impresses even the present-oriented criminal. Discounting death to zero price takes a unique degree of commitment to the present. Most criminals are not this present-oriented. The biblical case for capital punishment rests on the principle that some crimes are an especial afront to God. He demands that the convicted criminal be delivered immediately into His court. In the case of murder, the victim cannot announce a lesser penalty. Unlike Jesus on the cross, who asked God to forgive those who persecuted Him, the murder victim is silent. God therefore requires the criminal’s execution. A positive side efect of capital punishment is the inability of the criminal to gain revenge against those who condemned him. Those who commit crimes so heinous that the State may not legally punish them with anything less than execution are unable to threaten judges and jurors. When the State substitutes other penalties, the criminal can later seek revenge. In the name of leniency to criminals, the State places at risk those law-abiding citizens who announced judgment in God’s name. In the United States, the abandonment of capital punishment was accompanied by an unprecedented increase in crime, 1960 to 1975.5 It was an era in which traditional conservative humanism was 5. James Q. Wilson, Thinking About Crime (New York: Basic Books, 1975), ch. 1; U.S. Senator James L. Buckley, “Foreword,” Frank Carrington, The Victims (New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House, 1975).

The Face of Man

43

visibly replaced by various forms of liberal humanism. The State substituted new sanctions for old. It sought to heal evil men rather than condemn them. It sought to rehabilitate criminals rather than punish them. The healing State became the lenient State – lenient on criminals, but harsh on their victims and those who lived in fear of criminals. This was consistent with left-wing humanism’s concept of the State as an agency of healing, of positive sanctions. The previous decade had launched an era of judicial activism,6 but in 1960 there were still signs culturally that an older conservative humanism prevailed in the thinking of the general public. Yet within one decade, 1960 to 1970, this older attitude was abandoned by policy-makers and judicial theorists. For decades, liberal elitists and academics had called into question the legitimacy of traditional negative sanctions against crime. The 1950’s marked the last decade of the common man’s dam of resolve. As Irving Kristol has written, “Prior to the victory of modern liberal dogmas in the early 1950s, the police and the courts could cope with common street crime, as well as burglaries or robberies, without having to defer to a catalog of criminals’ constitutional rights, most of which, at the time, were still undiscovered. It may have made for less perfect justice, but it did deter wanton criminality among the young and ensured a more trusting, less fearful society.”7 A new judicial activism silenced conservative critics. The book title chosen by Karl Menninger, one of the reformers, said it all: The Crime of Punishment.8 The liberal elite succeeded in persuading voters to abandon “wild west” justice: the justice of predictable negative sanctions. The result was an unprecedented increase in crime.

Liberty and Justice Liberty requires the rule of law. The rule of law means predictable law. Men must believe that evil-doers will be punished if the evidence testiies against them. Their victims will be economically

6. The symbolic igure here was U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, beginning with his appointment to the Court in 1953. The “Warren Court” was decidedly liberal. 7. Irving Kristol, “The Way We Were,” Wall Street Journal (July 14, 1995). 8. Karl Menninger, M.D., The Crime of Punishment (New York: Viking, 1968).

44

DEUTERONOMY

rewarded by criminals, even if this means selling the criminals into slavery until their victims are repaid. The predictability of the law increases the likelihood that negative civil sanctions will be imposed. The criminal already discounts the personal cost of negative future sanctions. High time preference – a steep discounting of the future – is one aspect of criminal behavior generally.9 If the criminal understands that most crimes go unsolved and that most solved crimes go unpunished, his heavy discounting of the future drives his present costs of crime almost to zero. This increases the amount of crime in society: as the cost of something falls, more of it is demanded. By increasing the predictability of negative sanctions, the legal system decreases the amount of crime by raising its cost to criminals. There is another aspect of discounting: the victim’s. The victim estimates the likelihood of negative sanctions’ being imposed on the criminal. If the likelihood is low, why go to the trouble of seeking justice? Why take the risk? Also, will the victim be rewarded if the criminal is convicted? Is there the possibility of positive sanctions? The more likely the positive sanctions, the more likely the victim will cooperate with law-enforcement ojcials in solving the crime. The irst stage in the retreat of a society from the rule of biblical law is the substitution of an ideal of social revenge for the biblical ideal of victim’s rights. The ideal of victim’s rights is always abandoned by the humanist State, which regards all crime as crime against the State. The humanist State imposes negative sanctions, but always at taxpayers’ expense. The symbol of this legal order is the prison. The negative sanction of prison brings no positive sanctions to victims except in the sense of revenge. The biblical judicial ideal of victim’s rights fades; it is replaced either by a theory of social revenge or by a theory of criminal rehabilitation. They can trade places back and forth in the public’s estimation over time, as each is tried and found wanting. In both cases, the citizenry fears the criminal. In the irst case, the criminal is locked up for years. He is removed from the presence of law-abiding people. He associates with a caste of professional

9. Edward Banield, “Present-Orientedness and Crime,” in Randy E. Barnett and John Hegel III (eds.), Assessing the Criminal: Restitution, Retribution, and the Legal Process (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Ballinger, 1977), pp. 140–41.

The Face of Man

45

criminals in prison. He is prohibited from making economic restitution to his victims. Citizens fear the criminal’s social redemption (“buying back”) through personal restitution (“paying out”). They have no trust in biblical law as a means of restoration. They trust only in the State’s vengeance. “Lock him up and throw away the key!” In the second case, he is paroled early and released back into society before he makes restitution to his victims. Citizens receive into their midst hardened criminals. They learn to fear these men, who in turn fear neither God nor law-abiding men. When the fear of evil men undermines a community’s fear of God, that community is eventually going to experience tyranny. The worst men will claw their way to the top through the imposition of fear. A subculture based on rule by fear has an enormous competitive advantage in a society that fears men more than it fears God. When this subculture becomes dominant, the rule of law becomes the rule of criminals. The mark of a community’s commitment to liberty is its commitment to biblical law. God’s law must be enforced. The countenances of the citizenry must be set against the countenances of criminals. The citizenry represents God. Ordained civil agents represent the people before the face of God and represent God before the faces of criminals. Civil authority lows from God to citizens to the civil magistrate.10 They are judges insofar as they bring sanctions, positive or negative, against their ordained representatives. They are told not to fear the face of man.

Conclusion The rule of law requires the honoring of the principle of no respect for persons. God’s law is uniied, for it relects His moral unity. It is universally binding, for He is universally sovereign. Judgment should not be made unpredictable through the imposition of unpredictable sanctions. “Diferent strokes for diferent folks” is not a biblical principle of justice. When the sense of justice departs from a society, that society becomes vulnerable to appeals by criminals, guilt-manipulating politicians, revolutionaries, tyrants, and others who ofer to get even with 10. Gary North, Leviticus: An Economic Commentary (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), ch. 4.

46

DEUTERONOMY

the present order: the politics of revenge. When statist revenge is substituted for personal restitution, a society searches in vain for a judge who will bring stability, peace, and justice. When statist rehabilitation is substituted for personal restitution, a society also searches in vain for stability, peace, and justice. In both cases, liberty is at risk. The predictability of just laws becomes either the predictability of unjust laws or the unpredictability of any law. The issue here is hierarchy. The law is enforced by legal representatives, who serve as God’s agents and also as the community’s delegated agents. The judge must not fear law-breakers, for he declares God’s law. He must fear God, not men. Criminals must fear judges, who speak in the name of God and who mandate God’s civil sanctions. One mark of a disintegrating social order is the criminals’ loss of fear of the law. When judges in turn fear law-breakers, this fear spreads to the entire society. Courage is basic to law-enforcement as well as to military orders. There is supposed to be a covenantal hierarchy of fear: judges must fear both God and the voters; criminals must fear God and the judges. The society of Satan is based on a perverse hierarchy: criminals fear other criminals; judges and citizens fear criminals. They fear the faces of evil men.

5 BUREAUCRATIC COUNSEL Bureaucratic Counsel Behold, the LORD thy God hath set the land before thee: go up and possess it, as the LORD God of thy fathers hath said unto thee; fear not, neither be discouraged. And ye came near unto me every one of you, and said, We will send men before us, and they shall search us out the land, and bring us word again by what way we must go up, and into what cities we shall come. and the saying pleased me well: and I took twelve men of you, one of a tribe (Deut. 1:21–23).

The theocentric principle of this law is the omniscience of God, an incommunicable attribute. Men are not omniscient. They need means of increasing information. In this case, Israel needed spies. The spies would enter the land, evaluate its vulnerability to invasion, and return to speak accurately on God’s behalf. They were to think God’s thoughts after Him, as faithful representatives. Moses here recounted the story of the exodus generation’s rebellion against God’s command that they immediately conquer Canaan. God gave the command, and the people did not initially reject it. Instead, they added a suggestion, namely, that they be allowed to gather information regarding the best route into Canaan for military purposes. Moses approved of this request. He selected a representative from each of the tribes to conduct the reconnaissance operation. What appeared to be a sensible pre-war tactic turned out to be the irst in a series of retreats. The nation did not want to challenge the residents of Canaan, but their leaders did not admit this in the early stages of the operation. Moses went on to recount the story of their rebellion, how the exodus generation and those men old enough in the next generation to have participated in the conquest

47

48

DEUTERONOMY

had been prohibited from entering the land. Only Caleb and Joshua were excepted (Deut. 1:36, 38). They had shown resolve regarding the conquest; for this, they were spared the ignominy of having their personal inheritance in the land revoked by God. The next generation would inherit: “Moreover your little ones, which ye said should be a prey, and your children, which in that day had no knowledge between good and evil, they shall go in thither, and unto them will I give it, and they shall possess it” (v. 39). God’s negative sanction of disinheritance matched the nation’s negative strategy of non-confrontation. He wanted Israel to disinherit the Canaanites; this negative sanction would have been a positive sanction for Israel. This was what economists call a zero-sum game: the gains of the winners are ofset by the losses of the losers. Warfare has this characteristic. Israel wanted to avoid war; so, the spies recommended non-confrontation. This would have permanently disinherited Israel and permanently conirmed the continuity of inheritance in Canaan. Disinheritance is an inescapable concept. Either Israel would be disinherited or the Canaanites would be. By escaping the sanction of war, Israel wanted to escape war’s negative sanctions. But this granted immunity to Canaanites. It also constituted a negative sanction against Israel’s heirs. Ultimately, it constituted a negative sanction against God, who had promised Abraham that the fourth generation would inherit (Gen. 15:16). Had Israel’s strategy of non-confrontation been allowed to stand, God would have been exposed before His enemies as one who would not or could not fulill His promises.

A Matter of Strategy God had a strategy: the conquest of Canaan. This strategy was announced three times: to Abraham once and to Moses twice, at the beginning and end of the wilderness period. First, He had told Abraham that his heirs would conquer Canaan in the fourth generation after their descent into Egypt. This was Joshua’s generation. Second, He told the nation to begin the ofensive campaign (Deut. 1:21). This was their responsibility, God said, yet anyone who knew of the promise to Abraham would have known that this generation would not conquer. The only way for the third generation to participate in the conquest of Canaan was to surrender leadership to the fourth generation. Third, at the end of the wilderness period, God

Bureaucratic Counsel

49

told Moses and Joshua that the conquest must begin soon. This was carried out under Joshua. The conquest of Canaan was ethically and prophetically mandatory; the question was: Which generation would carry it out? Those to whom the command to march into Canaan was irst given soon rebelled against this strategy. They rebelled, not by citing the speciic details of the Abrahamic promise – fourth generation, not third – but by announcing that the Promised Land was not worth the military efort to inherit. “And they brought up an evil report of the land which they had searched unto the children of Israel, saying, The land, through which we have gone to search it, is a land that eateth up the inhabitants thereof; and all the people that we saw in it are men of a great stature” (Num. 13:32). In short, they tampered with the visible evidence. They said that this place could not possibly be the Promised Land of milk and honey. The land ate up its normal inhabitants; you had to be a giant to prosper. The recalcitrant captains should have gone to Moses with this request. “Tell God that we are not ready to lead this campaign. He told our father Abraham that the fourth generation would conquer Canaan. We are not that appointed generation. We respect the details of His prophecy. We do not want to get ahead of God’s prophetic timetable. We also do not want to get behind. We are ready to transfer leadership of the army of the Lord to our older sons, under Joshua’s command.” Had they put their request in terms of God’s promise to Abraham, they would have demonstrated their commitment to His word. Instead, they tried to thwart His word by declaring the land unit to conquer. God’s strategy was military conquest. The details of this operation were left to Moses and the captains of God’s holy army. God did not tell them the best route into Canaan. He did not do their tactical work for them. He announced to Moses the timing of the conquest, but He left to Moses and his advisors the responsibility for implementing the general strategy. Moses accepted the ofer of the captains to allow spies to go into the land for reconnaissance purposes. This seemed to be a tactical matter. What he did not understand until after their return was that this request was not tactical; it was strategic. The generation of the exodus had no intention of risking their lives to conquer Canaan. God had spoken, but perhaps they could buy more time. The request

50

DEUTERONOMY

regarding the tactical reconnaissance operation was their means of delaying the implementation of the mandated strategy.

Rule by Committee God announced the strategy. The task of the supreme commander is to design a military strategy. Military strategy is focused on a narrow goal: victory or stalemate, never defeat. This is why warfare lends itself to the establishment of a supreme commander. The society agrees on the fundamental goal: the avoidance of defeat. Because there is this unanimity of opinion and a narrowly deined performance standard, it is possible for a central planner to design a strategy. A military strategy lends itself to unitary decision-making. A senior representative of the nation must devise a wartime military strategy. The nation’s other representatives may approve or disapprove of the strategy; they may or may not be able to veto it if they do not approve. Lower-level representatives also afect strategy through approving or disapproving something that the senior representative has submitted for consideration. A committee cannot efectively design a strategy. The committee’s division of labor is valid for counsel but not for innovation. The Bible recommends a multitude of counsellors. Where no counsel is, the people fall: but in the multitude of counsellors there is safety (Prov. 11:14). Without counsel purposes are disappointed: but in the multitude of counsellors they are established (Prov. 15:22). For by wise counsel thou shalt make thy war: and in multitude of counsellors there is safety (Prov. 24:6).

The larger the multitude of counsellors, the less likely that they will be able to devise an alternate strategy. The larger the group, the less likely the agreement. A strong ruler knows that he is far less threatened by a large group of advisors than a small group. It costs too much for the members of a large group to combine against him. There are many competing strategic details to resolve, many competing egos to assuage. The Bible recommends a multitude of counsellors; it does not recommend a multitude of strategists. This system

Bureaucratic Counsel

51

is designed to increase the wisdom of the decision-maker and at the same time strengthen his authority. This process of centralized strategic planning through diversiied counsel is clearly true of military matters, but it is also true of economic organizations. Counsel is not the same as strategic decision-making. Devising a corporate strategy is the responsibility of one person who has been delegated the authority by the owners to represent the corporation. He is held responsible by owners or whoever is legally represented by this supreme commander. This is not true of counsellors. When asked, counsellors raise objections, comment on risks, suggest alternatives, and generally enable the commander to count the costs of his strategy. They do not design a strategy. Jesus used the analogy of military strategy to describe personal decision-making. “For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down irst, and counteth the cost, whether he have sujcient to inish it? Lest haply [it happpen], after he hath laid the foundation, and is not able to inish it, all that behold it begin to mock him, Saying, This man began to build, and was not able to inish. Or what king, going to make war against another king, sitteth not down irst, and consulteth whether he be able with ten thousand to meet him that cometh against him with twenty thousand? Or else, while the other is yet a great way of, he sendeth an ambassage [ambassador], and desireth conditions of peace” (Luke 14:28–32). We are to count the costs before we begin the action. Counsellors help us to estimate costs more accurately. Committees can veto plans; they are rarely able to establish plans. The voices of the members are not uniied. The division of intellectual labor produces cacophony in a committee. The unitary design needed for a successful strategy does not come from a committee. Folk wisdom understands this: “A camel is a horse designed by a committee.” The division of intellectual labor does not produce a uniied design because none of the committee’s members is willing to take inal responsibility for a strategy created by all the other members. The supreme commander trusts his own judgment more than he trusts the judgment of a committee. He relies on a committee to suggest several alternatives; he does not rely on it to produce a strategy. He refuses to be held responsible for a strategy designed by competing men who in turn will not take personal responsibility for the committee’s collective decision, if any. He understands that

52

DEUTERONOMY

committees can sometimes veto a strategy; they can select someone to design a new strategy; but they cannot devise a strategy.

To Veto God Israel’s spies attempted to veto God’s announced strategy, but they proposed no agreed-upon alternative. God had announced the overall strategy and the timing. Any attempt on the part of the captains or the spies to thwart that strategic plan was a form of rebellion. God did not ask the Israelites to accept or reject His strategy. He allowed them only to seek out information which would have enabled Moses to design tactics to implement God’s overall strategy. The committee of spies returned to give an account of Canaan that was at odds with everything God had told them. Only Caleb and Joshua publicly defended the basis of God’s strategy, namely, the vulnerability of the Canaanites to immediate invasion. “If the LORD delight in us, then he will bring us into this land, and give it us; a land which loweth with milk and honey” (Num. 14:8). For his public defense of God’s strategy, Joshua was appointed by God to succeed Moses and to direct Israel’s inheritance: “But Joshua the son of Nun, which standeth before thee, he shall go in thither: encourage him: for he shall cause Israel to inherit it” (Deut. 1:38). He and Caleb could have led the army to victory 40 years earlier than they eventually did. Had the spies been allowed to speak authoritatively for Israel, God would have executed the entire nation (Num. 14:11–12). Canaan would have remained occupied by the Amorites indeinitely. That is, the Amorites would have inherited the inheritance which God had promised to Abraham’s seed. It was this possibility that Moses raised in his debate with God: God’s vow to destroy the Amorites would not be fulilled; so, His enemies would mock Him (vv. 13–16). God heeded this warning (v. 20). God then applied negative sanctions. The spies had sought to veto God’s strategy, but God vetoed them. He executed them on the spot with a plague (v. 37). As is so often the case, ten of the spies had a hidden agenda. It relected the nation’s hidden agenda, which became clear only in retrospect: to avoid military conlict with Canaan. To conceal this agenda, they recommended the reconnaissance. God knew their agenda, yet he did not tell Moses to call a halt to the reconnaissance. He allowed Moses to approve the spies’ tactic. Moses would learn

Bureaucratic Counsel

53

soon enough what the spies’ hidden agenda was. The spies’ report discouraged the nation. “And ye murmured in your tents, and said, Because the LORD hated us, he hath brought us forth out of the land of Egypt, to deliver us into the hand of the Amorites, to destroy us. Whither shall we go up? our brethren have discouraged our heart, saying, The people is greater and taller than we; the cities are great and walled up to heaven; and moreover we have seen the sons of the Anakims there” (Deut. 1:27–28). The committee’s report had undermined the Lord’s recently announced strategy: to invade Canaan immediately (v. 21). Moses could not persuade them to believe God (v. 32). The authority of the committee’s majority report was overpowering when combined with the fears of that generation, fears which the people had repeatedly expressed to Moses. The spies had corroborated what the nation had feared: the Promised Land was illed with giants. Despite the fact that God cut down all of the nay-sayers on the committee, the people did not change their minds regarding God’s strategy. The majority report had truly spoken for them judicially. Only Moses’ intercessory prayer had saved them from God’s wrath.

Sovereign Counsellors The people who are represented by the decision-maker are sovereign over him. They have the authority to thwart their economic and political representatives. God holds them responsible for what their leaders do.1 This is why biblical law places centralized military decision-making authority into the hands of one man. The people can see who is responsible for making plans. This is much less true when committees make the plans. Members of committees hide from the sovereign people. They seek to avoid the limelight. They seek to transfer responsibility by spreading it among many others. When things go wrong, a committee is like a circle of men, each pointing to the man next to him. “He did it. Blame him.” Does this biblical structure of authority imply central planning? In military matters, yes. In military afairs, the decisions of the strategist have the characteristic of being all or nothing. A mistake can

1. Gary North, Leviticus: An Economic Commentary (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), ch. 4.

54

DEUTERONOMY

2

lead to national defeat. What about economic planning? Is it also to be centralized? Within one irm, yes. The owner or senior manager has to be held accountable. Accountable to whom? First to the share owners, but inally to the consumers. The share owners are legally sovereign; the consumers are economically sovereign.3 There has to be a central ojcer who announces the company’s general strategy. In a proit-seeking enterprise, the primary strategy is to make a proit. The company’s general rules and compensation schemes set the boundaries of proit-making eforts. These are announced and enforced by central management. Senior managers allow lowerechelon managers and salesmen to apply the general rules to speciic cases, where central management does not have immediate access to local information. For the owners to exercise legal sovereignty, managers must be under the control of the owners. Owners must be allowed to replace managers. This is why it is important for business law to allow proxy ights and corporate take-overs. If the diversiied owners of shares of the company are not allowed by existing management or the civil government to throw out the existing management, then the authority of the owners is thwarted. Government regulations that prohibit “predatory corporate raiders” subsidize the existing managers, increasing their immunity from proit-seeking share owners who would prefer to sell at a proit to raiders who see ways of increasing the market value of the company’s assets and shares.4

Consumer Sovereignty In a free market economy, the ultimate institutional sovereign is collective: consumers. Their individual decisions to buy or sell produce a collective result: an objective array of prices. Their decisions also produce proits or losses for speciic sellers. So, inal sovereignty in a free market is difuse. The free market allows buyers and

2. Even here, the Mosaic law divided national authority. Both a civil representative and then two priests had to blow the pair of trumpets: irst the civil ruler, then the priests (Num. 10:2–9). 3. On the distinction between legal sovereignty and economic sovereignty, see ibid., pp. 436–39. Owners tell managers what to do; consumers tell owners and managers if what was done was proitable. 4. Henry G. Manne, Insider Trading and the Stock Market (New York: Free Press, 1966), ch. 11.

Bureaucratic Counsel

55

sellers to come together and make individual exchanges voluntarily. Because ownership is difuse, sovereignty is difuse. Because accurate knowledge is difuse, ownership is difuse, for people specialize in those productive services that they understand best and therefore possess a comparative advantage. The free market rewards the pooling of accurate knowledge through the price system. The competitive bidding of buyers against buyers and sellers against sellers produces an array of publicly available prices. These prices convey information to other buyers and sellers. They also convey motivation for sellers to meet the demands of consumers on a cost-efective basis. In a free market, the goals of asset owners are complex and shifting. The operations of a free market are not like a military campaign. In a military campaign, the goals of citizens are highly focused: the avoidance of defeat, preferably through victory. The narrow focus of this common goal mandates central planning by a supreme military commander. Military victory through the concentration of speciic military forces is very diferent from economic victory, which comes mainly through the pooling of highly difused knowledge – the most valuable economic resource – through a system of rewards and punishments, i.e., proit and loss. In a free market, the consumers are a multitude of counsellors. Sellers must meet consumer demand proitably, or else they will go out of business. The counsellors possess legal authority: the legal right to buy or refrain from buying. They also possess economic authority: they own an asset (money) that they can use to buy other assets. The opinions of these counsellors can be ignored by sellers, but always at a price: reduced sales, reduced income. Thus, senior decision-makers in proit-seeking irms must take seriously the opinions of consumers, whose counsel has money attached to it. The Bible exhorts decision-makers to seek a multitude of counsellors. In economic afairs, this means that they must seek out representatives whose opinions relect the opinions of the consumers. This is why statistical sampling techniques are widely used by businesses. This is also why such techniques are used by politicians seeking election in a democracy. In a free society, the counsellors are sovereign, either as consumers or civil voters. They bring sanctions, both positive and negative, through money or votes. Decision-makers must pay attention to counsellors when the counsellors are armed with such sanctions.

56

DEUTERONOMY

The counsellors possess lawful authority. In the free market, as in a representative democracy, the biblical principle of a multitude of counsellors is greatly honored through appropriate systems of sanctions. In an unfree society, central planners strip consumers and voters of any meaningful authority. The result is always the same: reduced wealth. This is why socialism always impoverishes all but the senior politicians and their favored counsellors. After the fall of Communism in the late 1980’s in Eastern Europe and in the USSR in 1991, citizens of the formerly Marxist tyrannies learned just how far behind the capitalist West they had been. Their richest leaders were poor by comparison to the West’s middle class, a fact that the leaders had learned at the 1980 Olympics, which were held in Moscow. Visitors from the West were visibly far richer than the Soviet tyrants. This huge disparity of wealth could no longer be easily ignored in the USSR. The Communist leaders’ wealth was a joke; they were being laughed at by the West. The West’s political conservatives could dismiss the USSR as nothing more than “Bangladesh with missiles.”5 This condescension by the West broke the tyrants’ conidence in the beneits the Communist system had produced for them. Within a decade, European Communism was abandoned in a series of bloodless coups. European Communist parties changed their names. Western college professors were the last to learn. As late as 1989, the world’s most popular college-level economics textbook still asserted: “The Soviet economy is proof that, contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, a socialist command economy can function and even thrive.”6 Within two years, the Soviet Union no longer existed. It had visibly collapsed economically by 1989 and politically in August of 1991.

Conclusion God was Israel’s strategist. Moses was His mouthpiece, His chief of staf. When the spies attempted to replace God’s strategy with their own, they became rebellious. They attempted to usurp a 5. Richard Grenier’s phrase. 6. Paul A. Samuelson and William D. Nordhaus, Economics (13th ed.; New York: McGraw-Hill, 1989), p. 837. Cited in Mark Skousen, Economics on Trial (Homewood, Illinois: Business One Irwin, 1991), p. 214.

Bureaucratic Counsel

57

degree of authority that did not belong to them. Rather than remaining content with gathering information useful in the implementation of God’s strategy, they tried to replace that strategy. He brought judgment against them individually and against the nation that consented to their report. The ten spies died immediately; the generation died of, one by one, over the next four decades. Devising a strategy is not a project for a committee. A strategist is wise to consult committees and people with expert knowledge, but the vision and integration required for a successful strategy are not provided by committees. Those who make up a committee are not individually responsible for the outcome of a strategy to the degree that a supreme commander is. To match personal responsibility with strategy, a society or an organization must place one person in charge. Two captains of equal rank cannot successfuly command a military unit. Two admirals cannot direct a ship. The centralization of strategic authority is inevitable. Committees can implement strategies; they cannot design them. Hierarchy is visible and legal in a military chain of command. In a free society, wise rulers seek out counsellors who relect the opinions of citizens and consumers, who exercise control through the authority to impose sanctions: votes or money. This is what public opinion polls and market research are all about: seeking out representative counsellors who can serve as surrogates for the society’s inal counsellors, the people. In an unfree society, rulers strip the people of the authority to impose meaningful sanctions. God brings such societies under judgment. He strips economic planners of the ability to gain accurate information.7 The citizens of such societies withhold accurate information and their productive eforts from the rulers. The familiar phrase of workers in Soviet Russia is representative: “The government pretends to pay us, and we pretend to work.”

7. Ludwig von Mises, “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth” (1920), in F. A. Hayek (ed.), Socialist Economic Planning (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, [1935] 1963), ch. 3.

6 THE The SKILLS TRADE SkillsOF of FOREIGN Foreign Trade And command thou the people, saying, Ye are to pass through the coast of your brethren the children of Esau, which dwell in Seir; and they shall be afraid of you: take ye good heed unto yourselves therefore: Meddle not with them; for I will not give you of their land, no, not so much as a footbreadth; because I have given mount Seir unto Esau for a possession. Ye shall buy meat of them for money, that ye may eat; and ye shall also buy water of them for money, that ye may drink (Deut. 2:4–6).

The theocentric principle of this law is God as the sovereign Owner who allocates national lands as He sees it. He has placed boundaries around certain nations. This land law regarding Israel’s wilderness wandering was based on a broader principle of justice: the prohibition against theft. Israel was told not to seek another inheritance besides the land of Canaan. Esau’s land was listed as of-limits; so was Moab’s (v. 9). Israel had no legal claim to any other nation’s inheritance besides Canaan’s. To have set their eyes on any land but Canaan would have been a violation of the tenth commandment, the command against covetousness. God told them to buy meat and drink with money. They had been given money by the Egyptians. Israel had gained the inheritance of many of Egypt’s irstborn sons, who had all perished on Passover night. Israel had been capitalized by the Egyptians, who had illegally held them in bondage. Even after the capital losses imposed by Moses after the golden calf incident (Ex. 32:20), Israelites still had money. This is an indication of the importance of money in a lawful inheritance. It is not to be despised by critics of free market capitalism or the traditional family.

58

The Skills of Foreign Trade

59 1

Money has been deined as the most marketable commodity. It has the widest market of all commodities. Wherever men go, there are other men who want to exchange more specialized goods and services for money, the less specialized good. Money is the most liquid asset. This means that it can be exchanged for other valuable assets rapidly without advertising costs and with no discount. Money is an ideal form of wealth for men on the move. It is readily transportable, easily divisible, and has a high value in relation to its volume and weight. Money was what Israel needed for a 40-year march through the wilderness. Had there been no other nations to trade with, money would have done them far less good, since men cannot eat money. But men can surely eat the things that money can buy, and there were many cultures along Israel’s journey with one thing in common: a desire for more money.

Voluntary Trade Because the Israelites had money, they could trade with those foreigners along the way who had meat and drink for sale. In the wilderness, meat and drink were in short supply. The Israelites possessed money, but they could not eat their money. On the other hand, the nations they passed by had meat and drink. Pre-exodus Egypt had been the richest kingdom in the region around Sinai. Now the Israelites possessed much of the transportable wealth of Egypt. A series of mutually proitable exchanges became possible. The nations had what Israelites wanted, and vice versa. The Israelites possessed an advantage: the nations were afraid of them (Deut. 2:4). Israel had just defeated Egypt. They had crossed the Red Sea miraculously. This was a demonstration of supernatural power that threw fear into the hearts of the Edomites. But God warned Israel not to use force to extract wealth from Edom. He told them to be peaceable people, for other nations lawfully possessed their own inheritances. There were legal boundaries around their possessions. This made trade a major source of increased wealth for the Israelites. Israelites would give up money, which was of low value to them, in exchange for meat and drink. Giving up money for consumer 1. Ludwig von Mises, The Theory of Money and Credit (2nd ed.; New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1953), p. 32. The irst German edition was published in 1912.

60

DEUTERONOMY

goods meant the de-capitalization of Israel’s distant future. But men live in the present; they must eat and drink in the present. God allowed them to make the decision: money as part of the inheritance for the next generation vs. meat and drink in the present. Israelites were not to place their hope in money. They were also not to place their hope in any military conquest other than in or around the land of Canaan. So, with respect to portable wealth, those who gave up money for meat and drink were more present-oriented than those Israelites who refused to trade. They became spenders rather than savers. They valued the pleasures of meat and drink more than they valued their money. They knew that the next generation would conquer Canaan. At that future point, the spoils of Egypt would be rendered relatively less valuable. It was productive real estate that would then be valuable, for it would produce wealth for the whole nation. The spoils of Egypt became the means of immediate gratiication for some Israelites. The value to them of meat and drink in the present far outweighed the discounted future value of money. Money could not be invested at high rates of return by a nation wandering in the wilderness. It would not compound for entrepreneurs. The Israelites of the exodus generation knew they would not be allowed to spend their money in the Promised Land. What good was money to them? It was either a means of buying pleasure in the present or a means of transferring an inheritance to their children. But their children had been guaranteed an inheritance in Canaan. So, why not spend money? Money was less valuable to the exodus generation than meat and water. Meat and water were less valuable to some Edomites than money. Because each participant in an exchange values what the other has more than what he has, both of them can increase their satisfaction by a voluntary exchange. God told Moses to instruct the nation that from now on, and for the next four decades, voluntary exchange would be the only lawful avenue of their wealth-generating activities with other societies. They had to learn to prosper through peaceful exchange. Violence should not become a means of increasing the nation’s wealth. This set a pattern for post-conquest relations with the nations around Israel. Israel restrained itself when it possessed what appeared to be a military advantage. Israel would not have retained an advantage, had they violated the boundaries that God had placed

The Skills of Foreign Trade

61

around the nations, but the nations did not know this. Israel had to rely on trade to get what it wanted. This must have made an impression on the nations in the region. If anyone wanted access to the wealth of Israel, he could gain it by ofering an Israelite an advantage. The Israelites were ready to trade. They were not in the empirebuilding business. They were in the “let’s make a deal” business. This forced wealth-seeking Israelites to become skilled bargainers. They could not rely on military force to gain what they wanted. They had to learn self-restraint. Weak nations must do this of necessity. Strong nations are wise to do this. The example of Switzerland is over ive centuries old. That nation displays a ferocious determination to defend its territory from military invasion, yet displays complete neutrality outside its borders. It is an armed camp internally and a disarmed sales force externally. A banker defends his bank’s vault. He also makes visitors welcome when they come to deposit money or borrow at rates proitable to the bank. Switzerland has become the banker for the world’s central banks.2

A Matter of Positioning Israel gained a reputation in the wilderness for trading rather than ighting. This was probably what lured Arad, Sihon, and Og into suicidal attacks on Israel just prior to the conquest of Canaan. Those powerful kings assumed that trade-seeking Israel could not defend herself. They were wrong. Israel was about to become the most battle-hardened military force in the region. But for almost four decades, Israel had positioned herself as a non-violent trading nation, a wandering people without a home base. Trading nations that gain the reputation of being unwilling to ight become vulnerable to aggressive nations that prefer conquest to trade.3 This was not Israel’s condition, but it appeared to be Israel’s condition immediately prior to the irst battles of the conquest. After the conquest, Israel allowed foreigners to live inside her borders. The rule of law did not discriminate against foreigners who lived inside non-Levitical walled cities. They could buy and sell 2. The Bank for International Settlements is headquartered in Basle. This is the central banks’ clearing house, the central bankers’ central bank. 3. This is why Switzerland has had to maintain itself as an armed camp to defend its autonomy and neutrality. The Swiss avoid a reputation for softness.

62

DEUTERONOMY

homes and leave an inheritance to their children (Lev. 25:29–30). Furthermore, one law governed all traders (Ex. 12:49). This was unheard of in the ancient Near East. In all other societies, the cities’ gods were local. If you did not have legal access to the religious rites of these local gods, you had no legal standing. These rites excluded foreigners and women.4 But Israel’s God was a cosmic God. His transcendent authority was not dependent on geography. So, Israel became a place where all people could seek freedom from arbitrary civil government and legal protection for their property. This positioned Israel as a trading nation. Israel welcomed traders as no other Near Eastern nation did. But this positioning had begun prior to the conquest. When Israel had no homeland, she sought no nation’s wealth through conquest. Similarly, when Israel gained a homeland, she was commanded by God to seek no foreign national’s wealth through oppression. In both instances, Israel gained wealth through trade. Israel extended the division of labor by abandoning force. She tempted the best and the brightest wealthseekers from other societies to share their skills and information voluntarily through trade. Israel for centuries was a nation located on important trade routes. With access to the Mediterranean, Israel was one of a handful of neutral trading nations that operated outside of the jurisdiction of the great land-based empires: Egyptian, Hittite, and Babylonian.5 But a successful trade route is more than a matter of geography. It is also a matter of legal protection. From its days in the wilderness, Israel began building its reputation as a nation conducive to foreign trade. Revere writes of the coastal trade city: “Its main function was to guarantee neutrality. Continuity of the supply of goods was essential, since it could not be expected that traders – under the dijcult conditions of archaic long distance travel – would come to an outlying place unless they knew for certain that a safe exchange of goods was possible. The presence of a strong military power on the spot would unfailingly frighten them away. Political neutrality, guarantee of

4. Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome (Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor, [1864] 1955), Book II, Chapter VIII. 5. Robert B. Revere, “‘No Man’s Coast’: Ports of Trade in the Eastern Mediterranean,” in Trade and Market in the Early Empires: Economies in History and Theory, edited by Karl Polanyi, Conrad M. Arensberg, and Harry W. Peterson (Chicago: Regnery, [1957] 1971), ch. 4.

The Skills of Foreign Trade

63

supplies, protection of the lives and property of strangers had to be assured before trade could start. A prior understanding between the corporate parties was therefore needed, usually based on regular treaties. Such an understanding, no doubt, would include facilities for disembarking, lading, portage, storage, grading of goods and the ixing of equivalencies backed by the coastal authority. Without this mechanism of the port of trade, there could be no regular trading.”6 God’s prohibition against the multiplication of horses by the king was unquestionably part of this arrangement (Deut. 17:16). The presence of a large ofensive army – an army with chariots or cavalry – would send mixed signals to the land-based empires that used the coastal port cities as foreign trade centers. A safe, innocuous coastal nation was not bothered by the great empires until well into the eighth century B.C., when Assyria began its conquests.7 The empires avoided establishing cities in the coastal areas, possibly because trading cities might have opened these closed societies to new ideas and an uncontrolled wealth. Foreigners were kept at a distance through the use of neutral coastal ports and State-authorized caravans to and from those ports. Positioning is very important in establishing a market. When men think of a particular good or service, they think of the product, company, or nation that supplies the best known (best positioned) item. Israel’s positioning under God’s law was as a nation where voluntarism brought wealth to all market participants, including foreigners. Wealth lows into those nations in which property is protected and contracts are enforced impartially. God established “no trespassing” boundaries around other nations’ assets as well as neighbors’ assets. When it came to protecting private property, with the exceptions of rural land and the homes of Levites in Levitical cities (Lev. 25:32–33), “otherhood” in Israel was not diferent judicially than “brotherhood.” This judicial condition is the mark of a trading nation.

6. Ibid., p. 52. Mosaic law was adamant about the evil of false weights and measures (Lev. 19:35–36; Deut. 25:13, 15; Prov. 11:1; Prov. 20:23). 7. Ibid., p. 58.

64

DEUTERONOMY

Conclusion From the beginning of their wandering in the wilderness, the Israelites knew that they were not allowed to take land from the non-Amorite cities in the region. Those cities were the lawful possession of others. God honored the property rights of other nations that worshipped false gods. Even though these nations were afraid of Israel, they were not to be exploited. Israel was not to take advantage of them. Instead, the Israelites were told to trade for whatever they wanted from those nations. Voluntarism rather than military strength was to be the basis of gaining ownership of other nations’ goods. This was supposed to set the pattern for Israel’s future economic dealings with foreign nations. Without the threat of violence facing them, other nations would come to regard Israel as a place to do business. If they wanted to beneit from Israel’s productivity, they could bargain with Israelites. Without fear of coniscation, they could bring something valuable into Israel in search of a trading partner. Their property would be protected by Israelite law and custom. This safe haven for private property irrespective of national origin would make Israel a cross-roads for proit-seeking foreign traders. Egyptians could seek out Israelites or Babylonians or Hittites to do business. Israel could become one of the neutral, independent, coastal nations that served the great empires as common centers of trade. God would soon give Israel the geographical location that could make the nation a foreign trade center. But irst, He imposed a law that favored foreign nations: the protection of their property. By honoring this law prior to the conquest of Canaan, Israel would mark itself as a nation where private property was safe. Israel would become known as a trading nation rather than an aggressor nation. This reputation would position Israel as a regional trade center, bringing income from foreign traders seeking opportunities. This was part of God’s program of foreign missions through law: “Keep therefore and do them; for this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the nations, which shall hear all these statutes, and say, Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people. For what nation is there so great, who hath God so nigh unto them, as the LORD our God is in all things that we call upon him for? And what nation is there so great, that hath statutes and judgments so righteous as all this law, which I set before you this day?” (Deut. 4:6–8).

7 TRANSFERRING INHERITANCE TransferringTHE the Inheritance Get thee up into the top of Pisgah, and lift up thine eyes westward, and northward, and southward, and eastward, and behold it with thine eyes: for thou shalt not go over this Jordan. But charge Joshua, and encourage him, and strengthen him: for he shall go over before this people, and he shall cause them to inherit the land which thou shalt see (Deut. 3:27–28).

God was about to ordain a new leader over Israel. As Lord of the cosmos, God possesses the authority to select His representatives. This authority is the theocentric principle undergirding this law. Moses was told to be a mentor to Joshua in these last days of wilderness wandering. The older man would prepare the younger to take authority over the nation. This transfer of personal authority represented the coming transfer of the inheritance to Israel. Joshua would command Israel after Moses died. Only then would the actual transfer of land take place. God was about to remove the authority of Canaan over the land. Israel’s task was to enforce this transfer of ownership. This was clearly a land law. More than this: it was a one-time land law in Israel’s history. Moses asked God if God would allow him to go into the Promised Land (v. 25). God told him not to ask for this again (v. 26). Moses had been forbidden to cross over because he had struck the rock twice with the rod in order to call forth water, after God had told him to speak to the rock but not strike it (Num. 20:8, 11–12).1

1. Gary North, Sanctions and Dominion: An Economic Commentary on Numbers (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1996), ch. 11.

65

66

DEUTERONOMY

This negative sanction against Moses was a prohibition against his participation in the inheritance. Moses had identiied himself as a spiritual member of the exodus generation, a man who trusted more in signs and wonders than in the promises of God. The sanctions of God are the means of inheritance. Positive sanctions are inheritance sanctions; negative sanctions are disinheritance sanctions. The focus of sanctions, point four of the biblical covenant model, is point ive: inheritance and disinheritance. Positive sanctions are given to covenant-breakers ultimately to increase the inheritance of covenant keepers. “A good man leaveth an inheritance to his children’s children: and the wealth of the sinner is laid up for the just” (Prov. 13:22). The New Heaven and New Earth are the eternal inheritance of the righteous (Rev. 21:1). The historical model for this inal transfer of inheritance is the conquest of Canaan. The wealth created by covenant-breakers became the inheritance of covenant-keepers. “And it shall be, when the LORD thy God shall have brought thee into the land which he sware unto thy fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give thee great and goodly cities, which thou buildedst not, And houses full of all good things, which thou illedst not, and wells digged, which thou diggedst not, vineyards and olive trees, which thou plantedst not; when thou shalt have eaten and be full; Then beware lest thou forget the LORD, which brought thee forth out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage” (Deut. 6:10–12). Joshua inherited Moses’ mantle of authority. He replaced Moses in the civil hierarchy. This transfer of authority was the judicial basis of the fourth generation’s inheritance of Canaan.

Heirs and Inheritance Covenant-breaking man is short of time. He has to earn a very high rate of return in order to accumulate vast wealth in one lifetime. He has to compound this wealth at rates that are abnormally high. This means that he must bear greater risks. He may lose all of his capital in a bad transaction. The second commandment states speciically that covenant-breakers exercise only a few generations of rule, while covenant-keepers extend and compound their rule for thousands of generations, i.e., permanently. “Thou shalt not make thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the waters beneath the earth: Thou shalt not bow down thyself unto them, nor serve

Transferring the Inheritance

67

them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me, And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me and keep my commandments” (Deut. 5:8–10). The covenant-keeper can rest content with ordinary rates of growth, for he believes that his heirs will continue the process. The goal of the covenant-keeper is steady expansion, year by year, generation by generation. The continuity provided by the covenant releases covenant-keepers from a frantic search for abnormally high rates of return. If each generation is faithful in building up the inheritance, and if each generation trains up a faithful generation, the compounding process brings success. It is more important to raise up a faithful, competent, future-oriented generation than to make high rates of return for one generation, only to see the next generation renounce the faith, inherit, and squander the legacy. This breaks the covenant and dissipates the inheritance. Compound growth becomes negative because of covenantal rebellion (Deut. 28:38–40). This thwarts the compounding process. It sets the next generation back one or more generations. The threat of covenantal forgetfulness is always before us: “But thou shalt remember the LORD thy God: for it is he that giveth thee power to get wealth, that he may establish his covenant which he sware unto thy fathers, as it is this day” (Deut. 8:18). So is the threat of negative returns: “And it shall be, if thou do at all forget the LORD thy God, and walk after other gods, and serve them, and worship them, I testify against you this day that ye shall surely perish. As the nations which the LORD destroyeth before your face, so shall ye perish; because ye would not be obedient unto the voice of the LORD your God” (Deut. 8:19–20). God told the exodus generation that they would not inherit. This prophecy pressured that faithless generation to consider the future of their children. Only through their children would they participate in the inheritance. They could have participated in the conquest by transferring military leadership to their sons at the time they sent in the spies. This was not what that generation wanted. Even Moses wanted to escape this negative sanction. He wanted to walk into the Promised Land as the national leader. God would not allow it. His word was unbreakable. No member of that generation would inherit personally. The inheritance of the nation of Israel would be attained through the disinheritance of the exodus generation.

68

DEUTERONOMY

Because the exodus generation refused to disinherit the Canaanites through their sons, God disinherited the exodus generation. The Canaanites enjoyed an extra generation of dominion over the land. God told Moses to encourage Joshua. Joshua would lead the nation into Canaan. He would therefore replace Moses as the nation’s prophetic leader. He would command God’s holy army. He needed training, even at this late date. He needed a word of blessing. Moses, as the supreme commander, was uniquely able to provide this blessing. It was like the blessing of a patriarch to his son. This time, however, the inheritance would not be a bloodline inheritance, as had been true of patriarchy. It was a judicial inheritance based on personal confession: Joshua’s confession before the council of spies. Joshua, not Moses’ son, was the heir of the ojce of national prophet. As Moses’ successor, Joshua would have to lead as Moses had. He would have to exercise courage. He was the representative agent in the conquest. He had been such a representative at the council; now he would be the senior ojcer. He had demonstrated courage then; he would have to demonstrate it again. Moses had recently testiied to God’s omnipotence, at the very end of his career. “O Lord GOD, thou hast begun to shew thy servant thy greatness, and thy mighty hand: for what God is there in heaven or in earth, that can do according to thy works, and according to thy might?” (v. 24). It was this confession that Joshua needed to accept intellectually and internalize emotionally in his role as national leader. Through Joshua, the entire nation was duty-bound to accept it and act in terms of it. This testimony, if acted upon, would be the basis of their inheritance.

Courage Through Obedience Shortly prior to his death, Moses gave this advice to Joshua: “Be strong and of a good courage: for thou must go with this people unto the land which the LORD hath sworn unto their fathers to give them; and thou shalt cause them to inherit it” (Deut. 31:7b). God repeated this to Joshua immediately prior to the crossing of the Jordan River: Now after the death of Moses the servant of the LORD it came to pass, that the LORD spake unto Joshua the son of Nun, Moses’ minister, saying, Moses my servant is dead; now therefore arise, go over this Jordan, thou, and all this people, unto the land which I do give to them, even to the children of Israel. Every place that the sole of your foot shall tread upon, that

Transferring the Inheritance

69

have I given unto you, as I said unto Moses. From the wilderness and this Lebanon even unto the great river, the river Euphrates, all the land of the Hittites, and unto the great sea toward the going down of the sun, shall be your coast. There shall not any man be able to stand before thee all the days of thy life: as I was with Moses, so I will be with thee: I will not fail thee, nor forsake thee. Be strong and of a good courage: for unto this people shalt thou divide for an inheritance the land, which I sware unto their fathers to give them. Only be thou strong and very courageous, that thou mayest observe to do according to all the law, which Moses my servant commanded thee: turn not from it to the right hand or to the left, that thou mayest prosper whithersoever thou goest. This book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth; but thou shalt meditate therein day and night, that thou mayest observe to do according to all that is written therein: for then thou shalt make thy way prosperous, and then thou shalt have good success. Have not I commanded thee? Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the LORD thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest (Josh. 1:1–9).

This more detailed version of Moses’ instructions made it clear that the basis of Joshua’s courage would be his commitment to the law of God. As the national leader, it was his task to read the law daily and meditate on it. The law was not to depart out of his mouth; that is, his words of judgment (point four) were always to be grounded in the law (point three). The basis of the inheritance (point ive) would be their adherence to the law. If they ever departed from the law, they would forfeit their inheritance: Thou shalt betroth a wife, and another man shall lie with her: thou shalt build an house, and thou shalt not dwell therein: thou shalt plant a vineyard, and shalt not gather the grapes thereof. Thine ox shall be slain before thine eyes, and thou shalt not eat thereof: thine ass shall be violently taken away from before thy face, and shall not be restored to thee: thy sheep shall be given unto thine enemies, and thou shalt have none to rescue them. Thy sons and thy daughters shall be given unto another people, and thine eyes shall look, and fail with longing for them all the day long: and there shall be no might in thine hand. The fruit of thy land, and all thy labours, shall a nation which thou knowest not eat up; and thou shalt be only oppressed and crushed alway (Deut. 28:30–33).

Courage is a product of covenantal faithfulness. Without covenantal faithfulness, courage will depart: “In the morning thou shalt say, Would God it were even! and at even thou shalt say,

70

DEUTERONOMY

Would God it were morning! for the fear of thine heart wherewith thou shalt fear, and for the sight of thine eyes which thou shalt see” (Deut. 28:67). Courage increases, or should increase, when men experience victories. That is, when they gain positive sanctions or, in wartime, inlict negative sanctions, they grow more conident. But if they refuse to trust God as the source of their victories, two unpleasant things can result: 1) cowardice because they do not trust God to deliver their enemies into their hands as He has in the past, and 2) defeat through overconidence in their own power. Israel in the wilderness sufered from both amictions: cowardice after the spies’ report and overconidence immediately thereafter, when they attacked Amalek against God’s express command (Num. 14). When God instructed Moses to build up Joshua’s courage, He was telling Moses to relate the whole law to Joshua and the nation. The Book of Deuteronomy is Moses’ response to God’s command. The recapitulation of the law ends with Moses’ inal words to Joshua (Deut. 31:23). The law would serve Israel as the basis of the inheritance. Through the Mosaic law, Israel would maintain the kingdom grant from God.2 Grace precedes the law. The promise to Abraham preceded the kingdom grant. “For if the inheritance be of the law, it is no more of promise: but God gave it to Abraham by promise” (Gal. 3:18). But Israel could not retain this grant if she violated God’s law. “Now therefore hearken, O Israel, unto the statutes and unto the judgments, which I teach you, for to do them, that ye may live, and go in and possess the land which the LORD God of your fathers giveth you. Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall ye diminish ought from it, that ye may keep the commandments of the LORD your God which I command you” (Deut. 4:1–2).

Conclusion The exodus generation had been disinherited at the time of the council of spies. This negative sanction transferred the inheritance to their children. The parents would not enjoy the fruits of military victory. They preferred fruits without risk. They lost their inheritance.

2. Gary North, Leviticus: An Economic Commentary (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), pp. 8–10.

Transferring the Inheritance

71

God required courage from the next generation. They could not be risk-avoiders and also heirs. Under Joshua, they were courageous, though not enough to drive all of the Canaanites out of the land. “As for the Jebusites the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the children of Judah could not drive them out: but the Jebusites dwell with the children of Judah at Jerusalem unto this day” (Josh. 15:63; cf. 17:12–13). As a result, God ceased to support them militarily. Just before his death, Joshua announced: “Know for a certainty that the LORD your God will no more drive out any of these nations from before you; but they shall be snares and traps unto you, and scourges in your sides, and thorns in your eyes, until ye perish from of this good land which the LORD your God hath given you” (Josh. 23:13). This was an announcement of disinheritance, in contrast to Moses’ prophecy of inheritance at the time of his death. Joshua’s prophecy was fulilled partially at the time of the Assyrian and Babylonian captivities. It was fulilled completely in A.D. 70. What the nation learned at the captivity was that courage and obedience are linked. They could not maintain their courage apart from obedience. Without courage, they would eventually surrender the inheritance. Without obedience, they would lose their courage.

8 EVANGELISM Evangelism THROUGH Through LawLAW Behold, I have taught you statutes and judgments, even as the LORD my God commanded me, that ye should do so in the land whither ye go to possess it. Keep therefore and do them; for this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the nations, which shall hear all these statutes, and say, Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people. For what nation is there so great, who hath God so nigh unto them, as the LORD our God is in all things that we call upon him for? And what nation is there so great, that hath statutes and judgments so righteous as all this law, which I set before you this day? (Deut. 4:5–8).

The theocentric principle undergirding this law is God as the Lawgiver. Moses, as the representative of God before Israel and Israel before God, here announced a principle of dominion: the power of the specially revealed law of God in reducing foreigners’ resistance to Israel. Israel’s reputation would be elevated above that of other nations to the extent that other nations acknowledged the legitimacy of God’s law, which they would do, Moses said. Israel, as the nation that was governed by God’s law, would become pre-eminent among the nations – not politically but in terms of its moral inluence. Israel’s reputation would accompany individual Israelites. This reputation would confer an advantage on the nation’s foreign representatives. They would be seen as agents of the most just God. In this sense, Israel’s authority was moral. It was based on God’s law. Israel’s authority was to be based on a hierarchy of righteousness. Israel would represent God to the nations. This was a land law insofar as Israel had to obey it. It was a cross-boundary law insofar as foreign nations were required by God to acknowledge the wisdom of God’s revealed law. Clearly, it was

72

Evangelism Through Law

73

primarily a cross-boundary law. It had to do with the universal wisdom of God’s law. God expected foreign nations to hear of His law. How could this take place? Why should foreigners care anything about the laws governing a small nation like Israel? Normally, foreigners had little incentive to learn about the laws of a foreign nation. But two groups would pay attention: foreign traders and political representatives of foreign nations. Traders especially would pay attention, since their capital was at risk while inside the boundaries of a foreign nation. Foreigners normally had no legal standing in any nation of the ancient world, for they could not participate in the rites of the city’s local gods. But in Israel, a cosmic God had announced that every foreigner had legal standing in the search for justice: “One law shall be to him that is homeborn, and unto the stranger that sojourneth among you” (Ex. 12:49). A foreigner who had been cheated by an Israelite could bring the cheater before a civil court. Israel would become a center of trade to the extent that she enforced God’s law. This would bring foreigners into Israel, either as short-term opportunity-seekers [nokree ] or as permanent residents [geyr ] . The story of how property was safe in Israel, courts treated all men the same, and oppression of foreigners was a violation of the law would have spread rapidly. Such a legal order was unheard of in the ancient world.

Justice Is a Universal Goal There are many deinitions of justice, but rare is the nation that denies the legitimacy of justice. Men seek justice, often with greater fervor than they seek money. They regard justice as one of society’s major goals. They want to live under a civil government that ofers justice. God revealed that the nations would respect His law. They would recognize that the Mosaic law was a great legal order that relected a great God. Israel, as God’s unique national representative, would bask in the sunlight of God’s justice. How could this be if all men have fundamentally diferent concepts of justice? The very possibility of other nations’ honoring God by acknowledging the justice of Israel’s legal order points to the existence of common elements of justice that cross borders and eras.

74

DEUTERONOMY

God places in the heart (conscience) of every man the work of the law – not the law itself (Heb. 8:10), but the work of the law (Rom. 2:14–15).1 This knowledge is suppressed by covenant-breaking men in the inal stages of their rebellion (Rom. 1:18–22), but it is part of every person’s legacy as a human. The work of the law is in every person’s heart. But covenant-breakers’ active suppression of this revelation is why every appeal to the authority of a universal logic or ethic is doomed. The work of the law is innate to man, but no logical system that presupposes the sovereignty of man’s mind can logically come to a belief in the sovereignty of God. Thus, every attempt to invoke natural law theory as the basis of long-term social order is biblically spurious. A covenant-breaking man’s knowledge of the work of the law is held innately, not logically. It is suppressed actively, not passively. His knowledge condemns him eternally, and at best allows him to prosper for a time prior to his rebellion against the truth. The positive sanctions covenantally connected to men’s external conformity to the work of the law eventually undermine the ethical rebel’s sense of autonomy, which in turn leads him into external rebellion, just as God’s blessings on Sodom and Canaan did. Conformity to “natural law” – the work of the law in men’s hearts – will bless covenant-breaking men temporarily, but in blessing them, it eventually condemns them or their heirs in history. It cannot bring them to a knowledge of the truth. We are not saved by law. Neither are societies. Most Protestant theologians have insisted that this is the case with respect to individuals, but they have denied that this insight applies to society. Lutherans have been most forthright in this inconsistency. Luther’s two-kingdoms theory rested on his theory of two radically distinct forms of law: spiritual law governing Christians and natural law governing societies.2 He had no theory of Christian law for Christian societies, for his amillennial eschatology denied the possibility of a Christian society in history. To the extent that Christians have shared his eschatology and his social theory, they have adopted his ethical dualism. Every Christian theologian or social theorist who invokes natural law 1. John Murray, The Epistle to the Romans, 2 vols. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1965), I, pp. 74–76. 2. Charles Trinkaus, “The Religious Foundations of Luther’s Social Views,” in John H. Mundy, et al., Essays in Medieval Life (Cheshire, Connecticut: Biblo & Tannen, 1955), pp. 71–87.

Evangelism Through Law

75

theory is an ethical dualist. Some are quite forthright about this; others are not. But we should recognize the covenantal confession of the ethical dualist whenever we come across it: a denial that the law-order revealed in the Mosaic law is in any way binding on societies and civil governments today. The more adamant dualists argue that Christians can live under any legal order without compromising their faith, with only one exception: biblical civil law. Every legal order is permitted except the only one which God ever commanded: biblical civil law. In the social theory of the hard-core Christian ethical dualist, all civil legal orders are equal, but one is less equal than others: biblical civil law. Covenant-keeping men can and do depart from the proclamation of, and adherence to, God’s revealed law. This is why Israel was warned: “Only take heed to thyself, and keep thy soul diligently, lest thou forget the things which thine eyes have seen, and lest they depart from thy heart all the days of thy life: but teach them thy sons, and thy sons’ sons” (Deut. 4:9). This does not mean that they can completely suppress their knowledge of what God expects from them. It means that they refuse to obey the things that they know to be true. Their consciences become seared (I Tim. 4:2). The power of Israel’s testimony to the nations would be the fact that Israel’s civil courts would not misuse their power to impose unjust decisions on foreigners. As in the case of Israel’s time in the wilderness, when God restrained them from coniscating the inheritances of other nations (Deut. 2:4–6), so would God’s restraint of unjust judges provide a unique testimony. Foreigners who lived in fear of injustice in other nations would be able to live in peace and prosperity inside Israel. The power of Israel’s judicial testimony would be great because it was granted freely to the weak. In Israel, the three representative groups that were singled out as deserving of special judicial scrutiny, lest oppression raise its head, were widows, orphans, and strangers. “Cursed be he that perverteth the judgment of the stranger, fatherless, and widow. And all the people shall say, Amen” (Deut. 27:19; cf. Deut. 14:29; 24:17, 19–20).

Increased Trade, Increased Evangelism When a minority group without power is protected by law, members of that group spread the word. Such were strangers in Israel. When Israelite traders would come into a foreign nation whose agents traded regularly in Israel, they would probably have

76

DEUTERONOMY

received special consideration from the local sellers, despite the fact that the local courts granted no special consideration to foreigners. There is a tendency for good deeds to be repaid by those who seek a continuing proitable relationship. In this sense, Israel was in a position to set the judicial agenda outside of its own borders. Its testimony to the otherwise oppressed would have strengthened God’s hand, and the hand of God’s agents, in nations whose representatives had been treated well in Israel. The great empires of the second millennium B.C. did not establish jurisdiction over port cities on the coasts. They allowed these cities to operate under local jurisdictions.3 This indicates that the rulers understood the power of foreign ideas. The major clearing center for new ideas was a port city. Here men gathered from many nations, selling many wares, and telling stories of many gods. But one God, above all others, was a threat to the sovereignty of a host nation’s gods: Israel’s. This God claimed a universal reign irrespective of geography. To make this claim believable, Israel was required to enforce God’s law fairly and without discrimination against foreigners. All men are the same under God. His rule extends to all men.

The Extent of World Trade The question arises: How important was world trade in the ancient world? The modern historian assumes cultural evolution. He assumes that modern ships alone have made world trade possible. Prior to medieval times, he assumes, trade was limited to the Mediterranean Sea, expensive and infrequent land journeys, and coastal shipping. This assumption is incorrect. World trade has brought contacts between distant cultures for millennia. Only in the second half of the twentieth century has the extent of this trade become visible to a handful of specialists. The academic world dismisses the evidence because the evidence calls into question the long-held assumptions about the technological accomplishments of pre-modern societies. It is appropriate at this point to reproduce a section from my Introduction to Leviticus: An Economic Commentary, on the extent of 3. Robert B. Revere, “‘No Man’s Coast’: Ports of Trade in the Eastern Mediterranean,” in Trade and Market in the Early Empires: Economies in History and Theory, edited by Karl Polanyi, Conrad M. Arensberg, and Harry W. Peterson (Chicago: Regnery, [1957] 1971), ch. 4.

Evangelism Through Law

77

world trade before the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. Modern man thinks of cross-oceanic trade as a recent phenomenon. It isn’t. It goes back to the era of Abraham, at least. Missionary activity was to be a part of this trade.

********* There were traders from Northern Europe operating in North America in the early second millennium B.C.: Abraham’s era. Inscriptions of one of these visits were discovered in the 1950’s in Ontario, Canada.4 It should therefore surprise no one that Jews were trading in North America as early as Jesus’ time, and perhaps centuries earlier. There is evidence – automatically dismissed as fraudu5 lent (“forgery”) by establishment scholars – that someone brought the message of God’s Ten Commandments to the American southwest before the time of Jesus, possibly centuries before. I refer to the inscription, written in a Hebrew “stick” script,6 which records the decalogue. It was written on a boulder weighing 80 tons, located 30 miles southwest of Albuquerque, New Mexico, near the town of Los Lunas.7 The script (alphabet) dates from the twelfth century B.C.8 Professor Robert Pfeifer of Harvard University’s Semitic Museum irst translated the inscription in 1948.9 A more recent translation than Pfeifer’s reads: I [am] Yahve your God who brought you out of the land of the two Egypts out of the house of bondages. You shall not have other [foreign] gods in place of [me]. You shall not make for yourself molded or carved idols. You shall not lift up your voice to connect the name of Yahve in hate. Remember you [the] day Sabbath to make it holy. Honor your father and your mother to make long your existence upon the land which Yahve your God gave to you. You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery or idolatry. You shall not steal or deceive. You shall not bear witness against 4. Barry Fell, Bronze Age America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982), ch. 1. 5. See “Los Lunas Attracts Epigraphers,” Epigraphic Society Occasional Papers, XII (Aug. 1985), p. 34. See also Fell, Bronze Age America, p. 44. 6. Donald Cline, “The Los Lunas Stone,” ibid., X:1 (Oct. 1982), p. 69. 7. David Allen Deal, Discovery of Ancient America (Irvine, California: Kherem La Yah, 1984), ch. 1. 8. Barry Fell, “Ancient Punctuation and the Los Lunas Text,” Epigraphic Society Occasional Papers, XIII (Aug. 1985), p. 35. 9. A photocopy of Pfeifer’s translation appears in Deal, Discovery, p. 10.

78

DEUTERONOMY

your neighbor testimony for a bribe. You shall not covet [the] wife of your 10 neighbor and all which belongs to your neighbor.

It mentions two Egypts, an obvious reference to the two regions of Egypt, upper (close to the head of the Nile) and lower (close to the Mediterranean).11 As to when the inscription was made, George Morehouse, a mining engineer, has estimated that this could have taken place as recently as 500 years ago and as far back as two millennia.12 A “revisionist” who has studied the inscription in detail believes that the text may be from the era of the Septuagint, i.e., over a century before the birth of Jesus – surely no comfort for conventional textbook authors. The stone’s tenth commandment prohibiting covetousness mentions the wife before property, a feature of the Septuagint text.13 (The problem with this revisionist argument is that this “Septuagint” structuring of the text is also found in Deuteronomy 5:21.) Evidence of the ancient world’s advanced tools, maps,14 international trade, and highly sophisticated astronomical and observational science15 never gets into college-level world history textbooks. The evidence is automatically rejected or downplayed by conventional – and woefully uninformed – historians because it breaks with the familiar tenets of cultural evolution. Time is supposed to bring science, technology, and cultural advance. Cultural evolution, not cultural devolution, is supposed to be mankind’s legacy to future generations. The thought that international trade across the oceans existed ive centuries before Columbus, let alone ive centuries before David,16 is an afront to cultural evolutionists. 10. L. Lyle Underwood, “The Los Lunas Inscription,” Epigraphic Society Occasional Papers, X:1 (Oct. 1982), p. 58. 11. New Bible Dictionary (2nd ed.; Wheaton, Illinois: Tyndale House, 1982), p. 302. 12. George E. Morehouse, “The Los Lunas Inscriptions[:] A Geological Study,” Epigraphic Society Occasional Papers, XIII (Aug. 1985), p. 49. 13. Michael Skupin, “The Los Lunas Errata,” ibid., XVIII (1989), p. 251. 14. Charles Hapgood, Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings (Philadelphia: Chilton, 1966). 15. O. Neugebauer and A. Sachs (eds.), Mathematical Cuneiform Texts (New Haven, Connecticut: American Oriental Society, 1945); Neugebauer and Richard A. Parker, Egyptian Astronomical Texts, 3 vols. (Providence, Rhode Island: Brown University Press, 1960); Neugebauer, The Exact Sciences in Antiquity (2nd ed.; Providence, Rhode Island: Brown University Press, 1957); Livio C. Stecchini, “Astronomical Theory and Historical Data,” in The Velikovsky Afair: The Warfare of Science and Scientism, edited by Alfred de Grazia (New Hyde Park, New York: University Books, 1966), pp. 127–70. See also Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, Hamlet’s Mill: An essay on myth and the frame of time (Boston: Gambit, 1969). 16. Fell, Bronze Age America.

Evangelism Through Law

79

This is probably why a book like Patrick Huyghe’s Columbus Was Last (1992) had to be published by an obscure New York company, Hyperion, which allowed it to go out of print within a year. It also explains why there is so little awareness regarding amateur archeologist Emilio Estrada’s 1957 discovery of buried Japanese pottery on the coast of Ecuador: Japan’s Jomon-era stone-age pottery.17 Scholars do not want to face the obvious question: How did it get there? And why are there artistic similarities between the China’s Shang dynasty and the Mesoamerica Olmec culture – large cats (sometimes without their lower jaws), the dragon, and the use of jade – which overlapped each other from the ifteenth to the twelfth centuries, B.C.?18 Why were the implements and techniques used by the Mayans to make bark paper ive centuries before Christ so similar to the implements and techniques used by the Chou dynasty in the same era? Of 121 individual traits, the two systems shared 91, half of which were non-essential, and the other half, while essential, had alternative approaches available.19 Why didn’t the Mesoamerican techniques match papermaking techniques used by cultures in other parts of America?20 Why do Mayan stone art works after 500 B.C. shift from earlier forms to match Asian art forms of the same era?21 Meanwhile, at the other end of the hemisphere, slate technologies have been discovered in burial sites of the ancient Red Paint (red ochre) People in Maine and Labrador. These artifacts match slate technologies in Scandinavia. The era of conjunction was some 4,000 years ago.22 Huyghe writes: “The principal deterrent to the notion of historical contact is the widespread belief that ancient man was incapable of making ocean voyages in primitive boats. But there is certainly no doubt that Europeans had oceangoing watercraft quite early. Bronze Age rock carvings in Europe show plank-built ships were sailing Atlantic coastal waters more than 4,000 years ago.”23 17. Patrick Huyghe, Columbus Was Last (New York: Hyperion, 1992), ch. 2. 18. Ibid., p. 84. 19. Ibid., pp. 86–87. See Paul Tolstoy, “Paper Route,” Natural History (June 1991). 20. Ibid., p. 87. 21. Ibid., pp. 87–91. See Gunnar Thompson, Nu Sun (Fresno, California: Pioneer, 1989). Thompson is director of the American Discovery Project at California State University, Fresno. 22. Ibid., pp. 52–54. 23. Ibid., p. 54.

80

DEUTERONOMY

How many people know that the Carthaginians were sending trading ships to North America in the late fourth century B.C.? Throughout the eastern United States, Carthaginian coins from the 325 B.C. era have been discovered near navigable rivers and of the Atlantic coast.24 Beginning in the late eighteenth century, farmers in New England started digging up hoards of Roman coins. Few people know that numerous commercial bronze replicas of Assyrian deities have been discovered in Cuenca, Ecuador. The Phoenicians were producing these replicas on Cyprus as early as 600 B.C. Carthage, an ofshoot of Phoenecia, exported them to barbarian peoples.25 We know that after 300 B.C., Carthage began to mint electrum coins: mostly gold, but with some silver. Where did Carthage get the gold? These fake deities in South America are evidence that Carthage imported gold from South America through the sale of these replicas.26 These trips would also explain where Carthage got the pine lumber for building huge warships27 until the end of the irst Punic War with Rome in 241 B.C.28 (In that war, 264–41 B.C., Carthage lost 334 of these giant ships.)29 Barry Fell speculates that before the defeat, they had brought trees as ballast from North America, which is why we discover bronze coins there. They bought lumber from the Indians.30 After 241 B.C., Carthaginian trade with the Americas ceased. Roman trade replaced it.31 Paintings of Roman-Iberian coins appear on cave walls in Arkansas and as far west as Castle Gardens, near Moneta (“money”), Wyoming.32 There were Iberian-based banks all across North America in the time of Jesus. These contacts continued, and they left traces. “In 1933, an astonished Mexican archeologist excavated a terra-cotta head of a Roman igurine of the third century A.D. from an undisturbed ancient grave sealed under the Calixtlahuaca pyramid, thirty-ive miles southwest of Mexico City.”33

24. Barry Fell, Saga America (New York: Times Books, 1980), pp. 25–26, 62, 64. 25. Ibid., p. 82. 26. Ibid., p. 85. 27. Quinquiremes: ive rowers per oar, 250 rowers, 120 marines plus ojcers: 400 men per ship. Ibid., p. 75. 28. Ibid., p. 76. 29. Ibid., p. 75. 30. Ibid., p. 86. 31. Ibid., chaps. 6, 7. 32. Ibid., pp. 134–35, 144, 148–49, 159–60. 33. Huyghe, Columbus Was Last, p. 98.

Evangelism Through Law

81

The Carthaginians and Romans were late-comers. The Scandinavians were trading in North America during the Bronze Age, pos34 sibly as early as 1700 B.C. – the era of Joseph in Egypt. A visiting Norwegian sailor-king left an account of one of these visits in what is now called Petroglyph Park in Peterborough, Ontario, in Canada. He had an inscription chiseled into rock, written in a nearly universal alphabet of the ancient world, ogam consaine,35 and another alphabet, equally universal, Ti nag, an alphabet still employed by the Tuaregs, a Berber tribe in North Africa. The Norse inscription was accompanied by a comment written by an Algonquin Indian scribe in a script common among the pre-Roman Basques, but using a form of the Algonquin language still understood.36 The inscription was discovered in 1954.37 This same Basque script was also employed by the Cree Indians well into the nineteenth century. It was not known to be related to Basque until Fell transliterated into Latin consonants a document written in this “Indian” script. The document had been sent to him by a Basque etymologist who had been unable to decipher it. When it was transliterated, the Basque scholar recognized it as a pre-Roman dialect of the Basque tongue, one which was still in use in the medieval period.38 Some of the words are virtually the same in both the Algonquin and ancient Basque tongues.39 (Fell also reads Greek, Latin, German, French, Danish, and Gaelic; he has a working knowledge of Sanskrit, Kuic Arabic, and several Asian and African languages.)40 41 A thousand years before the birth of Jesus, Celtic traders were serving as missionaries in North America, bringing the stories of their gods across the continent: central and Western Canada, and as far south as Nevada and California. The petroglyphs of this era

34. Fell, Bronze Age America, ch. 1. The dating is calculated by the zodiac data in the inscription: ch. 5, especially pp. 127, 130. 35. A gift to man from the Gaulish god Ogimos, god of the occult sciences. Ibid., p. 165. 36. Ibid., p. 36. For additional information, see Huyghe, Columbus Was Last, ch. 5. 37. Ibid., p. 39. 38. Ibid., p. 146. Comparisons of the North American Indian script and the ancient Basque script appear on pages 148–49. 39. Ibid., p. 151. 40. Huyghe, Columbus Was Last, p. 59. 41. Fell, Bronze Age America, ch. 14.

82

DEUTERONOMY

42

reproduce Norse gods whose names are in ogam. Needless to say, none of this information has moved into college history textbooks. Textbooks include only certain kinds of texts. Textbook authors dismiss all such petroglyph evidence as “forgeries” – the same way they dismiss the texts of the Bible that challenge their concept of chronology. But this is beginning to change. A few academic specialists are beginning to admit that there is something of value in Fell’s work.43 We can therefore predict the traditional three stages of academic surrender: 1) “It isn’t true.” 2) “It’s true, but so what?” 3) “We always knew it was true.” As of the inal decade of the twentieth century, we are still in stage one. If Celtic traders were able to bring their gods to North America, so were Jewish traders. God expected them to do this. To some extent, they did, as the Los Lunas stone indicates. But they did not do it on a scale that matched the Celts. The requirement that they return for Passover each year must have inhibited their journeys. This was a barrier to world evangelism. It was a temporary barrier. Israel’s old wineskins would inevitably be broken because the geographical boundaries of the Mosaic law would eventually be broken if God’s law was obeyed. Population growth would have seen to that. So would the cost of journeying to Jerusalem, especially for international Jewish traders. But even if the Mosaic law was disobeyed, those wineskins would be broken. This is what took place deinitively with Jesus’ ministry, progressively with the establishment of the church, and inally in A.D. 70.44 The ire on God’s earthly altar was extinguished forever. When, sixty years later, Bar Kochba revolted, the Romans crushed the revolt in 135. There is a continuing stream of archeological discoveries indicating that some of the survivors led to Tennessee and Kentucky. An early ind in Bat Creek, Tennessee, by Smithsonian ield assistant John Emmert in 1889 is a ive-inch stone inscribed with eight Hebrew characters. The signiicance of this was denied by the Smithsonian’s curator, who claimed this was Cherokee syllabic script. As the saying goes, “Nice try, but no cigar” – he had read it upside-down. Over half a century later, Hebrew scholars 42. Ibid., chaps. 7–13. 43. Cf. David H. Kelley, “Proto-Tiinagh and Proto-Ogham in the Americas,” Review of Archeology, XI (Spring 1990). 44. David Chilton, The Great Tribulation (Ft. Worth, Texas: Dominion Press, 1987).

Evangelism Through Law

83

turned it right-side up and discovered these consonants: LYHWD. In the early 1970’s, Brandeis University’s Hebraicist Cyrus H. Gordon identiied the era of the style of these letters: Bar Kochba’s. He translated the phrase: “A comet for the Jews,” which was a standard phrase during the revolt. Similar coin inds from this era had been made in Kentucky, which Gordon believed had not been faked. Needless to say, none of this is in the textbooks. Neither will you ind a reference to the massive 1,375-page two-volume bibliography Pre-Columbian Contacts with the Americas Across the Oceans, which contains over 5,500 entries.45 For those of you who want to spend a lifetime following the trails into and out of America, here is the place to start.

********* Conclusion The Mosaic law was to serve Israel as a means of worldwide evangelism. Someone carved the Ten Commandments into a boulder in New Mexico in the days of Jesus or earlier. Some Israelite understood the truth of Deuteronomy’s assertion that the law of God is a powerful tool of evangelism. Oppressed men respond well to civil justice. The civil law of God was simple enough for traders and resident aliens to learn. They would know their rights before God. Their chief civil right in Israel was equality before the law. This was a unique right in the ancient world, where civil rights were tied to civil rites. Foreigners had no civil rites in the ancient city-states, so they had no rights. This was not so in Israel. One of the self-inlicted wounds of modern Christianity is Christians’ denial of the continuing validity of biblical law in New Testament times. They have stripped the church of one of its premier tools of evangelism: the proclamation of universal justice. God has given them their request – a world not under God’s Bible-revealed covenantal law – and has thereby brought them under the rule of covenant-breakers.

45. Provo, Utah: Research Press, 1989. Compiled by John L. Sorenson and Martin H. Raish.

9 HEAR, FEAR, TESTIFY Hear, Fear,AND and Testify Only take heed to thyself, and keep thy soul diligently, lest thou forget the things which thine eyes have seen, and lest they depart from thy heart all the days of thy life: but teach them thy sons, and thy sons’ sons; Specially the day that thou stoodest before the LORD thy God in Horeb, when the LORD said unto me, Gather me the people together, and I will make them hear my words, that they may learn to fear me all the days that they shall live upon the earth, and that they may teach their children (Deut. 4:9–10).

The theocentric basis of this law is the fear of God. As covenantal agents of God, fathers were required to teach their sons and grandsons the law of God. The family’s hierarchy was to extend Israel’s national covenant into the future. This was a not a seed law in the sense of a tribal law. It was an ajrmation of the covenant in the life of Israel. It is a universal law that is to govern covenant-keeping fathers throughout history. Only when God is no longer to be feared does this law cease in history, “that they may learn to fear me all the days that they shall live upon the earth.” Moses spoke these words to people who could remember the giving of the law. Through their parents’ oath of allegiance to God, they had participated in the sealing of the covenant at Sinai-Horeb (Ex. 19), immediately prior to God’s giving of the Ten Commandments (Ex. 20). Moses warned them not to forget, and to tell what they had seen to their children and grandchildren. The threat to Israel was a break in this verbal inheritance. There was a risk that their memories of this covenantal event might depart from Israel. But how? Through a failure to tell this story. The focus of this warning was not primarily individual; it was corporate. Old

84

Hear, Fear, and Testify

85

people remember the events of their youth even when they forget their own names. The memory spoken of here was corporate memory, i.e., the transmission of the story. If this story should ever depart out of the nation’s corporate heart, it would no longer deine Israel. It would no longer motivate them to fear God and obey Him. The transmission of Israel’s inheritance rested on the telling of this story. Here, Passover was not the focus; the giving of the law was. Passover was to remind them of the great deliverance from Egypt, which Moses called the iron furnace (Deut. 4:20). But the story of the giving of the law was equally important. It was not just that God had delivered them out of bondage; it was that He had also delivered to them His law. The events surrounding the covenantal meeting between God and Israel at Mt. Horeb had to be repeated to the next generation. They had heard God (v. 12). They were not eyewitnesses to God; they were earwitnesses to God. They were required to pass on this story just as they had received it: verbally.

Hearing Is Believing Modern man has a phrase, “Seeing is believing.” The technology of photography launched a new era. Men could at last record faithful images of what they had seen. This elevated the eye to a position of authority that it had enjoyed only in trials, where witnesses had to conirm the event. Now the photograph replaced one of the witnesses. But this legal authority as a witness is about to depart unless modern computer technology is reversed. The technology of digital imaging is going to make possible the altering of photographic images to such an extent that seeing will no longer be believing. The rise of modern science is generally explained in terms of the rise of experimentation. Only whatever can be measured is said to be scientiically valid. The repeatability of an experiment is the source of its validity: other scientists can see the same results. But the description of these experiments is always conveyed verbally. Words must accompany the images and mathematical formulas in order for others to understand the procedures and repeat them. Never has seeing been believing except for the individual who saw. To transmit a description of what he saw to others requires more than images. It requires words. The images conirm the words. Images do not speak for themselves. Facts do not stand alone. Facts are never brute facts; they are always interpreted facts.

86

DEUTERONOMY

This does not mean that seeing is irrelevant. I think of the scene in a Marx brothers movie where Groucho is discovered in the arms of some young woman. “What are you going to believe,” he asks the intruder, “me or your own eyes?” Eyes are a valid source of information, but there is always an interaction between sight and interpretation. The persuasive power of belief and habit is usually greater than the power of sight. The Israelites saw the Red Sea open before them; then they crossed over dry land; then they saw the water close over the Pharaoh’s army. Still, they soon ceased to believe that this uniied event was in any way relevant for their new trials. Seeing was believing, but what Israel believed was highly restricted through their lack of faith. Seeing lasts only for a moment; then memory takes over – memory iltered by faith. Hearing is repetitive. For those who did not see, as well as for those who saw but never learned the lesson, hearing is the dominant mode of communication.1

Hearing and Obeying There is a strong ethical element in the Hebrew verb “to hear.” The word for “hear” in Hebrew is the same as the word for “obey”: shawmah. “As soon as they hear of me, they shall obey me: the strangers shall submit themselves unto me” (Ps. 18:44; emphasis added). “Now therefore, if ye will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people: for all the earth is mine” (Ex. 19:5; emphasis added). “And he took the book of the covenant, and read in the audience of the people: and they said, All that the LORD hath said will we do, and be obedient” (Ex. 24:7; emphasis added).2 When God speaks, men should obey. When those in authority speak of God, the listeners should obey. This is why telling the story of the giving of the law was mandatory in Israel. The story was intended to persuade men to fear God, hear God’s law, and obey what they heard. Stories possess great authority when told by those in authority and conirmed by others in authority. The command to tell the story of the giving of the law was directed to parents and grandparents: 1. Reading involves sight, but prior to the advent of photography, reading was mainly hearing through the eyes. 2. See also Genesis 22:18; 26:5; 27:8, 13, 43; 28:7; Exodus 15:26; 18:24.

Hear, Fear, and Testify

87

people in authority. Children look up to their elders – literally when children are young. The awe associated with tall parents is analogous to the awe associated with God. The Israelites repeatedly expressed fear of the giants in the land; it was this that kept the exodus generation from the inheritance. They feared the children of Anak: “And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants: and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight” (Num. 13:33; cf. Num. 14:28). They saw other “men of great stature” (Num. 13:32). Israel’s spies had seen giants. But seeing was not to be believing. Hearing was to be believing. Moses said: “Hear, O Israel: Thou art to pass over Jordan this day, to go in to possess nations greater and mightier than thyself, cities great and fenced up to heaven, A people great and tall, the children of the Anakims, whom thou knowest, and of whom thou hast heard say, Who can stand before the children of Anak!” (Deut. 9:1–2). Not only were the Israelites to hear; they were to obey. It was time to claim the inheritance. But to do this, they had to trust what they heard, not what they saw.

Obedience and Inheritance The basis of maintaining the covenant’s kingdom grant is obedience to the terms of the covenant. An inheritance can always be dissipated. It can shrink to a shadow of its former self when the faithful become a remnant. The captivity brought home this point. Israel forfeited the original inheritance during the exile. Most Israelites remained behind, content with life in Assyria-Babylon-Persia. Only a remnant returned to the land on a permanent basis. The others came only at Passover. The problem with maintaining the compound growth of an original grant of capital is that growth can turn negative. This delays the conquest. The kingdom’s era of expansion is replaced by an era of contraction. The problem is, when you lose half of your capital, you must double it to get even. Large losses are dijcult to overcome. Growth seems almost automatic during the growth phase. It is taken for granted. Yet a 20 percent per annum increase becomes exponential in just a few years. Such rates of growth cannot be sustained. The expanding capital base runs up against the limits to growth. Those who pursue wealth-building as if such rates can be sustained for part of the economy without comparable rates of growth throughout the whole economy eventually reach environmental

88

DEUTERONOMY

limits. The investor runs out of investments that enable him to reinvest his proits at 20 percent. The compounding process slows. To sustain such high rates of growth, men often adopt techniques of debt: leverage. The threat to debt is two-fold: 1) mass inlation, which destroys the currency unit; 2) economic contraction, which bankrupts the debtors.

Bastardy and Culture Moses told his listeners to teach the next generation. They were also to teach their grandchildren. This would either constitute a double witness – parents and grandparents combined – or else it would overcome the defection of the children. The grandparent factor becomes a kind of covenantal insurance policy against a breakdown in the inheritance process. This is why bastardy is such a threat to a society. When fathers are absent, mothers must sustain the legacy. They do not enjoy the beneits of the division of labor. This places heavy burdens on mothers and children. Mothers must earn money to support their children. They must also allocate time to teach them. The covenantal legacy is threatened by a break in continuity. Grandmothers may intervene at this point, caring for the children while mothers are at work. If the grandmothers fail in their task of transmitting the story of the covenant, the third generation is cut loose from the covenant. This is when the breakdown begins. This has now taken place in the United States among the black population. In the early 1960’s, the rate of black illegitimacy was about 25 percent: high. By the 1990’s, it had reached the two-thirds level.3 In the inner cities, it was above 80 percent.4 The social breakdown in the black community that was predicted by Harvard professor Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1965 has taken place. Crime has escalated; welfare dependency is becoming universal among unmarried mothers. There has been a one-generation cultural echo: black to white. The rate of illegitimacy among whites was 22 percent in the early 1990’s – only slightly under the rate of black illegitimacy in the early 3. Jason DeParle, “Census Reports a Sharp Increase Among Never-Married Mothers,” New York Times (July 14, 1993). 4. Charles Murray, “The Coming White Underclass,” Wall Street Journal (Oct. 29, 1993).

Hear, Fear, and Testify

89

5

1960’s. By 1990, one quarter of children in the United States were growing up without fathers. Writes Nicholas Davidson: “This is the greatest social catastrophe facing our country. It is the root of the epidemics of crime and drugs, it is deeply implicated in the decline in educational attainment, and it is largely responsible for the persistence of widespread poverty despite generous government support for the needy.”6 Some 70 percent of all the juveniles in U.S. correc7 tional facilities grew up without fathers in the household. There is no indication that this demographic process is decelerating; on the contrary, it is accelerating. Between 1983 and 1993, the birthrate for unwed mothers in the United States rose by 70 percent.8 When the covenantal legacy is lost by three successive generations, it takes a religious revival to restore it. In my day, this will have to come from outside the secular entertainment media – music, television, and movies – and the secular schools, which combined eat up almost all of the daylight hours of every child. The government-funded school systems that are universal in the West in the twentieth century have divorced learning from the Bible. This has replaced the Christian covenantal inheritance for the vast majority of residents in the West.

Restoring the Testimony When Christian parents send their children to secular public schools, they are inevitably telling their children that knowledge – useful knowledge – has nothing to do with the Bible. Yet the words of Moses convey the opposite viewpoint: the knowledge of God’s revelation in the Bible is the foundation of all useful knowledge. The parents then have a major problem: to persuade their children of the moral consistency of the parents’ outlook, which is pro-secular education and pro-Bible. They do this by appealing to the traditional argument of the two hermetically sealed compartments of revelation: biblical and natural. Somehow, the two are consistent, yet they are separate. This outlook a jrms that the Bible does not

5. Ibid. 6. Nicholas Davidson, “Life Without Father,” Policy Review (Winter 1990), p. 40. 7. Philip F. Lawler, “The New Counterculture,” Wall Street Journal (Aug. 13, 1993). 8. Stephen A. Holmes, “Birthrate for Unwed Mothers Up 70% Since ‘83, Study Shows,” New York Times (July 20, 1994).

90

DEUTERONOMY

instruct natural revelation. But because of the hierarchical structure of all knowledge – from God to man – this argument cannot be sustained. Either secular presuppositions regarding cause and efect in history replace the Bible’s providential view of cause and efect, or else the Bible’s cosmic personalism is substituted for the cosmically impersonal universe of humanism. We cannot begin our reasoning process from the presupposition of the autonomy of nature and human thought and then logically reach the conclusion that God is totally sovereign in history. We cannot reason consistently from the god of humanism – evolving nature as interpreted by autonomous man – and end with the God of the Bible. The philosophical dualism of a majority of modern fundamentalists and evangelicals rests on their theory of knowledge: two sources of truth. This presupposition has led Christian philosophy into compromises with humanism from the days of the early defenders of the faith.9 It has culminated with the widespread support by Christians of the compulsory, tax-supported school. Christians send young children into an educational hierarchy in which the God of the Bible is either ignored or ridiculed. This has broken the covenant of the modern evangelical church. This substitution of covenants begins in kindergarten. It accelerates through graduate school. The American graduate school has been secular from its beginnings in the late nineteenth century.10 The opinions of a majority of college-educated Protestant evangelicals are not signiicantly diferent from the opinions of college-educated non-Christians.11 This is not surprising, since the colleges require all of their faculty members to have earned graduate degrees from secular universities. The professorial drift on campus into liberal humanism is disguised by a cloak of verbiage about Christian relevance in a pluralistic world. Such relevance usually is said to be available by baptizing some discarded humanistic fad. At the end of the twentieth century, writes David Wells, “It is only where assumptions in culture directly and obviously contradict

9. Cornelius van Til, A Christian Theory of Knowledge (Nutley, New Jersey: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1969). 10. George M. Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), ch. 9. 11. James D. Hunter, Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation (University of Chicago Press, 1987).

Hear, Fear, and Testify

91

articles of faith that most evangelicals become aroused and rise up to battle secular humanism’; aside from these speciic matters, they tend to view culture as neutral and harmless. More than that, they often view culture as a partner amenable to being coopted in the cause of celebrating Christian truth.”12 But it has not been secular humanism that has been co-opted; it has been modern evangelicalism. “Evangelicals now stand among those who are on easiest terms with the modern world, for they have lost their capacity for dissent. The recovery of dissent is what is most needed, and the path to its recovery is the reformation of the church.”13 Wells is speaking of upper-middle-class, well-educated men and women who are beneiciaries of humanist culture. He subsumes under his label all the pietist-fundamentalist-charismatic church growth proponents who dismiss theology as irrelevant.14 But this categorization is misleading without extensive qualiications. Pietistic fundamentalists have generally resisted the inroads of modernism, and the six-day creationists still do in academic areas related to origins. Fundamentalists have defended Scoield’s rejection of the Enlightenment ideal of inevitable progress, while rejecting both Darwinian liberalism and post-World War II evangelicalism. Bob Jones University surely has had no alliance with modernism. “We’re reactionaries and proud of it!” has been the cry of millions of fundamentalists, especially prior to 1976, when some of them began to take tentative steps back into American political life, from which they had been absent as an identiiable voting bloc since 1925. Wells is also not speaking of the Christian home school movement or the new theocrats who have at most made a grudging temporary truce, not an alliance, with humanism’s mandatory institutions. These people are dissenters, which is why evangelicals do not ind them respectable. When parents take their children out of the public schools, they have joined the ranks of the dissenters, for the public schools have long served as America’s only established church.15 There has been an implicit, unspoken alliance between Christians and right-wing Enlightenment culture since at least 1700. In 12. David F. Wells, No Place for Truth; or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology? (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1993), p. 11. 13. Ibid., p. 288. 14. Ibid., p. 289. 15. Sidney E. Mead, The Lively Experiment: The Shaping of Christianity in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), p. 68.

92

DEUTERONOMY

the name of Sir Isaac Newton, right-wing humanists have presented their case for universal principles of knowledge, law, and culture. But this implicit alliance was not self-consciously adopted in the name of an alliance; it was believed by the Christians to be inherently Christian.16 The fact that Newton hid his Unitarianism from his superiors at Cambridge in order to retain his teaching position only added to the confusion.17 After Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) destroyed the foundations of this Newtonian-Christian synthesis, American fundamentalists began to distance themselves from modernism. This self-conscious distancing escalated rapidly after the Scopes anti-evolution trial in 1925,18 and escalated again after the publication of The Genesis Flood in 1961. Newtonian mechanism still has its adherents in Christian scientiic circles, for it is seen as the only alternative to both evolutionary Darwinian organicism and Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty. Nevertheless, there has been a major break with modernism in the realm of creationism. This break has dismayed the neo-evangelicals, who strive to make peace with modern science at the expense of the Bible. What Wells says about evangelicals applies to the American Scientiic Ajliation, a group of Trinitarian scientists who reject the six-day creation.19 It does not apply well to the Creation Science movement. The restoration of Christian culture can come only from outside the existing educational system. The churches must abandon the lust for certiication through secular college education, beginning with the removal of all requirements for candidates for the ministry to attend State-accredited colleges and seminaries. Parent-funded Christian education, beginning at the lowest level, must steadily replace the tax-funded system of State-accredited secular education. The graduate schools will be the last to fall. This means that curriculum materials must be written which are systematically in opposition to the presuppositions of modern secularism. The Bible must be placed above conventional curriculum materials.

16. Cotton Mather, The Christian Philosopher (1721). 17. Gale E. Christenson, In the Presence of the Creator: Isaac Newton and His Times (New York: Free Press, 1984), ch. 10: “Heretic: Sotto Voce.” 18. George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), ch. 21. 19. Henry M. Morris, A History of Modern Creationism (San Diego, California: Master, 1984), pp. 130–44.

Hear, Fear, and Testify

93

The problem here is that the academic accreditation system was deliberately designed to keep out graduates of non-approved institutions. This keeps non-certiied people from entering the professions. Academic accreditation has been the humanists’ means of centralizing the curriculum of all schools, not just tax-funded schools. This system was designed by a liberal Baptist minister, Frederick Gates, and sold to his employer, oil billionaire and liberal Baptist John D. Rockefeller, Sr., who in turn persuaded the U.S. Congress to authorize the incorporation of the General Education Board in 1903. “It would be dijcult to overstate the value of the work the GEB did in the ensuing half century. Ironically, it seems largely forgotten today. . . . To understand the GEB, one must see it as an agency of change, one of such remarkable accomplishments that it is scarcely an exaggeration to refer to it as revolutionary.”20 One of its major accomplishments was “reforming college administration and developing professional standards for graduate education throughout the United States. . . .”21 Furthermore, “the work was done very quietly, with great circumspection and skill, for the good reason that, like any agent of change, the GEB was up against some form of established opposition in each of its successive missions. . . .”22 By the time it was voluntarily shut down in 1960, the year John D., Jr., died, it had expended $324 million on its many projects.23 Some $208 million had gone into higher education.24 But setting standards for lower-level schools was also part of the plan. The GEB was the main factor behind the creation of the public school system in the American South, through the funding of one professorship in education in every major state university in the South, and through lobbying in every state capital. From a few hundred schools in 1900, the South’s public school system grew to thousands in the 1920’s. For non-parochial school, non-immigrant group Protestants in the United States to break with this entrenched monopoly would

20. John Ensor Harr and Peter J. Johnson, The Rockefeller Century (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1988), p. 70. 21. Idem. 22. Ibid., p. 71. 23. Ibid., p. 75. 24. Ibid., p. 79. The two main igures in distributing the funds in the early years were Jerome Greene and Abraham Flexner. Idem.

94

DEUTERONOMY

have seemed impossible in 1960, but since that time, the Christian school movement has grown rapidly. The deterioration of the public schools has paralleled and accelerated the exodus of the Christians. These are self-reinforcing phenomena. Christian-fundamentalist curriculum materials are still highly inluenced by traditional secular outlines, and none of them is at a truly high level academically – there is no market at today’s prices for such an academically rigorous curriculum – but independent Christian schools represent an advance over what existed a generation earlier. A minority of Christian parents has begun to take seriously Moses’ words regarding the necessity of teaching their children the stories of the Bible. These stories, when coupled with the law of God, provide God’s people with the means of conquest: the cultural compounding process. But so much covenantal capital was dissipated by Christians in the twentieth century that it will take centuries to reclaim lost ground unless a revival – very high compound growth – should begin and be sustained. But in the past, revivals have never been sustained. The church must tell the story and show people how to apply it in New Covenant times. Parents must tell the story to their children. But the presumed judicial discontinuity between the Old Covenant and the New Covenant has created a problem. Of what relevance to the kingdom inheritance is the giving of the law at Horeb, if there is no continuity between the Ten Commandments, the case laws of Exodus, and New Covenant historical sanctions? If there is no visible kingdom of God in history that is tied covenantally to God’s revealed law,25 and if there is no predictability between corporate faith and corporate sanctions,26 then the story becomes little more than a testimony to personal moralism, if that. It loses its character as inheritance-preserving. This is the situation in the post-Puritan West. The assumption of judicial discontinuity has undermined the relevance of what had been a mandatory story.

25. Kenneth L. Gentry, Jr., The Greatness of the Great Commission: The Christian Enterprise in a Fallen World (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990). 26. Gary North, Millennialism and Social Theory (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), ch. 7.

Hear, Fear, and Testify

95

Conclusion Moses warned his listeners not to skip a generation. Parents were told to tell their children about the meeting between God and Israel at Mt. Horeb. God delivered the law to them at that time. Respect for the law was given added support by the testimony of parents and grandparents who had heard God speak in history This covenantal legacy was to be handed down verbally, generation by generation. This legacy would in turn undergird the legacy of land, which followed the giving of the law and the wilderness experience. Moses understood the threat of a break in Israel’s covenantal inheritance, which above all was an inheritance of law. The authority of God’s law was to be attested to by the testimony of the parents, who could trace back their unbroken testimony to the revelation of God at Mt. Horeb. When the children heard about God from their household elders, they were to fear God. They were to obey Him. The fear of God was to lead to the expansion of the inheritance, generation after generation.

10 REMOVING INHERITANCE RemovingTHE the Inheritance When thou shalt beget children, and children’s children, and ye shall have remained long in the land, and shall corrupt yourselves, and make a graven image, or the likeness of any thing, and shall do evil in the sight of the LORD thy God, to provoke him to anger: I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that ye shall soon utterly perish from of the land whereunto ye go over Jordan to possess it; ye shall not prolong your days upon it, but shall utterly be destroyed. And the LORD shall scatter you among the nations, and ye shall be left few in number among the heathen, whither the LORD shall lead you. And there ye shall serve gods, the work of men’s hands, wood and stone, which neither see, nor hear, nor eat, nor smell (Deut. 4:25–28).

This was a warning. Its theocentric basis is the second commandment: God as a jealous God.1 He alone is to be worshipped. Moses warned of sanctions to come, sanctions based on the second commandment. Moses prophesied that the people would build another golden calf to serve as their god. A calf would again serve as the nation’s representative to the world of spirits and power. There is no exclusively future tense in Hebrew, but it is clear from the structure of the passage that Moses’ comments were directed at a distant generation. That generation would be carried into captivity, where they would be forced to worship lifeless foreign gods. The nation’s punishment would it the crime.

1. The second commandment was the second in the list of ive priestly laws in the Decalogue. Gary North, The Sinai Strategy: Economics and the Ten Commandments (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1986), pp. xv–xvi.

96

Removing the Inheritance

97

The Prophet’s Job A biblical prophet, as God’s voice of authority (point two), set forth the law of the covenant: point three.2 Then he warned what the penalties would be if the people broke the law: point four.3 Biblical negative prophecy was always ethically conditional. Sometimes these conditions were explicit. If the listeners would turn from their covenant-breaking ways, the sanctions would not arrive. The word which came to Jeremiah from the LORD, saying, Arise, and go down to the potter’s house, and there I will cause thee to hear my words. Then I went down to the potter’s house, and, behold, he wrought a work on the wheels. And the vessel that he made of clay was marred in the hand of the potter: so he made it again another vessel, as seemed good to the potter to make it. Then the word of the LORD came to me, saying, O house of Israel, cannot I do with you as this potter? saith the LORD. Behold, as the clay is in the potter’s hand, so are ye in mine hand, O house of Israel. At what instant I shall speak concerning a nation, and concerning a kingdom, to pluck up, and to pull down, and to destroy it; If that nation, against whom I have pronounced, turn from their evil, I will repent of the evil that I thought to do unto them. And at what instant I shall speak concerning a nation, and concerning a kingdom, to build and to plant it; If it do evil in my sight, that it obey not my voice, then I will repent of the good, wherewith I said I would beneit them (Jer. 18:1–10).

Sometimes, the ethical conditions were implicit. For example, God told Abraham that his heirs would conquer Canaan in the fourth generation (Gen. 15:16). Yet God told the third generation to invade the land. He knew that they would disobey Him, which is why He could be speciic with Abraham. The prophecy was ethically conditional; God knew that the prophecy’s conditions would not be met by the third generation. God also knew that the Canaanites would not repent. Thus, the promise to Abraham was historically reliable. God had predestined the fourth-generation Israelites to covenantal victory and the Canaanites to covenantal

2. Ray R. Sutton, That You May Prosper: Dominion By Covenant (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1992), ch. 3. 3. Ibid., ch. 4.

98

DEUTERONOMY

4

defeat. God had ordained the Canaanites to condemnation. They fully deserved to be annihilated. This in no way denies the fact that the prophecy regarding their defeat was conditional. Moses spoke here of successive generations. The King James translators properly inserted “ye,” although the Hebrew text does not include the plural pronoun. His warning was directed at the conquest generation, but it is clear that God’s sanctions would come much later, to future generations that would rebel: “ye shall have remained long in the land, and shall corrupt yourselves, and make a graven image, or the likeness of any thing, and shall do evil in the sight of the LORD thy God, to provoke him to anger” (v. 25). Moses spoke to those future generations through their covenantal representatives: the generation of the conquest. He could do this because he knew that his words would persevere. He had already warned this generation to tell their children and grandchildren the story of the giving of the law (vv. 9–10). In order to preserve the landed inheritance, he said here, all successive generations would have to obey the terms of the covenant. That is to say, the maintenance of the kingdom grant was conditional. It always is. This raises the enduring theological question of the relationship between prophecy, promise, and conditions.

Prophecy, Promise, and Conditions This issue of covenantal conditionality has been a favorite debating topic for hundreds of years among technically precise Calvinists, who regard themselves as covenant theologians. This debate never gets settled. Paul’s words are the point of contention: his contrast between law and promise. “For if the inheritance be of the law, it is no more of promise: but God gave it to Abraham by promise” (Gal. 3:18). Covenant theologians have argued that there are unconditional promises in the Bible; otherwise, there can be no true promises, and therefore no true grace in history. I shall do my best here to clear up this matter.5 Paul’s contrast between law and promise seems absolute, but it really isn’t. There 4. “For there are certain men crept in unawares, who were before of old ordained to this condemnation, ungodly men, turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness, and denying the only Lord God, and our Lord Jesus Christ” (Jude 4; emphasis added). 5. Fat providence!

Removing the Inheritance

99

was an unstated condition in God’s promise to Abraham that neither Paul nor the theologians mention: sexual union. Putting the matter in biological terms, Paul’s allegorical contrast between Sarah and Hagar was not based on the diferences between the normal conception method and the virgin birth. “For it is written, that Abraham had two sons, the one by a bondmaid, the other by a freewoman. But he who was of the bondwoman was born after the lesh; but he of the freewoman was by promise” (Gal. 4:22–23). The promise to Abraham regarding Isaac was conditional. It was biologically conditioned, and it was also ethically conditioned. He was not to imagine that Sarah would become the judicial equivalent to the mother of the messiah. God’s promise to Abraham was not on a par covenantally with the messianic promise of the virgin birth (Isa. 7:14), although it was analogous to it. Isaac was not Jesus. Had Abraham misinterpreted God’s promise in terms of the virgin birth, he would have been ethically out of line. He would not have gone into Sarah’s tent. The prophecy would not have been fulilled. Conclusion: we must not attempt to separate historical conditions from the fulillment of biblical prophecy. Historical conditions are an inescapable aspect of every human action. No Calvinist argues that God sovereignly predestinates occasional events in an otherwise chance-governed world. That argument is the Arminian’s intellectual burden. The Calvinist argues that God predestinates everything. The Calvinist speaks of the decree of God as providentially undergirding all that comes to pass. In short, as I have said from time to time, God does not predestinate in a vacuum. The fulillment of a speciic prophecy is not some imposed event that God inserts into an otherwise autonomous low of historical events. The Arminian thinks it is, but the Arminian is wrong. Human action is therefore inescapable in the fulillment of every covenantal promise. Human action, in turn, is always ethically conditional, for everything that men say, think, or do is under the authority and jurisdiction God’s comprehensive law (Matt. 15:10–20). To argue otherwise is to adopt antinomianism: a theology of neutral, impersonal gaps in the law of God. The antinomian’s view of prophecy parallels his view of ethics. He sees the fulillment of biblical prophecy as a discontinuous intrusion by God into the autonomous processes of history, in much the same way that he sees the jurisdiction of God’s law as sporadic and under tight boundaries. In his view, history is mostly autonomous and chance-conditioned. History is

100

DEUTERONOMY

not predestined and decree-conditioned. History is not seen by the Arminian as covenantal in the sense of being the providential outcome of human action within the context of God’s sovereignty, authority, law, sanctions, and inheritance. But for a covenant theologian to defend the total separation of promise from ethical conditionality is necessarily to adopt some form of Arminianism-antinomianism: the God of the Bible as the God of the intrusion, whether historical or judicial.

Invoking Covenantal Witnesses Moses invoked heaven and earth to witness against the nation that day (Deut. 4:26). This is covenantal language. Moses was not invoking living organisms. He was not a believer in Gaia, the earth-goddess. He was invoking a double witness. He was putting the nation on alert: these two cosmic witnesses would stand guard, day and night, to testify against them. A double witness was required to convict someone of a capital crime. “At the mouth of two witnesses, or three witnesses, shall he that is worthy of death be put to death; but at the mouth of one witness he shall not be put to death” (Deut. 17:6). Heaven and earth are the limits of history; there is no place for men to commit sin that is outside of the boundaries of heaven and earth. David asked rhetorically: “Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I lee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there” (Ps. 139:7–8). There is no escape from God and His word. “Out of heaven he made thee to hear his voice, that he might instruct thee: and upon earth he shewed thee his great ire; and thou heardest his words out of the midst of the ire” (Deut. 4:36). God had said to Cain, “What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground” (Gen. 4:10). Blood has no vocal chords. But Abel’s blood was in the ground, and God saw this evidence of murder. The existence of historical evidence in the presence of an omniscient God constitutes a valid witness against lawless men. What Moses was saying was that God would see their acts of rebellion, their worship of rival gods. This evidence could not be covered up in God’s cosmic court. The evidence would cry out against them. This would constitute a covenantal witness against them. The proof of God’s covenantal sovereignty is the inheritance. When Israel successfully claims this legacy on Canaan’s battleields,

Removing the Inheritance

101

Moses announced, Israelites will know that God can and will enforce the terms of His covenant. The positive sanction of gaining the inheritance will testify to the reality of the negative sanction of its future revocation. The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. And because he loved thy fathers, therefore he chose their seed after them, and brought thee out in his sight with his mighty power out of Egypt; To drive out nations from before thee greater and mightier than thou art, to bring thee in, to give thee their land for an inheritance, as it is this day. Know therefore this day, and consider it in thine heart, that the LORD he is God in heaven above, and upon the earth beneath: there is none else. Thou shalt keep therefore his statutes, and his commandments, which I command thee this day, that it may go well with thee, and with thy children after thee, and that thou mayest prolong thy days upon the earth, which the LORD thy God giveth thee, for ever (Deut. 4:37–40).

Israel will break the covenant, Moses announced. This was a prophecy. He knew this was coming unless Israel avoided rebellion. Moses did not mention the possibility that Israel might not rebel, i.e., the conditional nature of the prophecy. The condition of covenantal faithfulness would not be met. Moses spoke in advance to those in the midst of rebellion. God in His mercy will not kill them all for their false worship. Instead, He will strip them of their inheritance, but only for a time. He will hear their cries for deliverance, even as He had heard their cries when they were in Egypt. He will remain faithful to His covenant with Abraham, even though the nation would wander into prohibited worship. But there will be a price to pay. There will be corporate negative sanctions. The covenant was still in force. By invoking heaven and earth, Moses was making this issue a matter of covenantal sanctions. Covenant sanctions are predictable in the ethically conditional sense of “if . . . then.” A prophet’s task was to persuade his listeners of the predictability of these sanctions. That which identiied an Old Covenant prophet was the speciic time frame of the predicted sanctions. With the closing of the canon of Scripture, this ojce was annulled. No man’s word today is lawfully elevated to the authority of the Bible. Moses, however, was the nation’s premier prophet. His words became part of Scripture, which is why his warning had judicial authority down through history. In Jesus’ parable of the rich man and the poor man, He has Abraham invoke Moses and the prophets. “Abraham saith unto

102

DEUTERONOMY

him, They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them. And he [Dives] said, Nay, father Abraham: but if one went unto them from the dead, they will repent. And he said unto him, If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead” (Luke 16:29–31). It is clear that Moses did not believe that Israel would listen to his words. He knew they would rebel. This passage was designed to comfort them in a time of captivity. God would deliver them out of captivity as surely as He had prophesied through Moses that He would deliver them into captivity. The promise of deliverance out of was as certain as the promise of deliverance into. Sin being what it is, bad situations are easier to get into than out of. But foretelling the future is a mark of supernatural authority, and God was telling them in advance what would take place. Israel could trust His word.

Removing the Inheritors Land is not mobile; people are. The threat to Israel’s landed inheritance was two-fold: 1) invasion by other nations; 2) Israel’s removal from the land. Under the judges, invasion was the problem. Centuries later, removal was the threat. The greater of these threats was removal, which is the focus of this prophecy. God threatened to remove the inheritance from Israel by removing Israel from the inheritance. Under the judges, Israel faced domination by nearby nations that forced Israel to pay tribute. These nations sought tribute, not permanent slaves. They did not seek to carry the people out of the land. Later, under Assyria and Babylon, which were building great empires, Israel was led into captivity. This was the focus of Moses’ warning, almost a millennium before Babylon carried of Judah. The prophetic time perspective was long. The greatest threat to their liberty would be their forced subordination to foreign gods. “And there ye shall serve gods, the work of men’s hands, wood and stone, which neither see, nor hear, nor eat, nor smell” (v. 28). To be forced to serve dead idols was a terrible prospect. But Moses knew where rebellious men’s hearts are: in their earthly possessions. So, he prefaced this ultimate curse with a this-worldly curse: captivity. They will lose their property. They will lose their military strength. This will culminate in their subordination to dead idols.

Removing the Inheritance

103

The basis of military success, David told Israel generations later, is not weaponry. “Some trust in chariots, and some in horses: but we will remember the name of the LORD our God” (Ps. 20:7). He was merely rephrasing Moses’ warning to Israel’s kings not to multiply horses (Deut. 17:16). Moses made it clear that their covenantal faithfulness alone would preserve their independence as a nation. This independence would someday be withdrawn. Moses ofered hope to the scattered captives. “But if from thence thou shalt seek the LORD thy God, thou shalt ind him, if thou seek him with all thy heart and with all thy soul. When thou art in tribulation, and all these things are come upon thee, even in the latter days, if thou turn to the LORD thy God, and shalt be obedient unto his voice; (For the LORD thy God is a merciful God;) he will not forsake thee, neither destroy thee, nor forget the covenant of thy fathers which he sware unto them” (vv. 29–31). Nevertheless, the full Mosaic covenant would never be restored to Israel. The civil covenant would be broken forever. After the remnant of Israel returned from captivity, the nation did not enjoy sustained political independence. The age of the empires had arrived. Control over Israel’s politics passed from the Medo-Persians to Alexander the Great and his successors, and from them to Rome. This loss of civil authority protected the nation from idolatry. Israel never again worshipped the gods of Canaan. Those gods had been defeated twice: by Israel under Joshua (partial) and by Assyria and Babylon (total), which replaced the Israelites with foreigners who did not worship the local gods of Canaan. Power would no longer come from Canaan’s gods under the captivity. Without power, the gods of the ancient world had no claim on men’s allegiance. The gods of the ruling empire would dominate while Israel was absent from the land. When the remnant of Israel returned, pagan gods were seen as enemies, the gods of their conquerors. Israel’s leaders could not worship these alien gods and still retain the allegiance of the nation. Israel did not again turn to idols. Israel’s post-exilic temptations were legalism, Greek philosophy, and Hellenic culture, not dead idols. The captivity cured them of their older bad habits. It was one thing for foreigners to reside in Israel as conquerors before the exile. It was quite another for them to remove Israelites from the land. This was the conclusion of pre-exilic idolatrous religions. Idolatrous worship in the pre-empire phase was local worship. The sovereignty of a god was manifested in his ability to extend visible rule to his people. Ancient civil theology was power

104

DEUTERONOMY

6

religion. The success of a god was tied to the success of his people militarily. This is why an invading army was less of a threat to Israel than captivity, and less of a covenantal sanction. Israel’s continuing presence in the land seemingly testiied to the nation’s continuing covenant with God. Israel’s defeat was not total. So, to break them of this idolatrous way of thinking, God told them that His covenant with them was valid irrespective of their geography. They would be carried of, yet this would not break God’s authority over them or His ability to deliver them. On the contrary, their military defeat would conirm the terms of His covenant. Unlike all the other religions of their day, Moses announced, Israel’s military defeat and geographical scattering would conirm them as God’s people.

Counting the Cost of Rebellion Moses presented a real-world problem before them. Like every prophet who invoked covenant sanctions, he challenged them with a cost-beneit analysis. What was the cost of rebellion? Captivity. What was the cost of captivity? Loss of land, loss of authority, and loss of the temple. The prophet had a dijcult task of persuasion. He came before people who were conident that the sanctions would not come, either because “we’re really not all that bad,” or because “God’s sanctions are symbolic, not historic” or because “God will not see us,” or because “God is merciful,” or because “we have the temple.” People want to commit sin with abandon. They want cost-free sinning. They refuse to acknowledge that sin has signiicant costs attached. Then there is future-orientation. Present-oriented people discount the future. They apply a high discount to future costs and future beneits. They are the grasshopper in Aesop’s fable of the ant and the grasshopper, a story resembling a biblical injunction: “Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise: Which having no guide, overseer, or ruler, Provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest” (Prov. 6:6–8). Present-oriented people regard the pleasures of sin as immediate, and therefore highly valuable, whereas future costs are distant, and therefore not a signiicant factor in decision-making today. Such an outlook is the 6. Gary North, Moses and Pharaoh: Dominion Religion vs. Power Religion (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1985).

Removing the Inheritance

105

antithesis of Moses’ time perspective, for Moses was highly future-oriented. “By faith Moses, when he was come to years, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter; Choosing rather to sufer amiction with the people of God, than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season; Esteeming the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures in Egypt: for he had respect unto the recompence of the reward. By faith he forsook Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the king: for he endured, as seeing him who is invisible” (Heb. 11:24–27). The Israelites prior to the exile returned to idolatry, generation after generation. No matter what negative corporate sanctions God imposed, Israel returned to idolatry. Moses had warned a future generation of the wrath to come, but no rebellious generation read his warning with this mental reservation: “This might mean us.” Like the men in Noah’s day, who married and gave in marriage, and were carried away in the lood, so is every generation entrapped by sin. “I’ll think about it tomorrow” is the appropriate tombstone marker for generations of covenant-breakers. In the Old Testament, there is only one example of national repentance prior to the imposition of negative covenant sanctions: Nineveh (Jonah 3). A king in Israel might occasionally repent representatively and thereby defer the corporate sanctions (e.g., Josiah and Hezekiah), but Jonah alone was able to see national repentance from the bottom up. The king of Nineveh repented last, not irst (Jonah 3:6). It was this repentance which gained Assyria the positive corporate sanctions that transformed her into an empire, which then brought the long-prophesied negative sanction of captivity to Israel. Moses’ prophecy was fulilled because Nineveh repented long enough to build up its strength as an empire.

Discounting the Cost of Rebellion Moses warned the generation of the conquest about the cost of idolatry. That generation was soon to compromise with idolatry by allowing idolatrous Canaanites to remain in the land (Josh. 15:63; 17:12–13). The Book of Judges shows how God delivered Israel into the hands of idolatrous foreign nations because of Israel’s idolatry. Moses’ warning was not taken seriously enough to change men’s behavior. Each generation imagined that the covenant’s negative sanctions would be delayed indeinitely. Each generation failed to count the cost. The debt to God kept growing, compounding so as to become unpayable. The debts inally came due at the time of the exile:

106

DEUTERONOMY

And the LORD God of their fathers sent to them by his messengers, rising up betimes, and sending; because he had compassion on his people, and on his dwelling place: But they mocked the messengers of God, and despised his words, and misused his prophets, until the wrath of the LORD arose against his people, till there was no remedy. Therefore he brought upon them the king of the Chaldees, who slew their young men with the sword in the house of their sanctuary, and had no compassion upon young man or maiden, old man, or him that stooped for age: he gave them all into his hand. And all the vessels of the house of God, great and small, and the treasures of the house of the LORD, and the treasures of the king, and of his princes; all these he brought to Babylon. And they burnt the house of God, and brake down the wall of Jerusalem, and burnt all the palaces thereof with ire, and destroyed all the goodly vessels thereof. And them that had escaped from the sword carried he away to Babylon; where they were servants to him and his sons until the reign of the kingdom of Persia: To fulil the word of the LORD by the mouth of Jeremiah, until the land had enjoyed her sabbaths: for as long as she lay desolate she kept sabbath, to fulil threescore and ten years (II Chron. 36:15–21; emphasis added).

Present-oriented people count temporally distant costs diferently than future-oriented people do. Future-oriented people discount those costs at a far lower rate than present-oriented people do. The burden of those future costs looms greater in the mind of a future-oriented person. He pays closer attention to them. This is equally true of future blessings. The future looms larger in the thinking of a future-oriented person than in the thinking of a present-oriented person. Israel did not respond in the present to the threat of negative sanctions in the distant future. But it is the mark of spiritual maturity that a nation does pay attention to the distant future in making its decisions. Nineveh responded, but Jonah had prophesied a relatively short time period: 40 days (Jonah 3:4). Total judgment in 40 days caught their attention. An unspeciied time period did not motivate Israel.

Conclusion Deuteronomy 1:6–4:49 made clear to the conquest generation that God is above all other gods and all other kings: hierarchy. He has the power to deliver His people both out of bondage and into bondage. No one can stay His hand. Moses presented a detailed account of how God had delivered their fathers out of Egypt and through the wilderness. In recent days, God had delivered Sihon

Removing the Inheritance

107

and Og into their hands, destroying them completely. The preliminary phase of the conquest was now completed. Moses concluded his historical account with a warning of covenantal judgment to come. This prophesied judgment was speciic: their removal from the land to a foreign nation. The moral cause would be idolatry: worship of the gods of Canaan. The resulting sanction would be their cultural subordination to foreign idols. The penalty would it the crime. But Moses did not put a time limit on the fulillment of this prophecy. It was open-ended. This did not reduce its threat to Israel. There were no cases of open-ended covenant lawsuits against Israel in the Bible that were not eventually prosecuted by God. The inal one came in A.D. 70.7 The nation did not respond in a way which indicated that they took Moses’ warning seriously. The Israelites became idolatrous again and again. They did not learn their lesson under the judges. But God gave them time to change their ways. He gave them so much time that they discounted the future costs of rebellion to something approaching zero. In the face of mercy, sinners continued to sin. But eventually the bills came due.

7. David Chilton, The Days of Vengeance: An Exposition of the Book of Revelation (Ft. Worth, Texas: Dominion Press, 1987).

Part III: Ethics/Boundaries (5–26)

11 JUDICIAL JudicialCONTINUITY Continuity And Moses called all Israel, and said unto them, Hear, O Israel, the statutes and judgments which I speak in your ears this day, that ye may learn them, and keep, and do them. The LORD our God made a covenant with us in Horeb. The LORD made not this covenant with our fathers, but with us, even us, who are all of us here alive this day. The LORD talked with you face to face in the mount out of the midst of the ire (Deut. 5:1–4).

This passage begins the third and longest section of Deuteronomy: the law. The theocentric focus of this law is God as the covenant-maker. The covenant’s authority extends through time, generation after generation. “The LORD made not this covenant with our fathers, but with us, even us, who are all of us here alive this day.” God had appeared to Israel at Horeb almost four decades earlier. Prior to His giving of the Ten Commandments, He appeared to the nation in ire and smoke: “And mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke, because the LORD descended upon it in ire: and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly” (Ex. 19:18). Sinai and Horeb are interchangeable names in this case, since it was at Horeb that the Israelites worshipped the golden calf in Moses’ absence (Ps. 106:19). Moses spoke here of the covenant God made with them. He said that this covenant was not the covenant that God made with their fathers. God made this covenant with those still alive: face to face. Some of the listeners had been young men or children at the time of that initial covenant act (Ex. 19). But what about those who were now under age 40? Those alive at the time of Moses’ second presentation of the law had not all been alive at the irst presentation

108

Judicial Continuity

109

of the law. What did Moses mean when he said, “The LORD made not this covenant with our fathers, but with us, even us, who are all of us here alive this day” (v. 3)? This sentence cannot be taken literally, nor was it so understood in Moses’ day. How should it be taken?

Face to Face To make sense of the passage, we should consider in detail another literal phrase that cannot be taken literally: face to face. “The LORD talked with you face to face in the mount out of the midst of the ire” (v. 4). We know this cannot be taken literally because of what God revealed to Moses on Mt. Sinai: And he [Moses] said, I beseech thee, shew me thy glory. And he said, I will make all my goodness pass before thee, and I will proclaim the name of the LORD before thee; and will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will shew mercy on whom I will shew mercy. And he said, Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live. And the LORD said, Behold, there is a place by me, and thou shalt stand upon a rock: And it shall come to pass, while my glory passeth by, that I will put thee in a clift of the rock, and will cover thee with my hand while I pass by: And I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt see my back parts: but my face shall not be seen (Ex. 33:18–23).

So, we know that Moses did not speak to God face to face. Yet a few verses before this passage, we read: “And the LORD spake unto Moses face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend. And he turned again into the camp: but his servant Joshua, the son of Nun, a young man, departed not out of the tabernacle” (Ex. 33:11). The key phrase here is this: as a man speaks to his friend. God spoke to Moses as someone bonded to Him through shared experiences and shared goals. Not only did the Israelites not speak to God literally face to face, they avoided speaking to Moses face to face after his return from the mountain. “And when Aaron and all the children of Israel saw Moses, behold, the skin of his face shone; and they were afraid to come nigh him. And Moses called unto them; and Aaron and all the rulers of the congregation returned unto him: and Moses talked with them. And afterward all the children of Israel came nigh: and he gave them in commandment all that the LORD had spoken with him

110

DEUTERONOMY

in mount Sinai. And till Moses had done speaking with them, he put a vail on his face” (Ex. 34:30–33). The glory of Moses was more than they could stand, let alone the glory of God. Yet in the confrontation between God and Moses regarding the ten spies’ false testimony regarding Canaan, and the people’s willingness to stone Joshua and Caleb, Moses reminded God that He had called Israel out of bondage and had promised to deliver Canaan into their hands. Moses asked: What if God destroys the nation irst? This will lead God’s enemies to mock Him. “And they will tell it to the inhabitants of this land: for they have heard that thou LORD art among this people, that thou LORD art seen face to face, and that thy cloud standeth over them, and that thou goest before them, by daytime in a pillar of a cloud, and in a pillar of ire by night” (Num. 14:14). But God is not seen face to face. What the Israelites saw was the glory cloud by day and the pillar of ire by night. In this, God manifested Himself to them. This was the literal application of “face-to-face.” Israel was in God’s presence, as in the presence of a friend, when they were led by the glory cloud. The reference is partially symbolic – the glory cloud – and partially ethical: the relationship between friends. Thus, whenever this ethical bond is broken by Israel through rebellion, Israel will no longer enjoy its face-to-face relationship with God. “Then my anger shall be kindled against them in that day, and I will forsake them, and I will hide my face from them, and they shall be devoured, and many evils and troubles shall befall them; so that they will say in that day, Are not these evils come upon us, because our God is not among us? And I will surely hide my face in that day for all the evils which they shall have wrought, in that they are turned unto other gods” (Deut. 31:17–18). “And he said, I will hide my face from them, I will see what their end shall be: for they are a very froward generation, children in whom is no faith” (Deut. 32:20).

“Not With Our Fathers” This phrase seems to refer to the patriarchs. Moses spoke to the nation about God’s new covenant, a covenant not made with their fathers. Moses was the father of the exodus. His generation had led Egypt. Yet he spoke here of the fathers. Such a reference points back to the generations that preceded his. What covenant was Moses speaking about? The covenant whose stipulations are the Ten Commandments. Moses was preparing his

Judicial Continuity

111

listeners for a second reading of the Decalogue (vv. 6–21). This had been a new covenant for Israel, one which provided the general principles of law by which the nation would judge and be judged. God had made this new covenant with those alive that very day. But what of those who had not been alive at Sinai-Horeb? They were listening now. They would soon hear the law read to them again, though modiied slightly: the justiication for the sabbath, i.e., their deliverance out of Egypt (v. 15). The important factor here was the continuity provided by the Mosaic law. The covenant was the same because the law was the same. The covenant had been made with them at Horeb because the law had not changed. The constancy of the Mosaic law was the judicial foundation of the continuity of the Mosaic covenant. The act of covenant renewal which would transfer the inheritance to the next generation would be grounded in the same commandments that had grounded that original covenant at Sinai-Horeb. The covenant had been made between God and all of the listeners because the covenant establishes continuity: God’s sovereignty, His authority, His law, His oath-bound historical sanctions, and His system of inheritance. Point ive – inheritance – is possible only because the covenant can be renewed through the generations. This covenant renewal system is what links the generations. The link is the covenant, not biology. The biblical covenant is not a blood covenant; it is a confessional covenant. It is established by oath, not genetics. By birth, men are automatically consigned to Adam’s covenant of death. They enter God’s redemptive covenant only by oath. Were the patriarchs participants in God’s redemptive covenant? Of course. Then why did Moses exclude them from this covenant? Because this covenant had been and would continue to be the historical manifestation of God’s redemptive covenant for a new era. There was a new priesthood: Aaron’s. There was therefore a new covenant with a new set of stipulations. “For the priesthood being changed, there is made of necessity a change also of the law” (Heb. 7:12). There was absolute continuity of redemption; there was only partial continuity of administration. Circumcision remained; Passover was new. God had made this new covenant with Israel. This covenant, as with the redemptive covenant in every era, included an administrative means of succession. The covenantal mark was still circumcision, but this mark was not sujcient. There also had to be annual covenant renewal: Passover.

112

DEUTERONOMY

The question arises: Did they actually celebrate Passover in the wilderness? The biblical texts do not say. Numbers does not provide information of events beyond the irst two years until two years before the conquest.1 Passover is not mentioned in the interim period. They celebrated it in the irst year (Num. 9:5), prior to their rebellion against Joshua and Caleb (Num. 14). The next reference to Passover is at the end of the wlderness era, when Moses told the conquest generation the proper date for celebrating it (Num. 28:16). It appears as though they had not celebrated it in the interim. Here is the theological problem: grace and law. The Passover was a means of grace, but it was closed to those who were not circumcised (Ex. 12:48). The conquest generation was not circumcised in the wilderness. This took place only after they had crossed into Canaan (Josh. 5:5). They immediately celebrated passover (Josh. 5:10–12). God timed their entrance into Canaan in terms of the Passover. If Passover had been celebrated in the wilderness, either these people had been excluded or else admitted apart from the mark of the covenant. Exclusion seems unlikely. What about participation? The Old Testament is silent.2 We must decide despite the absence of evidence: either there was no formal covenant renewal in the wilderness (no Passover) or there was grace shown to the conquest generation, i.e., access to Passover apart from circumcision. What do we know for sure? The parents refused to circumcise their children; they were in rebellion. It would have been consistent with this rebellion to have refused to 1. R. K. Harrison, Numbers: An Exegetical Commentary (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker, 1992), p. 431. 2. Paul wrote, “Moreover, brethren, I would not that ye should be ignorant, how that all our fathers were under the cloud, and all passed through the sea; And were all baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea; And did all eat the same spiritual meat; And did all drink the same spiritual drink: for they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them: and that Rock was Christ” (I Cor. 10:1–4). The drink that counted spiritually as the wine of the Lord’s Supper was water from the rock. But this took place only twice. What was the spiritual meat? Manna? How could this have counted as Passover? The manna did not appear on the sabbath; a double portion appeared the day before, and this portion did not rot the next day (Ex. 16:22–25), unlike any extra quantity saved on other days of the week (v. 20). If manna counted as a sacrament, as did the water from the two rocks, then excommunication meant exclusion from the community as a whole. Not to have access to manna meant death. Those banned from the community were also banned from the manna. In any case, Paul was speaking of New Testament sacraments: baptism (the cloud and sea) and the Lord’s Supper: wine (water from the two rocks) and bread (manna?). He was not speaking of circumcision and Passover.

Judicial Continuity

113

celebrate the feasts. They had cut themselves of from the future by refusing to: 1) conquer the land themselves or 2) turn power over to their adult sons to lead them into the Promised Land. They had also been unwilling to participate representatively in the conquest through faith in their sons’ future victory. The mark of this unwillingness was their refusal to circumcise their sons. My conclusion: they did not celebrate Passover.

To Maintain the Grant Moses introduced this third section of the Book of Deuteronomy with a call to Israel to learn, keep (guard),3 and do the statutes. He reminded them that God had made His covenant with them. They participated in the original covenant just as if they had been there at Sinai when God appeared in the iery cloud and gave them the commandments. Judicially, God had made the covenant with them through their legal representatives, their parents. The covenant at Sinai was their covenant, for God would deal with them as friends, face to face. He had broken of relations with their fathers after the rebellion of the spies. Only God’s promise to Abraham to deliver Canaan into Israel’s hands had preserved them. Moses had pleaded on this basis in order to save the entire nation (Num. 14:13–17). On the basis of that promise, to be fulilled soon by the fourth generation (Gen. 15:16), the face-to-face relationship with Israel had been maintained. Thus, the covenant was far more their covenant than it had been for their fathers at Sinai, who had broken it repeatedly. The very uncircumcised condition of the fourth generation testiied to the degree that their fathers had broken the covenant. To maintain the covenant, Moses announced, they would have to obey God. The continuity of law had not been broken. This was what linked them to their fathers. It was also what would link their descendants to them. The inheritance was grounded in God’s promise to Abraham; maintaining it would be grounded in their obedience to God.

3. “So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubim, and a laming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life” (Gen. 3:24); “And the LORD said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Gen. 4:9; emphasis added).

114

DEUTERONOMY

The focus of Moses’ immediate concern was the conquest. He was about to recapitulate the law because a new generation had succeeded the old. To them the Abrahamic promise applied. The covenant was their covenant far more than it had been their fathers’ covenant, for they were the heirs of the promise. They had to understand the judicial relationship between God, covenant, law, sanctions, and inheritance. To maintain the grant, they had to obey.

Grace, Law, Grace God granted them the inheritance, not on the basis of what they had done but on what He had promised. As heirs of the promise, they were heirs of grace. They had not earned the inheritance. It was theirs because God had promised Abraham that the fourth generation would inherit. They would have to ight to win it, but the promise was their motivation. As recipients of God’s grant, they could ight in great conidence. They had already learned this in the war against Midian, in which not one Israelite warrior had died (Num. 31:49). The land lowing with milk and honey would soon be theirs. This was grace. They would receive an infusion of capital to replace whatever they had spent of Egypt’s spoils. This capital would not just be money; it would be land. To this grant of land they would add their creativity and labor. This would in turn produce great wealth, if they continued to obey. This means that Israel’s greatest visible capital asset was the law of God. The law would serve them as their tool of dominion.4 But without God’s grace, God’s law is incapable of delivering the goods long term. The law always condemns those who seek to use it for their own purposes. Adherence to the law produces wealth, but this wealth then becomes a snare for its owners (Deut. 8:17–18). Men sin. Without grace, men cannot fulill the stipulations of the covenant. Habakkuk announced this principle clearly: “Behold, his soul which is lifted up is not upright in him: but the just shall live by his faith” (Hab. 2:4). Faith in God’s redemptive grace, not faith in man’s creative power, is the basis of covenant blessings. Through faith, men obey; through obedience, they maintain the covenant grant. 4. Gary North, Tools of Dominion: The Case Laws of Exodus (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990).

Judicial Continuity

115

Conclusion God spoke through Moses to the generation of the conquest. He told them that He had made a covenant with them. God was dealing with them just as if they had been the irst to make this covenant with Him. This was a new covenant which the patriarchs had not known. It was a fulillment of the promise made to Abraham. Moses told them that God had spoken to them out of the ire at Mt. Sinai, even though many who were listening to Moses had not been born at that time. He told them that God had spoken face to face with them, even though no man had seen God’s face. God had established a covenant at Sinai, and they were part of this covenant. They were about to inherit the land, fulilling the Abrahamic promise. The continuity of both promise and law placed them inside the covenant. To re-conirm this covenant, Moses would now read the Ten Commandments to them. First, he referred to the covenant-making event of Exodus 19: the face-to-face meeting between Israel and God at Mt. Sinai. This event was followed by Exodus 20: the giving of the Decalogue. Second, they were now going to hear the law again. This was evidence that God was still dealing with Israel on a face-to-face basis. God had not changed, and neither had the terms of His covenant, with one exception: the reason given for the sabbath. If Israel remained faithful to the terms of this covenant, the nation would maintain the kingdom grant that was embodied in the land.

12 SABBATH LIBERATION SabbathAND and Liberation But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, nor thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thine ox, nor thine ass, nor any of thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates; that thy manservant and thy maidservant may rest as well as thou. And remember that thou wast a servant in the land of Egypt, and that the LORD thy God brought thee out thence through a mighty hand and by a stretched out arm: therefore the LORD thy God commanded thee to keep the sabbath day (Deut. 5:14–15).

In the Exodus version of the fourth commandment, the theocentric focus is clearer: God made the earth in six days and rested the seventh. God as the Creator is its primary message. This version is diferent. It has to do with justice: masters and servants. Egypt had been unjust; therefore, God had delivered His people out of Egyptian bondage. The Exodus version is clearly a cross-boundary law. This version, however, is clearly a land law. It has to do with the history of Israel. Unlike the other nine commandments, this one creates problems of interpretation based on land law vs. cross- boundary law. The Ten Commandments listed in Deuteronomy 5 are the same that appear in Exodus 20. There is only one variation: the reason given for the sabbath. In Exodus 20, the reason given is creational: “For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it” (v. 11). This reason rests on something that God did. The reason given in Deuteronomy 5 rests on something that the Israelites had been. The focus of Deuteronomy 5:15 is on the Israelites’ experience in Egypt. What had

116

Sabbath and Liberation

117

been their condition? They had been servants. Egyptians had ruled over them. The implication is that the Egyptians had not allowed them to rest. Deuteronomy 5:15 contrasts with Exodus 20:11, but the contrast is implicit, not explicit. Exodus 20:11 tells us what God did. Deuteronomy 5:15 implies that the Egyptians did something else.

A Nation of Former Servants The exodus generation was a generation of slaves. They had grown up under bondage. Their thinking was shaped by their lifelong condition as subordinates. They had not been allowed to make important decisions for themselves. They had been told what to do under threat of physical sanctions. When Moses had challenged Pharaoh, Pharaoh’s response was to add new work requirements: to ind a substitute for straw in their brick-making. That is, their punishment was additional work. Moses had asked Pharaoh to allow the people time of for worship. Pharaoh’s answer was to make them work even harder, despite the fact that their production would be less ejcient, economically speaking. Work had been a negative sanction in Egypt’s slave society. The irst case law in Exodus 21 has to do with slave marriages (vv. 2–6). The second case law governs the sales of daughters as servants (vv. 8–11). God caught their attention by announcing laws that were intimately connected with what their previous condition had been. They had been slaves; here were rules that protected slaves. The question arises: Why did God not ofer in Exodus 21:11 the justiication for the sabbath given in Deuteronomy 5:15? Second, why didn’t He give the creational justiication for the sabbath to the conquest generation? Wasn’t the conquest generation more like God in His capacity as builder? Weren’t they about to build a new civilization? But this is not what we ind. Moses in the irst section of Deuteronomy 5 made the connection between the establishment of the national covenant at SinaiHoreb and this generation. He spoke of God as having made the covenant with them personally. Here, Moses repeated the connection. Who had been servants in Egypt? Those listening to him. Yet chronologically speaking, this was incorrect. The generation of former slaves had died of. Their slave mentality had condemned them to wander in the wilderness for four decades. Their fear of confrontation had led them into sin (Num. 14). They had not been willing to accept God’s assignment of military conquest. But Moses spoke as if all of

118

DEUTERONOMY

his listeners had just come out of Egypt. “And remember that thou wast a servant in the land of Egypt, and that the LORD thy God brought thee out thence through a mighty hand and by a stretched out arm.” The continuity of the covenant, as manifested above all in Passover, linked all successive generations of Israelites with the exodus generation. Passover was a rite of passage: passage out of bondage. Israel had no rite of passage from childhood to adulthood. The bar mitzvah is a modern rite. The Old Covenant had only two rites of passage: from the family of Adam into the family of Abraham (circumcision) – clearly a matter of adoption – and from the slave’s life to the liberated man’s life (Passover). Both rites were manifestations of God’s grace. The irst rite was a one-time event; the second was an annual event. The irst rite placed a man deinitively under the terms of God’s covenant; the second was an act of covenant renewal. The Passover celebrated what God did immediately after the irst Passover meal was eaten. The meal reminded Israelites of their slave condition. This is why they were required to eat bitter herbs (Ex. 12:8). The conquest generation did not ritually enter the family of Abraham until Gilgal, on the far side of the Jordan (Josh. 5:5). Yet they had already begun to inherit in terms of God’s promise to Abraham (Num. 21). Their willingness to ight was proof of their membership in Abraham’s line of descent. Israel had been a family. Abraham’s name had meant “father of multitudes.” Israel had become a multitude in Egypt (Ex. 1:7). But Israel in Egypt was not yet a nation because she was a slave. Not until Israel swore covenantal allegiance to God at Sinai and received the law did Israel become a nation. Prior to this corporate covenantal event, Israel had been an extended family. Now, for the second time, Israel received the Mosaic law. The people did not have to swear allegiance. This had been done representatively once and for all by their parents in Exodus 19. Moses had already pointed back to the events of Exodus 19, in preparation for the reading of the law. He would do so again upon the completion of his reading of the law (vv. 22–33). With the reading of the law, Moses renewed the national covenant. This public event was to be repeated every seventh year after they came into the land (Deut. 31:10–13).

Sabbath and Liberation

119

The Day of Liberation Deuteronomy 5:14 speaks of strangers in the gates. The language refers to the existence of gates. Israel in the wilderness had no gates. The gate was a judicial boundary. As with any boundary, the gate separated insiders from outsiders. Those inside the boundary were under the rule of law that governed the jurisdiction. Inside this boundary, God said, all men must be treated the same. “One law shall be to him that is homeborn, and unto the stranger that sojourneth among you” (Ex. 12:49). The sabbath law governed everyone inside the national boundaries of Israel. This included strangers, manservants, and maidservants. It also included animals. One year in seven, it even included the land, which was to receive a year of rest (Lev. 25:4–5). By giving a new reason for the sabbath, Moses established a sympathetic link among the listeners, their deceased parents, and all the servants whom the listeners might employ in the future. The sabbath became a day of liberation for all Israel, but especially those in bondage. The sabbath pointed to a future day of liberation. God had worked six days and had rested on the seventh. This pointed to Israel’s day of liberation at the end of her week. The bondservant was not to be required to work on the sabbath (Deut. 5:14). The conclusion is inescapable: a day of liberation would come for Israel’s bondservants. Egypt had refused to honor the sabbath with respect to servants, which was the crucial test of sabbath-keeping. The Israelites had been forced to work without a day of rest. They had also not been allowed to worship God. Moses’ challenge to Pharaoh was that the people be allowed to have time of from work in order to worship God. Pharaoh understood what this meant: a direct challenge to his status as a divinity in Egypt. If he granted this time of relief from work, he would have ritually acknowledged his subordination to the God of Israel. He refused to allow this.1 Israel did not get her rest period until the day after Passover. Israel’s day of rest was her day of liberation. Egypt was condemned in God’s eyes by the fact that the Egyptians did not allow their servants a day of rest. What He allowed Himself at the end of the creation week, Egypt did not allow for the 1. Gary North, Moses and Pharaoh: Dominion Religion vs. Power Religion (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1985).

120

DEUTERONOMY

slaves: a day of rest. The Egyptians had assumed that they owned all of the output of their servants. They had assumed that God owned none of this output. In short, they had assumed their autonomy from the Creator God. They had placed themselves under the bureaucratic rule of a supposed divine monarch, the Pharaoh, while extending his rule over their slaves. The legal condition of the slaves relected the Egyptians’ own legal condition: servants of Pharaoh. Their servants were their judicial representatives. This is why the sabbath law singled out servants. How men treat their servants is how their superiors will treat them. Their servants become their representatives. This hierarchical principle of subordinate representation governs one’s placement among the sheep or the goats at the inal judgment (Matt. 25:31–46). The sabbath law in Deuteronomy 5 warned Israel: to ignore the sabbath law is to become like the Egyptians. The evidence of how well Israelites obeyed the sabbath law would be seen in how they treated their servants. So it had been for Egypt; so it would be for Israel. The sabbath was Israel’s representative principle of liberation. If Israel refused to honor it, the nation would again come under the negative sanction of slavery. This was why Judah went into captivity to the Babylonians. The nation had not allowed the land its sabbath rest periods (Jer. 50:34).

Literal Texts for Less Literal Purposes There are discrepancies between the Exodus 20 account and the Deuteronomy 5 account. A minor one is the diference between the two versions of the law against covetousness. In Exodus 20, the prohibition begins with the neighbor’s property and moves to the neighbor’s wife (v. 17). The reverse is the case in Deuteronomy 5:21. Similarly, the blessing attached to the ifth commandment in Exodus 20:12 was long life in the land. In Deuteronomy 5:16, the promise is more general: “that it may go well with thee, in the land. . . .” But the discrepancy between the two justiications for the sabbath is not minor. The two accounts are totally diferent. How, then, are we to interpret Moses’ words? “These words the LORD spake unto all your assembly in the mount out of the midst of the ire, of the cloud, and of the thick darkness, with a great voice: and he added no more. And he wrote them in two tables of stone, and delivered them unto me” (Deut. 5:22). If God added no more words than the words which Moses had just repeated, then what of

Sabbath and Liberation

121

Exodus 20:11? These surely were words in addition to Deuteronomy 5:15. If some archeologist in Israel should ever discover the fragment of the broken tablet on which the sabbath law appeared, what would it say? Would it repeat both justiications or just one? If only one should appear, then one of the written accounts of the giving of the Decalogue is incomplete. If one of the accounts is incomplete, then the words, “he added no more,” cannot be taken literally. This discrepancy cannot be a function of Moses’ lagging memory. “And Moses was an hundred and twenty years old when he died: his eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated” (Deut. 34:7). He was in the inal stages of writing down the Pentateuch (Deut. 31:9). He would die within a few weeks, and possibly within a few days. The suggestion that he would not have remembered what God announced at the sealing of the national covenant, or what God wrote on the tables of the law for 40 days (Ex. 24:12, 18; Deut. 9:9), or what Moses wrote on the tables of the law for 40 days (Ex. 34:28), would be ludicrous. Higher critics like to think that diferent editors revised the two passages. But what forger would have been sujciently stupid to revise part of the Ten Commandments? The Decalogue was the heart of Israel’s religion. Of all the passages in the Pentateuch to tamper with, the Decalogue would have been the last choice of a clever forger. Every torah scroll in the nation would have been diferent from his revision. Only at the time of the rediscovery of the law under Josiah would such a forgery have been possible (II Ki. 22). But what would have been the forger’s motivation? Why not just re-write the seemingly deviant passage in the rediscovered scroll to make it conform to your scribal agenda? Why change one without changing the other? Why create a visible discrepancy? The higher critic must attribute a degree of stupidity to the forger that calls into question the intelligence necessary to become a successful forger. A forger this stupid would not have possessed the intellectual skills necessary to become a “redactor,” according to the canons of higher criticism: a master of the existing biblical texts and a master of deceit.2 2. Gary North, Tools of Dominion: The Case Laws of Exodus (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), Appendix C: “The Hoax of Higher Criticism.” See also Gary North, Boundaries and Dominion: The Economics of Leviticus (computer version; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), Appendix J: “Conspiracy, Forgery, and Higher Criticism.”

122

DEUTERONOMY

A Question of Covenantal Purpose My assumption is that God did verbally announce both reasons for the sabbath at the original sealing of the national covenant, but the words on the tablets included only the more general justiication: the creation account. The number-one question in the Book of Exodus is this: Who is Moses’ God? Answer: the God of the patriarchs (Ex. 3:15). This was what God told Moses to tell the rulers of Israel (Ex. 3:16). This answer looked back to the stories found in the irst book of the Pentateuch, the book of origins. This God was the God of creation, which Moses asserted in the opening words of Genesis. At the time of the sealing of the national covenant, the Israelites had just passed through the Red Sea. This event would have been at the forefront of concern for any nearby pagan nation that might hear of this deliverance. Who are the Israelites? Who knows? Who cares? But a God who can part the waters of the Red Sea is a God to be reckoned with. What He did at the Red Sea pointed to His sovereignty as Creator. The God of creation rules over nature. A creationbased justiication of the sabbath would have been understood by all nations. The Exodus justiication of the sabbath is consistent with the purpose of the book: to announce the authority of God. This authority is absolute because He is the Creator. The Deuteronomy version applies speciically to Israel’s history. Moses in Deuteronomy was announcing a link between the generation of the exodus and the generation of the conquest. This link was covenantal-judicial: the Decalogue. It was also historical. Moses in Deuteronomy was making it clear to that generation that they were the heirs of all that had taken place in Egypt, before most of them had been born. The justiication for the sabbath in Deuteronomy is historical-participatory. This its Moses’ covenantal goal for Deuteronomy better than Exodus’ creational justiication does, namely, to ajrm point ive of the covenant: inheritance. This is the primary theme of Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy 5:22 reads: “These words the LORD spake unto all your assembly in the mount out of the midst of the ire, of the cloud, and of the thick darkness, with a great voice: and he added no more. And he wrote them in two tables of stone, and delivered them unto me.” The degree of literalism in Moses’ words here must be judged by two things: the context of his monologue on the Decalogue and the written record in Exodus. The context here was national covenant

Sabbath and Liberation

123

renewal and inheritance. The written record in Exodus was more universal: the authority of God as Creator. Conclusion: God and Moses wrote on the tablets what we read in Exodus 20:11, not what we read in Deuteronomy 5:15.

Conclusion The sabbath law explicitly governed the treatment of subordinates. The test of how a man honored the sabbath was how he treated his subordinates. This is true in both versions of the law. The justiication for the sabbath law in Deuteronomy 5 is diferent from the justiication in Exodus 20. In the earlier version, God’s creation week is used to justify the sabbath: a cross-boundary law. In the second version, Israel’s time of bondage in Egypt is given as the reason. In the irst version, God set the positive pattern for all superiors in history. In the second, Egyptians set the negative pattern. God gives men a weekly day of rest out of mercy. Israelites had to do the same for their subordinates. In both versions of the sabbath law, subordinates are the focus of concern. How men treat subordinates relects their obedience to God’s law. From God to the lowest subordinate, each ruler in the hierarchy is supposed to honor the sabbath principle of rest. The day of rest is by implication the day of liberation. The day of rest is the model of the inal liberation from bondage to sin. We labor today to enter into rest later, just as God did. “There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God. For he that is entered into his rest, he also hath ceased from his own works, as God did from his. Let us labour therefore to enter into that rest, lest any man fall after the same example of unbelief” (Heb. 4:9–11). There have been periods of liberation throughout covenant history. Israel did not remain a slave to Egypt indeinitely. This implied that no nation or people will be in servitude to any other indeinitely. This also implied that servitude will eventually end. The deinitive abolitionist act occurred in Christ’s ministry, when He fulilled the jubilee laws (Luke 4:18–21). With the abolition of the jubilee laws also went Israel’s permanent slave laws (Lev. 25:44–46). The Hebrew sabbath was intended to relieve men from the bondage of labor once a week. By honoring the sabbath, they acknowledged publicly that they were not in bondage to the futile quest for more. The quest for more is a hard task-master. It knows no limits. The Hebrew sabbath announced: “Enough for now!”

124

DEUTERONOMY

Until men are willing to believe this and act in terms of it, they re3 main slaves to one of two idols, either nature or history. (Philosophy and religion are social phenomena – idols of history – that attempt to make sense out of nature and history.) Regarding a land ruled by either of these idols, it can accurately be said, as the fearful spies said of Canaan, “The land, through which we have gone to search it, is a land that eateth up the inhabitants thereof” (Num. 13:32b).

The New Testament Sabbath The New Testament’s covenantal deliverance of God’s people out of the Old Covenant was presented by the author of the Hebrews as an aspect of the sabbath (Heb. 4). This deliverance was achieved deinitively by Jesus Christ in His earthly work, whose eforts serve as a model for our earthly labors: “For he that is entered into his rest, he also hath ceased from his own works, as God did from his” (v. 10). Covenant-keepers enter God’s rest deinitively through faith in Christ: “For we which have believed do enter into rest” (v. 3a). They must strive toward this rest historically: “Let us labour therefore to enter into that rest, lest any man fall after the same example of unbelief” (v. 11). They achieve rest at the inal judgment. This is in the future: “There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God” (v. 9). One theological reason why the New Covenant sabbath is the irst day of the week rather than the last is that Christ’s entrance into the heavenly places as the high priest took place in the past. Our rest has been attained deinitively and representatively through Christ. We look back in faith to His attainment of deinitive rest on our behalf, even though we also look to the end of time for its inal consummation. The irst day of the week – the eighth day4 – is our day of rest because of our testimony that, judicially speaking, we have already entered into our promised rest through Christ’s representation on our behalf.

3. Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction: Christian Faith and Its Confrontation with American Society (Westchester, Illinois: Crossway, [1983] 1993), p. 11. 4. Gary North, The Dominion Covenant: Genesis (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987), pp. 72–73.

13 LAW AND Law andSANCTIONS Sanctions Ye shall observe to do therefore as the LORD your God hath commanded you: ye shall not turn aside to the right hand or to the left. Ye shall walk in all the ways which the LORD your God hath commanded you, that ye may live, and that it may be well with you, and that ye may prolong your days in the land which ye shall possess (Deut. 5:32–33).

God as the Lawgiver is the theocentric focus of this law. This case law was therefore a cross-boundary law. It was not a tribal law. It was a law of national inheritance in Canaan, since it referred to the land. The question is: Was it exclusively a land law? I argue that it extended beyond the boundaries of Israel, for the Mosaic law was inherently expansionist and evangelical. Paul universalized it. Moses informed the conquest generation that God had spoken these words to him immediately after the giving of the law in Exodus 20. The phrase, “ye shall not turn aside to the right hand or to the left,” occurs repeatedly in the Pentateuch and in Joshua. The model was the march through the Red Sea: “But the children of Israel walked upon dry land in the midst of the sea; and the waters were a wall unto them on their right hand, and on their left” (Ex. 14:29). They were safe on dry land in between two mountains of water. This judicial principle also underlay the decisions of Israel’s civil judges (Deut. 17:8–11) and the king: “That his heart be not lifted up above his brethren, and that he turn not aside from the commandment, to the right hand, or to the left: to the end that he may prolong his days in his kingdom, he, and his children, in the midst of Israel” (Deut. 17:20). This principle was to become the basis of Israel’s extension of dominion over other nations: “And the LORD shall make thee the head, and not the tail; and thou shalt be

125

126

DEUTERONOMY

above only, and thou shalt not be beneath; if that thou hearken unto the commandments of the LORD thy God, which I command thee this day, to observe and to do them: And thou shalt not go aside from any of the words which I command thee this day, to the right hand, or to the left, to go after other gods to serve them” (Deut. 28:13–14). The phrase also appears in the Book of Joshua, at the beginning of the conquest and at the end of his rule, when he transferred authority to the judges. The people told him: “Only be thou strong and very courageous, that thou mayest observe to do according to all the law, which Moses my servant commanded thee: turn not from it to the right hand or to the left, that thou mayest prosper whithersoever thou goest” (Josh. 1:7). Decades later, he told the rulers: “Be ye therefore very courageous to keep and to do all that is written in the book of the law of Moses, that ye turn not aside therefrom to the right hand or to the left” (Josh. 23:6). Solomon echoed this: “Turn not to the right hand nor to the left: remove thy foot from evil” (Prov. 4:27).

Ethical Cause and Efect The basis of long-term success in history is adherence to the laws of God. This is stated clearly in the text. Moses exhorted the nation to obey God in order to prolong their lives in the land. This was a national extension of the Decalogue’s familial rule: “Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee” (Ex. 20:12). Paul pointed out that this was the irst commandment to which a promise was attached (Eph. 6:2). This is a very important observation. A promise in the Bible is always conditional. This is because a promise is always covenantal, and covenants are always ethically conditional. Calvinists speak of unconditional election, but this phrase is technically incorrect. Election from the beginning was always conditional on the faithfulness of Jesus Christ in history. God imputes – unilaterally declares judicially – the perfect righteousness of Christ to individual sinners, but this perfect righteousness was not unconditional. It was conditional down to the last jot and tittle of the law. “For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet ofend in one point, he is guilty of all” (James 2:10). God’s promise to Abraham regarding the inheritance was not made in terms of the Mosaic law. Paul wrote: “And this I say, that the covenant, that was conirmed before of God in Christ, the law,

Law and Sanctions

127

which was four hundred and thirty years after, cannot disannul, that it should make the promise of none efect. For if the inheritance be of the law, it is no more of promise: but God gave it to Abraham by promise” (Gal. 3:17–18). Yet there was a law implicitly attached to the Abrahamic covenant promise: the law of circumcision. The conquest generation had to be circumcised before the conquest could begin within the Jordan’s boundaries (Josh. 5:5). There were conditions attached to the promise. Paul said that the commandment’s positive sanction of long life for those who honor parents was a promise. This was obviously a conditional promise. This conditional promise was explicitly part of the Mosaic law. God extended this same promise from the family to the nation when He broadened the stipulations of the covenant to the whole of the Mosaic law. Covenant law has sanctions attached. These sanctions are positive and negative. These sanctions are the means of inheritance. The negative sanctions are the means of disinheritance, while the positive sanctions are the means of inheritance. This means that point three of the biblical covenant model – ethics – is inextricably connected with point four: sanctions. Point ive – inheritance – is the result of point four. They are a consistent, judicially unbreakable unity. Thus, God’s promise of inheritance to Abraham’s heirs was inextricably bound to the stipulation of the Abrahamic covenant: circumcision. Similarly, God’s promise to the Israelites regarding the maintenance of the covenant grant was inextricably bound to the stipulations of the Mosaic covenant. The Mosaic covenant’s stipulations were far more comprehensive than the Abrahamic covenant’s had been. “Ye shall walk in all the ways which the LORD your God hath commanded you, that ye may live, and that it may be well with you, and that ye may prolong your days in the land which ye shall possess” (Deut. 5:33). The Israelites were told to obey God in order to receive speciic beneits. The presentation of the law was in terms of results: beneits for obedience, set-backs for disobedience. God did not present the covenant as a system of rules that was in no way connected with outcomes. On the contrary, God presented His law in terms of the wisdom of pursuing righteousness because of the beneits. “Doing well by doing good” is the very essence of biblical ethics. More speciically, doing well in history by doing good is biblical. Anyone who suggests that God has created an ethical system that promises only “pie in the sky bye and bye” has either not understood the

128

DEUTERONOMY

biblical covenant model or else he has denied that this Old Covenant ethical system extends into the New Covenant. In the second case, he needs proof based on the New Covenant. It is not sujcient 1 to assert such a conclusion without exegetical proof. Solomon said: “Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt ind it after many days” (Eccl. 11:1). “And Jesus answered and said, Verily I say unto you, There is no man that hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my sake, and the gospel’s, But he shall receive an hundredfold now in this time, houses, and brethren, and sisters, and mothers, and children, and lands, with persecutions; and in the world to come eternal life” (Mark 10:29–30).

Straight and Narrow, Deep and Wide The road to success for Adam prior to the Fall was broad. He could do anything he wanted to without fear of loss, with one exception. For Abraham, this road was narrower. He had to circumcise the males of his household. For Moses, the road was narrower still. More things were placed of-limits. In some areas, the New Covenant is even narrower. For example, divorce is no longer lawful merely on the basis of a written declaration by a husband (Matt. 5:31–32); it was under the Mosaic law (Deut. 24:1). On the other hand, the minutia of the dietary laws have been annulled completely (Acts 10; I Cor. 8). So, certain ethical limits have been tightened; ritual limits have been loosened. Mosaic land laws, seed laws, and priestly laws have been annulled.2 But the requirements for extending the kingdom have been made far more rigorous, especially geographically.3 Predictable, historical, visible corporate sanctions are unbreakably attached to God’s law. This is covenant theology’s explanation of God’s promise of the church’s visible victory in history. This promise is what amillennialists and premillennialists deny; they preach the visible cultural defeat of the church in history.

1. Since 1973, theonomists have been waiting for this proof. 2. Gary North, Leviticus: An Economic Commentary (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), pp. 637–43. 3. Kenneth L. Gentry, Jr., The Greatness of the Great Commission: The Christian Enterprise in a Fallen World (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990).

Law and Sanctions

129

This is why premillennialists and amillennialists either deny covenant theology or else deine it in such a way that the law’s sanctions are removed. We are told that there is no possible widespread cultural victory for the church in history because of the following reasons: 1) the Mosaic law has been completely annulled; 2) the covenant’s historical sanctions are no longer predictable; or 3) the promise of the church’s defeat in history has replaced the promise of Israel’s victory in history, at least in this dispensation. None of these theological arguments is correct.4 Because God’s covenant is a uniied system, God’s law, His historical sanctions, and our inheritance are an unbreakable unity. The inescapable reality of God’s predictable sanctions in history is why it is theologically mandatory to link theonomy with postmillennialism. Nontheonomic postmillennialism can exist without theonomy, but theonomy cannot exist without postmillennialism, assuming that we deine theonomy in terms of the ive points of the biblical covenant. Of course, it is quite possible to discuss all ive points independently, and many Calvinists do: God’s sovereignty without God’s law, God’s sanctions without church hierarchy, and so forth. This is the way that Reformed Baptists adhere to Calvinism: without the covenant. It is also the way that most Presbyterians adhere to Calvinism. Protestants have been doing this for centuries. But if we speak of biblical covenant theology, we must speak of an integrated system: all ive points. Deuteronomy is clearly structured in terms of these ive points. So is Leviticus.5 So is the Pentateuch.6 Covenant theology identiies the straight and narrow path. It argues that because God is absolutely sovereign, every fact of history operates under His authority. God has given to covenant-keepers the hierarchical authority to extend His kingdom in history. They are to do this in terms of His Bible-revealed law, the tool of dominion.7 Covenant-keepers who possess lawful, ordained authority are required to bring predictable individual sanctions in terms of God’s law: speciic cases. God also brings corporate sanctions in terms of

4. Kenneth L. Gentry, Jr., He Shall Have Dominion: A Postmillennial Eschatology (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1992). 5. North, Leviticus, pp. 44–45. 6. Ibid., pp. xlii–xlix. 7. Gary North, Tools of Dominion: The Case Laws of Exodus (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990).

130

DEUTERONOMY

His law. This is why covenant-keepers inherit progressively over time, while covenant-breakers are progressively disinherited. “A good man leaveth an inheritance to his children’s children: and the wealth of the sinner is laid up for the just” (Prov. 13:22). The ethically straight and narrow path leads to widespread dominion in history. Those who remain on this path inherit the earth. His soul shall dwell at ease; and his seed shall inherit the earth (Ps. 25:13). For evildoers shall be cut of: but those that wait upon the LORD, they shall inherit the earth (Ps. 37:9). But the meek shall inherit the earth; and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace (Ps. 37:11). For such as be blessed of him shall inherit the earth; and they that be cursed of him shall be cut of (Ps. 37:22).

Deuteronomy and Inheritance The word Deuteronomy is an English transliteration of the Greek words for second and law. Deuteronomy is the second presentation of the law. Moses read the Decalogue to the people in Deuteronomy a second time. Why? Because this was part of an act of national covenant renewal. The long-promised Abrahamic inheritance was about to be claimed by the fourth generation. Yet this generation had not been circumcised. Legally, they were outside Abraham’s family covenant. Moses’ second reading of the law was a recapitulation of the events of Exodus 19 and 20, which is why Moses told that story and read that law. Because the Aaronic priesthood remained the same, this was not a new covenant with a new law. It was covenant renewal. Only through national covenant renewal, which involved circumcision, could this generation inherit. They were still technically outside the full covenant, Abraham’s covenant of the promised inheritance. They had to go through a separate act of covenant renewal because of the rebellion of their parents in not circumcising them. Their parents had clearly broken the Abrahamic covenant. They had, judicially speaking, placed their children outside the inheritance. It was as if they said to themselves, “Since we cannot inherit, our children will

Law and Sanctions

131

not inherit, either.” These were present-oriented people without a sense of dominion, without a commitment to kingdom-building. By reading the law to the uncircumcised generation, Moses turned their minds back to the irst event in national covenantmaking: the covenant established at Sinai-Horeb (Ex. 19, 20). This reading was an act of covenantal subordination (point two).8 This followed the irst covenantal step in the conquest: the total destruction of Arad’s kingdom (Num. 21:1–3), a whole burnt ofering (point 9 one). Moses was preparing them for the next covenantal step: crossing the Jordan, a boundary violation signifying the conquest of Canaan (point three). Then would come the next covenantal step: circumcision, an oath sign (point four). Then would come the next covenantal step: the total destruction of Jericho, another whole burnt ofering on Canaan’s side of the Jordan (point one). Only then would come the full conquest: inheritance (point ive).

Conclusion The law of the covenant was Israel’s tool of dominion. Israel was about to inherit, according to God’s promise to Abraham. But inheriting is not the same as maintaining. To maintain the kingdom grant, Israel would have to obey God. This passage ofers a conditional promise: long life in the land as a positive sanction for obedience. God’s promises are reliable. This means that His corporate historical sanctions are predictable. Predictable in terms of what standard? His Bible-revealed law. Biblical law begins with the Ten Commandments, which Moses has just read to them. It also includes case laws or application laws, which he will read to them later. The important point is that the law of the covenant and the maintenance of Israel’s kingdom grant in history were linked by the presence of God’s predictable corporate sanctions. Paul’s citation of the ifth commandment and its positive sanction of long life ajrmed the continuing validity of a crucial aspect of the Mosaic covenant. He universalized this promise: from long life in the land of Canaan to long life on earth. This was not an act of covenantal annulment. It was the antithesis of covenantal annulment. This fact constitutes a major exegetical dilemma for those who oppose theonomy. 8. Exodus is the book of the covenant (Ex. 24:7). 9. North, Leviticus, ch. 1.

14 THEThe WEALTH NATIONS Wealth OF of Nations Now these are the commandments, the statutes, and the judgments, which the LORD your God commanded to teach you, that ye might do them in the land whither ye go to possess it: That thou mightest fear the LORD thy God, to keep all his statutes and his commandments, which I command thee, thou, and thy son, and thy son’s son, all the days of thy life; and that thy days may be prolonged. Hear therefore, O Israel, and observe to do it; that it may be well with thee, and that ye may increase mightily, as the LORD God of thy fathers hath promised thee, in the land that loweth with milk and honey (Deut. 6:1–3).

Moses was repeating himself. The same principles of interpretation apply here as in Deuteronomy 5:32–33. Moses had just given a similar message: obey the law, enjoy long years, and have things go well for you: “Ye shall walk in all the ways which the LORD your God hath commanded you, that ye may live, and that it may be well with you, and that ye may prolong your days in the land which ye shall possess” (Deut. 5:33). He added three extra themes here: intergenerational covenant-keeping, population growth, and inherited wealth.

Intergenerational Covenant-Keeping “Thou, and thy son, and thy son’s son”: this phrase reminded Moses’ listeners that their ethical responsibilities did not end with themselves; they extended down to those who would eventually inherit. “Keep all his statutes and his commandments,” Moses told them. To preserve the inheritance intact through the generations, each generation would have to bear the responsibilities associated with training up the next two generations.

132

The Wealth of Nations

133

This law places grandparents into the chain of family command. The grandparents have responsibilities to preserve whatever capital they have accumulated. But this capital base is more than marketable wealth. The crucial capital asset is ethics. Without this, marketable wealth will inevitably be dissipated. This is the message of Deuteronomy 28:15–68. Obviously, parents have greater covenantal authority over children than grandparents do. Parents are God’s designated mediators between God and their children. The question is: Will the grandchildren mimic their parents or their grandparents? Which representative model will be dominant? There is always the possibility that grandchildren will model themselves after their grandparents. Folk wisdom has a saying: “We make our grandparents’ mistakes.” Each generation sees more clearly the mistakes of their parents, and so seeks to avoid them. This leads to a kind of generation-skipping. We have seen this in the twentieth-century United States. The 1920’s were years of ethical rebellion: the “roaring twenties.” This was a time of economic growth, sexual experimentation, artistic creativity and degeneracy, and present-orientation. In the United States, it was a time of illegal drugs: alcohol. The 1930’s followed: the Great Depression. The children of the “lappers” of the 1920’s grew up in the depression years and World War II. They grew up in hard times, marched of to war, saw death on a massive scale, came home, started families, worked hard, saved their money, and enjoyed a growing prosperity without social rebellion. These children of the Great Depression bore the “lower children” who came of age in the late 1960’s, a time of economic growth, sexual experimentation, artistic creativity and degeneracy, and present-orientation. The marijuana-smoking lower children had far more in common with their hip-lask grandparents than with their parents. The 1970’s brought a reaction somewhat like the 1930’s: economic recessions, stagnation of per capita economic growth, a glum reaction against deviant behavior, and a growing conservatism. The children of the lower children became far more like their grandparents. The nostalgia among the young for the socially conservative 1950’s began in the late 1970’s and escalated in the 1980’s. The point is, there is no automatic straight-line social development. Societies are linear only in the broadest sense. They can experience culture-shattering crises that break the covenant. When this happens, people may react the way their grandparents did when

134

DEUTERONOMY

facing similar crises. There is a kind of cultural echo efect: grandparents to grandchildren. There is also an economic echo efect. De Tocqueville observed in the 1830’s that there was a rags-to-riches-to-rags phenomenon in the United States. This was an era of great economic freedom in which there were very few welfare guarantees by the State. “. . . I know no other country where the love of money has such a grip on men’s hearts or where stronger scorn is expressed for the theory of permanent equality of property. But wealth circulates there with incredible rapidity, and experience shows that two successive generations seldom enjoy its favors.”1 The responsibility of the grandparents is even greater if they live in the households of their children and have responsibilities of supervising their grandchildren. This is the case in many black2 households in the United States today, where grandmothers raise the grandchildren while their unmarried mothers work. The breakdown of the black family since the 1940’s has led to a situation where two-thirds of the children today are born illegitimate – over 80 percent in inner-city areas.3 This has put enormous economic pressure on unmarried mothers and has added heavy social responsibilities on grandmothers, who are also frequently unmarried. Third-generation illegitimate children are becoming common. This has led to what appears to be irreversible poverty – irreversible without a moral transformation or an economic collapse.4 The liberalization and feminization of black churches and the rise of the welfare State have left black families with few moral resources, such as fathers. White illegitimacy is now in the 22 percent range. There 1. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, edited by J. P. Meyer (12th ed.; Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor, [1848] 1969), p. 54. 2. When Negroes were called Negroes by Negro leaders, it made things easier for whites. But the old word was abandoned when representatives of the American black power movement of the late 1960’s learned how to manipulate the white media’s representatives through calculated guilt manipulation and violent rhetoric, which was exactly what TV newscasters and journalists needed to get air time – the holy grail for TV newscasters and journalists. These Marxist and secular interlopers had to come up with a new word to describe their race as part of their systematic program to replace the older generation of Christian Negro leaders, who had preached – literally – nonviolence. The black power movement was a lash in the pan, but their re-naming of Negroes has stuck. I defer to convention here. I think people should get to call themselves whatever they want to. 3. Charles Murray, “The Coming White Underclass,” Wall Street Journal (Oct. 29, 1993). 4. It is easier in 1997 to predict the latter than the former.

The Wealth of Nations

135

appears to be a one-generation echo efect racially: from blacks to whites. In the early 1960’s, black illegitimacy was about 25 percent, while White illegitimacy was about 5 percent. Clearly, there has been a breakdown in social values. The retreat of Christian orthodoxy in the United States, especially in non-rural areas outside of the South, which began around 1890, has broken the covenant. Within a century, there were signs of breakdown everywhere: legalized pornography (late 1950’s), rising crime rates (1960–), the drug culture (late 1960’s), legalized abortion (1973), a rising divorce rate (at least half of all marriages fail), rising welfare dependency, and collapsing standards in the government schools – all compounded in the black inner cities. From the generation that grew up in the 1890’s – the “gay nineties,” in which secularism made its irst major cultural gains – to the children who are coming of age to vote in the 1990’s, it took only four generations: from my grandparents to my children. It did not take long. The broken social covenant of the “gay nineties” has produced a culture in which almost nothing remains of the ideal of Christendom. The covenantal question is this: How long can long-term economic growth be sustained by a society that is growing ethically perverse? Is economic growth self-sustaining irrespective of moral vision? Not if the inner city is a valid example. Economic growth is the product of certain attitudes toward the future: future-orientation, peaceful exchange, honest dealing, legitimate private ownership, minimal civil government, predictable civil government, and so on. These attitudes are becoming less common in the inner-city ghetto. These are not the attitudes of men with no fathers, no wives, poor educations, and no jobs. They are surely not the attitudes of drug addicts.

Population Growth The next covenantal promise as a positive sanction is this one: “that ye may increase mightily.” This increase is numerical. Biological expansion is the product of two things: high birth rates and low death rates. A high birth rate is a covenantal promise: “There shall nothing cast their young, nor be barren, in thy land: the number of thy days I will fulil” (Ex. 23:26). So is a low death rate: “Honour thy father and thy mother, as the LORD thy God hath commanded thee; that thy days may be prolonged, and that it may go well with thee, in the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee” (Deut. 5:16).

136

DEUTERONOMY

The compound growth process is governed by what has become known as the law of 73. The annual rate of growth divided into the number 73 gives the period of time it takes for the population to double. A 7.3 percent per annum growth rate will produce a doubling in ten years. A 10 percent growth rate will produce a doubling in 7.3 years. This means that a 3 percent per annum increase will produce a doubling in a little over 24 years. This will increase a population by a factor of 16 in a century. This is serious multiplication. Anything that multiplies by a factor of 16 in a century gets very, very large in a millennium. Israel began with about 2.4 million people. In just two centuries, with a 3 percent growth rate, the population would have been 614 million people. Twenty-four years after that, it would have been over 1.2 billion – the estimated population of China today. This would have been two centuries before the Davidic kingdom. This obviously was not going to happen – not within the geographical conines of tiny Israel. But there is no doubt that once compound growth produces an upward-pointing curve, the population approaches its environmental limits very fast. With a low growth rate, it takes a long time to reach the point when the population curve turns upward, but once it does, it reaches its limit fast. There are two limits to growth, each corresponding to one of man’s two idols: physical environment and time. The corresponding idols are nature and history.5 If any population compounds, it will usually run out of space before it runs out of time. In a world in which time is considered functionally unlimited, growth’s limits are said to be environmental. Why is time considered functionally unlimited? Because any rate of growth, no matter how low, reaches its environmental limits within the conines of historical time. Cosmic evolutionary time therefore is not an environmental limit in such a world. The only question is the rate of growth in comparison to the perceived environmental limits. With the coming of quantum physics in the late 1920’s – the physics of the subatomic world – and the invention of the silicon computer chip in the 1950’s, a handful of creative writers have begun to speculate about a realm that has no physical limits, a realm in

5. Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction: Christian Faith and Its Confrontation with American Society (Westchester, Illinois: Crossway, [1983] 1993), p. 11.

The Wealth of Nations

137

which there is no law of diminishing returns. As proof, they point to the fact that the speed of the computer chip has doubled every 18 to 24 months since the late 1950’s: “Moore’s Law.”6 This is the highest decades-long growth rate of anything known in man’s history. Chip speed increases so rapidly that by the time a buyer receives delivery of the fastest microcomputer on the market – delivery generally takes up to three weeks – it is likely that an even faster microcomputer will be advertised in the same price range. But while limits to growth may not actually exist in the subatomic world – which I doubt – they surely exist in the capital markets. It costs billions of dollars to construct a new computer chip factory in the 1990’s. Until these costs cease to rise, there will still be an economic limit to the rising speed of the chips, although what that limit is, no one on earth knows.7 What may apply to subatomic physics does not apply to reproduction rates. There are biological limits to growth. These limits are either environmental or chronological. Either the population runs out of space or the world runs out of time. When the population in question is man, analysts assume that mankind must run out of space or the things necessary for man’s survival that are produced in space. Put another way, modern man assumes that time is functionally limitless. There will be no inal judgment in historical time. There will only be the slow erosion of the universe as it moves over billions of years toward its own heat death: the triumph of physical entropy over life.8 The heat death of the universe is the only temporal limit acknowledged by modern man: time runs out because there is nothing left by which time can be measured. This leads modern man to a conclusion: mankind must reach environmental limits soon. Man’s population has already turned the corner; it is on the upward slope of the exponential curve. At present population growth rates, men will approach ininity as a limit within a few centuries. So, demographers and social commentators assume that there must be a reversal of man’s growth within a century or

6. First observed by Gordon Moore, co-inventor of the computer chip in the 1950’s. 7. I would guess that the economic crisis produced by the Year 2000 computer glitch is that limit. 8. Gary North, Is the World Running Down? Crisis in the Christian Worldview (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1988), ch. 2.

138

DEUTERONOMY

so: war, plague, famine, or population control – either State-imposed or free market-imposed. The covenantal question is this: How long can any population grow in the face of widespread paganism and apostasy? (Atheism is a little-shared view.) Israel did not grow. After the exile, only a handful of Israelites returned to the land. Israel from that time on was under the domination of a series of empires until Rome expelled all of them from Palestine in A.D. 135, after Bar Kochba’s rebellion. It was a small, isolated nation. Nothing like the promise of Deuteronomy 6:3 took place. The promise was conditional. It rested on ethics. Israel rebelled continually. But inherent in that promise was a covenantal possibility: the illing of the earth. That had been true since the days of Adam and Noah, both of whom were told by God to multiply. Covenant-keeping men would have run out of time before they ran out of space. The command to multiply, coupled with the economic means of multiplication, points to the end of time. Modern man does not want to acknowledge the end of time. Thus, he is trapped in a dilemma: he must accept the limits to growth. He wants to ajrm the compound growth of knowledge and wealth, yet this is impossible in a world of unlimited time. We run out of space, if nothing else. So, a few men are willing to listen to another scenario: war, plague, famine, and population control. Nature has always kept mankind in check, but for now, it no longer does. History is supposedly unbounded; so, it cannot replace nature as the imposer of limits: no inal judgment. This leaves it to warring man or scientiic man or sovereign nature, which will produce some man-killing bacterium or virus, to impose the inevitable negative corporate sanctions. A series of best-selling books in the mid-1990’s on the potential for killer plagues testiies to modern man’s wondering about limits. He sees the efects of compound growth, and he knows this growth cannot go on for centuries. The question is: What will stop it?9

9. Again, I believe that the predictable efects of the Year 2000 will stop it in 1999 or 2000. For how long, I do not know.

The Wealth of Nations

139

Milk and Honey Moses spoke of “the land that loweth with milk and honey.” This language was covenantal. It was not to be taken literally. What this covenantal language meant was that the new land would be a good place to raise cattle and bees, as well as all the other good things of rural living. Reuben, Gad, and half the tribe of Manasseh took this language so seriously that they gave up their claims on land across the Jordan because what they found outside the boundaries of Israel was good for cattle. Moses granted them their request. The language of lowing milk and honey testiied to a land that would provide covenant-keeping people with the comforts of middle-class living, however deined. Solomon prayed: “Two things have I required of thee; deny me them not before I die: Remove far from me vanity and lies: give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with food convenient for me: Lest I be full, and deny thee, and say, Who is the LORD? or lest I be poor, and steal, and take the name of my God in vain” (Prov. 30:7–9). The covenantal imagery of milk and honey meant that no matter how fast Israel’s population grew, there would be wealth for all. This meant that the economic limits to growth inside Israel would expand with the population. But this promise obviously had limits. Space is in ixed supply. There are always spatial limits to growth for populations that occupy space. We do not live in the quantum. What this promise clearly pointed to was emigration out of Israel: the extension of Israel’s holy commonwealth ideal beyond the geographical conines of Palestine. This expansion would force major adjustments in such geography-based rituals as festivals held in a central city. The very promise of population growth pointed to a new covenant with new legal requirements. This law promised covenant-keepers that their growth in numbers would never be threatened by the limits of their environment if they obeyed God’s law. Their numbers and their wealth would grow together. There would be milk and honey for all. This promise is anti-Malthusian to the core. Malthus’ suggestion in his thenanonymous Essay on Population (1798) that human numbers expand geometrically, while food expands only arithmetically, makes no 10

10. American parents used to sing to their children of the big rock candy mountain, where lemonade rivers lowed.

140

DEUTERONOMY

sense biologically. Humans eat things that multiply. Why edible things cannot be cultivated to multiply faster than we do, he never said. One seed of corn produces an ear; one ear produces hundreds of seeds. Corn multiplies a lot faster than men do. Malthus dropped the phrase in later (signed) editions. Nevertheless, it is that phrase from the irst edition which is most closely associated with his name: the Malthusian thesis. It is far more powerful rhetorically than it ever was logically or has been empirically since then. Modern man, beginning in the eighteenth century, has found ways of multiplying food faster than men. The price of food as a percentage of family income has been dropping steadily for two centuries. This development what has fueled the increase in man’s population. Economic growth – milk and honey – has more than kept pace with man’s population. The poor in any industrial nation, and in most non-industrial nations, eat better today than their ancestors did two centuries ago. Even the things that we should not eat in large quantities, and which our ancestors could not aford to eat in large quantities, such as sugar, we eat because we want to and can aford to. Our ancestors had to content themselves with honey. Americans consume over 100 pounds of sugar a year. Sugar beets, not honey bees, have made it possible for dentists to make a good, upper middle-class living. (Speaking of dentistry, what advocate of “simpler living” and a “return to nature” is prepared to go back to the pre-anesthetic dentistry of 1840?) England’s adoption of free market capitalism in the eighteenth century ratiied the trustworthiness of Moses’ covenantal promise. We live in a land lowing with milk and honey, but with very few urban lies and hardly any bee stings. Should we conclude that Israel could not have made a similar discovery? Israel failed to experience long-term per capita economic growth, not because Israel lived way back then, but because Israel was covenantally unfaithful.

The Wealth Formula Moses set forth a conditional promise: population growth and per capita economic growth in exchange for corporate covenantal obedience. Had Israelites conformed to the terms of the covenant, Israel would have experienced the same kind of compound growth that the West has enjoyed since the mid-eighteenth century. Wealth is so widespread today that we fail to recognize the magnitude of what the West has experienced over the last two centuries.

The Wealth of Nations

141

The economic condition of the average Englishman in 1750 was far closer to the economic condition of the average Israelite in Joshua’s day than it was to the average Westerner today. Travel was just about as slow. The cost of travel was just about as high. Metallurgy was superior, but medicine probably was not. The physical pain of life’s disasters was no diferent. A ire could wipe out a family’s wealth just as completely in 1750 A.D. as in 1400 B.C. Mortality rates for children were high in England. We do not know what they were in Israel. Communications were much better in England because of the printing press, but widespread illiteracy made this a beneit mainly for the elite. For the wealthy and well educated, life was substantially advanced beyond Joshua’s day – more sophisticated toys – but for the average farmer, it was not much diferent. For the average English coal miner, it was worse. On the whole, the typical Israelite would have recognized the life style of England in 1750 as being marginally more productive than Israel’s, but probably not worth putting up with the English climate (and surely not with English cooking). Had he visited any modern industrial nation, he would have recognized this world as beyond the dreams of kings. Ours is a radically diferent world economically from 1750. The diference is not in raw materials. Those have not changed. The “limits to growth” doom-sayers might even argue there are fewer resources today. The diference is in science, technology, and rates of capital formation. But how did these changes come about? Through changes in economic organization. The chief diference is in the power of the institutions of capitalism to draw forth productive ideas from millions of people and then supply entrepreneurs with the capital required to transform a handful of these ideas into consumer-satisfying output.11 The diference, in short, is in the division of labor, just as Adam Smith wrote in 1776. The structure of production of the pin factory in chapter 1 of Wealth of Nations has been imitated around the world, and its output had multiplied 500-fold by the inal decade of the twentieth century. But how could this have been accomplished? By improving industrial output on average by

11. John Jewkes, David Sawyers, and Richard Stillerman, The Sources of Invention (2nd ed.; New York: Norton, 1969).

142

DEUTERONOMY

12

a little under three percent per annum since 1776. From about 1870 until the 1990’s, the annual economic growth rate in the United States was 3.25 percent.13 What is a barely measurable improvement in one factory’s production on an annual basis becomes a world-transforming miracle in a little over two centuries, i.e., the amount of time from the death of Moses to the beginning of Gideon’s judgeship. Putting it diferently, this would have been from Moses’ death to the birth of David’s grandfather’s grandfather’s father. The West, beginning with Great Britain, found a way to sustain compound economic growth of somewhat under three percent per annum despite wars and revolutions. This discovery has changed the world. Who is to say that a society that honored the Mosaic law could not have done the same? Who is to say that compound economic growth could not have begun 14 centuries before the death of Jesus Christ rather than 17 centuries after?

Conclusion Moses delivered to Israel the judicial foundation of long-term economic growth. Through God’s grace, the nation could adhere to the Mosaic law. This would have produced the growth in population and per capita wealth promised by Moses. But God, in His sovereignty, did not predestine Israel to obey. The growth opportunity was lost. But this does not mean that the potential for enormous long-term growth was not available to Israel. Had Israel continued to grow as fast as the world’s population has grown since 1776, the illing of the earth would have been completed millennia ago. But it was not God’s time. The rate of population growth will vary until such time as God has determined that time must end. We will run out of time before we run out of raw materials, space, and productive new ideas. Time, not nature, is the crucial limit to growth. 12. Walt W. Rostow estimates the average annual increase of world industrial production as 2.84 percent per year. Rostow, The World Economy: History & Prospect (Austin: University of Texas, 1978), p. 48. Such a precise igure is spurious. The incomplete documentary evidence and the dijculty of comparing rates of growth in diferent periods and nations make such statistics little more than informed guesses. But “less than three percent” seems like a reasonable guess until someone can prove that this guess is extremely high or extremely low. 13. Milton Friedman, “Getting Back to Real Growth,” Wall Street Journal (Aug. 1, 1995).

The Wealth of Nations

143

Modern man in his heart fears the idol of history more than he fears the idol of nature, so he has invented a mythology – uniformitarianism – which comforts him by assuring him that mankind has all the time in the world. “There’s plenty more where that came from!” Billions of years have passed, we are assured, so billions must lie ahead. “No inal judgment anytime soon!” Modern man then pretends to fear nature: the resource limits to growth. He invents whole philosophies to deal with nature and nature’s limits.14 He whistles past the graveyard, telling himself that mankind will run out of resources before we run out of time. He forgets Moses’ words. It is God who is to be feared, not nature. It is the ixed supply of time, not the far less ixed supply of raw materials, which threatens every covenant-breaking man and covenant-breaking mankind as a whole. Time is the only irreplaceable resource, and it is in short supply. Nothing points this out to man more efectively than the multiplication of man. God’s dominion command (Gen. 1:28; 9:1), when obeyed, forces men to hear the ticking of the prophetic clock. Either we must lower the rate of population growth to zero or less, or face judgment: at the hand of God or the hand of the idol of nature. Covenant-breaking man prefers to deal with the idol of nature, with whom he believes he can work out a peace treaty on terms satisfying to man.

14. North, Is the World Running Down?

15 LAW AND Law andINHERITANCE Inheritance Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD: And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes. And thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates (Deut. 6:4–9).

This passage begins with what have become the most famous words of Judaism, “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD,” called the shawmah Israel, or “hear, Israel.” In Hebrew, the word for “hear” is the word for “obey”: shawmah. The passage then adds what became some of the most famous words of Jesus: “And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might” (v. 5).1 Moses then told the nation that these words must become central to the nation, with each father teaching them to his son from morning to night (v. 7). The theocentric focus of this law is obvious: God as the one and only God. The phrase “morning to night” indicates the comprehensive authority of biblical law. All day long, the law of God applies to the afairs of men. Fathers were to spend time with their sons, either in the ields or in the family business. Sons were to receive knowledge of the law in the context of proitable labor. The familiar phrase, 1. “And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the irst commandment” (Mark 12:30).

144

Law and Inheritance

145

“learning by doing,” was applicable. It was a system of instruction we might call “learning while doing.” The law was not some abstract legal code. It was an integrated system of rules that was supposed to be taught in the context of daily living. God’s Bible-revealed law was not to become peripheral in the lives of God’s covenant people. It was to be central. It was to govern men’s activities throughout the day. It was to be memorized, discussed, and acted upon by young and old. Fathers were not to tell their sons, “Do as I say, not as I do.” Their lives were to become consistent with their words. The sons would hear God’s law and see their fathers carrying it out. This law mandated a mastery of the details of biblical law to all those who were covenanted to Him. All of this has been lost to modern man. Today, formal education is not Bible-based, family-based, occupation-based, or personal. It is humanism-based, State-based, abstract, and bureaucratic. It is also intensely feminine in the early years.

The Feminization of Early Education One of the monumental and as yet unsolved problems of modern society is that women teach boys: either mothers or female school teachers. The context of teaching is the classroom or home, not the work place. This means that education for males has moved away from the father-son apprenticeship model, which was clearly the Mosaic norm, to the classroom, where education is bureaucratic, impersonal, and abstract – separated from a father’s discipline and his occupation. This is also generally true of home schooling. Education in the modern world is almost completely feminized until the high school level. There are economic factors for this change. Women can be employed less expensively than men. Their income is normally supplemental to their husbands’ income, or else they are single and can share the expenses of an apartment with other women. They can aford to work for less than a man can, especially a married man. The “school marm” has been a ixture of American education since at least the mid-nineteenth century. When the knowledge of Latin ceased to be the criterion for all teaching positions, women began to replace men as teachers below the college level. College education was closed to all but a tiny minority, mainly masculine, throughout the world until the late nineteenth century. In the United States, the creation of state-funded land-grant universities, beginning with Federal legislation that set aside Federal land for state-funded agricultural schools (1862), changed this by opening up college to both

146

DEUTERONOMY

sexes. The elective system, which scrapped compulsory Latin and classical education, as well as compulsory chapel attendance, began 2 at Harvard University in the 1880’s and spread rapidly. This moved higher education from theology – Latin had for centuries 3 been the international language of theologians – to science and the liberal arts. This was a worldwide shift in higher education. It replaced knowledge of Latin with the college diploma as the basis of access to teaching and ministerial positions. But college attendance was still highly restricted until after World War I. The great expansion of State-funded college education came after World War II. Women gained equal access to higher education, both economically and legally. Nevertheless, more than any other college major except possibly home economics, elementary education has been the choice of women, which is why it has the lowest prestige of any ield except home economics. There is another important economic reason for the abandonment of apprenticeship: the extension of division of labor made possible by modern capital accumulation. Specialization accompanies capitalization. Fathers today are employees, not owners. They are not given time by their employers to teach their sons on the job. The extreme division of labor made possible by modern capitalism makes it unlikely that a son will follow his father in a family business. There is no family business, and the son’s skills are diferent from his father’s. A father cannot easily teach his sons their lifetime trade. Men change occupations several times in a career. The restructuring of modern corporations due to international competition is now threatening the lifetime employment practices of earlier generations, even in patriarchal Japan. So, education has to be performed in a specialized classroom setting, as it has always been for the very rich and well-placed elite corps of students who have been trained to staf the bureaucracies in man’s history. But what has worked well for an educated and privileged elite has not worked equally well for the mass of students. Beyond basic literacy, the training appropriate for an elite bureaucracy is diferent from the training appropriate for students who do not it into a book-oriented bureaucratic setting. Meanwhile, the impersonalism of a classroom has replaced the personalism of apprenticeship all over the world. 2. George M. Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 187–89. 3. Ibid., pp. 37–38.

Law and Inheritance

147

The feminization of American culture begins in the grammar school classroom. Socially, it is regarded as “women’s work” to teach young children. There is a social stigma attached to men who 4 teach young children. Thus, the success indicators of American education through age 11 or 12 are female standards: sitting quietly at a desk, good penmanship, neatness, and unquestioned subordination to authority. Boys who meet these criteria tend to be regarded by other boys as sissies, i.e., imitation girls: non-athletic, non-confrontational, and bookish. There is a stigma attached to “book learning” for little boys. Mark Twain’s character Huckleberry Finn is representative. Huck is an outdoorsman, someone who cannot stand Aunt Polly’s feminine world. His friend Tom Sawyer is somewhere in between, but it is Huck, not Tom, who incarnates the masculine image of mid-nineteenth-century American youth. For a century, the Boy Scouts ofered an extra-curricular alternative to the feminized classroom, but scouting came midway in a boy’s life. The Cub Scouts, a later development than the Boy Scouts, is run by mothers. Male scoutmasters run the Boy Scouts; boys are eligible when they turn 10½. Scouting has faded in popularity in the late twentieth century, reducing boys’ personal contact with masculine authority except in the principal’s ojce. Positive sanctions and most negative sanctions are imposed by women until children reach high school. In the inal two years of high school, boys’ academic achievement shoots ahead of girls’ achievement in math and science, but this comes at age 15 or 16, late in the maturity 5 process.

4. This is why a day care center can be such a proitable family-run business: most men refuse to do it. This reduces competition. Meanwhile, unmarried women seek out male role models for their young children. 5. Reasons ofered for this change have been both social and genetic. Social arguments include these. First, there are more male teachers at the high school level, who regard spirited intellectual competition as manly. They reward boys’ behavior: more aggressive, questioning. Second, girls who are equally competitive with boys tend to be regarded as masculine and perhaps a threat to male egos. Girls who want to be popular with boys tend to be quiet, refuse to ask questions, and play the feminine role: submissive. They fall behind academically, especially in math and science. Girls test at 50 points below boys on the Scholastic Achievement Test in math: 450 vs. 500 out of 800 maximum. Jane Gross, “To Help Girls Keep Up, Girls-Only Math Classes,” New York Times (Nov. 20, 1993). Problem: the girls do not test lower than boys in the language arts. Are they more aggressive in language arts classes? This seems doubtful. Another explanation is genetic: girls think more abstractly than boys until puberty, when boys begin to catch up and then excel.

148

DEUTERONOMY

In the inal decades of the twentieth century, the gang has replaced the family for teenage ghetto youths whose fathers are either absent or inefectual. The gang is exclusively male, although there are female gangs that are extensions of male gangs. The gang is bound by a self-maledictory blood oath and some form of initiation rite of passage. It becomes the educator for rebellious young men who have rejected the public school. It is far closer to the apprenticeship ideal. It ofers an apprenticeship in crime.

The Myth of Religious Neutrality The move from the personalism of apprenticeship to the impersonalism of the classroom is economics-driven: a group of parents shares the cost of a tutor. There is a loss of personalism. There is a move from practical wisdom to instruction in abstract material and rote memorization. This is a continuing problem for modern education, as it has always been in bureaucratic or priestly education. The medical profession in the twentieth century has adopted internship as a way to imitate apprenticeship: on-the-job training after graduation from medical school. The decline of apprenticeship has paralleled the rise of secular education: results-based rather than ethics-based. The sellers of educational services have always sought access to a wider market of potential buyers by establishing common-ground, religiously neutral education. This has been going on since the earliest days of university education in the twelfth century: the rise of scholasticism and also the revival of Roman law at the University of Bologna.6 Specialized instruction in technological ields also lends itself to the myth of neutrality. Graduate school education in the United States, except for theological seminaries, has been secular from its origins in the inal quarter of the nineteenth century.7 The advent of Unitarian, state-funded education in nineteenthcentury America separated religious confession from education. Progressive education has always been messianic: the substitution

6. Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 123–31. 7. Marsden, Soul of the American University, ch. 9.

Law and Inheritance

149 8

of the government school for God as the agent of redemption. It has been at war with the educational criteria of Deuteronomy 6.

Solutions Parents have the legal option of delegating authority to other teachers. The classic biblical example of this is God’s delegation of authority over His son to earthly parents. The Old Covenant example is Hannah’s vow to delegate Samuel’s upbringing to Eli the priest (I Sam. 1). The parent must be sure that the teacher will be equally faithful in teaching the law to the child. A parent can send his child to live with a man who will apprentice the child. Also, a parent can hire a tutor, which is a traditional exception to direct parent-child instruction. This is an expensive solution. Both approaches retain the personalism of parent-child instruction. There are those who reject the biblical right of the parent to delegate the teaching function, but all such objections end at the time that the child is eligible for college. At age 18, the critics of earlier delegated education insist that the parent now possesses this right of delegation. The child is said to have become accountable, and the parent therefore becomes free from the teaching obligation when the child graduates from high school. Yet the parent still pays the child’s bills. In the Mosaic covenant, reaching age 20 authorized a man to join God’s holy army (Ex. 30:14).9 Parents are required by God’s law to educate their children, morning to evening. But because of the division of labor, some parents are better teachers than others. As specialization increases, the teaching skills of some parents become more evident. Parents will trade of: one parent comes in and teaches a group of students math and science; another teaches music; another teaches a foreign language. To deny the legitimacy of joint teaching is to assert the

8. R. J. Rushdoony, The Messianic Character of American Education: Studies in the History of the Philosophy of Education (Nutley, New Jersey: Craig Press, 1963). 9. High school graduation, especially the prom, serves unojcially as a similar twentiethcentury rite of passage in the United States. The most persuasive study of this topic is Jean Shepherd’s hilarious short story, “Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories,” in the book with the same title (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1976).

150

DEUTERONOMY

ridiculous: the equal ability of all people in every ield. The assertion that a mother may not lawfully teach any children but her own is an assertion that: 1) all mothers are equally gifted teachers; or 2) any diferences in teaching skills are irrelevant or insigniicant in the outcome of education; or 3) children should be deprived of the specialized skills of several teachers until after high school. All three arguments are doomed. Parental concern for their children’s education, as well as widespread parental exhaustion and defeat in the face of chemistry, physics, and calculus, will eventually overcome the arguments of the “parents-only” purists. Only if some impersonal high school curriculum appears in which the children teach themselves, either by computer or by private study, can the parents-only argument become remotely plausible. But even in such a case, the parent must delegate instructional responsibilities to the author of the software or the books. We are back to square one: parents are commanded to teach their children by means of biblical law. Either this responsibility may be delegated or else all programmed education from outside the family must cease. Parental sovereignty over education must be restored. The fundamental starting point in the reconstruction of education is therefore the removal of all State funding and regulations. This includes taxfunded educational vouchers.11 Economic sovereignty must match legal sovereignty. He who pays the piper should call the tune. 10

The Covenant Model The entire passage, Deuteronomy 6:4–15, constitutes a single covenantal command. The structure of this passage parallels the biblical covenant model: all ive points. Point one, transcendence/ presence, is summarized by the opening: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD 10. “Now there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit. And there are diferences of administrations, but the same Lord. And there are diversities of operations, but it is the same God which worketh all in all. But the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to proit withal. For to one is given by the Spirit the word of wisdom; to another the word of knowledge by the same Spirit; To another faith by the same Spirit; to another the gifts of healing by the same Spirit; To another the working of miracles; to another prophecy; to another discerning of spirits; to another divers kinds of tongues; to another the interpretation of tongues: But all these worketh that one and the selfsame Spirit, dividing to every man severally as he will” (I Cor. 12:4–11). 11. Gary North, “Educational Vouchers: The Double Tax,” The Freeman (May 1976); North, “Vouchers: Politically Correct Money,” ibid. (June 1995).

Law and Inheritance

151

our God is one LORD.” This God is the Creator God of the patriarchs. He is not some local deity. He speaks with a uniied voice. He speaks to men clearly in the midst of history. Point two, hierarchy/authority, is seen in the command to love Him, and not just love Him, but love Him with everything man has at his disposal: heart, soul, and strength. Men must place their lives at God’s disposal, doing in love whatever He commands. Point three, ethics/boundaries, is found in the command to place God’s words or commandments at the center of our lives. Men must teach these laws to their children down through the generations. Biblical law is to become the framework of interpretation of every person’s life, governing what he does and says from morning to night. Even the boundaries of a man’s house were supposed to be marked by the presence of the written law. Point four, oath/sanctions, appears in the next section of the passage. God promises to deliver the wealth of the Canaanites into the hands of the Israelites. For the Canaanites, this will constitute negative sanctions. For Israel, it will constitute positive sanctions. And it shall be, when the LORD thy God shall have brought thee into the land which he sware unto thy fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give thee great and goodly cities, which thou buildedst not, And houses full of all good things, which thou illedst not, and wells digged, which thou diggedst not, vineyards and olive trees, which thou plantedst not; when thou shalt have eaten and be full; Then beware lest thou forget the LORD, which brought thee forth out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage (vv. 10–12).

The Israelites were told to fear God because of this, and to swear their oaths by His name: “Thou shalt fear the LORD thy God, and serve him, and shalt swear by his name” (v. 13). Point ive, succession/inheritance, is found in the covenantal threat of disinheritance: “Ye shall not go after other gods, of the gods of the people which are round about you; (For the LORD thy God is a jealous God among you) lest the anger of the LORD thy God be kindled against thee, and destroy thee from of the face of the earth” (vv. 14–15). This passage later became the legal basis for the covenant lawsuits brought by the prophets against Israel. Here, in one brief passage, we ind the outline of God’s covenantal dealings with Israel until the temple was destroyed in A.D. 70. As a geographically based

152

DEUTERONOMY

nation, Israel was removed twice from the land: at the captivity and at the diaspora under Rome. They were scattered across the face of the earth. But as a people, they were not destroyed from the face of the earth. After their return from the exile, Jews did not again pursue the gods around them. After the diaspora under Rome, they remained an identiiable people. The problem today is the growing sophistication of covenantbreakers. The gods of Canaan did not reappear in history. Other gods did. They have ofered power and inluence – positive sanctions – to those who are willing to worship them. Such worship has become progressively more intellectual and moral than liturgical, more a matter of replacing biblical laws with other laws. Rather than teaching one’s sons the law of God, men have turned over their sons to be trained by certiied educators who are far more familiar with rhetoric than law.

Teaching the Next Generation The passage following this one instructs covenant-keepers to instruct their children in the law of God. Parents are warned that children will ask questions about the meaning of God’s law. “And when thy son asketh thee in time to come, saying, What mean the testimonies, and the statutes, and the judgments, which the LORD our God hath commanded you?” (Deut. 6:20). We might expect the required answer to be related to the person of God, holiness of God, or some other lofty speculation. Not so. The answer is to be tied to the corporate blessings of God in history. Then thou shalt say unto thy son, We were Pharaoh’s bondmen in Egypt; and the LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand: And the LORD shewed signs and wonders, great and sore, upon Egypt, upon Pharaoh, and upon all his household, before our eyes: And he brought us out from thence, that he might bring us in, to give us the land which he sware unto our fathers. And the LORD commanded us to do all these statutes, to fear the LORD our God, for our good always, that he might preserve us alive, as it is at this day. And it shall be our righteousness, if we observe to do all these commandments before the LORD our God, as he hath commanded us (vv. 21–25).

God had delivered them from bondage in Egypt. Then He had imposed negative sanctions on Pharaoh and his household. Next,

Law and Inheritance

153

He had brought them into the Promised Land. This was the fulillment of a promise to the patriarchs. God commanded Israel to obey Him, “for our good always, that he might preserve us alive, as it is at this day.” That is, God has established a cause-and-efect relationship in history between covenant-keeping and corporate blessings. The basis of Israel’s preservation of its inheritance in the land was covenantal obedience to the speciic terms of God’s revealed law. The children of Israelites were to be instructed in two things: the history of Israel and the law of God. They were to be told that these two courses of study are covenantally related. The basis of the relationship between history and law is point four of the biblical covenant model: sanctions. A mark of rebellion against God’s covenant is the denial of this ixed relationship. To study history apart from God’s law is to lay the foundation for national disinheritance. If the events of history have nothing predictable to do with God’s law, then history becomes the product of forces other than God and His covenant. God’s law then becomes, at best, a guide for personal ethics, a guide that cannot deinitively be shown to advance the careers of those who adhere to it. It is basic to modern Christian theology to deny that such a corporate cause-and-efect relationship exists in New Testament times. If it did exist, then Christians would be compelled to preach, teach, and obey biblical law if they want to prosper. This thought is anathema to modern theologians, so they deny that success in history has anything to do with God’s law as revealed in the Bible, especially the Old Testament. Calvinist theologian Meredith G. Kline writes that ethical cause and efect in history are, humanly speaking, essentially random. “And meanwhile it [the common grace order] must run its course within the uncertainties of the mutually conditioning principles of common grace and common curse, prosperity and adversity being experienced in a manner largely unpredictable because of the inscrutable sovereignty of the divine will that dispenses them in mysterious ways.”12 If they had ever heard about it, Kline’s position would be too much for most Christians. You have to be trained for years as a professional theologian in order to believe anything as ethically antinomian and as

12. Meredith G. Kline, “Comments on an Old-New Error,” Westminster Theological Journal, XLI (Fall 1978), p. 184.

154

DEUTERONOMY

culturally futile as Kline’s position. Christians ind it dijcult to teach their children that obedience to God produces random results in history, whether corporately or personally. So, they search for common-ground ethical principles of individual action, hopefully shared by all honest men, that will reintroduce ethics into the discussion of historical cause and efect, but without any invocation of the Bible and God’s predictable sanctions, which would reintroduce the embarrassing issue of biblical law. They are apt to cite Benjamin Franklin’s famous eighteenth-century motto in Poor Richard’s Almanack, “Honesty is the best policy.” This is a statement of personal faith rather than a developed social theory. This declaration is devoid of biblical covenantal content because: 1) the deinition of honesty is not tied to the Bible; 2) the deinition of “best” is not tied to the Bible; and 3) there is no way to demonstrate a link between the two. There is a practical problem with Franklin’s motto. With no explicit biblical laws to adhere to, no God-invoked historical sanctions to undergird it, and no common deinition of “best policy,” this common-ground humanist faith can lead to a morally questionable career such as Franklin’s. He hired men to serve under him who he knew were British spies, most notably Edward Bancroft, during his term of service as an ambassador to France during the American Revolution. He refused to tighten security in the Paris ojce, despite continual warnings to do so. He met secretly with Paul Wentworth, the head of Britain’s agents in France. He was known to the British secret service as “72” and “our leading man.” Franklin’s biographer Cecil Currey concluded: “Benjamin Franklin wanted to win the American Revolution. No matter who lost – the United States, France, England – Benjamin Franklin wanted to win. In some ways he did. His honor remained intact. He gained new renown. He was rewarded by a grateful nation with additional positions of public responsibility. His secrets generally remained hidden.”13 In Franklin’s case, dishonesty was the best policy during his career in France. If America lost, he would survive as a covert friend of Britain; if America won, nobody would believe his duplicity other than his political enemy John Adams and his fellow ambassador in Paris, Arthur Lee, both of

13. Cecil V. Currey, “The Franklin Legend,” Journal of Christian Reconstruction, III (Summer 1976), p. 143.

Law and Inheritance

155

whom suspected him. He got away with it. (Two professional historians have written on Franklin’s status as a possible double agent and ally of British spies. One did so anonymously and did not go 14 into teaching; the other saw his book consigned to what he later called “historical limbo.”15) The problem is, those who say they are God’s chosen people have been hesitant or openly resistant to teaching their children that God commands obedience and imposes sanctions in history in terms of this obedience. They have tried to ind alternatives to such a revelationally grounded concept of historical cause and efect. They have sought broader ethical principles that have been sanctioned by covenant-breakers. In short, they have substituted new laws for old and new sanctions for old, which ultimately implies new gods for old.

New Gods for Old Consider post-exilic Israel. The experience of the exile broke Israel’s habit of worshipping the idols of the land of Canaan. But the people continued to substitute new gods for old. In the name of the God of the Bible, they worshipped more subtle gods than those represented by physical idols. Greek philosophy and literature became a snare for a minority of well-connected Jews during the three centuries before the birth of Jesus. This was Judaic Hellenism. But the Jews’ commitment to cosmopolitan Hellenism did not overcome their commitment to a proto-Talmudic law. The idols of ancient paganism were deaf, dumb, and blind (II Ki. 19:17–18; Dan. 5:23). They judicially represented demonic forces whose ofer of power and wealth was limited to geographical regions. They were not universal gods. To sustain an empire, a ruler had to destroy the authority of local gods by destroying their temples and their cities’ walls or by removing the people from their walled city-states. The smashing of a city’s walls represented the 14. The author of 1789, distributed by the John Birch Society. He later worked on the staf of a famous conservative U.S. Senator. 15. Currey, “Franklin Legend,” p. 150. See also Currey, Code Number 72: Ben Franklin: Patriot or Spy? (Englewood Clifs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1972). His previous book on Franklin was Road to Revolution: Benjamin Franklin in England, 1765–1775 (Garden City, New York: Anchor, 1968). The earlier book was favorably received by historians. It was not controversial. It was not memorable. It was safe.

156

DEUTERONOMY

destruction of its gods, as the fall of Jericho indicated. Jericho was Israel’s model: total destruction. But this was a one-time event. For the inheritance to survive, Israel could not repeat this act of total devastation. Instead, Israel was commanded to commit genocide or remove from the nation all of the inhabitants of Canaan’s cities. This was why God allowed Israel to leave the cities’ walls intact: the removal of the former residents was sujcient. But this complete removal was also covenantally necessary: should any of them remain in the land, they would lead the Israelites into false worship (Deut. 7:1–5). After the exile, the Jews faced a new problem: syncretism. The religion of the empires was a religion of cooperating gods. The heart of this religion was politics. The political order replaced the priestly order. The various priesthoods became functionaries of the State. Their task was to secure the favor of all of the gods of the conquered cities. Today, we call this religion pluralism. While the modern world’s version of syncretism is not openly idolatrous, the result is the same: the substitution of political salvation in history for the rule of local gods.16

Covenant-Keeping and Worldly Success Deuteronomy 4 identiies covenantal faithfulness as the basis of continued dominion in the Promised Land. The sanction of removal from the land is clearly a negative sanction, a divine punishment. The implication is that covenantal faithfulness brings positive sanctions: economic success. We read in Deuteronomy 8 that compound economic growth is a public testimony to the cause-and-efect relationship between man’s covenantal faithfulness and God’s positive sanctions in history. “But thou shalt remember the LORD thy God: for it is he that giveth thee power to get wealth, that he may establish his covenant which he sware unto thy fathers, as it is this day” (Deut. 8:18). The problem is that the positive sanctions can lead to covenantal rebellion: “And thou say in thine heart, My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth” (Deut. 8:17). The blessing of God can become the basis of covenant-breaking

16. See Appendix C, below: “Syncretism, Pluralism, and Empire.”

Law and Inheritance

157

man’s belief in the autonomy of man. The blessing becomes a snare. The gods of modernism are the gods of man’s autonomy. They are the product of mankind’s success. The gods of modernism are secularized versions of covenantal truths. Does number really rule the world? No, but God in His wisdom created a world in which some of the numerical inter-relationships discoverable through man’s mind are found to govern some of the operations of nature, thereby making science possible. Is compound economic growth really possible? Yes, for a time, when men honor God’s law, especially God’s laws restricting the claims of the State on the wealth of men (I Sam. 8:15, 17). But time will run out – something that compound growth in a inite world points to. Is science a tool of dominion? Yes, but not when scientists adopt theories of origin and providence that place impersonal randomness and unbreakable law on the dialectical throne of an autonomous universe. The legitimate goal of success in history is to be attained by the means of grace. The covenantal faithfulness of God’s people leads to success. Success can be sustained, however, only by continuing covenantal faithfulness. When men believe they have discovered the secret of compound growth apart from the law of God, they have said in their heart that the power of man’s mind in guiding his hand is the source of our wealth. This confession of faith is the essence of modernism. It is the mark of apostasy. A world built in terms of such a confession cannot be sustained long term.

Conclusion The command to worship God by obeying His law was tied to sanctions: positive (inheritance) and negative (disinheritance). The ultimate threat to the Israelites was that God would remove them from the land if they worshipped the gods of Canaan. This was a land-based command. The gods of Canaan were the great threat to them: land-based gods. If the Israelites did not have the moral strength to separate themselves spiritually and ritually from the gods of the land, God would separate them from both the land and its gods. The sanctions related speciically to the inheritance and disinheritance of the land of promise. This threat was fulilled twice: at the exile and after the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. The question arises: Were the sanctions more general than this? That is, was the command to worship God a cross-boundary law and therefore valid

158

DEUTERONOMY

in the New Covenant? Yes, because the God of Old Covenant Israel is a universal God: the one and only true God. No other god may safely be worshipped. When God ordered Israel to hear, He simultaneously ordered Israel to obey. The Christian community has ceased to hear or obey, except highly selectively. The churches’ self-conscious rejection of God’s Bible-revealed law, its mandated sanctions, and Christians’ kingdom inheritance in history has undermined their assertion of God’s absolute sovereignty (partial, says the Arminian) over history and the church’s authority in history. A God who is not completely sovereign over history is not the Creator God of the Bible who providentially ordains everything that comes to pass. He does not issue announcements to pagan rulers as God did to King Cyrus: Thus saith the LORD to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have holden, to subdue nations before him; and I will loose the loins of kings, to open before him the two leaved gates; and the gates shall not be shut; I will go before thee, and make the crooked places straight: I will break in pieces the gates of brass, and cut in sunder the bars of iron: And I will give thee the treasures of darkness, and hidden riches of secret places, that thou mayest know that I, the LORD, which call thee by thy name, am the God of Israel. For Jacob my servant’s sake, and Israel mine elect, I have even called thee by thy name: I have surnamed thee, though thou hast not known me. I am the LORD, and there is none else, there is no God beside me: I girded thee, though thou hast not known me: That they may know from the rising of the sun, and from the west, that there is none beside me. I am the LORD, and there is none else. I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things (Isa. 45:1–7).

A partially sovereign god cannot legitimately assert his authority in history. No wonder, then, that modern Christians are convinced that their partially sovereign God has not issued unique laws as tools of dominion, nor has He ofered a world-conquering vision to His followers. A God who does not impose predictable corporate sanctions in history is in no position to guarantee his followers a visible kingdom in history as a reward for obeying His laws.

16 GENOCIDE GenocideAND and INHERITANCE Inheritance When the LORD thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee, the Hittites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than thou; And when the LORD thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them: Neither shalt thou make marriages with them; thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son. For they will turn away thy son from following me, that they may serve other gods: so will the anger of the LORD be kindled against you, and destroy thee suddenly. But thus shall ye deal with them; ye shall destroy their altars, and break down their images, and cut down their groves, and burn their graven images with ire (Deut. 7:1–5).

The theocentric focus of this law is the inal judgment, when God will cut of for all eternity all those who oppose Him. This focus was not clear to Israelites, for Israel had no concept of the inal judgment, which is a New Testament doctrine. The inal judgment is the ultimate example of inheritance and disinheritance. The bodily resurrection to eternal life and the bodily resurrection to eternal death (Rev. 20:14–15) are the models of earthly inheritance and disinheritance. This law mandated genocide. Theologically, it relected the inal judgment: God’s absolute, eternal disinheritance of covenantbreakers. What God told Israel do to the Canaanites is representative of what He will do in eternity to those who refuse to covenant with Him in history. There will be no post-resurrection covenants. Destruction will be total: worse than annihilation – eternal damnation.

159

160

DEUTERONOMY

Adam’s broken covenant will remain broken for all eternity. This was the theological foundation of genocide under the Old Covenant. Israel’s inheritance of Canaan was to be complete. Therefore, so was the Canaanites’ disinheritance. The existing inhabitants of the land were to be driven out of the land or annihilated, preferably the latter. The Israelites were warned by God not to make a covenant of any kind with them. This included the marriage covenant, but it also included ecclesiastical and civil covenants. The separation of God from the idols of Canaan was to be total. This separation was to be enforced by the sword. God forbade them to show any mercy to the inhabitants. Genocide had to include infants and children. We know this because of God’s requirements regarding Israel’s subsequent dealings with the Amalekites. “Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass” (I Sam. 15:3). This was repayment for an event that had taken place four and a half centuries earlier: the refusal of Amalek to allow Israel to pass through their land at the time of the exodus. This established a condition of permanent warfare between Israel and Amalek. “For he said, Because the LORD hath sworn that the LORD will have war with Amalek from generation to generation” (Ex. 17:16). This was reajrmed just before the conquest: “Remember what Amalek did unto thee by the way, when ye were come forth out of Egypt; How he met thee by the way, and smote the hindmost of thee, even all that were feeble behind thee, when thou wast faint and weary; and he feared not God. Therefore it shall be, when the LORD thy God hath given thee rest from all thine enemies round about, in the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee for an inheritance to possess it, that thou shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; thou shalt not forget it” (Deut. 25:17–19). Samuel reminded Saul just before the inal battle, over four centuries later: “Thus saith the LORD of hosts, I remember that which Amalek did to Israel, how he laid wait for him in the way, when he came up from Egypt” (I Sam. 15:2). Saul lost his kingship for his refusal to destroy the animals and the king of the Amalekites (I Sam. 15:27–28). God has a long memory when it comes to imposing negative sanctions. Total warfare against a city had already taken place outside Canaan: at Hormah, where the Israelites destroyed Arad’s kingdom (Num. 21:3). It would happen one time inside the land: at Jericho. It was also to

Genocide and Inheritance

161

have taken place under Saul. In all three cases, there were to be no spoils of war; everything was to be destroyed. But with respect to capital rather than people, Canaan was not to be totally destroyed. Israel would lawfully claim the wealth of Canaan as an inheritance.

Idol Speculation Modern scholarship assumes that men’s faith in God is based on deep-rooted psychological needs (which modern scholars have failed to overcome through the techniques of modern rationalism), tradition (which has been uprooted by modern society), and fear of the unknown (which has been superseded by fear of the known), rather than on the actual existence of a supernatural realm that afects cause and efect in history. The god of modern man is the noumenal god of Kant: dwelling impersonally beyond history in a realm of mystery that is related to history only through the autonomous ethical consciousness of individual men.1 Scholars assume that primitive men, past and present, have been unable to recognize the random character of many seemingly coordinated yet improbable events in history. Primitives have attributed these improbable events to a supernatural being’s active intervention in history. The scholars have misunderstood both the events and the primitives. The ancients understood full well the distinction between a random, improbable series of events and supernatural intervention into nature. For example, after each of the cities of Philistia was struck by a plague whenever the Ark of the Covenant was brought inside its boundaries, the priests advised the rulers to perform an empirical test. “Now therefore make a new cart, and take two milch kine, on which there hath come no yoke, and tie the kine to the cart, and bring their calves home from them: And take the ark of the LORD, and lay it upon the cart; and put the jewels of gold, which ye return him for a trespass ofering, in a cofer by the side thereof; and send it away, that it may go. And see, if it goeth up by the way of his own coast to Beth-shemesh, then he hath done us this great evil: but if not, then we shall know that it is not his hand that smote us; it was a chance that happened to us” (I Sam. 6:7–9). It had not been chance, they soon learned: the oxen took the cart and the Ark back to Israel.

1. Richard Kroner, Kant’s Weltanschauung (University of Chicago Press, [1914] 1956).

162

DEUTERONOMY

So, too, did Solomon understand the diference between a world governed by a combination of impersonal chance and impersonal fate vs. a world governed by a sovereign God. Solomon in his pain of recognition admitted what modern man prefers to suppress: belief in a world governed entirely by impersonal chance or impersonal fate or an impersonal mixture of the two leads to the madness of meaninglessness. The wise man’s eyes are in his head; but the fool walketh in darkness: and I myself perceived also that one event happeneth to them all. Then said I in my heart, As it happeneth to the fool, so it happeneth even to me; and why was I then more wise? Then I said in my heart, that this also is vanity (Eccl. 2:14–15). For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast: for all is vanity (Eccl. 3:19). All things come alike to all: there is one event to the righteous, and to the wicked; to the good and to the clean, and to the unclean; to him that sacriiceth, and to him that sacriiceth not: as is the good, so is the sinner; and he that sweareth, as he that feareth an oath. This is an evil among all things that are done under the sun, that there is one event unto all: yea, also the heart of the sons of men is full of evil, and madness is in their heart while they live, and after that they go to the dead (Eccl. 9:2–3).

Solomon, speculating as a philosopher, looked at death and saw it as the great leveling agent. He argued that if temporal life is all there is, then nothing has meaning, for one life cannot be distinguished from another, one species from another. To divinize the temporal by denying the supernatural is to surrender all meaning to death: the death of meaning. The ancients were far wiser than modern man, for they tried to structure their lives in terms of a ritually responsive supernatural realm rather than an inherently incomprehensible impersonal realm.2 They believed that local gods governed their lives rather 2. Kant’s noumenal realm is incomprehensible to the mind of man, yet it is held in dialectical tension with the partially knowable phenomenal realm. Man’s mind supposedly holds the two realms together.

Genocide and Inheritance

163

3

than distant butterlies. They did not deny what their eyes occasionally showed them, namely, that the supernatural can directly inluence the course of history. They understood that priestly magic was not always trickery. This understanding was the basis of their worship of local deities. Idols served as links in history between demons and men. The Bible speaks of idols as blind and deaf, but it does not speak this way of demons. It makes the point that an idol is not a god. The idol merely represents sources of supernatural power that men invoke by covenant oath and correct ritual procedure. Israel was warned not to establish covenants with the Canaanites, for the Canaanites invoked demons through their idols. God told Israel to destroy the idols of Canaan, not because idols can see and hear but because they represent covenantal links between men and the occult realm of the demonic. Because there are demons who act in history, they persuade men to believe that by invoking this or that deity, men can manipulate the cosmos. “As above, so below” is magic’s statement of faith. The usual perception of the one who believes in magic is that procedurally precise rituals performed here below can invoke power from on high to afect things here below. This is correct only insofar as Satan is the prince of the power of the air (Eph. 2:2). In fact, magic invokes power from below.4 Men can manipulate local things, such as a voodoo doll, in order to produce speciic efects at a distance. This is neither mind over matter (“telekenesis”) nor words over matter. It is the invocation of demonic beings that have been given

3. The “butterly efect” is modern science’s latest phrase to describe the efects of the unknown. A butterly’s luttering wings can supposedly set up wind patterns that produce a hurricane a continent away. Men probably do not believe this about literal butterlies and literal hurricanes, but they do believe that unnoticed, seemingly random, and incalculably undetectable causes produce measurable results. The irst kind of event is too small for man to control; the second may be much too large to control. Man is trapped in a cosmic maelstrom not of his own or anyone else’s making. The phrase “butterly efect” was popularized in James Gleik’s best-selling book, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Viking, 1987). For a cogent rebuttal, see Stanley L. Jaki, The Only Chaos and Other Essays (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1990). Jaki is a Roman Catholic priest, physicist, and historian of science. Gleik is a New York Times reporter. Gleik is far better known than Jaki. (And, because of his development and sale of the New York City local Internet service, the Pipeline, far richer.) 4. R. J. Rushdoony, “Power from Below,” Journal of Christian Reconstruction, I (Winter, 1974).

164

DEUTERONOMY

limited powers in history, such as the efects produced by Satan in his testing of Job. The ancients knew that these powers can be invoked and manipulated by men for the ends of men. Idols of the ancient city represented demons who participated in the covenantal life of the family, clan, and city. This is why Paul warned that to participate in cultic feasts is to participate in devil worship: “What say I then? that the idol is any thing, or that which is ofered in sacriice to idols is any thing? But I say, that the things which the Gentiles sacriice, they sacriice to devils, and not to God: and I would not that ye should have fellowship with devils. Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord, and the cup of devils: ye cannot be partakers of the Lord’s table, and of the table of devils” (I Cor. 10:19–21). This clear warning regarding covenantal meals is in the chapter preceding his description of the church’s covenantal meal. Modern rationalists interpret the Bible so as to remove all traces of supernaturalism. They view the realm of the demonic as nonexistent, as impotent in history as carved idols or as impotent as God. They view the demonic as a self-serving invention of priestly magicians. Even a few Christians assume this: speciically, certain sleightof-hand artists known today as magicians. They are not magicians; they are illusionists. Magic uses ritual to link supernatural forces to history: “as above, so below.” But modern magicians view the supernatural as an illusion and their illusions as real.5 I exchanged a long series of detailed letters with one such Christian illusionist who insisted that Satan and his demons have never had any supernatural power in history. This man denied that the magicians of Egypt possessed supernatural powers, denied that the sticks they threw down actually turned into snakes, despite the clear statement of the text of the Bible that this took place (Ex. 7:12). No, he insisted, they merely used trickery to make it look as though they had conjured up snakes. On this point, he insisted, the Bible cannot possibly mean what it speciically says. I pointed out to him that this is the humanist’s hermeneutics: interpreting the Bible in terms of modern man’s anti-supernatural presuppositions, dismissing the God of the Bible along with the priests of Egypt. He did not change his mind. He

5. The most prominent illusionist denier of the supernatural is known professionally as the Amazing Randi.

Genocide and Inheritance

165

viewed the priests of Egypt simply as skilled tricksters, as he is. That is, he chooses to believe that he and his humanist peers are every bit as clever as they were. Modern man wants it both ways: to be as clever as the ancients but far wiser. Modern man may be as clever; he is surely less wise. The priests of Egypt and Phoenicia could distinguish among chance, demons, and God. They could devise accurate tests to evaluate which was the dominant factor in particular situations: “Then the magicians said unto Pharaoh, This is the inger of God: and Pharaoh’s heart was hardened, and he hearkened not unto them; as the LORD had said” (Ex. 8:19). Modern man is more like Pharaoh than his magicians. As Jaki says, that which parades as modern scientiic cosmology does not include the fear of God, which is the beginning of all wisdom.6

Localism or Cosmos What holds the world together? The New Testament makes it clear: He who was born of God and woman does, “In whom we have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins: Who is the image of the invisible God, the irstborn of every creature: For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him: And he is before all things, and by him all things consist” (Col. 1:14–17). The unity of the cosmos is secured by the sovereignty of God. Behind the seemingly ininite and therefore humanly immeasurable particulars of history and nature is cosmic personalism: a Creator-Sustainer God who has counted the hairs of every head (Matt. 10:30), or as modern man would put it, the subatomic particles of every galaxy. Butterlies and hurricanes are all part of God’s decree. Ancient religion did not emphasize the coherence of the cosmos, for the primary categories of ancient religion were pantheistic and animistic. The gods of Canaan were regarded by the inhabitants as local gods. They were cultic gods in the sense of familistic, clan-based, and civic. This was the common theological outlook of

6. Jaki, The Only Chaos, p. 7.

166

DEUTERONOMY

7

the ancient world, including Greece and Rome. The boundaries of a city marked the limits of a local god’s sovereignty. Beyond those boundaries he could extend his reign only through military triumphs by members of his cult. When Ben-hadad’s advisors explained the defeat of Syria by Israel, they invoked the localism of Israel’s God (I Ki. 20:28). This public theological assessment led to the destruction of Syria’s army by Ahab’s troops. Evil as Ahab was, God gave him the victory rather than to allow Ben-hadad imagine that the God of Israel was some local Near Eastern deity whose sovereignty was threatened by the military forces of Syria. God controlled events outside the geographical boundaries of Israel. The kings of the earth were required to acknowledge this. Adam had known and was required to acknowledge this verbally and ritually; so are the rest of us. The idols of Canaan were representational. They mediated oath-bound covenants. This was why Israel was required to destroy the idols, groves, and other representations of demonic authority. The nations of Canaan were in covenantal subjection to covenant-breaking supernatural beings represented by idols. These beings promised power to men and delivered on the promise enough of the time to keep the power-seekers in covenantal bondage. God did not require the death of every man, woman, and child in Canaan merely because a handful of professional illusionists had used their skills to establish local priesthoods. Had the cults of Canaan been, cosmically speaking, nothing more than income-producing enterprises of prestidigitators who today would be entertaining crowds in Las Vegas gambling casinos, God would not have mandated genocide. God promised to give Israel victory over the inhabitants of the land. This meant that every human covenantal agent of demonic forces had to die, so that there would be no further invocation of local demons. The demons of the ancient city operated inside geographical boundaries imposed by God. No demon could exercise its powers at will across the face of the earth. Thus, when a city fell to an invader, the participants on both sides recognized that the gods of the victorious city had participated in the defeat of the gods of the

7. Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome (Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor, [1864] 1955).

Genocide and Inheritance

167

defeated city. Jesus made it clear that civil war is characteristic of Satan’s kingdom. Then was brought unto him one possessed with a devil, blind, and dumb: and he healed him, insomuch that the blind and dumb both spake and saw. And all the people were amazed, and said, Is not this the son of David? But when the Pharisees heard it, they said, This fellow doth not cast out devils, but by Beelzebub the prince of the devils. And Jesus knew their thoughts, and said unto them, Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand: And if Satan cast out Satan, he is divided against himself; how shall then his kingdom stand? And if I by Beelzebub cast out devils, by whom do your children cast them out? therefore they shall be your judges. But if I cast out devils by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God is come unto you (Matt. 12:22–28).

Annihilation: Sanctions Applied Israel’s defeat of the cities of Canaan was to relect God’s defeat of the demons that were worshipped in those cities. To this extent, the magical formula, “as above, so below,” was correct.8 What men would see on earth would relect the warfare in heavenly places. This is why God required total annihilation. There would henceforth be no reasonable doubt: the God of Israel is sovereign. But Israel always doubted. This is why Israel failed to drive out or destroy all of the inhabitants. Israel’s doubt regarding the trustworthiness of God’s promise of total victory, as manifested by Israel’s comprehensive negative military sanctions in Canaan, laid the foundation of Israel’s subsequent bouts with idolatry. The military sanctions were comprehensive, but they were not total. The army of Israel drove out most of the land’s inhabitants, but it did not drive out all of them (Josh. 15:63; cf. 17:12–13). This failure gave a foothold to the few remaining Canaanites to lure the Israelites into idol worship. The idols of Canaan represented demons whose power had not been totally extinguished by God because Israel had failed to destroy every trace of their places of covenant renewal and the people who were under these pre-invasion covenants. Just before his death, Joshua announced: “Know for a certainty 8. The request in the Lord’s Prayer, “in earth, as it is in heaven,” is a call for ethical correspondence, not metaphysical. It is preceded by “thy will be done” (Matt. 6:10).

168

DEUTERONOMY

that the LORD your God will no more drive out any of these nations from before you; but they shall be snares and traps unto you, and scourges in your sides, and thorns in your eyes, until ye perish from of this good land which the LORD your God hath given you” (Josh. 23:13). Thorns in your eyes: here was a powerful image to warn men of the efects of idolatry. The Israelites had to move from word to deed. God’s word speciied total annihilation. This was the mandatory deed. By removing the idols and the inhabitants, Israel would inherit everything worth inheriting.

Human Capital and Technology The division of labor is basic to wealth. To increase the division of labor, men save – restrict their present consumption – in order to produce capital goods that they expect will produce consumer goods and services in the future. Thrift inances the increase of goods and services. In recent decades, it has become more clear to economists that human capital is a very valuable resource.9 Genocide is the antithesis of the division of labor: the systematic destruction of highly developed human capital. While Israel was promised the vineyards and houses of their enemies, there was no doubt that the skills used to produce such wealth would perish with the destruction of the inhabitants. Nevertheless, God required annihilation. This would reduce the division of labor compared to what it could have been through local trade. Why did God require this? What cost-beneit analysis informed God that it was better for Israel to reduce the division of labor by destroying the inhabitants of the land? We can only guess, but our guesses can be informed guesses. The essence of magic is the principle of something for nothing, or at least something costly for something seemingly inexpensive. Light a few candles, recite some incantations, paint a design on some convenient surface, and presto: you get what you want. There is no requirement that the participants plan and save for the future, or select the proper mix of land, labor, and capital. There is no doubt that the Canaanites had understood conventional economic 9. Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1981).

Genocide and Inheritance

169

planning, which is why they left a legacy to Israel. But undergirding their concept of scientiic cause and efect was their reliance on supernatural forces that promised something for practically nothing. The demons required covenantal subordination. Their covenants elevated magical formulas and rituals above rational planning and prayer. The productivity of economic planning was assumed by Canaanites to require rituals such as human sacriice and temple prostitution. Power from below was understood as necessary for power in history. It was this invocation of magical power through debauchery and murder that God would not tolerate. Rational planning there was in Canaan. The physical capital left by the inhabitants proved this. But technology is not neutral. Technology is applied cosmology. It is governed by assumptions regarding cosmology: cause and efect. These assumptions govern the development and application of technology. The assumptions governing Canaanite technology were so demonic that God wanted Israel to destroy all traces of that cosmology by destroying all those who professed it. The ultimate resource is not the human mind, contrary to modern economists. The ultimate resource is a confession of faith which acknowledges the God of the Bible as the master of the universe and the source of man’s abundance (Deut. 8:18). The theological content of the Christian confession of faith and the scientiic worldview that it produces are the source of long-term economic growth. Modern technology is the outworking of what the world called technology before the seventeenth century: grammar.10 Modern technology rests on the grammar of science. So did late medieval technology, which was highly sophisticated both in theory and application.11 Modern man invokes the repeatable wonders of science through written formulas governed by a series of assumptions regarding cause and efect. The grammar of mathematics underlies modern technology, but this grammar is not autonomous; it rests in turn on a host of presuppositions regarding the coherence of man’s reasoning processes and the relation of this coherence to the external world.12

10. Jaki, The Only Chaos, p. 124. 11. Ibid., ch. 3. 12. Vern S. Poythress, “A Biblical View of Mathematics,” in Gary North (ed.), Foundations of Christian Scholarship: Essays in the Van Til Perspective (Vallecito, California: Ross House Books, 1976), ch. 9; cf. Eugene Wigner, “The Unreasonable Efectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics, XIII (1960), pp. 1–14.

170

DEUTERONOMY

To what extent is the grammar of science and number dependent on the grammar of faith? Canaan’s buildings did not fall down. Canaanites’ ields continued to produce food despite their denial of God’s sovereignty. Their accumulated capital was transferrable. How was this possible? Because man is made in the image of God. This common humanity brings with it common knowledge by means of common grace.13 Such knowledge, like the knowledge of cooking, is afected by time and place; it produces recognizable variations, but like recipes, it is repeatable and therefore transferrable. Accurate scientiic formulas are valid whenever invoked, or so the theory of modern science announces. Their accuracy is not immediately dependent on a personal confession of correct theology. This is what distinguishes chemistry from alchemy. But scientiic formulas are not invoked outside of the processes of history. These processes are always covenantal. Scientiic formulas and their applications are inluenced by covenantal cause and efect in history. Some societies inherit; others are disinherited. The point is, because scientiic formulas and the knowledge that underlies them are transferrable – universal, in other words – they and their products can be inherited. This is why the wealth of the sinner can be laid up for the just (Prov. 13:22).

Economic Growth Through Imported Knowledge 14

Economic growth is a process of compounding. The division of labor is extended over time, not just across borders. The extension of per capita wealth through the extension of the division of labor is dependent on the maintenance of social order. It is not just free trade across borders that makes men rich. There must be saving, wise investing, and scientiic discovery.15 There must be social development, which includes a progressive commitment to the moral boundaries imposed by biblical law. What the conquest of Canaan teaches us is that God calls to a temporal halt the path of economic development of certain social orders. This is not a random

13. Gary North, Dominion and Common Grace: The Biblical Basis of Progress (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987). 14. See Chapter 14. 15. John Jewkes, David Sawyers, and Richard Stillerman, The Sources of Invention (2nd ed.; New York: Norton, 1969).

Genocide and Inheritance

171

cessation of development. Inheritance and disinheritance are linked covenantally. Jeremiah announced: “Thus saith the LORD against all mine evil neighbours, that touch the inheritance which I have caused my people Israel to inherit; Behold, I will pluck them out of their land, and pluck out the house of Judah from among them. And it shall come to pass, after that I have plucked them out I will return, and have compassion on them, and will bring them again, every man to his heritage, and every man to his land. And it shall come to pass, if they will diligently learn the ways of my people, to swear by my name, The LORD liveth; as they taught my people to swear by Baal; then shall they be built in the midst of my people. But if they will not obey, I will utterly pluck up and destroy that nation, saith the LORD” (Jer. 12:14–17). Canaan’s division of labor was soon to be cut of. It was about to be replaced by Israel’s division of labor. Canaan’s approach to science and technology had to end. A new social order would use Canaan’s physical capital to extend God’s dominion. The genocidal disinheritance of Canaan would provide the physical inheritance of Israel. This inheritance was not to include knowledge that was in any way dependent on the invocation of Canaan’s gods. “And ye shall overthrow their altars, and break their pillars, and burn their groves with ire; and ye shall hew down the graven images of their gods, and destroy the names of them out of that place” (Deut. 12:3). Israel failed in this exercise of religious intolerance, which is why Joshua warned against invoking the names of regional gods. “That ye come not among these nations, these that remain among you; neither make mention of the names of their gods, nor cause to swear by them, neither serve them, nor bow yourselves unto them” (Josh. 23:7). God is the Creator, the source of all accurate knowledge. His universalism gives His people an enormous advantage. They are in a position to make productive use of the discoveries of other nations and other religions. But the use of such information is limited by biblical law. To the extent that such information is dependent on the invocation of the name of any other god, it may not be used by His people. This means that occult knowledge is forbidden. Knowledge that is available only to the initiate into a cult or secret society is not valid, although this knowledge may be true within limits. But if such knowledge can be separated from the name of the god invoked by the cult, it is eligible to become part of the covenant-keeper’s inheritance.

172

DEUTERONOMY

An example would be the mathematical knowledge developed within the conines of the Pythagorean cult. Initiation into that oath-bound cult would have been forbidden to covenant-keeping Israelites, but both studying and applying the Pythagorean theorem regarding right triangles would have been legitimate activities. The truth of the theorem is not dependent on the ritual practices of the cult. The theorem became part of the inheritance of the West, which for a millennium meant Christendom. The key issue is the oath: to swear by. The oath places man covenantally under the god invoked by the oath. Wealth, including knowledge, that is obtainable only through such oath-taking is not part of a legitimate inheritance. If the secrets of the cult pass into the public domain, as Pythagorean mathematics did, then covenantkeepers may lawfully put them to good use. Using Euclidian geometry is valid because there is no oath involved. But to seek membership in the cult in order to gain inside knowledge of its economically advantageous secrets, even to make them public, would be valid only as part of a government-directed spying operation in a war efort, such as was used in the conquest of Canaan: the spies (Josh. 2). It would then be a matter of military conquest, not economic gain. It would be a matter of the sword, not the purse. Industrial spying is therefore invalid, even if done by governments, as it surely is in the modern world. So is joining a secret order that promises business or political success. C. S. Lewis called this the desire for membership in the inner ring, and he warned against it.16

Universal God, Regional Capital God is not threatened by other gods. Over time, His people become less threatened by other religions. The Israelites were forbidden to speak the names of other gods. “And in all things that I have said unto you be circumspect: and make no mention of the name of other gods, neither let it be heard out of thy mouth” (Ex. 23:13). Is this law still in force? If it is in force, is it to be taken literally? Or is it an injunction against invocation? The prophets mentioned the names of other gods. So did Stephen at his stoning (Acts 7:43). This was an aspect of the study of comparative religions: announcing the 16. C. S. Lewis, “The Inner Ring” (1944), in Lewis, The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (New York: Macmillan, 1980), pp. 93–105.

Genocide and Inheritance

173

superiority of God to His rivals. The prohibition against speaking the names of other gods must have been an injunction against another kind of speaking, namely, covenantal or magical invocation. After their return from the Babylonian captivity, the Jews did not again go after other gods. Their susceptibility to idolatry had ended. Hellenism and legalism became national problems, but idolatry did not. The threat today is the threat of syncretism, also known as pluralism: the acceptance of anti-theistic presuppositions by the covenant-keeping community.17 The universality of God and His covenants makes it possible for covenant-keepers to accept the non-oath-bound indings of rival religious worldviews. God’s church is not regional, nor was it ever intended to be. It crosses the boundaries of geography and time. The church in the broadest sense is the means of absorbing new information and making such information even more productive. It is to disseminate information and vision. Christendom’s productivity is supposed to undermine all covenant-breaking social orders, bringing them face to face with the sanctions of God in history: positive and negative. This ofensive conquest is not by the sword but by faith and productivity. Discoveries always cross borders. Useful knowledge cannot be monopolized for long. The question is: Will covenant-keepers gain and retain the dominant inluence in the interpretation and applications of these discoveries, or will their covenantal enemies gain control over Christians by means of these discoveries? In other words, whose inheritance is it? There can be no neutrality. One side or the other will inherit. The idea that these discoveries are covenantally neutral is incorrect. Truth comes only from God, and this includes the interpretation of theories and facts. Meanwhile, truths that are accepted by covenant-breakers are always misinterpreted because they deny God as the origin of all truth. As time goes on, this misinterpretation becomes more consistent, i.e., more consistently wrong. Truths are not regarded by covenant-breakers as testimonies to the God of the Bible (Rom. 1:20–25). Such truths are always held down through unrighteousness, which brings God’s judgment in history: “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in 17. See Chapter 15, above: section on “New Gods for Old.”

174

DEUTERONOMY

unrighteousness” (Rom. 1:18). The visible sign of such judgment is open homosexuality (Rom. 1:26–27). Legalized homosexuality in any society is a curse of God for corporate unbelief. It is a prelude to corporate destruction. So, the beneits of science and technology are always dependent on the proper use of knowledge. If covenant-keepers are unable or unwilling to set the terms of discourse for new discoveries and the application of old ones, then the wealth generated by these discoveries will eventually undermine faith: “And thou say in thine heart, My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth” (Deut. 8:17). This will eventually result in negative sanctions: “And it shall be, if thou do at all forget the LORD thy God, and walk after other gods, and serve them, and worship them, I testify against you this day that ye shall surely perish. As the nations which the LORD destroyeth before your face, so shall ye perish; because ye would not be obedient unto the voice of the LORD your God” (Deut. 8:19–20).

Open Borders The Israelites were not going to be welcomed by the Canaanites. Even if they had come peacefully, they would not have been welcomed. They represented a threat to the Canaanite social order. They were people who were covenanted to another God. Religious pluralism was impossible. One side or the other would win. Israel later welcomed strangers from other lands. Why weren’t those immigrants a threat to Israel, just as Israel had been to Canaan? First, because immigrants entered Israel on Israel’s terms: open obedience to God’s civil law was required. Proselyting for a rival god was a capital crime (Deut. 13:6–10). Second, because the gods of such immigrants would not be local gods. These immigrants had left the domain of their regional gods. Idols of non-universal gods were not a major threat to Israel. As for gods making universal claims, there were none in the pre-captivity, pre-empire Old Covenant era. All rival gods were local. After the Babylonian captivity, the gods of a series of empires shared their pantheon with conquered deities of conquered nations. These were not universal gods in the sense that Israel’s God was: a God who shared no pantheon space with rivals. The gods of Greece were local and animistic or else politically contrived Olympian gods. In contrast, Greek philosophy made universal claims, and Hellenism did become a major problem for Jews and Christians. But Hellenism was not tied to idols.

Genocide and Inheritance

175

Israel allowed open borders because God did not allow public proselyting or public observance of rival religions. The civil order was established by a covenantal oath to God. He, and He alone, was the acknowledged sovereign of Israel. In Elijah’s day, this law was being violated by priests of Baal. His confrontation on Mt. Carmel was designed to end this practice. “Then the ire of the LORD fell, and consumed the burnt sacriice, and the wood, and the stones, and the dust, and licked up the water that was in the trench. And when all the people saw it, they fell on their faces: and they said, The LORD, he is the God; the LORD, he is the God. And Elijah said unto them, Take the prophets of Baal; let not one of them escape. And they took them: and Elijah brought them down to the brook Kishon, and slew them there” (I Ki. 18:38–40). The main threat of immigration is covenantal, not economic. The increase in the national division of labor that takes place when immigrants arrive is a net beneit. The judicial problem arises because of the rival gods and rival philosophies that immigrants bring with them. The religious pluralism of modern Western politics relegates non-political covenants to adiaphora: things indiferent to political religion, so long as they do not infringe upon the realm of political religion. But we have found that political pluralism is as theocratic as any other religion. It will not tolerate challenges to its inal authority from any realm outside of politics. Decade by decade, political religion extends its claims over all the other areas of life. The modern immigrant brings with him gods that are as universal in their claims as the God of the Bible is. The local gods of ancient paganism are barely remembered, let alone understood. How can a society survive the claims to authority of the representatives of rival universal gods? How can these universal claims be harmonized with the universal claims of modern political religion? Harmonizing these claims has been the long-term national experiment of the Enlightenment era, beginning around 1700. A businessman likes to have a growing supply of laborers who compete against each other to sell him their labor time. Immigration is a blessing for the employer. It increases the supply of labor, thereby lowering costs. But what if, after ive years, these immigrants could vote themselves a share of his business? Then he would be more careful about who gains access to the nation. Naturalization makes the immigrant a participant in the modern welfare State: a citizen. He can lawfully exercise the civil sanction of voting. He can

176

DEUTERONOMY

therefore gain legal entitlements to other people’s wealth. So, modern political pluralism, when combined with the welfare State, creates a state of afairs in which those who already have the vote and capital resist the arrival of immigrants who bring rival philosophies regarding what constitutes the good society and the legitimate means of obtaining it. In 1650, Northern Europe had been battling invading Turks for two centuries. Today, there are so many Turks living in Germany that the Germans could not expel them even if they wanted to: the Turks would take too much money out of German banks. Turks do not become secular humanists just because they live in Northern Europe. The diferential in birth rates make it clear where pluralistic Europe is heading: toward Islam. Islam is not pluralistic. When they at long last have the votes to do so, Muslims will change the rules. They always do. It is part of their religion. The economist reduces everything to economics: cost-beneit analyses. Economics is as relentless in its extension of its reductionism as any other academic worldview. What is signiicant politically for an economist is whatever he can reduce to it economic concepts.18 The economist is unwilling to acknowledge that politics is covenantal even though it is based on a binding oath of allegiance under a monopolistic legal order, which in turn has its origin in God’s common grace civil covenant. Marriage and the church are also covenantal and so do not readily lend themselves to economic reductionism.19 This is why the economist sounds unbelievable when he discusses immigration as if it were little more than international job-seeking. The immigrant no longer brings idols with him. Instead, he brings a worldview tied to another religious order. This worldview has legitimacy equal with all others in a pluralistic political order. Idols in Mosaic Israel did not. When he becomes a 18. See, for example, James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962). Over two decades later, Buchanan won the Nobel Prize in economics, presumably for this work more than his subsequent studies. (Tullock, a lawyer with no formal economic training, was not mentioned publicly by the Nobel Committee.) 19. One of the unresolved problems in economics is the economic analysis of prostitution. While the economist argues that “everything has a price,” no unmarried economist acknowledges publicly that he much prefers sex from a prostitute to sex in marriage because of prostitution’s tremendous cost savings. “Don’t buy: rent!” Few men say that renting sexual favors from strangers is a better deal for them than bearing the burden of supporting a wife. Sex available for hire makes it inherently less valuable in most would-be buyers’ eyes than marital sex.

Genocide and Inheritance

177

naturalized citizen, the modern ex-immigrant can work to impose this worldview by voting. American Constitutional political theory relies on some version of Madison’s theory of factions in Federalist 51 to save republican democracy from Balkanization. Madison argued that political factions would cancel each other out, leaving commitment to the common civil order as the binding national confession. This implicitly assumed that there is a widely agreed-upon common source of justice, although Madison, like the U.S. Constitution, did not mention natural law. His argument was very close to Rousseau’s argument for the absolute sovereignty of the General Will, expressed only through politics, over all other voluntary contracts and institutions. Madison’s theory privatizes non-political relations, removing them from issues of State; Rousseau’s absorbs all other relations into politics. I call Madison’s view political Unitarianism.20 The end result is the same: the common bond of politics. Because covenantal consensus breaks down when the census reveals diversity, modern pluralistic society faces a crisis: cacophony. As Cornell University professor W. Pearce Williams put it in a 1983 letter to the New York Times, “we live in a consensual society in which we often have to do things we don’t want to do, or even think are wrong, because we have agreed to abide by majority rule. Destroy that argument, and the result is not freedom but anarchy – a condition which the United States seems rapidly approaching.”21 Immigration is from two sources: foreign countries and mothers’ wombs. The abortion movement is an anti-immigration movement of unique commitment. The abortionists resent the welfare implications of motherhood, but they also resent it with respect to the State. They see babies as welfare cases. Margaret Sanger was the founder of Planned Parenthood, still the best organized proabortion organization in the United States. In her book, The Pivot of Civilization (1922), she criticized the inherent cruelty of all welfare states. She insisted that organized eforts to help the poor are the “surest sign that our civilization has bred, is breeding, and is perpetuating constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents,

20. Gary North, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989), pp. 450–52. 21. Cited in Jaki, The Only Chaos, p. 43.

178

DEUTERONOMY

22

and dependents.” Such charity must be stopped, she insisted. The fertility of the working class must be regulated in order to reduce the production of “benign imbeciles, who encourage the defective and diseased elements of humanity in their reckless and irresponsible swarming and spawning.”23 Swarming (like insects), spawning (like ish): here was marvelous zoological rhetoric from the lionized founder of Planned Parenthood. “If we must have welfare, give it to the rich, not the poor,” she concluded.24 “More children from the it, less from the unit: that is the chief issue of birth control.”25 For abortionists, the womb is an open border. They seek to kill all those who would cross it without authorization. What is the biblical solution? Respect for covenantal oaths. The marriage oath creates a claim on open entry for the biological fruit of marriage. This legal claim must be defended by the civil government if mothers seek to revoke it. Second, the civil oath grants authority to impose God’s sanctions. Those who are not under the terms of the civil oath should not be allowed to impose its terms on others. Thus, immigration is economically legitimate. What is not legitimate as a Christian ideal is a civil oath that does not bind men to allegiance to the God of the Bible. God brings negative sanctions against all rival civil oaths, and open immigration leads to two such sanctions: the breakdown of society (anarchy) or the substitution of a theocratic oath to a rival god. Roger Williams’ experiment in tiny Rhode Island – a civil order without an oath to God – became the irst operational model of the Enlightenment’s much larger experiment in religious pluralism. We can safely predict concerning how this professedly neutral civil covenant will end: broken.

Conclusion God told Israel to conquer Canaan by force. The Israelites were prohibited from making any sort of covenant with them. The best way to prevent this was to destroy every last one of them, so that the nation would not be in a position to make additional covenants. 22. Margaret Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization (New York: Brentano’s, 1922), p. 108; cited in George Grant, Grand Illusions: The Legacy of Planned Parenthood, 2nd ed. (Franklin, Tennessee: Adroit, 1992), p. 27. 23. Sanger, ibid., p. 115; cited in Grant, ibid. 24. Ibid., p. 96; cited in Grant, ibid., p. 28. 25. Sanger, “Birth Control,” Birth Control Review (May 1919); cited in Grant, ibid., p. 27.

Genocide and Inheritance

179

This reduction in the available division of labor obviously was a threat to the transfer of local knowledge: either saving knowledge to the Canaanites or destructive knowledge from the Canaanites. The beneits of whatever technical knowledge possessed by the Canaanites would not ofset the liabilities of the covenantal worldview which accompanied their technical knowledge. Israel was more vulnerable to the knowledge possessed by Canaan than Canaan was to the knowledge possessed by Israel. This would not always be true, but it took the captivity and the occupation of the land by outsiders – later called Samaritans – to reduce this vulnerability. Any surviving post-conquest local gods of Canaan had by then been visibly defeated by the gods of Assyria, Babylon, and Medo-Persia. In terms of the theology of the ancient Near East, this defeat had removed them permanently as historical forces to contend with or contend for. No society invoked the gods of Canaan after the rise of the empires.

17 BYBy LAW BY Promise? PROMISE? LawOR or By All the commandments which I command thee this day shall ye observe to do, that ye may live, and multiply, and go in and possess the land which the LORD sware unto your fathers (Deut. 8:1).

The theocentric framework of this law is the dominion covenant: the command to be fruitful and multiply (Gen. 1:26–28). God established His authority over mankind with these words, even before He created man. This case law therefore was no seed law or land law. Deuteronomy 8 is by far the most important passage in the Bible dealing with the topic of Adam Smith’s classic 1776 book, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. It announces the covenantal pattern for economic growth: grace, subordination, law, sanctions, and inheritance. It lists the unmerited gifts that God gave to Israel, from their deliverance out of bondage to the raw materials of the Promised Land. This is all grace. Twice it calls upon the Israelites to remember God’s grace (vv. 2, 18). This is a call to subordination. Four times it reminds them to keep God’s commandments (vv. 1, 2, 6, 11). It speaks of the positive sanction of economic growth (v. 13) and the negative sanction of expulsion from the land (vv. 19, 20). Yet the entire chapter deals with the inheritance: the land of Israel. To maintain this inheritance, the Israelites had to obey God’s Bible-revealed law. In other words, their maintenance of the inheritance was ethically conditional. The passage begins with a call to obedience. Moses warned the generation of the conquest to obey all of God’s commandments. The theme of covenantal faithfulness through national obedience is continual in Deuteronomy, for only through corporate covenantal

180

By Law or By Promise?

181

obedience to the Mosaic law could the conquest generation maintain its inheritance. The language of the text is clear: collecting the promised inheritance was conditional. “All the commandments which I command thee this day shall ye observe to do, that ye may live, and multiply, and go in and possess the land which the LORD sware unto your fathers.” This verse raises a theological problem regarding the terms of inheritance. God had sworn to the patriarchs that He would give the land to Israel. He had promised Abraham that the fourth generation would inherit (Gen. 15:16). The theological question is this: Was Israel’s inheritance legally secured by God’s promise or by their obedience to the law?

Circumcision and Inheritance In the context of God’s promise to Abraham that his seed would inherit, Paul wrote: “For if the inheritance be of the law, it is no more of promise: but God gave it to Abraham by promise” (Gal. 3:18). Paul was speaking of Jesus Christ, not the Israelites, as the inheriting seed. He was speaking of the kingdom of God, not the land of Canaan. Nevertheless, the judicial question was the same in both cases: By law or by promise? Paul argued clearly: by promise. On this passage, Protestantism rests much of its case for salvation by grace rather than works: “That the blessing of Abraham might come on the Gentiles through Jesus Christ; that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith” (v. 14). Yet there is no doubt that one legal condition for Israel’s inheritance was circumcision. Abraham was required to circumcise his household’s males (Gen. 17:12–13). They, in turn, were supposed to circumcise their household males. The generation of the exodus had failed to do this, so Joshua had the conquest generation circumcised as soon as they crossed the boundary of the Jordan River (Josh. 5:7). The promise was valid, but to qualify judicially as the generation of the conquest, all the males had to be circumcised. Wasn’t circumcision a work of the law? Yes. So, if inheritance was by circumcision, how could it be by promise?

Who Was a Lawful Heir? To make sense of this seeming anomaly, we should seek a solution in the judicial nature of the Abrahamic promise. The fourth

182

DEUTERONOMY

generation would inherit, God had promised. He had sealed that promise with a covenantal oath-sign: passing a ire between pieces of a dismembered animal (Gen. 15:17). This was a sanctions-bound self-maledictory oath: “So let it be done unto Me if I do not bring to pass what I have promised to Abraham.” But what constituted a generation? Judicially, this had to mean circumcised sons. A man was not an Israelite by birth; he was an Israelite by covenant. “And the uncircumcised man child whose lesh of his foreskin is not circumcised, that soul shall be cut of from his people; he hath broken my covenant” (Gen. 17:14). The external mark of this covenant was circumcision. The same was true corporately of the inheriting generation. They would not become that promised generation by birth; they would become that generation by covenant. The promise was secure; nevertheless, conforming to the deinitional terms of the promise mandated the work of circumcision: no circumcision – no generation; no generation – no fulillment of the promise. So, the judicial basis of the fourth generation’s inheritance was law: circumcision. Yet the judicial basis of the possibility of inheritance was promise. This two-fold conclusion is inescapable: promise as the judicial basis of God’s granting of the inheritance to Israel through Abraham; Israel’s obedience as the judicial basis of His assigning it to them as promised. The special form of obedience was the oath. Circumcision was an oath sign. Protestant commentators have gone out of their way to avoid discussing the fourth generation’s circumcision as the judicial requirement of collecting the inheritance. It is clear why they have done this: the Pauline doctrine of inheritance by promise. While James did not write about the judicial basis of Christ’s inheritance, we can be fairly sure what he would have written: inheritance by Christ’s obedience. To mark Himself as the heir – the lawful heir – of the promise, Christ had to obey the law. The situation facing the fourth generation was analogous: to mark themselves as the lawful heirs of the promise, they had to obey the law. Paul wrote of Abraham, “For the promise, that he should be the heir of the world, was not to Abraham, or to his seed, through the law, but through the righteousness of faith. For if they which are of the law be heirs, faith is made void, and the promise made of none efect” (Rom. 4:13–14). But on what is saving faith grounded judicially? On the substitutionary atonement of Christ. This atonement

By Law or By Promise?

183

was grounded judicially in the perfection of Christ, who obeyed the whole of the law of God. He was a perfect sacriice; no other would have sujced to placate God’s wrath. “Though he were a Son, yet learned he obedience by the things which he sufered; And being made perfect, he became the author of eternal salvation unto all them that obey him” (Heb. 5:8–9). Christ’s legal sonship was marked by His perfect obedience, even unto death. Analogously, the fourth generation’s heirship was marked by their circumcision, even unto risking death, i.e., their temporary military incapacity while inside the boundaries of the Promised Land. Protestants speak of unmerited grace. With respect to the recipients of grace, grace is indeed unmerited. Men do not merit God’s favor on their own account. But with respect to the judicial basis of grace, it is completely merited by the perfect life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Unmerited grace is grounded in Christ’s merit through obedience. This merit is a legal claim, and as heirs to grace, this legal claim passes to the elect. Salvation is legally claimed by the elect, not on the basis of their obedience, but on the basis of Christ’s obedience. Grace is grounded in the law and one man’s perfect fulilling of its stipulations. So, to discuss Israel’s inheritance in terms of promise only or law only is to discuss half of the legal transaction. The inheritance was established by grace through God’s promise, but there was supposed to be obedience on the part of the fourth generation. While God might have graciously delivered the land to them despite their legal condition as uncircumcised men. Joshua understood the legal conditions of the inheritance. Israel might, by God’s grace, inherit without obedience, but they were supposed to obey. This was Moses’ message to them, too: maintenance of the kingdom grant was conditional. As the author of the Hebrews put it, “And being made perfect, he became the author of eternal salvation unto all them that obey him” (Heb. 5:9).

Maintaining the Kingdom Grant “All the commandments which I command thee this day shall ye observe to do, that ye may live, and multiply, and go in and possess the land which the LORD sware unto your fathers.” This was not the announcement of the judicial deinition of what constituted the fourth generation, namely, circumcision; this was an announcement of a covenantal link between obedience and inheritance. How

184

DEUTERONOMY

can we make theological sense of Moses’ words? He invoked the promise while mandating obedience. First, we must ask: Did Moses expect the blessings listed in Deuteronomy 8 to unfold sequentially? Did he mean to say that the fourth generation had to obey the commandments in order for God to multiply them, to be followed by their conquest of the land? Obviously not, since he was preparing them for the conquest, not for a long period of population growth as the means of military conquest. Their multiplication would come after they had secured the land. Yet the text places multiplication prior to the securing of the land. If we were to take his words as sequentially meaningful, his call to obedience would make no chronological sense. The conquest would be delayed for another generation. But the fourth generation had to inherit. Second, we must ask: What was Moses getting at? Answer: the requirement that they obey God in order to possess the land, maintain the land, and multiply in the land. They obeyed God irst by submitting to circumcision. This act of obedience preceded the conquest. While they might have relied on God’s grace to enable them to conquer the land without being circumcised, instead they relied on God’s grace to enable them to escape military defeat during their time of physical incapacity.1 In both scenarios, they had to rely on grace. The form which grace took in that instance was the promise, which Moses cited. The promise they could be sure of. The question was: How best to claim the grace-based inheritance. By refusing to be circumcised or by risking a military set-back? They chose the latter. Grace precedes law in both God’s covenant of creation and His covenant of redemption. He gave the law to Adam (Gen. 2:16) after He had given Adam life and land (Gen. 2:7–14). This is the covenantal pattern: grace precedes law. James Jordan is correct: “God’s Word is always promise before it is command. . . . God always bestows the Kingdom as a gift before presenting us with our duties in it.”2 The kingdom had been bestowed on Abraham as a gift. That is, the land had long ago been assigned to Abraham’s heirs. God had assigned the land to Israel by grace and promise, but 1. They knew the story of Shechem: how Simeon and Levi had slaughtered them while the Shechemites were recovering from circumcision (Gen. 34:25–26). 2. James B. Jordan, Covenant Sequence in Leviticus and Deuteronomy (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989), p. 7.

By Law or By Promise?

185

He had not yet passed legal title to the new owners. That would come through military conquest. They had received the law at Sinai four decades earlier, not four centuries earlier. They had been tested in the wilderness in terms of the Mosaic law, and the fourth generation had passed these tests. After the conquest, they would have to remain judicially faithful in order to retain possession. Grace always precedes law in God’s dealings with His subordinates. We are in debt to God even before He speaks to us. The land grant was based on the original promise given to Abraham. That promise came prior to the giving of the Mosaic law.3 This is why Jordan says that the laws of Leviticus are more than legislation; the focus of the laws is not simply obedience to God, but rather on maintaining the grant.4 The basis of maintaining the grant was ethics, not the sacriices. Man cannot maintain the kingdom in sin.5 Moses continued: “And thou shalt remember all the way which the LORD thy God led thee these forty years in the wilderness, to humble thee, and to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart, whether thou wouldest keep his commandments, or no” (v. 2). This would seem to violate the principle of grace preceding redemption. God had humbled them in order to see whether or not they would obey Him. The giving of the law at Sinai was followed by the negative sanction of national humiliation. Only four decades later was the prospect of inheritance before them. This seems to point to another pattern: law-humiliation-grace. To whom was Moses speaking? To the heirs of a formerly enslaved nation. The giving of the law did not take place in an historical vacuum. It took place after a series of miraculous deliverances. The giving of the Mosaic law was the culminating act of national deliverance. Grace precedes law, but it does not annul law. Law conirms grace. It ratiies a prior gift of God.

Covenantal Predictability and Social Theory Is the historical fulillment of God’s promises separate from the law? Not according to Moses. Is this fulillment separate from the recipients’ fulillment of the law? Only partially. Grace may bring 3. Ibid., p. 8. 4. Ibid., p. 9. 5. Ibid., p. 11.

186

DEUTERONOMY

fulillment despite a period of rebellion. Nevertheless, there is a covenantal pattern announced in the law, but especially in Deuteronomy: obedience brings blessings; disobedience brings cursings. Inheritance and disinheritance are not random; they are predictable covenantally. They are not predictable perfectly in all cases because grace is greater than sin. Negative sanctions are sometimes delayed despite sin (e.g., the Amorites in Canaan, Abraham to Moses – an example of common grace).6 But our ajrmation of grace must not become an ajrmation of historical indeterminism regarding corporate blessings and cursings. If grace is invoked to deny the consequences of law, then he who so invokes grace has become an ally of covenant-breakers. He has denied the covenant. He has denied the historical relevance of God’s law in history. But history does not take place in a judicial vacuum. Other law-orders will be imposed in order to govern men, including Christians. We must decide: God’s law or chaos? God’s law or tyranny? Whenever the covenantal predictability of corporate inheritance and disinheritance is denied, a uniquely biblical social theory becomes impossible. This is why Lutheranism has always been incapable of producing independent social theory. Luther was adamant about the irrelevance of Christianity for legal theory. To rulers, he wrote: “Certainly it is true of Christians, so far as they themselves are concerned, are subject neither to law [n]or sword, and have need of neither. But take heed and ill the world with real Christians before you attempt to rule in a Christian and evangelical manner.”7 As for true Christians, “these people need no temporal law or sword. If all the world were composed of real Christians, that is, true believers, there would be no need for or beneits from prince, king, sword, or law.”8 Luther was an ethical dualist.9 Because Lutheranism denies any relevance to biblical law in the arrival of corporate blessings, it must invoke ethical dualism: natural law or pagan law for the civil sphere, personal morality for the individual 6. Gary North, Dominion and Common Grace: The Biblical Basis of Progress (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987). 7. Martin Luther, “Temporal Authority: To What Extent Should It Be Obeyed?” (1523), Luther’s Works (1962), XLV, p. 91. 8. Ibid., p. 89. 9. Charles Trinkaus, “The Religious Foundations of Luther’s Social Views,” in John H. Mundy, et al., Essays in Medieval Life (Cheshire, Connecticut: Biblo & Tannen, 1955), pp. 71–87.

By Law or By Promise?

187

Christian, and silence regarding the church. But what is true of Lutheranism is equally true of any form of Christianity which uses the doctrine of grace to annul the covenantal predictability of historical sanctions. When Calvinism abandons faith in covenantal predictability in history, it ceases to be Calvinism; it becomes Lutheranism. Protestant social theology has almost always been Lutheran in content, if not form: an unstable mixture of personal Christian morality combined with humanistic, common-ground natural law theory. Personal morality is regarded as having had no meaningful implications for the development of social theory. This delivers social theory into the hands of covenant-breakers and their intellectual allies within the church, who share the covenant-breakers’ assumptions regarding the possibility of both ethical neutrality and epistemological neutrality, as well as the irrelevance or even harmful efects of Old Testament law on society. When theonomists challenge this unojcial but long-term alliance, they are challenged with some variation of the following: “The LORD look upon you, and judge; because ye have made our savour to be abhorred in the eyes of Pharaoh, and in the eyes of his servants, to put a sword in their hand to slay us” (Ex. 5:21).

Conclusion Moses told the conquest generation to obey God’s law. Yet he also cited the promise. He said that the long-term success of the conquest was dependent on their continued covenantal faithfulness. Yet the promise God made to Abraham was secure: sealed by an oath-sign. Their conquest of the land was guaranteed. Yet they were told to obey God’s laws. There can be no doubt that Moses invoked both the law and the promise. This is what troubles Protestant commentators. The solution to the problem is to recognize the judicial basis of the promise, which was a form of grace. All grace is grounded judicially on the perfect fulillment of the whole of God’s law. There must be perfect obedience. “For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet ofend in one point, he is guilty of all” (James 2:10). There can be no separation of law and promise, for promise is grounded in law. The question is: Whose obedience? The answer is inescapable: Jesus Christ’s obedience. So, the fulillment of any promise rests judicially on the fulillment of the demands of the law. Grace is present because of the representative character of Christ’s

188

DEUTERONOMY

fulillment, just as the curse is present because of the representative character of Adam’s Fall. Imputation by God is fundamental: the imputation of Christ’s perfection or the imputation of Adam’s sin. God looks on each person and imputes – declares judicially – one or the other moral condition. Then He pronounces sentence: “Guilty” or “Not guilty.” The Israelites would soon mark themselves as lawful heirs to the promise through circumcision. This they did under Joshua. In the wilderness, it had not mattered so much that they were not circumcised, but after they crossed the boundary of the land, they would have remained profane – sacred boundary violators – had they not become circumcised.10 To avoid remaining profane, they submitted to circumcision. Then they proceeded to remove the truly profane nations from the land. Moses was also warning them in this passage about the ethical basis of maintaining the kingdom grant. A nation of covenantbreakers could not indeinitely occupy the Promised Land. God would remove them (Deut. 8:19–20).

10. On the concept of the profane, see Gary North, Leviticus: An Economic Commentary (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), ch. 6.

18 MIRACLES, ENTROPY, SOCIAL THEORY Miracles, Entropy, AND and Social Theory And thou shalt remember all the way which the LORD thy God led thee these forty years in the wilderness, to humble thee, and to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart, whether thou wouldest keep his commandments, or no. And he humbled thee, and sufered thee to hunger, and fed thee with manna, which thou knewest not, neither did thy fathers know; that he might make thee know that man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the LORD doth man live. Thy raiment waxed not old upon thee, neither did thy foot swell, these forty years (Deut. 8:2–4).

The theocentric focus of this law is the absolute sovereignty of God over the creation, including man. God broke the laws of nature in order to sustain His people in the wilderness. This should persuade all men to obey God. God had fed Israel miraculously with manna. In the midst of their national humiliation, there had been life-giving grace. But that was not all: “Thy raiment waxed not old upon thee, neither did thy foot swell, these forty years” (v. 4). Their clothes had not worn out. Their feet had not become swollen. Moses made it clear that God’s grace had not been a one-time event. It had been a continuous process for four decades. He reminded them of this because a miracle sustained for decades ceases to be regarded as a miracle. It becomes a familiar aspect of daily life. It seems to be an inherent part of the environment, but it isn’t. Men expect beneits in this life. When these beneits are continual, men regard them as normal. This law was not a land law. It related to Israel’s wandering, but its intent was man’s universal obedience: “And he humbled thee, and sufered thee to hunger, and fed thee with manna, which thou knewest not, neither did thy fathers know; that he might make thee

189

190

DEUTERONOMY

know that man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the LORD doth man live.” Jesus cited this law to Satan in the famous stones-into-bread temptation (Matt. 4:4). It is clearly a cross-boundary law. A miracle is abnormal. It is a supernatural act of deliverance or blessing which disrupts the normal pattern of events. But the normal pattern of events is itself a manifestation of grace, beginning with life itself. This grace need not imply God’s favor; it is nevertheless an unmerited gift to men and angels, both fallen and unfallen.1 Both historical continuity and discontinuity are acts of God’s grace. The former is so continuous – a series of life-sustaining acts strung together ininitesimally close – that its gracious character is perceived only through faith, which in turn is an initially discontinuous event that through self-discipline is supposed to become continuous. The miracles of the wilderness era were so continuous that they took on the appearance of common grace. Moses reminded Israel of the special position which the nation had in God’s eyes, as proven by their patch-free clothing. God had actively intervened in history to sustain them in preparation for the promised day of judgment. The day of judgment is a day of sanctions, positive and negative, depending on one’s covenantal status. The day of negative sanctions was about to arrive inside the boundaries of Canaan. For the Israelites, this would bring the promised inheritance. For the Canaanites, this would bring the promised disinheritance; their cup of iniquity was at long last full (Gen. 15:16).

The Second Law of Thermodynamics I have written a book on the apologetic uses and misuses – mostly misuses – of the second law of thermodynamics.2 I wrote it for two reasons: 1) to refute a socialist propagandist who had presented a defense of State economic planning in terms of the need to reduce entropy; 2) to refute modern Creation Science insofar as the second law has been invoked to thwart the construction of an explicitly

1. Gary North, Dominion and Common Grace: The Biblical Basis of Progress (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987), ch. 2. 2. Gary North, Is the World Running Down? Crisis in the Christian Worldview (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1988).

Miracles, Entropy, and Social Theory

191

creationist social theory. In both cases, the theorists have misused the second law of thermodynamics. The irst law of thermodynamics is called the law of the conservation of energy. It states that the total energy of the universe – a supposedly closed system – does not change. Potential energy may become kinetic (changing) energy, but total energy does not change. Modern physics is built on this law. The condition described by the irst law of thermodynamics is one reason why there can never be a perpetual motion machine. It would have to produce more usable energy (work) than it began with. It would have to do its work and then re-supply itself with an amount of potential energy equal to or greater than it expended in doing the work. This is sometimes called a perpetual motion machine of the irst kind. The second law of thermodynamics states that in a closed system, potential energy can become kinetic energy, but kinetic energy – energy transformed – cannot become potential energy. Therefore, the energy available for usable work declines over time (classical thermodynamics). As an example, temperature moves from hot to cold, but it does not move from cold to hot unless external heat is applied. Another example: a brick may fall from a wall to the ground, but it will not rise from the ground to the wall unless additional energy is added to the process from outside the system, such as someone who lifts it. Put chronologically, time does not move backward. Contemporary humanism teaches that from the moment just after the Big Bang until that frozen waste called the heat death of the universe, energy is dissipated.3 Sir Arthur Eddington called this time’s arrow, and it creates a serious cosmological problem for evolutionists. Time’s arrow proceeds from order to disorder, whereas evolution’s arrow supposedly moves from less order to greater order – from the simple to the complex. These two processes have yet to be reconciled by means of an appeal to the thermodynamic laws governing the universe as a closed system. In any physical process – potential energy to kinetic energy – there will always be heat loss or heat dispersion, also described as an increase in randomness, within a closed system (statistical thermodynamics). This loss of coherence is sometimes called entropy.

3. But will electrons quit moving? Will atoms still be there? Does the second law apply to the subatomic realm?

192

DEUTERONOMY

Entropy is a measure of the increase in randomness. The work performed by a machine is a one-time event. The energy has been dissipated, some of it into heat loss. In a machine without oil or some other lubricant, the grinding of metal is audible to all: heat is being produced and then dissipated. There is no lubricant in nature that can overcome all of this heat loss. This is entropy’s law. This is a second reason why there can be no perpetual motion machine: heat loss. The machine cannot regain all of the energy expended in work because some of that kinetic energy is lost through heat dispersion. Perpetual clothing is the equivalent of a perpetual motion machine. This passage proves that, in principle, a perpetual motion machine is possible, but it takes supernatural resource inputs to make it run. The system – nature – is not closed all of the time. Whenever it is closed, however, clothing always wears out through friction. Everything wears out. Feet swell and then wear out. People attached to feet wear out. This is the second law of thermodynamics at work. Where work is performed in a closed system – no new infusions of energy or anything else from outside – the second law guarantees that there is a permanent loss of potential energy, so that some day, potential energy will dissipate – become random – and cease to perform any work. The universe eventually will go into permanent retirement, sometimes called the heat death of the universe. This is inevitable, unless . . . unless the second law of thermodynamics is violated by what is known in Christian circles as the inal judgment, or unless the second law of thermodynamics is violated by miracles, or unless the second law of thermodynamics is not actually a law but merely a familiar process regionally and temporally that is not in fact universal. Most physicists regard it as universal,4 which is why most physicists: 1) deny any inal judgment other than the impersonal heat death of the universe; 2) deny the existence of miracles. Once you admit the existence of miracles that are generated and sustained from outside the system of the universe, you thereby deny the universality of the second law of thermodynamics. If the universe is an open system, then the second law need not always apply. Unless you see God as a kind of pipeline operator who siphons of useful energy from other parts of the universe in order to overcome the negative efects of entropy in this region of the universe, 4. They are not equally sure regarding the subatomic realm.

Miracles, Entropy, and Social Theory

193

you must regard miracles as a violation of the second law. To deine miracles as consistent with the second law, you would have to explain the patch-free clothing of the Israelites as having caused a loss of potential energy somewhere else in the immense closed system called the universe. “Entropy still ruled in the wilderness, but its efects on Israelite clothing were ofset by God, who drained of potential energy from some other region.” Ultimately, this strictly physical approach to miracles would force Christians to explain the resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ in terms of permanently lost potential energy and the existence of a heat sink into which wasted energy was dispersed.

In the Garden of Eden

5

Adam had a nose. He had a sense of smell. But what was there to smell? The fragrance of lowers is a product of the second law of thermodynamics: the move from order to disorder. The millions of tiny particles that activate our sense of smell are distributed randomly, which is why we smell them rather than step in them. They do not pile up. Consider another example. What if Adam had wanted to build an internal combustion engine? Without a carburetor, the liquid known as gasoline would not power an automobile except in one iery propulsion event. The carburetor breaks up the liquid into tiny droplets and distributes them randomly in a heat chamber where these particles can be ignited safely by an electric spark. Were it not for the second law of thermodynamics, there would be only one explosion, not thousands per minute. What if Adam had wanted to play a friendly game of solitaire? He would have pulled out a deck of cards and shumed them. No cheating here! Shuming a deck of cards makes the order of the cards unpredictable. Why? Because their order has moved toward randomness. Why? Because of the second law of thermodynamics. This means that the second law of thermodynamics operated before the Fall of man. This was admitted once by Henry M. Morris, who elsewhere has built his apologetic for creationism on the second law. In an essay addressed primarily to scientists rather than 5. This section is based on “Entropy in the Garden of Eden,” Is the World Running Down?, pp. 124–26.

194

DEUTERONOMY

the general Christian public, he made this statement regarding the operation of the second law in Eden: “The formal announcement of the second law in its post-Fall form is found in Genesis 3:17–20. . . . Thus, as best we can understand both Scripture and science, we must date the establishment of the second law of thermodynamics, in its present form at least, from the tragic day on which Adam sinned. . . .”6 To speak of the “second law in its post-Fall form” and “in its present form at least” is an unobjectionable way to discuss the second law. It suggests that we must distinguish the pre-Fall and post-Fall operations of the second law. This implies that we should distinguish a cursed from an uncursed operation of that law. We live in a cursed-entropy world, not an entropy-cursed world. But as far as I am aware, nowhere else in his writings does Morris discuss the implications of this distinction, nor do his colleagues in the Creation Science movement. This is a major weakness in that movement. A discussion of entropy prior to Adam’s Fall is long overdue in Creation Science – so overdue that I suspect that a full discussion would raise objections to the ways in which the movement has used the second law in the past, as well as the ways in which the members of the movement have refused to use it. The correct use of the second law of thermodynamics in Christian apologetics mandates tight constraints. To argue that the world is running down because of entropy is incorrect. Prior to Adam’s rebellion, the second law of thermodynamics operated in a world that was in no way running down. The second law today operates diferently from the way it did in Eden. That is, the physical efects of the second law of thermodynamics were in some fundamental way changed by God after the Fall of man. These efects have been cursed. Entropy is a fact of life, like death and taxes. Prior to the Fall of man, it was equally a fact of life, before death and taxes had appeared. Despite entropy’s cursed efects, we can and should work to achieve longer life spans and lower taxes. The Bible prophesies a future era of longer life spans (Isa. 65:20). Why not lower taxes to match? Why not reductions in entropy? Entropy is a cost. We can

6. Henry M. Morris, “Thermodynamics and Biblical Theology,” in Emmett L. Williams (ed.), Thermodynamics and the Development of Order (Norcross, Georgia: Creation Research Books, 1981), pp. 129–30.

Miracles, Entropy, and Social Theory

195

ind ways of lowering costs. Motor oil reduces metallic friction and therefore reduces entropy. With respect to entropy’s economic costs, they have been steadily reduced since the Industrial Revolution. That entropy exists, there can be no doubt, although if it operates in the subatomic realm, it has not yet manifested itself. That entropy, as a cost of production, can have signiicant efects on a particular social order is also not doubted. But that a serious social theory can be constructed in terms of entropy as an ever-growing social cost is highly doubtful, as socialist Jeremy Rifkin’s failed attempt indicates. He ceased writing about entropy within a few years after he announced it as a major intellectual breakthrough, substituting time-management as the culprit of capitalism.

Continuity and Discontinuity The Christian’s case against Darwinian evolution can be based on the second law of thermodynamics only on the unstated assumption that today’s universe is not governed by the physical laws of the pre-Fall universe. The Christian must be very careful how he uses the second law. He cannot accurately say that entropy did not exist in Eden, because it did operate there. Pollen’s move from an ordered to a disordered (random) state – entropy – was what activated Adam’s sense of smell. What was missing in Eden was hay fever, not entropy. Entropy was not cursed before the Fall; today it is. But this is not how modern defenders of Creation Science usually state their case. They state it incorrectly, as if the second law of thermodynamics did not operate prior to the Fall. They do not distinguish between the uncursed and cursed efects of the second law; instead, they distinguish between a world before the second law was imposed by God and today’s fallen world under its despotic rule. They argue that the second law came into existence as a result of God’s curse. Morris writes: “This law states that all systems, if left to themselves, tend to become degraded or disordered. . . . This, then, is the true origin of the strange law of disorder and decay, universally applicable, allimportant second law of thermodynamics. Herein is the secret of all that’s wrong with the world. Man is a sinner and has brought God’s curse on the earth.”7 In 1982, he wrote: “It is well to be reminded 7. Henry M. Morris, The Genesis Record: A Scientiic and Devotional Commentary on the Book of Beginnings (San Diego, California: Creation-Life, 1976), p. 127.

196

DEUTERONOMY

that the two greatest laws of science – the universal principles of conservation and decay – are merely the scientiic formulations of, first, God’s completed and conserved work of creation, and second, His curse on the creation because of sin.”8 It is as if he had forgotten his properly qualiied statement in 1981: “The formal announcement of the second law in its post-Fall form is found in Genesis 3:17–20. . . . Thus, as best we can understand both Scripture and science, we must date the establishment of the second law of thermodynamics, in its present form at least, from the tragic day on which Adam sinned. . . .”9 Morris’ inaccurate formulation of the second law is widely cited in creationist circles, where it is invoked repeatedly in the apologetic against Darwinism. Hardly anyone knows about his correct formulation, which would force creationists to qualify this apologetic and thereby weaken it rhetorically, though strengthen it logically. Invoking the second law of thermodynamics is a strictly negative apologetic tactic, and, as we shall see, it falls on deaf humanist ears. The Christian uses this argument to refute a Darwinist’s assertion that ours is the only world there has ever been or will ever be. The Christian says: “If this really is the only world there has ever been, then the second law of thermodynamics tells us that things could not have evolved from less order to more order. Entropy denies Darwinism.” To which the faithful Darwinian replies: “But the second law applies only to closed systems, and the earth is not a closed system.” The proper Christian response is: “Then how did the universe itself evolve from disorder to order?” To which the no longer faithful Darwinian responds: “In the nanosecond of the Big Bang, when the second law did not apply.” The Darwinist must invoke cosmic discontinuity – the evolutionist’s equivalent of the Bible’s doctrine of creation out of nothing – in order to secure the present continuity of nature’s evolutionary processes. Many leading Darwinists have now capitulated to discontinuity, e.g., defenders of what is known as “punctuated equilibrium,” the physically unexplainable, extremely rapid, comprehensive biological trans-

8. Henry M. Morris, Evolution in Turmoil (San Diego, California: Creation-Life, 1982), p. 174. 9. Morris, “Thermodynamics and Biblical Theology” (1981), op. cit., pp. 129–30. Emphasis added.

Miracles, Entropy, and Social Theory

197

10

formations of entire species. But this does not shake their faith in the naturalism of the laws of evolution, any more than the existence of miracles shakes the Christian’s faith in the universality of the laws of thermodynamics. Each side explains the existence of exceptions to the not-quite universal laws of thermodynamics in terms of its respective presuppositions regarding the origins of the universe. In short, neither side is willing to admit that the universe has been governed by the second law of thermodynamics throughout history, if we deine history as including either the garden of Eden or the Big Bang. The Christian’s legitimate apologetic use of the second law of thermodynamics is therefore extremely limited in scope: to force the Darwinist to abandon uniformitarianism, i.e., the original Darwinian doctrine that the processes of nature that we observe today have always been operational. This doctrine is what provided the pre-Darwinian geologists with their evolutionary time scale, which was crucial to their denial of the accuracy of Genesis 1. This discovery of what John McPhee has called “deep time” led to the next intellectual revolution: Darwinism.11 Darwin adopted Hutton’s and Lyell’s uniformitarian geology before he restructured biology.12 But rare is the contemporary Darwinist who is silenced by the uniformitarian argument for cosmic continuity. He is willing to invoke cosmic discontinuities whenever convenient, now that he and his peers have agreed that Darwin’s continuity-based arguments have permanently shoved the Bible’s God out of the universe and out of men’s thinking. Having made such efective epistemological and cultural use of Darwinian continuity, evolutionists today feel secure in invoking discontinuity whenever convenient, in much the same way that the creationists invoke miracles. Punctuated equilibrium – unexplainably huge discontinuities in macro-evolution – is modern Darwinism’s equivalent of the Israelites’ crossing of the Red Sea. Darwinists want their cosmic miracles to be impersonal, so as to avoid considering God’s inal judgment. They want inal judgment

10. The main proponent in the United States is Harvard University paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. 11. McPhee is quoted by Stephen Jay Gould, Time’s Arrow/Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 2. 12. Robert A. Nisbet, Social Change and History: Aspects of the Western Theory of Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 182–84.

198

DEUTERONOMY

to be the impersonal eternal heat death of the universe long after they and everything else has died, not the highly personal eternal lames of the lake of ire. In contrast, Christians want their historical miracles to be personal, long before everything has died, in order to invoke God’s inal judgment. They want to escape the meaninglessness of the impersonal heat death of the universe in order to believe in the meaningfulness of God’s highly personal judicial declaration, “Not guilty!”

Is the Social World Running Down?

13

Those who invoke the second law as an argument against Darwinism are almost always premillennialists. Most of the others are amillennialists. As pessimillennialists, they also are highly tempted to argue that the social order is analogous to the physical order. It, too, is visibly running down. Nothing can restore it except: 1) the premillennial return of Jesus Christ to set up an earthly millennial kingdom (where the second law will be annulled or else overcome by regular miracles); 2) the amillennial return of Christ at the inal judgment (after which the second law will be annulled). Not many pessimillennialists will actually go into print on this point. In a lyer produced by the Bible-Science Association and the Genesis Institute (same address), we read the following: “The creationist realizes that the world is growing old around him. He understands that things tend to run down, to age, to die. The creationist does not look for the world to improve, but to crumble slowly — as in erosion, decay, and aging.”14 This is a philosophy of self-conscious defeat, a cry of cultural despair. It is also not the kind of philosophy that anyone would normally choose to challenge socialists or other humanists. The whole idea of social entropy as an aspect of physical entropy is wrong-headed. First, the entropic process of cosmic physical decay takes place in humanistic time scales of millions of years. Such a time scale is irrelevant for social theory, whether Christian or pagan. Societies do not survive for millions of years – not so far, anyway.

13. This section is based on Is the World Running Down?, ch. 3: “Entropy and Social Theory.” 14. What’s the Diference? Creation/Evolution? (no date), p. 2.

Miracles, Entropy, and Social Theory

199

Second, what does it mean to say “the world will [or will not] improve”? What world? The geophysical world? What does an ethical or aesthetic term such as “improve” have to do with the physical world? Scientiic evolutionists have been careful to avoid such value-laden adjectives with respect to historical geology or biology, at least with respect to the world prior to mankind’s appearance. Without a moral evaluator, says the Darwinist, there can be no meaning for the word “improve.” Christians should be equally careful in their use of language. The Christian should argue that God evaluates any improvement or degeneration in the external world, and therefore men, acting as God’s subordinates, also make such evaluations. But there is no autonomous impersonal standard of “world improvement,” as any evolutionist readily admits. So, the lyer apparently had as its point of reference not the geophysical world but rather man’s social world. The lyer says that things tend to run down. “Evolution demands that things ‘wind up’ even as we see them run down. Therefore the evolutionist looks for things to improve.” This implies that Christians should not look for things to improve. Again, what do we mean by “improve”? If things only tend to run down, this implies that sometimes things don’t run down. If so, then there must be decay-ofsetting progressive forces in operation. What might these be? The main one is the gospel of salvation. Regeneration restores ethical wholeness to men. Another ofsetting factor is obedience to the law of God. God’s law enables men to rebuild a cursed world. In other words, ethics is fundamental; entropy isn’t. This is why entropy, to the extent that any such phenomenon applies to the afairs of men, is only a tendency. The reason why I keep citing this short document (tract) is because it is the one creationist document I have seen that even mentions social theory, and even then only vaguely. I would have been happy to consider other documents from Creation Scientists that deal with entropy in relation to social theory, but I have been unable to ind any. In 1988, I searched the complete set of the Creation Social Sciences and Humanities Quarterly and found nothing on the topic. There is zero interest in this topic in modern evangelicalism. There is almost as little interest in the relationship between creationism and the social sciences. By 1895, 36 years after the publication of Origin of Species, Darwinism had captured virtually every academic ield. By 1995, 34 years after the publication of Morris

200

DEUTERONOMY

and Whitcomb’s Genesis Flood, this thin quarterly magazine had 600 subscribers. Why this silence on social theory? It may be that the entropy paradigm is so powerful that six-day creationists have become pessimistic about the possibility of constructing the foundations of a self-consciously biblical social science. Perhaps they have been bamed by some variation of this question: “If entropy is the dominant factor in life, how can there be progress in social institutions, including the family and the institutional church?” The answer that I ofer is simple enough: both the resurrection and bodily ascension of Jesus Christ have made possible the historical overcoming of many of the cursed aspects of entropy in the physical universe, and to whatever extent that entropy-related curses afect social institutions, these efects can be ofset even more rapidly than in the physical realm. Why? Because the three main institutions of society – family, church, and State – are covenantal. Point four of the biblical covenant model – sanctions15 – ofers legitimate hope in comprehensive healing in history. This healing is both personal and institutional.16 The closer we get to man, who is made in God’s image, the more the covenant’s sanctions of blessings and cursings become visible. I suspect that there is a better explanation for pessimillennialists’ silence on social theory. It is not that pessimillennialists have become paralyzed in their development of social theory by the power of the concept of entropy. Rather, it is the other way around: their pessimillennialism has governed their use of the concept of entropy. Their inherently pessimistic social theory has led to a particular application of the entropy concept: the denial of entropy in the pre-Fall world. They see physical entropy much as they see the social world: inherently debilitating rather than cursed in its efects. They see entropy as the dominant factor in a physical world governed by physical decay; they see disorder as the dominant factor in a social world governed by moral decay. They see isolated islands of physical order in a world of escalating physical disorder; they see isolated islands of social order in a world of escalating social and moral decay. They view the physical universe as declining into oblivion apart 15. Ray R. Sutton, That You May Prosper: Dominion By Covenant (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1992), ch. 4. 16. Gary North, Healer of the Nations: Biblical Blueprints for International Relations (Ft. Worth, Texas: Dominion Press, 1987).

Miracles, Entropy, and Social Theory

201

from occasional miracles; they see history as declining into oblivion apart from rare events of individual salvation. The physical world must march toward physical chaos until God calls the process to a halt at the inal judgment. The social world must also march toward social chaos until God calls the process to a halt at the inal judgment. In neither case does the New Testament doctrine of Christ’s bodily resurrection and ascension to the right hand of God play any theoretical role. In both cases, the Old Testament’s curses are left unafected by the New Testament’s blessings. In both cases, the Old Testament’s tale of rebellion and destruction is dominant. In neither case does New Testament biblical theology play any role. The New Testament’s message of comprehensive redemption – the Great Commission – is denied in the name of the Old Covenant’s pre-ascension setbacks. When I published Is the World Running Down?, I did not expect Creation Scientists to respond to it in print. I was correct; almost no one did. More to the point, no one in the movement has ever written a book on entropy and social theory; mine remains the only Christian book that deals with the subject, which minimizes the connections between physical entropy and social entropy. I admit freely that physical entropy imposes costs on production processes, but the key question is social: Which social order best encourages the discovery and implementation of technological reductions in these costs? Creation Scientists do not bother to ask this question. The Creation Science movement has not produced a single social theorist since The Genesis Flood appeared in 1961. This is ominous for the Creation Science movement. It means that the movement’s attempt to reconstruct modern natural science has not only failed to persuade the vast majority of natural scientists, it has persuaded no social scientists. Why is this ominous? Because the success of Darwinism can be measured by its penetration of all other academic ields within a single generation. As I said earlier, three decades after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, the worldwide intellectual community had become overwhelmingly Darwinian. In almost every academic discipline in the social sciences and the humanities, Darwinists had laid totally new intellectual foundations; each ield had been totally reconstructed to conform to Darwinism. By 1890, the Progressive Movement in the United States was ready to restructure civil government and social theory, including theology, in terms of the Darwinian

202

DEUTERONOMY

17

ideal of scientiic central planning. So were Progressivism’s cousins in Europe, the Social Democrats. The absence of any similar efort, let alone success, among Creation Science’s adherents outside of the natural sciences, indicates that there is either something missing in or radically wrong with the movement’s entropy apologetic. This was one of my main themes in Is the World Running Down?: the incompatibility of Creation Science’s entropy apologetic with biblical social theory. Our physical world is not a closed system; neither is our social world. God intervenes in nature and history. He intervened in the corporate life of Israel during the wilderness period, overcoming entropy in the area of apparel.

Pessimillennialism and Social Theory I argue that the Creation Science movement has a hidden but widely shared eschatological agenda: pessimillennialism. Dispensational premillennialists and amillennialists want to believe that the social world must continue to deteriorate alongside the physical world, and a whole lot faster. They accept what might be called “the uniformitarianism of social deterioration.” Evil is always compounding in such a view. This steady increase in evil is fast approaching that point on the social graph when the curve will turn sharply upward and begin to approach ininity as a limit: the exponential curve. In other words, pessimillennialists believe that things will soon get so bad socially that Jesus will just have to come again in person to straighten everything out by force. This time of exponential social evil is almost upon us; therefore, they conclude, the Second Coming is just around the corner. They believe that there is not enough time remaining to reverse this process of deterioration. Furthermore, there is no possibility of doing so: social entropy is as universal as physical entropy is. No long-term reversal of social entropy is compatible with the entropy apologetic. The institutional church is seen as socially impotent; the gospel is seen as exclusively personal; and fulilling the Great Commission18 is seen as an impossible dream.

17. Sidney Fine, Laissez Faire and the General-Welfare State: A Study of Conlict in American Thought, 1865–1901 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1956), Part 2. 18. Kenneth L. Gentry, Jr., The Greatness of the Great Commission: The Christian Enterprise in a Fallen World (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990).

Miracles, Entropy, and Social Theory

203

Until Creation Science begins to have an impact on social thought, it will be unable to counteract Darwinism, which long ago reconstructed social theory in its own image. The presuppositions underlying modern biological evolution appeared irst in the social theories of the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment, not in the natural sciences.19 Then, after 1880, the free market social theory of pre-Darwinian evolutionism was abandoned; replacing it was reform Social Darwinism: State planning. Evolutionistic social theory laid the foundations of biological Darwinism, just as pessimillennialism laid the foundations of Creation Science’s entropy apologetic. Until the eschatological agenda of Creation Science is openly discussed, Creation Science will continue to be irrelevant outside of the natural sciences. Until pessimillennialism is abandoned by Creation Science, Creation Science will continue to be irrelevant in the area of social theory. Pessimillennialism makes impossible the development of a speciically biblical social theory.20 Premillennialists presumably believe in “universal social entropy.” But there is neither a formula governing social entropy nor any way scientiically to identify or measure this supposed phenomenon, unlike physical entropy. Premillennialists implicitly assume that this universal social entropy will be reversed or ofset during the future millennium. They do not say this explicitly, however. Premillennialists refuse to discuss the topic of entropy’s operations during the coming millennium. Perhaps they choose not to think about such matters; in any case, they refuse to write about them. Henry M. Morris ignores the topic in his commentary on the Book of Revelation. He says that entropy will be repealed after the inal judgment,21 but he is conveniently silent with respect to entropy during the millennial kingdom. Most premillennialists believe that things will no longer decline morally and socially during the millennium.22

19. F. A. Hayek, “The Results of Human Action but not of Human Design” (1967), in Hayek, Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (University of Chicago Press, 1967), ch. 6; S. S. Schweber, “The Origin of the Origin Revisited,” Journal of the History of Biology, X (1977), pp. 229–316. 20. Gary North, Millennialism and Social Theory (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990). 21. Henry M. Morris, The Revelation Record (Wheaton, Illinois: Tyndale House, 1983), p. 441. 22. An exception is accountant-turned-theologian Dave Hunt. See Hunt, Beyond Seduction: A Return to Biblical Christianity (Eugene, Oregon: Harvest House, 1987), p. 250. For a critique, see Is the World Running Down?, pp. 257–63.

204

DEUTERONOMY

Presumably, premillennialists also believe that the efects of physical entropy will somehow be ofset during the millennium. They never discuss this, and so I cannot know for sure what they believe on this point. I doubt that they do, either. On the other hand, if entropy’s efects will be ofset cosmically, then the millennium will constitute one gigantic miracle. If they will be ofset at a price by normal scientiic and technological progress, then we can in theory do the same thing now without the bodily return of Jesus to rule from Jerusalem or Colorado Springs or wherever He will set up headquarters. In either case, entropy is not a permanently debilitating factor in social organizations. Either a series of miracles will ofset it, as took place in the wilderness era, or mankind’s eforts in reducing costs will ofset it. Amillennialists see no permanent future reversal of social decline in history; a better day is not coming on this side of the Second Coming. In this sense, amillennialists are what Rushdoony once said they are: premillennialists without earthly hope. Neither of these pessimillennial creationist groups sees any advantage in devoting time and money to a study of biblical social theory. Why bother? Isn’t everything going to hell in an entropic handbasket? Is not everything doomed? Wouldn’t any investment of time and money in developing a creationist social theory constitute a waste of scarce economic resources, like polishing brass on a sinking ship? Moses had an answer for such rhetorical questions: no!

Conclusion A very clever professor of engineering once stated a speciic form of the second law of thermodynamics: “Confusion (entropy) is always increasing in society. Only if someone or something works extremely hard can this confusion be reduced to order in a limited region. Nevertheless, this efort will still result in an increase in the total confusion of society at large.”23 If knowledge were the product of physical creation – or if life were – then his theorem would be correct in this sin-cursed (but not entropy-cursed) world. Moses’ account of the wilderness indicates that life is not strictly physical. Other laws apply. It is worth noting that the famous physicist, Erwin 23. W. L. Everitt, Dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois. Cited in Paul Dickenson, The Ojcial Rules (New York: Delacorte Press, 1978), p. 48.

Miracles, Entropy, and Social Theory

205

Schrödinger, insisted that life is governed by laws diferent from those established by modern physical theory. In his book, What Is Life?, he wrote: “What I wish to make clear in this last chapter is, in short, that from all we have learnt about the structure of living matter, we must be prepared to ind it working in a manner that cannot be reduced to the ordinary laws of physics.”24 To persuade Israel that promise precedes law, and therefore that grace precedes law, Moses reminded them of their experience in the wilderness. God had overcome the laws of nature by feeding them with manna and by keeping their clothing from wearing out. In modern terminology, God had suspended the second law of thermodynamics. Entropy in these areas had been reduced to zero. There had been neither wear nor tear on their clothing. This was miraculous. Moses expected Israel to understand this. God’s active intervention into the processes of nature had been continuous for four decades. He had overturned the laws of nature in order to humble them without killing them. To keep them both humble and alive in the wilderness as a test of their covenantal commitment, He had performed a series of miracles that constituted one long miracle. They had passed the test. Now, Moses was telling them, God would secure the long-promised kingdom grant for them through military conquest. But their continued covenantal corporate obedience would be required by God in order for the nation to maintain this kingdom grant. This Mosaic world-and-life view ofers hope for society. Whenever men remain covenantally faithful through obedience to God’s Bible-revealed laws, social progress is not only possible, it is assured. God’s kingdom grant was given to the church by Jesus after His resurrection: “All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen” (Matt. 28:18b–20). This kingdom grant was sealed by His ascension in history. “Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works

24. Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell (Cambridge University Press, [1944] 1967), p. 81.

206

DEUTERONOMY

than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father. And whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be gloriied in the Son. If ye shall ask any thing in my name, I will do it” (John 14:12–14). Therefore, Jesus instructed us, “If ye love me, keep my commandments” (v. 15). The Great Commission will be fulilled prior to the inal judgment: “Then cometh the end, when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father; when he shall have put down all rule and all authority and power. For he must reign, till he hath put all enemies under his feet. The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death. For he hath put all things under his feet. But when he saith, all things are put under him, it is manifest that he is excepted, which did put all things under him. And when all things shall be subdued unto him, then shall the Son also himself be subject unto him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all” (I Cor. 15:24–28). The termination of entropy’s curse will coincide with the termination of death: the last enemy to be subdued. No more worn-out clothes and no more swollen feet: what was in the wilderness evermore shall be, world without end, amen.

19 CHASTENING INHERITANCE ChasteningAND and Inheritance Thou shalt also consider in thine heart, that, as a man chasteneth his son, so the LORD thy God chasteneth thee. Therefore thou shalt keep the commandments of the LORD thy God, to walk in his ways, and to fear him. For the LORD thy God bringeth thee into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and depths that spring out of valleys and hills (Deut. 8:5–7).

The theocentric focus of this passage is stated in the passage: God as the chastener of His son, Israel. Israel’s judicial position as an adopted son was the basis of both types of sanction: positive (Promised Land) and negative (chastening). The proof of God’s negative sanctions would be Israel’s imminent inheritance of the Promised Land. This was not a seed law. Its intent was universal: “Therefore thou shalt keep the commandments of the LORD thy God, to walk in his ways, and to fear him” (v. 6). Deuteronomy follows Numbers, the book of sanctions. Moses here tells Israel that they must obey God’s commandments in order to escape His chastening, but also because God was about to lead them into the Promised Land. The covenantal link between historical sanctions and earthly inheritance is as unbreakable as the link between God’s revealed law (“commandments”) and sanctions (“chastening”). Put another way, the covenantal link between historical sanctions and eschatology is as ixed as the covenantal link between law and historical sanctions. Put a third way, historical sanctions are the covenantal link between law and eschatology. Put comprehensively, theonomy is not simply a matter of God’s law; it is a matter of the covenant: God’s absolute sovereignty, man’s subordinate authority, Bible-revealed law’s

207

208

DEUTERONOMY

continuity, historical sanctions’ predictability, and postmillennialism. Put as a slogan, theonomy is a package deal.

Israel as God’s Son “Thou shalt also consider in thine heart, that, as a man chasteneth his son, so the LORD thy God chasteneth thee.” This warning ajrmed the legal status of Israel as the son of God. More than this: Israel was God’s irstborn son. “And thou shalt say unto Pharaoh, Thus saith the LORD, Israel is my son, even my irstborn: And I say unto thee, Let my son go, that he may serve me: and if thou refuse to let him go, behold, I will slay thy son, even thy irstborn” (Ex. 4:22–23). As the irstborn son, Israel was entitled to a double portion of the inheritance (Deut. 21:15–17). This relected the greater responsibility of the irstborn son in representing the father and the covenant line. The irstborn was supposed to declare his father’s word to the younger sons. The younger sons would grow up under the authority of the irstborn son. His authority was psychologically derived from his age, but it was judicially derived from his status as heir. The heir spoke his father’s word authoritatively. This placed an added responsibility on Israel’s shoulders to declare God’s commandments to the gentiles. Judicially speaking, the gentiles were the younger sons. They were not to speak authoritatively to Israel; the opposite was true. This was why God raised up Jonah as a prophet to bring God’s covenant lawsuit against Nineveh. The Promised Land was Israel’s double portion. Deuteronomy 8 devotes considerable space to a detailed description of the manifold blessings of the Promised Land (vv. 7–13). There was to be no question in their minds that this constituted a double portion. This was the preferred land. It was not then the barren, parched land that it is today. It was still a land where a ram could get its horns caught in the branches of a thicket on top of a mountain (Gen. 22:13). Today, the mountains of Palestine are barren. Israel was required to obey God’s commandments as a representative son. Israel was under the covenant. In order to declare the covenant authoritatively, a person must be under the terms of the covenant. To remind them that they were under these terms, Moses warned them of God’s chastening. There had been negative sanctions imposed on national Israel for her disobedience. These sanctions testiied to Israel’s status as a son. Chastening was a negative sanction intended to restore the father-son relationship. It was not a

Chastening and Inheritance

209

sanction designed to beat down and destroy those brought under them. It was not the permanent negative historical sanction that God demanded that Israel impose on the inhabitants of Canaan. Israel’s status as a irstborn son reveals why God told Israel to destroy Canaan. The Canaanites were second-born sons of God: disinherited sons. They were occupying the inheritance of the irstborn son. But why did this give Israel the right to kill them? In the Mosaic law, there was only one case where a family member was authorized to take part in the execution of another family member: when the convicted member had tried to lure the sanctions-bringing member to worship a false god (Deut. 13:6–10). Canaanites were a threat to Israel because they would eventually lure Israel into false worship. This was the reason God gave Israel for destroying the Canaanites. The presence of Canaanites in the land would be a constant source of temptation (Ex. 34:11–16). If allowed to remain in the Promised Land, the Canaanites would eventually become bonded to Israel through marriage (Ex. 34:16). As the second-born sons in the household, they would lead Israel into rebellion against the Father. God knew this, and so He announced that He had judged the Canaanites in advance and had found them guilty. Israel had to serve as God’s executioner. The irstborn sons and the second-born sons could not occupy the same landed inheritance. This theme of the inheritance of the irstborn and second-born sons is found repeatedly in Genesis. Again and again, the irstborn son proved to be the disinherited son. It began with Adam’s rebellion; the inheritance was transferred to God’s chronologically second-born son, Jesus Christ.1 The second-born Son became the irstborn judicially. This theme of the rebellion of the irstborn continued with Cain’s slaying of Abel. Esau was also the irstborn, but God told Rebekah that the younger would rule the elder (Gen. 25:23). This repeated reversal of the legal pattern of inheritance was based on God’s grace in re-inheriting the younger brother through adoption while condemning the disinherited older brother. The Canaanites as elder brothers had gained possession of the land, but as disinherited

1. Paul established the distinction between the irst Adam and the second or last Adam, Jesus Christ: “And so it is written, The irst man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit” (I Cor. 15:45).

210

DEUTERONOMY

sons, their claim was invalid. Israel, by God’s grace, had become the irstborn son with lawful title.

Sufering and Imposing Negative Sanctions Moses had already reminded them that God had humbled them in the wilderness (Deut. 8:2). This sufering was a form of chastening. Their sufering was to remind them that they were under the terms of God’s covenant as a son. God had already called them to impose His permanent negative historical sanctions on the wilderness side of the Jordan. This had led to the expansion of Israel’s inheritance. Reuben (Israel’s irstborn), Gad, and half the tribe of Manasseh inherited this land (Num. 32:33). This served as a down payment on the national inheritance. God had shown that He would deliver their inheritance to them through military conquest. They should not fear their enemies. The four decades of negative sanctions were not intended to destroy them but rather to conirm them in the covenant. They were sons, not bastards. “For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth. If ye endure chastening, God dealeth with you as with sons; for what son is he whom the father chasteneth not? But if ye be without chastisement, whereof all are partakers, then are ye bastards, and not sons” (Heb. 12:6–8). The legal bastards – disinherited sons – were about to be publicly disinherited. Sonship is by oath consigned. There must be a physical representation of this covenant oath in order for it to become the legal basis of inheritance. The Israelites had not yet been circumcised, which is why they had to be circumcised before they could begin the war to inherit Canaan (Josh. 5:8). Outside of Canaan, they had already begun the conquest, but the actual inheritance of the transJordan lands was delayed until after the defeat of Canaan (Deut. 3:20). The tribes dwelling on the wilderness side of the Jordan also had to be circumcised before lawful title to the inheritance could be legally transferred by God to His irstborn son. Israel’s physical sufering at Gilgal was preparatory to the far worse physical sufering of the Canaanites. Israelites had to experience the negative physical sanction of circumcision before they could lawfully impose the negative physical sanction of death inside the boundaries of the Promised Land.

Chastening and Inheritance

211

Those who were formally under God’s covenant sanctions were the only people authorized by God to impose negative civil sanctions in Israel. Citizenship is established by oath. Those who seek to impose negative civil sanctions and participate in the political sacrament of voting must irst place themselves formally under the terms of God’s two covenants, church and State.2

Conclusion Moses announced the requirement that Israel, as the son of God, was required to keep God’s commandments. God had been humbling them for four decades. Now, He was about to bring them into a bountiful land which would be their inheritance. The sequence was as follows: negative sanctions as a means of maturity through chastening, obedience to God’s law as an ethical requirement, and inheritance in history. The chastening, while a negative sanction, was in fact conirmation of their legal position as inheriting sons. So, this negative sanction was a form of grace. Once again, we are reminded that grace precedes law. But this passage also indicates that law precedes the transfer of the inheritance in history. The second-born gentile sons of Canaan had been disinherited by God in Abraham’s day: “But in the fourth generation they shall come hither again: for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full” (Gen. 15:16). This verbally imputed disinheritance – what we might call deinitive or judicial disinheritance – was to be achieved progressively: “I will send my fear before thee, and will destroy all the people to whom thou shalt come, and I will make all thine enemies turn their backs unto thee. And I will send hornets before thee, which shall drive out the Hivite, the Canaanite, and the Hittite, from before thee. I will not drive them out from before thee in one year; lest the land become desolate, and the beast of the ield multiply against thee. By little and little I will drive them out from before thee, until thou be increased, and inherit the land” (Ex. 23:27–30). This disinheritance was to be inally achieved in history: “When the LORD thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee, the Hittites, and the 2. This principle of civil law remains covenantally authoritative. It is dishonored in New Testament times by every system of civil government that bases citizenship on anything other than public Trinitarian confession and communing membership in the institutional church.

212

DEUTERONOMY

Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than thou; And when the LORD thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them” (Deut. 7:1–2). The covenant’s development in history is relected in the structure of the covenant: sovereign grace, hierarchical sonship, law, sanctions, and inheritance. The conquest of Canaan, from God’s deinitive promise to Abraham regarding the inheritance of Abraham’s sons to the inal defeat and disinheritance of the Canaanites, is representative of all of man’s history. While this covenant sequence was always broken by Old Covenant Israel, as represented by the survival of a remnant of Canaanites in the land, the New Covenant sequence moves toward historical fulillment of this sequence. “For evildoers shall be cut of: but those that wait upon the LORD, they shall inherit the earth” (Ps. 37:9).

20 OVERCOMING POVERTY Overcoming Poverty A land wherein thou shalt eat bread without scarceness, thou shalt not lack any thing in it; a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills thou mayest dig brass (Deut. 8:9).

This description appeared in a passage devoted to the dominion. It related to Israel’s inheritance of the land, but its ethical intention was universal: “Therefore thou shalt keep the commandments of the LORD thy God, to walk in his ways, and to fear him” (Deut. 8:6). It was not a seed law or land law. This description of a land without scarcity seems consistent with the sabbatical year of release from debt: “At the end of every seven years thou shalt make a release. And this is the manner of the release: Every creditor that lendeth ought unto his neighbour shall release it; he shall not exact it of his neighbour, or of his brother; because it is called the LORD’S release. Of a foreigner thou mayest exact it again: but that which is thine with thy brother thine hand shall release; Save when there shall be no poor among you; for the LORD shall greatly bless thee in the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee for an inheritance to possess it” (Deut. 15:1–4). But it seems inconsistent with Deuteronomy 15:11: “For the poor shall never cease out of the land: therefore I command thee, saying, Thou shalt open thine hand wide unto thy brother, to thy poor, and to thy needy, in thy land.” God’s ajrmation that they would eat bread without scarceness – the abolition of poverty – did not negate the sabbatical year law, which implied that this law would cease when there was no more poverty in the land. But He also promised that there would always be poverty in the land. How can all this be sorted out biblically?

213

214

DEUTERONOMY

Biblical Scarceness vs. Economic Scarcity The word translated here as “scarceness” occurs only once in the Old Testament. It is derived from a Hebrew word, miskeluth, meaning poverty, which is found only in Ecclesiastes. “Better is a poor and a wise child than an old and foolish king, who will no more be admonished” (Eccl. 4:13). “Now there was found in it a poor wise man, and he by his wisdom delivered the city; yet no man remembered that same poor man. Then said I, Wisdom is better than strength: nevertheless the poor man’s wisdom is despised, and his words are not heard” (Eccl. 9:15–16). Miskeluth in turn derives from the Hebrew word translated as “folly”: siklooth. This word is also conined exclusively to verses in Ecclesiastes, such as in Ecclesiastes 2:13: “Then I saw that wisdom excelleth folly, as far as light excelleth darkness.” Siklooth is derived from sawkal’: silliness. “And Samuel said to Saul, Thou hast done foolishly: thou hast not kept the commandment of the LORD thy God, which he commanded thee: for now would the LORD have established thy kingdom upon Israel for ever” (I Sam. 13:13). By tracing the origins of these words, we see a connection: scarceness, poverty, folly, silliness. The essence of silliness is that men refuse to keep God’s commandments, as Samuel told Saul. Obedience brings wealth. This is the core meaning of Moses’ description of the Promised Land. The land contains a sujcient supply of scarce economic resources to enable a covenant-keeper to eat bread. This concept is diferent from the economists’ concept of scarcity. The economist deines scarcity in terms of price. At zero price, the demand for a scarce economic resource will be greater than its supply. This was surely not what Moses had in mind: “. . . a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills thou mayest dig brass” (Deut. 8:9b). Any expenditure of labor is a payment. The copper of Israel was not obtainable apart from labor.1 The Promised Land was not outside of history and its cursed scarcity. It was a place with sujcient resources that a folly-avoiding person who obeyed God’s commandments would not sufer poverty. David observed: “I have been young, and now am old; yet 1. The King James translators always translated the Hebrew word for copper as brass, an alloy of copper and zinc.

Overcoming Poverty

215

have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread” (Ps. 37:25). Poverty in Israel would be abnormal for covenantkeepers if Israel remained faithful to God. This wealth principle was not conined to Mosaic Israel.

The Ultimate Resource The ultimate resource is not human creativity, contrary to Julian Simon’s book.2 Rather, it is God’s covenant. Not creativity as such but adherence to God’s law is what brings forth the positive creativity that sustains long-term economic growth. Human creativity can sometimes be perverse, and it then brings forth not wealth but poverty. Warfare is sometimes such a counter-productive endeavor. Covenant-keeping is the key to wealth. It is the wealth formula. A society does not need resources other than liberty, a willingness to work hard and wisely in terms of God’s moral standards, and some way to transport products to and from the world outside. The tiny community of Hong Kong since 1945 has become a formidable economic competitor in several ields, most notably in textiles and inancial services.3 The United States government has long been pressured by American textile and clothing manufacturers to legislate import quotas against clothing exported by this geographically tiny (a little over 400 square miles) society of six million hard-working people,4 so competitive are Hong Kong’s manufacturers. Hong Kong has almost no natural resources. It has to import at least 90% of everything it consumes. Only one-seventh of its land is arable.5 Its only natural resource of any consequence is its harbor. Meanwhile, other parts of the world are awash in natural resources, but they are also awash in envy, crime, government regulations on the economy, and present-oriented people who choose not to save. These societies are marked by their poverty.

2. Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1981). 3. I am reviewing this passage in August of 1997, a few weeks after political authority over Hong Kong was transferred by Great Britain to Communist China. 4. In 1945, about 600,000 lived there. Alvin Rabushka, Hong Kong: A Study in Economic Freedom (University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 11. 5. Ibid., p. 12.

216

DEUTERONOMY

Israel’s Natural Resources Israel had many natural resources. It also had access to the Mediterranean Sea. It was “A land of wheat, and barley, and vines, and ig trees, and pomegranates; a land of oil olive, and honey” (Deut. 8:8). The threat to Israel’s prosperity was not the threat of natural resource depletion. God did not warn them to use civil government coercion to conserve resources. He warned them against forgetting where they had received these resources: Beware that thou forget not the LORD thy God, in not keeping his commandments, and his judgments, and his statutes, which I command thee this day: Lest when thou hast eaten and art full, and hast built goodly houses, and dwelt therein; And when thy herds and thy locks multiply, and thy silver and thy gold is multiplied, and all that thou hast is multiplied; Then thine heart be lifted up, and thou forget the LORD thy God, which brought thee forth out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage (Deut. 8:11–14).

Covenantal forgetfulness would eventually produce covenantal faithlessness. This would lead to God’s corporate negative sanctions against them (vv. 19–20). If they enjoyed the gifts without remembering and worshipping the Giver, then their prosperity would not survive. It was God’s covenantal administration that would enable them to prosper in the Promised Land.

Land and Labor The list of resources emphasized agriculture, herding, and mining. These were traditional occupations in the ancient world, along with seafaring, trade, and textiles. The Promised Land’s geography ofered all of them. The economist generally refers to these resources as land.6 The Promised Land was illed with resources. The Israelites could therefore look forward to prosperity. They were not expected by God to believe in Hong Kong economics: compounding creativity that makes land valuable mainly as a consumer good

6. In this technical sense, the sea is land. Because of its liquid status, the sea and rivers present problems for assigning ownership. That which lows is dijcult to isolate; that which cannot be isolated is dijcult to own and disown. It is this problem which leads to pollution, both liquid and air-borne: using water and air as free resources to reduce production costs.

Overcoming Poverty

217

rather than land that supplies raw materials. Even today, Hong Kong’s economic success is almost beyond the willingness of university-educated people to understand, accept, or believe. This was especially true prior to 1980. As Rabushka wrote in 1979, “One can, I think, count the number of American economists who study Hong Kong’s political economy on the ingers of one hand, or at most two.”7 The idea that widespread prosperity can be attained without the natural resource of land is not readily believed. This was especially true before Bill Gates became the richest man in America at age 30 by owning and improving software code. To go from about $50,000 in 1981 to $100 billion in 1999 by means of magnetic ones and zeros embedded on pieces of plastic – plus the ability to persuade millions of buyers that these inexpensive pieces of plastic are useful – would have appeared impossible in 1981. Today, however, creating this kind of personal wealth seems possible only by doing highly creative things with magnetic ones and zeros. Nevertheless, a great deal has changed in people’s thinking since 1980. This change accelerated rapidly among the West’s intellectual elite after the highly popular (in the Western media, but not in the USSR) Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev publicly admitted the collapse of the Soviet economy in 1989, which in fact had not collapsed at all, since it had never been sujciently productive to have collapsed. The Soviet Union had always been little more than a Third World country, i.e., dependent on government aid and loans from Western banks. It had an insane economic system, a fact made hilariously clear in Leopold Tyrmand’s 1972 book, The Rosa Luxemburg Contraceptive Cooperative. Communist nations’ poverty had been visible to anyone who visited them with open eyes and no socialist presuppositions, i.e., people other than Western intellectuals.8 What collapsed in 1989 was Western intellectuals’ faith in the productivity of the State’s direct ownership of the means of production. This collapse was seen within a few months in America’s book stores: $24.95 books written by Marxist college professors were 7. Rabushka, Hong Kong, p. 2. 8. Sylvia R. Margulies, The Pilgrimage to Russia: The Soviet Union and the Treatment of Foreigners, 1924–1937 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968); Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).

218

DEUTERONOMY

being sold in discount bins for a dollar or two. After the failed Communist coup in late August of 1991, such books became very dijcult to ind except for a few titles in university book stores, where tenured Marxist professors who pretend that their worldview hasn’t become a joke, even among their liberal academic colleagues, still assign them to students who have no way to escape. Yet new Marxist book titles had illed whole bookcases annually prior to 1989.

The Wealth Formula What God told Israel was this: the maintenance of the kingdom grant was conditional. They had to keep God’s commandments. He did not tell them that He would miraculously add new supplies of iron and copper if they proved to be obedient. He would multiply them and their locks. He would multiply their vines. They would get wealthier, step by step. The heart of this system of economic growth was the covenant: law, positive corporate sanctions, and compound economic growth. God gave them the wealth formula. They did not adopt it. This had to wait until the late eighteenth century. When men at long last accepted it, they entered into the world of compound economic growth, where growth in output of two percent per year for two centuries brings personal wealth beyond the dreams of kings in 1800. Computer technology has converted silicon – sand – into wealth beyond anything ever dreamed by the ancient and medieval magicians and alchemists. But the modern world has reversed the covenantal imagery of blessing. “That in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore; and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies” (Gen. 22:17). God views sand as cheap and children as valuable. The modern world sees children as a liability and sand as an asset.9 This 9. The U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion in 1973. Two years later, beachfront property in southern California began to soar in value even faster than other southern California real estate did. Sand was now seen as being both scarce and desirable. A beach bum’s lifestyle – clinging, irritating sand and blinding sun, with its cancer-causing, wrinkle-producing, “skin like leather by age 35" tanning – became the lifestyle of choice for present-oriented rich people. They became willing to pay extreme price premiums for truly mediocre housing to gain easy access to this unproductive, responsibility-avoiding lifestyle. I grew up in that once middle-income environment, 1953–59, and was happy to leave. The now middle-aged kid brother of one of my best friends in high school remains one of the ever-popular Beach Boys, still singing for Rhonda to help him. But for me, ”Surf’s up!" meant “I’m gone!”

Overcoming Poverty

219

is why the modern world is headed for judgment. A good, old fashioned plague would change modern man’s imputation of economic value. So would the bankruptcy of government-funded pension plans.

What the Land Might Lack Trade is the voluntary, non-coercive means by which a person who has more of some item than he wants, compared to how much he wants what someone else has, is able legally to get his hands on the other person’s goods. Each person enters into an exchange believing that he will be better of after the exchange. This is as true statistically of nations as of individuals. Residents of a nation that lacks some resource can buy it from residents in another nation. For example, in the late 1970’s, Hong Kong imported 85 percent of its food and exported 90 percent of its manufactures.10 Meanwhile, some nation grew the food that it sold to Hong Kong. Hong Kong residents wanted food more than extra clothing; the other nation’s residents wanted clothing more than extra food. Hong Kong was in efect manufacturing food; its trading partner was in efect growing clothing. The same sort of arrangement categorizes trade between the United States and Japan. It was not necessary that God ill the Promised Land with every conceivable natural resource. It was only necessary that He give them His law and the grace to obey it, which allows men’s creativity to lourish. This creativity is the basis of most economic growth. Raw materials have always been available. What makes them valuable is men’s knowledge of productive, consumer-satisfying things to do with them. What makes them worth searching for and digging up is the income potential provided by other men with other things to exchange. He who has the productive skills that produce the inished products that consumers desire to buy will not lack anything in whatever land God places him, but only for as long as there is freedom.

10. Rabushka, Hong Kong, pp. 2–3.

220

DEUTERONOMY

Conclusion The Promised Land was not a land literally lowing with milk and honey. It was a land that possessed great advantages, not the least of which was its location on a widely used trade route. It had minerals. It had room for sheep. It had a climate it for agricultural production. It had not yet been stripped of its fertility by millennia of ecological exploitation and neglect. The key to prosperity in the land of Israel was covenantal faithfulness, not government-planned resource conservation. To continue to eat bread without scarceness, Israel would have to avoid the folly of covenant-breaking. The land was bountiful, which was appropriate for an inheritance. But the land was to be understood as a manifestation of God’s grace. Subordination follows grace; law follows subordination; sanctions follow law; and an inheritance either multiplies, stagnates, or contracts in terms of men’s sanctions and God’s. For those who kept the covenant, the land would lack nothing, even as Hong Kong lacks nothing. When a nation is productive, it can buy whatever it does not have. When God said “thou shalt not lack any thing in it,” He did not mean that the land contained everything they needed. It would contain the people of the covenant. Covenantal faithfulness, not minerals and climate as such, would enable them to escape the burden of poverty.

21 THE COVENANTAL IDEAL The Covenantal Ideal of Economic Growth OF ECONOMIC GROWTH When thou hast eaten and art full, then thou shalt bless the LORD thy God for the good land which he hath given thee. Beware that thou forget not the LORD thy God, in not keeping his commandments, and his judgments, and his statutes, which I command thee this day: Lest when thou hast eaten and art full, and hast built goodly houses, and dwelt therein; And when thy herds and thy locks multiply, and thy silver and thy gold is multiplied, and all that thou hast is multiplied; Then thine heart be lifted up, and thou forget the LORD thy God, which brought thee forth out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage; Who led thee through that great and terrible wilderness, wherein were iery serpents, and scorpions, and drought, where there was no water; who brought thee forth water out of the rock of lint; Who fed thee in the wilderness with manna, which thy fathers knew not, that he might humble thee, and that he might prove thee, to do thee good at thy latter end; And thou say in thine heart, My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth. But thou shalt remember the LORD thy God: for it is he that giveth thee power to get wealth, that he may establish his covenant which he sware unto thy fathers, as it is this day (Deut. 8:10–18).

The theocentric focus of this law is God as the gracious Provider. God demands thankfulness on the part of the recipients of His grace. The message here is clear: covenant-keepers can become spiritually forgetful as a direct result of the visible blessings of God. As a result of the gift, they forget the Giver. That covenant-breakers forget the God who gave them their blessings should come as no shock, but this warning was directed at covenant-keepers.

221

222

DEUTERONOMY

Because the sin of covenantal forgetfulness is universal, this law was not a seed law or land law. Those theologians who argue that this was exclusively a land law want to escape from its implications: God brings sanctions in history against those who forget Him. The problem is, when they argue this way, they strip the covenant of its predictability and therefore also its authority in history. Those who forget God are supposedly in no worse shape in history, and perhaps far better shape, than those who remember Him.

Social Theory Forgetfulness is an aspect of point two of the biblical covenant model: hierarchy. The covenantally forgetful man forgets something quite speciic: his complete dependence on the grace of God. Moses here listed the external blessings that God had given them in the wilderness, a hostile place that would not sustain a large population. They had received water out of the rock and a daily supply of food. In the wilderness, they had been kept humble and subordinate by their reliance on God’s miracles. God would soon give them blessings after they conquered the Promised Land. The transfer of inheritance from Canaan to Israel would be an aspect of God’s comprehensive deliverance of the nation out of bondage and into freedom. Their freedom would initially be accompanied by a discontinuous increase in their external wealth: military victory. Then this wealth would multiply.

Miracles as Welfare The move from Egypt to Canaan is a model of the move from slavery to freedom. The model of a free society is not Israel’s miraculous wilderness experience, where God gave them manna and removed many burdens of entropy. The predictable miracles of the wilderness era were designed to humble them, not raise them up. The wilderness experience was not marked by economic growth but by economic stagnation and total dependence. They were not allowed to save extra portions of manna, which rotted (Ex. 16:20). On the move continually, they could not dig wells, plant crops, or build houses. At best, they may have been able to increase their herds, as nomads do (Num. 3:45; 20:4; 32:1). The wilderness experience was a means of teaching them that God acts in history to sustain His people. The wilderness economy with its regular miracles was

The Covenantal Ideal of Economic Growth

223

not to become an ideal toward which covenant-keepers should strive. Israel longed for escape from the wilderness. It was God’s curse on the exodus generation that they would die in the wilderness. The wilderness economy was a welfare economy. The Israelites were supplied with basic necessities even though the people did not work. But they lacked variety. People without the ability to feed themselves were fed by God: same old diet. People without the ability to clothe themselves were clothed by God: same old fashions. Israel wandered aimlessly because the nation had refused to march into war. They were not it to lead, and so they had to follow. They were welfare clients; they had no authority over the conditions of their existence. They took what was handed out to them. And like welfare clients generally, they constantly complained that their life style just wasn’t good enough (Num. 11). They had been unwilling to pay the price of freedom: conquest (Num. 14). God therefore cursed them to endure four decades of welfare economics. The only good thing about the wilderness welfare program was that it did not use the State as the agency of positive blessings. No one was coerced into paying for anyone else’s life style. God used a series of miracles to sustain them all. There was no coercive program of wealth redistribution. Israel was a welfare society, not a welfare State. The lure of the welfare State remains with responsibility-avoiding men in every era. It was this lure which attracted the crowds to Jesus. “Jesus answered them and said, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Ye seek me, not because ye saw the miracles, but because ye did eat of the loaves, and were illed” (John 6:26). They wanted a king who would feed them. They viewed Jesus as a potential candidate for king because He could multiply bread. They associated free food with political authority. He knew this, and He departed from them (John 6:11–15). Men in their rebellion against God want to believe in a State that can heal them. They believe in salvation by law. They prefer to live under the authority of a messianic State, meaning a healer State, rather than under freedom. They want to escape the burdens of personal and family responsibility in this world of cursed scarcity. They want to live as children live, as recipients of bounty without a price tag. They are willing to sacriice their liberty and the liberty of others in order to attain this goal. One mark of spiritual immaturity is the quest for economic miracles: stones into bread. The price of this alchemical wealth is

224

DEUTERONOMY

always the same: the worship of Satan. “And when the tempter came to him, he said, If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread. But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God” (Matt. 4:3–4). Modern welfare economics teaches that the State can provide such miracles through positive economic policy, i.e., by taking wealth from some and transferring it to others, either directly or through monetary inlation. This belief is the presupposition of the Keynesian revolution, which dominated twentieth-century economic thought, 1936–1990. John Maynard Keynes actually described credit expansion – the heart of his system – as the “miracle . . . of turning a stone into bread.”1 When Israel crossed into the Promised Land, the identifying marks of their wilderness subordination were removed by God: the manna and their permanent clothing. This annulment of the welfare economy was necessary for their spiritual maturation and their liberation. The marks of their subordination to God would henceforth be primarily confessional and ethical. The only food miracle that would remain in Israel would be the triple crop two years prior to a jubilee (Lev. 25:21). God promised to substitute a new means of Israel’s preservation: economic growth. No longer would they be conined to manna and the same old clothing. Now they would be able to multiply their wealth. The zero-growth world of the welfare society would be replaced by the pro-growth world of covenantal remembrance.

The Power to Get Wealth This passage includes this command: “But thou shalt remember the LORD thy God: for it is he that giveth thee power to get wealth, that he may establish his covenant which he sware unto thy fathers, as it is this day” (v. 18). This verse is one of the most important verses in the Bible regarding wealth. Covenantally speaking, it is the

1. Keynes (anonymous), Paper of the British Experts (April 8, 1943), cited in Ludwig von Mises, “Stones into Bread, the Keynesian Miracle,” Plain Talk (1948), reprinted in Henry Hazlitt (ed.), The Critics of Keynesian Economics (Princeton, New Jersey: Van Nostrand, 1960), p. 306.

The Covenantal Ideal of Economic Growth

225

Bible’s most important verse on the nature and purpose of wealth. It states that wealth is a means of God’s establishment of His covenant. The covenant is established by grace. God brings covenantbreakers under His covenant through adoption. Israel’s adoption by God is the biblical model (Ezek. 16:6–13). Adoption takes place by God’s declarative judicial act: God announces His lawful claim on His children. God told Moses: “And thou shalt say unto Pharaoh, Thus saith the LORD, Israel is my son, even my irstborn: And I say unto thee, Let my son go, that he may serve me: and if thou refuse to let him go, behold, I will slay thy son, even thy irstborn” (Ex. 4:22–23). God’s claim superseded Pharaoh’s false claim of ownership. God’s deliverance of Israel out of Egypt’s bondage was His declaration of a superior claim of jurisdiction. Liberty under God was the alternative to servitude under Pharaoh. God delivered Israel progressively out of bondage: out of Egypt, through the wilderness, and into Canaan. So, the judicial reality of Israel’s deinitive liberation by God was established visibly through Israel’s progressive deliverance out of the burdens of Adam’s curse. Israel survived in the wilderness through a series of miracles: the overcoming of scarcity (manna and water), the overcoming of entropy’s curse (wear and tear), and the overcoming of their enemies in battle. Why the need for progressive deliverance? Why not instant liberation? Moses gave them the answer: their need for humility. God had humbled them in order to prove them (vv. 2, 16). They had not been morally it to inherit immediately after their deliverance from Egypt. The irst generation was still a nation of slaves. They had the slave’s mentality. They could not forget the onions of Egypt (Num. 11:5). They remembered onions and forgot God. This element of covenantal forgetfulness would remain Israel’s great temptation until their return from the exile. They kept forgetting that God was the source of their blessings. They kept returning to idolatry. Their power to get wealth in the Promised Land was analogous to their experience of miracles in the wilderness. The wilderness miracles were designed to strengthen their faith in a God who delivers His people in history and who fulills His promises to His people in history. The problem was that the continuity of these miracles became a part of Israel’s predictable environment. Israel began to take them for granted. Moses twice repeated the fact that God had humbled them in the wilderness (vv. 2, 16). Moses wanted them to

226

DEUTERONOMY

understand that the threat of being humbled is always present with the promise of covenantal blessings in history. The wilderness miracles had been designed by God to remind Israel that God was their deliverer. Moses then extended this principle: wealth was to remind them that God is their deliverer. God delivers men visibly through covenantal blessings. These blessings can be measured: “And when thy herds and thy locks multiply, and thy silver and thy gold is multiplied, and all that thou hast is multiplied. . .” (v. 13). What is visible to all testiies to the existence of a covenantal realm of bondage and deliverance that is invisible. This is a manifestation of the covenantal principle of representation (point two): the visible testiies to the existence of the invisible. “For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead” (Rom. 1:20a). Jesus’ miracles of healing were examples of this principle of representation. They authenticated His messianic ojce under God.2 The visible blessings of God in history are to remind men of the blessings of God in eternity. The visible curses of God in history are to remind men of the curses of God in eternity. But in Old Covenant Israel, there were no clear distinctions between eternal negative sanctions and eternal positive sanctions. Not until the last section of the Book of Daniel was the doctrine of the bodily resurrection clearly enunciated (Dan. 12:2–3). The grave seemed to cover all men equally. The distinction between paradise and hell is a New Testament doctrine. So, the focus of Old Covenant covenantal sanctions was historical.

Economic Growth Moses enunciated here for the irst time in recorded history the doctrine of permanent economic growth. In all other ancient societies,

2. “And, behold, they brought to him a man sick of the palsy, lying on a bed: and Jesus seeing their faith said unto the sick of the palsy; Son, be of good cheer; thy sins be forgiven thee. And, behold, certain of the scribes said within themselves, This man blasphemeth. And Jesus knowing their thoughts said, Wherefore think ye evil in your hearts? For whether is easier, to say, Thy sins be forgiven thee; or to say, Arise, and walk? But that ye may know that the Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins, (then saith he to the sick of the palsy,) Arise, take up thy bed, and go unto thine house. And he arose, and departed to his house” (Matt. 9:2–7).

The Covenantal Ideal of Economic Growth

227

history was seen as cyclical. Men viewed history much as they viewed nature. The fruitfulness of spring and summer would inevitably be overcome in the fall and winter. The idea of linear history – temporal beginning and end – was not believed because the covenant-breaking world rejected the cosmic judicial basis of linear history: creation, Fall, redemption, and temporal consummation. The twin idols of nature and history were cyclical in covenant-breaking religion. Only the new idol of autonomous philosophy ofered some possibility of linear development: the growth of knowledge. But this came late in ancient man’s history. Philosophy appeared in Greece at about the time that Israel was sent into exile and ceased worshipping the carved idols of Canaan. In Israel, the doctrine of compound economic growth (Deut. 8) preceded by 900 years the doctrine of the bodily resurrection (Dan. 12:2). Moses taught Israel that compound economic growth is possible through covenantal faithfulness. If Israel remembered God as the source of their wealth – an act of covenantal subordination – and continued to obey His law as a nation, then God would shower them with even more wealth. This wealth was designed to conirm the covenant. God’s covenantal blessings and cursings had been visible in the wilderness, Moses reminded them. The curses were designed to humble them, he said. Then what of the prophesied blessings? Moses was equally clear: they were designed to conirm the covenant. God would continue to deal with Israel covenantally, which meant that they could expect visible blessings and visible cursings in terms of their own ethical response to these blessings. Do not forget who provided these blessings, Moses warned, when blessings multiply. These external blessings would not be covenantally neutral. They would be signs of the continuing covenantal bond between God and Israel. Economic growth was an aspect of the covenant. The presence of the covenant should be recognized in the compounding of wealth. If visible blessings conirmed the covenant over time – a progressive fulillment – then economic growth was in principle as open-ended as the covenant. The covenant is perpetual; so is the possibility of longterm economic growth. Economic growth would not automatically cease because nature is cyclical. Economic growth would compound through the seasons because the covenant transcends the seasons.

228

DEUTERONOMY

Sanctiication is progressive. The blessings of God are supposed to compound because the visible conirmation of God’s covenant in history is designed to reconirm the terms of the covenant to each succeeding generation. Each generation is to experience positive feedback: blessings, remembering, obedience, blessings. This process of economic growth is what makes possible an ever-increasing inheritance. God’s gracious kingdom grant is progressively appropriated by the heirs through the progressive conirmation of the covenant. The goal is the conquest of the whole earth through conversion and conirmation. “And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen” (Matt. 28:18–20).3

The Idea of Progress and Inheritance The ideal of economic growth parallels the ideal of progress in history. Moses made it clear that the covenantal faithfulness of Israel was not a static ideal. History is progressive because corporate sanctiication is progressive. It is not simply that history is linear; it is also progressive. This section of Deuteronomy is important because it sets forth the ideal of progress. God had delivered Israel from bondage. He had led them through the wilderness. Now, in fulillment of His promise to Abraham, He was about to lead them into the Promised Land. In the Promised Land, they could legitimately expect the multiplication of both their numbers and their wealth. “And when thy herds and thy locks multiply, and thy silver and thy gold is multiplied, and all that thou hast is multiplied” (v. 13). This multiplication process is basic to the fulillment of the dominion covenant given to Adam and Noah. But this process is at bottom covenantal, not autonomous. It is an aspect of God’s positive historical sanctions in response to corporate covenantal faithfulness. To sustain corporate progress, two ideas must be widespread in a culture: the idea of linear history and the idea of progressive corporate sanctiication. When the idea of linear history is absent, men do not 3. Kenneth L. Gentry, Jr., The Greatness of the Great Commission: The Christian Enterprise in a Fallen World (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990).

The Covenantal Ideal of Economic Growth

229

sustain hope in the future of corporate progress, for progress must inevitably be swallowed up in the retrogressive phase of the next historical cycle. The Great Reversal will overcome the hopes and dreams of all men. It will cut short every program of social improvement. The discontinuity of reversal will always overcome the continuity of progress.4 In short, if history is not linear, the visible inheritance will eventually be destroyed. The visible distinctions between covenant-breaking societies and covenant-keeping societies will disappear or be made operationally irrelevant by the magnitude of the Great Reversal. Such an outlook requires the following re-writing of the second commandment: “Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me, and doing the same unto them that love me, and keep my commandments.” When the idea of progressive corporate sanctiication is absent, men do not sustain hope in the either the supposed mechanism or the supposed organicism of progress. Progress is, at best, limited to an elite core of individuals: a matter of inner discipline, secret knowledge, capital accumulation (e.g., money-lending), or mystical retreat from history. When a society loses faith in corporate progress, its citizens lose a major incentive to forego consumption in the present for the sake of greater future income. Men become more present-oriented than those in societies that retain faith in corporate progress. They apply a higher rate of discount (interest) to future income. The rate of economic growth slows as the rate of saving drops. If there is no possibility of sustained covenantal progress based on a distinction between the earthly fate of the wicked vs. the earthly fate of the righteous, then the present consumption of capital is the recommended policy. Solomon summarized this view: “There is a vanity which is done upon the earth; that there be just men, unto whom it happeneth according to the work of the wicked; again, there be wicked men, to whom it happeneth according to the work of the righteous: I said that this also is vanity. Then I commended mirth, because a man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry: for that shall abide with

4. Gary North, Millennialism and Social Theory (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), chaps. 4, 7, 8.

230

DEUTERONOMY

him of his labour the days of his life, which God giveth him under the sun” (Eccl. 8:14–15). In short, if there is no visible corporate sanctiication, then the visible corporate inheritance will also be dissipated. The pagan ancient world did not have a doctrine of compound economic growth because it had no doctrine of sustainable corporate progress. J. B. Bury wrote in 1920 that the idea of progress requires faith in the inevitability of mankind’s autonomous advancement. This advancement must not be the result of any outside intervention; it must be man’s gift to man.5 It is not sujcient for the development of the idea of progress that men recognize the existence of advancement in the past. The question is this: Must there be inevitable long-term advancement in the future?6 Belief in prog7 8 ress is an act of faith. Classical Greece did not possess this faith. “But, if some relative progress might be admitted, the general view of Greek philosophers was that they were living in a period of inevitable degeneration and decay – inevitable because it was prescribed by the nature of the universe.”9 As Bury noted, Greek science “did little or nothing to transform the conditions of life or to open any vista into the future.”10 What was true of Greek thought was equally true of every ancient society except Israel. The world was in the grip of an idea: cyclical history. Science was stillborn in every society in which belief in cyclical history was dominant.11 Physicist and historian Stanley Jaki has presented a series of masterful expositions of the relationship between the Greeks’ view of cyclical history and their failure to extend the science they discovered. The Christian ideal of progress made possible the advancement of Western science; it was not Renaissance science that launched the modern idea of progress.

5. J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into Its Growth and Origin (rev. ed.; New York: Dover, [1932] 1955), p. 5. 6. Ibid., p. 7. 7. Ibid., p. 4. 8. Idem. 9. Ibid., p. 9. 10. Ibid., p. 7. 11. Stanley L. Jaki, Science and Creation: From Eternal Cycles to an Oscillating Universe (rev. ed.; Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1986). Cf. Jaki, The Savior of Science (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1988), ch. 1; The Only Chaos and Other Essays (Lanham, Maryland: Academic Press of America, 1990), ch. 5.

The Covenantal Ideal of Economic Growth

231

12

Contrary to Ludwig Edelstein, the Greeks did not take seriously the idea of progress, for they believed, among other anti-progress ideas, in the Great Year of the cosmos: the 26,000-year rotation of the heavens, an idea that was denounced by several church fathers from Origen to Augustine.13 Belief in this Great Year was common in many ancient societies. It was important in Platonic thought.14 15 Priests and astrologers noticed the precession of the equinoxes. Ancient astronomers knew that every few thousand years, the pole star changes. We know today that the wobbling of the earth’s axis is the cause; the earth whirls like a spinning top with an inclined axis. Ancient societies explained this odd movement in terms of the unbalanced rotation of the heavens. The heavens were seen as rotating around the earth as if the stars were part of a system analogous to a broken mill.16 Paralleling this, classical thought developed the cyclical idea of an original golden age which was followed by degeneration,17 and which will be followed by a new golden age. Edelstein sees the documentary evidence of classical optimism as being “widely dispersed”18 – another phrase for “scattered and unsystematic.” He sees the idea as “popular in antiquity,” but his presentation of the scattered and fragmentary evidence is insujcient to prove his case. Edelstein, as is the case with the vast majority of modern historians, sees in Renaissance science the recovery of the lost classical scientiic heritage.19 Yet the primary origin of the details of Renaissance science was the deliberately unacknowledged science of the late middle ages, a fact demonstrated by physicist Pierre Duhem in ten detailed volumes. The demonstrated fact of the medieval origins of modern science has been ignored or actively suppressed by the humanist academic world. The irst ive volumes of Duhem’s Le Système du Monde were in print in 1917; the second 12. Ludwig Edelstein, The Idea of Progress in Classical Antiquity (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967). 13. Jaki, The Only Chaos, pp. 74–75. 14. Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, 2 vols., The Spell of Plato (4th ed.; Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1963), I, p. 19, and the footnotes: pp. 208–19. 15. See any standard encyclopedia under “precession.” 16. Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, Hamlet’s Mill: An essay on myth and the future of time (Boston: Godine, [1969] 1977), ch. 9. 17. Hesiod, Works and Days, lines 109–201. 18. Edelstein, Idea of Progress, p. xxxii. 19. Ibid., p. 141.

232

DEUTERONOMY

ive volumes appeared only in 1954–59. In between, the French academic community and publishing world suppressed their publication because they undermined one of the most cherished myths of the Enlightenment, namely, that medieval science was “medieval.” The story of this exercise in humanist academic censorship has been written by Jaki.20 Duhem is still unknown to most historians. An exception is Robert Nisbet, who ofered two brief, favorable sen21 tences in his History of the Idea of Progress (1980). Yet Nisbet repeatedly relies on Edelstein’s book to defend his own view that the classical world accepted the idea of progress.22 It was Christianity, with its doctrine of creation, Fall, redemption, and the Great Commission (Matt. 28:18–20), that brought together the Old Covenant idea of God’s positive corporate sanctions and the New Covenant idea of world transformation. The twin doctrines of the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ and His ascension to the right hand of God made possible the overcoming of the more cyclical Old Covenant pattern of man’s ethical Fall, his ethical redemption by God, and a subsequent fall. Christ’s resurrection and ascension were deinitive historical acts of victory over the familiar cycle of fall-redemption-fall. “And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins. Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable. But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the irstfruits of them that slept” (I Cor. 15:17–20). Christ’s bodily resurrection set forth the personal model; His bodily ascension set forth the civilizational model. The ascension proved His post-resurrection claim of total power over history (Matt. 28:18–20).

20. Stanley L. Jaki, “Science and Censorship: Hélène Duhem and the Publication of the ‘Système du Monde,’” Intercollegiate Review (Winter 1985–86), pp. 41–49. Cf. Jaki, Uneasy Genius: The Life and Work of Pierre Duhem (Boston: Martinus Nijhof, 1984). 21. Robert A. Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress (New York: Basic Books, 1980), pp. 78, 101. 22. Ibid., ch. 1. Nisbet was heavily inluenced by his teacher, Frederick Teggert, who compiled a book of classical references to progress: The Idea of Progress (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949).

The Covenantal Ideal of Economic Growth

233

Finitude: Things and Time Twice, God told mankind to multiply: Adam (Gen. 1:28) and Noah (Gen. 9:1). This command was a call to ill the earth. This is the dominion covenant. But it was also necessarily a call for man to acknowledge the limits of time. At some point in the future, the dominion covenant will be fulilled. That day will mark the end of history. “Then cometh the end, when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father; when he shall have put down all rule and all authority and power. For he must reign, till he hath put all enemies under his feet” (I Cor. 15:24–25). At that point, a new covenantal order will come into existence: an eternal order. There is no possibility of permanent long-term growth in a inite universe. Nothing compounds indeinitely. At some point, the population reaches the limits of growth. At any positive rate of growth, wealth approaches ininity as a limit when the curve turns upward and becomes what we call an exponential curve.

The Realm of the Quantum The only thing in our recent history – or any history – that does seem to grow without meaningful limits is the capacity and speed of computer chips, which doubles at least every two years, possibly every eighteen months.23 At this rate of growth, the computer chip will equal man’s brain capacity sometime in the second half of the twenty-irst century. Then, two years later, it will be twice as large. But what of the cost of manufacturing these chips? The cost of building a single chip production plant is running into the billions of dollars. At some point, the cost of pursuing Moore’s law – the doubling of microchip capacity every two years – should reach the limits of capital available to build the production facilities. The big questions are these: Will the chips ever be used to create less expensive chip production facilities? Will microchips be used to design microfactories? Will the capacity of the chips overcome the cost of 23. This is known as Moore’s law. This “law” was articulated in the 1960’s by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel Corp., the creator of the modern microcomputer chip. A similar relationship law is Metcalfe’s law: the cost-efectiveness of computer networks grows exponentially to the number and power of the terminals. George Gilder in 1997 added a third “law” governing telecommunications bandwidth. He forecasted that the supply of bandwidth will triple every year for the next 25 years. Gilder Technology Report (Feb. 1997), p. 1.

234

DEUTERONOMY

capital? Will the “intelligence” of the chips lower the cost of their production? If so, then we will have arrived at a state of afairs in which the law of decreasing returns is overcome in one area of life, and the most important area economically: the cost of obtaining usable information (though not necessarily wisdom). Is this state of afairs conceivable? Yes. Raymond Kurzweil, a developer of computerized machines that convert written text into voice patterns, thereby allowing the blind to read, has stated that most of the cost of a computer comes from the chips, and all but about two percent of the cost of the chips derives from the cost of the information embodied on them.24 George Gilder concludes: “Driving the technology in the quantum era will not be Goliath fabs [fabrication factories] that can produce millions of units of one design but lexible design and manufacturing systems that can produce a relatively few units of thousands of designs.”25 The linear increase in the speed of the chips seems to violate a fundamental economic law: the law of diminishing returns. But even if exponential linearity is possible in the quantum realm of the microcosm, as Gilder asserts, men so far can gain access to this microcosmic realm only through physical production of the gateways into the microcosm: the chips themselves. The non-quantum realm of chip manufacturing is still governed by the law of diminishing returns, as enormous capital losses in chip manufacturing testify from time to time. Yet even if this ever ceases to be true, there is still no reason to accept Gilder’s moral vision: “Overthrowing matter, humanity also escapes from the traps and compulsions of pleasure into a higher morality of spirit.”26 Gilder has confused the realm of the quantum with the human spirit, a mistake going back to Kant’s theory of the noumenal realm. The antinomies separating the realm of the quantum from the realm of molecular reality are analogous to those separating Kant’s noumenal from his phenomenal. The impersonal quantum realm has no ethics; neither does the impersonal phenomenal realm of cause-and-efect science. This is the problem with Kant’s nature/freedom or science/personality dualism. The

24. Cited in George Gilder, Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution in Economics and Technology (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), p. 328. 25. Ibid., p. 329. 26. Ibid., p. 381.

The Covenantal Ideal of Economic Growth

235

God of the Bible is shoved out of both realms. So is His law. So are His sanctions.

Population Growth Consumes Space We live in the space-time continuum, however much we can make use of quantum physics. We are not subatomic creatures. The impossibility of indeinite compound growth of both humanity and man’s wealth points to the limit of time. There will come a time when the physical room for mankind’s multiplication will no longer allow any extension of the covenantal process of dominion. At that point, the Genesis command to multiply must end. A new cosmic order will be imposed by God, i.e., a new covenantal order (II Pet. 3:10). Progressive sanctiication in history will have fulilled the terms of the dominion covenant. Our world is generally governed by the laws of thermodynamics, even though there are exceptions, e.g., miracles.27 The irst law of thermodynamics establishes the ixity of matter-energy: the initude of the creation. This law is as important covenantally as the second law, which establishes a one-way move from potential energy to used-up energy that can no longer do any work. Both laws point to initude. Both laws establish theoretical limits to growth. Sections of the universe can be rearranged by man, but to do this, man must tap the energy or matter of the universe. This matter-energy is inite. Because of the cursed nature of the second law, so is time. Time’s arrow moves in only one direction. At today’s rates of change, the second law seems to establish a cosmic limit of eons of time. How much time, no one can say for certain, but the estimates tossed out by cosmologists are never less than tens of billions of years. In stark contrast, human population growth accelerates the coming of the end of time, for it approaches ininity as a limit at an accelerating rate after the curve becomes exponential. The tens of billions of years supposedly remaining until either the heat death of the universe or the collapse back to the omega point of another Big Bang – though smaller than the irst one, says the second law – are covenantally little more than conceptual side shows. Astronomical time becomes irrelevant eschatologically in the face of man’s compounding population growth. What is signiicant 27. See Chapter 18, above.

236

DEUTERONOMY

eschatologically is population growth: the biological ability of man’s population to reach the environmental limits of growth within a few centuries, or a few millennia if life outside the earth is environmentally sustainable. At two percent growth per annum, it will not take tens of billions of years for mankind to ill up the cosmos. Six billion people growing at two percent per year become 327 billion people in two centuries, 2.4 trillion in three centuries, or (I think improbably) 52 quadrillion, 600 trillion in eight centuries. Of course, there can be catastrophes. Population growth can be reversed. So can economic growth. But the West’s attainment of sustained positive economic growth rates in the range of over two percent per year since the late eighteenth century has placed before mankind a believable vision of wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. When it comes to compound growth, a little goes a long way remarkably fast.

The Zero-Growth Movement The ideology underlying the zero-growth movement – both population growth and economic growth – rests on a recognition that mankind will reach its environmental limits to growth relatively soon unless the compounding process ceases. There is a legitimate sense of foreboding associated with this temporal limit, a realization that man’s deinition of himself and his meaning in history will change radically when mankind’s population reaches its environmental limits, which will not take two centuries if present growth rates continue. This sense of foreboding is the sense of impending doom, either eschatological or cultural – the transformation of the Enlightenment’s commitment to growth. The defenders of the zero growth school of thought call for coercive State action to begin to impose judicial limits to growth now, before mankind’s population reaches its environmental limits. They want men to begin to come to grips emotionally with the limits of growth. They correctly sense that there is some eschatological connection between nature’s limits and man’s temporal limits. There is a connection: the fulillment of the dominion covenant and therefore its temporal annulment, either through a new revelation from God, which the New Testament does not allow (Rev. 22:18), or else the end of time. Biblically speaking, long-term compound growth of both men and per capita wealth is the result of covenantal faithfulness. The judicial condition for maintaining such growth is freedom. The zero

The Covenantal Ideal of Economic Growth

237

growth movement must therefore overcome freedom in the name of the environment. It is quite open in its call to place political restraints on economic freedom. Mankind’s ability to multiply both man and things over time is seen as the great threat to the survival of “the good life,” as deined by academics and intellectuals who have already attained historically great wealth, especially leisure. If the price of extending such freedom and therefore such wealth to the masses of humanity is the continuation of economic growth, and if humanity keeps multiplying because of its increasing wealth, therefore making mandatory even greater economic growth, then the zero growth movement is ready to establish a new international world order that will use coercion to end the growth process. The zero growth movement is a movement of “haves” who are determined to keep most of what they have and deny an opportunity to the “have nots.” The multiplication of scarce positional goods – goods that relect social status and which lose their utility as status goods when lots of people can buy them28 – threatens the present social order in which the rich and their well-paid spokesmen are visibly on top. By calling a halt to aggregate economic growth, the zero growth movement seeks to stabilize today’s production of positional goods and the wealth to buy them. The zero growth movement is to positional goods in general what California’s Coastal Land Commission is to socially prime waterfront area property. Such property would lose its status as socially prime if agents of the middle class could buy up valuable land and build time share apartments and condominiums for re-sale. Thus, the land’s present owners have used the State to prohibit such purchases. In the name of preserving the natural environment, the present owners of this highly unnatural environment – expensive homes, electricity lines, phone lines, etc. – keep out the rif-raf. They have made it illegal for their money-seeking neighbors to sell property to your agents and mine: real estate developers. The phrase “real estate developers” is a hated phrase in socially prime circles, for it means “the middle class.”29

28. Fred Hirsch, The Social Limits to Growth (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 11. 29. Thomas Sowell, Pink and Brown People and Other Controversial Essays (Stanford, California: Hoover Institution Press, 1981), p. 104. This essay appeared originally in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner (March 23, 1979): “Those Phony Environmentalists.”

238

DEUTERONOMY

Meanwhile, the middle class does the same thing to the lower middle class through zoning commissions. Zoning commissions keep apartments and mobile home parks out of middle-class neighborhoods. The freedom of buying and selling threatens today’s distribution of positional real estate. Existing owners of such real estate cannot aford to buy all of these goods, so they use the State to restrict such purchases by newcomers. This raises the social value of existing property by lowering its market value. This is a State subsidy to those present owners of real estate who seek maximum status income rather than maximum money income.

Idolatry, Autonomy, and Power Moses warned them of the major temptation that lay ahead: “And thou say in thine heart, My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth” (v. 17). The wealth that would inevitably come from God as a way to conirm their keeping of the covenant would lead them into temptation. The covenant’s ethically governed cause-and-efect sanctions in history would not sustain their faith in God. Israel would forget the sovereign Giver. They would attribute their wealth to another sovereign: themselves. We know that Israel constantly worshipped idols until the era of the exile. These idols were fertility gods. Yet Moses’ warning did not identify idolatry as the great threat to Israel, but rather selfworship. Moses did not warn them that they would attribute to idols the source of their wealth, yet this is what they did do for the next eight centuries. Israelites did not sacriice their children by requiring them to pass through secular universities; they required them to pass through ire (II Ki. 17:17; Ezek. 23:37). How can we reconcile this seeming discrepancy? The pre-exilic idol was a representational link between man and the supernatural. By making their requests known to the idol, men sought their own ends. But the idol was not regarded as autonomous; it was part of the continuum between man and cosmic sources of power. The idol had to be constructed by man. This creative act transferred to man partial authority over the process of environmental manipulation. The god represented by the idol required man to become part of this creative process. Without man and the work of his hands, the god represented by the idol would lack something important: man’s piety and fear. The god would also

The Covenantal Ideal of Economic Growth

239

not be fed. For paganism, unlike Old Covenant religion, sacriices and oblations were the care and feeding of gods.30 Pagan religion is a system of mutually beneicial transactions. Man gets what he wants by placating a god who wants something from man. Man and god are part of a larger cosmic process in which each of them achieves his goals through a division of labor. Both man and his god confront impersonal fate, impersonal chance, or both, depending on the situation, and each requires the services of the other in order better to attain his own goals. Neither can claim absolute autonomy, for each is entwined in impersonal cosmic forces, and each works most efectively in cooperation with the other. Then in what sense could the covenant-breaking Israelite say to himself that the power of his hands had brought him his wealth? Only in the sense of his shared authority in the process of wealth-getting. He would beg before an idol, and the god represented by this idol would then include him in the process of wealthcreation. It was man’s request and man’s ritual obeisance that made possible the creation of wealth. An idolatrous man would subordinate himself to an idol in some proscribed sense – some set of formal ritual boundaries – but not in the way that a covenant-keeper subordinates himself to a God who is completely autonomous and above the creation’s processes. In idolatrous religion, there is no complete autonomy, but there is also no complete subordination. Both pagan man and his god were involved in a cosmic battle against impersonal forces and boundaries. Sometimes they joined forces; sometimes they did not. Pagan man saw his gods as only relatively more powerful than he was. It was a matter of degree. Thus, by linking himself to an idol, man could increase his likelihood of getting his own way by conforming ritually to a relatively more powerful being. But classical paganism saw man and god as colaborers in the ields of fate or luck/chance.31 By placating a god through idolatrous worship, pagan man believed that he could in some way manipulate this god into doing man’s will. Man’s cleverness in getting a good deal determined the 30. Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16, vol. 3 of The Anchor Bible (New York: Doubleday, 1991), p. 148. 31. Charles Norris Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture: A Study of Thought and Action from Augustus to Augustine (New York: Oxford University Press, [1944] 1957), pp. 157–59.

240

DEUTERONOMY

degree of his success as a bargainer. Man knew that he could not get something for nothing out of the deity, but he sought transactions that were weighed heavily in man’s favor: something for practically nothing. The closer he came to this favorable exchange rate, the better he could claim, “My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth.” By getting a god to do man’s will on man’s terms, pagan religion sought greater autonomy. What pagan man did not want was a god who drove a hard bargain.

Autonomy as Power Over Nature Man’s quest for autonomy is a quest for power: self-made law. In the West, what is called autonomy is power over nature. To gain such power, man requires knowledge of nature’s processes and sujcient capital to exploit this knowledge. Law is generally regarded as natural, i.e., outside of man yet discoverable by man. In the most consistent forms of humanism, however, law is seen as man-made, i.e., an order imposed on the “raw stuf” of nature by man’s creative mind. This suggestion seems crazy to most “common sense” rationalists, but it is inherent in Kant’s revision of philosophical categories. In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant concluded: “Thus the order and regularity in the appearances, which we entitle nature, we ourselves introduce. We could never ind them in appearances, had not we ourselves, or the nature of our mind, originally set them there.”32 So, the judicial debate in the West has been between the advocates of judge-discovered law (e.g., English common law) and legislator-made law (e.g., European civil law).33 Neither side accepts the legitimacy of God-revealed law. Such a view would undermine man’s claim to autonomy. In contrast to Western rationalism, Eastern man seeks an escape from law and nature by immersion in the cosmic unity, which is impersonal and non-judgmental. Buddhist D. T. Suzuki announced: “Buddhism does not condemn this life and universe for their wickedness as was done by some religious teachers and philosophers. The so-called wickedness is not radical in nature and life. It is

32. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781), A 125. Trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: Macmillan, 1929), p. 147. 33. Cf. N. Stephen Kinsella, “Legislation and the Discovery of Law in a Free Society,” Journal of Libertarian Studies, XI (Summer 1995), pp. 134–81.

The Covenantal Ideal of Economic Growth

241

34

merely supericial.” The Eastern mystic sees both nature and law as illusions, as fetters on true understanding. But the nirvana of sellessness involves a surrender of personal autonomy in order to gain autonomy from nature and law: incorporation into the monistic one.35 There is also pantheism, which completely denies man’s autonomy and seeks immersion in monistic nature. But Eastern mystical man is as adamant as Western rational man regarding the illegitimacy of God-revealed law in the sense of publicly declared universal standards. Revealed law points to an autonomous God who dictates to an eternally subordinate man. Eastern man is willing to forfeit his autonomy for the sake of ontological wholeness, but only to impersonal, monistic, non-judgmental forces. Autonomy is a unique characteristic of God. God alone establishes the law. Man is a creature; he must conform himself to nature’s laws or else seek to escape from nature, which also means escaping from meaning and sensibility. So, what Western man means by autonomy is a knowledge of impersonal law which gives him the ability to gain control over nature for his own ends. Knowledge is power. While man does not make the law, as the discoverer of law he can use it to manipulate nature. He seeks a proitable bargain from nature. It is not that he created the law; he merely exploits it for his own purposes. This is also the goal of idolatrous pagan man: not autonomy from his deity but a cost-efective manipulation of nature through his deity. Modern man subordinates himself to an impersonal law-order with limited jurisdiction over him in order to gain a lever over nature. Similarly, pagan man subordinates himself to a personal deity of limited jurisdiction over him in order to gain a lever over nature. Modern man acknowledges his subordination to law in general in order to exercise control over things in particular. Pagan man acknowledges his subordination to a local deity in order to exercise control over things in particular. Modern man hopes to use the law to beat the law. Pagan man hopes to use the deity to beat the deity.

34. D. T. Suzuki, Outlines of Mahayana Buddhism (New York: Schocken Books, [1907] 1963), p. 128. Schocken Books is a Jewish publishing house. 35. Gary North, The Dominion Covenant: Genesis (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987), pp. 364–67.

242

DEUTERONOMY

The Curse on the Quest for Autonomy Moses foretold blessings if Israel obeyed God: an extension of the nation’s wealth beyond the inheritance from Canaan. But if they rebelled, they could expect an analogous disinheritance: “And it shall be, if thou do at all forget the LORD thy God, and walk after other gods, and serve them, and worship them, I testify against you this day that ye shall surely perish. As the nations which the LORD destroyeth before your face, so shall ye perish; because ye would not be obedient unto the voice of the LORD your God” (vv. 19–20). Here Moses raised the issue of false worship, which is always enmeshed in the quest for autonomy. While they would claim that the might of their hands had created their wealth, in fact they would worship false gods. They would claim autonomy, but they would practice idolatry. They would claim to be in control, but in fact they would ind themselves in moral bondage. God would then apply his corporate sanctions in history. They would be expelled from Canaan as surely as the Canaanites had been. Not all of the Canaanites were expelled by Israel (Josh. 15:63; cf. 17:12–13). Similarly, not all of the Israelites were taken into captivity by Nebuchadnezzar; he left the poorest people behind (II Ki. 24:14). God promised to visit the same kinds of sins with the same negative sanctions. Inside the boundaries of Israel, false worship would no longer be tolerated. The Promised Land was under the covenant. The nation would visibly come under negative sanctions if they worshipped other gods. So, long-term economic growth cannot be sustained by any society unless its members honor the terms of the law. This does not mean that only confessing nations can experience economic growth. It does mean that when prosperous nations grow lax about enforcing the biblical principles of civil law, they will ind that their wealth dissipates. The blessings of external covenant-keeping will fade when men cease to honor the civil principles of biblical law: private property, freedom of exchange, restitution, honest weights and measures, and so on. But will men honor these principles even though they do not honor the God who established them? This question has not been resolved, since men learned the wealth formula of private property and limited civil government only since the late eighteenth century, in a Protestant nation.

The Covenantal Ideal of Economic Growth

243

Conclusion Deuteronomy 8 sets forth the basis of compound economic growth. It ties sustained economic growth to corporate covenant-keeping. In doing so, it establishes eschatological limits to growth. In a inite world, nothing grows forever. Therefore, longterm economic growth as a predictable reward for corporate covenant-keeping becomes a testimony to the potential brevity of history. This brevity can be overcome through corporate covenantbreaking – the quest for autonomy – and God’s predictable negative historical sanctions. Nevertheless, Deuteronomy 8 moved the discussion of time from the cosmos to the covenant. It moved from cosmically imposed cyclical history36 to God-imposed linear history. In doing so, this passage broke with ancient cosmology. Modern evolutionism’s cosmology is equally incompatible with it. Covenantal history is not subsumed under vast quantities of cosmic time; on the contrary, it is determinative of cosmic time. Positive covenant sanctions, not the second law of thermodynamics, determine the limits of history. Deuteronomy 8 establishes not merely the covenantal possibility of compound economic growth but the covenantal requirement of such growth. A failure of a society to achieve this is a sign of its covenant-breaking status, whether permanent or temporary. This brings me to a conclusion: the zero growth movement is a covenant-breaking movement with a covenant-denying eschatology. Humanism’s “limits to growth” philosophy is misconstrued. It focuses on physical limits to growth – inescapable in a inite world – in order to call men to impose anti-growth policies through political coercion. The biblical goal is to call on mankind to extend existing environmental limits to growth through production, including especially the production of additional human beings. Our awareness of the existence of inal limits to growth should inspire us to pursue growth through personal capital accumulation and the de-capitalization of the State. The environmental limit of time is our great enemy, not the environmental limit of raw materials, including living space. By extending man’s dominion to the inal limits of the environment’s ability to sustain human life, man reaches the eschatological limit of 36. Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1959).

244

DEUTERONOMY

time. It is our God-assigned task to ill the earth, not to impose politi37 cal limits on growth. The biblical concept of “ill the earth” does mean there are inal limits. The traditional plea of the foreign missions fund-raiser is woefully incomplete: “When that last sinner is brought to saving faith in Jesus Christ, Christ will return in glory!”38 Christ will return in glory when mankind has fulilled the dominion covenant, which includes the Great Commission.39 That last sinner, whoever he or she may be, will complete the Great Commission, but only after mankind has completed the dominion covenant. The ideal of growth will never end in history. It is an eschatological corollary of history. Our task as covenant-keepers is to bring on the end of history by working to reach mankind’s limits to growth.

37. State land, including rain forests (such as on the Olympic coast of Washington State) and jungles, should be auctioned of by the State to the highest bidders. The income generated by such sales should then be used to pay of government debt. Government debt is a great civil evil in our day. As the supply of privately owned rain forests and jungles grows smaller, their prices will go up. Corporations or other well-capitalized groups can then buy them up to construct rain forest preserves or jungle preserves, turning them into non-proit wild life parks, or scientiic research centers, or proit-seeking adventure theme parks. “Save the tigers” will become an ecologically attainable goal when the breeding of tigers for tiger-hunting game preserves becomes proitable. Meanwhile, it is not the State’s job to set aside wild life preserves at taxpayers’ expense, any more than it is the State’s job to set aside preserves for smallpox germs. When you hear the politically correct words, “protect the environment from man,” think “smallpox.” If men are willing and able to pay for cleared land where a snake-infested jungle now stands, it should be cut down and plowed under. This is for private owners of jungles to decide, not State bureaucrats. An ecological problem today is this: men are burning down government-owned rain forests to get access to free land. When a private irm can increase its wealth by burning down part of a government-owned rain forest, the government has in efect posted a large sign in front of every rain forest: “Burn Me!” Some gasoline and a match are a lot cheaper than a sealed-bid auction. 38. I heard just such a plea sometime around 1965. I heard it again in early 1997 at a church-sponsored missions conference. Eschatology afects missions. 39. Gentry, Greatness of the Great Commission.

22 DISINHERITING THE HEIRS Disinheriting the Heirs And it shall be, if thou do at all forget the LORD thy God, and walk after other gods, and serve them, and worship them, I testify against you this day that ye shall surely perish. As the nations which the LORD destroyeth before your face, so shall ye perish; because ye would not be obedient unto the voice of the LORD your God (Deut. 8:19–20).

The theocentric principle undergirding this warning is the doctrine of God as the sanctions-bringer in history. The language of negative sanctions here was absolute. These sanctions were historical. This law was not a seed law. It did not apply exclusively to tribal relationships. It was a land law because it applied to Israel’s survival inside Canaan’s boundaries. But was it exclusively a land law? That is, does the same negative sanction of national removal from the land threaten every covenanted nation? This seems unlikely. Invasion, perhaps, but not actual removal. Mass conversion to a rival faith, as in North Africa, 632–732, and Constantinople, 1453, but not actual removal. What Israel did to Canaan was a one-time event: genocide. Similarly, what Assyria did to the Northern Kingdom and Babylon did to Judah were unique events, analogous to what Israel had done to Canaan. We can also ask: Do nations lawfully covenant with God in New Testament times? This text does not say, but the context of this text was a universal aspect of the covenant: covenantal forgetfulness and God’s desire that all nations obey Him. “Therefore thou shalt keep the commandments of the LORD thy God, to walk in his ways, and to fear him” (v. 6). Thus, if forgetfulness is a permanent covenantal problem, it must still apply to nations, for the nation is the context of the Great Commission (Matt. 28:18–20).

245

246

DEUTERONOMY

To Perish The Hebrew word translated as “perish” is elsewhere translated as “destroy.” In this context, the word seems to mean total destruction: the same degree of destruction that God was asking them to bring against the Canaanites. God had used Israel to destroy Arad completely, whose newly ownerless land Israel had then inherited, as promised. “And Israel vowed a vow unto the LORD, and said, If thou wilt indeed deliver this people into my hand, then I will utterly destroy their cities. And the LORD hearkened to the voice of Israel, and delivered up the Canaanites; and they utterly destroyed them and their cities: and he called the name of the place Hormah” (Num. 21:2–3). The destruction of Canaan was to be comparable: Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, When ye are passed over Jordan into the land of Canaan; Then ye shall drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you, and destroy all their pictures, and destroy all their molten images, and quite pluck down all their high places: And ye shall dispossess the inhabitants of the land, and dwell therein: for I have given you the land to possess it. And ye shall divide the land by lot for an inheritance among your families: and to the more ye shall give the more inheritance, and to the fewer ye shall give the less inheritance: every man’s inheritance shall be in the place where his lot falleth; according to the tribes of your fathers ye shall inherit. But if ye will not drive out the inhabitants of the land from before you; then it shall come to pass, that those which ye let remain of them shall be pricks in your eyes, and thorns in your sides, and shall vex you in the land wherein ye dwell. Moreover it shall come to pass, that I shall do unto you, as I thought to do unto them (Num. 33:51–56).

This was a command in the form of a prophecy. God warned the Israelites that if they did not bring total destruction to the Canaanites, the Canaanites would remain in the land to vex them spiritually. If Israel then worshipped the gods of Canaan, God would impose the negative sanction that He had instructed Israel to bring against Canaan. Yet this language of total destruction was conditional. There was always to be the possibility of forgiveness on God’s terms when He dealt with Israel. This meant that there would not be total destruction. Take heed unto yourselves, lest ye forget the covenant of the LORD your God, which he made with you, and make you a graven image, or the

Disinheriting the Heirs

247

likeness of any thing, which the LORD thy God hath forbidden thee. For the LORD thy God is a consuming ire, even a jealous God. When thou shalt beget children, and children’s children, and ye shall have remained long in the land, and shall corrupt yourselves, and make a graven image, or the likeness of any thing, and shall do evil in the sight of the LORD thy God, to provoke him to anger: I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that ye shall soon utterly perish from of the land whereunto ye go over Jordan to possess it; ye shall not prolong your days upon it, but shall utterly be destroyed. And the LORD shall scatter you among the nations, and ye shall be left few in number among the heathen, whither the LORD shall lead you. And there ye shall serve gods, the work of men’s hands, wood and stone, which neither see, nor hear, nor eat, nor smell. But if from thence thou shalt seek the LORD thy God, thou shalt ind him, if thou seek him with all thy heart and with all thy soul. When thou art in tribulation, and all these things are come upon thee, even in the latter days, if thou turn to the LORD thy God, and shalt be obedient unto his voice; (For the LORD thy God is a merciful God;) he will not forsake thee, neither destroy thee, nor forget the covenant of thy fathers which he sware unto them (Deut. 4:23–31).

So, on the one hand, there would be what God described as total destruction. On the other hand, captivity abroad would be substituted for total destruction. “And ye shall perish among the heathen, and the land of your enemies shall eat you up” (Lev. 26:38). Israel would perish as captives perish, not as the families of Korah and Dathan had perished: “They, and all that appertained to them, went down alive into the pit, and the earth closed upon them: and they perished from among the congregation” (Num. 16:33).

The Prophesied Seed There was one promise that was not conditional: Jacob’s. “The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come; and unto him shall the gathering of the people be” (Gen. 49:10). This was a messianic prophecy, not a covenantal prophecy. Old Covenant messianic prophesies were not ethically conditional. Nothing that man could do to rebel against God would in any way hinder the scheduled advent in history of the messiah. This being the case, the corporate negative historical sanction of destruction could not be total. The language of total destruction had to be interpreted in terms of the messianic prophesies. The destruction of Israel would be analogous to the destruction of Canaan: not total, as God had required, but partial, as Israel had actually imposed.

248

DEUTERONOMY

A remnant of Canaan remained in the land; so would a remnant of Israel also remain during the Babylonian captivity. “And he [Nebuchadnezzar] carried away all Jerusalem, and all the princes, and all the mighty men of valour, even ten thousand captives, and all the craftsmen and smiths: none remained, save the poorest sort of the people of the land” (II Ki. 24:14). A remnant of captives also would return. God did not intend that the language of total destruction be interpreted literally, for He had already given Israel a pair of promises that made total destruction impossible. First, there would be an inheriting seed of Judah. Second, there would be an opportunity to repent in a foreign land. The symbolism (rhetoric) of Deuteronomy 8:19–20 was not to be understood by Israel as negating the eschatology of the messianic promises and the ethically conditional status of pre-messiah covenantal lawsuits against Israel. Judicial theology always prevails over biblical symbolism; the latter is in service to the former.1 The promised messianic inheritance assured Israel of some minimal degree of continuity. The inheritance would not be completely removed from the nation at least until Shiloh appeared. Israel would not be removed from the face of the earth, although Israel might be removed from the face of the land. This physical removal was the covenantal threat set before them in Deuteronomy 8:19–20. Part of the landed inheritance would be removed from them and transferred to others. Upon their return, the old laws of landed inheritance would be modiied to include strangers. Israel would no longer have a monopoly of ownership in the Promised Land. “And it shall come to pass, that ye shall divide it by lot for an inheritance unto you, and to the strangers that sojourn among you, which shall beget children among you: and they shall be unto you as born in the country among the children of Israel; they shall have inheritance with you among the tribes of Israel. And it shall come to pass, that in what tribe the stranger sojourneth, there shall ye give him his inheritance, saith the Lord GOD” (Ezek. 47:22–23). There could be no legitimate doubt in the mind of any Israelite that Israel could lay claim to Canaan unconditionally. Israel would gain legal title through conquest, but this legal title was no better

1. This is a basic principle of the hermeneutics of Christian Reconstruction and the Calvinist tradition generally.

Disinheriting the Heirs

249

than their corporate maintenance of the terms of ownership. These terms were covenantal. They involved biblical law. God reserved the right to evict Israel from the land if the terms of His contract were not honored. Bodily eviction was the primary threatened sanction here. God would use another nation to sweep them out of the land, just as He had used them to sweep out the Canaanites. God was jealous; He would not tolerate false worship by His people. The negative sanction of disinheritance would remind them of their conditional status as inheriting sons. The Babylonian captivity would remind them of this conditional inheritance. Upon the remnant’s return from captivity, the new terms of landed inheritance would remind them that landed inheritance would no longer rest legally on the original conquest under Joshua. It would rest on a family’s mere presence in the land at the time of the captives’ return, even a gentile family (Ezek. 47:22–23). The judicial threat of Deuteronomy 8:19–20 was this: if Israel did not preserve the monopoly of God’s public worship in the land of Israel, God would not preserve Israel’s monopoly of landed inheritance. This post-exilic inclusion of strangers in the inheritance pointed to a broadening of the covenant to include the gentiles. With the fulillment of the messianic prophecies, the gentiles became co-heirs of the entire covenantal inheritance. “For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus. And if ye be Christ’s, then are ye Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise” (Gal. 3:27–29). This lay in the distant future in Moses’ day, but the unconditional nature of Jacob’s prophecy pointed eschatologically to a day of gentile inheritance. First, the scepter would depart from Judah. Second, no matter how comprehensive His language of destruction and disinheritance, God would preserve a remnant of Israel.

Predictable Corporate Sanctions Deuteronomy 8:19–20 established speciic negative sanctions. The law of the covenant did not stand alone. To this law were attached sanctions. In this instance, the negative sanction of national eviction was built into the Mosaic law. To discuss God’s covenant law-order apart from God’s predictable corporate sanctions in history is at best a theological mistake and at worst a mark of self-conscious antinomian rebellion. It is comparable to discussing history apart from

250

DEUTERONOMY

eternity and its two-fold sanctions. To say that heaven and hell are not predictable is to deny Christian orthodoxy. In fact, it is the denial of a literal hell and a literal lake of ire that is the premier mark of heresy in the twentieth century. This denial of predictable sanctions has been moved from eternity to history. It is widely believed among Protestant scholars today that there are no predictable divine sanctions in history. This denial of predictable historical sanctions, if true, would make impossible the creation of a uniquely biblical social theory. If God does not bring predictable corporate sanctions in history in terms of His Bible-revealed law, then Christians and Jews must adopt some version of natural law theory or democratic theory or some other humanist system of man-imposed sanctions in their search for social predictability. Sanctions are an inescapable concept in social theory. It is never a question of sanctions vs. no sanctions. It is always a question of which sanctions imposed by whom in terms of which law-order. There is no escape from this limit on man’s thinking. If there were no predictable relationship between law and sanctions, there could be no social theory. Men would not be able to make sense biblically of their social environment.

Political Theory Political theory should be justiied in terms of social theory. Politics is a subset of a more comprehensive system of sanctions: a higher law and therefore higher sanctions. In modern humanist political theory, political representatives are believed to represent larger social forces. As such, they impose civil sanctions as stewards or legal representatives of these forces. These forces may be seen as personal or impersonal, but they are always believed to be partially predictable by man. The justiication for civil sanctions rests on a formal appeal to a speciic theory of justice. Justice is always deined as a coherent system of law and sanctions. In all widely held theories of politics, justice can be legitimately sought in the realm of politics only because justice is understood as being broader than politics. Men believe that they must submit to negative institutional sanctions because they believe that these sanctions in some way will prevent or forestall the imposition of even more threatening negative sanctions by something more powerful and more menacing than man and his sanctions.

Disinheriting the Heirs

251

Consider a simple example. Residents of urban areas located close to earthquake faults elect political representatives who pass laws establishing building codes that reduce the threat of collapse during an earthquake. The impersonal seismic forces that produce earthquakes are understood as governed by the laws of geology. These laws can be studied and catalogued. While individual earthquakes may not be predictable very far in advance, the statistically predictable occurrence of earthquakes in general is widely believed. This predictability is what justiies the building codes. Negative civil sanctions for violating these building codes are regarded as legitimate because of the statistical predictability of earthquakes. The lesser threat of civil sanctions is justiied in terms of the larger threat of collapsing buildings. The laws of geology do not autonomously justify such building codes. There must be an added element of moral law. The State is seen as the preserver of the peace. It is assumed by voters that a city full of dead and dying people after an earthquake may not be peaceful. Building codes will therefore help to preserve the peace, just as ire codes do. Other moral arguments could also be introduced: the State as insurer, protector, or healer. These additional elements are used to justify civil building codes in seismically vulnerable regions. Conclusion: a knowledge of physical laws is necessary but not sujcient to justify negative civil sanctions. On what basis are laws against certain immoral public acts justiied? What if there were no overarching system of moral law with predictable sanctions attached? That is, if God did not threaten to bring coercive sanctions against society in general for tolerating certain immoral acts, would there be a legitimate reason for the State to bring coercive sanctions against those who commit such acts? This is the issue of what is commonly designated as a victimless crime. Economist and legal theorist F. A. Hayek has written: “At least where it is not believed that the whole group may be punished by a supernatural power for the sins of individuals, there can arise no such rules from the limitation of conduct towards others, and therefore from the settlements of disputes.”2 In short, “no God–no victim.”

2. F. A. Hayek, Rules of Order, vol. 1 of Law, Legislation and Liberty (University of Chicago Press, 1973), p. 101.

252

DEUTERONOMY

The judicial case against the sale of addictive drugs might be made in terms of addiction as a potential source of crime. Question: On what judicial or moral basis can negative civil sanctions be imposed on potential causes of future crimes? Wouldn’t this open the door to civil sanctions against all sorts of not-yet-crimes and might-become-crimes? Could the State then be restrained from becoming tyrannical? The State would then replace God as the perceived victim of victimless crimes. Its majesty would be seen as threatened by such activities, and many are the actions that might challenge this majesty. If drug addiction is uniquely threatening to social peace, those who defend the imposition of civil sanctions against addictive drug sales must make their case based on the statistical relationship between widespread addiction and crime. This is because the case for negative civil sanctions against the sale of addictive drugs cannot be made directly from biblical law. There is no biblical civil law against drunkenness except in the case of the rebellious son. But gluttony is also speciied in the text as a mark of his rebellion (Deut. 21:20). No one suggests negative civil sanctions against the sale of fattening foods. Governments have passed endless laws against the sale of drugs in response to the steady increase in middle-class addiction, which has accompanied the breakdown of biblical faith. The nineteenth century, which has few such laws, was not cursed by an addicted population. Humanist society has failed. Laws against drug sales cannot restore the lost faith in God and meaning. They merely raise the price of rebellion, but at the cost of a great loss of honest people’s liberties. Modern social theory has abandoned the idea that God brings predictable sanctions in history in terms of His law. This includes most Christian social theory, such as it is. Theonomy is the main exception to this rule. For humanist social theory, the idea of God’s sanctions in history is relegated to adiaphora: things indiferent to the humanist faith. Mirroring this humanistic outlook is modern Christian theology, which relegates civil law to adiaphora. For humanists, God’s law and His sanctions in history are irrelevant to their worldview; for most Christians, God’s law and sanctions in history are equally irrelevant to their worldview. On this shared testimony, the humanist-pietist alliance has rested for three centuries.3 Political

3. Gary North, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989).

Disinheriting the Heirs

253

pluralists have always declared this confession of faith, from Roger Williams to the Christian Coalition.4 To the extent that Christians are beginning to consider the possibility that God brings predictable corporate sanctions in history, to that extent they have moved away from political pluralism and toward theonomic covenantalism. The dividing issue here is the question of the source of our knowledge of these laws and also their divinely imposed sanctions. If the source is believed to be shared by all rational men irrespective of their belief in the Bible as the unique, revealed word of God, then natural law theory undergirds social theory, either as some variant of medieval scholasticism or right-wing Enlightenment humanism. In both cases, Protestants ind themselves under the domination of humanism, either by way of Greece or Scotland, Aristotle or the two Adams: Ferguson and Smith. On the other hand, if the source of this knowledge is not shared, but is found exclusively in the Bible, then theonomic covenantalism undergirds social theory.

4. As I wrote in the Foreword, the Christian Coalition is a political action organization. It was created by cable television multimillionaire entrepreneur Pat Robertson. In its 1995 political testament, Contract With the American Family, the organization announced the standard pluralist-Unitarian worldview that has governed the United States since the late nineteenth century. Ralph Reed, Jr., its Executive Director, proclaimed: “We believe in an America where all citizens are judged on the content of their character, and not on their gender, race, religion, or ethnic background” (pp. ix–x). This is the standard pluralist-humanist litany, “without respect to race, color, creed, or national origin.” It places character above theological confession (creed). It deines the content of character apart from the Bible. The document correctly invokes Roger Williams as the originator of the American doctrine of the separation of church and State (p. 5). It rewrites colonial history, just as third-rate humanist high school history textbooks have done for a century, by claiming that the Puritans had led from “the European system of ojcially sanctioned ‘state religions’” which “beneited neither the state nor the religion involved” (p. 5). In fact, Massachusetts and Connecticut maintained state-established Congregational churches well into the 1820’s. The document calls for tax-funded education that maintains “traditional values” (p. 13), which was exactly what Unitarian Horace Mann called for when he promoted the public school movement in Massachusetts in the 1830’s: traditional values stripped of all theological content. Contract With the American Family (Nashville, Tennessee: Moorings, a division of Random House, 1995) is subtitled: A bold plan by Christian Coalition to strengthen the family and restore common-sense values. This is an appeal to something resembling eighteenth-century Scottish common-sense rationalism, which did not survive Darwinism and modern existentialist philosophy. The last major institution to defend Scottish rationalism was Princeton Theological Seminary, which went liberal in 1929. See Gary North, Crossed Fingers: How the Liberals Captured the Presbyterian Church (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1996), ch. 10.

254

DEUTERONOMY

Sanctions and Sovereignty Rushdoony has written that the source of a society’s law is its god.5 This is an accurate observation, but it is incomplete as stated. The source of a society’s sanctions is also its god. I will go farther: if a society distinguishes sharply between the source of its law and the source of its sanctions, the latter is the god of that society. In general, however, societies regard the source of law and sanctions as the same. There is always some degree of schizophrenia regarding a society’s god because there are multiple sources of sanctions in history. In the twentieth century, Protestants have given lip service to God as sovereign over history, yet they also have denied that God’s law has any place in civil law codes. But if God is over history, yet without predictable sanctions in history, He becomes analogous to the god of deism. Christian social theory then becomes something analogous to Scottish Enlightenment moral philosophy. Protestant Christians for three centuries have gone a long way down this road in the direction of operational deism. They ajrm that God brings sanctions against societies, but not in terms of biblical law. God supposedly brings sanctions in terms of natural law. He has revealed Himself equally clearly to all rational men regarding His universal but theologically neutral moral law, i.e., natural law. This universal revelation is said to supersede biblical law, which was supposedly annulled by the New Testament. This removes fundamental law from the Bible and transfers it to logic, custom, or power. It therefore establishes the political sovereignty of man, who no longer must confess faith in the God of the Bible in order to rule legitimately in civil society. To the degree that a system of cosmic or social sanctions is regarded as unpredictable in history, to that same degree are sanctions-bringing representative agents freed from observing the details of cosmic or social law. They can substitute other laws that are in no clear way governed by cosmic or social law. The sovereignty of God progressively becomes the sovereignty of man, which in turn elevates the sovereignty of the State, which is seen increasingly as the ultimate sanctions-bringer in history. 5. R. J. Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law (Nutley, New Jersey: Craig Press, 1973), p. 5.

Disinheriting the Heirs

255

Conclusion The covenantal threat listed here was disinheritance. Moses was preparing the conquest generation for a military campaign. The military spoils would be the long-deferred inheritance: Canaan. The threat of disinheritance was a powerful threat for such a group. Israel had waited four centuries for the fulillment of God’s promise to Abraham. Now, at the very time of fulillment, Moses warned them that if they broke covenant with God by worshipping other gods, God would remove them from the land. The irst step toward apostasy, Moses warned, was their vain imagining that they, rather than God, were the source of their wealth (v. 17). The threat was their removal from the land. God would remove them as surely as He would soon remove the present inhabitants. This promise of disinheritance was no less reliable than the promise of inheritance to Abraham. Inheritance was about to take place; they could rest assured that disinheritance would also take place. If they worshipped the gods of Canaan, God would remove them from those regions in which local deities were believed to exercise their sovereignty. If Israelites attributed to themselves and their adopted local gods the wealth they would enjoy in Canaan, God would deal with them in the same way. This warning established a fundamental principle of covenant theology: similar corporate sins bring similar negative corporate sanctions in history. Whenever those who call themselves by God’s name refuse to believe this principle, even going so far as to deny its continuing authority, they ind themselves on the defensive. Those who worship other gods and obey other laws promise positive sanctions in history. If those who are called by God to worship Him and obey His laws refuse to acknowledge the threat of negative corporate sanctions in history, they become “we, too” social theorists. “Our way is just as good as your way.” This eventually becomes, “Our way is pretty much the same as your way, since God is the author of universal truth. Your way obviously works – positive sanctions abound – so we will restructure our way to mimic your way.” As dispensational publicist Tommy Ice has put it, “Premillennialists have always been involved in the present world. And basically, they have picked up on the ethical positions of their contemporaries.”6 In this, they have not 6. Tommy Ice, response in a 1988 debate: Ice and Dave Hunt vs. Gary North and Gary DeMar. Cited in Gary DeMar, The Debate Over Christian Reconstruction (Atlanta, Georgia: American Vision, 1988), p. 185.

256

DEUTERONOMY

been alone. Christian social theorists have been doing this from the beginnings of systematic Christian social theory in the medieval West. They have followed the lead of the early church’s apologists, who imported the wisdom of Greece in the name of commonground truth.7

7. Cornelius Van Til, A Christian Theory of Knowledge (Nutley, New Jersey: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1969), ch. 4; cf. Van Til, Christianity in Conlict (Syllabus, Westminster Seminary, 1962).

23 OVERCOMING VISIBLE Overcoming THE the Visible OddsODDS Hear, O Israel: Thou art to pass over Jordan this day, to go in to possess nations greater and mightier than thyself, cities great and fenced up to heaven, A people great and tall, the children of the Anakims, whom thou knowest, and of whom thou hast heard say, Who can stand before the children of Anak! Understand therefore this day, that the LORD thy God is he which goeth over before thee; as a consuming ire he shall destroy them, and he shall bring them down before thy face: so shalt thou drive them out, and destroy them quickly, as the LORD hath said unto thee. Speak not thou in thine heart, after that the LORD thy God hath cast them out from before thee, saying, For my righteousness the LORD hath brought me in to possess this land: but for the wickedness of these nations the LORD doth drive them out from before thee. Not for thy righteousness, or for the uprightness of thine heart, dost thou go to possess their land: but for the wickedness of these nations the LORD thy God doth drive them out from before thee, and that he may perform the word which the LORD sware unto thy fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Understand therefore, that the LORD thy God giveth thee not this good land to possess it for thy righteousness; for thou art a stifnecked people (Deut. 9:1–6).

Moses here presented a prophecy. This prophecy, as with all biblical prophecies, had an ethical component. God always deals with men covenantally, and the covenant rests on God’s law.1 This prophecy announced the near-term fulillment of God’s original promise to Abraham. That promise had linked Israel’s victory to Canaan’s immorality: “But in the fourth generation they shall come hither again: 1. Ray R. Sutton, That You May Prosper: Dominion By Covenant (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1992), ch. 3.

257

258

DEUTERONOMY

for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full” (Gen. 15:16). The iniquity of the Amorites was now full. The day of the Lord was at hand. This prophecy was ethical, as all but messianic prophecies were. The Israelites were commanded to begin the conquest. This command rested on God as sovereign over history. His prophecy regarding the fourth-generation’s conquest of Canaan was about to come true. The theocentric nature of this prophecy is obvious. God’s decree is sovereign. This was a land law. It related to the conquest. But it had implications far beyond the conquest. It related corporate disobedience to defeat in history as a general principle. As Orwell might have put it in Animal Farm: “Original sin is total, but some sins are more total than others.”

The Day of the Lord “Hear, O Israel: Thou art to pass over Jordan this day.” This announcement was not supposed to be taken literally. The Israelites did not cross the Jordan that day. Moses still had a great deal more to tell them, as the length of the remainder of this commentary indicates. Moses did not die that day. After he died, the nation mourned 30 days (Deut. 34:8). Then they crossed the Jordan. So, what did Moses mean by “this day”? The “day” referred to here was the day of the Lord. This phrase refers in Scripture to a period of divine judgment that constitutes a turning point in a society’s history. The phrase does not occur in the Bible until the prophets; it occurs most often in the Book of Isaiah. Generally, it refers to a period of negative corporate sanctions.2 “Howl ye; for the day of the LORD is at hand; it shall come as a destruction from the Almighty” (Isa. 13:6). Occasionally, the phrase “that day” is used to describe a time of national restoration: positive corporate sanctions. “And it shall come to pass in that day, that the Lord shall set his hand again the second time to recover the remnant of his people, which shall be left, from Assyria, and from Egypt, and

2. “For the day of the LORD of hosts shall be upon every one that is proud and lofty, and upon every one that is lifted up; and he shall be brought low” (Isa. 2:12). “And the loftiness of man shall be bowed down, and the haughtiness of men shall be made low: and the LORD alone shall be exalted in that day” (Isa. 2:17). “Therefore the LORD will cut of from Israel head and tail, branch and rush, in one day” (Isa. 9:14).

Overcoming the Visible Odds

259

from Pathros, and from Cush, and from Elam, and from Shinar, and from Hamath, and from the islands of the sea. And he shall set up an ensign for the nations, and shall assemble the outcasts of Israel, and gather together the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth” (Isa. 11:11–12). The day of the Lord was a period of national sanctions: inheritance and disinheritance. Usually, it meant disinheritance for rebellious Israel and inheritance for some invader. In this context, however, it meant Israel’s inheritance and Canaan’s disinheritance. The Bible uses the language of heavenly transformation to describe covenantal-political transformations. This is clear in Isaiah’s prophecy regarding the defeat of Babylon by Medo-Persia (Isa. 13:1). “Behold, the day of the LORD cometh, cruel both with wrath and ierce anger, to lay the land desolate: and he shall destroy the sinners thereof out of it. For the stars of heaven and the constellations thereof shall not give their light: the sun shall be darkened in his going forth, and the moon shall not cause her light to shine. And I will punish the world for their evil, and the wicked for their iniquity; and I will cause the arrogancy of the proud to cease, and will lay low the haughtiness of the terrible. I will make a man more precious than ine gold; even a man than the golden wedge of Ophir. Therefore I will shake the heavens, and the earth shall remove out of her place, in the wrath of the LORD of hosts, and in the day of his ierce anger” (Isa. 13:9–13). This same cosmic language was invoked prophetically by Jesus to describe the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70: “Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken” (Matt. 24:29). The Bible uses the language of cosmic transformation to describe national disinheritance: the end of an old world order. An old world order is then replaced by a newer world order. The inal new world order in history is Jesus Christ’s. No other will ever replace it. “And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed: and the kingdom shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand for ever” (Dan. 2:44). The time period of judgment normally lasts for longer than a day, but the inal consummation comes on one day, the day of inal judgment being the archetype. It is marked by either the total

260

DEUTERONOMY

3

destruction of the unrighteous or their unconditional surrender. The siege of Jerusalem, which ended the Old Covenant order, took far more than a day, but it was consummated with a day of destruction: the burning of the temple – not by ojcial command – by a pair of Roman soldiers. The Jewish defector Josephus, who became a court historian for the Roman emperor, referred to this as “that fatal day.”4 This iery event marked the demise of the Mosaic priesthood in Israel. It also marked the origin of Rabbinic Judaism, or as Neusner calls it, “the Judaism of the two Torahs,” i.e., the Old Testament and the Mishnah/Talmud.5 The teachers of the oral law had followed the Pharisees rather than the Sadducees; their ideas triumphed among the Jews after the fall of Jerusalem.6 From that time on, those who proclaimed themselves as the legitimate heirs of Moses added their respective authoritative commentaries on the Old Testament: the New Testament for Christians and Mishnah/ Talmud for Jews.7 In both cases, the respective interpretive commentaries were assumed by their adherents to take precedence operationally over the Old Testament, although neither group challenged the authority of the Old Testament.8 Both sides acknowledged the radical covenantal discontinuity that had taken place with the burning of the temple. The Old Order was gone forever. It cannot possibly replace the New World Order of Jesus Christ, for no order ever will. This is why dispensational theology is utterly wrong about: 1) the removal of the church from history by the Rapture; 2) the absence of every trace of the New Testament order during the interim period of seven years until Christ returns bodily to set up His millennial kingdom; and 3) the substitution of a Jewish theocratic-bureaucratic order during the millennium, where temple sacriices of bulls and sheep 3. Gary North, Unconditional Surrender: God’s Program for Victory (3rd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1988). 4. Flavius Josephus, The Wars of The Jews, VI:IV:5. 5. Jacob Neusner, An Introduction to Judaism: A Textbook and Reader (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991), p. 157. Neusner is the most proliic scholarly author in modern history; his bibliography runs over 30 single-spaced pages, over 400 volumes. 6. Herbert Danby, The Mishnah (New York: Oxford University Press, [1933] 1987), p. xiii. 7. An exception is the Karaite sect of Judaism, which acknowledges the authority only of the Pentateuch. They organized themselves as a separate sect in the eighth century, A.D. Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), p. 169. 8. Jacob Neusner, Judaism and Scripture: The Evidence of Leviticus Rabbah (University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. xi.

Overcoming the Visible Odds

261

and goats will be restored. Although dispensational theologians refuse to say this in print, these animal sacriices would have to replace the Lord’s Supper. The Lord’s Supper is said by dispensationalists to memorialize the death of Christ. What will the “memorials” 9 (Scoield’s term) of the animal sacriices symbolize? There is no equality possible; one sacriicial “memorial” or the other must be authoritative. There will be no revival of a Jewish theocratic order10 because Jesus Christ is not a bigamist with two brides and a diferent sacramental system for each of them. The gentile church is not Leah with the Jewish church serving as Rachel, or vice versa. There is only one bride for the Bridegroom. There is also only one inal world order: Jesus Christ’s. It will never be broken by an eschatological discontinuity: the Rapture, followed by a Great Tribulation period. We learn this from Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the tares. “He said unto them, An enemy hath done this. The servants said unto him, Wilt thou then that we go and gather them up? But he said, Nay; lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest: and in the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, Gather ye together irst the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn them: but gather the wheat into my barn” (Matt. 13:28–30). Jesus explained: “The enemy that sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the world; and the reapers are the angels. As therefore the tares are gathered and burned in the ire; so shall it be in the end of this world” (vv. 39–40). There will be no uprooting of either wheat or tares, the church or the rebels, until the end of time.

9. See the comments on Ezekiel 43:19 in the original Scoield Reference Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 1909), p. 890, and suggestion number one in the New Scoield Reference Bible (Oxford, 1967), p. 888n. Suggestion number one is that these animal sacriices will be memorials, just as Scoield wrote. Suggestion number two simply scraps the whole temple-sacriice scheme by allegorizing the passage – a familiar approach of dispensational “hermeneutical literalists” whenever their professed hermeneutics leads them into some embarrassing exegetical dead end. The authors were too timid to say which suggestion they prefer. 10. If, as the dispensationalists argue, “Israel always means Israel and not the church,” then the millennial age must be Jewish. Dispensationalists appeal to the Psalms to describe the restored kingdom. As postmillennialist O. T. Allis wrote a generation ago, “According to Dispensationalists the Psalms have as their central theme, Christ and the Jewish remnant in the millennial age.” Oswald T. Allis, Prophecy and the Church (Philadelphia: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1945), p. 244.

262

DEUTERONOMY

Moses told Israel that a day of covenantal discontinuity had arrived. There would soon be a covenantal displacement in the land of Canaan. The Levitical laws governing landed inheritance (Lev. 25) and all the other Mosaic land laws would soon have a meaningful geographical context. A new world order was about to replace the Canaanites’ old world order. The magnitude of this covenantal discontinuity would be visible to all. Everyone would know in retrospect that God alone had been behind this transformation because of the disparity in physical size between the winners and the losers. The multitude of Israelite ants would consume the Anakim elephants.

The Bigger They Are The Anakim were large people, probably Goliath-sized. Goliath was a little over nine feet tall (I Sam. 17:4). Spies sent by Moses to survey Canaan had reported: “And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants: and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight” (Num. 13:33). The region around Canaan had been the home of several groups of these giant peoples. “The Emims dwelt therein in times past, a people great, and many, and tall, as the Anakims; Which also were accounted giants, as the Anakims; but the Moabites call them Emims” (Deut. 2:10–11). The Hebrew word translated giant is rawfaw. Og of Bashan was a giant. He was described by Moses as the last of them. “For only Og king of Bashan remained of the remnant of giants; behold, his bedstead was a bedstead of iron; is it not in Rabbath of the children of Ammon? nine cubits was the length thereof, and four cubits the breadth of it, after the cubit of a man” (Deut. 3:11). A man who sleeps in a bed that is over 13 feet long and six feet wide is either a giant or else worries a lot about falling out of bed. Og’s size did him no good militarily. “And the rest of Gilead, and all Bashan, being the kingdom of Og, gave I unto the half tribe of Manasseh; all the region of Argob, with all Bashan, which was called the land of giants” (Deut. 3:13). The military success of Israel over Og of Bashan was a trans-Jordan preliminary testament: Israel would inherit Canaan despite the presence of giants. Which giants? Wasn’t Og the last of them? In what sense was Og the last of the remnant of giants, when Anakim still dwelt in Canaan? Moses said: “For only Og king of Bashan remained of the remnant of giants.” What did Moses mean by this? Was Og even larger than the others? The size of his bed indicates that he was. A

Overcoming the Visible Odds

263

man the size of Goliath does not need a bed over 13 feet long. Og was the largest giant of all, the last of the original race mentioned in Genesis 6:4.11 Canaan’s Anakim were accounted as giants (Deut. 2:11, 20). When God enabled Israel to conquer Og, He showed Israel that the “not quite giants” would not be a large problem. Other tribes of peoples accounted as giants had been conquered by Israel’s relatives, Esau and Ammon. “That also was accounted a land of giants: giants dwelt therein in old time; and the Ammonites call them Zamzummims; A people great, and many, and tall, as the Anakims; but the LORD destroyed them before them; and they succeeded them, and dwelt in their stead: As he did to the children of Esau, which dwelt in Seir, when he destroyed the Horims from before them; and they succeeded them, and dwelt in their stead even unto this day” (Deut. 2:20–22). If the heirs of evil Esau and the even more evil Ammon had inherited the lands of the giants, then Israel should not fear the Anakim. The issue was ethics, not size, as the text indicates. Israel in David’s time faced Philistine heirs of the giants. In each case, the giants lost their battles with individual challengers from Israel (II Sam. 21:16–22). The old phrase, “the bigger they are, the harder they fall,” is well illustrated by the fate of the giants.

Counting the Costs Moses had sent out spies to survey the land and report back (Num. 13). The sight of the giants had terriied some of the spies (v. 33). What they had personally seen made a greater impression on them than what they had heard from God through Moses. Then Joshua and Caleb reminded them of what they had heard. “If the LORD delight in us, then he will bring us into this land, and give it us; a land which loweth with milk and honey. Only rebel not ye against the LORD, neither fear ye the people of the land; for they are bread for us: their defence is departed from them, and the LORD is with us: fear them not. But all the congregation bade stone them with stones. And the glory of the LORD appeared in the tabernacle of 11. The legend of these giants can be found in Hesiod’s Theogany, lines 53–54. This is probably an eighth-century work contemporary with the ministry of Isaiah. See also Jane Ellen Harrison, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (2nd ed.; New Hyde Park, New York: University Books, [1927] 1962), pp. 452–53.

264

DEUTERONOMY

the congregation before all the children of Israel” (Num. 14:8–10). This did no good; in fact, it outraged the other spies. When men’s hearts are rebellious, what they see means more to them than what God has told them. That was the ten spies’ problem. Each of them substituted “I saw with my own eyes” for “Hear, O Israel.” We are told to count the cost of our actions. Jesus warned His listeners regarding the cost of discipleship. He used the analogy of military planning. “Or what king, going to make war against another king, sitteth not down irst, and consulteth whether he be able with ten thousand to meet him that cometh against him with twenty thousand? Or else, while the other is yet a great way of, he sendeth an ambassage, and desireth conditions of peace. So likewise, whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:31–33). This requirement to count the cost led to Moses’ decision to send out the spies. But what ten of the dozen spies forgot was this: facts are to be interpreted in terms of God’s word. Facts are not autonomous; there are no “brute facts.” Facts are always interpreted facts. They are interpreted correctly by God because they have been created by God. They are what God says they are because He created them that way. Van Til has put it this way: “The non-Christian assumes that man is ultimate, that is, that he is not created. Christianity assumes that man is created. The non-Christian assumes that the facts of man’s environment are not created; the Christian assumes that these facts are created.”12 The spies were supposed to interpret what they saw by what God had told them. Lawrence “Yogi” Berra, the former New York Yankees baseball star and a legendary coiner of classic obvious phrases,13 once said, “You can observe a lot just by looking.” But far more important than looking is interpreting. Accurate interpreting begins and ends with hearing and believing the word of God. Israel was facing what appeared to be enormous odds against them. The spies’ own eyes seemed to tell them this. But men’s eyes tell them nothing apart from men’s faith. Our eyes may conirm our faith, fail to conirm it, or confuse us, but they do not operate autonomously. The information that eyes provide must then be interpreted. 12. Cornelius Van Til, The Christian Theory of Knowledge (n.p.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1969), p. 14. 13. His most famous: “It’s déjà-vu all over again.” Another: “When you reach a fork in the road, take it.”

Overcoming the Visible Odds

265

The Israelites were told to estimate the odds in terms of God’s promise to Abraham regarding the sins of Canaan: “But in the fourth generation they shall come hither again: for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full” (Gen. 15:16).

Judicial Blindness and Deafness Soon after Moses announced the crossing of the Jordan, he revealed to Israel the rules of warfare. The irst rule: “When thou goest out to battle against thine enemies, and seest horses, and chariots, and a people more than thou, be not afraid of them: for the LORD thy God is with thee, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt” (Deut. 20:1). God subsequently warned them in the midst of the conquest of Canaan: “Be not afraid because of them: for to morrow about this time will I deliver them up all slain before Israel: thou shalt hough [hamstring] their horses, and burn their chariots with ire” (Josh. 11:6b). Israel defeated the initial wave of charioteers, just as God had promised (Josh. 11:9). But the Israelites refused to believe their own eyes, just as they had refused to believe their own eyes at the Red Sea. “And the children of Joseph said, The hill is not enough for us: and all the Canaanites that dwell in the land of the valley have chariots of iron, both they who are of Beth-shean and her towns, and they who are of the valley of Jezreel” (Josh. 17:16). “And the LORD was with Judah; and he drave out the inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron” (Jud. 1:19). Israel’s theological inheritance to each succeeding generation was reduced by the power of sight over hearing. They would not listen to God’s written word and His prophets. The Bible speaks of hearing and seeing as ethical. What is foundational is not the physical acuity of man’s sight and hearing, but a man’s covenantal framework of interpretation. Isaiah wrote: “Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, Here am I; send me. And he said, Go, and tell this people, Hear ye indeed, but understand not; and see ye indeed, but perceive not. Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and convert, and be healed. Then said I, Lord, how long? And he answered, Until the cities be wasted without inhabitant, and the houses without man, and the land be utterly desolate, And the LORD have removed men far away, and there

266

DEUTERONOMY

be a great forsaking in the midst of the land” (Isa. 6:8–12). God inlicted judicial blindness on the nation. Israelites would see and hear, yet they would not perceive the covenantal meaning of what they saw and heard. This biblical principle of judicial blindness was basic to Jesus’ use of parables: And the disciples came, and said unto him, Why speakest thou unto them in parables? He answered and said unto them, Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given. For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath. Therefore speak I to them in parables: because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand. And in them is fulilled the prophecy of Esaias, which saith, By hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand; and seeing ye shall see, and shall not perceive: For this people’s heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed; lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them. But blessed are your eyes, for they see: and your ears, for they hear (Matt. 13:10–16).

Paul also quoted Isaiah’s words in his inal recorded lecture to the Jews: “Go unto this people, and say, Hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand; and seeing ye shall see, and not perceive: For the heart of this people is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes have they closed; lest they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them” (Acts 28:26–27). The hearing that should govern men’s decision-making is covenantal hearing.

Comparative Degrees of Moral Rebellion The text says that God would soon give the victory to the Israelites despite their unrighteousness. “Not for thy righteousness, or for the uprightness of thine heart, dost thou go to possess their land: but for the wickedness of these nations the LORD thy God doth drive them out from before thee, and that he may perform the word which the LORD sware unto thy fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” (v. 5). Three ideas are present here: 1) Israel is not righteous; 2) the Canaanites are more unrighteous than Israel; 3) God’s promise to Abraham will be fulilled.

Overcoming the Visible Odds

267

The original promise had included a prophecy regarding the sins of the Amorites: they would be illed, i.e., their national boundaries of tolerable rebellion would be breached. The promise of land for Abraham’s heirs was not devoid of a speciic prophecy regarding the ethical condition of the Canaanites. The fulillment of the promise was therefore as secure as the fulillment of the prophecy. The element of ethical conditionality had been present in the original terms of the promise.14 The promise not only did not annul the ethical stipulations of God’s covenant with Abraham; its fulillment would soon conirm that covenant, Moses said. But the Israelites were not to regard the fulillment of the original promise as a conirmation of their righteousness. They were only to regard the fulillment as conirming the Canaanites’ even greater unrighteousness. The illing up of the Canaanites’ iniquity had placed a chronological boundary around Canaan: the day of the Lord. The Canaanites would not extend their dominion over the land beyond this chronological boundary, which was both an ethical-covenantal boundary and a prophetic boundary. God had announced to Abraham, “Thus far and no farther” regarding Canaan’s sins and its time remaining. Now He would fulill His promise.

Canaanites Were Worse Esau had defeated giants; so had Ammon (Deut. 2:20–22). Yet Esau and Ammon were not paragons of national virtue. Ammonites were so evil that it took ten generations of covenant membership to enable an Ammonite to become a citizen of Israel (Deut. 23:3). Yet God had delivered the giants into their hands. This victory was not evidence of the righteousness of either Esau or Ammon. Compared to the giants, however, they were better. Moses warned Israel not to misinterpret the victory that lay ahead. “Speak not thou in thine heart, after that the LORD thy God hath cast them out from before thee, saying, For my righteousness the LORD hath brought me in to possess this land: but for the wickedness of these nations the LORD doth drive them out from before thee” (Deut. 9:4). The Israelites could not legitimately regard themselves as morally deserving of the victory. They deserved nothing 14. Chapter 17.

268

DEUTERONOMY

special, but the Canaanites deserved worse. Their evil had multiplied over time. Their debts to God had compounded. Their day of reckoning had almost arrived. The Israelites were to serve as agents of God’s judgment. Morally speaking, the Israelites were in much the same condition as the deceased reprobate at whose funeral the best that the eulogizer could say about him was this: “His brother was worse.” Israel, as God’s adopted son, was better than the Canaanites, the disinherited sons of Adam. Autonomous man has no legal claim on God. The temptation of Israel was to regard the impending military victory as a sign of their superior ethical standing before God. The lure, once again, was autonomy. “For my righteousness the LORD hath brought me in to possess this land” was the ethical equivalent of “My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth” (Deut. 8:17). Both assertions rested on a belief in Israel’s autonomy. Moses warned them: “Understand therefore, that the LORD thy God giveth thee not this good land to possess it for thy righteousness; for thou art a stifnecked people” (Deut. 9:6). Then he recounted their experience in the wilderness: “Remember, and forget not, how thou provokedst the LORD thy God to wrath in the wilderness: from the day that thou didst depart out of the land of Egypt, until ye came unto this place, ye have been rebellious against the LORD. Also in Horeb ye provoked the LORD to wrath, so that the LORD was angry with you to have destroyed you” (vv. 7–8). The cause, Moses reminded them, was the golden calf incident (vv. 12–14). The threat then had been national destruction. It still was (Deut. 8:19–20). When God had threatened to destroy them after the golden calf incident, Moses had interceded with God, appealing to His name and reputation. “Wherefore should the Egyptians speak, and say, For mischief did he bring them out, to slay them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth? Turn from thy ierce wrath, and repent of this evil against thy people. Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, thy servants, to whom thou swarest by thine own self, and saidst unto them, I will multiply your seed as the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have spoken of will I give unto your seed, and they shall inherit it for ever. And the LORD repented of the evil which he thought to do unto his people” (Ex. 32:12–14). It would have been futile for Moses to have invoked Israel’s righteousness as the basis of God’s extension of mercy. This was still true for the generation of the conquest.

Overcoming the Visible Odds

269

The Adamic Covenant Canaanite civilization was unrighteous. More than this: it was progressively unrighteous. It kept getting worse. It had therefore reached its temporal limits. It had reached its boundaries of dominion. Canaan was about to forfeit its inheritance. If the unrighteousness of Canaan had progressed to such a degree that God was willing to impose total negative sanctions, then there must have been a standard of righteousness governing Canaan. Negative sanctions without law is tyranny. God is no arbitrary tyrant. Then on what lawful basis does God impose negative sanctions? Paul wrote that the negative sanction of death rules in history because the law of God condemns all of Adam’s heirs. “Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned: (For until the law sin was in the world: but sin is not imputed when there is no law. Nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam’s transgression, who is the igure of him that was to come” (Rom. 5:12–14). In short, no negative sanctions–no law. The converse is also true: if negative sanctions, then law. Canaan was under covenantal stipulations. This was the judicial basis of God’s prophecy against Canaan. Canaan had violated God’s law long enough. The day of reckoning had arrived. This implies that Canaanites were under law. Which law? Covenantal law to which historical sanctions are attached. This raises a crucial question: Which covenant? Canaan had not formally covenanted with God as Abram had (Gen. 15:18). Canaanites were not under the law of the covenant in the way that Abraham’s heirs were. The transfer of inheritance was nevertheless about to take place based on Canaan’s violation of God’s law. How could this be? The answer is found in the Adamic covenant. There is a universal covenant between God and Adam’s heirs. It operates in history. Societies progress in terms of their conformity to the law of this covenant. Societies also are cut short in history in terms of this law: the second commandment. Moses had just reiterated the second commandment: “Thou shalt not bow down thyself unto them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me” (Deut. 5:9). This warning was not

270

DEUTERONOMY

limited to Israel, since it spoke of God-haters, i.e., covenant-breakers. The second commandment was the judicial basis of the negative sanctions that Israel was about to impose on Canaan: the Canaanites’ sincere worship of false gods. The Adamic covenant has corporate sanctions. It is not just a law governing individuals. Not only do individuals die, civilizations also die. Not only does God kill individuals, He also kills civilizations. God would soon prove this to Canaan and Israel. The Book of Deuteronomy, as the book of the inheritance, is both a testament and a testimony to the fact that God kills societies. He executes judgment in history in terms of the Adamic covenant’s stipulations. Adam ate from the forbidden tree; so, Adam’s heirs can distinguish good from evil, just as the serpent promised. They cannot legitimately plead ignorance of the law. That they actively suppress God’s truth in unrighteousness, worshipping the creature rather than the Creator (Rom. 1:18–22), testiies to their covenantal knowledge of the truth, not their lack of knowledge. Any suggestion that God does not hold all mankind responsible for obeying His law must come to grips with the destruction of Canaan. Why did God speak to Abraham of the growing iniquity of the Amorites if there was no ethical standard governing Amorite civilization? Because God brought judgment on Canaan, we must ask: By what standard? Moses had warned Israel in the passage immediately preceding this one that if Israel worshipped other gods, God would bring the same judgment against Israel that He was about to bring against Canaan (Deut. 8:19–20). By worshipping other gods, men honor the laws of other covenants. Covenants have stipulations. To adopt other laws besides God’s law constitutes rebellion. How can God legitimately hold covenant-breakers in the Adamic sense responsible for breaking a corporate law-order that they have never publicly ajrmed? Because they are covenantbreakers in Adam, and they are also covenant-breakers on their own account. Adam and his heirs are under corporate covenant law as surely as they are under individual covenant law. Whole societies perish as surely as individuals die. The question then is: How do Adam’s heirs know about the law-order under which they operate and for which God holds them corporately responsible? Paul

Overcoming the Visible Odds

271

provided the answer: the work of the law is written in every person’s heart.15 “For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves: Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean [intervening] while accusing or else excusing one another” (Rom. 2:14–15).

Natural Law and Common Grace In the history of Western political theory, this judicial knowledge has been referred to as natural law. In one sense, such knowledge is inborn and therefore natural. It is built into the hearts of all rational men. In another sense, it is supernatural: as an image of God, each man relects God. Such knowledge is not sujcient to bring all men to saving faith, but it is sujcient to condemn them before God. Such knowledge is sujcient to enable them to perceive the external requirements of the common law. The question is: Will they obey what they know to be true? The biblical answer is simple: “If God gives them the grace to obey.” Grace in this sense is an unearned gift from God, i.e., a gift earned by Jesus Christ on the cross but not earned by the recipients on their own account. Calvinist theologians often call this unearned gift common grace. Calvin called it general grace.16 Common grace enables men to obey at least some of the works of the common law in their hearts. But when this common grace is removed from them in history, societies march into the valley of the shadow of death. Moses announced that Canaan was nearing the end of its long march into destruction. Those Christians who deny the existence of common grace in history have a major exegetical problem with Israel’s conquest of Canaan. Why was Canaan condemned by God? By what standard was Canaan condemned? How had Canaan illed up its cup of iniquity by Joshua’s day? What should Christians call those historical means by which God had earlier prevented them 15. On the distinction between the work of the law written in an unregenerate person’s heart and the law written in the regenerate person’s heart, see John Murray, The Epistle to the Romans, 2 vols. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1965), I, pp. 74–76. 16. John Calvin, The Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559), II:II:17. Ford Lewis Battles translation, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), I:276. See Battles’ footnotes on the same page.

272

DEUTERONOMY

from following the dictates of their rebellious hearts? If the cup of iniquity was full in Joshua’s day, what had reduced the level of iniquity in Abraham’s day? Without the concept of common grace, and speciically corporate common grace, these questions are unanswerable covenantally. Sects that refuse to acknowledge the existence of common grace are unable to develop an explicitly biblical social theory or political theory. They must therefore sit under the academic and judicial tables of covenant-breakers, praying to God that a few scraps will fall from the tables occasionally to feed them (Matt. 15:22–27). They necessarily must view the history of the church as one long march into the shadow of death. They necessarily must adopt a view of Christians as perpetual crumb-eaters in history. In other words, they necessarily must adopt pessimillennialism, either premillennialism or amillennialism.17 They must reject an eschatology that insists that Christianity will triumph in history, for such a triumph would mean that the positive sanctions of saving faith are in some way related judicially to the negative sanctions that disinherit covenant-breakers in history. This triumphant scenario raises the issue of corporate common grace and its removal from covenant-breaking societies in history. In short, they cannot explain the covenantal relationship between Israel and Canaan, between Christ and Caesar. So, they simply ignore it. There is no neutrality. To deny common grace is to ajrm a universal common law other than God’s covenant law. Some law must rule society; sanctions must be applied in terms of some law. By denying common grace in history, Christians necessarily ajrm the sovereignty of natural law over God’s revealed law. They ajrm the autonomy of Adamic law over Bible-revealed law. They ajrm covenant-breaking man’s superior authority to interpret Adamic law apart from God’s special grace of biblical revelation. If predictable sanctions in history are not imposed by God in terms of the stipulations of His Bible-revealed law, which has precedence over natural (Adamic) law, then predictable sanctions in history must governed by 17. The Protestant Reformed Church openly denies common grace and ajrms amillennialism. For a critique of the anti-postmillennial presentations of the Protestant Reformed Church’s senior theologian, see Kenneth L. Gentry, Jr., He Shall Have Dominion: A Postmillennial Eschatology (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1992), Appendix A: “Cultural Antinomianism.”

Overcoming the Visible Odds

273

Adamic common law. One set of sanctions must become dominant in society: either those that are attached to biblical law or those that are understood by covenant-breaking men to be attached to what they regard as uncursed natural law. There is no equality possible here: one law-order must be superior to the other. The predictability of corporate historical sanctions will be assessed by men in terms of biblical law or natural law. The triumph of Israel over Canaan tells us which law-order is dominant – biblical law – but those who deny common grace do not get the message. They are forced to explain the victory of Israel over Canaan as some sort of anomaly in history. So also must they explain the victory of Christ over Caesar, i.e., the replacement of pagan Rome by Christianity. As far as cultural dominance in history is concerned, critics of common grace think that God is on the side of covenant-breakers. Their worldview is straightforward: evil must get more powerful over time, while Christianity must get weaker. The question then arises: Why should Christians attempt to develop biblical social theory? Isn’t this in efect wasted efort eschatologically, an exercise in intellectual futility? By their actions, pessimillennialists and the critics of common grace theology have demonstrated that this is exactly what they believe. They have counted the costs of dominion, which include the personal costs of developing an explicitly biblical social theory. They have compared these estimated costs with the estimated beneits of success. They have weighed in the balance biblical social theory and biblical social action, and they have found both wanting. Why? Because their risk-reward estimates have been afected by their pessimillennialism. They have echoed the ten spies: “And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants: and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight” (Num. 13:33). They have made it clear that they believe that in New Covenant history, God is on the side of covenant-breaking societies. In short, “Nice guys inish last.”18

18. Another baseball slogan. Leo Durocher is the source. Years later, he said that he was misquoted. His reference to a last-place team was: “Nice guys. Finished last.”

274

DEUTERONOMY

Which Side Is God On? The most important question in estimating the costs of any risky action is this: Will God be pleased with what I am about to undertake? To estimate the height of the Anakim was not dijcult. The diference in physical stature between the Anakim and the Israelites was obvious. Their eyes told them: seek peace, avoid confrontation. But what they saw was not the heart of the cost-beneit analysis. The heart of the matter was their heart before God. Were they going to believe His promise or their own eyes? Their problem was this: rebellious hearts make bad estimates. After God had told the exodus generation that their representatives’ treatment of Joshua and Caleb had doomed them to death in the wilderness, they decided that it was time to march into battle. “And they rose up early in the morning, and gat them up into the top of the mountain, saying, Lo, we be here, and will go up unto the place which the LORD hath promised: for we have sinned. And Moses said, Wherefore now do ye transgress the commandment of the LORD? but it shall not prosper. Go not up, for the LORD is not among you; that ye be not smitten before your enemies. For the Amalekites and the Canaanites are there before you, and ye shall fall by the sword: because ye are turned away from the LORD, therefore the LORD will not be with you. But they presumed to go up unto the hill top: nevertheless the ark of the covenant of the LORD, and Moses, departed not out of the camp. Then the Amalekites came down, and the Canaanites which dwelt in that hill, and smote them, and discomited them, even unto Hormah” (Num. 14:40–45). Not until the next generation came to maturity did Israel have a victory at Hormah (Num. 21:3). The Israelites were not supposed to go into battle unless the war had been authorized by the priesthood. The tribes were to march into battle only after the priests had blown the trumpets. “And the sons of Aaron, the priests, shall blow with the trumpets; and they shall be to you for an ordinance for ever throughout your generations” (Num. 10:8). Bloodshed had to be preceded by the payment of atonement money to the priests (Ex. 30:12–13).19 Under the Mosaic covenant, the priesthood had the exclusive authority to decide 19. Gary North, Tools of Dominion: The Case Laws of Exodus (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), ch. 32.

Overcoming the Visible Odds

275

if God was on the side of Israel. Their declaration alone sanctioned the war in God’s eyes; without this sanction, a war should not have been sanctioned in the nation’s eyes. The West has always placed the authority to declare war exclusively in the hands of the national civil government. The churches historically have had no interest in challenging this state of afairs. At most, the medieval church claimed the right to impose a few of the rules of warfare, such as truce days. Today, secular agencies do this, most notably the International Red Cross. Once a war is declared by the government, the churches immediately become vocal supporters of the war efort.20 There is no further discussion about the legitimacy of the war. Whatever discussion takes place must take place before the war breaks out. Those who favor peace lose the debate completely on the day that war is declared. All debate ends. One mark of a society that has lost faith in its moral foundations is the existence of such debate after a war begins. For example, in the American Civil War (1861–65), by late 1864, after the fall of the city of Atlanta, when the Confederacy was beginning to be seen by its supporters as a lost cause militarily, a few Southern preachers began to voice doubts about both the moral legitimacy of slavery and the justness of the Confederacy’s cause. After the war ended in defeat, almost no Southerner publicly lamented the demise of slavery.21 The shock of military defeat had changed their minds. Moral legitimacy had been determined on the battleield; the South’s preachers merely relected the military results.

20. American clerics who opposed the World War I sometimes sufered civil sanctions: arrest and imprisonment. A Church of the Brethren pastor was sent to prison for having recommended to his congregation that they refuse to buy war bonds. He was tried after the armistice in 1918 and sentenced to prison for ten years, later commuted to a year and a day. H. C. Peterson and Gilbert C. Fite, Opponents of War, 1917–1918 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, [1957] 1968), pp. 118–19. As the authors point out, clerical opponents of the war were usually from smaller, poorer churches. Ibid., p. 117. For publishing an anti-war book on prophecy, The Finished Mystery, in July of 1917, eight leaders of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, including Joseph Rutherford, were sentenced to 20 years in prison in June of 1918, after World War I had ended. A Federal appeals court overturned this decision in 1919. James J. Martin, An American Adventure in Bookburning In The Style of 1918 (Colorado Springs: Ralph Myles Press, 1989), pp. 16–17. Martin’s account is more accurate than Peterson and Fite’s (pp. 119–20). 21. One who did was the Presbyterian theologian Robert Dabney. See his book, A Defence of Virginia [And Through Her, of the South] (New York: Negro University Press, [1867] 1969). Cf. North, Tools of Dominion, pp. 234–35.

276

DEUTERONOMY

Conclusion Moses told the Israelites that the day of the Lord had arrived. The day of the Lord was a day of historical sanctions: positive for Israel and negative for Canaan. While its completion would take place only under Joshua – a six-year day of vengeance – the day had already begun. The day of the Lord is always a day of sanctions. Moses warned Israel: the fact that God was going to use Israel to bring negative corporate sanctions against Canaan should not lead them to conclude that they had any legal claim on God based on their own righteousness. They would replace Canaan as God’s agents in the land, but their legal claim to the land was based on two things only: God’s promise to Abraham and the two-fold boundary that God had placed on Canaan’s iniquity, ethical and temporal. God’s announcement of “no further dominion” for Canaan was not to be regarded as an announcement of unconditional dominion for Israel. Dominion is by covenant, and God’s covenant is always ethically conditional. The covenant has stipulations to which predictable historical sanctions are attached. These sanctions are the basis of extending the inheritance. Canaan had forfeited its inheritance by breaking the Adamic covenant’s corporate stipulations. These stipulations were common grace stipulations. The Canaanites looked invincible. They were in fact highly vincible. They were guaranteed losers in history, according to the Abrahamic promise, which was in fact an integral aspect of the Abrahamic covenant. This promise was a prophecy regarding the temporal limits of corporate rebellion. Canaan’s transgression of the Adamic covenant’s boundaries would bring predictable negative sanctions in history. The prediction was the Abrahamic promise: “But in the fourth generation they shall come hither again: for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full” (Gen. 15:16).

24 INHERITANCE, SONSHIP Inheritance,SERVITUDE, Servitude, andAND Sonship I prayed therefore unto the LORD, and said, O Lord GOD, destroy not thy people and thine inheritance, which thou hast redeemed through thy greatness, which thou hast brought forth out of Egypt with a mighty hand. Remember thy servants, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; look not unto the stubbornness of this people, nor to their wickedness, nor to their sin: Lest the land whence thou broughtest us out say, Because the LORD was not able to bring them into the land which he promised them, and because he hated them, he hath brought them out to slay them in the wilderness. Yet they are thy people and thine inheritance, which thou broughtest out by thy mighty power and by thy stretched out arm (Deut. 9:26–29).

The theocentric reference point here is God’s legal status as Israel’s owner. Israel was God’s inheritance. To the extent that Israel extended its national inheritance, God would extend His. This relationship was representative. Israel was required to act as God’s agent, even as Adam was required to act as God’s agent.

Moses as the Replacement Patriarch Moses summarized here the results of his verbal exchange with God in Exodus 32, when God had ofered to establish Moses as the patriarch of a new nation. That exchange had involved God’s ofer of sonship to Moses, in efect making him a new Abraham. And the LORD said unto Moses, I have seen this people, and, behold, it is a stifnecked people: Now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may wax hot against them, and that I may consume them: and I will make of thee a great nation. And Moses besought the LORD his God, and said, LORD, why doth thy wrath wax hot against thy people, which thou hast

277

278

DEUTERONOMY

brought forth out of the land of Egypt with great power, and with a mighty hand? Wherefore should the Egyptians speak, and say, For mischief did he bring them out, to slay them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth? Turn from thy ierce wrath, and repent of this evil against thy people. Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, thy servants, to whom thou swarest by thine own self, and saidst unto them, I will multiply your seed as the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have spoken of will I give unto your seed, and they shall inherit it for ever. And the LORD repented of the evil which he thought to do unto his people (Ex. 32:9–14).

Moses had immediately interceded with God by appealing to God’s reputation. If God slew Israel, the Egyptians would say that He could not deliver on His promises. This would tarnish God’s reputation, Moses implied. Moses appealed to the integrity of God’s name, not to the non-existent integrity of Israel. God honored this appeal to His own honor. He spared Israel. God had promised Moses an inheritance: a new nation. As the patriarch of such a nation, Moses would be acclaimed and honored. In response, Moses reminded God that it was God’s honor that was primary. As the patriarch of a new nation, Moses would gain the authority to direct their future, to lead them in the paths that he would choose. In efect, this new nation would become Moses’ servant, his inheritance. His name would be on them. Moses would in fact replace Abraham as the founding patriarch, for the promise to Abraham would be broken by the destruction of Israel. Either Israel would not conquer in the fourth generation, contrary to God’s promise (Gen. 15:16), or else Abraham’s name would be extended in history only by Moses’ adopting a new nation. But that would have violated Jacob’s promise regarding Judah’s bearing of the sword until Shiloh came (Gen. 49:10). Moses countered God’s ofer by invoking the names of the patriarchs with whom God had made His covenant. That is, he appealed to God’s word. Finally, in the speech to the conquest generation, he said that he had told God that Israel was God’s inheritance (Deut. 9:26, 29). To have given Moses a completely new inheritance, God would have had to disinherit Israel completely. That would have been the same as disinheriting His own word, Moses implied. This argument saved Israel, which remained God’s inheritance.

Inheritance, Servitude, and Sonship

279

God’s Name Was on Israel God had placed His name on the Israelites through His covenant with Abraham. He had changed Abram’s name to Abraham (Gen. 17:5). Similarly, he had changed Jacob’s name to Israel (Gen. 32:28). The authority to name someone is a mark of foundational authority. Adam named the animals (Gen. 2:19); then he named Eve (Gen. 2:23). In both cases, God had brought to Adam the living objects to be named. Adam was the father of the human race. God had created Adam, marking God as mankind’s father. God’s authority was higher than Adam’s, for He had created Adam and had named Adam. In this judicial sense, God’s name was on Adam. Because God had delegated to Adam authority over the creation (Gen. 1:26), He had Adam name the living creatures under his immediate authority. So, God’s name was on the creation directly, for He had created it, yet it was also on the creation indirectly, because Adam had named the animals, and His name was on Adam. The world is therefore God’s lawful inheritance, both directly and indirectly. God’s authority is both direct (providential) and indirect (covenantal). That is to say, His authority is simultaneously unmediated and mediated. This is why the Bible ajrms both God’s absolute predestination and man’s full responsibility for his own actions. “And truly the Son of man goeth, as it was determined: but woe unto that man by whom he is betrayed!” (Luke 22:22). God had disinherited Adam by cursing his body and the ground for his transgression (Gen. 3:17–19) and casting him out of the garden (Gen. 3:24). But before issuing His curse, God had promised the serpent that Eve would have an heir who would bring negative sanctions against the serpent’s seed (Gen. 3:15). God did not execute Adam on the day of Adam’s transgression, for to have done so would have cut of Adam’s seed. This would have made impossible the promised seed’s ability to bring sanctions against the seed of the serpent. God extended common grace – a gift unmerited by the recipients – in the form of extended life and dominion in history to the serpent, to Eve, and to Adam. He did this for the sake of the promised seed.1 This seed was Jesus Christ, who would inherit through 1. Gary North, Dominion and Common Grace: The Biblical Basis of Progress (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987), pp. 57–59.

280

DEUTERONOMY

Abraham. Paul wrote: “Now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made. He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ” (Gal. 3:16). God’s name is on God’s Son. His Son was incarnate in history in the person of Jesus Christ. God’s name was therefore also on Abraham, for through Abraham would God’s incarnate Son come in history. There was no escape from this judicial naming. As surely as the promised seed would come in history to crush the head of the serpent, God’s name was on Abraham and his descendants. As surely as Adam was God’s servant, Abraham and his descendants were God’s servants. This ojce of servantship was in fact sonship. God told Moses: “And thou shalt say unto Pharaoh, Thus saith the LORD, Israel is my son, even my irstborn” (Ex. 4:22). But how had Israel been restored to sonship after God’s disinheritance of Adam? Through covenantal adoption. Again the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, Son of man, cause Jerusalem to know her abominations, And say, Thus saith the Lord GOD unto Jerusalem; Thy birth and thy nativity is of the land of Canaan; thy father was an Amorite, and thy mother an Hittite. And as for thy nativity, in the day thou wast born thy navel was not cut, neither wast thou washed in water to supple thee; thou wast not salted at all, nor swaddled at all. None eye pitied thee, to do any of these unto thee, to have compassion upon thee; but thou wast cast out in the open ield, to the lothing of thy person, in the day that thou wast born. And when I passed by thee, and saw thee polluted in thine own blood, I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live; yea, I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live (Ezek. 16:1–6).

Israel was God’s inheritance because His name was on Israel through adoption. God had named Jacob Israel, which relected His position as Israel’s adopter. God’s inheritance was His possession. The entire nation was spoken of by Moses as being God’s inheritance. It was this judicial claim by God on national Israel which alone had saved Israel from God’s wrath. By invoking the legal language of inheritance, Moses had stayed the hand of God at the time of the golden calf. Now Moses reminded his listeners of their position as God’s inheritance. But this inheritance was reciprocal. God became Israel’s inheritance. Moses stated this explicitly with respect to the Levites, who had no landed inheritance in Mosaic Israel. “Wherefore Levi hath no part nor inheritance with his brethren; the LORD is his inheritance, according as the LORD thy God

Inheritance, Servitude, and Sonship

281

promised him” (Deut. 10:9). What was true of Levi as the priesthood of Israel in relation to the other tribes was also true of Israel as the priesthood of humanity in relation to the other nations.

From Servitude to Sonship This judicial position of being God’s inheritance is a position of blessedness. “Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD: and the people whom he hath chosen for his own inheritance” (Ps. 33:12). Nevertheless, to be part of another person’s inheritance is to be his slave. Possessing such an inheritance down through the generations was lawful in Israel under the jubilee code, but this inter-generational slavery was limited to heathen slaves who had begun their term of bondage when they were outside of the national covenant. “Both thy bondmen, and thy bondmaids, which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids. Moreover of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land: and they shall be your possession. And ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them for a possession; they shall be your bondmen for ever: but over your brethren the children of Israel, ye shall not rule one over another with rigour” (Lev. 25:44–46). This Mosaic law revealed a covenantal principle: better to be a slave in the household of faith than to be a free man outside the covenant. This principle did not end with Jesus’ fulillment of the jubilee law (Luke 4:18–21). Its administration did, however. Under the New Covenant, the highest ideal is liberty: “Art thou called being a servant? care not for it: but if thou mayest be made free, use it rather” (I Cor. 7:21). This liberty is possible because the covenant of redemption is no longer tied exclusively or uniquely to membership in any geographically and historically bounded nation. The mediatory status of national Israel in the Mosaic covenant of redemption is forever annulled. Old Covenant Israel is no longer God’s son. Old Covenant Israel was deinitively disinherited at the cruciixion: the veil of the temple separating the holy of holies from the common area was torn from top to bottom (Matt. 27:51). Old Covenant Israel was progressively disinherited through its persecution of the New Testament church, and inally disinherited at the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. After that, Old Covenant Israel ceased to

282

DEUTERONOMY

exist. Its successor, rabbinic Judaism, possesses neither a temple nor an animal sacriice system. The covenantally valid sacriicial ires of the temple were extinguished forever when the unauthorized ire lit by a pair of Roman soldiers burned the temple to the ground.2 The Mosaic covenant has been forever annulled. Under the Mosaic covenant, servanthood was a blessing because it was a form of preliminary sonship. The possibility of redemption from bondage was always present through adoption by another Israelite.3 Meanwhile, the servant was under the household covenant of the master. This brought blessings that were not available outside the household of faith. The Mosaic covenant was itself a form of sonship that involved servantship. The transfer of the inheritance from father to son was marked by a change in practical status from servant to son. We see this illustrated in the New Covenant’s replacement of the Old Covenant. Because the New Covenant has replaced the Old Covenant, covenant-keeping gentiles can become sons. For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus. For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus. And if ye be Christ’s, then are ye Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise. Now I say, That the heir, as long as he is a child, difereth nothing from a servant, though he be lord of all; But is under tutors and governors until the time appointed of the father. Even so we, when we were children, were in bondage under the elements of the world: But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, To redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons. And because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father. Wherefore thou art no more a servant, but a son; and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ (Gal. 3:26–4:7).

With the advent of the Son of God in history, Israel was ofered its long-awaited opportunity to move from inheritance-servitude to inheritance-sonship. The price of this transition was two-fold: 1) Israel’s public acknowledgment of Jesus as the messiah; 2) Israel’s public 2. See Chapter 23, above: section on “The Day of the Lord,” pp. 258–62. 3. Gary North, Leviticus: An Economic Commentary (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), pp. 510–11.

Inheritance, Servitude, and Sonship

283

consent to the extension of adoptive sonship status to the prodigal sons, i.e., the gentiles. But Old Covenant Israel, like the older brother in the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:28), was hard-hearted. The older brother in the parable complained to his father that the father had never slain a fatted calf for him. Where was his reward as the irstborn son? This was Israel’s constant complaint to God. “Where is our reward? We have been faithful. Where is our fatted calf?” Moses warned them in this passage: with the golden calf in Israel’s background, they should all be content with the fact that God had not slain the nation at the foot of the altar. A recurring theme in the Old Covenant is the rebelliousness of the older brother, whose inheritance ordinarily was the double portion (Deut. 21:17). Instead, the younger son inherited because of the older brother’s rebellion, e.g., Seth over Cain, Isaac over Ishmael, Jacob over Esau, Joseph over Reuben, David over Eliab, and ultimately Jesus over Adam. The rebellious irstborn resents the faithful second-born. “And Eliab his eldest brother heard when he spake unto the men; and Eliab’s anger was kindled against David, and he said, Why camest thou down hither? and with whom hast thou left those few sheep in the wilderness? I know thy pride, and the naughtiness of thine heart; for thou art come down that thou mightest see the battle” (I Sam. 17:28). Then the younger brother inherits through his covenantal faithfulness. The Jews should have remembered all this when Jesus told His parable of the prodigal younger brother who repented and the stifnecked older brother who complained. The older brother refused to rejoice with his father at the return of the younger brother in humility. His father’s joy meant nothing to him; he cared only about the honor shown to his prodigal brother. His brother’s humility had regained his access to the household and its rewards. What was the public mark of his brother’s humility? His willingness to enter his father’s household as a servant, not as a son (Luke 15:21). He understood that servantship is preferable to life outside the household of faith. This realization is the only basis of a return to sonship for prodigal sons. The sons of Adam are all prodigal sons.

Conclusion Moses designated Israel as God’s inheritance. Their status as God’s inheritance placed them in the judicial position of servants, yet also as lawful sons. They owed God service, for the inheritance

284

DEUTERONOMY

is lawfully at the disposal of the heir. They were also subordinate to God as the lawful heir. This is why Jesus’ parable of the servants who kill the heir of the master so outraged the Jews (Matt. 21:38–46). The inheritance does not exercise authority over its owner. Moses made it clear to them that their status as God’s inheritance placed them in a special judicial position: subordinate. What he did not say, but which was implied by biblical theology, is this: legitimate sonship always begins with servantship. Even sin-free Adam was not allowed to touch all of God’s inheritance. Servantship is the training required of all lawful sons. As the inheritance of God, Israel could prove its legal status as the son of God. Israel would then inherit the kingdom of God. The implied warning was clear: should Israel rebel against its judicial status as God’s inheritance – as bondservants in the household of faith – God would disinherit Israel, just as He had threatened to do after the golden calf incident. Next time, there might not be a Moses to plead with God for mercy.

25 SONSHIP, INHERITANCE, AND IMMIGRATION Sonship, Inheritance, and Immigration And now, Israel, what doth the LORD thy God require of thee, but to fear the LORD thy God, to walk in all his ways, and to love him, and to serve the LORD thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul, To keep the commandments of the LORD, and his statutes, which I command thee this day for thy good? Behold, the heaven and the heaven of heavens is the LORD’S thy God, the earth also, with all that therein is. Only the LORD had a delight in thy fathers to love them, and he chose their seed after them, even you above all people, as it is this day. Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart, and be no more stifnecked (Deut. 10:12–16).

The fear of God is the theocentric focus of this passage. Covenantal faithfulness begins with fear (Prov. 9:10). Fear, obedience, and love were united in this passage. Israel was told to obey God. The basis of this fear was legally grounded in God’s status as Creator: “Behold, the heaven and the heaven of heavens is the LORD’S thy God, the earth also, with all that therein is.” The backward logic was sharp: from man’s obedience to God’s ownership. The logic of the passage is that man’s absolute obedience is required by God because God is the absolute owner of the universe. This ownership included Israel, which owed a special debt to God as God’s chosen nation. “Only the LORD had a delight in thy fathers to love them, and he chose their seed after them, even you above all people, as it is this day” (v. 15). God’s cosmic ownership identiies this law as a universal law. It was not a seed law or a land law. The fourth generation would soon be circumcised at Gilgal (Josh. 5:7). The circumcision of their lesh would visibly bond them with Abraham, but this circumcision of their lesh would not be

285

286

DEUTERONOMY

sujcient to maintain the kingdom grant. They would have to obey God’s law. Moses referred to this as the circumcision of the heart. Paul made extensive use of this metaphor in his development of the New Covenant’s extension of the Old Covenant’s promises and inheritance to the gentiles. The central issue is ethics, Paul insisted, not circumcision. “For circumcision verily proiteth, if thou keep the law: but if thou be a breaker of the law, thy circumcision is made uncircumcision. Therefore if the uncircumcision keep the righteousness of the law, shall not his uncircumcision be counted for circumcision? And shall not uncircumcision which is by nature, if it fulil the law, judge thee, who by the letter and circumcision dost transgress the law? For he is not a Jew, which is one outwardly; neither is that circumcision, which is outward in the lesh: But he is a Jew, which is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, and not in the letter; whose praise is not of men, but of God” (Rom. 2:25–29). This is exactly what Moses told them in this passage. It is not who you are but what you do that determines how God deals with you. God does not regard persons in declaring His formal judgments. “For the LORD your God is God of gods, and Lord of lords, a great God, a mighty, and a terrible, which regardeth not persons, nor taketh reward” (Deut. 10:17).

Sonship and Inheritance Moses was making a crucial covenantal observation. It was in fact the most important aspect of the Mosaic Covenant: the mark of true sonship is the circumcised heart. Ethics is more important than ritual. The true son is the son who obeys his father. It was this message that the Israelites forgot or denied by their actions, generation after generation, culminating in the nation’s consummate rebellion: the cruciixion of Jesus Christ. Jesus drove home Moses’ message in his parable of the two sons: “But what think ye? A certain man had two sons; and he came to the irst, and said, Son, go work to day in my vineyard. He answered and said, I will not: but afterward he repented, and went. And he came to the second, and said likewise. And he answered and said, I go, sir: and went not. Whether of them twain did the will of his father? They say unto him, The irst. Jesus saith unto them, Verily I say unto you, That the publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you. For John came unto you in the way of righteousness, and ye believed him not: but the publicans and the harlots believed him: and ye, when ye had seen it,

Sonship, Inheritance, and Immigration

287

repented not afterward, that ye might believe him” (Matt. 21:28–32). The true Son of God, the true heir of Abraham, was murdered by the would-be heirs. Jesus’ next parable revealed that He knew exactly what they would do to Him: the parable of the husbandmen who killed the heir (Matt. 21:33–46).

Circumcised Sons Circumcision was the physical mark of subordination to the Mosaic covenant. Circumcision was the Old Covenant’s oath-sign.1 Every biblical covenant must be ratiied by an oath, and this oath invokes negative sanctions on the covenant-breaker.2 The negative sanction of the cutting of the lesh was the judicial equivalent of invoking negative sanctions on the oath-taker for disobeying God’s law. The covenant’s oath-sign invokes positive and negative historical sanctions in terms of the covenant’s stipulations. Circumcision did not guarantee Israel’s inheritance; it merely invoked positive sanctions for obedience, which in turn would ensure the inheritance. Moses was warning his listeners: obedience to God was a more important sign of sonship than circumcision was. Circumcision invoked God’s sanctions, but these sanctions were applied in terms of God’s law. Point four of the biblical covenant model – oath/sanctions – refers the oath-taker back to point three: ethics. The physical mark of the Old Covenant was circumcision. But the other visible mark was of much greater importance: obedience to the law. Circumcision without obedience brings God’s negative sanctions. Jesus warned: “Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the ire. Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them. Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven” (Matt. 7:19–21). Circumcision without obedience is a curse, not a blessing. Moses’ words in this passage relect the biblical covenant model. God, as the sovereign owner of heaven and earth (point one), established His covenant with representatives (point two): the patriarchs of Israel. He has placed Israel under His law (point 1. Meredith G. Kline, By Oath Consigned: A Reinterpretation of the Covenant Signs of Circumcision and Baptism (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1968), ch. 3. 2. Ibid., pp. 40–43.

288

DEUTERONOMY

three), to which are attached sanctions (point four). These sanctions are invoked by circumcision; they are applied by God in terms of obedience or disobedience. Corporate inheritance is the ultimate positive sanction in history: the kingdom of God on earth. His soul shall dwell at ease; and his seed shall inherit the earth (Ps. 25:13). For evildoers shall be cut of: but those that wait upon the LORD, they shall inherit the earth (Ps. 37:9). But the meek shall inherit the earth; and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace (Ps. 37:11). Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth" (Matt. 5:5).

While Israel’s inheritance is not speciically mentioned in this passage, this is the central theme of the Book of Deuteronomy. Moses did identify that generation as part of Abraham’s promised seed, “even you above all people, as it is this day” (v. 15). Israel could not rely on circumcision as the judicial basis of its national inheritance. Maintaining the kingdom grant is always an ethical task.3 Israel’s rituals were symbols of cleansing and restoration, but they were useless if they were not accompanied by a change of heart and behavior. Circumcision would condemn Israel if the nation committed the sins of Canaan. Circumcision would bring the Mosaic covenant’s negative corporate sanctions. Deuteronomy is the second reading of the law because the Mosaic law was the written testament that speciied the terms of the national inheritance.

Sons and Strangers Sons inherit; strangers in the household do not. This had been Abraham’s dilemma. “And Abram said, Lord GOD, what wilt thou give me, seeing I go childless, and the steward of my house is this Eliezer of Damascus?” (Gen. 15:2). The judicial question is this: Who is the true son with a lawful claim on the inheritance?

3. James B. Jordan, Covenant Sequence in Leviticus and Deuteronomy (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989), p. 9.

Sonship, Inheritance, and Immigration

289

The true sons of God are those who obey Him. This raised a major question for Israel, one which they never answered correctly: Can a stranger become a son? The answer was covenantally obvious but repulsive to Israel: yes. The stranger, if he acts as a son should act, is entitled to become the lawful heir. The son, if he acts as a stranger to the covenant, is to be disinherited. Adopted sons replace biological sons as the lawful heirs. This is the message of the New Covenant. The gentiles could become sons on the same basis that the Jews could: obedience to God’s covenant, i.e., adoption. Both Jews and gentiles need adoption, Paul wrote to the Galatians: “But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, To redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons. And because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father” (Gal. 4:4–6). Adoption had always been open to gentiles in Israel, but it took up to ten generations for the heirs of some strangers to achieve this (Deut. 23:3). Under the New Covenant, adoption required a new oath-sign, baptism, and a new Passover, the Lord’s Supper. As had been the case with the Mosaic Covenant’s rituals, these new oath-bound rituals were not to be regarded as substitutes for obedience. And hereby we do know that we know him, if we keep his commandments. He that saith, I know him, and keepeth not his commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him (I John 2:3–4). And whatsoever we ask, we receive of him, because we keep his commandments, and do those things that are pleasing in his sight (I John 3:22). And he that keepeth his commandments dwelleth in him, and he in him. And hereby we know that he abideth in us, by the Spirit which he hath given us (I John 3:24). By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God, and keep his commandments (I John 5:2).

The true son does the will of his father. By identifying a man’s works, others can identify his covenantal father. This covenantal concept of sonship was why the circumcised stranger was a threat to the self-esteem of covenant-breaking Israelites. The visible obedience of covenant-keeping strangers testiied against the sonship of covenant-breaking Israelites.

290

DEUTERONOMY

Those who were the biological heirs of the conquest generation had an inheritance in the land. Immigrant strangers could not inherit rural land except through their adoption into a family line of the conquest generation. But they could buy houses in the cities, and they could become full citizens in the cities after several consecutive generations of circumcised heads of households. They could become full sons of the covenant even though they could not inherit rural land. This eventually placed a heavy social and psychological premium on the possession of a claim to rural land. Land rather than ethics became the chief diferentiating factor in the minds of covenant-breaking heirs of the conquest generation.

Sacrosanct Land The land became sacrosanct in the thinking of those Israelites who placed formal title to land above obedience as the true mark of sonship. “The land, the land” became their cry. The supreme mark of their disinheritance would be their removal from the land. Recognizing this sinful outlook in advance, Moses warned: “And it shall come to pass, that as the LORD rejoiced over you to do you good, and to multiply you; so the LORD will rejoice over you to destroy you, and to bring you to nought; and ye shall be plucked from of the land whither thou goest to possess it. And the LORD shall scatter thee among all people, from the one end of the earth even unto the other; and there thou shalt serve other gods, which neither thou nor thy fathers have known, even wood and stone. And among these nations shalt thou ind no ease, neither shall the sole of thy foot have rest: but the LORD shall give thee there a trembling heart, and failing of eyes, and sorrow of mind” (Deut. 28:63–65). Assyria removed Israelites from the land in the Northern Kingdom in 722 B.C. In 586 B.C., Babylon removed most of those living in the Southern Kingdom.4 A comparative handful returned from the Babylonian captivity in 538; the vast majority remained behind in Babylon. Moses saw this, too. “And ye shall be left few in number, whereas ye were as the stars of heaven for multitude; because thou wouldest not obey the voice of the LORD thy God” (Deut. 28:62). Only a remnant returned to Israel, as Jeremiah had foretold: “And I 4. Not all, however: “But Nebuzar-adan the captain of the guard left certain of the poor of the land for vinedressers and for husbandmen” (Jer. 52:16).

Sonship, Inheritance, and Immigration

291

will gather the remnant of my lock out of all countries whither I have driven them, and will bring them again to their folds; and they shall be fruitful and increase” (Jer. 23:3). Rome removed most of them permanently from the land in 135 A.D. after Simon bar Kochba’s abortive rebellion (132–35).5 The diaspora had begun. Without the laying on of hands (semikah), which could be done lawfully only inside the boundaries of the land of Israel, a Jewish court under Phariseeism had no authority to impose the punishments mandated in the Bible. The development of an alternative system of sanctions became a major task of Judaism after the failure of Bar Kochba’s rebellion.6 The problem of rule outside the land had appeared earlier, however, with the destruction of the temple. The holiness of Israel could no longer be based on the presence of the temple in the land. The Jews became in their own eyes the holiness of God, replacing the temple. This meant that all Jews everywhere participated in this holiness. To attest to this separate judicial condition of holiness, they needed to be judged by Jewish law, and this law could invoke sanctions that were valid only inside the boundaries of Israel. The holiness of the Jews had been a major doctrine of the Pharisees even before A.D. 70. This placed the Pharisees in a dominant position within Judaism after A.D. 70.7 The Romans placed Gamaliel – the son of Paul’s teacher8 – at the head of the Jews’ local system of patriarchal rule.9 From the fall of Jerusalem until Bar Kochba’s rebellion, the Jewish leaders began the work of codifying the Pharisees’ oral law, but it remained oral.10 The greatest early codiier was Rabbi Akiba, born around A.D. 50, who as an old man died at the hands of the Romans after the failure of Bar Kochba’s rebellion, which Akiba had supported.11 He had publicly identiied

5. Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz reports that Bar Kochba persecuted no one except Jewish Christians, who refused to take up arms against Rome. Heinrich Graetz, A History of the Jews, 6 vols. (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1893), II, p. 412. 6. George Horowitz, The Spirit of Jewish Law (New York: Central Book Co., [1953] 1973), p. 93. 7. Jacob Neusner, An Introduction to Judaism: A Textbook and Reader (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991), pp. 160–61. 8. Paul Johnson, A History of The Jews (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), p. 150. 9. Neusner, Introduction to Judaism, p. 159. 10. Ibid., p. 158. 11. Ernest R. Trattner, Understanding the Talmud (New York: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1955), pp. 101–2.

292

DEUTERONOMY

12

Bar Kochba as the messiah. Late in the second century A.D., Rabbi Judah Ha-Nasi (“the Prince” or “the Patriarch”) completed the codiication of the Pharisees’ oral tradition. This was the Mishnah.13 The Talmud, a detailed and seemingly unstructured series of comments on the Mishnah, was completed in Babylon around A.D. 500.14 These developments, which sealed of Judaism from the surrounding Roman culture, moved in a direction opposite from developments in the early church. The New Testament’s inclusion of gentiles into the kingdom’s inheritance was an extension of Moses’ original principle of sonship through obedience. Baptism merely speeded up the process of inclusion: from several generations (Deut. 23:3–8) to immediate covenantal membership. Inclusion became deinitive at the time of baptism; the Mosaic law’s multigeneration progressive inclusion process for immigrants was annulled along with the jubilee law.

Visible Economic Evidence of Civil Justice Moses went from a warning regarding stifnecked rebellion to a discussion of God as the judge: “For the LORD your God is God of gods, and Lord of lords, a great God, a mighty, and a terrible, which regardeth not persons, nor taketh reward” (Deut. 10:17). Here is a God to be feared. He cannot be bought of. An attempted bribe brings no beneits in God’s court. The proof of God’s imperviousness to any attempt to delect His judgment is His treatment of those who are in no position to ofer a bribe. God executes righteous judgment for the amicted: orphans, widows, and strangers. “He doth execute the judgment of the fatherless and widow, and loveth the stranger, in giving him food and raiment” (v. 18). These three groups were the Mosaic law’s symbols – its representatives – of the judicially defenseless in Israel. Members of these groups could not execute judgment in Israel. Who, then, would represent them in a court of law? God would, Moses warned. And since He would, His earthly judges had better do the same. “Love ye therefore the stranger: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt” (v. 19). By reminding them of their stay in Egypt, Moses 12. Ibid., p. 137. The source for this is the Jerusalem Talmud, Ta’an 4:7, 68d. 13. Graetz, History of the Jews, II, pp. 460–61. 14. Trattner, Understanding the Talmud, p. 55.

Sonship, Inheritance, and Immigration

293

recalled the penalty of injustice: national destruction. He also reminded them of the positive historical sanctions shown by God to covenant-keepers who are unrighteously amicted by covenantbreakers: “Thy fathers went down into Egypt with threescore and ten persons; and now the LORD thy God hath made thee as the stars of heaven for multitude” (v. 22). This was a clear prophecy of what would happen to Israel if the nation’s leaders handed down corrupt judgments that respected persons or bribes. Israel’s fate would relect Egypt’s fate. If Israel’s judges did not honor the rule of law in its courts, treating strangers the same as Israelites, then Israel would be brought low. Israel had been a stranger in Egypt. At irst, Egypt had treated Israel well. This had been manifested by Pharaoh’s elevation of Joseph as second in command. Egypt had survived the famine because the Pharaoh had honored Joseph’s advice. Egypt received a blessing through the stranger in her midst. Had Pharaoh returned Joseph to prison, where he had been brought under negative judicial sanctions unrighteously by Potiphar, Egypt would have sufered a disaster. Egypt’s treatment of this stranger within her gates would determine Egypt’s fate. In a later generation, a new Pharaoh brought the Israelites under bondage. This arrangement seemed to be proitable for a time. The Pharaoh gained the beneit of cheap slave labor for at least a generation. But this could not become a permanent relationship under the law of God. The debt relationship for this evil – the negative sanctions – compounded over time. The debts came due at the exodus. Egypt was destroyed. When had Israel’s population growth taken place? During the good times, the days of liberty in Egypt. The multiplication of Israel was what had frightened the Pharaoh of the oppression (Ex. 1:9). That is, strangers lourished in Egypt. This is an important mark of a righteous society: strangers lourish. The rule of law, if the law is just, provides the judicial framework for economic growth. Immigrants are notoriously thrifty and hard working compared to those who stayed behind in the old country. What we call the Puritan work ethic, which includes future-orientation and thrift, enables the immigrants to prosper. A society that oppresses strangers is unjust. The blessings of justice can be seen in communities of immigrants who prosper and eventually grow wealthy enough to move out of their cultural ghettos in a generation or two. This has been the

294

DEUTERONOMY

15

experience of the United States. It has made the United States unique in modern history, especially prior to 1924, when the immigration laws were drastically tightened.16 Moses warned Israel to deal justly with orphans, widows, and strangers. Yet if Israel did this, resident aliens would lourish economically according to their talents and their work ethic. If Israelites resented their success, as Egyptians had resented Israel’s success, and began dishonoring God’s law by perverting justice to strangers, then the days of vengeance would come. On the other hand, Israel’s covenantal success would be manifested by the economic success of resident aliens. The Mosaic law even provided for the sale of poor Israelites into household servitude to resident aliens (Lev. 25:47–52). The sign of God’s blessing would be rich strangers in the land. To attempt to tear them down through judicial discrimination would call forth God’s judgment against the nation. The essence of envy is the desire to tear down someone else merely because he is superior. Envy was the motivation of the Philistines in illing in Isaac’s wells with dirt (Gen. 26:15). They did not coniscate these wells for their own use; instead, they destroyed his inheritance from his father. They were not made richer, but Isaac was made poorer. This is the heart, mind, and soul of envy. When a society compromises the rule of law in order to tear down economically successful people, it slays the judicial goose that lays the golden eggs. When a society knows this and does it anyway, it has become consumed with envy. Its earthly reward will be an increase in judicial arbitrariness, bureaucracy, and poverty, as well as class resentment. It will grow worse, for the sin of envy cannot be placated. There is always someone who is superior in some respect.17

15. Thomas Sowell, Ethnic America: A History (New York: Basic Books, 1981). 16. America’s problem, unlike Mosaic Israel’s, is that the civil oath does not pledge citizens to obedience to God and God’s revealed law. Thus, the immigrant can gain citizenship while maintaining the religious oath which he brought with him. Because Western nations impose only secular oaths on their citizens, immigrants who retain their alien religious oaths undermine the remnants of the Christian social order that created the West. They are allowed to impose political sanctions in terms of religious worldviews hostile to Christianity. The experiment in secular civil government is not yet completed. It will end badly. 17. Helmut Schoeck, Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, [1966] 1969), pp. 251, 336. The novel by L. P. Hartley, Facial Justice, is a classic statement of the insatiable nature of envy (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1960).

Sonship, Inheritance, and Immigration

295

The Open Invitation The uncircumcised alien could prosper in Israel when God’s law was enforced. This was another indication to Israel that physical circumcision was not the heart of the matter; ethical circumcision was. The covenantal issue was obedience to God’s law. If a resident alien producer served Israelite consumers ejciently, he would prosper. The Mosaic law invited aliens to come to Israel and serve those living in Israel by producing on a free market. The Mosaic law’s promise of equal justice would recruit productive people to Israel – clearly a beneit to consumers in Israel. Political envy and jealousy were held at bay by the Mosaic law. The stranger’s wealth would not be extracted from him by coercive, arbitrary civil laws. Private property would be secure when the Mosaic law was enforced. This open invitation to immigrate to Israel was a means of increasing Israel’s wealth. Attracting productive people is even better than discovering valuable raw materials. Human creativity is more valuable in the long run than raw materials are, whose prices tend to fall in relationship to the price of labor in a growing economy.18 Again and again in history, societies that ind themselves in possession of valuable raw materials have fallen behind economically within a century or less because governments extract the mineral wealth. The State grows larger, strangling the productivity of its citizens. The monarchy of Spain is the classic example. It controlled access in and out of its American empire. It controlled the choke points of commerce. This way, the king made sure that he received his 20 percent share of the precious metals mined in his American colonies.19 Spain’s government and monopoly controlled all aspects of commerce.20 Spain’s monarchs misjudged the source of Spain’s continuing wealth. The goose that would lay the most golden eggs in the Americas was not Spain’s mining monopoly; rather, it was the system of economic liberty that prevailed above the Rio Grande River. Curtis Nettels, a specialist in American colonial history, concludes regarding South America: “In the end the stiling efects of

18. Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1981). 19. Curtis P. Nettels, The Roots of American Civilization (2nd ed.; New York: AppletonCentury-Crofts, 1963), p. 43. 20. Ibid., p. 45.

296

DEUTERONOMY

regulation contributed a major cause of the successful revolt of the colonies during the Napoleonic wars.”21 Spain enjoyed the wealth of the South American and Mexican gold mines for almost two centuries, but by the end of the seventeenth century, Spain’s economy had visibly begun to fall behind England’s and even the Netherlands’, whose national income rested on trade rather than mining. The absence of gold mining above the Rio Grande in early North America made its economic triumph far more likely in the long run. Men seeking liberty and individual economic opportunity came by the tens of millions to the United States. Liberty made the diference economically, not gold. A nation’s gold mines eventually run out; liberty need not run out. Whether it does or doesn’t depends on a society’s ethics.

Immigration and Membership Oaths The possibility of immigration raised the issue of economic inheritance. Strangers in Israel could become legal heirs through adoption by Israelite families. Blood-line inheritance was not the basis of the Mosaic Covenant. The Mosaic Covenant was not a blood-line covenant. It was an ethical-judicial covenant. Men were by oath consigned, not by blood consigned. Israelites could not lawfully pass laws or make judicial decisions that discriminated against strangers. They could not lawfully place discriminatory judicial penalties on strangers. Legislated envy was illegal in Israel. The gentile had a protected position in Israel’s legal code. He could buy a lawful inheritance inside Israel’s walled cities (Lev. 25:29–30). Ultimately, he had a possibility of becoming a co-heir through adoption. One mark of a free society is that strangers can lourish economically. The encouragement of immigration is part of biblical law. The problem comes when the national civil covenant establishes citizenship apart from a confession of faith, i.e., a covenantal oath of allegiance to the God of the Bible and His law. When inheritance is by mere physical presence, or by a pledge of allegiance to a secular State, immigration becomes a covenantal threat to those who are already dwelling in the land. When the State is used as a means of coercive wealth distribution – e.g., the modern welfare State – then the

21. Ibid., p. 47.

Sonship, Inheritance, and Immigration

297

immigrant becomes an economic threat: a potential drain on the wealth of present residents. The ultimate form of immigration is birth. The abortion movement in the United States was founded on class hatred by dedicated racists and eugenicists such as Margaret Sanger, who cried out against the foreign-born working class because its members were “benign imbeciles, who encourage the defective and diseased elements of humanity in their reckless and irresponsible swarming.”22 “More children from the it, less from the unit” she declared; “that is the chief issue of birth control.”23 Sanger and her ideological associates wanted to reduce the low of immigrants: crossing borders and crossing birth canals. The irst step in their legislative agenda was achieved through the legalization of birth control devices (the elimination of a negative judicial sanction on voluntary exchange); the second was the 1924 U.S. immigration law (the imposition of new negative sanctions against immigrants); the third was the legalization of abortion by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1973 (the removal of negative sanctions against abortionists and the imposition of permanent negative sanctions against infants).

Adoption in Family, Church, and State Biblical inheritance is by sonship. Sonship is attained by means of covenant oath and obedience. Biblically speaking, sonship is legally open to anyone who is willing to ajrm the covenantal oath: in family, church, or State. The biblical model for sonship is adoption. In family afairs, the head of the household initiates the adoption ofer at his discretion. Adopted sonship is not automatically granted to everyone who seeks it. The family is a private institution grounded in biology (Gen. 2:24) as well as by a covenant oath of mutual intimacy and sexual exclusivity. With respect to the Adamic family’s civil status, the terms of its confession are private even though the State lawfully regulates certain aspects of membership, such as its biological heterosexuality, and also enforces inheritance. No child is a bastard under biblical civil law on the basis of his married parents’

22. Margaret Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization (New York: Brentano’s, 1922), p. 125; cited in George Grant, Grand Illusions: The Legacy of Planned Parenthood (Franklin, Tennessee: Adroit Press, 1992), p. 27. 23. Sanger, “Birth Control,” Birth Control Review (May 1919); cited in idem.

298

DEUTERONOMY

refusal to confess the faith established by God’s law for the two other public covenantal institutions, church and State. Neither is a child who was not born into a family entitled to membership merely because he confesses a married couple’s confession. Family covenant membership is automatic through birth.24 There must not be legal discrimination against the Adamic covenant family based on the issue of confessional content other than the promise of exclusive mutual bonding. This is not true of church and State. In church and State, an open membership ofer – the ofer of adoption – is automatically extended to the general public with the original incorporation of either of these covenantal organizations. These two institutions are public monopolies: the monopoly of the sacraments and the monopoly of life-threatening violence. God has established rules governing both of these monopolistic institutions. Those who have gained early access to the beneits of membership are not allowed by God to close these beneits to newcomers. Membership is open to all comers on the original terms of the covenant. In neither church nor State are ojcers allowed by God to discriminate against anyone who seeks membership through covenant oath. A racist Trinitarian church has violated God’s law. So has an anti-immigration Trinitarian State. So has anyone who seeks to substitute a covenantal oath in either institution that denies the theology of the Athanasian creed. Sonship is by oath. Public sonship is by public Trinitarian oath. To substitute a new oath is to substitute a new covenant.25 This does not mean that Christians’ opposition to immigration is illegitimate when the State has adopted a non-Trinitarian confession. Christians may legitimately seek to substitute a Trinitarian covenant, which will require votes. If they see that certain immigrants who confess a rival and highly aggressive religion are becoming eligible for citizenship, then as a defensive political strategy for the sake of the extension of the kingdom of God, they may legitimately seek to work politically to cut of such immigration as part of their goal of establishing a Trinitarian confession for the nation. But for

24. What distinguishes the Christian family from the Adamic family is infant baptism. Children are supposed to be baptized as infants, thereby transferring to the institutional church covenantal authority over the children through the parents. Baptists and non-Christians deny the validity of this legal arrangement. 25. Gary North, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989), Part 3.

Sonship, Inheritance, and Immigration

299

those Christians who deny the legitimacy of a Christian nation – the vast majority of Protestant Christians today – any opposition to immigration is made in terms of non-confessional considerations. This constitutes discrimination based on economic, racial, or other considerations. The Bible condemns all such judicial discrimination except against citizens of enemy nations during a declared war, which would in efect constitute an invasion, or against immigrants amicted with contagious deadly diseases, which would also constitute an invasion.

Conclusion The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. It is also the beginning of wealth. The circumcision of the heart – obedience to God – is the basis of maintaining God’s inheritance and expanding it. The circumcised heart is the mark of legitimate sonship. This opened the possibility of inheritance to strangers in Mosaic Israel. The immigrant, if he consented to circumcision, could look forward to urban citizenship for his heirs. Even if he remained uncircumcised, he was entitled to civil justice in terms of the Mosaic law. The rule of law mandated by God: “One law shall be to him that is homeborn, and unto the stranger that sojourneth among you” (Ex. 12:49). The Mosaic law’s protection of private property was universal. This was a major incentive for productive strangers to immigrate to Israel. They could enjoy the fruits of their labor despite their alien legal status. There is no question that this aspect of the Mosaic law was an aspect of Israel’s evangelism to the world (Deut. 4:5–8).26

26. See Chapter 8, above.

26 OATH,Oath, SANCTIONS, INHERITANCE Sanctions, AND and Inheritance Thou shalt fear the LORD thy God; him shalt thou serve, and to him shalt thou cleave, and swear by his name. He is thy praise, and he is thy God, that hath done for thee these great and terrible things, which thine eyes have seen. Thy fathers went down into Egypt with threescore and ten persons; and now the LORD thy God hath made thee as the stars of heaven for multitude (Deut. 10:20–22).

The theocentric focus of this passage is the fear of God. God is sovereign over history, as Israel’s history had demonstrated. Such fear should lead to covenantal swearing, Moses said: “to him shalt thou cleave, and swear by his name.” Because of the presence of a covenantal oath, this law is a universal law. It was not a seed law or land law, although it had to do with the inheritance of Canaan. It has to do with inheritance in general because the passage assumes the presence of a covenantal oath.

Fulilled Promises Israel’s oath-bound covenantal subordination had resulted in the fulillment of two of God’s three promises to Abraham. First, the promise of numerous descendants: “And he brought him forth abroad, and said, Look now toward heaven, and tell the stars, if thou be able to number them: and he said unto him, So shall thy seed be” (Gen. 15:5). The second promise had also been fulilled: collecting the inheritances of Egypt’s irstborn. “And he said unto Abram, Know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them; and they shall amict them four hundred years; And also that nation, whom they shall serve, will I judge: and afterward shall they come out with great substance” (vv. 13–14).

300

Oath, Sanctions, and Inheritance

301

The third prophetic promise had not yet been fulilled when Moses spoke to the elders of Israel, but it soon would be: the inheritance of Canaan. “But in the fourth generation they shall come hither again: for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full” (v. 16). The fulillment of the irst two promises was supposed to produce conidence in the fulillment of the third: national inheritance. The fulillment of all three promises was supposed to motivate the nation to even greater covenantal faithfulness. “Therefore thou shalt love the LORD thy God, and keep his charge, and his statutes, and his judgments, and his commandments, alway” (Deut. 11:1). Joshua and the older members of his generation as children had seen God’s historical sanctions on Egypt; the younger members and their children had not. “And know ye this day: for I speak not with your children which have not known, and which have not seen the chastisement of the LORD your God, his greatness, his mighty hand, and his stretched out arm, And his miracles, and his acts, which he did in the midst of Egypt unto Pharaoh the king of Egypt, and unto all his land” (vv. 2–3). God had destroyed Egypt’s army by burying them all in the Red Sea (v. 4); He destroyed Dathan and Abiram by having the earth swallow them (v. 6). The older members had seen all this with their own eyes (v. 7). This was supposed to make the conquest generation obedient. “Therefore shall ye keep all the commandments which I command you this day, that ye may be strong, and go in and possess the land, whither ye go to possess it” (v. 8). The sight of God’s sanctions in history is to become a means of covenantal reinforcement.

Eschatological Inheritance The exodus generation would have to inherit, just as Abraham had inherited: through their heirs. They had been told this a generation earlier. “But your little ones, which ye said should be a prey, them will I bring in, and they shall know the land which ye have despised” (Num. 14:31). The exodus generation had to content itself with inheriting eschatologically. Their victorious heirs would represent them. They would achieve their victory through their heirs, just as God had promised mankind in His curse on the serpent (Gen. 3:15). Eschatological inheritance is worth very little for men without saving faith, especially present-oriented men without faith in the future. Israel was about to become a nation of immigrants. The immigrant’s future-oriented ideal of making a better life for his children

302

DEUTERONOMY

and his grandchildren makes him a thrifty, hard-working, uncomplaining servant in society. Rarely do his grandchildren sustain either his eschatological vision or his savings rate. They assume that what they possess is normal and almost cost-free rather than the unique inheritance of two generations of thrift and hard work. They become historically forgetful. They become forgetful regarding the way to wealth: a high savings rate, and service to the consumer. Covenantal forgetfulness was the crucial economic threat to Israel, which was about to become a nation of newly arrived immigrants. Beware, Moses warned, that “thou say in thine heart, My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth” (Deut. 8:17). The older generation’s weakness had been present-orientation: a refusal to be content with eschatological inheritance. As soon as Moses told them that they would not be allowed to conquer Canaan, they rushed into a forbidden war with Amalek (Num. 14:44–45). They immediately became overconident when they should have been humble before pagan covenant-breakers for a generation. Previously, they had lacked conidence when they should have been humble before God and therefore conident regarding their imminent victory over covenant-breakers. In both cases, they did not have conidence in the predictability of God’s historical sanctions: 1) negative corporate sanctions on Canaanites through Israel inside the land; 2) negative corporate sanctions on Israel through Amalekites outside the land. These decisive events had been uniquely covenantal. First, the Israelites had not believed in the historical relevance of point one of the biblical covenant model: 1) the sovereignty of God over the events of history; 2) His unique judicial presence with them as a nation. Second, they had not accepted their national ojce as God’s representative agent in bringing negative corporate sanctions against Canaan. Third, they had not obeyed God’s revelation to them: imminent victory over Canaan, said Joshua and Caleb; imminent defeat by Amalek, said Moses. Fourth, they had initially sought to avoid imposing God’s sanctions and then had sought to impose sanctions on their own. Fifth, they had no patience with the doctrine of eschatological inheritance. They were present-oriented.

Promise and Continuity Moses pointed to the growth of Israel’s population. They had arrived in Egypt as a handful; now they were a multitude. He cited

Oath, Sanctions, and Inheritance

303

the words of God to Abram: the stars of heaven. God’s promise to childless Abram had been fulilled. The change in name to Abraham – father of nations or multitudes had been fulilled. God’s revelation to Abram four centuries earlier had been reliable. The Israelites could see with their own eyes that God’s promise had been fulilled. But this had been equally true of the preceding generation. They had not believed their own eyes. They had not acknowledged that they were living proof of the reliability of the covenantal promise to Abram.1 They had not understood that God’s oath in history had come true in history. They had not looked to their own history, including their immediate history, with the eyes of faith. The fulillment of God’s oath to Abram had been ignored by the exodus generation. It had made no impact on their thinking, their words, or their actions. The Israelites of the exodus did not acknowledge the importance of continuity in history. The judicial basis of Israel’s continuity was God’s oath to Abram. That which followed this oath had conirmed the terms of the oath. The oath had not been mere words; it had been a prophecy. This prophecy had come true in their generation. But the fathers of the conquest generation had refused to acknowledge that the fulillment of God’s oath in history had transferred to them a heavy degree of responsibility. They no doubt understood that this was the case, but they refused to acknowledge it. They were determined not to enter the Promised Land. They had no desire to transfer leadership to their sons under Joshua, even though Joshua’s generation had been identiied prophetically by God as the inheriting generation (Gen. 15:16). They preferred not to inherit. They clung to their authority in the wilderness rather than transfer it to their sons and march into Canaan. They preferred to allow death to transfer this authority four decades later. They preferred wandering in the wilderness to seeing the fulillment of God’s covenant oath to Abram in their lifetimes. God’s oath to Abram was the basis of their covenantal inheritance as sons of Abraham. Their very self-deinition was tied to God’s oath. This meant that it was tied to everything that had happened since then, for the events since the days of Abraham had conirmed the oath. It was a true oath because it had been fulilled as 1. He had not yet been re-named in Genesis 15.

304

DEUTERONOMY

promised. Moses reminded the conquest generation: the handful had become a multitude, as promised. The God of Israel could foresee the future because He shaped the future. The decree of God is sovereign over history. Faith in this principle would enable the conquest generation to fulill the promise regarding the fourth generation. The inheritance was assured, Moses told them. Why was he so sure? Because he understood the history of Israel from the days of Abram to his own day. He understood that continuity in history is covenantal. The continuity of history rests on God’s covenant oath and His sanctions in history. These historical sanctions conirm the original oath and bring it to pass in history. This means that inheritance in history is covenantal. It rests on God’s oath. But God’s oath is tied to God’s law. This is why men are required to obey God. The fear of God produces obedience to God’s law. Obedience brings God’s positive sanctions. Positive sanctions bring the inheritance.

Continuity and Conquest Point ive of the biblical covenant model is continuity. But this implies succession in history. The Book of Deuteronomy makes it plain that covenantal continuity involves inheritance. It is not merely that Israel persevered as a nation. Israel inherited the Promised Land. Israel’s perseverance was not supposed to be merely biological; it was to be cultural and economic. Israel was to take possession of wells that others had dug, vineyards that others had planted. Israel was not to wander in circles in the wilderness. God’s promise to Abram had been more than mere national survival; it had involved the promise of inheritance. The promise had been numerical: from no sons at all to sons like the stars of heaven. That is, the fulillment of the promise could be visibly measured in history. Obviously, that promise had been igurative. Moses knew from the numbering how many people constituted Israel. The symbolic language of the measureless stars of heaven had pointed to a future census. The language of immeasurability had pointed to measurability, i.e., confirmation. The impossible would come true. Abraham’s new name would in fact be confirmed in history. He was not merely to be the father of a handful; he was to become the father of nations. God asked him to believe this, which he did. Then it came true.

Oath, Sanctions, and Inheritance

305

Covenantal continuity is the continuity of growth. It is not the continuity of mere survival; it is the continuity of conquest. It is not the continuity of life in the historical shadows; it is the continuity of dominion. It is not the continuity of mere confession; it is the continuity of kingdom extension. Whenever God’s people refuse to acknowledge that the continuity promised to God’s people in history is a continuity of expansion, dominion, and conquest, they begin to act like the exodus generation. Their lack of faith produces timidity. Timidity produces half-hearted measures. The lack of success of half-hearted measures reinforces their lack of faith. They dwell in the wilderness and call it the Promised Land in history. They spiritualize the language of victory. They call a stalemate in the wilderness a triumph of the kingdom. Moses was preparing them for conquest. He did this by telling them again and again to fear God. Why should they? Because God is the God of the oath. He is the God of oath-bound sanctions in history. These historical sanctions conirm His oath by bringing expansion and victory to His people. Moses was rallying the troops of the fourth generation by calling to their attention the history of God’s dealings with earlier generations. He was calling them to military conquest in history; so, he reminded them of their demographic expansion in the past. Moses told them to swear by God’s name. This was a call to covenant renewal. They were to swear their oath to the God who had sworn an oath to Abram. The promises attached to that oath had been fulilled. This oath-bound God “hath done for thee these great and terrible things, which thine eyes have seen.” What they had seen was preliminary to what they would soon see: the defeat of Canaan. The defeat of Canaan had been part of the original oath (Gen. 15:16). There was no legitimate reason to hold back any longer. The inheritance was at hand.

Conclusion Moses told them to fear God and swear allegiance to Him. He ofered as evidence the fulillment of the seemingly impossible promise to Abraham: the multiplication of his heirs. Israel had grown from 70 people to a multitude. Moses appealed to a positive corporate sanction – multiplication – as a justiication of the requirement to fear God and swear allegiance to Him. Moses could also have mentioned the prophesied capitalization of Israel through the

306

DEUTERONOMY

disinheritance of Egypt’s irstborn, which was God’s second promise to Abraham. The third promise to Abraham, as yet unfulilled, was Israel’s inheritance of the land. This had been an eschatological inheritance for the exodus generation, just as Abraham’s inheritance had been eschatological: multiplication of his heirs, their spoiling of the Egyptians, and the conquest of Canaan. The fulillment of this third aspect of the inheritance was as sure as the irst two had been. What had seemed impossible to Abraham had already come true. Now the third stage of the inheritance was about to come true. Moses was arguing from the oath-bound covenant to the inheritance by way of historically fulilled prophecy. The Abrahamic covenant’s oath had invoked positive sanctions in history. These were sanctions of inheritance: heirs, capital, and land. Although Moses here mentioned only the multiplication of Abraham’s seed, the other two sanctions were part of the original promise. The Israelites were therefore required to obey God’s law (Deut. 11:1). Moses made it clear that all three aspects of the covenant are linked judicially: obedience to God’s law, predictable oath-bound corporate sanctions in history, and corporate inheritance in history.

27 RAIN AND Rain andINHERITANCE Inheritance For the land, whither thou goest in to possess it, is not as the land of Egypt, from whence ye came out, where thou sowedst thy seed, and wateredst it with thy foot, as a garden of herbs: But the land, whither ye go to possess it, is a land of hills and valleys, and drinketh water of the rain of heaven: A land which the LORD thy God careth for: the eyes of the LORD thy God are always upon it, from the beginning of the year even unto the end of the year. And it shall come to pass, if ye shall hearken diligently unto my commandments which I command you this day, to love the LORD your God, and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul, That I will give you the rain of your land in his due season, the irst rain and the latter rain, that thou mayest gather in thy corn, and thy wine, and thine oil (Deut. 11:10–14).

This prophecy was not universal. It was tied to the land of Canaan. Its theocentric focus is God’s sovereignty over the weather. While this control is still a feature of God’s sovereignty, the prophecy was speciic: specific boundaries, specific topography, and speciic weather. As we shall see, the New Covenant established a diferent principle for weather. It is no longer predictable in terms of national ethics. It would be in the Promised Land: “Take heed to yourselves, that your heart be not deceived, and ye turn aside, and serve other gods, and worship them; And then the LORD’S wrath be kindled against you, and he shut up the heaven, that there be no rain, and that the land yield not her fruit; and lest ye perish quickly from of the good land which the LORD giveth you” (Deut. 11:16–17).

307

308

DEUTERONOMY

Egypt vs. Canaan Canaan, Moses promised, would be very diferent from Egypt. One visible diference would be the source of water. The comparison was between watering with one’s foot and watering from on high. What did it mean, “waterest with thy foot”? This probably referred to Egyptian irrigation. The Nile was the only source of water in Egypt. A series of man-made canals directed the water to various regions. Farmers tapped into the water supplied by these canals. A farm’s irrigation system may have employed a series of small, footactivated water wheels to direct the low. This was W. M. Thompson’s suggestion in 1880. He had seen nineteenth-century Egyptian peasants use such devices. Or the verse may have referred to the farmer’s moving of dirt with his foot to plug one furrow in order to direct the water into another furrow.1 In either case, irrigating by foot was a time-consuming, labor-intensive process. Much of the farmer’s labor would have been devoted to directing the precious water into the seeded soil. This would not be a farmer’s main burden in the Promised Land. In Canaan, God would bring water from the sky. From the beginning of the year to the end, God’s eyes would be upon this land (v. 12). This was a clear beneit compared with Egypt, where the survival of the nation depended on the brief period each year in which the Nile looded. This was the only source of Egypt’s water and therefore its prosperity. Not so in Canaan. Under God’s direct authority, the rain and the sun would nourish the land to enable it to produce its wealth.

Bureaucracy and Waterworks There was another important aspect of this blessing: the reduction of administrative bureaucracy. We know that whenever ancient societies depended heavily on national irrigation systems and sophisticated technologies of lood control, they became centralized bureaucracies that were controlled by those with the astronomical

1. W. M. Thompson, The Land and the Book, 3 vols. (New York: Harper & Bros., 1880), I, p. 22.

Rain and Inheritance

309 2

and technical information necessary to plan agriculture. Wittfogel calls these centralized civilizations hydraulic economies. “Time keeping and calendar making are essential for the success of all hydraulic economies. . . .”3 He classiies Egypt as a hydraulic economy. We know that ancient Egypt possessed a sophisticated astronomical calendar that charted the stars.4 One specialist in the ancient world’s systems of measurement has reported that the Egyptians as early as the irst dynasty had measured the geography of the Nile down to minutes of both longitude and latitude, from the equator to the Mediterranean Sea. This could not have been done, he argues, without highly advanced astronomical knowledge.5 6 Egypt was the classic model of an imperial bureaucracy. It is not far-fetched to connect Egypt’s bureaucracy to Egypt’s dependence on a single source of water. The land of Canaan was a very diferent environment from Egypt. Its source of water was the heavens. There could be no centralized control of the water supply. There was no way to gain a special advantage through knowledge of the calendar combined with knowledge of the rise and fall of a single river. The knowledge of the seasons was available to any observant farmer. Knowledge of the timing of the rain would not become the monopoly of any priestly caste. This necessarily decentralized power in Israel. As for the calendar, the priests had to share this knowledge with the people. The three annual journeys to Jerusalem had to be timed perfectly (Ex. 23:14–17). So did the day of atonement (Lev. 16:29–30). The nation had to be told in advance when these times were so that people could plan their journeys. The times of the year were to remain common knowledge in Israel. The irstfruits ofering had to be made at Pentecost, ifty days after Passover (Ex. 34:22; Lev. 23:15–17). The

2. Karl A. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1957). 3. Ibid., p. 29. 4. Henri Frankfort, et al., The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man: An Essay on Speculative Thought in the Ancient Near East (University of Chicago Press, [1946] 1977), p. 81. 5. Livio C. Stecchini, “Astronomical Theory and Historical Data,” in The Velikovsky Afair: The Warfare of Science and Scientism, edited by Alfred de Grazia (New Hyde Park, New York: University Books, 1966), p. 167. 6. Gary North, Moses and Pharaoh: Dominion Religion vs. Power Religion (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1985), ch. 2.

310

DEUTERONOMY

feast of Booths or Tabernacles was linked to the harvest (Lev. 23:39–43). The Israelites understood the agricultural calendar. The sabbatical year of release (Deut. 15), in which the reading of the law to the assembled nation would occur (Deut. 31:10–13), had to be known to all men in Israel, including strangers. This would in turn provide knowledge of the timing of the jubilee year (Lev. 25). None of this was secret information. Knowledge of God’s law and knowledge of the calendar were linked. The tribes had possession of information regarding their boundaries. This decentralized another form of knowledge in Israel: geography. The four types of specialized knowledge by which Egyptian bureaucrats controlled the nation – astronomy, the calendar, lood cycles, and geography – were either possessed by all Israelites or were irrelevant to agriculture in Israel. God controlled the water supply, Moses said. For as long as Israelites believed this, the priesthood could not plausibly assert power over the afairs of the nation based on their special meteorological relationship with God. In fact, the opposite was true: the false religion of the priests of Ahab’s reign was the cause of God’s withholding of rain (I Ki. 17:1). A prophet who opposed the ojcial priesthood to the point of commanding their collective execution (I Ki. 18:40) was the mediatorial source of water in Israel: an antibureaucratic igure if there ever was one.

Linear Time, Eschatological Time Time for Israel was not cyclical; it was linear. It was linear because it was eschatological. Dozens of prophecies were tied to Israel’s future. Jacob-Israel’s prophecy regarding the coming of Shiloh was the main one: “The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come; and unto him shall the gathering of the people be” (Gen. 49:10). Astronomy in the ancient world produced a cyclical worldview. The priests’ knowledge of the speciic positioning of the heavens throughout the year was extremely sophisticated – far beyond that possessed by most educated people in modern times. The ancients knew about the wobbling of the earth’s axis, although they explained this in terms of the wobbling of the heavens.7 They knew about the 7. Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, Hamlet’s Mill: An essay on myth and the future of time (Boston: Godine, [1969] 1977).

Rain and Inheritance

311

26,000-year cycle of the pole stars. This “great year” led to a cyclical view of history.8 They did not know about the hydrologic cycle: bodies of water-evaporation-condensation-rain. They had a more direct view of rainfall: the intervention of some deity. Moses called it “the rain of heaven.” God views the land from heaven. He cares for it. He sends the rain. The absence of rain should be seen as a covenantal curse: “Take heed to yourselves, that your heart be not deceived, and ye turn aside, and serve other gods, and worship them; And then the LORD’S wrath be kindled against you, and he shut up the heaven, that there be no rain, and that the land yield not her fruit; and lest ye perish quickly from of the good land which the LORD giveth you” (Deut. 11:16–17). This warning was fulilled under Ahab (I Ki. 17). Thus, the cycle of rain was not to be understood as a cycle in the sense of providing a model for time. Israel’s agricultural cycle would be cyclical: rain, sun, harvest, planting, but always within the framework of the three annual feasts and festivals. These festivals were eschatological, always looking ahead toward the coming of the messiah and His kingdom. The rain cycle was therefore covenantal. It would be governed by the nation’s obedience or disobedience to God’s law. Here was a crucial distinction between Israel and all other ancient nations: nature was not seen as normative. Its processes were seen as dependent on the nation’s covenantal faithfulness. The operations of nature in Israel were diferent from its operations outside the borders of the land. The Mosaic Covenant’s land laws and seed laws were unique to Israel, for they were tied to the messianic prophecies, especially the prophecy regarding Shiloh.9 Inside Israel’s borders, nature was an aspect of the special grace of the Mosaic Covenant: “And it shall come to pass, if ye shall hearken diligently unto my commandments which I command you this day, to love the LORD your God, and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul, That I will give you the rain of your land in his due season, the irst rain and the latter rain, that thou mayest gather in thy corn, and thy wine, and thine oil. And I will send grass in thy ields for thy cattle, that thou mayest eat and be full” (Deut. 11:13–15).

8. See Chapter 21, above: section on “The Idea of Progress and Inheritance.” 9. Gary North, Leviticus: An Economic Commentary (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), ch. 33.

312

DEUTERONOMY

Outside these borders, the common grace of the Adamic covenant applied: “. . . for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matt. 5:45b).10 Jacob had gone down into Egypt because the common curse of nature had impoverished him. God’s special grace had been shown to Egypt through Joseph’s ability to interpret Pharaoh’s dream. Egypt had grain for sale during the famine; Palestine did not. God did not spare Egypt from nature’s curse by interfering with nature’s processes. He spared Egypt by a special revelation in advance. God had a plan for the sons of Jacob. This plan was larger than the plans of the decision-makers. As Joseph said to his brothers, “But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive” (Gen. 50:20). Egypt’s salvation in a time of famine had been based on the Pharaoh’s power to tax one-ifth of the crops of Egypt (Gen. 41:34). He had the power to place Joseph in charge of the entire operation: “And he made him to ride in the second chariot which he had; and they cried before him, Bow the knee: and he made him ruler over all the land of Egypt” (Gen. 41:43). This power was derived from two sources: Egypt’s faith in the Pharaoh as a god and the priesthood’s knowledge of the cycles of the Nile. Joseph exempted the priesthood from his famine-driven purchase of the land of Egypt in the name of Pharaoh (Gen. 47:22). This indicates that the priests had been the allies of Pharaoh in maintaining Pharaoh’s power over the nation. The Mosaic law prohibited the exercise of such power by any king in Israel (Deut. 17:16–17). Israel’s covenant-governed hydrologic cycle reinforced this prohibition.

The Biblical Doctrine of Economic Growth Because the Mosaic Covenant was eschatological, Israelites could legitimately expect long-term per capita economic growth in response to their faithfulness. The cyclical pattern of rain-sun-harvest would not become a restriction on Israel’s development. On the contrary, the covenantal basis of this cycle guaranteed compound growth in response to national covenantal faithfulness. The agricultural

10. Ibid., pp. 549–54.

Rain and Inheritance

313

cycle was not dominant inside Israel’s borders; covenant law, its sanctions, and linear time were. The Mosaic Covenant’s positive sanction of growth – population and productivity – meant that the Israelites were not prisoners of nature. Nature is subordinate to God, and God ruled Israel by a covenant. The Israelites could gain control over nature through national obedience. In Egypt, the priests and perhaps other initiated specialists controlled the output of agriculture through their guild’s knowledge of the calendar and the Nile’s lood pattern. Salvation was by knowledge and power, not national obedience. In Israel, none of this was the case. The wealth of national Israel would be the product of ethics: the special grace of the Mosaic Covenant. Its positive economic sanctions were population growth and increased wealth per capita. The biblical model for economic growth was based on the existence of visible economic blessings as the means of covenantal conirmation. “But thou shalt remember the LORD thy God: for it is he that giveth thee power to get wealth, that he may establish his covenant which he sware unto thy fathers, as it is this day” (Deut. 8:18). A cyclical worldview denies the long-run possibility of such positive economic sanctions. So does the modern world’s zero economic growth model.11 The ancients believed that a cycle of growth would always be undermined by a cycle of decay. The cosmic age of gold was followed by ages of debased metals.12 This pattern of decay was dominant in the thinking of cyclical cosmologists. The great year would repeat its cycle, and social cycles must relect this cosmic cycle.13 Moses denied the existence of any cosmic cycle when he told the people that rain would come in terms of the covenant. The Mosaic Covenant was eschatological. Its sanctions had to be interpreted in terms of linear eschatology, not the great year. There would be only one messiah, not an endless series of them. The Bible’s primary theme is the transition from wrath to grace. There would not be another Adam to repeat the transgression of 11. Gary North, Tools of Dominion: The Case Laws of Exodus (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), ch. 29. 12. Hesiod, Works and Days, lines 105–200. 13. Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1959).

314

DEUTERONOMY

the irst Adam. On the contrary, the messiah would be a superior Adam, a second Adam whose fulillment of the terms of the covenant would forever replace the Adamic covenant and its tests and sanctions. The New Heavens and the New Earth would replace the present cosmic order. Yet there must be eschatological continuity between history’s New Heavens and the New Earth and eternity’s: For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth: and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind. But be ye glad and rejoice for ever in that which I create: for, behold, I create Jerusalem a rejoicing, and her people a joy. And I will rejoice in Jerusalem, and joy in my people: and the voice of weeping shall be no more heard in her, nor the voice of crying. There shall be no more thence an infant of days, nor an old man that hath not illed his days: for the child shall die an hundred years old; but the sinner being an hundred years old shall be accursed (Isa. 65:17–20).

This prophesied era cannot refer to eternity, for sinners will still be dwelling among the righteous. Death will still be present. The prophesied millennial blessing of extended life expectancy is earth-bound. No verse in Scripture more clearly refutes the amillennial system of interpretation.14 This is why amillennialist Archibald Hughes, in his book, A New Heaven and New Earth (1958),15 refuses comment on this passage. He writes as though this passage did not exist, despite the fact that his book invokes its language. He comments exclusively on the New Testament’s passages where this phrase occurs. He knows exactly what he is doing. He refuses to discuss the historical aspects of kingdom inheritance in a book devoted to the eternal inheritance. This is the heart of amillennialism: it asserts a radical discontinuity between New Covenant history and eternity.16 The Mosaic Covenant’s optimistic eschatological worldview made possible the hope of sustained positive sanctions: a permanent inheritance. The Bible ajrms that this covenantal inheritance cannot be dispersed or destroyed in eternity. It will begin to manifest itself in history. Over and over, the Old Testament ajrms this fact:

14. Gary North, Millennialism and Social Theory (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), pp. 98–106, 213–14. 15. Archibald Hughes, A New Heaven and a New Earth: An Introductory Study of the Coming of the Lord Jesus Christ and the Eternal Inheritance (Philadelphia: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1958). 16. North, Millennialism and Social Theory, p. 123.

Rain and Inheritance

315

His soul shall dwell at ease; and his seed shall inherit the earth (Ps. 25:13). For evildoers shall be cut of: but those that wait upon the LORD, they shall inherit the earth (Ps. 37:9). But the meek shall inherit the earth; and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace (Ps. 37:11). This inheritance is the kingdom of God. It is a kingdom visibly manifested by its dominion in history. Daniel told Nebuchadnezzar: Thou sawest till that a stone was cut out without hands, which smote the image upon his feet that were of iron and clay, and brake them to pieces. Then was the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold, broken to pieces together, and became like the chaf of the summer threshingloors; and the wind carried them away, that no place was found for them: and the stone that smote the image became a great mountain, and illed the whole earth (Dan. 2:34–35). And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed: and the kingdom shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand for ever. Forasmuch as thou sawest that the stone was cut out of the mountain without hands, and that it brake in pieces the iron, the brass, the clay, the silver, and the gold; the great God hath made known to the king what shall come to pass hereafter: and the dream is certain, and the interpretation thereof sure (Dan. 2:44–45).

Sustained economic growth is not only possible; it is normative. It remains an ethical obligation for every covenant-keeping society. This economic implication of the eschatology of the Mosaic Covenant was not annulled by the New Covenant. The fact that Shiloh came to fulill the terms of the Mosaic Covenant did not annul its eschatology. On the contrary, Jesus Christ announced that His deinitive fulfillment of the Mosaic Covenant in history must be progressively implemented in history by His followers (Matt. 28:18–20). We call this the Great Commission.17 Commission is the correct word: this worldtransforming task has been commissioned to us, and we are paid a very high commission: 90 percent. God contents Himself with a

17. Kenneth L. Gentry, Jr., The Greatness of the Great Commission: The Christian Enterprise in a Fallen World (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990).

316

DEUTERONOMY

18

mere 10 percent: the tithe. As any salesman will tell you, a 90 percent commission structure is a very great commission.

Conclusion Moses told the Israelites that their inheritance in the Promised Land would be something unique: an agricultural cycle marked by covenantal sanctions, positive and negative. Their covenantal faithfulness would determine which category of sanctions they would experience. This framework would apply to agriculture. The covenant, not miracles of nature, would soon become normative inside Israel’s national boundaries. The Mosaic Covenant’s eschatological foundation would therefore govern the Mosaic economy in the broadest sense, Moses told them. Negative corporate sanctions would not become permanent; positive corporate sanctions could become permanent. Paganism’s cyclical pessimism has no covenantal foundation, Moses implicitly was telling them. Covenant-keepers will inevitably inherit the earth in history. The kingdom of God is the universal kingdom in history because it is the universal kingdom in eternity. While the Old Covenant did not speak of eternity, it spoke very clearly about history. It taught that history is covenantal, not cyclical. Moses said that this fact would be seen by all Israel in the rain of heaven.

18. Gary North, Tithing and the Church (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994).

28 LAW,Law, SANCTIONS, INHERITANCE Sanctions,AND and Inheritance Therefore shall ye lay up these my words in your heart and in your soul, and bind them for a sign upon your hand, that they may be as frontlets between your eyes. And ye shall teach them your children, speaking of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. And thou shalt write them upon the door posts of thine house, and upon thy gates: That your days may be multiplied, and the days of your children, in the land which the LORD sware unto your fathers to give them, as the days of heaven upon the earth (Deut. 11:18–21).

The theocentric focus of this law is the authority of the word of God. The laying up of God’s words in one’s heart and soul was described as if the words were to be written on one’s hand or written down on pieces of paper and pasted to one’s forehead. The language here was analogical. God’s words are not literally stored up in the bloodpumping organ we call the heart. They are, however, stored away in the obedient covenant-keeper’s soul. They are to guide his actions. These words must be reinforced throughout the day by personal obedience and by teaching the next generation by word and deed. The context of this passage was God’s law. Obeying the laws of God is to become a way of life for all men. The covenant-keeper is supposed to talk about the law from morning to night as he works beside his children. The law governs every aspect of our lives, and so we are to talk about it throughout the day. Our very conversations are to remind us of the comprehensive nature of God’s law. Because God’s law is comprehensive, our discussion of the law is to be comprehensive. Every covenant-keeper is to become an expert in the law of God. He is to think about it, discuss it, and explore its

317

318

DEUTERONOMY

implications every day. Men are to discuss God’s law daily because they are to honor it daily through obedience. Men are to use their own words to build ethical hedges around their lives. Their own words should serve as constant ethical reminders: guideposts. To argue that this law was exclusively a land law is to deny the previous sentences in this paragraph. Yet there was a sense in which this was a land law. The Ten Commandments were to be written down on the doorposts of every home. This was a literal requirement under the Mosaic economy. In the United States in the 1950’s, families often placed a rubber doormat in front of the door that said, “welcome.” Those who came in were irst supposed to wipe of the dirt from the soles of their shoes by standing on the doormat and rubbing their shoes on it. Symbolically, the Israelites were to wipe of their evil behavior from their souls when they entered a home. In modern times, Orthodox Jews seek to obey this law in a literal fashion. They place a tiny scroll of the Ten Commandments inside a small storage device called a mezuza, which is then ajxed to the front door of the home or business. The problem with their interpretation of this law is that the scroll inside a mezuza can’t be seen. The device can easily become a kind of talisman. I have seen a Jew kiss his ingers and then touch the mezuza on leaving his business. This is a way to show respect, but the problem is that the stipulations of the law itself are not visible. This makes the mezuza analogous to the Ark of the Covenant, where the tables of the law were stored. The idea of having the Decalogue written on the doorposts was that it could be read by all literate people who passed through the door. The same was true of all gateways. This included the gates of the city, where the judges met to decide cases. This law required that the Ten Commandments be written on the equivalent of the wall of a civil court. Is this law still in force? The New Covenant indicates that there has been a deinitive shift from external writing to internal writing. The Epistle to the Hebrews twice asserts that the New Covenant has fulilled the prophecy of Jeremiah 31:31–33: “For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, saith the Lord; I will put my laws into their mind, and write them in their hearts: and I will be to them a God, and they shall be to me a people” (Heb. 8:10). “This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, saith the Lord, I will put my laws into their hearts, and in their minds will I write them” (Heb. 10:16). I regard this as

Law, Sanctions, and Inheritance

319

analogous to the circumcision of the heart, which is the fulillment of the requirement of the circumcision of the lesh. “But he is a Jew, which is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, and not in the letter; whose praise is not of men, but of God (Rom. 2:29). The circumcision of the heart annulled the Old Covenant’s requirement of the circumcision of the lesh. Similarly, embedding the law of God into the heart in the New Covenant annulled the law requiring the Israelites to write the Ten Commandments on their doorposts and gates. It is not that the Israelites were not also required to place the law in their hearts. They were, as this Deuteronomic passage indicates. But this external requirement is no longer judicially binding on covenant-keepers under the New Covenant.

Teaching One’s Children The proper method of writing the law on the heart is by instruction. Parents are to instruct their children throughout the day. This is good for the children and better for the parent. The parent cannot in good faith utter that famous disclaimer, “Do as I say, not as I do.”1 The law of God requires obedience. There is no legitimate escape from the stipulations of the law. We are to keep the whole of the law in our mandated quest for perfection.2 The child is to see consistency between what the parent says and does. The children are to internalize the law – write it in their hearts – though hearing it, seeing parents applying it daily, and obeying it. They mimic their parents, and in doing so, they reinforce the law of God, which is already written on their hearts through the grace of conversion. They are to achieve progressively daily what regeneration has already done for them deinitively. The transition from wrath to grace involves God’s preparation of the heart for the law. At the time of redemption, God creates a special place in a covenant1. “Be ye followers of me, even as I also am of Christ” (I Cor. 11:1). 2. “And when Abram was ninety years old and nine, the LORD appeared to Abram, and said unto him, I am the Almighty God; walk before me, and be thou perfect” (Gen. 17:1). “Thou shalt be perfect with the LORD thy God” (Deut. 18:13). “He is the Rock, his work is perfect: for all his ways are judgment: a God of truth and without iniquity, just and right is he” (Deut. 32:4). “Let your heart therefore be perfect with the LORD our God, to walk in his statutes, and to keep his commandments, as at this day (I Ki. 8:61). ”Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect” (Matt. 5:48).

320

DEUTERONOMY

keeping man’s conscience that is designed to house God’s law. Then the covenant-keeper is supposed to work all of his life to ill up this designated area of his conscience with practical knowledge of the law. As he increases his understanding of how the laws are to be applied in speciic cases, he becomes a mature Christian. Successful teachers tell us that the very process of teaching increases the teacher’s understanding of the material taught. The process reinforces what the teacher knows, imbedding it in his mind. If he does not teach it, the material fades from his thinking. Like notes taken in college and never reviewed or taught, yet never thrown away, the note-taker’s memory of them fades. James wrote: “But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass [mirror]: For he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was. But whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty, and continueth therein, he being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work, this man shall be blessed in his deed” (James 1:22–25). Moses warned Israel not to permit the forgetfulness born of inaction. The mental notes taken in childhood must be reviewed and renewed throughout life. The very act of imparting this knowledge to children throughout the normal events of the day is a means of retaining the law and writing it in the heart.

Van Til’s Childhood Experience The Calvinist philosopher Cornelius Van Til described his early years growing up on a Dutch farm in the late nineteenth century: “Ours was not in any sense a pietistic family. There were not any great emotional outbursts on any occasion that I recall. There was much ado about making hay in the summer and about caring for the cows and sheep in the winter, but round about it all there was a deep conditioning atmosphere. Though there were no tropical showers of revivals, the relative humidity was always very high. At every meal the whole family was present. There was a closing as well as an opening prayer, and a chapter of the Bible was read each time. The Bible was read through from Genesis to Revelation. At breakfast or at dinner, as the case might be, we would hear of the New Testament, or of ‘the children of Gad after their families, of Zephon and Haggi and Shuni and Ozni, of Eri and Areli.’ I do not claim that I always fully understood the meaning of it all. Yet of the

Law, Sanctions, and Inheritance

321

total efect there can be no doubt. The Bible became for me, in all its parts, in every syllable, the very Word of God. I learned that I must believe the Scripture story, and that ‘faith’ was a gift of God. What had happened in the past, and particularly what had happened in the past in Palestine, was of the greatest moment to me.”3 His parents understood the need of presenting the Bible to their children day by day. The children learned that the Bible was very important to their parents. It therefore became important for the children. Years later, Van Til would tell his students at Westminster Seminary that his father used to teach him and his brother as the three of them worked in the ields on their hands and knees. His brother’s son Henry later followed in his uncle’s footsteps to become a professor and author.4 Henry’s son also became a professor and an author.5 This inheritance began in the ields, with a father teaching his sons the Bible and the catechism. The father was planting more than physical seeds as they worked.

The Christian School The day came when Van Til’s parents sent him to a Christian school. He remembered his vaccination decades later. “I can still feel it.”6 The school was itself a form of vaccination: a vaccination against covenant-breaking. The school was an extension of his family. His parents had vowed at his baptism to instruct him in God’s ways. “It was in pursuance of this vow that they sent me to a Christian grade school.”7 The school taught a curriculum from the point of view of his Dutch Calvinist parents. “In short, the whole wide world that gradually opened up for me through my schooling was regarded as operating in its every aspect under the direction of the all-powerful God whose child I was through Christ. I was to learn to think God’s thoughts after him in every ield of endeavor.”8

3. Cornelius Van Til, Why I Believe in God (Philadelphia: Committee on Christian Education, Orthodox Presbyterian Church, n.d.), pp. 5–6. 4. Henry R. Van Til, The Calvinistic Concept of Culture (Philadelphia: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1959). 5. L. John Van Til, Liberty of Conscience: The History of a Puritan Idea (Nutley, New Jersey: Craig Press, 1972). 6. Van Til, Why I Believe in God, p. 6. 7. Ibid., p. 7. 8. Idem.

322

DEUTERONOMY

Sending children to a Christian school was common to conservative Dutch households in his day, and remains so. The Christian school has kept the Dutch community together in the United States, and it has kept Dutch Calvinists together in the secular, covenant-breaking Netherlands. The Christian school provides specialized education that parents are not always capable of providing. The school is based on the biblical principle of the division of labor: “Now ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular. And God hath set some in the church, irst apostles, secondarily prophets, thirdly teachers, after that miracles, then gifts of healings, helps, governments, diversities of tongues” (I Cor. 12:27–28). The school provides specialized instruction. This instruction replaces the father’s time in the ields or wherever he works. With the vast increase in the division of labor since the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth century, a father is less and less able to pass his skills to his sons. He works away from home, and his skills rarely match his sons’ abilities or interests. They learn their morality from him, but not their occupations. Education today is overwhelmingly formalized. From age ive through graduate school, the student is educated in the classroom education. Formal education is tied to the printed word. Apprenticeship has been replaced by classroom bureaucracy and written examinations. The educational cost per student is far lower under bureaucracy. In the eighteenth century and earlier, wealthy families hired tutors for their children. The less wealthy had to settle for a classroom setting: more students per instructor and therefore lower cost per family. The wealthy in England have for two centuries sent their sons to boarding schools in order to separate them from their families. This is also done by the wealthiest old families in the United States.9 This is a rite of passage into the elite of both societies. The modern State seeks to steal the legacy of the faithful: the hearts and minds of children. The educational bureaucrats today have imposed a massive system of ideological kidnapping on the voters. This is the inherent nature of all compulsory education, regulated education, and tax-funded education. Education is not neutral. The bureaucrats have built a gigantic system of humanist indoctrination

9. Nelson Aldrich, Jr., Old Money: The Mythology of America’s Upper Class (New York: Knopf, 1988), pp. 144–58.

Law, Sanctions, and Inheritance

323

with funds extracted from all local residents in the name of common-ground education. This justiication has always been a lie, from Horace Mann’s public schools in Massachusetts in the 1830’s 10 until today. From the late nineteenth century until today, leading American educators have been forthright in their public pronouncements of their agenda. This agenda is deeply religious. John Dewey, the “father” of progressive education, dedicated humanist, and philosopher stated his position plainly: “Our schools, in bringing together those of diferent nationalities, languages, traditions, and creeds, in assimilating them together upon the basis of what is common and public in endeavor and achievement, are performing an ininitely significant religious work.”11 More than this: “In such a dim, blind, but efective way the American people is conscious that its schools serve best the cause of religion in serving the cause of social uniication. . . .”12

Enjoying the Inheritance There is a positive sanction attached to the law governing judicial instruction: “That your days may be multiplied, and the days of your children, in the land which the LORD sware unto your fathers to give them, as the days of heaven upon the earth” (Deut. 11:21). Long life in the land is a universally desirable gift from God. Nobody appeared a second time before any king in the ancient world with the greeting: “O, King, live briely.” They said, “O, King, live forever.”13 The promise of long life connects law and sanctions judicially. In this case, the connection is stated positively: teach your children God’s law, and both you and they will enjoy long life. This is an extension of the ifth commandment: “Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee” (Ex. 20:12). Paul wrote: “Children, obey your

10. R. J. Rushdoony, The Messianic Character of American Education: Studies in the History of the Philosophy of Education (Nutley, New Jersey: Craig Press, 1963). 11. John Dewey, “Religion and Our Schools,” Hibbert Journal (July 1908); reprinted in Education Today, edited by Joseph Ratner (New York: Putnam’s, 1940), p. 80. This document is reprinted photographically in David Noebel, et al., Clergy in the Classroom: The Religion of Secular Humanism (Manitou Springs, Colorado: Summit Press, 1995), p. 19. Many other statements like Dewey’s appear in this highly useful book. 12. Ibid., pp. 80–81; in Noebel, ibid., pp. 19–20. 13. I Kings 1:31; Nehemiah 2:3; Daniel 2:4; 3:9; 5:10; 6:6, 21.

324

DEUTERONOMY

parents in the Lord: for this is right. Honour thy father and mother; (which is the irst commandment with promise;) That it may be well with thee, and thou mayest live long on the earth” (Eph. 6:1–3). There is no question that Paul regarded the judicial link between obedience to parents and long life on earth as a New Covenant phenomenon. This means that the ifth commandment was not a land law whose visible corporate sanction was tied exclusively to the Mosaic economy in Israel. The positive sanction of long life for obedience to parents has not been annulled by the transition from the Old Covenant to the New Covenant. This implies that the positive sanction of long life for teaching one’s children about God’s law has also not been annulled. What has been annulled is the circumscribed geographical focus of the public reign of the original laws: the land of Israel. Covenant-keepers are no longer promised that they will live long in the land of Israel in peace and prosperity, handing down the inheritance. Paul made it clear: the promise now applies to the whole earth. The New Covenant rests on the Great Commission. The predictable sanctions of God’s law now apply everywhere that the gospel is preached and the covenant is ajrmed corporately. This is what it means to disciple the nations. They are brought under the discipline – the sanctions – of God’s covenant. This is extremely signiicant for the development of Christian social theory. The covenantal link between God’s Bible-revealed law and His predictable corporate sanctions in history has not been broken by the advent of the New Covenant. In the case of Deuteronomy 11:21, the connection was rigorously covenantal: 1) God has given His people the land (transcendence); 2) parents teach children (hierarchy); 3) God’s law is put into the heart (ethics); 4) Israelites can live long in the land sworn by God to the fathers (oath); 5) their children can also live long in the land (succession).

Inheritance and Disinheritance The land would be someone’s inheritance, either Israel’s or the Canaanites’. The alternative was for the land to return to the beasts, which God would not allow (Ex. 23:29). Mankind, not the beasts, is to exercise dominion over nature (Gen. 1:26; 9:1–3). The conservationist rhetoric about the sacred wilderness rests on very bad theology. For Israel to inherit, the Canaanites would have to be disinherited. This is the model for eschatology: the expansion of God’s kingdom in history must come at the expense of Satan’s. To argue otherwise

Law, Sanctions, and Inheritance

325

is to argue that Satan’s visible kingdom must expand at the expense of God’s, which is exactly what amillennialists argue, and premillennialists argue regarding the premillennial “Church Age.” In the inal judgment, Satan and his covenantal subordinates will be totally disinherited (Rev. 20:10). Covenant-keepers will then openly inherit the whole earth, and both it and they will be relieved of the burden of sin and its curses (Rev. 21). The conquest of Canaan was a type of the inal judgment. What would be the basis of Israel’s inheritance? Judicially, it would be obedience: the covenantally representative obedience of the coming messiah (Isa. 53). But obedience was not the whole story; it never is. Sanctions are attached to God’s law. The sanctions in this case would be conidence (positive) and fear (negative). For if ye shall diligently keep all these commandments which I command you, to do them, to love the LORD your God, to walk in all his ways, and to cleave unto him; Then will the LORD drive out all these nations from before you, and ye shall possess greater nations and mightier than yourselves. Every place whereon the soles of your feet shall tread shall be yours: from the wilderness and Lebanon, from the river, the river Euphrates, even unto the uttermost sea shall your coast be. There shall no man be able to stand before you: for the LORD your God shall lay the fear of you and the dread of you upon all the land that ye shall tread upon, as he hath said unto you (Deut. 11:22–25).

The Israelites were supposed to have conidence in God as totally sovereign over history. Next, they were supposed to trust Moses’ words as representing God. Third, they were supposed to trust God’s law. Fourth, they were supposed to trust God’s prophecy of the fear which He would place in the hearts of the Canaanites. Obedience to God’s law was the key. Their obedience would prove their faith in God and Moses’ words in God’s name. If they obeyed God’s law, they would inevitably inherit the Promised Land. The crucial theological point here is that inheritance is fundamentally ethical. Obedience to God’s law is the inescapable component of inheritance. Faith in God is important, but faith without works is dead faith (James 2:17–20). It does not count. It is analogous to someone who believes that the stock market will rise, but who then refuses to invest his money in terms of what he believes. He refuses to “put his money where his mouth is.” He does not participate in the rise. His accurate forecast haunts him after it turns out to be true.

326

DEUTERONOMY

This, too, is a model for eschatology. “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Matt. 6:19–21). The person who views the inheritance as ultimately eschatological must see to it that he structures his life in terms of the covenantal stipulations governing this inheritance. “For what shall it proit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (Mark 8:36). The Israelites would not be allowed to claim this victory without risk, nor would they possesses it overnight. “I will not drive them out from before thee in one year; lest the land become desolate, and the beast of the ield multiply against thee. By little and little I will drive them out from before thee, until thou be increased, and inherit the land” (Ex. 23:29–30). (There is nothing sacred about wilderness areas. They are merely as-yet undomesticated regions, like the garden of Eden prior to Adam.) The promise to Abraham regarding the fourth generation’s inheritance of the land was God’s deinitive eschatological announcement (Gen. 15:16). The military conquest of Canaan would be the progressive fulillment of this prophecy. The eventual displacement of the Canaanites would be the inal aspect of this prophecy. To achieve this, the Israelites had to trust God’s promises. Again, this is a model for biblical eschatology. The inheritance of the earth in history by God’s covenant people is deinitive, for God has announced it repeatedly. The process of inheritance is ethical: ever-increasing obedience to God’s law, which is followed by ever-increasing positive economic sanctions that conirm the covenant. “But thou shalt remember the LORD thy God: for it is he that giveth thee power to get wealth, that he may establish his covenant which he sware unto thy fathers, as it is this day” (Deut. 8:18). Covenant-keepers are required to redeem the world for God, i.e., buy it back. They are not to use military conquest or force; that was a one-time event for Israel. They must buy it back by preaching the gospel, obeying God’s law, and faithfully employing the wealth that God pours down on them because of their obedience. Covenantkeepers will inherit the earth progressively through their obedience to God’s law, their conidence in the transforming power of the gospel, their ability to meet consumer demand ejciently, their biological

Law, Sanctions, and Inheritance

327

multiplication, their tithing to the church, and their charitable service. “He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much: and he that is unjust in the least is unjust also in much” (Luke 16:10). If there were no predictable corporate sanctions attached to God’s law, we could have no conidence in the future success of the kingdom of God in history. Our eschatological hopes would be exclusively post-mortem. But the Bible teaches that what takes place on earth is a down payment – an earnest – for what will take place beyond the inal judgment. History points to eternity; earth points to heaven. Jesus warned Nicodemus: “If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe, if I tell you of heavenly things?” (John 3:12). At the inal judgment, covenant-keepers will inherit the earth; covenant-breakers will be completely disinherited (Matt. 25:31–46). But inal judgment is preceded by progressive judgment in history. What takes place in history mirrors the inal inheritance and disinheritance, so as to provide a covenantal warning in history. There must be sujcient continuity between history and eternity to provide covenant-keepers with legitimate conidence and to provide covenant-breakers with legitimate fear. The conquest of Canaan is the model for history, which in turn is the model for eternity.

Conclusion Moses gave Israel a command and a promise: law and sanctions. He told them to mark their dwelling places by the law of God. He told them to teach their children the law. In doing this, they would hide the law in their hearts (Ps. 119:11). If they did this, Moses said, they would be visibly blessed with large families. They would enjoy “the days of heaven upon the earth” (Deut. 11:21). The covenantal link between obedience and visible sanctions was basic to this passage. The inheritance was deined in terms of heirs and their possession of land. Paul wrote that the same link still operates under the New Covenant (Eph. 6:1–3). There is no way covenantally to break the link uniting law-keeping, positive sanctions, and inheritance, any more than there is a way to break the link uniting law-breaking, disobedience, and disinheritance. These links make possible the development of biblical social theory. Being possible, the development of an explicitly biblical social theory is a covenantal mandate, part of the dominion covenant itself.

328

DEUTERONOMY

Because Christian theologians for nineteen centuries have ignored or even denied the existence of these judicial links in the New Covenant era, the church has never been able to develop an explicitly biblical social theory. The result is the Babylonian captivity of the church today. And like the Hebrews during the original Babylonian captivity, most Christians prefer ghetto life outside the Promised Land to the rigors of a life of rebuilding the nation’s broken wall and the crumbling homes of their forefathers. For now, only a remnant has decided to return.

29 AND CommonCOMMON Grace and GRACE Legitimate Inheritance LEGITIMATE INHERITANCE These are the statutes and judgments, which ye shall observe to do in the land, which the LORD God of thy fathers giveth thee to possess it, all the days that ye live upon the earth. Ye shall utterly destroy all the places, wherein the nations which ye shall possess served their gods, upon the high mountains, and upon the hills, and under every green tree: And ye shall overthrow their altars, and break their pillars, and burn their groves with ire; and ye shall hew down the graven images of their gods, and destroy the names of them out of that place (Deut. 12:1–3).

The theocentric focus of this law is the illegitimacy of all other forms of worship. In the case of the gods of Canaan, illegitimacy meant illegality. To destroy the name of every god of Canaan was a morally mandatory act on the part of the Israelites. There was no neutrality possible. There also was no possibility of a nameless God in Israel. Either God’s name would be destroyed inside the boundaries of Israel or else the Canaanite gods’ names would be destroyed. God made it clear: their idols had to be smashed. As with their idols, so with their names: total elimination. “. . . make no mention of the name of other gods, neither let it be heard out of thy mouth” (Ex. 23:13b). This was a land law. It is no longer in force. It had to do with the destruction of Canaanite civilization and the theology of the ancient world: Canaan’s gods as local deities tied to the land. God refused to accept equality with other deities. This is as true under the New Covenant as it was in the Old. “Then Paul stood in the midst of Mars’ hill, and said, Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious. For as I passed by, and beheld

329

330

DEUTERONOMY

your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription, TO THE Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you” (Acts 17:22–23). The Athenians had added an unidentiied god to their pantheon of deities just to make sure some unacknowledged god would not bring negative sanctions against them because they had ignored him. The God of the Bible was being treated by Athens as if He were one of these nameless gods. But the God of the Bible cannot be placated with an altar to no god in particular, or with any altar at all. Paul announced: “God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands; Neither is worshipped with men’s hands, as though he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things” (Acts 17:24–25). An occasional public sacriice does not impress Him. He is the Creator God. What God demands is the sacriice of every person’s life, in every area of his life. “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacriice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service” (Rom. 12:1). He calls all men to devote the whole of their lives.1 This has to include civil afairs. But the modern church rejects this politically incorrect conclusion. UNKNOWN GOD.

Smashing Idols The conquest of Canaan was a military action. The Canaanites were to be completely destroyed. After the destruction of Canaan, only the Amalekites deserved total destruction because of the evil they had shown to Israel during Israel’s wilderness wandering. God had established a covenant of total destruction with Israel against Amalek: “And the LORD said unto Moses, Write this for a memorial in a book, and rehearse it in the ears of Joshua: for I will utterly put out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven. And Moses built an altar, and called the name of it Jehovah-nissi: For he said, Because the LORD hath sworn that the LORD will have war with

1. This was what the American Communist Party demanded of its members. Benjamin Gitlow, The Whole of Their Lives (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948). Before he recanted, Gitlow had been the senior ojcial of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), and had held virtually every important ojce, including editor-in-chief. He went to jail for his beliefs, 1919–21.

Common Grace and Legitimate Inheritance

331

Amalek from generation to generation” (Ex. 17:14–16). Samuel reminded Saul of this covenant: “Samuel also said unto Saul, The LORD sent me to anoint thee to be king over his people, over Israel: now therefore hearken thou unto the voice of the words of the LORD. Thus saith the LORD of hosts, I remember that which Amalek did to Israel, how he laid wait for him in the way, when he came up from Egypt. Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass” (I Sam. 15:1–3). Saul lost his kingship for showing mercy to Amalek’s king, as if his enemy’s ojce as king made him an equal with Saul, and also for allowing the Israelites to keep Amalek’s domesticated animals as spoils.2 Samuel hacked Agag to pieces to demonstrate God’s covenant of total destruction (I Sam. 15:33). This was an extension of a pre-conquest covenant of destruction. After Canaan was captured, no new war of annihilation was valid. That the annihilation of Canaan was to be a one-time event is seen in the jubilee inheritance law. Every half century, ownership of every piece of rural land reverted back to the heirs of the families of the conquest generation (Lev. 25:13). But after Israel’s return from the exile, the jubilee law was to be altered. “And it shall come to pass, that ye shall divide it by lot for an inheritance unto you, and to the strangers that sojourn among you, which shall beget children among you: and they shall be unto you as born in the country among the children of Israel; they shall have inheritance with you among the tribes of Israel. And it shall come to pass, that in what tribe the stranger sojourneth, there shall ye give him his inheritance, saith the Lord GOD” (Ezek. 47:22–23). Non-Israelites were not to be driven out, nor were they to be disinherited. Why not? Because the gods of Canaan by then had been annihilated in the hearts of men.

2. “But Saul and the people spared Agag, and the best of the sheep, and of the oxen, and of the fatlings, and the lambs, and all that was good, and would not utterly destroy them: but every thing that was vile and refuse, that they destroyed utterly. Then came the word of the LORD unto Samuel, saying, It repenteth me that I have set up Saul to be king: for he is turned back from following me, and hath not performed my commandments” (I Sam. 15:9–11a).

332

DEUTERONOMY

God, Stars, and History The ancient world believed that to defeat a city was to defeat that city’s god or gods. To the degree that a conquering army spared the lives of the citizens of a defeated city, to that extent was mercy granted by the conquerors’ god to the losers’ god. To build an empire, a conquering nation either had to remove the citizens of a defeated city and replace them with people who worshipped the empire’s gods, or else the empire had to incorporate the defeated city’s gods into the pantheon of the empire. Where no provision for such incorporation existed theologically in the culture of the victor, the victor had to annihilate or completely dispossess the losers. This meant destroying all traces of their gods. It was assumed that the gods of the two armies battled each other. In other words, what took place on the battleield was matched by a conlict in heaven.3 If there was conlict on the battleield, there had to be conlict in heaven. There was no cosmic unity in paganism’s nature; there was no absolute God who controlled what comes to pass in history. “On irst looking upon the external world, man pictured it to himself as a sort of confused republic, where rival forces made war upon each other.”4 Two ways to conceive of unity in the cosmos, through impersonal forces, are fate and astrology. The belief that the heavens above are related to events on the earth below is the theoretical basis of astrology, a common belief in the ancient world and even today. The ancient world believed that the heavens were related to earthly history. Immanuel Velikovsky goes so far as to argue that the Greek myth that Athena was born out of Zeus’ forehead had its origin in the fact that the planet Venus was born in historical times: a spin-of (literally) of the planet Jupiter. Venus was originally a comet, he says, and it caused the events of the exodus.5 While I do not think he is correct – God did not use Venus to bring the plagues of the exodus on Egypt – there is no doubt that the heavens and the

3. Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome (Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor, [1864] 1955), Book III, Chapter XV, pp. 205–6. 4. Ibid., III:II, p. 121. 5. Immanuel Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1950), p. 172.

Common Grace and Legitimate Inheritance

333

gods were closely associated in ancient thought. This includes biblical thought. “The kings came and fought, then fought the kings of Canaan in Taanach by the waters of Megiddo; they took no gain of money. They fought from heaven; the stars in their courses fought against Sisera” (Jud. 5:19–20). This is not to be interpreted literally; these words appear in Deborah’s song. Songs are exercises in symbolism. There is a biblical analogy between stars and earthly afairs. The king of Babylon was described with an angelic-heavenly analogy: a star-angel who sought to surpass God’s other star-angels. “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High” (Isa. 14:12–14). (Lucifer was the morning star in the ancient world, i.e., Venus, but only when it preceded the appearance of the sun. It was called Hesperos when it followed the sun.) The host of heaven is described as stars. And out of one of them came forth a little horn, which waxed exceeding great, toward the south, and toward the east, and toward the pleasant land. And it waxed great, even to the host of heaven; and it cast down some of the host and of the stars to the ground, and stamped upon them” (Dan. 8:9–10). And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a ig tree casteth her untimely igs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind (Rev. 6:13). And there appeared another wonder in heaven; and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth: and the dragon stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born (Rev. 12:3–4).

Literal stars did not fall on earth, nor will they, contrary to dispensationalism’s proclaimed hermeneutics of prophetic literalism. God defeated Satan’s angelic host in history because of the incarnation of Jesus Christ in history. Satan and his host fell to earth. The transition from the Old Covenant to the New Covenant was marked by the casting down of Satan to earth. Preliminary phases of

334

DEUTERONOMY

this casting down began during Christ’s ministry. “And the seventy returned again with joy, saying, Lord, even the devils are subject unto us through thy name. And he said unto them, I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven” (Luke 10:17–18). The inal act of heavenly disinheritance was post-cruciixion. And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him. And I heard a loud voice saying in heaven, Now is come salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ: for the accuser of our brethren is cast down, which accused them before our God day and night. And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony; and they loved not their lives unto the death. Therefore rejoice, ye heavens, and ye that dwell in them. Woe to the inhabiters of the earth and of the sea! for the devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time. And when the dragon saw that he was cast unto the earth, he persecuted the woman which brought forth the man child (Rev. 12:7–13; emphasis added).

My point here is that the ancient world viewed reality as a supernatural realm. Men, local gods, and the heavenly orbs interacted in history. For example, the appearance of the star of Bethlehem was noted by non-Jewish star-gazers. They also understood what it meant: the birth of a long-prophesied king. They asked Herod: “Where is he that is born King of the Jews? for we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him” (Matt. 2:2). With the end of the Old Covenant, these cosmic relationships ceased. The fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 completed the prophecies regarding stars falling from heaven: the end of the Old Covenant order and with it, the Mosaic order, with its temple sacriices. Prior to A.D. 70, there were good reasons to believe in connections between the heavens and the earth. These reasons were covenantal, not astrological or astronomical. Men were to acknowledge that God governs both heaven and earth. The world is governed in terms of ethics, for God created the world. The prophet Amos said: “Ye who turn judgment to wormwood, and leave of righteousness in the earth, Seek him that maketh the seven stars and Orion, and turneth the shadow of death

Common Grace and Legitimate Inheritance

335

into the morning, and maketh the day dark with night: that calleth for the waters of the sea, and poureth them out upon the face of the earth: The LORD is his name: That strengtheneth the spoiled against the strong, so that the spoiled shall come against the fortress. They hate him that rebuketh in the gate, and they abhor him that speaketh uprightly” (Amos 5:7–10).

Genocide as Deicide The destruction of Canaan would necessarily involve the destruction of Canaan’s gods. A defeated army meant the defeat of the army’s gods. This was the theology of Canaan and the nations around Canaan. This was not biblical theology. A defeat of Israel on the battleield would be a sanction against the nation for its unrighteousness. The Israelites would be subjected militarily or carried into captivity as God’s predictable sanction against national rebellion, Moses repeatedly warned. This would not testify to God’s weakness but to His sovereignty. The victors who thought otherwise would be punished. “For thus saith the LORD of hosts; After the glory hath he sent me unto the nations which spoiled you: for he that toucheth you toucheth the apple of his eye. For, behold, I will shake mine hand upon them, and they shall be a spoil to their servants: and ye shall know that the LORD of hosts hath sent me” (Zech. 2:8–9). Only with the transfer of the kingdom’s inheritance to a new nation, the church of Jesus Christ, would inal destruction come to Old Covenant Israel. Jesus warned Israel’s leaders: “Therefore say I unto you, The kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof” (Matt. 21:43). This was an implied threat: the destruction of Israel except insofar as Israel united covenantally with this new nation in terms of the New Covenant (Rom. 11). Canaanite culture was so evil in God’s sight that it had to be destroyed. Israel would soon serve as God’s sanctions-bringer in history. There was to be no mercy shown, because the evil of Canaanite culture was too great. To show mercy to the Canaanites would be the equivalent of accepting the evils which they had practiced. It would be a grant of mercy to their gods. This is why Moses demanded the total annihilation of both men and idols. By publicly removing the Canaanites from history, God would demonstrate His wrath against evil. He had already partially done this with Egypt. This partial destruction had terriied the Canaanites,

336

DEUTERONOMY

according to Rahab (Josh. 2:9–11). God had already done it completely with the Canaanite cultures beyond the Jordan: Arad and Bashan. The gods of the land of Canaan would become a snare to Israel. The very survival of these gods would testify either to Israel’s military weakness or God’s inability to bring to pass what He had promised to Abraham: full inheritance. Such military weakness would be interpreted by Israel in terms of Canaanite theology: the partially successful defense of Canaan’s old order against the new order of Israel. That is, the gods of Canaan would be seen as possessing partial sovereignty in history. The absolute sovereignty of God would be understood by covenant-breaking Israelites as a myth because of the very survival of Canaan’s gods and Canaan’s original residents. In short, neither mercy nor military weakness was allowed to Israel by God during this one-time conquest. The gods of the ancient world were local gods: gods of the nation, city, or family. These gods were said to rule within certain geographical boundaries. Their power was tied to geography and to the rites practiced by their followers. Fustel wrote: “There was nothing more sacred within the city than this altar, on which the sacred ire was always maintained.” The perpetual ire on the altar became central liturgically to Mosaic Israel (Lev. 6:13), but this had not been true in pre-Mosaic covenant religion. Israel could exist and even prosper without this altar, as the Assyrian-Babylonian captivity indicated, but God did demand sacriice inside the land, and the altar’s ire was basic to this requirement. In other ancient religions, however, a break in the ire’s continuity was considered catastrophic. For example, any virgin who allowed Rome’s sacred ire to go out in the temple of Vesta was buried alive as a sanction. Israel was told to break down Canaan’s altars. There could be no rival sacred ire in Israel – not in the home, the city, or anywhere else. “Burn their groves with ire,” Moses said. These destructive ires were not sacred ires. They were merely military acts. It did not require a Mosaic priest to ojciate at the destruction of a sacred Canaanite altar. So it would be for Israel in A.D. 70, when Roman soldiers burned the temple. No priest ojciated.

The Spoils of War and Common Grace The destruction of Canaan’s altars served as a representative destruction of Canaan’s culture. With the exception of Jericho, which had

Common Grace and Legitimate Inheritance

337

to be completely destroyed, the economic capital of Canaan became part of Israel’s inheritance. If the Israelites killed the Canaanites and smashed their implements of worship, they were entitled to the spoils of war. This means that the products of a culture are not inherently tainted by the ethics of that culture. This fact legitimizes trade. It is neither ritually polluting nor immoral to exchange goods and services with someone who practices a rival religion. The fact that a Canaanite had created something of value as a testament to his own faith or religious premises did not pollute the item he created unless it was actually used in some cultic rite. Canaan’s sacred implements were targeted for destruction, but the common implements of life that testiied to the Canaanites’ view of the sacred became legitimate spoils of war. This points to a theological distinction between common grace and special rebellion. The sacred groves of Canaan were in fact unholy groves, i.e., profane groves in which covenant-breakers transgressed God’s standards of righteous worship. The lawful boundaries of God’s sacred worship had been violated repeatedly in Canaan, which is why their groves were profane. Special rebellion had polluted these groves so thoroughly that Israel had to smash them. But the other aspects of Canaan’s culture – orchards, houses, ields, etc. – were part of the realm of the common. They were neither sacred nor profane. The realm of the common is analogous to the trees of Eden, except for the forbidden tree and tree of life after the Fall: open to all men without covenantal restriction. Thus, the capital of Canaan, like the capital of Egypt, could become part of Israel’s inheritance. Common grace is deined as God’s unmerited gifts to men irrespective of their covenantal confessions. Men do not earn these gifts, nor is God required to provide these gifts by anything other than His autonomous choice. But by His healing common grace, God enables men of many religious confessions to become productive. This productivity beneits mankind. But in the final analysis, God does this for the sake of His people, who will progressively inherit the earth in history. If the saints do not inherit in history, then the productivity and wealth of covenant-breakers must be supplied by God primarily for the purpose of condemning them in eternity, as Dives was condemned (Luke 16:19–25). Their very productivity will condemn them: “For unto whomsoever much is given, of him

338

DEUTERONOMY

shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more” (Luke 12:48b). There would therefore be no continuity between the process of inheritance and disinheritance in history and God’s declaration of inal inheritance and disinheritance in eternity. The process of corporate covenantal sanctions in history would then have nothing predictable to do with the corporate sanctions in eternity: saved vs. lost. In short, the bodily resurrection and ascension of Christ in history – positive sanctions for His perfect covenant-keeping – would have nothing predictable to do with the outcome of the Great Commission in history (Matt. 28:18–20). The complete disinheritance of Canaan was God’s means of destroying the works of unrighteous men. But rather than destroying their capital assets, God destroyed them and the ritual implements for worshipping their gods. Even in the unique case of Jericho’s assets, the precious metals were to go to the temple (Josh. 6:19). The special grace of God would thereby overcome the special rebellion of Jericho. Because of the extent of the rebellion of the Canaanites, Israel could not lawfully enslave them. Canaanites were not allowed to remain inside the boundaries of the land. To have allowed this would have meant allowing the continuing presence of agents of Canaan’s local deities. They would become evangelists for a false religion. Because pagan religion was expressly a religion of the land, the mere presence of Canaanites would testify falsely to the partial sovereignty of Canaan’s gods. Any assertion of the partial sovereignty of any god except the Bible’s God is inescapably a denial of the religion of the Bible. Thus, the presence of Canaanites inside Israel’s boundaries posed too great a threat for Israel to bear safely. The Israelites would eventually interpret the mere presence of Canaanites as a partial victory of Canaan’s gods over Moses’ God, rather than blaming their own fears and their disobedience to God. Such a false view of God would lead to Israel’s rebellion and false worship: idolatry. The trickery of the Gibeonites overcame this rule, but they became slaves to the temple (Josh. 9:27). Individual Israelites could not proit from the trickery of Gibeon; the Levites alone did. The special grace of God overcame His declaration of genocide against Gibeon, but the priestly tribe alone proited. The Gibeonites and their labor did not become part of the common grace inheritance of

Common Grace and Legitimate Inheritance

339

individual families outside of Levi. The Gibeonites’ labor would reduce the burdens on Levi, not the burdens of any other tribe.

The Rejection of Christendom “And ye shall overthrow their altars, and break their pillars, and burn their groves with ire; and ye shall hew down the graven images of their gods, and destroy the names of them out of that place. Ye shall not do so unto the LORD your God” (vv. 3–4). The principle here is obvious: mandated negative sanctions imposed against Canaan’s gods; none against Him. To leave Canaan’s idols intact was illegal; to impose negative sanctions on God’s ritual implements was also illegal. There could be no judicial equality between God and Canaan’s deities. There was no judicial neutrality possible. To assert the equality of Canaan’s gods with the God of the Bible was to assert a world without the God of the Bible. The twentieth-century West is pluralistic. It has been marked by a functional atheism unknown in any previous society. Most people say that they believe in a god of some kind. Only in the formerly Communist, former East Germany is admitted atheism as high as 40 percent of the population. In the nations of Western Europe, those who claim to be church members constitute no less than 58 percent of the population (The Netherlands) and as high as 98 percent (Ireland). Yet only in Ireland is once-a-month church attendance as high as 82 percent; the second-place country is Italy, at 36 percent. Some 93 percent of Denmark’s population claim to be church members, yet once-a-month church attendance is about 4 percent. In the United Kingdom, it is 11 percent; France is 13 percent; Spain is 14 percent; Germany is 21 percent. The United States has higher attendance: in 1990, 40 percent of those surveyed claimed to have attended religious services within the previous week, although the only streets that experience trajc jams on Sunday mornings are those located close to stadiums during professional football season. Many Americans surveyed probably lied about their recent attendance, but at least they believed that they should have attended. These percentages have stayed constant for three decades. But in 1776, in what was then regarded as an intensely Christian society, only 17 percent of the American population were church members. This doubled to 34 percent by 1850 as a result of the revival known as the Second Great Awakening. It climbed to half the population by 1900. Demands on church members declined

340

DEUTERONOMY

throughout the nineteenth century, and have continued to decline. Parallelling this increase in church membership has been the progressive secularization of American society. Operationally, the public institutions of the West are atheistic. The State is ojcially neutral religiously in the United States, and the State demands sacriice of 40 percent or more of the citizenry’s income. In Western European nations, what passes for tax-funded Christianity is theological liberalism, which is humanism in clerical robes. God’s name has been publicly disenfranchised. The ideal of Christian civilization – Christendom – is ridiculed by Christians and humanists alike as theocratic oppression, “medievalism,” and “triumphalism.” Professed religious neutrality is the civil order of the day. Civil neutrality has been a myth highly useful to humanists in the early stages of their iniltration and transformation of Christian society. The only alternative to Christian triumphalism is Christian defeatism, but “defeatism” is word avoided like the plague by the eschatological defeatists who publicly ridicule triumphalism. Conservative theological seminaries universally reject postmillennialism’s triumphalism. In this, they are joined by the humanists, who govern the present “neutral” social order. It is as if the leaders of Mosaic Israel had joined political forces with the leaders of Canaanite society in order to create a common pluralist civil order. This pluralistsyncretist impulse was exactly what Moses warned against. It always means the defeat of God’s people and their political subservience to His enemies. There is no legitimate confessional neutrality. There is no permanent common confession in history between Christ and antichrist. “He that is not with me is against me; and he that gathereth not with me scattereth abroad” (Matt. 12:30). There is no middle ground between Christian social defeatism and Christian social triumphalism. There is therefore no permanent eschatological neutrality. Eschatology cannot legitimately be dismissed as an aspect of adiaphora: things indiferent to the faith. But this is not believed by the vast majority of those who call themselves evangelical Christians today. In the name of both amillennialism and premillennialism, the ancient ideal of Christendom is dismissed as impossible in history and therefore illegitimate as a goal.

Common Grace and Legitimate Inheritance

341

The Kingdom of God, Sort Of Pessimillennial pietists assert such incoherent judicial statements as this one: “But the Kingdom of God is a rule, not a realm.” What does this mean? It means that there is no biblically revealed law of God worth enforcing by the State solely on the basis of its status as biblically revealed. The kingdom of God supposedly has neither a uniquely biblical civil law nor appropriate civil sanctions. This means that God is on permanent leave as king in history. A king with no realm is not a king; he is merely: 1) an abdicated monarch; 2) a publicly rejected monarch who used to have a realm; or 3) a would-be monarch without enough dedicated followers to enforce his claim. This means that “Thus saith the Lord!” is judicially irrelevant unless it is accompanied by “Thus saith religiously neutral common-ground logic.” The god of such a confessionally neutral civil realm is self-proclaimed autonomous man. Anyone who asserts that “religious neutrality is a myth” without concluding that “political pluralism is therefore equally a myth” is sufering from self-delusion and confusion on a crippling scale. Pessimillennial pietists assert a two-stage kingdom of God: today’s exclusively internal, spiritual manifestation of God’s kingdom – “for Christians only” – and an exclusively future comprehensive kingdom, when Jesus will come back to rule over His presently nonexistent realm. They write such things as this: “. . . Jesus spoke about a Kingdom that had come and a Kingdom that was still to come – one Kingdom in two stages. . . . The second stage, which will take place when Christ returns, will assert God’s rule over all the universe; His kingdom will be visible without imperfection.”6 The authors are telling us in no uncertain terms that there is no judicial, confessional, and civilizational continuity in history between the irst stage and the second stage of God’s kingdom. In the irst stage, God supposedly has no realm. His people must therefore content themselves throughout history with life in the confessional equivalent of pre-Mosaic Canaan. They live today in what is fast becoming a new Sodom, yet they seek to persuade each other that all we need to do today is to restore the social order of Ur of the Chaldees. If this blindness continues, they will eventually ind 6. Charles Colson and Ellen Santilli Vaughn, Kingdoms in Conflict (New York: William Morrow, 1987), pp. 84, 85.

342

DEUTERONOMY

themselves, as Lot found himself, crying out to Sodomites: “Behold now, I have two daughters which have not known man; let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you, and do ye to them as is good in your eyes: only unto these men do nothing; for therefore came they under the shadow of my roof” (Gen. 19:8). Like Lot, they naively believe that their homes somehow possess a widely acknowledged immunity from social evil in today’s common-confession civil order. They think that a common-confession State will protect their rights as confessional Christians in the family and the church. But the humanist State is at war with the Christian family and the Christian church. The State demands subservience by the family and the church. This was also true in the Roman Empire, which is why the war between Christianity and pagan Rome was absolute: a war to the death. Christians today believe in the possibility of a permanent common civil confession between Christianity and humanism. In its more insightful moments, modern evangelicalism prophesies a coming revival of Roman Empire-like tyranny. This was Francis Schaefer’s point in How Should We Then Live? (1976). In fact, he thought that the coming “imposed order” might be worse than Rome’s. As an alternative, he called for a return to the Bible, not as a utilitarian solution to cultural problems, but as a moral requirement. “It means the acceptance of Christ as Savior and Lord, and it means living under God’s revelation.” But as a consistent premillennialist, he had never accepted the theocratic ideal of Christendom for the era prior to the millennium. The best that Christians can legitimately hope for, he said, is minority status. “Such Christians do not need to be a majority in order for this inluence on society to occur.”7 This made no sense, given his premillennial eschatology. His book and his ilm series surveyed the systematic growth of religious self-consciousness on the part of non-Christians in the West: their dedication to removing every trace of Christian inluence. The series began with a section on the persecution of Christians by the Roman Empire. There is no doubt as to what he privately thought must come: something far worse for the Church, namely, the Great Tribulation. But he was not willing to admit forthrightly to his ilm

7. Francis A. Schaefer, How Should We Then Live? (Tappan, New Jersey: Revell, 1976), p. 252.

Common Grace and Legitimate Inheritance

343

audience and to his readers that this was the underlying eschatological presupposition of his life’s work. This was why his work was not a call to explicitly Christian social action but a survey of what the Church has given up; not an explicitly biblical blueprint for social and cultural reconstruction but a cataloguing of Christendom’s surrender and hand-wringing disguised as an intellectual’s cultural critique; not a call for the progressive establishment of God’s kingdom on earth in history but a program of religious common-ground anti-abortion politics – yet somehow in the name of a non-utilitarian Christianity. He forthrightly denied the legitimacy of a confessional Christian nation. In the Old Testament there was a theocracy commanded by God. In the New Testament, with the church being made up of Jews and Gentiles, and spreading all over the known world from India to Spain in one generation, the church was its own entity. There is no New Testament basis for a linking of church and state until Christ, the King returns. The whole “Constantine mentality” from the fourth century up to our day was a mistake. Constantine, as the Roman Emperor, in 313 ended the persecution of Christians. Unfortunately, the support he gave to the church led by 381 to the enforcing of Christianity, by Theodosius I, as the ojcial state religion. Making Christianity the ojcial state religion opened the way for confusion up till our own day. There have been times of very good government when this interrelationship of church and state has been present. But through the centuries it has caused great confusion between loyalty to the state and loyalty to Christ, between patriotism and being a Christian. We must not confuse the Kingdom of God with our country. To say it another way: “We should not wrap Christianity in our national lag.”8

What he really meant, of course, is that we should not wrap our nation in Christianity’s lag. But every nation must be wrapped in some religious lag. There is no religious or ethical neutrality, after all. So, we must ask ourselves, what lag did Francis Schaefer prefer that we wrap our nation in? He never said, but since there is no neutrality, there will always be a lag (i.e., a public symbol of political sovereignty). It lies high today in the name of neutrality, lapping over

8. Frances Schaefer, A Christian Manifesto (Westchester, Illinios: Crossway, 1981), p. 121.

344

DEUTERONOMY

the public school system. It lies high every time a nation defaults from an explicit religion. That lag is the lag of secular humanism. Jesus is described by Colson as a “King Without a Country.” Yet this is hardly what Jesus announced: “Therefore say I unto you, The kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof” (Matt. 21:43). Jesus has a country: His church. This universal country is supposed to permeate every country on earth, bringing them all under covenantal subordination to Jesus Christ: “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost” (Matt. 28:19). One piece of evidence of such national subordination is the Trinitarian confession of the nation’s civil covenant. Because Christians have ceased to believe this, they have allowed and then promoted the substitution of other oaths and other covenants, but always in the name of a purer, higher, and more mature Christianity.

Kingdom Oath The ideal of Christendom is out of favor today. Christendom is the cultural manifestation of the Trinitarian kingdom of God, a social order founded on a confession of faith in the Trinitarian God of the Bible. The rejection of the legitimacy of the visible kingdom of God – and, by implication, of the Great Commission which underlies it – is universal, even inside the churches. The universal commitment today is to political pluralism and the ideal of a religiously oath-less civil order. But there are always oaths; the question is: To which god? The God of the Bible or some rival god? The most popular rival god today is the State. Men must swear allegiance to the State and its constitution, not to God and His Bible, when they seek or conirm their citizenship in today’s “neutral” societies. Christian evangelicals accept this arrangement as both normal and normative. Yet there has never been a single treatise written by any Bible-ajrming Protestant Christian apologist for pluralism that shows how the Bible’s required sanctions against false worship are consistent with political pluralism, i.e., a common civil oath. Christians speak today in defense of pluralism as if such a general treatise had been written three centuries ago, with dozens of monographs and textbooks following it through the centuries. They act as though the civil religion of political pluralism is consistent with – an extension of – the Bible. It never occurs to them that

Common Grace and Legitimate Inheritance

345

political pluralism is a form of polytheism: equal time for all religions in civil afairs, equal time for all law-orders, equal time for covenant- breakers and the gods they represent. The god of the State then is elevated to the throne of civil power. This god banishes all gods whose spokesmen do not acknowledge his sovereignty in history. Christian pluralism’s assertion of “equal time for Jesus” then becomes humanism’s “no time for Jesus.” The Christians’ cries of “Unfair!” accomplish nothing politically signiicant. There is no neutrality. There can be no covenant between Christ and Satan. But Christ’s spokesmen for over three centuries have insisted that there is such a covenant in the civil realm. The result has been exactly what Moses said it would be: the cultural displacement of biblical religion by its enemies. The Trinitarians assent to a surrender to the civil confession of the unitarians; then both groups surrender to the civil confession of the humanists. Christians then ind themselves in the absurd position of having to call for a restoration of the defunct common-ground unitarian confession in the name of traditional civil liberty. The humanists laugh in derision, having long since absorbed the unitarians into their ranks. The supposedly naked public square is in fact fully clothed in the clerical robes of humanism.

Genocide and Economic Inheritance The annihilation of Canaan’s population and the destruction of Canaan’s implements of worship were mandated by God in order to demonstrate His absolute sovereignty. The Canaanites had rebelled long enough. Their evil had compounded too far for God to tolerate it any longer. Their cup of iniquity was full (Gen. 15:16). In terms of the pagan theology of the ancient world, the continuing toleration of Canaan would have constituted God’s incomplete victory over His rival gods, i.e., His limited sovereignty. In terms of Moses’ warning, Israel’s toleration of Canaanites would have meant that His people were playing the harlot, or would soon do so, with the gods of Canaan. Showing mercy to Canaanites would represent an ethical failure on Israel’s part, not any sharing of sovereignty between God and the gods of Canaan. Genocide was required inside the boundaries of the Promised Land because the Israelites were spiritually weak. If the Canaanites remained in the land, the Israelites would be lured into the power religions of Canaan, just as they had been lured into the worship of the golden calf. Inside the land’s boundaries, the Canaanites had

346

DEUTERONOMY

claimed sovereignty for their local gods. This claim had to be visibly refuted by Israel’s annihilation of the Canaanites. For Israel to inherit the Promised Land, the Canaanites had to be disinherited. So did the gods of Canaan and the theology of Canaan. The dominion religion had to overcome the power religion by military action this one time. The spiritual vulnerability of Israel had to be ofset by a complete military victory. But such was not to be. They were too weak spiritually to impose God’s negative sanctions completely. They did not totally annihilate the Canaanites. As Moses prophesied, Israel then fell back into sin and idolatry. The incomplete military victory of the Book of Joshua was followed by the repeated military defeats of the Book of Judges. The Israelites imposed incomplete military sanctions against Canaan; their enemies outside the land subsequently imposed far more complete military sanctions against the Israelites. From this bondage the judges repeatedly delivered them. This requirement of annihilation did not apply to the economic assets of Canaan, which could be claimed by the Israelites as part of their inheritance: the spoils of war. Canaan’s capital was the product of false local religions, but it was also part of the general dominion covenant: mankind’s mandatory subduing of the earth (Gen. 1:26). The more general dominion covenant took precedence over the special rebellion of Canaan. Only those highly specialized capital goods that were expressly designed for false worship came under the ban. With the exception of the precious metals of Jericho, which were set aside for the tabernacle (Josh. 6:24), even the gold and silver implements of Canaan’s worship could be claimed by the conquering Israelites, though obviously not in the form of idols. Melted down – transformed from speciic to general economic uses – the precious metals of Canaanite religion could become the lawful inheritance of the Israelites. Here was another reason to burn the groves of Canaan: Israelites could lawfully coniscate any gold and silver. The common grace of God, as seen in the lawful use of Canaan’s precious metals, added an incentive for the special judgment of God against the special rebellion of Canaan.

Conclusion The annihilation of Canaan was to be a one-time event. Other rules of war applied to nations outside the boundaries of Canaan (Deut. 20). God did not require that the names of gods outside the

Common Grace and Legitimate Inheritance

347

land not be mentioned. The focus of God’s concern was Canaan and its gods. After the exile, the inheritance pattern of the jubilee year was to be extended to gentiles living in the land at the time of Israel’s return (Ezek. 47:22–23). The law was altered because the conditions had altered. Never again would Israel be tempted to worship the gods of Canaan, for the authority represented by those gods had been totally vanquished by the invading empires. Never again did Israel worship the gods of Canaan. The New Testament does not authorize either genocide or the elimination of the mention of the names of other gods. The civil issue in the New Testament is political sanctions, not military sanctions. The legitimate possession of the civil authority to declare and enforce God’s law is sujcient for covenant-keepers: sanctions by Trinitarian oath. The names of other gods may be spoken. The relevant covenantal question is: Whose name do citizens invoke in the civil oath? In other words, by whose name are civil sanctions invoked? Here, no neutrality is possible. The quest for such neutrality is the quest for political polytheism.

30 COMMUNAL MEALS AND Communal Meals and National Incorporation NATIONAL INCORPORATION But unto the place which the LORD your God shall choose out of all your tribes to put his name there, even unto his habitation shall ye seek, and thither thou shalt come: And thither ye shall bring your burnt oferings, and your sacriices, and your tithes, and heave oferings of your hand, and your vows, and your freewill oferings, and the irstlings of your herds and of your locks: And there ye shall eat before the LORD your God, and ye shall rejoice in all that ye put your hand unto, ye and your households, wherein the LORD thy God hath blessed thee. Ye shall not do after all the things that we do here this day, every man whatsoever is right in his own eyes. But when ye go over Jordan, and dwell in the land which the LORD your God giveth you to inherit, and when he giveth you rest from all your enemies round about, so that ye dwell in safety; . . .(Deut. 12:5–10).

God’s name was to be placed publicly on Israelite society. Here is the theocentric focus of this law: God as the owner of Israel. God was to become central to the life of the nation. This shared confession would unify the nation. The unity of Israel was grounded in the unity of God (Deut. 6:4). At the same time, the plurality of Israel was grounded in the plural nature of God (Gen. 1:26; 11:7). This plurality was to serve as the basis of Israel’s system of tribal localism and political decentralization. Israel, like God, was to be both one and many.

An Anti-Polytheistic Land Law Canaan was a polytheistic culture. Israel was monotheistic, though not unitarian. God is plural in His unity. “Let us make man

348

Communal Meals and National Incorporation

349

in our image” (Gen. 1:26a). “Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language” (Gen. 11:7a). This language is dismissed by unitarians as a so-called “plural of majesty,” meaning unitarian majesty. On the contrary, such language announced early and emphatically that God is plural, which is why He is majestic. The persons of the Trinity operate as the ultimate team. The equal ultimacy of unity and plurality in the Godhead is the ontological foundation of man’s incorporation: the coming together of many in a display of unity. Canaanitic culture was pluralistic because it was polytheistic. There was no single place of sacriice and celebration in Canaan. The cities worshipped diferent gods. Canaan was not incorporated as a unitary social order. City by city, society by society, Israel captured the land. Altar by altar, the gods of Canaan fell. Canaanite society possessed no sacriicial unity. Divided, it fell. Moses warned Israel that a new order would soon be incorporated in Canaan: uniied nation, uniied confession, uniied celebrations. Israelites would henceforth be required to journey to a central location to eat their sacriicial meals. These common meals would mark the end of Israel’s pilgrimage. The feasts would be celebrated familistically and nationally, not tribally. The dozen tribes had no covenantal function during the national feasts. The Levites would ojciate at the celebrations; the other tribes would have no role. The tribes could not become what the cities of Canaan were: separate centers of formal worship, each with its own god. This pointed clearly to the centrality of worship rather than the centrality of politics as the basis of national incorporation. The great sin of Jeroboam was not his political secession from national Israel, which God imposed as a punishment on King Rehoboam for his ruthless increase in taxation (I Ki. 12:14–15). Jeroboam’s great sin was his creation of a new priesthood and new places of worship, which constituted idolatry (vv. 15–33). Jeroboam’s motive was political. He interpreted Israel’s unity in terms of politics. “If this people go up to do sacriice in the house of the LORD at Jerusalem, then shall the heart of this people turn again unto their lord, even unto Rehoboam king of Judah, and they shall kill me, and go again to Rehoboam king of Judah” (v. 27). This was a politician’s assessment of covenantal unity. He reimposed the multiple worship centers that had prevailed in pre-Mosaic Canaan: “Whereupon the king took counsel, and made two calves of gold,

350

DEUTERONOMY

and said unto them, It is too much for you to go up to Jerusalem: behold thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt. And he set the one in Bethel, and the other put he in Dan” (vv. 28–29). It was this which God had expressly prohibited: “Take heed to thyself that thou ofer not thy burnt oferings in every place that thou seest: But in the place which the LORD shall choose in one of thy tribes, there thou shalt ofer thy burnt oferings, and there thou shalt do all that I command thee” (Deut. 12:13–14). Jeroboam abolished central worship because he regarded politics as above worship, whether in Jerusalem or in his newly established Northern Kingdom. His idolatry was political. This is covenant-breaking man’s perpetual temptation: to elevate politics over worship, the kingdom of man over the kingdom of God. God withered Jeroboam’s hand when the new king attempted to bring sanctions against a prophet who condemned the new worship (I Ki. 13:4). The king then begged the prophet to restore his hand, which he did. Then the king invited him to share a meal with him. “And the man of God said unto the king, If thou wilt give me half thine house, I will not go in with thee, neither will I eat bread nor drink water in this place: For so was it charged me by the word of the LORD, saying, Eat no bread, nor drink water, nor turn again by the same way that thou camest” (vv. 8–9). Jeroboam fully understood the covenantal function of shared meals. So did the prophet, who refused to eat what was obviously a political meal in the presence of the king. He refused to sanctify Jeroboam’s political idolatry.1

Lawful Administrators There would be blessings in the Promised Land, Moses said. The main blessing would be land; the secondary blessing would be peace; the tertiary blessing would be wealth. These positive sanctions were to be accompanied by sacriice. “But when ye go over Jordan, and dwell in the land which the LORD your God giveth you to inherit, and when he giveth you rest from all your enemies round

1. In the United States, politicians occasionally meet with religious leaders of all faiths at “prayer breakfasts.” These events are held mainly for the beneit of the politicians, who thereby deflect public criticism by those religious leaders in attendance and also by others who naively interpret these events as in some way holy. These are common grace events that solidify support for political polytheism.

Communal Meals and National Incorporation

351

about, so that ye dwell in safety; Then there shall be a place which the LORD your God shall choose to cause his name to dwell there; thither shall ye bring all that I command you; your burnt oferings, and your sacriices, your tithes, and the heave ofering of your hand, and all your choice vows which ye vow unto the LORD” (Deut. 12:10–11). The required national sacriice included a shared meal or series of shared meals. “And ye shall rejoice before the LORD your God, ye, and your sons, and your daughters, and your menservants, and your maidservants, and the Levite that is within your gates; forasmuch as he hath no part nor inheritance with you” (v. 12). The focus of the national celebration was familial, but the Levite, as a member of the ecclesiastical tribe, was to be invited into these family festivals. His tribe was in charge of the covenantal sacriices; he was therefore entitled to share in the familial celebration. We see here three blessings: land, peace, and bread. The land was administered by families; peace was administered by civil government; bread was administered ecclesiastically. I use the word “administered” here covenantally: an oath-bound minister of God who allocates the assets under his lawful jurisdiction. He acts as God’s steward or trustee. What is signiicant here is this: bread is covenantally ecclesiastical, not familial. Families owned the land that produced the grain that made bread-making possible, but the priestly tribe had primary claim on the bread. They were lawfully entitled to a tenth of the land’s net output (Num. 18:21). This is because they administered the sacriices. So, the Levites were the administrators – the representative agents – over the bread of the nation.2 Their God-given legal claim on a token payment marked them as the source of bread in the land. They represented God when they collected the families’ tithes. They acted in God’s name and on His behalf. “And all the tithe of the land, whether of the seed of the land, or of the fruit of the tree, is the LORD’S: it is holy unto the LORD” (Lev. 27:30). The land was administered by families, but the church had the fundamental legal claim over the output of the land: bread. The Levites therefore had to be invited in by families to share

2. Joseph served as Egypt’s priest when he allocated grain and bread in Egypt. He was Egypt’s administrator over bread. Joseph in efect had replaced Egypt’s chief baker, who had been executed two years earlier, as Joseph had prophesied in prison (Gen. 40:22).

352

DEUTERONOMY

in the familial meals during the communal sacriices. The Levites had first claim on these meals. It is imperative that we understand that the Levites’ legal claim to a tenth of every family’s bread was not based on the social services which they provided.3 It was based on their lawful administration of the sacriices. As evidence, consider the fact that they did not have to be invited in to share a family meal back home. Their lawful claim to participation in the families’ meals existed only during the national festivals, which centered around the sacriicial lame of the altar.

Local and National Incorporation The Levites were spread across the nation. They lived in cities inside every tribe’s jurisdiction. Israel’s families were told to share their meals with “the Levite that is within your gates” (v. 12). This indicates that a local Levite journeyed to the central location alongside residents of his region. The local Levite joined with local families to share meals in a distant city. The tribal bond no longer functioned in the place of sacriice. The national geographical bond did. The tribes maintained a separate legal existence. They had inluence over families through the laws of landed inheritance (Lev. 25). They had inluence over geography because of the same laws of inheritance. They defended their own land. This meant that civil jurisdiction – bearing the sword – was in the hands of tribal captains. In this sense, Israelite tribal law mirrored the Canaanite system. What distinguished Israel from Canaan institutionally was its common theological confession, including the mark of circumcision, and common national celebrations. First, confession: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD” (Deut. 6:4). Second, common national celebrations, which are the focus of this passage. Common theological confession bound Israel to one God by oath. Common 3. On this point, Rushdoony is dangerously wrong. He sees their claim as based on their role as providers of social services. He insists that families administered the tithe by allocating it to the representatives they deemed God’s best servants. He wrote in 1979, “What we must do is, irst, to tithe, and, second, to allocate our tithe to godly agencies. Godly agencies means far more than the church.” R. J. Rushdoony and Edward A. Powell, Tithing and Dominion (Vallecito, California: Ross House, 1979), p. 9. For a detailed critique of Rushdoony’s ecclesiology, which centers on his view of the allocation of the tithe, see Gary North, Tithing and the Church (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), Part 2.

Communal Meals and National Incorporation

353

celebrations bound Israel to one God by eating. The celebrations imposed an economic loss: costs of making the journey and any oferings. They also involved economic gains to those who were normally not included in family celebrations: the local Levites. The overwhelming majority of the costs associated with national incorporation were ecclesiastically imposed. The costs of the journey, the sacriicial oferings, and the shared meals were all imposed by laws regulating ecclesiastical sacriices. Families were bound to the nation by means of theological confession and common sacriice, which involved a journey to a common location. At the center of Israel covenantally were an implied ecclesiastical oath (circumcision), an altar, and the Ark of the Covenant, which contained the tables of the law (Deut. 31:26). None of these centralizing features of Israelite society was uniquely tribal. The incorporation of the one and the many in Israel was both confessional and ecclesiastical. Mosaic civil law was enforced primarily by tribal units of government, but neither the civil law nor its required negative sanctions had its origin in tribal civil governments. Because civil law enforcement was administered primarily by tribal governments in Mosaic Israel, this means that the unifying forces of Mosaic Israel were not primarily civil. The tribes were subordinate to the nation, but the nation was constituted by theological confession and maintained by ecclesiastical sacriice. The authority of these two foundations of incorporation was ajrmed economically: losses imposed by the costs of centralized worship. The tithe was paid locally to local agents of the cross-boundary national tribe: Levi. The mandated national celebrations required the participation of local Levites as guests at the family meals. This law applied to all other holy oferings and sacriices, which could not be lawfully ofered in the local community (Deut. 12:17–18). The Levites would always possess legal access to the family’s communion meals in the city of sacriice. “Take heed to thyself that thou forsake not the Levite as long as thou livest upon the earth” (v. 19). To refuse the Levite was to invite excommunication, and with it, the loss of citizenship.

Intermediating Authorities One of the fundamental themes in Western political theory and also social theory has been the debate over the legitimacy of intermediary institutions. Conservative political theory ever since

354

DEUTERONOMY

Edmund Burke’s Relections on the Revolution in France (1790) has appealed to local units of civil government as possessing lawful authority. At least in theory, local units of civil government are supposed to be the most important except during a war. Radical political theory has ajrmed the opposite ever since Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract (1762): the bond that unites men is their political participation in a unitary national State, which incorporates the General Will of the people. In between the national State and the individual there is no legitimate realm of independent civil authority.4 This debate over political theory has been parallelled in social theory. A consistent follower of Rousseau denies the legitimacy of any claim to independent authority made by non-civil, intermediary institutions generally, not just local or regional civil governments. In contrast, a consistent follower of Burke ajrms superior authority of local non-civil institutions – family, church, voluntary association – over the claims of the State, especially the national State, outside of narrowly circumscribed areas of civil authority. Independent, decentralized social institutions are viewed as a necessary restraint on illegitimate State power.5 With the unexpected, overnight, non-violent collapse of the Soviet Union in August of 1991, the victors in the West’s two-century debate have been the secular conservatives and secular nineteenthcentury liberals, whose economic theories of decentralized private ownership have always paralleled Burke’s defense of political and social decentralization.6 It took over two centuries for the debate between Burke and Rousseau to be concluded in the West. The manifest failure of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic’s central economic planning at long last persuaded the West’s intellectuals of the worthlessness of Communism, both as an economic system and

4. Robert A. Nisbet, “Rousseau and the Political Community,” in Nisbet, Tradition and Revolt: Historical and Sociological Essays (New York: Random House, 1968), ch. 1. 5. Robert A. Nisbet, Conservatism: Dream and Reality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. 34–46. 6. Adam Smith and Edmund Burke respected each other’s opinions. Burke had read and adopted Smith’s economics, while Smith is said to have commented: “Burke is the only man I ever knew who thinks on economic subjects exactly as I do without any previous communication having passed between us.” Cited in Isaac Kramnick (ed.), Edmund Burke (Englewood-Clifs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1974), p. 100. The same quotation appears in Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind: from Burke to Santayana (rev. ed.; Chicago: Regnery, 1954), p. 19.

Communal Meals and National Incorporation

355

a political system. Nevertheless, seven decades of Communist terrorism had not persuaded most of them of the utter illegitimacy of Communism as an ideology. As long as Western intellectuals believed that Communism was making suficient economic progress to maintain its machinery of terrorism, most of them refused to voice more than occasional token objections to Soviet Communism’s barbarism.7 Many of them respected the power that such barbarism conferred on Communism’s rulers. Western intellectuals believe in State power as the primary means of transforming society. This is why they abandoned respect for Communism without a blink after 1991. Stripped of their power, the Communists were stripped of their legitimacy in the humanistic West. The Western intellectuals’ much-beloved Premier Gorbachev disappeared overnight, only to surface two years later as the head of a heavily endowed non-profit foundation promoting world government for the sake of ecology. This Red had turned into a Green.8 He had become a Western intellectual, devoid of personal power. So, nobody in authority pays much attention to him.9 There was a reason for the intellectuals’ overnight dismissal of Communism. For two centuries, all but a few of them have worshipped at the altar of pragmatic economic growth. Communism was “the god that failed” for only a handful of Western intellectuals.10 It was never a god for most of them. Economic pragmatism remains their god. This god is now seen as having brought negative corporate sanctions against the god of Communism. Western intellectuals today blandly dismiss Communism as merely a failed scientiic experiment that happened to cost well over 100 million 7. Jean-Francois Revel, The Flight from Truth: The Reign of Deceit in the Age of Information (New York: Random House, [1988] 1991). 8. He was the political leader who had long ignored warnings from Russian engineers regarding the unsafe status of Chernobyl-type nuclear reactors, and who was in charge when the 1986 Chernobyl disaster took place. This has all been politely ignored by the Western intellectuals. 9. When he ran for president in Russia in 1996, he received so few votes that his candidacy was not statistically visible. Boris Yeltsin, his old antagonist, was elected over a Communist who no longer called himself a Communist. The ex-Communists had no further use for a loser like Gorbachev in 1996, just ive years after his removal from ojce. 10. The phrase comes from a 1949 collection of essays by ex-Communist liberals and socialists: The God That Failed, edited by Richard H. Crossman. This was the only variety of anti-Communism that was taught on college campuses until the 1980’s.

356

DEUTERONOMY

lives – a noble experiment, a few of them might say in private, but now passé.11 Their pragmatic god is still on his throne in their hearts, dispensing blessings and cursings. Mosaic law had elements of both Burke and Rousseau. There is no question that intermediary institutions played a major role in Mosaic civil law, for the tribal civil governments were the primary agencies of law enforcement. This was Burkean. So was the Mosaic law’s devaluation of civil government compared to family and ecclesiastical governments. The Mosaic law’s system of national sacriices and festivals was a unique mixture of familism and centralized representation. This representation was ecclesiastical rather than civil. Intermediary civil institutions (tribes) had no covenantal role to play in the Mosaic law’s reconciliation of the one and the many through national incorporation. People participated at the national festivals either as family members or as priests. The priests had a lawful claim on the families’ culinary rites of celebration: meals. Indeed, the common meal was the rite of reconciliation: between man and God, family and priesthood. The State had no covenantal role to play here; neither did the tribe.

Conclusion The reconciliation of the one and the many is the Trinity. This reconciliation was relected in the communal rites of Mosaic Israel. The meals were mandated national celebrations that involved economic sacriice. Families journeyed to a common location marked of from the rest of Israel by the presence of the altar and the Ark. Participation in the rites of celebration was secured by theological confession, which in turn was marked by circumcision. A common theological confession uniied the nation under the Mosaic law’s 11. Felix Somary records in his autobiography a discussion he had with the economist Joseph Schumpeter and the sociologist Max Weber in 1918. Schumpeter expressed happiness regarding the Russian Revolution. The USSR would be a test case for socialism. Weber warned that this would cause untold misery. Schumpeter replied: “That may well be, but it would be a good laboratory.” Weber responded: “A laboratory heaped with human corpses!” Schumpeter retorted: “Every anatomy classroom is the same thing.” Felix Somary, The Raven of Zurich (New York: St. Martin’s, 1986), p. 121. I am indebted to Mark Skousen for this reference. The USSR became what Schumpeter predicted, an anatomy classroom illed with corpses, but with this variation: unlike medical classrooms, the USSR killed people to gain its huge supply of corpses. So did Red China. So did Marxist Cambodia.

Communal Meals and National Incorporation

357

covenantal sanctions: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD” (Deut. 6:4). Common meals in a common place also uniied the nation under the Mosaic law’s covenantal sanctions. The nation secured its incorporation through confession and eating. The church does the same. The centrality of confession and communion in Mosaic Israel should be obvious. It was not only a civil oath that bound the nation (Ex. 19), but also an ecclesiastical oath. The Mosaic law mandated national festivals, once Israel inherited the land of Canaan. The inheritance was secured by means of military sanctions, but it was to be maintained by non-military sanctions. It was secured by civil action, but was to be maintained by ecclesiastical action. Israel fought as tribal units but celebrated nationally as family units made holy by two things: a journey to the place of the altar and the presence of Levites at family meals. The national celebration imposed economic losses on families. Enlightenment political theory has substituted civil confession for theological confession as the basis of establishing national incorporation. It has substituted voting for eating as the basis of maintaining national incorporation. From Machiavelli to Hobbes, from Locke to Madison, the message was the same: national incorporation is by civil oath alone. What is astounding is that this Enlightenment confession is regarded by Protestants and most Catholics as a statement of Christian principles. The enemies of Christianity have triumphed over Christianity in the civil realm because they have persuaded Christians of the illegitimacy of Trinitarian confession as the basis of national incorporation. The result has been the substitution of massive taxation for the tithe, bread and circuses for bread and wine. This is the empire’s familiar pattern of development, from the Roman Empire to all the other evil empires that seek to revive it. They will all perish, to be replaced in history by a common kingdom that is established by Trinitarian confession and maintained by communion meals eaten in the presence of ecclesiastical authorities. This thought is, of course, distressing news for Enlightenment political theorists and their spokesmen inside the churches and Christian college classrooms.

31 DISINHERITING CANAAN’S GODS Disinheriting Canaan’s Gods When the LORD thy God shall cut of the nations from before thee, whither thou goest to possess them, and thou succeedest them, and dwellest in their land; Take heed to thyself that thou be not snared by following them, after that they be destroyed from before thee; and that thou enquire not after their gods, saying, How did these nations serve their gods? even so will I do likewise. Thou shalt not do so unto the LORD thy God: for every abomination to the LORD, which he hateth, have they done unto their gods; for even their sons and their daughters they have burnt in the ire to their gods (Deut. 12:29–31).

The Book of Deuteronomy is illed with passages that warned the Israelites not to name the names of the gods of Canaan, not to adopt their rituals, not to have anything to do with them. These were all land laws. So was this one. The theocentric focus of this law is God’s determination to destroy all rivals. Just as He was planning to disinherit the gods of Canaan, so would He disinherit Israel if she played the harlot with those gods. This law should be seen as an aspect of the ifth point of the covenant: inheritance-disinheritance. In fact, this law is the very heart of point ive: God’s disinheritance of all rival gods. This is the model for point ive. The fundamental theme of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, is this: the transition from wrath to grace. But there is no such transition for the fallen angels who joined Satan in his rebellion. For them there is no hope of redemption. Though they masquerade as gods, they know that they will be cut of at the end of history. For them, the transition is from wrath to greater wrath. They receive God’s common grace in history: unearned gifts of life,

358

Disinheriting Canaan’s Gods

359 1

power, a cause-and-efect universe, and inluence over men. But their end is sure: destruction. They will be disinherited in eternity.

Disinheritance in History The question is: Will Satan be representatively disinherited in history? That is, will his human disciples be disinherited? The Book of Deuteronomy is surely the testament of inheritance for God and His people. Is it also a testament of disinheritance for the gods of Canaan and their people? In principle, yes. The Israelites were told by God to spare neither the idols nor the inhabitants of Canaan. “And thou shalt consume all the people which the LORD thy God shall deliver thee; thine eye shall have no pity upon them: neither shalt thou serve their gods; for that will be a snare unto thee” (Deut. 7:16). But God told Moses at the end of the book that they would not obey God in this genocidal assignment. “And the LORD said unto Moses, Behold, thou shalt sleep with thy fathers; and this people will rise up, and go a whoring after the gods of the strangers of the land, whither they go to be among them, and will forsake me, and break my covenant which I have made with them. Then my anger shall be kindled against them in that day, and I will forsake them, and I will hide my face from them, and they shall be devoured, and many evils and troubles shall befall them; so that they will say in that day. Are not these evils come upon us, because our God is not among us? And I will surely hide my face in that day for all the evils which they shall have wrought, in that they are turned unto other gods” (Deut. 31:16–18). This rebellion would recapitulate the Fall of Adam: the transition from grace to wrath. This transition was endemic for Israel until the time that God removed the kingdom from Israel and transferred it to the church: deinitively at the resurrection, progressively in New Testament church history, and inally at the fall of Jerusalem. Jesus told the rulers of Israel: “Therefore say I unto you, The kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof” (Matt. 21:43). This is why the church is called the Israel of God. Paul wrote: “For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth any thing, nor uncircumcision, but a new creature. And as 1. Gary North, Dominion and Common Grace: The Biblical Basis of Progress (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987), pp. 34–35.

360

DEUTERONOMY

many as walk according to this rule, peace be on them, and mercy, and upon the Israel of God” (Gal. 6:15–16).2 So, the transition from grace to wrath is overcome through greater grace. “Ye are of God, little children, and have overcome them: because greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world” (I John 4:4). There is a war for the inheritance in history: disinherited sons claim the inheritance. This war is covenantal. It involves all ive points of the covenant. It is a war over sovereignty, authority, law, sanctions, and inheritance. As such, it is at bottom ethical. The gods that men worship are relected in the laws that men obey. “What thing soever I command you, observe to do it: thou shalt not add thereto, nor diminish from it” (Deut. 12:32). This passage begins with a prophecy: “When the LORD thy God shall cut of the nations from before thee, whither thou goest to possess them, and thou succeedest them, and dwellest in their land” (v. 29). Title to their land will surely be transferred to Israel. The question facing Israel was the question of maintaining the kingdom grant. I wrote in Leviticus: An Economic Commentary: “Leviticus presents the rules governing this kingdom grant from God. This land grant preceded the giving of these rules. Grace precedes law in God’s dealings with His subordinates. We are in debt to God even before He speaks to us. The land grant was based on the original promise given to Abraham. That promise came prior to the giving of the

2. Traditional dispensationalists are forced to come up with highly creative interpretations of this passage. John F. Walvoord insists that “the Israel of God” in verse 16 refers to “Israelites who in the church age trust Jesus Christ.” Israelites? What Israelites? Ever since A.D. 70, there have been no Israelites. There have been only Jews. Israel is gone. From the Orthodox Jewish viewpoint, there can be no biblical Israel until the messiah returns. According to Walvoord, Paul wrote that peace and mercy are upon gentiles and “Israelites” who are inside the church. This means that God distinguishes two kinds of Christians, Jews and gentiles. Yet verse 15 insists that there is no such distinction. Walvoord calls his obviously forced and convoluted exposition “natural and biblical.” He calls it “the simplest explanation,” despite the fact that no one except dispensationalists have ever argued for this supposedly simple explanation of this verse. All other Christian expositors have understood that the church is the New Covenant inheritor of Mosaic Israel’s title, in both senses: name and covenantal promises. Walvoord devotes one brief paragraph to his refutation of almost two millennia of Christian interpretation of the passage. Walvoord, “Does the Church Fulill Israel’s Program?” in Walvoord and Roy B. Zuck (eds.), The Bib Sac Reader (Chicago: Moody, 1983), p. 41. (“Bib Sac” refers to Dallas Theological Seminary’s quarterly journal, Bibliotheca Sacra.) What is really amusing is that he dismisses rival views as “determined by theological presuppositions rather than proper exegesis.” Ibid., p. 49. Such a lack of self-awareness is remarkable, even among theologians.

Disinheriting Canaan’s Gods

361

3

Mosaic law. This is why James Jordan says that the laws of Leviticus are more than legislation; the focus of the laws is not simply obedience to God, but rather on maintaining the grant.4 The basis of maintaining the grant was ethics, not the sacriices. Man cannot maintain the kingdom in sin.5 The fundamental issue was sin, not sacriice; ethics, not ritual.”6 God warned them against dallying with the rituals of Canaan’s gods. God warned them, “enquire not after their gods, saying, How did these nations serve their gods? even so will I do likewise” (v. 30). But the primary issue was not liturgy; it was ethics: “Thou shalt not do so unto the LORD thy God: for every abomination to the LORD, which he hateth, have they done unto their gods; for even their sons and their daughters they have burnt in the ire to their gods” (v. 31). The great evil of Canaan’s rituals was the nations’ willful destruction of their children in formal sacriice. This was ethics encapsulated in ritual. Human sacriice is the greatest ritual evil in history, and it was widespread prior to the spread of the Christian gospel. Classical Greece and Rome both practiced human sacriice,7 although the textbooks do not mention this, and even specialized historical monographs ignore it or mention it only in passing. This historical blackout is an aspect of the successful re-writing of history by humanists who rely, generation after generation, on their peers’ glowing accounts of a supposedly secular classical world, an academically satisfying world in which formal religion was socially peripheral and mostly for political show. The fact that a vestal virgin was buried alive as a sanction against either her unchastity or allowing the ritual ire to go out8 is an historiographical inconvenience, and so it is rarely mentioned. Vesta was the sacred fire of Rome, a goddess.

3. James B. Jordan, Covenant Sequence in Leviticus and Deuteronomy (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989), p. 8. 4. Ibid., p. 9. 5. Ibid., p. 11. 6. Gary North, Leviticus: An Economic Commentary (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), p. 9. 7. Lord Acton, “Human Sacriice” (1863), in Essays in Religion, Politics, and Morality, 3 vols. (Indianapolis, Indiana: LibertyClassics, 1988), III, ch. 19. 8. Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome (Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor, [1864] 1955), Book III, Chapter VI, p. 147.

362

DEUTERONOMY

9

She was the incarnation of moral order, both in Greece and Rome. Her ritual requirements had the sanction of execution attached to them. Where we ind the imposition of the death penalty, we do not ind a socially peripheral issue. Centuries later, the sacriicial bloodshed of Mexico’s Aztecs in the late ifteenth century reached the limits of this ritual abomination.10 The remarkable speed of that perverse civilization’s disinheritance by the Spanish and their Indian allies, from 1519 to 1521, should give pause to the academic world, which does not take seriously covenantal cause and efect. (Modern legalized abortion more than matches the ejciency of the Aztecs’ slaughter, but not as a ritual practice.)

Comparative Religion God forbade the Israelites from naming the names of the gods of Canaan. “And in all things that I have said unto you be circumspect: and make no mention of the name of other gods, neither let it be heard out of thy mouth” (Ex. 23:13). Was this a ban against historical scholarship? Was this prohibition to be taken literally? The language here is covenantal. Naming a name of a god was in this context an act of invocation. It was an act of worship. Calling upon a god is an act of religious subordination. To invoke the name of a god is to acknowledge formally that he brings sanctions in history. The context of Deuteronomy 12:30 was historical study for the sake of covenantal subordination: “. . . enquire not after their gods, saying, How did these nations serve their gods? even so will I do likewise.” The prohibition of false worship took the form of a universal prohibition of mentioning the names of the gods of Canaan, but to ignore the area of comparative religion is to ignore the possibility that false worship can be introduced in the name of progressive reform as well as the restoration of ancient practices. To be able to recognize a proposed progressive innovation as the restoration of an ancient abomination is an advantage. Without a knowledge of the past, it becomes more dijcult for guardians of orthodoxy to defend its boundaries.

9. Ibid., I:III, pp. 30–32. 10. Serge Gruzinski, The Aztecs: Rise and Fall of an Empire (New York: Abrams, [1987] 1992), pp. 49–56.

Disinheriting Canaan’s Gods

363

There is no doubt that the rulers of Israel spoke the names of foreign gods. “Woe to thee, Moab! thou art undone, O people of Chemosh: he hath given his sons that escaped, and his daughters, into captivity unto Sihon king of the Amorites” (Num. 21:29). “Wilt not thou possess that which Chemosh thy god giveth thee to possess? So whomsoever the LORD our God shall drive out from before us, them will we possess” (Jud. 11:24). But Chemosh was not a god of Canaan. Its geographical area of sovereignty was outside the boundaries of Israel. Foreign gods did not pose the same degree of covenantal threat to Israel that the gods of Canaan did, for they were not perceived as exercising sovereignty inside the boundaries of the Promised Land. To invoke the names of foreign gods was a violation of the irst commandment (Ex. 20:3), but for false worship to become socially signiicant, there had to be some basis for people to believe that cause and efect in history were inluenced by the god invoked. This god had to be able to impose sanctions on behalf of those who invoked his name. Because the ancient world outside of pre-exilic Israel did not invoke the name of any inally sovereign god, the social threat to Israel came from the pre-conquest local gods of Canaan. What about local gods? Could Israelites lawfully speak their names? I think that they could, although I am not sure that this was the case. The prophet Jeremiah spoke Baal’s name as part of his covenant lawsuit (Jer. 7:9; 11:13). But Baal was a god of Moab (Num. 22:41). It may be that the word, meaning “master” or “owner,” was widely applied in Israel to rival gods. But as for the speciic names of the gods of pre-conquest Canaan, the Bible is silent. After the exile, there seems to have been no application of this law. The sovereignty of the pre-conquest gods of Canaan was inally destroyed by the Assyrians and Babylonians. The new world of empire was openly polytheistic. Many gods resided in the pantheon of each empire. The cultural threat of exclusively local gods ended forever in Israel. The threat of polytheism and syncretism still existed, but Israel’s defensive position as a nation under foreign domination restricted the spread of polytheism. A polytheist in post-exilic Israel was a traitor to the nation, a collaborator with the enemy. He would have been ostracized. The threat to orthodoxy in post-exilic Israel was two-fold: legalism and pagan philosophy. It was the lure of Greek philosophy and culture, with its common-confession universalism and its aestheticism, that pulled cosmopolitan Jews away

364

DEUTERONOMY

11

from Moses. Meanwhile, legalists planted thickets of ritual hedges around the Mosaic law. The kernel of orthodoxy was either ground into lour and leavened with Hellenistic universalism or else smothered by the legalism of the Pharisees. In modern times, the study of comparative religion has again become a threat to theological orthodoxy, not because the advocates of comparative religion invoke the sanctions of rival gods, but because they deny the supernatural existence of all gods. Comparative religion is a form of cultural relativism – indeed, the supreme form. It insists that the details of theology and ritual change through time and across borders. But this academic polytheism is tempered by its universalism. Here is the supposedly universal aspect of all religion: faith in beings and forces that do not exist in the way that religious disciples believe. The universalism of religion is the universalism of error in the face of either as-yet unsolved questions or as-yet rejected scientiic answers. Religion’s sanctions are said to be exclusively personal and social; all of the gods invoked by their disciples are equally without power. Men, not gods, impose sanctions in history, say the advocates of comparative religion. All of the gods have been disinherited by rational men, we are told, save one: the god of humanity. To inherit in history – the only inheritance that supposedly matters – men must invoke the god of humanity. It is this god alone that brings predictable positive sanctions to those who invoke its name and subordinate themselves to its representative agents: consumers (economic sanctions) and voters (political sanctions). All the other natural and social forces in history are understood by humanists as impersonal. Comparative religion in post-conquest, pre-exilic Israel posed the threat of the elevation of local gods above the God of the Bible. Comparative religion in the modern world poses the threat of the de-throning of the God of the Bible and His banishment to the common pantheon of all other gods, save one: the god of humanity. This pantheon of gods no longer occupies the acropolis on the highest hill of the city. More likely, a local television transmission tower does. The threat of comparative religion is the threat of idolatry. Idolatry invokes gods other than the God of the Bible, gods who are

11. Martin Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in their Encounter in Palestine during the Early Hellenistic Period, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Fortress, [1974] 1981), I, p. 313.

Disinheriting Canaan’s Gods

365

believed to be the most powerful sanctions-bringers in history. Ancient comparative religion invoked local gods; modern comparative religion invokes a universal god: mankind. The issue of sanctions in history necessarily raises the issue of inheritance in history. To inherit, men must ally themselves to the god who really does bring sanctions in history.

Theology and the Visible Kingdom of God The most important theological issue is theology proper: the doctrine of God. He who gets this doctrine wrong will sufer eternal negative sanctions. The early church fought long and hard to establish orthodoxy in this area of theology. It is here, and only here, that the church has come to an agreement: Trinitarianism. On the other four covenantal issues – hierarchy, law, sacraments, and eschatology – there has been no universal agreement. If theology proper is the most important issue of theology, then the Book of Genesis is the most important book in the Pentateuch. Genesis describes the origin of the universe and presents the Creator-creature distinction. The debate over origins has been the fundamental debate between Christianity and paganism from the beginning. Evolutionism has been around a long time. So has the doctrine of the eternality of matter.12 In our day, the evolutioncreation issue has dwarfed all others as the chief theological battleield. More intellectual ground has been surrendered faster by Christianity since the advent of Darwinism than ever before in the history of the church. Even Islam’s invasion of the West and its complete conquest of North Africa, 632–732, was a minor afair compared to the surrender of the modern church to a modiied Darwinism: theistic evolution. The medieval church resisted Islam; the modern church has generally baptized evolutionism rather than resist it. Why, then, elevate eschatology to the forefront? Because this is a commentary on Deuteronomy. The issue raised by Deuteronomy is the issue of inheritance in history: Who will inherit, and who will be disinherited? The debate over eschatology has become a major dividing point since the mid-nineteenth century – again, about the

12. Aristotle, Physics, VIII.

366

DEUTERONOMY

time of Darwinism’s appearance. The triumph of Darwinism in both the academic and political worlds has been accompanied by the triumph of dispensationalism in the Arminian pietistic Protestant world.13 The issue of eschatology is the ifth great debate in the history of the church. The irst was theology proper. It was basically settled in the fourth century. The second debate was over hierarchy: church vs. church (the East-West split came in 1054) and church vs. state (culminating in the conlict between Pope Gregory VII and Emperor Henry IV in 1076). The debate over law began in the Western church at that time: canon law vs. a revived secular Roman law.14 Scholasticism soon appeared: the philosophical attempt to reconcile the two. It failed. The Reformation was fought mainly over sanctions: public debate over the role of indulgences (the issue of purgatory), the number and meaning of the sacraments (realism vs. nominalism),15 vows of celibacy made by the clergy and nuns, and the judicially binding character of excommunication. Finally, in the 1800’s, eschatology became a major divisive issue in Protestantism. Eschatology is part of the covenant: point ive. The church can get the last four points incorrect and still persevere in history, but it cannot inherit in history until it gets correct all ive points and their applications. The progressive disinheritance of the church, which has accelerated since the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, began long before Darwin. Modern evolutionism ofers the most coherent theological system in the history of the war between belief and unbelief: from the doctrine of impersonal creation (the Big Bang) to the doctrine of the impersonal last judgment (the heat death of the universe).16 But rival theologies have always confronted Christianity. These rival theologies have always occupied territory within the church and its allied academic agencies.

13. The one major exception: the Church of Christ (Campbellite). 14. Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1983). 15. Covenantalism is implied by Calvin’s rejection of Roman Catholicism’s realism (real presence) and also Anabaptism’s nominalism (remembrance). But his invocation of “mystery” did not solve the problem. 16. Gary North, Is the World Running Down? Crisis in the Christian Worldview (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1988), ch. 2.

Disinheriting Canaan’s Gods

367

Eschatology The most common eschatologies, premillennialism (fundamentalist churches) and amillennialism (European liturgical churches), have correctly relegated the conquest of Canaan to the Old Covenant. They have also relegated inheritance in history to the Old Covenant. But these are separate issues. After the exile, the laws of landed inheritance changed. The gentiles occupying the land were to be incorporated into the jubilee’s inheritance system (Ezek. 47:22–23). This pointed to the New Covenant’s incorporation of the gentiles into the covenant. It was not the conquest of Canaan that was fundamental to Israel; it was the preservation of the messianic seed line that was fundamental. The crucial eschatological issue was the Promised Seed, not the Promised Land. This does not mean that the issue of inheritance in history was an exclusively Old Covenant issue. On the contrary, the issue of inheritance is far more a New Covenant issue. The Old Covenant inheritance centered around the Promised Seed (Gen. 3:15). Only much later did the issue of the Promised Land become intermixed with the Promised Seed (Abraham’s covenant). This was a temporary mixing of categories of inheritance that ended with the coming of the Messiah, i.e., Shiloh (Gen. 49:10), and His rejection by Israel. The universalism of the Genesis inheritance (Gen. 3:15) has now been mixed with the universalism of the kingdom of God in history (Matt. 21:43). This is the meaning of the Great Commission: “And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen” (Matt. 28:18–20). So, far from being relegated to the Old Covenant, inheritance has become the fundamental eschatological issue of the New Covenant. To relegate formal eschatology to the inal judgment and post-resurrection world, which amillennialism does, is a fundamental error with culturally debilitating consequences. It means surrendering civilization to covenant-breakers as a consequence of eschatological, prophetic inevitability. The same criticism is equally applicable to premillennialism’s view of the church’s inluence as it must inevitably operate prior to Christ’s eschatologically discontinuous return with His angels to establish His new headquarters on earth rather than at the right hand of God in heaven.

368

DEUTERONOMY

The eschatological issue of headquarters should not be ignored. Eden was to serve Adam as his headquarters in the conquest of the world: the dominion covenant.17 Adam was forcibly removed from headquarters after his rebellion. Headquarters for Noah was the ark, but only for a few months. After that, geography played no role until Abram was called out of Ur of the Chaldees. Ur could not serve as headquarters for Abraham; no place else could, either. Abraham wandered. After him, Israel wandered. Geographical headquarters was re-established only with Israel’s conquest of Canaan. But the same threat existed for Israel as had existed for Adam, as Deuteronomy constantly warns: removal from headquarters. This happened at the time of the irst exile, and then culminated with the removal of geographical headquarters with the fall of Jerusalem. Dispensational premillennialists assume that headquarters will be reestablished in Jerusalem by Jesus when He returns to set up His earthly kingdom.18 Historic premillennialists remain silent regarding the place of earthly headquarters during the premillennial kingdom. Amillennialists and postmillennialists insist that kingdom headquarters in history has been transferred to heaven. The main diferences between amillennialism and postmillennialism center around the degree to which history will visibly manifest the judicial inheritance which Jesus Christ obtained through His death and resurrection, and which He announced to His disciples in Matthew 28:18. Will this legal title to all things, which was granted to Jesus by God the Father after the resurrection, progressively manifest itself culturally in the work of Christians in building up the kingdom of God on earth and in history?19 Whatever is judicially 17. Gary North, The Dominion Covenant: Genesis (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987), ch. 3. 18. While this is almost universally believed by dispensationalists, the movement’s theologians rarely mention it. 19. Because of confusion on this point, let me clarify: the New Covenant kingdom of God was established deinitively in history by Jesus prior to His death and resurrection. “But if I cast out devils by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God is come unto you” (Matt. 12:28). Title to the earth was transferred to Him by God after the resurrection. Jesus transferred title to the church, His bride, no later than Pentecost (Acts 2). Thus, the New Covenant kingdom of God began before title was transferred. The church lawfully invokes its legal title, but this title is reclaimed from Satan progressively, through Christian reconstruction, i.e., working out our faith with fear and trembling (Phil. 2:12), in every area of life – matching Christ’s transferred title to everything – through service to others: “But Jesus called them to him, and

Disinheriting Canaan’s Gods

369

deinitive in history must be extended progressively in history. This process is analogous to Jesus’ sin-free inal and perfect sanctiication, which is judicially transferred to believers deinitively at the time of their redemption,20 but which they must work out in history (Phil. 2:12). God gave Abraham legal title to the Promised Land, but actual possession had to wait (Gen. 15:16). Is the church operating under an analogous grant of lawful title? What Abraham received deinitively by promise was achieved by his covenantal heirs, although they subsequently surrendered geographically for a time (the exile) and then covenantally in Christ’s day. Eschatologically, Old Covenant Israel moved steadily toward apostasy and defeat in history, beginning with the incomplete conquest of Canaan. Is the church also moving progressively toward inal defeat, though not apostasy? Why should the church be defeated in history? Israel was defeated because Israel apostatized completely. No conservative Trinitarian theologian argues that the entire church will apostatize completely, yet most Christian theologians believe that the church will be defeated culturally. So, the cultural history of the church will supposedly be found on the last day to have recapitulated the cultural history of Old Covenant Israel. This raises a very embarrassing question: Is the post-ascension church always in the same eschatological condition as pre-ascension Israel? The amillennialist seeks to evade this question, but when pressed, his answer is yes. He believes, but refuses to say in public, that the bodily ascension of Jesus Christ in history and the sending of the Holy Spirit in history are insujcient to empower the church in history to break out of its sad pathway to visible cultural defeat. Amillennialists have an implicit but unstated conclusion with regard to the doctrine of the bodily ascension of Christ: the cultural

saith unto them, Ye know that they which are accounted to rule over the Gentiles exercise lordship over them; and their great ones exercise authority upon them. But so shall it not be among you: but whosoever will be great among you, shall be your minister: And whosoever of you will be the chiefest, shall be servant of all. For even the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many” (Mark 10:42–45). The dominion covenant is progressively achieved by Christians in history on a culture-wide basis by means of the church’s division of labor (Rom. 12; I Cor. 12). 20. “But to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justiieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness. Even as David also describeth the blessedness of the man, unto whom God imputeth righteousness without works, Saying, Blessed are they whose iniquities are forgiven, and whose sins are covered” (Rom. 4:5–7).

370

DEUTERONOMY

power of sin is greater in history than the cultural power of redemption. They relegate the prophesied victory of the church in history to the realm of personal victory over sin, while ajrming the church’s inevitable visible defeat. The bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ took place in history, but for all the good it does the church culturally, it might as well never have happened. The ascension’s impact is internal and individual, not external and cultural, insists the amillennialist. Theological liberals have been far more consistent in their view of the resurrection and ascension: they have relegated both historical events to the realm of the spirit. To them, the bodily ascension of Christ is a phrase testifying to the spiritual optimism of the early church, not a visible, veriiable historical event. Amillennialists believe the same thing regarding the promised victory of the church in history. When the Bible repeatedly predicts that covenant-keepers will inherit the earth in history, the amillennialist says, “Spiritual, not literal!” Postmillennialists believe that Christ’s bodily ascension to heaven and the sending of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost empowered the church in history to recapture lost territory in every realm of life. Amillennialists believe that such reconquest cannot take place in history; the church will surrender territory, should it ever actually recapture it. The church’s cultural inheritance supposedly will go the way of the Mosaic land inheritance. Christ’s ascension plays no role in amillennial social theory. As I wrote in the conclusion of Chapter 6 in Leviticus: There is remarkably little discussion of the ascension of Christ in mod21 ern orthodox theology. This topic inevitably raises fundamental historical, cosmological, and cultural implications that modern premillennial and especially amillennial theologians find dijcult to accept, such as the progressive manifestation of Christ’s rule in history through His representatives: Christians.22 In a world in which grace is believed to be progressively devoured by nature, there is little room for historical applications of the doctrine of the historical ascension. Covenantal postmillennialism alone can 21. Gary North, Millennialism and Social Theory (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), pp. 227–29. 22. No theological or eschatological school denies that there can be prolonged set-backs in this manifestation of Christ’s rule. Conversely, none would totally deny progress. I know of no one who would argue, for example, that the creeds of the church prior to the fourth century were more rigorous or more accurate theologically than those which came later.

Disinheriting Canaan’s Gods

371

confidently discuss the doctrine of Christ’s ascension, for postmillennialism does not seek to confine the efects of Christ’s ascension to the realms of the 23 internal and the trans-historical. That is to say, postmillennialism does not assert the existence of supposedly inevitable boundaries around the efects of grace in history. On the contrary, it asserts that all such boundaries will be progressively overcome in history, until on judgment day the very gates (boundaries) of hell will not be able to stand against the church (Matt. 16:18).”24

Both amillennialism and premillennialism teach the inevitable disinheritance of the church in history and the illegitimacy of the ideal of Christendom as applying to civilization prior to the bodily return of Christ. Eschatology shapes social theory.

Conclusion God told Moses that He would disinherit the gods of Canaan. He would do so by enabling the Israelites to disinherit the Canaanites. But He warned them not to worship the gods of defeated Canaan. While the ancient world believed that the gods of a city that lost a war were also defeated, the fact is that the Israelites were sorely tempted to worship the gods of Canaan. The presence of a remnant of surviving Canaanites would be interpreted by Israel as though the gods of Canaan had overcome the God of the Bible, despite the fact that Israel had overthrown the idols of Canaan. Despite the fact that the losers had lost, the Israelites were tempted to worship the losers’ gods. The losers became the winners in Mosaic Israel. Foreign agents had to destroy the remnants of Canaan’s gods: Assyria and Babylon.

23. This is why amillennialism drifts so easily into Barthianism: the history of mankind for the amillennialist has no visible connection with the ascension of Jesus Christ. Progressive sanctiication in this view is limited to the personal and ecclesiastical; it is never cultural or civic. The ascension of Christ has no transforming implications for society in amillennial theology. The ascension was both historical and publicly visible; its implications supposedly are not. The Barthian is simply more consistent than the amillennialist: he denies the historicity of both Jesus’ ascension and His subsequent grace to society. Christ’s ascension, like His grace, is relegated to the trans-historical. See North, Millennialism and Social Theory, pp. 111–13. 24. Kenneth L. Gentry, Jr., He Shall Have Dominion: A Postmillennial Eschatology (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1992), chaps. 12, 13.

372

DEUTERONOMY

Israel’s military defeat of Canaan should have meant the defeat of Canaan’s gods. Only because Israel was ethically rebellious did traces of Canaan’s old culture and old theology survive. These remnants of evil then served as evil leaven, just as Moses had warned. Only after the second defeat of Canaan’s gods, as a result of the defeat of Israel by Assyria and Babylon, were the gods of Canaan inally disinherited. Israel had to be temporarily disinherited in order for Canaan’s gods to be permanently disinherited.

32 LURESomething OF MAGIC: The LureTHE of Magic: for Nothing SOMETHING FOR NOTHING If there arise among you a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams, and giveth thee a sign or a wonder, And the sign or the wonder come to pass, whereof he spake unto thee, saying, Let us go after other gods, which thou hast not known, and let us serve them; Thou shalt not hearken unto the words of that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams: for the LORD your God proveth you, to know whether ye love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul. Ye shall walk after the LORD your God, and fear him, and keep his commandments, and obey his voice, and ye shall serve him, and cleave unto him (Deut. 13:1–4).

The theocentric framework of this law is the worship of God. Proper worship necessitates obedience to God’s revealed law, Moses said. Worship, like wisdom, begins with the fear of God. Once again, Moses warned Israel to obey God’s commandments. This is the continuing ethical theme of the Book of Deuteronomy, which constituted the second giving of the law. But the point of this obedience, given the positioning of Deuteronomy as book ive of the Pentateuch, is inheritance. Covenant-keeping is the basis for maintaining the national inheritance. This was a land law. It governed the nation’s response to false prophets. The prophet no longer exists. The ojce ended with the Old Covenant in A.D. 70.

The Prophet’s Judicial Role This passage dealt with those people who claimed to be prophets. A prophet had a speciic judicial function in Mosaic Israel: to

373

374

DEUTERONOMY

declare to a God-designated audience God’s direct revelation regarding the future, but more to the point, regarding the faith and behavior of that audience. The prophet delivered a covenant lawsuit against someone or against some group. If the listeners did not repent, he warned, God would bring negative sanctions against them. Sometimes the prophet’s message was repentance.1 Jonah’s covenant lawsuit against Nineveh is a representative example: repent or else be destroyed within 40 days. Publicly, he prophesied destruction only, but the possibility of their corporate repentance, and therefore their avoidance of negative corporate sanctions, had been implicit from the beginning (Jonah 4:2). Sometimes, however, the prophet’s role was limited to provoking a confrontation prior to God’s imposition of negative sanctions. Elijah’s confrontation with Ahab prior to the drought is representative (I Ki. 17:1–5). The prophet was usually outside the priestly hierarchy. He was not a member of the tribe of Levi. Samuel, for example, was an Ephraimite (I Sam. 1:1). The prophet announced that the law of God was not being obeyed. He demanded in God’s name that the existing legal order or the nation’s dominant social practices be abandoned. He announced his God-given authority as superior to the civil and ecclesiastical authorities. In the name of God’s law, the prophet demanded the scrapping of the existing legal and social order. The listeners’ obvious response was: “Who are you to say?” When a man came to the nation in the name of the true God and His true law, he was inescapably a revolutionary in the eyes of a covenant-breaking Establishment. The question then arose: “In God’s eyes, who is the authorized representative of the nation’s Godsanctioned Establishment?” A related question arose: “What evidence does this man present which testiies to his ojce as a prophet?” This was what the iery competition on Mt. Carmel was all about (I Ki. 18). The prophet might perform signs and wonders. He might predict the future. His possession of supernatural abilities – outside the normal space-time continuum – testiied to his special legal status. This was partial evidence of his special relationship with God, but it

1. Not always, however: Moses’ prophetic role was not intended to gain Pharaoh’s repentance. See below: section on “Something for Nothing.”

The Lure of Magic: Something for Nothing

375

was not sujcient to prove his claim of God-given authority. Far more important than signs and wonders was theological orthodoxy. A true prophet had to come in the name of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It did not matter what signs and wonders he performed if he came in the name of another god. His signs and wonders might be deceptions, or they might be authentically supernatural, but his message was itself a deception. No god other than the true God could be lawfully worshipped publicly inside the borders of Israel. The prophet’s ability to perform signs and wonders – below-cost shortcuts in the normal space-time continuum – had to be accompanied by orthodox theological confession. The diferentiating mark between magic and prophecy was theological confession.

Boundaries and Prophecy Men are creatures before God. They are under His authority. They are also under the constraints of the creation. They are not originally creative. They are re-creative as subordinates who are made in God’s image. It is legitimate for men to re-work the creation by means of their knowledge of the laws governing the creation. Adam was told by God to dress the garden (Gen. 2:15). This means that God told Adam to re-work the creation. Adam was told to improve his environment. The world was originally created good, but Adam had the power and the lawful authority to make it better. He also had the responsibility to make it better. But he could lawfully exercise this authority only as a creature who acknowledged his limitations. He was required by God to acknowledge by his actions his belief in his own creaturehood and his subordination to God. He was not allowed to dress, touch, or eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. He understood this, and he told Eve. She represented Adam, who in turn represented God. She spoke a prophetic word to the serpent: “But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die” (Gen. 3:3). Then she violated her own prophetic word. So did Adam. God then brought a covenant lawsuit against the serpent, Eve, and Adam, in the order of their responsibility, from lower to higher, in terms of His original prophetic word to Adam. Prophecy concerned ethical boundaries: violate them, God warned, and predictable negative sanctions would come. Some of these sanctions would come predictably in history; all will come

376

DEUTERONOMY

predictably in eternity. The prophet’s job was to warn his audience of the adverse consequences of breaking God’s covenant. The boundaries were enforced by God. Violate His ethical boundaries and you will experience unpleasant consequences, the prophet warned. These ethical boundaries were testiied to by the prophet’s ability to overcome creational boundaries, sometimes called laws of nature. The Old Covenant prophet was empowered by God to escape these conventional limits because this ability testiied to his authority in announcing both the ethical boundaries and the predictability of their attached sanctions. Violating the laws of nature was the prophet’s means of calling a halt to the nation’s violation of the laws of God.

Boundaries and Magic To acknowledge the lawful boundaries which God has placed around man is to worship God by obeying Him. We are not to pursue our goals by means of magic. What is magic? It is any attempt to invoke supernatural powers, asking them to alter man’s environment by means of causation that are beyond temporal cause and efect. Magic is a method of calling for supernatural intervention by personal forces to alter the processes of either nature or history. Without this supernatural intervention, man’s ritual manipulations and invocations are powerless. For example, the voodoo doll is a powerless implement of magical incantation apart from demonic intervention. The element of repeatability is missing because the supernatural cause is absent. The supernatural cause of the sought-for outcome is not predictably present in the way that the ordinary means of temporal causation are predictably present. The personal “catalyst” that makes possible the magical series of events is invoked, not employed. A prophet might seek to ajrm his judicial ojce by altering nature or by forecasting events. If Israelites who were skilled craftsmen in this particular manipulation of nature or skilled forecasters of historical trends could not replicate his performance in a statistically signiicant number of cases, the self-proclaimed prophet did not thereby validate his ojce. He may have been a prophet, or he may have been a clever trickster, or he may have been a magician. The judicially compulsory evidence of his ojce as prophet was his verbal orthodoxy. The crucial test of his ojce was not his performance of signs and wonders; it was his confession of faith.

The Lure of Magic: Something for Nothing

377

Idolatry Herbert Schlossberg has argued that there are two pagan idols: nature and history.2 The quest for signs and wonders is a mark of these two idols. Schlossberg says that all social idols are idols of history. This would seem to include philosophy.3 Historically, after the Israelites returned from the captivity, they ceased to worship the idols of Canaan. Simultaneously, philosophy arose in Greece and spread across the Mediterranean world. Hellenism became the preferred idol of choice among socially cultured Israelites until the fall of Jerusalem. Pharisaic legalism, which also arose in the post-exilic era, was a domestic theological error. Hellenism was clearly an imported idol. Legalism was defended in the name of Israel’s God; Hellenism was defended in terms of a universal wisdom that transcended divisive supernatural revelation. The primary covenantal issue of idolatry is transcendence. Something or someone is proclaimed as superior to God. In operation, this issue becomes ethical. An idol is any representative manifestation in history (point two) of a law-order that substitutes for God’s (point three). Moses made it plain in Deuteronomy, over and over, that obedience to God’s commandments is the visible test of one’s confessional orthodoxy. A man who would subsequently call on Israelites to disobey these commandments, Moses said, was to be regarded as a fool. If he also named the name of another god, he was to be executed. “And that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams, shall be put to death; because he hath spoken to turn you away from the LORD your God, which brought you out of the land of Egypt, and redeemed you out of the house of bondage, to thrust thee out of the way which the LORD thy God commanded thee to walk in. So shalt thou put the evil away from the midst of thee” (Deut. 13:5).

Something for Nothing For a man to escape the limits of temporal creation means that he can gain something for what appears to be nothing. By subordinating himself to supernatural powers that are forbidden by God, a 2. Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction: Christian Faith and Its Confrontation with American Society (Westchester, Illinois: Crossway, [1983] 1993), p. 11. 3. There is a sense in which autonomous man regards philosophy as the mediating factor between nature and history.

378

DEUTERONOMY

man can sometimes escape the limits of temporal cause and efect. This ability to go beyond commonly repeatable causation ofers to some initiates of occultism the possibility of gaining wealth, power, and inluence over others. This lure is powerful. Men are impressed with magic, which seems to ofer them access to a below-cost realm of human action, a realm that is in some unstated way connected to the realm of conventional causation. The text indicates that signs and wonders were possible in the Old Covenant world. Moses himself had been in a battle of signs and wonders when he and Aaron challenged the priests of Egypt. The test was the test of the snakes. Moses’ snakes ate the Egyptians’ snakes. But the test decided nothing, for Pharaoh’s heart was hardened. The visible test of the comparative signs and wonders did not persuade him (Ex. 7:10–14). The message of the Bible is that while power is persuasive, confession is even more powerful. Moses’ confession of faith through Aaron (Ex. 7:2) was more powerful than Pharaoh’s, and this was demonstrated by the victory of Aaron’s serpents (Ex. 7:12). This did not change Pharaoh’s mind, because the power of God in hardening Pharaoh’s heart was more powerful than the persuasive power of the signs and wonders. God kept Pharaoh from changing his mind and therefore from changing his confession. Paul wrote: “What shall we say then? Is there unrighteousness with God? God forbid. For he saith to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. So then it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that sheweth mercy. For the scripture saith unto Pharaoh, Even for this same purpose have I raised thee up, that I might shew my power in thee, and that my name might be declared throughout all the earth. Therefore hath he mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth” (Rom. 9:14–18). Moses, in his ojce as a prophet (Deut. 34:10), was not sent by God in order to change Pharaoh’s mind. He was sent to provide God with an occasion to demonstrate God’s power in history: predictable sanctions. The end result inside the boundaries of Egypt was the transfer of the inheritance of Egypt’s recently deceased irstborn sons to Israel (Ex. 12:35–36). The Egyptians had long believed that they could get something for nothing out of Israel: slave labor and the inheritance. At the time of the exodus, this generations-long miscalculation was exposed for all to see. The Egyptians

The Lure of Magic: Something for Nothing

379

had believed that the State’s coercion of Israel would remain proitable: the most ejcient allocation of scarce resources. They were called to account by God at the time of the exodus. The tyranny of socialism’s commitment to a world of something for nothing led to a national economic disaster, as it always does. The historical model of socialism is Pharaoh’s Egypt: bureaucratic, tyrannical, and ultimately disastrous for those in charge.4 The events of 1989–91 in Eastern Europe and the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics were merely recapitulations of the Egyptian model. The systems broke down economically, politically, and socially in a massive collapse – remarkably, without much bloodshed.5 The magician seeks to gain his ends by escaping from some of the limits of his own creaturehood. The creation places limits on him that he deeply resents, just as Adam resented the boundary around the forbidden tree. He seeks to escape the requirement that in order to gain a new set of circumstances, he must give up something of value. He wishes to increase his wealth – to improve his circumstances – by holding onto his wealth and augmenting it in ways that do not threaten his wealth. He wants personal economic growth – an increase in the options available to him – without a threat to his net worth. He does not care who provides this for him. He also does not care if others in the economy sufer losses in order to provide his gains. He cares only about his own advancement and the advancement of those working with him. He is convinced that magic will provide these gains. He may even believe that his risk-free gains come at no one’s expense. But whatever his belief regarding the source of his gains, he believes that he does not have to ofer something of value equal to or greater than whatever he expects to receive. Yet even he suspects that there is never something for nothing. He is at risk. He knows that if he performs his invocation incorrectly, he could lose everything. In the face of supernatural power,

4. Gary North, Moses and Pharaoh: Dominion Religion vs. Power Religion (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1985). 5. Marxist politicians, having re-named their parties, returned to favor politically within a few years in most of these Eastern European nations. Eastern Europeans had not been prepared for freedom and responsibility in 1990. The moral erosion and escape from personal responsibility fostered by socialism had done its work. The lure of something for nothing is still very strong.

380

DEUTERONOMY

men know that they are at great risk. They know that the supernatural power invoked has the power to provide beneits from outside of the space-time continuum. The threat of loss is inescapable: such a power can also impose costs from outside of the space-time continuum. Thus, the extreme concern of the magician with formulas and rituals. The details of supernatural rituals become more important than the details of scientiic procedure. They also become less predictable, for the outcome of magic is less predictable. The malevolent whims of the supernatural force invoked are more of a threat to the magician than the outcomes of most of nature’s formulas are to the scientist or the craftsman. The magician seeks to obtain something for nothing. It is not that he seeks personal gain at minimal expenditure. We all do this. What he seeks is access to wealth or power outside the realm of ethical law. He substitutes ritual for ethics. Ritual seems cheaper than ethics. In doing so, he risks something very important for the sake of something far less important. “For what shall it proit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (Mark 8:36).

The Annulment of the Ojce of Prophet The two-fold test of the prophetic ojce was this: accurate predictions of the immediate future and adherence to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The death penalty was mandatory for any prophet whose predictions failed to come true – signs and wonders (Deut. 13:1–5) or any other event (Deut. 18:22) – or who announced the sovereignty of any other god (Deut. 18:20). There was a very high risk for anyone claiming to be a prophet whose words had not been put into his mouth by God. Or so it seemed. But there really wasn’t. A true prophet would come in times of apostasy. But in times of apostasy, the word of God is not honored. The false prophet is honored; the true prophet is not. So, negative civil sanctions would be imposed on the true prophet, which was the case in Israel again and again. Then God’s corporate negative sanctions would come with a vengeance. Jesus Christ’s ministry was the fulillment of the prophetic ojce, which He annulled when He came in judgment in the inal act of corporate negative sanctions against Old Covenant Israel: the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. He knew what was in store for Him and what would then be in store for Israel. He warned the religious rulers that this would be the case, for it had always been the fate of prophets to

The Lure of Magic: Something for Nothing

381

be put under negative sanctions by the rulers of Israel, leaving the nation exposed to God’s wrath. Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because ye build the tombs of the prophets, and garnish the sepulchres of the righteous, And say, If we had been in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets. Wherefore ye be witnesses unto yourselves, that ye are the children of them which killed the prophets. Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers. Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell? Wherefore, behold, I send unto you prophets, and wise men, and scribes: and some of them ye shall kill and crucify; and some of them shall ye scourge in your synagogues, and persecute them from city to city: That upon you may come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel unto the blood of Zacharias son of Barachias, whom ye slew between the temple and the altar. Verily I say unto you, All these things shall come upon this generation. O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not! Behold, your house is left unto you desolate (Matt. 23:29–38).

The Bible’s Prophetic Monopoly The completion of the New Testament era of revelation with the destruction of Jerusalem completed the judicially binding revelation of God. All of the New Testament’s manuscripts were written before the inal revocation of the Old Covenant in A.D. 70. This includes the Book of Revelation.6 This means that the Bible has supplanted the covenantal authority of any man to announce formally, on threat of historically unique supernatural sanctions, the annulment of any biblical law that came prior to his ministry. Similarly, he cannot lawfully announce new universally binding laws in God’s name. This means that the ojce of prophet no longer exists; the Bible alone is the inal word of God. The Old Covenant prophet could lawfully tell kings to change the nation’s laws on threat of immediate national punishment. A true prophet’s ability to perform signs and wonders veriied two

6. Kenneth L. Gentry, Before Jerusalem Fell: Dating the Book of Revelation (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989).

382

DEUTERONOMY

things: 1) his ability to invoke supernatural sanctions to enforce his covenant lawsuit; 2) his ability to see that God would defend the prophet’s lawsuit by imposing speciic sanctions. Such authority belongs to no man today. No man today speaks with the same authority as the completed Bible. No man can lawfully invoke publicly God’s speciic historical sanctions in a speciic time frame. He can only invoke the general covenantal sanctions that apply to the kind of sin under consideration. He can speak prophetically only in the sense of warning men of the sanctions to come; he cannot lawfully invoke sanctions in the way that an Old Covenant prophet could: guaranteed in the immediate future in the name of God. “And Elijah answered and said to the captain of ifty, If I be a man of God, then let ire come down from heaven, and consume thee and thy ifty. And there came down ire from heaven, and consumed him and his ifty” (II Ki. 1:10). This power is no longer granted by God to anyone who speaks in His name. The very possession of power analogous to this is evidence of false prophecy; it is demonic. Such power was necessary to validate a prophet’s word, which was given to him by God only because God’s judicially authoritative revelation had not yet been completed. The prophet was authoritatively inspired. In the world after the inal replacement of the Old Covenant in A.D. 70, no one is authoritatively inspired. If he were, his words would possess formal equality with the Bible, and because of the immediate nature of his inspiration, superior operational authority.

Civil Law The question arises: What is the lawful role of civil government in suppressing false prophecy? Is this law still in force? “And that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams, shall be put to death; because he hath spoken to turn you away from the LORD your God, which brought you out of the land of Egypt, and redeemed you out of the house of bondage, to thrust thee out of the way which the LORD thy God commanded thee to walk in. So shalt thou put the evil away from the midst of thee” (Deut. 13:5). If the ojce of true prophet no longer exists, then what is the covenantal, judicial threat to society of a false prophet? There is none. The threat of God’s corporate negative sanctions no longer exists with respect to false prophecy, since the promise of God’s corporate positive sanctions no longer exists with respect to true

The Lure of Magic: Something for Nothing

383

prophecy, having been annulled by the New Covenant. Then on what basis can a civil government lawfully impose negative sanctions against false prophecy? There seems to be none. The ojce has been annulled. So have the related sanctions. A false prophet was judicially analogous to a private citizen today who makes a policeman’s uniform, dons it, and then tells people what to do in the name of the law. This is illegal: the assertion of civil authority not ordained by a lawful government. The false prophet in Israel made a similar assertion. The sanction against this illegitimate assertion was execution. If there were no ojce of policeman today, there would be no need of civil laws against imitating one. If every police uniform were regarded as merely a funny costume, there would be no justiication for imposing civil sanctions against someone who wears such a costume and then announces his authority in the name of the law. If a costume does not imply sanctions-bearing authority, it is judicially harmless. If it is judicially harmless, it is beyond civil sanctions.7 The Bible is now complete. It serves as the prophet that tells people what is required of them. The voice of God is in print. No other voice can claim equal authority. Thus, there is no judicial role for a prophet in the post-A.D. 70 New Covenant era. There have been no false prophets since A.D. 70 because there have been no true prophets. Today, there are only misguided or corrupt people who claim to be prophets. Their claim is to be dismissed, not by civil law, but by ecclesiastical law. Church members who make such claims, and who demand that Christians do what they say rather than obey lawfully constituted church authorities, are to be placed under negative church sanctions. If they persist in their claims, they may have to be excommunicated. They are not to be executed.

Conclusion There is no way to gain something for nothing apart from the grace of God. Even here, the covenantal limits of creation are still in force. God extends grace to individuals and societies because He revoked grace from His Son, Jesus Christ, in the latter’s sacriice on Calvary. The payment was made by Jesus Christ. By grace, Christ’s 7. A trademarked costume is protected by civil law, but only as a matter of torts: private party vs. private party. The threatened sanctions are a matter of restitution.

384

DEUTERONOMY

representative victory over sin and death is extended by God to men. “For Christ also hath once sufered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the lesh, but quickened by the Spirit” (I Pet. 3:18). That which is a below-cost beneit for the recipients of God’s grace has been paid for. Some men gain something valuable for nothing because Jesus Christ sufered something terrible for righteousness. Thus, the Bible testiies to the covenantal illegitimacy of the economic quest for something for nothing. The magician can perform signs and wonders. What distinguished him from the prophet under the Old Covenant was confession. The prophet warned men that they should not expect something for nothing. They should not expect to keep the fruits of righteousness apart from the continual investment required to sustain it: covenantal faithfulness. The prophet warned men that they should not expect something (fruits) for nothing (sin). If men persisted in the pursuit of something for nothing, they would reap judgment. The day of reckoning would come. This was the prophet’s message. It was a covenantal lawsuit based on an orthodox confession of faith. That a true prophet might perform signs and wonders – what appeared to be something for nothing – was in fact a conirmation of the fact that there is never something for nothing. When men gain something for nothing, they do so only because they are recipients of grace, which rests judicially on supernatural payment by a representative. The magician also was beyond conventional historical limits, but his message was diferent. He performed his miracles in terms of a diferent confession. He promised more of the same – power on demand – for those who conformed to another god. Such a god could not bring permanent below-cost beneits, Moses warned. God would bring negative corporate sanctions on Israel if the nation believed such a prophet. More than this: God would bring negative sanctions on Israel if Israel’s civil government failed to execute false prophets. This covenantal connection between widespread lawbreaking and predictable corporate negative sanctions was the justiication of civil sanctions: the threat of God’s corporate negative sanctions if a public evil was not brought under the threat of civil sanctions. The magistrate acted as a surrogate for God, imposing Bible-mandated negative sanctions on speciic covenant-breakers as

The Lure of Magic: Something for Nothing

385

a way to head of God’s corporate negative sanctions. This is equally true in New Covenant times. The reason why this Mosaic civil sanction is no longer mandated is because the ojce of prophet has ceased. The Bible has replaced the prophet under the New Covenant. No man speaks with authority equal to, and therefore superior to, the Bible. The threat of false prophecy is no longer civil. No one lawfully commands civil rulers in the name of God on threat of God’s immediate negative sanctions. The ojce of prophet has no judicial authority today. Neither does the ojce of false prophet. The State does not need a penalty in order to defend its authority from false prophets.

33 COMMERCE COVENANT CommerceAND and Covenant Ye shall not eat of any thing that dieth of itself: thou shalt give it unto the stranger [geyr] that is in thy gates, that he may eat it; or thou mayest sell it unto an alien [nokree]: for thou art an holy people unto the LORD thy God. Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother’s milk (Deut. 14:21).

This was clearly a land law, for it dealt with unclean meat. All such laws ended with the New Covenant. Peter in a vision was told by God to eat unclean animals (Acts 10). Paul wrote: “As concerning therefore the eating of those things that are ofered in sacriice unto idols, we know that an idol is nothing in the world, and that there is none other God but one” (I Cor. 8:4). I can see no judicial connection between the second sentence and the irst sentence. The irst sentence sets forth a law governing ritually clean animals that died naturally. The second sentence governs a speciic case: seething a kid in its mother’s milk. The second has no speciic economic application that I can see. The irst does. Theologically, these are separate verses. There is no reason given in the Bible for either of these prohibitions. This makes it dijcult to identify the theocentric focus of either prohibition. The irst prohibition cannot have had anything to do with health, since the law speciied that strangers in the land were allowed to eat such meat. God would not deliberately have threatened the health of a resident alien. To call biologically contaminated meat a gift would have been a terrible misuse of language. The Hebrew word for “gift” here is found throughout the Old Testament. God’s gifts to mankind and to Israel were in no way polluted or threatening; neither was this gift. So, this law was based on something other than health considerations.

386

Commerce and Covenant

387

The Mosaic law prohibited the eating of animals that had died naturally. The sanctions attached to this prohibition were mild. “And every soul that eateth that which died of itself, or that which was torn with beasts, whether it be one of your own country, or a stranger, he shall both wash his clothes, and bathe himself in water, and be unclean until the even: then shall he be clean” (Lev. 17:15). Because this law applied to the resident alien, it was not exclusively ecclesiastical, since the uncircumcised stranger or “protected stranger”1 [geyr] did not belong to the congregation. But there were no civil penalties mentioned. So, with respect to the stranger, the law against eating such meat was merely a suggestion. The matter of ritual cleanliness did not afect him. If he ever did approach the tabernacle, which was the only place where ritual uncleanliness was a threat to him or to the nation, it would have been to ofer sacriice (Num. 15:29). In this case, he was under the purity restrictions. Otherwise, he was not holy to the degree that an Israelite was, so the threat of uncleanliness was of no importance to him, just so long as he did not attempt to approach the tabernacle, thereby committing a boundary violation. He was holy in the sense of being set apart as a resident in Israel, a person living under Mosaic civil law. He was set apart to this degree: he was a beneiciary of the common grace of God that overlowed within the land’s boundaries because of the special grace shown to Israel. He was set apart – holy – by God in a way that a resident of another land was not. He could eat such meat, but it was not legal to sell it to him. It had to be a gift. The presumption of the Mosaic law was that a stranger in economic need was threatened by poverty more than Israel was threatened by a stranger who ate such meat. It was lawful for an Israelite to make a gift of prohibited meat to him. For a the price of a ritual washing, he could relieve himself of any ritual pollution extending beyond evening. If the stranger had any qualms about eating such meat, he could sell it to a non-resident alien [nokree], just as an Israelite could.

Sacred and Profane I have covered the topics of sacred, profane, and common at some length in Chapter 6 of my Leviticus commentary, and at greater length 1. Jacob Milgrom, The JPS Torah Commentary: Numbers (New York: Jewish Publication Society, 1990), p. 398.

388

DEUTERONOMY

in the electronic version, Boundaries and Dominion. I discussed why the sacred can be profaned by a boundary violation, but the common cannot be. It is the sacred character of something that creates the possibility of a ritual boundary violation. We cannot profane something that is common. A holy object is to be protected from violation. The closer a person came to the holy of holies, the more dangerous he became: to himself and to Israel. God did not tolerate anyone except the high priest to enter the holy of holies, and then only once a year (Ex. 30:10; Lev. 16:34). A boundary violation in this case threatened the nation. God might depart from the holy land of Israel. What was the holy object in question in this verse? The Israelite? The meat? The land? The covenant? The tabernacle? Another law points to the status of the Israelite as holy: the law governing the clean animal slain in the ield by wild beasts. “And ye shall be holy men unto me: neither shall ye eat any lesh that is torn of beasts in the ield; ye shall cast it to the dogs” (Ex. 22:31). The meat of an animal that had died of sickness, old age, or an accident was not holy. It was not to be set aside to God for His exclusive use. On the contrary, it was to be consumed inside the holy land only by two classes of foreigners: resident aliens [geyr] and foreign visitors [nokree]. The Israelite could not eat it, but he could touch it in order to transport it. If he touched it, he became unclean (Lev. 11:39), but this was not much of a burden. To cleanse himself ritually, he merely had to wash himself and his clothes. “But all other lying creeping things, which have four feet, shall be an abomination unto you. And for these ye shall be unclean: whosoever toucheth the carcase of them shall be unclean until the even. And whosoever beareth ought of the carcase of them shall wash his clothes, and be unclean until the even” (Lev. 11:23–25). “And he that beareth the carcase of them shall wash his clothes, and be unclean until the even: they are unclean unto you” (Lev. 11:28). If an Israelite was not planning to approach the tabernacle, his unclean status did not matter. The Israelite could pick up the dead animal and transport it to a commercial center. He could then sell it to a visiting foreigner. He could give it to a resident alien who was willing to live under God’s civil laws. This alien was the equivalent of a refugee. He was not a citizen, nor was he a member of the congregation, but he was a lawful member of the community.

Commerce and Covenant

389

This indicates two degrees of holiness: the Israelite and the resident alien. It also indicates non-holy status: the non-resident alien. The resident alien was entitled to special consideration. He could not lawfully be charged interest when he sought an emergency loan 2 (Lev. 25:35). It was legal to charge interest to a nokree (Deut. 23:20). In this case, the resident alien could be given an asset that was illegal for an Israelite to use for himself. The non-resident alien could be charged. Why was there a distinction? If an Israelite wanted to proit from his dead animal, he could sell it to a non-resident alien. He could not proit from a resident alien. He could not enter into commerce in this instance with a resident alien. This would have tended to direct the prohibited meat into commerce. Most people prefer proit to charity most of the time. The meat of animals that had died of natural causes would have tended to wind up on the tables of travellers and foreign businessmen. The living animal had been ritually clean, no matter who owned it, but it was prohibited to Israelites because of the way it had died. So, the diference in holiness had to be in the judicial status of its original owner. The Israelite was a priest to the nations. He was under God’s national covenant. The resident alien was voluntarily under the laws of the land on a permanent basis, but he had not sworn a covenantal oath to God. The visiting stranger was under the law only temporarily. The relationship between the person and the land seems to have been the distinguishing issue here. The Israelite was tied to the land covenantally. The resident alien was tied to the land residentially. The stranger was tied to the land commercially. The commercial tie was seen as having no judicially permanent status. There was no oath-bound bonding in commerce. This is a general principle of biblical economics: the transitory character of commerce. It possesses no covenantal aspect; it is contractual, not covenantal. The holiness of the land of Mosaic Israel was presumed by this law. The degree of holiness of people was tied to the permanence of their connection to the land. The land was holy, so the meat could not be consumed by those who had an oath-bound connection to the land. In the mouths of the permanent residents of God’s holy

2. Gary North, Tools of Dominion: The Case Laws of Exodus (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), pp. 709–11.

390

DEUTERONOMY

land, the meat became profane. In the mouths of the less permanent resident aliens, it became profane if it had been purchased. In the mouths of non-residents, it was not profane at all. The most pure individual could not eat the meat because of his permanent connection to the land. The less pure individual could not buy the meat because of his voluntary connection to the land. The impure individual could buy the meat because of his commercial connection to the land. With the coming of the New Covenant, the land of Israel began to lose its covenantal status. With the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, it lost it completely. There is no longer any holy land except in a travel brochure – a distinctly commercial artifact. The non-holy status of the land has not been changed by the formation of the State of Israel in 1948, contrary to Zionists and dispensationalists. God dwells equally with all of His chosen people today; they approach Him judicially only in oaths and sacraments.3 Land ownership in the New Covenant has moved from the legal status of holy to that of commerce. While land ownership may possess special characteristics because of the commitment that men sometimes have to a family residence, their constant movement from place to place has undermined this traditional commitment. In the United States, where one-ifth of the population moves each year, land ownership is no longer widely regarded as fundamentally diferent from the ownership of other forms of wealth. The mobility of people has undermined any lingering sense of the holiness of land. Men move today in terms of market demand, and this has led to the psychological de-sacralization of land. This is less true today in Europe and parts of Asia, but as the free market extends its inluence, mobility replaces permanence. It also replaces geographical community. Neither the local geographical community nor the land retains men’s permanent allegiance. Consumer demand extends its sovereignty as men 3. God has a special protecting relationship with the Jews as self-professed covenantal heirs of Old Covenant Israel insofar as He preserves their separate identity in history. He does this in order to fulfill Paul’s prophecy regarding Old Covenant Israel, the branch which God has cut of: “And they also, if they abide not still in unbelief, shall be grafed in: for God is able to graf them in again. For if thou wert cut out of the olive tree which is wild by nature, and wert grafed contrary to nature into a good olive tree: how much more shall these, which be the natural branches, be grafed into their own olive tree?” (Rom. 11:23–24). But these disinherited heirs of Moses can reclaim their share of the inheritance only by becoming Christians and joining Christ’s church.

Commerce and Covenant

391

seek to maximize their incomes. Consumer demand is constantly changing; so are men’s residences.4

Commerce and Purity The biological purity of meat was not the judicial question here. Neither was the ritual purity of the meat. The ritual purity of the eater was. Because the eater’s degree of holiness was based on his degree of permanence in the holy land, the meat was available for limited commerce. The market value of the meat would be determined by the market demand for it. The Israelite owner could act as the economic agent of two kinds of aliens: resident and non-resident. The seller could not legally accept an economic bid by a resident alien. The Israelite decided which alien would receive the carcase of the animal. Charity had to govern the transfer of ownership to the resident alien; commerce would govern the transfer to the non-resident alien. The purity of the land became an economic advantage to the non-resident alien: subsidized meat. He would be the only legal bidder in the auction for this kind of meat. This is another way of saying that it paid foreigners to do business inside the boundaries of Israel. The non-resident alien had an advantage over the residents of the land: monopolistic access to the free market for this form of meat. The purity of the land therefore served as an economic barrier to entry into resident alien status. A non-resident alien would forfeit his legal access to this segment of the meat market if he decided to take up permanent residence. He might occasionally be given free meat, but he could no longer bid commercially for this form of meat. This was a cost of becoming a resident. Yet the imposition of this cost was unique: the loss of an indirect subsidy. A nation that ofered an indirect subsidy to non-resident foreigners was unique in the ancient world. God did not waste this form of meat, yet He did impose tight holiness restrictions on His people. The animal would not be totally 4. Part of this mobility is a product of government-guaranteed long-term loans in which part of the risk of default by the debtor is borne by taxpayers rather than lenders. This coercive arrangement has subsidized mobility and has undermined community. So have government-funded highway systems.

392

DEUTERONOMY

worthless just because it died of natural causes. There would be a market for its meat. This saved the Israelite from a total loss. But this law did impose some loss on the Israelites. There were economic costs of holiness. Concerns about holiness did not eliminate the market in this case. Did they eliminate the market in other cases? What about unclean animals? Were they under similar restrictions: total for Israelites, partial for resident aliens, and non-existent for non-residents? Could an Israelite lawfully sell pork to non-resident aliens? I think the purity laws were designed for the sake of the land. The degree of one’s legal connection to the land marked the degree of restriction in the case of the animal that had died naturally. Such deaths would occur from time to time. The economic question was: How to minimize this loss without compromising the purity of the land? The law allowing sales to non-resident aliens reduced the risk to Israelites of raising ritually clean animals. There would at least be some local demand for such dead beasts. But had this speciic limitation on unavoidable losses been applied generally, it would have led to the commercialization of unclean foods. Had it been legal for Israelites to sell pork to non-resident aliens, some Israelites would have begun commercial ventures for this purpose. The land would have become illed with unclean beasts, thereby increasing the likelihood of prohibited contacts by Israelites with such beasts. So, my assessment of this law is as follows: in order to reduce the economic loss imposed by the unforeseen death of a clean animal, the Mosaic law made two exceptions to the rule against eating ritually clean animals that died naturally. This reduced economic risk in the clean animal industry. But the Mosaic law did not encourage the production of unclean animals by opening up a market for them. Commerce was not supposed to increase the number of ritually impure animals; it was merely to decrease the economic risk of an unforeseen loss of a clean animal. This law must have increased the slaughter of sick but ritually clean animals. The owner’s risk of losing access to the broader commercial market increased as a clean animal aged or grew sick. He knew that if it died, the market for its remains would shrink dramatically. To avoid the requirement of providing non-resident aliens with an economic subsidy – reduced competition on the demand side – the Israelite had to kill the animal before it died of natural causes. Also, a weak animal would become easy prey of wild beasts.

Commerce and Covenant

393

If they got to the animal irst, only the dogs would beneit. It should be clear that the economics of the Mosaic law encouraged the slaying of clean animals. The holiness of the land led to the slaying of ritually clean animals. Blood would be shed for the beneit of the righteous. The blood of animals would be poured into the land. “Only ye shall not eat the blood; ye shall pour it upon the earth as water” (Deut. 12:16).5

The Annulment of the Mosaic Land Laws The fact that meat which was prohibited to an Israelite could lawfully be sold to a non-resident alien indicates that this law was a land law. He who had no legal attachment to the land had legal access to a commercial market for such meat. The purity of the land was not threatened by the consumption of such meat by aliens. The holiness of the land was not threatened in this case by the eating habits of those with no covenantal connection to the land. This is another piece of evidence that the Mosaic food laws were land laws, not health laws or laws of moral purity. I have developed this thesis in my commentary on Leviticus.6 The food laws protected the land’s holy status as God’s place of residence. These laws tended to keep foreigners out of the nation who might otherwise settle there. Food laws were barriers to entry. People had to change their diets when they entered Israel. People do not like to change their diets. It takes a strong-willed person to make a break with his nation’s culinary tradition. If this break must become permanent, it takes considerable will. The cost of maintaining an imported diet was high. It was legal, but the availability of prohibited meat7 would have been reduced below what it would have been, had there been no dietary laws. Those who were not covenanted with the God of Israel would have had either an emotionally dijcult time adjusting their diets or a costly time for not adjusting. The holy status of the land of Israel ended with the advent of the church. Jesus had predicted this to the Jews: “Therefore say I unto you, The kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof” (Matt. 21:43). This prophecy 5. See also Leviticus 7:26–27; 17:10–14; 19:26; Deuteronomy 12:23; 15:23. 6. Gary North, Leviticus: An Economic Commentary (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), pp. 340–47. 7. It would have been salted or smoked; there was no refrigeration.

394

DEUTERONOMY

was deinitively fulilled with His death and resurrection: the giving of the Great Commission to the church (Matt. 28:18–20). It was extended progressively after the sending of the Holy Spirit to the church (Acts 2). It was inally fulilled with the fall of Jerusalem, when the temple sacriices ended forever.

The Annulment of the Mosaic Food Laws The Mosaic food laws had no connection with health considerations. God had not subjected Noah and Abraham to increased health risks by allowing them to eat whatever they wanted. God’s covenant with Abraham looked forward to the conquest of the land, but it did not impose either land laws or food laws. The food laws were holiness laws established to reinforce the holiness of the land. This is why they were announced by Moses, not by Abraham or Noah. After the fall of Jerusalem, these laws were inally annulled. But Jesus had already announced their deinitive demise. “Not that which goeth into the mouth deileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this deileth a man” (Matt. 15:11). Peter had received a revelation from God regarding the deinitive annulment of the food laws. On the morrow, as they went on their journey, and drew nigh unto the city, Peter went up upon the housetop to pray about the sixth hour: And he became very hungry, and would have eaten: but while they made ready, he fell into a trance, And saw heaven opened, and a certain vessel descending unto him, as it had been a great sheet knit at the four corners, and let down to the earth: Wherein were all manner of fourfooted beasts of the earth, and wild beasts, and creeping things, and fowls of the air. And there came a voice to him, Rise, Peter; kill, and eat. But Peter said, Not so, Lord; for I have never eaten any thing that is common or unclean. And the voice spake unto him again the second time, What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common. This was done thrice: and the vessel was received up again into heaven (Acts 10:9–16).

Peter understood completely what this revelation meant. As he announced to Cornelius, the Roman centurion: “Ye know how that it is an unlawful thing for a man that is a Jew to keep company, or come unto one of another nation; but God hath shewed me that I should not call any man common or unclean” (Acts 10:28). This was an announcement by God to the world that the land of Israel had

Commerce and Covenant

395

deinitively lost its separate judicial status. But Peter forgot, and Paul later called it to his attention. “But when Peter was come to Antioch, I withstood him to the face, because he was to be blamed. For before that certain came from James, he did eat with the Gentiles: but when they were come, he withdrew and separated himself, fearing them which were of the circumcision. And the other Jews dissembled likewise with him; insomuch that Barnabas also was carried away with their dissimulation. But when I saw that they walked not uprightly according to the truth of the gospel, I said unto Peter before them all, If thou, being a Jew, livest after the manner of Gentiles, and not as do the Jews, why compellest thou the Gentiles to live as do the Jews?” (Gal. 2:11–14). Calvin was adamant about the abolition of the Mosaic food laws. In his commentary on Acts 15, he ridiculed those who would revive any aspect of the food laws. Calvin was a master of invective, and we see it here: As touching meats, after the abrogating of the law, God pronounceth that they are all pure and clean. If, on the other side, there start up a mortal man, making a new diference, forbidding certain, he taketh unto himself the authority and power of God by sacrilegious boldness. Of this stamp were the old heretics, Montanus, Priscillianus, the Donatists, the Tatians, and all the Encratites. Afterwards the Pope, to the end he might bind all those sects in a bundle, made a law concerning meats. And there is no cause why the patrons of this impiety should babble that they do not imagine any uncleanness in meats, but that men are forbidden to eat lesh upon certain days, to tame the lesh. For seeing they eat such meats as are most it, both for delicacy and also for riot, why do they abstain from eating bacon, as from some great ofence, save only because they imagine that that is unclean and polluted which is forbidden by the law of their idol? With like pride doth the tyranny of the Pope rage in all parts of life; for there is nothing wherein he layeth not snares to entangle the miserable consciences of men. But let us trust to the heavenly oracle, and freely despise all his inhibitions. We must always ask the mouth of the Lord, that we may thereby be assured what we may lawfully do; forasmuch as it was not lawful even for Peter to make that profane which was lawful by the Word of God.8

Anti-bacon babblers: Calvin had no toleration for such as these! Since Vatican II (1963–65), Roman Catholics have been allowed to 8. John Calvin, Commentary upon the Acts of the Apostles, 2 vols. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker, [1560] 1979), I, pp. 422–23.

396

DEUTERONOMY

eat meat on Fridays. The last traces of “taste not, touch not” (Col. 2:21) were removed. Any attempt to revive the Mosaic food laws for any reason is a move leading out of the church. The only food laws today apply to the Lord’s Supper, a mandatory meal for Christians that is legally barred to non-Christians.

Conclusion The law allowing the sale of certain meats to non-resident aliens reduced the burden of an unforeseen loss due to the unexpected death of a clean animal. This preserved the holiness of the land by placing restrictions on Israelites and resident aliens. The non-resident alien received an indirect economic subsidy because of this law. He could buy what Israelites and resident aliens could not. The resident alien who bought such meat from an Israelite committed no crime. The Israelite did commit an ecclesiastical infraction. With respect to the locus of law enforcement, the food laws were to be enforced by priests and family members; they were not civil laws. They had civil implications – citizenship through church membership – but not civil sanctions. If a non-resident alien sold such meat to a resident alien, neither of them committed an infraction, for neither was under the ecclesiastical covenant. This law was ecclesiastical, not civil. No civil penalties were speciied. If an alien ate pork, the holiness of the land was not threatened. But ecclesiastical law did restrict what covenant-keeping Israelites could do with meat. This in turn afected market prices, which would have made unclean meat more expensive by reducing its production in Israel. Prices were afected in Israel by the dietary laws, but there is no indication that these laws applied to resident aliens, other than the general prohibition of eating blood (Lev. 17:13), which was a Noachic law (Gen. 9:4) that is still in force (Acts 15:20, 29). This would explain why there were herds of pigs in Jesus’ time (Matt. 8:30–32). Israelites could not produce unclean meat commercially, but resident aliens could. Resident aliens had faced a major problem when the jubilee law was enforced (which may have been never) in pre-exilic times: they could not buy permanent ownership of rural land. When enforced, this law would have tended to eliminate the permanent commercialization of unclean animals. The jubilee law surely would have made the development of permanent herds of such beasts unlikely, for the resident alien could not have counted on access to rural land after the jubilee. Only in the post-

Commerce and Covenant

397

exilic era, when resident aliens at the time of Israel’s return gained lawful permanent access to the land (Ezek. 47:22–23), would such herds have become more likely.9

9. In the modern State of Israel, pork is produced by Kibbutz “X,” but it is not marketed as pork. It is marketed either as penguin or duck. Christian Arabs also produce pork, which is sold through non-kosher butcher shops; Jewish meatpackers act as intermediaries. Felix Kessler, “And on This Farm, He Had a Penguin, With an Oink, Oink. . .”, Wall Street Journal (Aug. 2, 1979), p. 1.

34 TITHES OFofCELEBRATION Tithes Celebration Thou shalt truly tithe all the increase of thy seed, that the ield bringeth forth year by year. And thou shalt eat before the LORD thy God, in the place which he shall choose to place his name there, the tithe of thy corn, of thy wine, and of thine oil, and the irstlings of thy herds and of thy locks; that thou mayest learn to fear the LORD thy God always. And if the way be too long for thee, so that thou art not able to carry it; or if the place be too far from thee, which the LORD thy God shall choose to set his name there, when the LORD thy God hath blessed thee: Then shalt thou turn it into money, and bind up the money in thine hand, and shalt go unto the place which the LORD thy God shall choose: And thou shalt bestow that money for whatsoever thy soul lusteth after, for oxen, or for sheep, or for wine, or for strong drink, or for whatsoever thy soul desireth: and thou shalt eat there before the LORD thy God, and thou shalt rejoice, thou, and thine household, And the Levite that is within thy gates; thou shalt not forsake him; for he hath no part nor inheritance with thee. At the end of three years thou shalt bring forth all the tithe of thine increase the same year, and shalt lay it up within thy gates: And the Levite, (because he hath no part nor inheritance with thee,) and the stranger, and the fatherless, and the widow, which are within thy gates, shall come, and shall eat and be satisied; that the LORD thy God may bless thee in all the work of thine hand which thou doest (Deut. 14:22–29).

The theocentric focus of this law is stated in the text: “that thou mayest learn to fear the LORD thy God always” (v. 23). Men fear nature, especially in agricultural societies. They seek ways to reduce this fear. “Save for a rainy day,” we are told. We trust in our own devices. God told Israel that under His covenant, there would be plenty of sunny days ahead for covenant-keepers. He would provide the

398

Tithes of Celebration

399

capital necessary to fund their celebrations. The discipline of tithing was designed to acknowledge their fear of God and reduce their fear of nature and history. The tithes of celebration were especially useful in this regard. They were a form of holy wastefulness. This wastefulness included the consumption of intoxicating liquors.1 It was “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we live.” I have quoted the entire passage because there may be confusion if it is not seen as a unit. There is already sujcient confusion when it is seen as a unit. Sorting out the implications of Israel’s system of tithes is a dijcult process, as we shall see.

National and Local Festivals The initial tithe mentioned in this text was to be consumed by families and Levites at a central location. The central feasts were not tribal afairs. They were familistic, ecclesiastical, and national. Was this feast to be funded by a second tithe in addition to what was owed yearly to the Levites? The text indicates that it was. This tithe was used to fund the family’s expenses at one of the three annual festivals, presumably Booths (“Tabernacles”), the post-harvest feast. There was a second tithe of celebration: a third-year tithe. This festival took place locally. It substituted for the festival in Jerusalem. Levites were invited, but so were strangers, widows, and orphans. The presence of strangers indicates that it was not an ecclesiastical festival. Was it civil? Or was it something else entirely? Until we know what agency enforced it – which the text does not say – we cannot be sure. These tithes were imposed by God. If the nation obeyed Him and paid them, He promised to bless them (v. 29). The question is: Were these civil taxes? God did not threaten to impose negative corporate sanctions on Israel if the State refused to impose penalties for anyone’s failure to tithe and participate in the festivals. Who, then, was the victim? For this to have been a matter of civil government, the invited attendees would have had to possess a lawful civil claim on other people’s wealth. Not to have brought one’s tithe to the festival would have been a matter of theft. There would have been some system of State-imposed restitution available to the victims. But

1. Strong drink was an intoxicant.

400

DEUTERONOMY

the primary victims were the families that owed God the money. The lion’s share of these expenditures was to be consumed by the actual wealth producers. The judicial problem here is to identify the earthly victims who could lawfully bring a lawsuit against the non-tithers. If these were widows, strangers, and orphans in general, how could they prove damages in particular? If this was impossible, on what judicial basis could the State have acted on their behalf to collect from non-tithers in general to allocate to speciic claimants?

Celebration in Jerusalem This law stated that a tithe on the land was to be eaten in a central city (v. 24). All land-owning and land-leasing Israelites were required to journey to Jerusalem, presumably at the post-harvest feast of Booths, in order to celebrate together. They had to bring a tithe of their crops, which they would consume at the feast. To avoid carrying heavy crops to a distant city, and also to allow them to eat other crops brought in from other regions, they were allowed to sell their crops in their home city and buy whatever they wanted in Jerusalem. Presumably, part of the tithe inanced the journey. If not, then this was a truly heavy inancial burden. This celebration was to serve as a reminder that their wealth did not depend on their eforts alone. This additional tithe might otherwise have been invested, but it had to be consumed. Men were asked to place their faith in God more than in thrift. The celebration declared: “There’s a lot more where that came from!” This was a rural land-based tithe in addition to the normal tithe on all forms of net income. The tithe that applied to all income had to go to the Levites as their inheritance (Num. 18:21). It was not left in the hands of the people who had produced it. This Levitical tithe I refer to as the irst tithe, following rabbinic tradition. It was Levi’s inheritance. In contrast was the second tithe: the tithe of national celebration. While the Levite had to be invited by land-owning families to celebrate (v. 27), he was not entitled to all of it or even the bulk of it. This was not the case in the irst tithe. Rabbis have concluded that this was a second tithe.2 2. Herbert Danby, note to Maaser Sheni (“Second Tithe”), which is a section of the First Division, Zeraim (“Seeds”), The Mishnah (New York: Oxford University Press, [1933] 1987), p. 73n.

Tithes of Celebration

401

The First Tithe This was the tithe owed to the Levites as the tribe without an inheritance in land. “But the tithes of the children of Israel, which they ofer as an heave ofering unto the LORD, I have given to the Levites to inherit: therefore I have said unto them, Among the children of Israel they shall have no inheritance” (Num. 18:24). It was owed to them because they had no landed inheritance in rural areas. Their legal claim on the income of others was based on their lack of any original claim on the land. All net income in the land, except for the income of priests and Levites when they were serving the Lord in ecclesiastical callings, was subjected to the irst tithe.3 The seventh year was a year of simultaneous debt release throughout the land (Deut. 15). In that year, the land was to lie fallow (Lev. 25:4–5). A tithe was owed on whatever grew of its own accord and was harvested. It was owed on new animals born during the year. It was owed by those who derived income from sources other than agriculture. Any attempt to explain the tithes of celebration as substitutes for the irst tithe is an argument in favor of the expropriation of the Levites’ lawful inheritance. They had no inheritance in land, but they had a substitute inheritance: the tithe. To argue that these other tithes were substitutes is to argue that the Levites were disinherited by this law. They would have had to forfeit their income in order to make celebrations possible for land owners. Clearly, a tithe of celebration was an additional tithe. The questions are: Who had to pay it? Who enforced it?

The Second Tithe The second tithe was a tithe solely on agricultural output. The text is clear on this. “Thou shalt truly tithe all the increase of thy seed, that the ield bringeth forth year by year. And thou shalt eat before the LORD thy God, in the place which he shall choose to place his name there, the tithe of thy corn, of thy wine, and of thine oil, and the irstlings of thy herds and of thy locks. . . .” Those who lived in cities did not pay it. All income not derived from agriculture was 3. Gary North, Sanctions and Dominion: An Economic Commentary on Numbers (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1997), ch. 10.

402

DEUTERONOMY

exempt. Agricultural land owners paid the second tithe in ive out of seven years. The second tithe had to be consumed in the central city of worship. This is why the prohibition in Deuteronomy 12:17–18 against eating the tithe in one’s own gates has to refer to the national tithe of celebration: “Thou mayest not eat within thy gates the tithe of thy corn, or of thy wine, or of thy oil, or the irstlings of thy herds or of thy lock, nor any of thy vows which thou vowest, nor thy freewill oferings, or heave ofering of thine hand: But thou must eat them before the LORD thy God in the place which the LORD thy God shall choose, thou, and thy son, and thy daughter, and thy manservant, and thy maidservant, and the Levite that is within thy gates: and thou shalt rejoice before the LORD thy God in all that thou puttest thine hands unto.” If the central city was too far away for a family to carry the tithed goods, the family could sell the goods for money. This money had to be spent on food and drink at the celebration (v. 25). The rabbis concluded that these agricultural goods could be redeemed lawfully only by an added payment of one-ifth to the Levites.4 This rule is not found in this text. The rabbis appealed to what appear to be similar texts, such as this one: “And all the tithe of the land, whether of the seed of the land, or of the fruit of the tree, is the LORD’S: it is holy unto the LORD. And if a man will at all redeem ought of his tithes, he shall add thereto the ifth part thereof” (Lev. 27:30–31). The rabbis were incorrect. The law in Leviticus governed an item owed to God, such as an animal, that the family wanted to keep. For the privilege of buying back what was God’s, the family paid a 20 percent premium to the Levite. This was money paid in lieu of his receiving the designated commodity. This was not the situation with the second-year tithe. There was no element of redemption in this tithe. This tithe was under the authority of the family, not the Levite. The family was not redeeming something that belonged to God. It was merely changing the form in which the tithe would be carried to Jerusalem. The Levites had a claim to part of the second tithe: participation in meals. Strangers, widows, and orphans did not.

4. Danby, op. cit., p. 73.

Tithes of Celebration

403

The Demand for Money When widely obeyed, this law would have led to an increase in the demand for money locally in national festival years. The demand for money would have increased at a higher rate in regions farther away from the central city because of the higher transportation costs. The price of agricultural goods would have been lower than in Jerusalem in these distant areas, which is another way of saying that there was an increased demand for money locally. At the same time, demand for agricultural goods would have increased in the central city because travellers brought their money into the city to buy the food consumed during the celebration: “More money chasing fewer goods.” The fall in the price of agricultural goods in the outlying regions and the parallel rise in the money price of such goods in the central city would have produced proit opportunities for specialists in transportation. They would have been able to buy goods in the distant regions in order to move them to the central city and sell them to the attendees. They would have “bought low and sold high.” Moving goods from places where they are in low demand to a place where they are in high demand is an important market service. Families would have estimated which was more proitable to them: carrying the bulky goods to Jerusalem vs. paying money for them there.

The Third Tithe This tithe was long ago called the third tithe (Tobit 1:8). Nevertheless, Jewish commentators have regarded the second and third 5 tithes as one. This interpretation is incorrect. There was a third tithe. It was diferent in at least two ways from the second tithe. First, the celebration was held locally. Second, non-citizens in the community were invited in to celebrate, not just the Levites. “At the end of three years thou shalt bring forth all the tithe of thine increase the same year, and shalt lay it up within thy gates: And the Levite, (because he hath no part nor inheritance with thee,) and the stranger, 5. John Gill, An Exposition of the Old Testament, 4 vols. (London: Collingridge, [1763] 1852), I, p. 745. Gill had greater knowledge of the primary sources of early Judaism than any other Christian commentator, before or since. Alfred Edersheim, a convert from Judaism, knew the sources, but he did not write a Bible commentary.

404

DEUTERONOMY

and the fatherless, and the widow, which are within thy gates, shall come, and shall eat and be satisied; that the LORD thy God may bless thee in all the work of thine hand which thou doest” (vv. 28–29). This was a tithe of celebration, but it was communal rather than national. It was a tithe for the sake of the judicially dispossessed. There may have been a third distinction having to do with the tax base: a tithe on any increase, not just agricultural. This depends on the meaning of this verse: “At the end of three years thou shalt bring forth all the tithe of thine increase the same year, and shalt lay it up within thy gates” (v. 28). If we interpret these words as governed by the context of the second tithe, then this was a substitute for the second tithe. But the substitution clearly was not strict. The festival was held locally. Local residents other than Levites were invited in. Town residents were more likely than not to be members of the same tribe as the rural land owners who lived in the surrounding area. I regard this celebration as tribal. It was not national. The question arises: Did the tithe requirement apply to all income? If we see this tithe as primarily tribal, and if we also see the cities as part of the tribes’ inheritance, then the tithe may have been required on all forms of net income. On the other hand, if this is interpreted within the context of the introductory verses, it applied only to agriculture. This may seem like a small matter, but it is central to understanding welfare economics from the biblical perspective. If the tithes of celebration were tithes exclusively on the land, imposed because the land was not part of the Levites’ original inheritance and from which they were excluded by the jubilee law, then the State may have had a legitimate role in enforcing these tithes. It was a matter of defending the original agreed-upon terms of the allocation of private property at the time of the conquest. But the celebration tithes were consumed mainly by the producers. The Levites had a claim only on a small portion of this wealth. Also, the third tithe went in part to subsidize attendance by non-Levites. On what legal basis did they possess a claim on the income of anyone else? What legal principle undergirded this law, assuming that this law mandated State wealth-redistribution? If the State was authorized to enforce the third tithe on land owners, then the Mosaic law did authorize coercive wealth-redistribution, although extremely small, in this instance.

Tithes of Celebration

405

The Judicially Defenseless In the third year, the tithe of celebration was shared with those residents who were not eligible to be citizens in the local tribe. This tithe is generally referred to as the poor tithe, but a prosperous stranger or widow was also to be invited. The rabbinic assumption was that these four categories – widows, orphans, strangers, and Levites – would have been poor, but there is no reason to assume that Levites were poor. The correct classiication of these attendees is judicial, not economic. The stranger and the orphan (a minor) were not eligible to serve in the Lord’s army. They could therefore not be citizens. The Levite had no inheritance in the land. He could not be a citizen in the tribe in which his city was located unless it was a Levitical city. He served in a separate military unit, one which defended the Ark of the Covenant.6 The widow, though the head of a household, was not eligible to serve in the army. She was an heir only through her husband and her children when they reached adulthood. She could not hold civil ojce because she was not under the family authority of a man who was himself eligible to serve in the army and therefore as a judge.7 While any of these guests at the festival may have been poor, the criterion for being invited to the festival was not their poverty. Rather, it was their lack of judicial standing as citizens eligible to hold civil ojce in the local tribe. Thus, to call this third-year tithe a poor tithe is incorrect, although Jewish tradition so labels it.

The Levites’ Lawful Inheritance The Levites had no landed inheritance in Israel. The other tribes did. The tithe on the land was the Levites’ inheritance. This leads me to a conclusion: anything that undermined the tithe on the land undermined Levi’s inheritance. If the interpretation of any Mosaic law led to the legalization of an exemption from any of the tithes, this interpretation had the economic efect of disinheriting Levi. If those who enjoyed the fruit of the land could gain a competitive advantage over other land owners by legally refusing to pay 6. North, Sanctions and Dominion, pp. 32–38. 7. I conclude that Deborah served as a judge because she was married and not a widow.

406

DEUTERONOMY

their tithes, then the Levites would be steadily disinherited. If a leaseholder or land owner could legally have retained an extra 20 percent per year, six years out of seven, and use this money to invest in tools, seed, or whatever, stewardship over the land would have been exercised increasingly by non-tithers. This would have been true in the case of covenant-breaking Israelites as well as covenant-breaking resident aliens. This leads to a very important conclusion, one which I had not seen before I began interpreting the laws governing the tithes of celebration. There was an implicit clause built into God’s original grant of land: the primary tithe of the land belonged to Levi. This was Levi’s inheritance. This clause guaranteed that Levi could not be disinherited by covenant-breakers who refused to pay their tithes on the land’s produce. Because the other tribes inherited rural land, Levi inherited the irst tithe on this land. Also, Levites lawfully participated in the tithes of celebration. This was a matter of civil law because it was a matter of tribal inheritance. It was not a matter of church-State relations. The State enforces contracts. Under the Mosaic covenant prior to the exile, the appropriate civil sanction for refusing to pay tithes on the land must have been the disinheritance of the tithe-protester. This sanction was applied on the basis of Levi’s lawful inheritance. It was not a civil enforcement of an ecclesiastical obligation. It was a civil enforcement of Levi’s tribal inheritance. The judicial issue was Levi’s inheritance, not the theological commitment of the land’s steward. My conclusion is that the resident alien could lease rural land, but he had to pay the irst tithe to the Levites. The original owner could not alienate – literally – Levi’s inheritance by leasing his land to an alien. Levi had an enforceable legal claim on a portion of the output of the land. This solves the problem of the irst tithe. It does not solve the many problems of the second and third tithes. Were the tithes of celebration part of Levi’s inheritance? Part of these tithes was. The Levites had to be invited to the festivals. The legal question is this: Could the economic portion of this obligation have been met without the participation of the land’s steward in the festival? That is, could he have paid the Levites a portion of these tithes, thereby fulilling his obligation? The law does not say. We must guess. It is not an easy guess.

Tithes of Celebration

407

The Levites had a right to attend the celebrations, i.e., participation in the life of the nation, which included celebrations. Did this mean that the Levites had a right to celebrate in the presence of those who served as the land’s stewards? Was there more to their claims beyond money for food? If we answer yes, then the non-Israelite lease holder or excommunicated Israelite had to attend the celebrations on threat of civil sanctions. What sanctions? The law does not say. Perhaps it was the forcible removal of the leaseholder from the property. If so, this would have been a very costly penalty, at least during Israel’s agricultural phase. Who was authorized to enforce the claims of the Levites? If this law was strictly ecclesiastical, then the Levites had this right: excommunication. This certainly would have been a self-interested enforcement system. The judges would have been the stated beneiciaries of the law. Did they possess this authority to judge in irst-tithe cases? They shared this authority. The tithe was owed to them because they were the priestly tribe, and also because they had a legal claim based on their lack of landed inheritance. Both church and State were authorized by God to enforce the irst tithe. Then why not also the second and third tithes, at least with respect to participation by the Levites? There seems to be no good reason not to assume that this was the case. The problem comes with respect to institutionally enforceable claims by the other participants: widows, orphans and strangers. This raises the issue of Israel as a welfare State. Did the Mosaic civil law force one group of residents to inance annual festivals for others? It is not easy to make such a case based on the textual evidence here. These were feasts to honor God: “that thou mayest learn to fear the LORD thy God always.” They were feasts to which Levites had to be invited. Were they somehow exclusively civil and therefore compulsory? Only to the extent that the Levites possessed a civil legal claim on being invited to attend. At most, the civil character of these festivals, if any, would have authorized the State to enforce a claim on some food and drink – hardly a major expense. The suggestion that the State had the authority to compel attendance at a religious festival is foreign to everything else we know of the Mosaic law. But if this was the case, we have problems: the resident alien and the excommunicated Israelite.

408

DEUTERONOMY

Alien Leaseholders It is clear from the text that the second tithe was a tithe on the produce of the land. This raises the question of the leaseholder. It was legal for an owner to lease his land to another person for up to 49 years – until the jubilee (Lev. 25:10). The question arises: Could this leaseholder have been a resident alien? The Bible does not say. It was legal to lease out the land to another person (Lev. 25:25–28). It was also legal to sell oneself to a resident alien (Lev. 25:47–54). We must discover the answer by means of other principles of biblical law, as well as by their implications. What is said here of a resident alien is also true of an excommunicated Israelite. Next, was a resident alien or an excommunicant required to pay any tithe of celebration? The text does not say. It would make the expositor’s task much easier if it did. The tithe of celebration was a tithe on the land’s produce, year by year. Did the alien or excommunicant have to attend these festivals and spend his tithe? That is, did the State have the right to compel anyone to attend a festival? Clearly, the Levites did not possess such authority when dealing with an alien or an excommunicant. I can see nothing in the Mosaic law to indicate that the State possessed such authority. Did the State or the church lawfully enforce these tithes? If it was only the church, then the church’s threat of excommunication and, as a result, loss of citizenship held no terrors for a covenant-breaking resident alien. He was not a citizen. Then what was the meaningful sanction against him if he refused to pay this tithe? Could the State have forced the resident alien to leave the leased land? If so, was he entitled to a refund from the Israelite land owner whom he had paid? That would have placed a heavy burden on the land owner, who had put his money to other uses. If the owner was not liable, then removal from the land was a heavy economic burden on a family that refused to attend a festival. It would have amounted to coniscation of property on a huge scale. On whose behalf? To what victim had the alien owed the tithe? To God by way of himself, mainly. It does not seem biblical to argue that the State had any jurisdiction over the resident alien in this matter, with the possible exception of paying for a Levite’s food and drink, who was owed support based on the original land distribution.

Tithes of Celebration

409

My conclusion is that no covenantal agency possessed the authority to enforce attendance or support by a resident alien or excommunicant, except for a small portion owed to Levites based on their right of inheritance. This conclusion, however, leads to an unexpected conclusion. If it was lawful for a resident alien or an excommunicant to avoid paying all tithes of celebration, he could operate with a much lower overhead than a covenant-keeping Israelite could. He could spend the money locally or else reinvest it. He would have been able to save up capital by avoiding the celebration. Over time, this would have given him a major advantage, as his extra returns compounded. The non-participating resident alien would have had an advantage over Israelites in bidding for control over the land. This would have tended to transfer stewardship over land to those who were not heirs of the conquest. They could have leased the land from Israelites, paid a token amount to inance food once a year for a local Levite, and invested the diference. Other things being equal, they would eventually have displaced the Israelites from agriculture. The Israelite land owners would have done well by leasing their land to aliens and excommunicants, but they would not have remained on the land. So, if the tithe law was not enforced by the State, the celebration tithes would have tended to push tithe-paying Israelites of the land and into the cities, leaving non-tithing resident aliens and excommunicated Israelites in control of the land. Such people did take control of the land during Israel’s exile, but this was understood to be a curse on Israel. Did the Mosaic law subsidize a result which was similar to the result of the captivity? Was land stewardship distributed in favor of covenant-breakers? This, surely, is an unexpected application of the Mosaic law – the disinheritance of Israel! Under such an interpretation, this tithing law was self-defeating. It was a tithe on agriculture only. Urban Israelites escaped it, and so could resident aliens who leased rural land for farming. Who, then, would pay it? A strange law, indeed!

Legal Discrimination? An alternative to this interpretation is to deny that the resident alien or excommunicant had the right to lease land in Mosaic Israel, precisely because he could not be efectively pressured ecclesiastically to celebrate in Jerusalem. If any such prohibition on land ownership had been enforced, there would have been costs imposed on

410

DEUTERONOMY

Israel’s economy. Owners would have received lower bids for leasing their land, since aliens and excommunicated Israelites would not have been allowed to bid. The land would not have been used by the most ejcient producers. Of course, the tithes of celebration were not imposed for short-term ejciency’s sake. They were imposed for God’s sake. The problem here is that a covenant-keeping resident alien would have been discriminated against by such a prohibition. Why shouldn’t he have been allowed to act as a steward of the land? On what legal grounds could he have been excluded? Wasn’t one law in Israel to govern all men (Ex. 12:49)? What was the covenantal basis of such an exception? Where was the justice of such an exclusion? The fact that some resident aliens might not pay the tithes of celebration was not much of a reason to exclude aliens in general from leasing agricultural land.

Who Enforced the Third-Year Tithe? This third tithe confuses things even more. Others besides Levites were to be invited in. Did the land owner owe them a place at his table, on threat of civil sanctions? Was the civil government the enforcing agent? If it was, then we have here an example of the welfare State in action. Unlike the Levites, these guests had no legal claim based on the original inheritance. If the State lawfully forced a recalcitrant land owner to invite them in, then they were not guests. They were welfare State clients. They were beneiciaries of State coercion. Did God mandate such a system in His law? Then there is the question of who was required to pay? Was it every local Israelite or just local land users? On what legal basis would landless people in a town have owed the guests anything? Not by a distinction between original landed inheritance and the absence thereof. Urban land had not been part of the original inheritance that was excluded from the Levites. Levites lived in towns and could buy property. Were landless urban dwellers required to subsidize other landless urbanites, who had no civil claim on the output of non-rural property? Was this an incipient form of statist bread and circuses in the Mosaic law?

Tithes of Celebration

411

Dijcult Choices Well, which is it? How was this law enforced? Here are the choices. First, the State compelled land owners and leaseholders to attend religious festivals on threat of losing their land or some other civil sanction. Second, the State compelled land owners and lease holders to provide free meals for an indeterminate number of strangers during third-year festivals, with double restitution to these unidentiied victims if they refused to pay. Third, because the State could not legally compel payment of celebration tithes, it prohibited non-tithing resident aliens and excommunicants from leasing rural land, in order to avoid indirectly subsidizing non-tithers. Fourth, the State had no authority in this area; instead, the Levites lawfully enforced the celebration tithe laws. But because the Levites had exclusively ecclesiastical authority, they had no way of enforcing these laws on resident aliens and excommunicants, i.e., they had no meaningful sanctions to impose. Therefore, because no covenantal institution possessed efective negative sanctions in this area, nonpaying resident aliens and excommunicants would have gained a competitive advantage in agriculture and would have steadily displaced paying Israelites from the land. Because non-tithers would progressively dominate the land, and urban Israelites were not required to pay, this law had to become a dead letter. It was inherently unenforceable. If so, then why did God announce it? Let us review the options in greater detail. Did the State impose attendance? If so, this law violated the biblical legal principle of victim’s rights.8 Who was the victim of a refusal to attend? To whom did the criminal owe restitution? To himself? This makes no sense. I prefer to stick with victim’s rights. The State did not impose attendance. Did the State compel wealth-redistribution? The feasts were by invitation only. In this sense, this law was like the gleaning law (Deut. 24:19–22). Those with assets – land owners – were required by God to invite others to share their wealth. But this was not a civil law. No bureaucrats provided the land owners with lists of those who had to be invited. Then who were the identiiable victims? Which uninvited strangers had a legal claim on which land owner’s hospitality? Which widows? Which orphans? How did the judges 8. Gary North, Victim’s Rights: The Biblical View of Civil Justice (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990).

412

DEUTERONOMY

allocate the percentage owed by land users to speciic uninvited victims? How would such assessments have been determined without creating an arbitrary judicial system? This view of State power is so far removed from the Mosaic law that it, too, makes no sense. Did the State prohibit resident aliens and excommunicants from leasing land – not just nonpaying ones, but all of them? To allow only paying ones to lease land would have meant that the State had the power to compel attendance by removing nonpaying ones from the land. We are back to the irst choice: State compulsion. So, did biblical law discriminate, on the basis of ecclesiastical membership, against would-be farmers? If so, Israel was not merely a theocracy; it was an ecclesiocracy. But the Mosaic law indicates that Israel was not an ecclesiocracy. Is this law an exception? This is possible, but I am unwilling to take this huge exegetical step. Surely such a view of this law’s implications violates the principle of the rule of law. This leaves one inal choice: this law was institutionally unenforceable. We must therefore accept its economic implication, namely, that non-tithers would have had a competitive advantage in farming. This would have moved non-tithers onto the land and tithers into the cities, where they would no longer have been required to pay celebration tithes.

Old Wineskins Built into the Mosaic land laws were at least two self-destruct clauses. This law was one of them. The other one was the jubilee land law. The jubilee law mandated that rural land be returned to the heirs of the conquest every half century. A growing population – one of God’s promises to Israel for obeying His law – meant ever-smaller parcels of land. This in turn meant a declining share of family income derived from agricultural output. This tithe law was a parallel law. Over time, the covenantal faithfulness of Israel would have reduced the value of any tithe on income from land. As time went by, no family could count on much help from its landed inheritance. Meanwhile, the costs of celebrating would have gone up. The larger the population, the more expensive festival rent rates in Jerusalem would have become: competitive bidding. What this law did was to point ahead to a day when the old wineskins of the Mosaic land laws would be broken by the new wine

Tithes of Celebration

413

of population growth. The Mosaic land laws were inherently antirural. They subsidized urbanization. This is not surprising. Biblical eschatology points to a city: Zion, the city of God (Zech. 8; Rev. 21; 22). Israel’s land laws were designed to push Israelites of the land and into the cities. Eventually, these laws would have pushed them out of the nation. As I wrote in my commentary on Leviticus, “The jubilee inheritance law was designed to promote emigration out of Israel and urban occupations inside the land that relied on foreign trade. The rural land inheritance law promoted contact with foreigners. This was an aspect of the dominion covenant. It was to serve as a means of evangelism. The story of Israel, her laws, and her God was to spread abroad (Deut. 4:5–8).”9 The landed inheritance of Canaan was temporary. Men who paid careful attention to the Mosaic law would have seen that Israel was like Eden: a temporary training camp for worldwide dominion. The land of Israel was both a boot camp and headquarters. The diaspora was an inescapable concept for Israel. Either the nation would rebel against God, avoid population growth, and be carried into captivity, or else it would obey God, grow, and extend God’s kingdom across the face of the earth. In either case, they could not remain bottled up inside Israel’s geographical boundaries. Israel chose the irst approach, twice: pre-exilic and postcruciixion. For that, she lost the inheritance (Matt. 21:43). In between the conquest and the dispersion, what about the implicit subsidy to nonpaying resident aliens and excommunicants? Other things being equal, they would have inherited rural land – not as owners but as actual users. But the per capita value of this landed inheritance would have fallen steadily in times of national obedience. Besides, other things are not equal. This law was given “that the LORD thy God may bless thee in all the work of thine hand which thou doest.” Obedience to God would have brought national blessings. Even with growing festival nonparticipation in the countryside, the urban faithful would have continued to celebrate voluntarily with their growing nonagricultural incomes, leaving the nonparticipants to fall behind economically in the countryside.

9. Gary North, Leviticus: An Economic Commentary (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), p. 422.

414

DEUTERONOMY

New Testament Annulment The three temple-related annual festivals were aspects of Israel’s land laws and seed laws. The national festivals maintained geographical and ritual unity among the geographically dispersed tribes. These mandated journeys to a central location reminded the tribes of the centrality of the temple-altar, the Ark of the Covenant, the tablets of the law, and the geographically dispersed tribe of Levites. These celebrations were times of common confession. There is no New Testament indication that any comparable national ceremony is to bind New Testament churches or residents of any covenanted Christian nation. The national feasts were tied explicitly to Jerusalem and the tabernacle; nothing like this geographical centrality exists under the New Covenant. The New Covenant substitutes the sacraments and decentralized worship for the temple festivals. The third-year tithe of local celebration was not associated with the temple. It was a tribal afair. It involved a voluntary tax on the land and, if the inclusive language is taken literally, also on town residents. Those who were the contractual stewards of the land were required by God to pay both of these tithes, but no agency enforced this. One cost of leasing the land was participation in the festivals. But no one was forced by threat of formal sanctions to bear this cost. Judicially, the second and third tithes were Mosaic land laws. The third tithe was also a seed law, having to do with the tribes. These laws were tied to the conquest of Canaan. They were annulled when Israel’s unique status as owner of the Promised Land ceased. Israel’s kingdom inheritance was transferred to the church (Matt. 21:43). These two tithes did not extend into the New Covenant. But as examples, they serve us well. Christmas is a common time of celebration in the West. The American tradition of feeding the homeless a turkey at Christmas bears a faint trace of the old Mosaic practice. But these common meals, while funded by the higher classes, have rarely been attended by them. There is no social mixing today of property owners, widows, orphans, and strangers. Something socially healing has been lost with the annulment of the older festival pattern.

Tithes of Celebration

415

Medieval Catholicism celebrated over one hundred holy days (holidays).10 Spain had 150 saints days and festival days as late as 1620.11 Beginning with Luther’s recommendation, Protestants drastically reduced the number of such holidays.12 This led to an increased number of work days in Protestant nations. It also led to a sabbatarian rest pattern of one day in seven. This development, when pursued consistently, very nearly destroyed the idea of a church calendar. Liturgical churches that are closer to the medieval pattern are more likely to pay attention to the church calendar; the Presbyterian and Anabaptist traditions do not. In Puritan Massachusetts in the mid-seventeenth century, it was illegal to celebrate Christmas. The government assessed a ine for any violation.13 Religious celebrations are suspect in the Puritan tradition. In some instances today, Christmas and Easter are not celebrated by strict Presbyterians, al14 though this is rare. With the rise of the trade union movement, the number of paid holidays increased. The number of religious holidays in Protestant nations is still small, usually consisting of Christmas eve and day, and Easter weekend. Christian celebrations today are generally conined to families and local churches. There is no equivalent of Mosaic Israel’s compulsory national feast of celebration.

Conclusion Land owners were told by God to set aside voluntarily an extra ten percent of their net agricultural income in six years out of seven in order to fund the tithes of celebration. Five feasts were celebrated nationally and one locally. In the sabbatical year, land owners still had to attend feasts in Jerusalem, but they did not have to invite in strangers, widows, and Levites. Participation in these national feasts was to be inanced by a special tithe on all rural land. Given

10. Christopher Hill, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (2nd ed.; New York: Schocken, 1967), p. 146. 11. Ibid., p. 148. 12. Ibid., pp. 149–51. 13. May 11, 1659: Nathaniel B. Shurtlef (ed.), Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, 5 vols. (Boston: William White, Commonwealth Printer, 1853), V, p. 366. 14. In large congregations, such concern is absent. Preaching against Christmas is a sure way to shrink a congregation.

416

DEUTERONOMY

the expenses and burdens of travel, it is likely that the feast of Booths served as the national tithe-feast. In the third year, however, rural land-owning families were required to allocate a tithe for a local celebration, inviting widows, orphans, strangers, and Levites to attend. At these feasts, the head of a rural family was not to conserve funds. The family and its guests were required to consume the entire tithe. Nothing was to be held back. This was God’s celebration. This freedom from economic restraints was manifested by the authorization of intoxicating drink as part of the national celebrations. This law countered excessive future-orientation. The future is in God’s hands, just as the present is. The present has its lawful rewards. To “save for a rainy day” was legitimate in Mosaic Israel; on the other hand, never to acknowledge God’s sunny days was illegitimate. As an ethical model, the Mosaic tithes of celebration are valid in the New Covenant.15 They are not ecclesiastically mandatory, however. The irst tithe was Levi’s inheritance in lieu of land. It was imposed on all income in Israel. This inheritance was enforceable in a civil court. It was a tribal inheritance, not an ecclesiastical inheritance as such.16 The civil sanction was not speciied. Loss of citizenship was one possibility. Actual coniscation is another. The tithe today is not connected to the conquest generation’s distribution of land. It is therefore no longer a civil matter. What of the second and third tithes on the land? They, too, were part of God’s requirements. But they were neither civil nor ecclesiastically enforced, with the possible exception of payment for Levites’ meals. Because of the economic burden of these laws, nonpaying resident aliens and excommunicants would have gained control over rural agricultural land, other things being equal. God’s grace, however, does not make things equal. He promised to bless the nation if they obeyed. If rural renters had refused to pay but urban dwellers 15. Perhaps the greatest piece of literature in the English language in defense of this ethical model is Charles Dickens’ masterpiece, A Christmas Carol. It is surely the most popular, especially through a series of movies. I know of no other story that has been made more often into movies and television specials. 16. The New Covenant tithe is a Melchizedekan tithe, not a Levitical tithe (Heb. 7). Gary North, Tithing and the Church (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), p. 133. This is why the State cannot legitimately enforce it. It is the church’s moral claim on God’s covenant people, not a legal claim enforceable in a civil court.

Tithes of Celebration

417

did pay, God would have honored the urban faithful. This is why there are limits to humanistic economic analysis. The economists do not see the covenantal structure of economics, including growth theory. The value of the land’s output in a family’s budget would have fallen over time in a growing population. This meant that there would come a day when these festival laws would be annulled by God in order to meet the new environment: urban life, emigration, and falling income from small-scale agriculture. The celebration tithe laws were old wineskins: designed by God to be broken, either by apostate rural non-tithers or by successful covenant-keepers who went abroad and did not return to the annual festivals except on rare occasions.

35 THEThe CHARITABLE LOAN Charitable Loan At the end of every seven years thou shalt make a release. And this is the manner of the release: Every creditor that lendeth ought unto his neighbour shall release it; he shall not exact it of his neighbour, or of his brother; because it is called the LORD’S release. Of a foreigner thou mayest exact it again: but that which is thine with thy brother thine hand shall release; Save when there shall be no poor among you; for the LORD shall greatly bless thee in the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee for an inheritance to possess it. Only if thou carefully hearken unto the voice of the LORD thy God, to observe to do all these commandments which I command thee this day (Deut. 15:1–5).

The theocentric focus of this law is God’s sabbath. There had to be a scheduled resting in the Promised Land: of the land, of agricultural workers, of domesticated farm animals, and of at least one form of debt. God had rested on the seventh day; Israel was to rest in the seventh year. The law of the sabbath was announced in the fourth commandment. This placed it under point four of the biblical covenant model: oath/sanctions.1 The release from work was a positive sanction. So was the release from debt. “Forgive us our debts” (Matt. 6:12) remains a valid prayer. This release from debt was called the Lord’s release. The Hebrew word here translated “release,” shawmat, means “rest” or “throw down.” The mandatory resting of the land in the seventh year is related grammatically to the release from debt: “But the seventh year thou shalt

1. Gary North, The Sinai Strategy: Economics and the Ten Commandments (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1986), pp. xvi–xvii; ch. 4: “Sabbath and Dominion.”

418

The Charitable Loan

419

let it rest and lie still; that the poor of thy people may eat: and what they leave the beasts of the ield shall eat. In like manner thou shalt deal with thy vineyard, and with thy oliveyard” (Ex. 23:11). The blessings of God were once again said to be tied to national obedience. Israel’s inheritance of the land was ethically conditional. Law, positive sanctions, and inheritance were a covenantal unit. This means that law, negative sanctions, and disinheritance were equally a covenantal unit. The positive sanction of rest was explicitly tied to the maintenance of the national inheritance. This rest included rest from debt. This was a land law: “for the LORD shall greatly bless thee in the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee for an inheritance to possess it.” It was tied to Israel’s system of covenantal release. The sabbatical year is no longer required, for this law applied only to Canaan, when the date of Israel’s entry into the land could be accurately determined. The sabbatical was tied to the calendar of the feasts.

Loans to the Poor There was an annulment provision in this law of debt release. It would not apply when there were no longer poor people in the land (v. 4). This should be regarded as hyperbolic language. “For the poor shall never cease out of the land: therefore I command thee, saying, Thou shalt open thine hand wide unto thy brother, to thy poor, and to thy needy, in thy land” (v. 11). But the fact remains that in some unique way, this law was connected judicially to the presence of poor people in the land. This exclusionary clause should alert us to the possibility that this law was not universal in scope or application. It was tied in some way to both the poor and the land. Moses explained the application of this law. It was explicitly related to poor people. “If there be among you a poor man of one of thy brethren within any of thy gates in thy land which the LORD thy God giveth thee, thou shalt not harden thine heart, nor shut thine hand from thy poor brother: But thou shalt open thine hand wide unto him, and shalt surely lend him sujcient for his need, in that which he wanteth” (Deut. 15:7–8). There was a strong element of moral obligation here. What did the word mean, “wanteth”? The same Hebrew word, khawsare, is used to describe God’s care for them in the wilderness. They lacked nothing. “Yea, forty years didst thou sustain them in

420

DEUTERONOMY

the wilderness, so that they lacked nothing; their clothes waxed not old, and their feet swelled not” (Neh. 9:21; emphasis added). Yet the exodus generation had complained continually that they lacked everything good which they had possessed in Egypt. In response, God kept them wandering in the wilderness. He disinherited that generation. So, the idea of “want” in this context is serious poverty, where one’s work or life are in danger. Such a lack of basic necessities is not common to covenant-keepers: “The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want” (Ps. 23:1). There were sanctions attached to this law because it was a subset of a larger category of biblical laws: charity. “He that giveth unto the poor shall not lack: but he that hideth his eyes shall have many a curse” (Prov. 28:27). These promised negative sanctions were neither civil nor ecclesiastical. There is no suggestion that any covenantal institution had the right or obligation of threatening formal negative sanctions against individuals who disobeyed this law. These promised sanctions were historical and individual. The Bible is clear about the presence of these sanctions in history. God imposed them directly, apart from any intermediary covenantal authorities. The mandated discipline here was self-discipline. The man with money to lend was to consider the plight of the poor man. He was to evaluate the causes of the poor man’s poverty. Having determined that the person was not poor because of bad habits, the man with money was to lend generously. If he did, he would be rewarded: a positive sanction. “Beware that there be not a thought in thy wicked heart, saying, The seventh year, the year of release, is at hand; and thine eye be evil against thy poor brother, and thou givest him nought; and he cry unto the LORD against thee, and it be sin unto thee. Thou shalt surely give him, and thine heart shall not be grieved when thou givest unto him: because that for this thing the LORD thy God shall bless thee in all thy works, and in all that thou puttest thine hand unto” (vv. 9–10). Again, it was God, not the State, who would reward the generous lender. This is why this law had nothing to do with civil sanctions. Biblical civil sanctions are exclusively negative. The Bible does not authorize compulsory wealth redistribution.2

2. David Chilton, Productive Christians in an Age of Guilt-Manipulators: A Biblical Response to Ronald J. Sider (3rd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, [1985] 1996).

The Charitable Loan

421

Lending and Dominion In the middle of this passage, there is a requirement that has nothing to do with lending to the poor. This passage is extremely important in establishing the legitimacy of money-lending as a profession: “For the LORD thy God blesseth thee, as he promised thee: and thou shalt lend unto many nations, but thou shalt not borrow; and thou shalt reign over many nations, but they shall not reign over thee” (v. 6). Here is a legitimate reason to seek wealth: to become an international money-lender. There is a reason to become a moneylender: to increase the inluence of your covenant-keeping society. The lender is the master over the borrower. To seek such mastery over other nations is legitimate. To be in a inancial position to lend to covenant-breaking nations is a blessing of God. His kingdom is advanced by such lending. Conversely, it is a curse to be in debt to other nations. The text here is not talking about what is today called foreign aid, which is in fact State-to-State aid: using tax money extracted from the residents of one nation to fund State-funded projects in another nation.3 It is talking about the aggregate debt or credit positions of a covenant-keeping society: the net efects of voluntary, individual decisions to lend to or borrow from foreigners. When men are future-oriented, they are willing to lend at low rates of interest. They have what Mises calls low time-preference. When men are present-oriented, they are willing to pay high rates of interest.4 Edward Banield calls these two groups upper class (future-oriented) and lower class.5 There is a proitable voluntary transaction possible between members of both groups: a future-oriented person can proitably lend to present-oriented person. This transaction is proitable on both sides. Both actors get what they want. But there is a superior and inferior here. “The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender” (Prov. 22:7). While a present3. P. T. Bauer, Dissent on Development: Studies and debates in development economics (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1972), pp. 95–135. 4. Murray N. Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State: A Treatise on Economic Principles (Princeton, New Jersey: Van Nostrand, 1962), pp. 323–33. Reprinted by the Mises Institute, Auburn, Alabama, in 1993. 5. Edward C. Banield, The Unheavenly City: The Nature and Future of Our Urban Crisis (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), pp. 48–54.

422

DEUTERONOMY

oriented person gains access to the money or goods he wants immediately in exchange for a promise to repay the lender in the future, he does not gain this advantage at zero cost. He becomes a servant. But this is his choice. It is not a matter of compulsion. The Bible makes it very clear that there are legitimate hierarchies in this life. Point two of the biblical covenant model is hierarchy.6 One of these hierarchies is economic: lender over debtor. Another is social: master over servant. These hierarchies are individual. They are also social. They are also international. This verse clearly recommends becoming an international lender. It very clearly discourages becoming an international debtor. This is another way of saying that it is an advantage to be future-oriented and a disadvantage to be present-oriented. The covenant-keeper is supposed to be future-oriented. He is supposed to be thrifty. Accumulating capital for the purpose of becoming a lender is a good thing for covenant-keepers. How does a person accumulate capital? By spending less than he receives. That is, he accumulates capital by becoming a net exporter of goods and services. He takes in more money than he spends. What is true of an individual is equally true of a nation. I do not necessarily mean merely a nation-State; I mean a nation: a covenantally oathbound society. To become an international money-lending society, a nation must be illed with future-oriented people who are net exporters of goods and services. They can lend abroad only because they sell abroad. They have money to lend abroad because they earned money from abroad which they lend to people in those societies that ran trade deicits with them. The trade surplus in the broadest sense creates a balance (equality) of payments surplus (inequality). But how can there be a surplus if there is balance? Because there is a balance of assets: goods and services (assets) exported = goods and services (assets) imported + money loaned out (future income: asset). This equation applies also to an individual who is accumulating capital. This verse makes it clear that the nation of Israel was to become a money-lending nation by means of international trade. It was to become a trade surplus nation, i.e., a net exporter of goods, services,

6. Ray R. Sutton, That You May Prosper: Dominion By Covenant (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1992), ch. 2.

The Charitable Loan

423

and money. The money exported (lent) out had to come from the surplus of exports over imports. Goods lowed out; money and goods lowed in. The lower the percentage of goods that lowed back in, the larger the percentage of money that lowed back in. Then this money was lent back out. This is the model followed in the post-World War II era by the Asian “tigers”: irst Japan; then Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore. Their domestic economies have been export-driven. Their businesses have learned how to compete in international markets. Their citizens in the aggregate have run net trade surpluses by becoming international lenders. This process is a unit: two sides of the same coin. Then the coin is lent at interest.

The Israelite Bondservant After the discussion of morally obligatory lending, the text introduces what appears to be a wholly unrelated topic: the Israelite bondservant. This bondservant was to be released in the seventh year. And if thy brother, an Hebrew man, or an Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: Thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy lock, and out of thy loor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing to day (vv. 12–15).

There is something missing here: an explanation of the diference between this kind of Israelite bondservant and the Israelite bondservant described in Leviticus 25: And if thy brother that dwelleth by thee be waxen poor, and be sold unto thee; thou shalt not compel him to serve as a bondservant: But as an hired servant, and as a sojourner, he shall be with thee, and shall serve thee unto the year of jubile: And then shall he depart from thee, both he and his children with him, and shall return unto his own family, and unto the possession of his fathers shall he return. For they are my servants, which I brought forth out of the land of Egypt: they shall not be sold as bondmen. Thou shalt not rule over him with rigour; but shalt fear thy God. (Lev. 25: 39–43).

424

DEUTERONOMY

Here is an Israelite bondservant who was purchased by another Israelite. He remained a bondservant until the jubilee. This could be as long as 49 years. Yet the text in Deuteronomy 15 insists that the Israelite bondservant be released in the seventh year. How can these two laws be reconciled?

A Question of Collateral The person described in Leviticus 25 was a person with no land to return to. What redeemed him from bondage was the return of his land at the jubilee (Lev. 25:13). Because he had no land in the interim, he could ind himself without the means to repay a commercial loan. He defaulted on his loan, and he was then sold into bondage to repay it. The presumption of the passage is that he no longer held title to any land. He was landless until the jubilee. He had no collateral for the loan other than his own labor. So, when he defaulted, he lost his freedom. The collateral for a loan could be either goods or services. Goods could easily be pledged and transferred at the time of default. Labor services could be transferred, too, but they involved the loss of freedom for a speciied period of time. If goods were pledged, their transfer redeemed the loan. But what was the value of a person’s labor services? To assess this, there had to be a labor market. There was a market for long-term labor services. We would call it a slave market. An Israelite’s enslavement was legally limited; it could not exceed 49 years. This limitation did not apply to foreigners (Lev. 25:44–46). Why not? Because an Israelite’s redemption out of bondage was by rural land ownership: part of the original inheritance attained by the conquest generation. When the Israelite bondservant’s land was returned to him, he could return to his land. He thereby gained redemption from bondage.

An Interest-Free Loan There was another distinguishing factor: the circumstances of a loan. The Israelite who had no land to pledge for a loan was considered a poor risk. He had lost control over it for some reason. Perhaps he had lost it by having to repay a previous loan. So, the lender wanted security for his loan. He wanted long-term labor services that would command a market price high enough to guarantee his repayment.

The Charitable Loan

425

But what of the poor man in Deuteronomy 15:12? He was morally entitled to a loan. More than this: he was entitled to an interestfree loan. “If thou lend money to any of my people that is poor by thee, thou shalt not be to him as an usurer, neither shalt thou lay upon him usury” (Ex. 22:25). “And if thy brother be waxen poor, and fallen in decay with thee; then thou shalt relieve him: yea, though he be a stranger [geyr], or a sojourner [toshawb]; that he may live with thee. Take thou no usury of him, or increase: but fear thy God; that thy brother may live with thee. Thou shalt not give him thy money upon usury, nor lend him thy victuals for increase” (Lev. 25:35–37). A poor man had a superior claim on a righteous man’s loanable funds. This was not a commercial loan. Commercial loans were legitimate. The non-resident alien [nokree] had no claim to an interest-free loan. “Unto a stranger [nokree] thou mayest lend upon usury; but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon usury” (Deut. 23:20a). But an interest-free loan was morally compulsory in Mosaic Israel in a way that a commercial loan was not. The poor man who sought an interest-free loan could be asked to pledge his cloak, but it had to be returned to him by evening (Ex. 22:26). This kept him from pledging an asset that was already pledged, but it meant that only a nearby neighbor would lend to him – a person who would know his character and the reasons for his present poverty. The interest-free loan proved that the borrower was at risk of bondage only until the sabbatical year of release. He was not at risk until the jubilee. The presence of interest proved that he was at risk for a longer period: until the jubilee. The zero-interest loan was morally obligatory on the lender. The interest-bearing loan was not. The person seeking an interest-bearing commercial loan had no moral claim on the prospective lender. He was at greater risk in case he defaulted. In the year of release, the lender was to provide the borrower with capital: “Thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy lock, and out of thy loor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him” (Deut. 15:14). “It shall not seem hard unto thee, when thou sendest him away free from thee; for he hath been worth a double hired servant to thee, in serving thee six years: and the LORD thy God shall bless thee in all that thou doest” (v. 18). There was no such obligation on the lender when a long-term Israelite bondservant departed in the jubilee year.

426

DEUTERONOMY

He would return to his land empty-handed. But the poor man who defaulted on a charitable loan apparently had no land to return to. Perhaps he had pledged his land earlier, and had lost control over it. He was to be given animals, food, and wine at his release. What if the man released in the sabbatical year did not want to face the trials of life without his landed inheritance? What if the jubilee was years away at the time of the irst sabbatical year after his bondage began? In that case, he might choose to remain with the lender. The subsequent passage sets forth the ritual terms of permanent bondservice: the pierced ear (Deut. 15:16–17). This covenantal mark of bondage obligated only him, not his adult heirs. If he came into bondage as a poor man by way of a default on an interest-free charity loan, his adult heirs could not be obligated to stay with him. He took the oath of allegiance in his own name only.

New Testament Applications The New Testament Christian faces an even more rigorous requirement: “But love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the children of the Highest: for he is kind unto the unthankful and to the evil” (Luke 6:35). Even a poor non-resident alien is now to become the beneiciary. The man with assets is to lend to this person without hope of repayment. A charity loan is still governed by the Old Covenant rule: no interest. Does this mean that every potential borrower’s request must be granted? No; the charity loan is still limited by the rule that evil is not to be subsidized. The moral character and habits of the borrower must be known to the lender. The lender must make an evaluation: Is this a truly poor man whose economic troubles are not of his own making? There is no obligation on anyone’s part to subsidize incompetence born of immoral or present-oriented behavior. The person with assets to lend may choose to have a representative agency make this evaluation for him. He may decide to loan money to the agent or organization, allowing someone else to decide who deserves an interest-free loan. Such loans are to be made on the same basis as the Mosaic charitable loan: no interest. We are not to loan money at interest to charitable organizations. The idea of

The Charitable Loan

427 7

interest-paying church bonds is abominable. If churches or nonproit Christian organizations choose to raise money, let the members and supporters borrow the money in the commercial loan market and give it to the church (best), or lend this money at zero interest (second-best). If Christian organizations must borrow money at interest, let them borrow from unbelievers or commercial banks. But this is a third-best decision, for it places the church in a subordinate position to covenant-breakers: the servanthood of the debtor. It is a dark day when God’s church is in hock to unbelievers through commercial banks. It may have to be done, but it is a dark day when it is done. In modern times, there is no provision for collateralized labor, i.e., a period of legally enforceable debt servitude. For charitable loans, this is a good rule; for commercial loans, it is not. Today, there is also no national year of release. This is legitimate; Israel’s national sabbatical year was an aspect of the Mosaic land laws: the inheritance. Furthermore, the jubilee was an aspect of the original conquest. It no longer has any judicial or covenantal purpose.

The Limits on Debt The New Testament rule governing charity loans has broadened the Mosaic limits. Christians are to lend at zero interest to the righteous poor without hope of any repayment. The absence today of an enforceable period of debt servitude does not afect this obligation. If anything, it reinforces it. The very absence of such a period of servitude points to the New Testament rule: lend without hope of repayment. Would it be illegitimate for a society to legislate such a requirement, though not a period longer than the six-year limit of Deuteronomy 15? We must ask: On what basis? If the sabbatical year was a land law, which it appears to have been, then the annulment of Mosaic Israel’s special covenantal position removes that as a justiication. What covenantal legal principle might legitimately be substituted? Not the sabbath law. Paul was clear: “One man esteemeth one day above another: another esteemeth every day alike. Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind” (Rom. 14:5). The enforcement of the 7. Gary North, “Stewardship, Investment, and Usury: Financing the Kingdom of God,” in R. J. Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law (Nutley, New Jersey: Craig Press, 1973), Appendix 3.

428

DEUTERONOMY

sabbath is not to become an aspect of judicial sanctions. The locus of enforcement has shifted to the individual.8 There was never any moral obligation to make commercial loans under the Mosaic covenant. This is still the case. There remains a moral obligation to loan at zero interest to the brother in the faith or a righteous resident alien. This law had nothing to do with seed or land. This is why the uncircumcised resident alien was morally entitled to a zero-interest emergency charity loan. It was a law governing personal relations among people who agreed to live under the legal terms of God’s civil covenant. It was a land law, but not a Promised Land law. It was a covenantal land law: a cross-boundary law that would apply to any nation formally covenanted under God. Today, Western nations are only rarely formally covenanted under God, and none acknowledges the Bible to be the supreme law of the land. There is therefore no equal moral obligation to lend to resident aliens. This biblical obligation depends on the society’s view of debt and the moral outlook of the poor neighbor. If the poor man is an honest man who is in a crisis through no fault of his own, then he is morally entitled to a zero-interest charity loan from a true believer in the God of the Bible. But, like the poor man in Exodus 22:26, he can legitimately be asked to surrender his cloak as collateral. This is a means of seeing to it that he does not indebt himself to many lenders simultaneously. This is an institutional restraint on debt servitude which should be honored today. To lend, hoping for nothing in return is one thing; to devise a system which encourages poor people to run up large debts on the basis of no collateral or multiple loans on the same piece of collateral is something else. Honest, hard-working, otherwise future-oriented people should not be encouraged to become servants to debt. Extending credit to present-oriented people who are willing to pay high rates of interest on commercial or consumer loans is legitimate (Deut. 15:6). It is not legitimate to encourage future-oriented people who are trapped by circumstances beyond their control to go ever-deeper into charitable debt. They should also be encouraged to repay all debts to avoid a life of servitude. A sign of spiritual maturity is debt-free living. A sign of even greater spiritual maturity is debt-free lending.

8. North, Sinai Strategy, pp. 85, 255.

The Charitable Loan

429

There is no longer a six-year debt limit on this moral obligation to repay. The New Testament extends greater mercy, but it imposes greater moral maturity in paying of debts and avoiding them in the irst place. “For yourselves know how ye ought to follow us: for we behaved not ourselves disorderly among you; Neither did we eat any man’s bread for nought; but wrought with labour and travail night and day, that we might not be chargeable to any of you: Not because we have not power, but to make ourselves an ensample unto you to follow us. For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat” (II Thess. 3:7–10).

Conclusion The interest-free loan was a charitable loan. It was morally obligatory, though not legally obligatory, for an Israelite with surplus assets to loan to a poor Israelite brother or a poor resident alien on an interest-free basis. Such a loan involved the threat of a six-year maximum period of bondservice in case of a default. Liberation day was the national sabbatical year, which was also the year of release for all charitable loans. This was a very diferent kind of loan from an interest-bearing commercial loan that was collateralized by an Israelite’s land or labor until the next jubilee. In the case of a non-Israelite, a default on a large commercial loan could lead to inter-generational slavery (Lev. 25:44–46).9 The early church and the medieval church misinterpreted the Mosaic laws governing charitable debt. A series of church councils and decrees placed extensive prohibitions on interest-bearing loans.10 This hampered the growth of industry for over a thousand years. It also placed Christians into debt to Jews, who had no restrictions on lending at interest to gentiles. This created great hostility on the part of gentiles and led to repeated violence and defaults on loans, especially by gentile governments. 9. Gary North, Leviticus: An Economic Commentary (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), ch. 31. 10. J. Gilchrist, The Church and Economic Development Activity in the Middle Ages (New York: St. Martins, 1969), Documents. Gilchrist provides translations of numerous texts, from Nicea (325) on, that dealt with usury. The premier study of the late medieval church’s position is John T. Noonan, The Scholastic Analysis of Usury (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1957). For a summary, see Noonan, “The Amendment of Papal Teaching by Theologians,” in Charles E. Curran (ed.), Contraception: Authority and Dissent (New York: Herder & Herder, 1965), pp. 41–75.

36 CONSUMING Consuming Capital CAPITAL in Good Faith IN GOOD FAITH All the irstling males that come of thy herd and of thy lock thou shalt sanctify unto the LORD thy God: thou shalt do no work with the irstling of thy bullock, nor shear the irstling of thy sheep. Thou shalt eat it before the LORD thy God year by year in the place which the LORD shall choose, thou and thy household. And if there be any blemish therein, as if it be lame, or blind, or have any ill blemish, thou shalt not sacriice it unto the LORD thy God. Thou shalt eat it within thy gates: the unclean and the clean person shall eat it alike, as the roebuck, and as the hart (Deut. 15:19–22).

The theocentric principle here is simple: God got paid irst. He was entitled to the unblemished irstborn males. A secondary theological principle, which governed the blemished irstborn, was this: the covenant’s positive sanctions were predictable for covenantkeepers. Covenant-keeping Israelites had to consume their capital publicly as a way to testify to their conidence in the truth of this covenantal principle. This law was a land law. It was part of the Passover’s requirements: And it shall be when the LORD shall bring thee into the land of the Canaanites, as he sware unto thee and to thy fathers, and shall give it thee, That thou shalt set apart unto the LORD all that openeth the matrix, and every irstling that cometh of a beast which thou hast; the males shall be the LORD’S. And every irstling of an ass thou shalt redeem with a lamb; and if thou wilt not redeem it, then thou shalt break his neck: and all the irstborn of man among thy children shalt thou redeem. And it shall be when thy son asketh thee in time to come, saying, What is this? that thou shalt say unto him, By strength of hand the LORD brought us out from Egypt, from

430

Consuming Capital in Good Faith

431

the house of bondage: And it came to pass, when Pharaoh would hardly let us go, that the LORD slew all the irstborn in the land of Egypt, both the irstborn of man, and the firstborn of beast: therefore I sacriice to the LORD all that openeth the matrix, being males; but all the irstborn of my children I redeem (Ex. 13:11–15).

The negative sanction of the slain animal was to testify against covenant-breakers. Pharaoh was the archetype of every covenantbreaker. Those under his covenantal authority saw their irstborn sons die: the ultimate negative sanction in Old Covenant history, and in most other cultures as well. The slaying of the irstborn animal represented God’s negative sanction against sinners: death. It represented Adam: the irstborn son who rebelled against God and who brought forth God’s negative sanctions. These laws of sacriice were ecclesiastical. Biblical civil law does not threaten negative sanctions for men’s refusal to extend positive sanctions to others. Biblical civil law threatens negative sanctions against those who impose negative sanctions on others. This does not mean that these laws had no civil implications. They did. The violator could be excommunicated, and an excommunicated man lost his citizenship. He moved from the legal status of Israelite to the legal status of stranger. He therefore could not serve as a judge. No longer being under the negative sanctions of the church, he could no longer remain eligible to impose negative civil sanctions on others. Israel was a theocracy. Dual confessions, ecclesiastical and civil, were required from those who possessed lawful civil authority.

Sacriices Mandated an Immediate Loss God owned the irstborn. When the irstborn males of clean animals arrived, they had to be consumed before the Lord in Jerusalem. The irstborn were the sign of God’s blessing. This law required men to consume the tokens of their economic future. These animals could not be trained to do any work. They were purely consumption items. They were not to become capital assets. The people of Israel were required to squander a portion of their assets to the glory of God.

432

DEUTERONOMY

Clean, unblemished irstborn animals were set apart as holy sacriices. Clean, blemished firstborn animals were set apart for a meal of celebration locally. As with the tithes of celebration,1 this was an aspect of holy wastefulness. Israelites were to rejoice in complete conidence: “There’s lots more where that came from!” The donkey was set apart for execution, although it could be redeemed with a lamb (Ex. 13:13; 34:20). Presumably, this could be a blemished lamb that was not itself a irstborn male, since it was not replacing an animal that could lawfully be sacriiced. The donkey was not a sacrificial animal, nor could it be lawfully eaten, since it was unclean. It was a work animal, a beast of burden. It could be ridden or hooked up to a cart. It was symbolic of the covenant-breaker, most notably the Gibeonites (Josh. 9). Thus, its substitute could be a less valuable animal: a lamb that was it neither for sacriice nor breeding. What of unclean animals other than donkeys? They had to be redeemed by a money payment, just as a irstborn son was. “Every thing that openeth the matrix in all lesh, which they bring unto the LORD, whether it be of men or beasts, shall be thine: nevertheless the irstborn of man shalt thou surely redeem, and the irstling of unclean beasts shalt thou redeem. And those that are to be redeemed from a month old shalt thou redeem, according to thine estimation, for the money of ive shekels, after the shekel of the sanctuary, which is twenty gerahs. But the irstling of a cow, or the irstling of a sheep, or the irstling of a goat, thou shalt not redeem; they are holy: thou shalt sprinkle their blood upon the altar, and shalt burn their fat for an ofering made by ire, for a sweet savour unto the LORD” (Num. 18:15–17). The point was, there had to be either death or redemption. Regarding an unblemished clean animal: “Thou shalt eat it before the LORD thy God year by year in the place which the LORD shall choose, thou and thy household.” This applied to the unblemished irstborn. These belonged to God. They were an economic liability: they had to be transported to the central city of sacriice. It was likely that this would be done during one of the three annual festivals. In the meantime, these irstborn animals had to be cared for. They would absorb capital. 1. Chapter 34.

Consuming Capital in Good Faith

433

An unclean beast could not be lawfully consumed or ofered. For these, the Israelite had to pay the market price plus 20 percent to the priest. “And if it be any unclean beast, of which they do not ofer a sacriice unto the LORD, then he shall present the beast before the priest: And the priest shall value it, whether it be good or bad: as thou valuest it, who art the priest, so shall it be. But if he will at all redeem it, then he shall add a ifth part thereof unto thy estimation” (Lev. 27:11–13). The clean beast without a blemish was eaten by its owner, but only after it had been taken to the central city. The clean beast that had a blemish was eaten by its owner in the gates of the nearby city. A donkey either had to be redeemed by a money payment or a lamb had to be sacriiced in its place. These were consumption goods, not visible testimonies of the future. They could not become capital goods except in the case of the donkey, for which the owner sacriiced a lamb. Such acts of consumption acknowledged publicly that God is in control of history. He deserves a sacriice. He will also bring additional wealth into the households of faithful Israelites. The economic loss involved in the sacriice testified to a man’s faith in this system of covenantal cause and efect, a system of covenantal causation that operates predictably in history. With respect to blemished animals, the law was less burdensome: “Thou shalt eat it within thy gates.” This saved transportation costs. These animals were not sacriices in the sense of burnt oferings. They were communal meals: “the unclean and the clean person shall eat it alike” (v. 22). The word “unclean” applied to those who ate the meal. It could not have applied to the food eaten. Israelites could not lawfully eat unclean foods. But they could lawfully eat with strangers in certain ritually required meals. More than this: they were required to eat with strangers. They even had to pay for the meal. The foreigner was more likely to dwell in a walled city, where he could buy, sell, and inherit real estate. He was to be invited to share in the festivities. He was to be made welcome. He was to be made aware of the fact that Israelites regarded themselves as under the protective covenant of God. The positive sanctions associated with the productivity of the irstborn could be safely squandered in a festival meal. Here was a nation that had such conidence in the reliability of God’s covenant sanctions that people were willing to

434

DEUTERONOMY

consume their irstborn animals at a party in which covenantbreakers were invited. This was clearly a form of evangelism.

A Statement of Faith When God required the Israelites to eat the irstborn male animals, He was requiring them to make a statement of faith: they had conidence in the future. God would enable the female animal to bring additional ofspring into the world. Even miscarriages could be overcome through national covenantal faithfulness. “There shall nothing cast their young, nor be barren, in thy land: the number of thy days I will fulil” (Ex. 23:26). God was with Israel. Israelites were required to acknowledge this ritually and economically. A way to acknowledge their conidence of the future was to consume capital in partying. A shared meal was extremely important in several ways. First, it pointed to the gentile as a co-laborer under the dominion covenant. He, too, had a legitimate role in the subduing of the earth (Gen. 1:26–28). His work is acceptable to God.2 Although the uncircumcised stranger was not a recipient of special grace, he was a recipient of common grace.3 The shared meal of the blemished animal was a means of common grace. The animal could not be used on God’s altar, but it had to be used to beneit the uncircumcised resident. His judicial status as a covenant-breaker was his lawful claim to access to the meal. As to which covenant-breakers would be invited, this was up to the Israelite, but someone from among the class of unclean men had to be invited. Second, it pointed to the need of the Israelite to maintain contacts with uncircumcised residents within the gates of the city. If a man eats a meal with another man, there is a degree of fellowship present. Those who eat together normally talk together. The obvious question from the covenant-breaker would have been: “Why did you invite me? I’m not an Israelite.” This would have served as a means of testimony regarding God’s deliverance of Israel in history, just as the young son’s question did at the family’s Passover meal. 2. This means that his work is acceptable to covenant-keepers. The wealth supplied by his productivity can lawfully be purchased by covenant-keepers, thereby increasing their wealth. 3. Gary North, Dominion and Common Grace: The Biblical Basis of Progress (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987).

Consuming Capital in Good Faith

435

Clearly, the blessings of God were to pass down to covenant-breakers who lived in Israel. The blessings in this case were paid for by the sacriice of a capital asset. This was another example of Israel’s uniqueness in the ancient world. The stranger was to participate ritually in the life of the nation. This did not entitle him to citizenship; only circumcision and inter-generational covenantal faithfulness could do that (Deut. 23:2–8). He could not participate in the Passover meal apart from circumcision. But people of his judicial status were entitled to participate in ritually required meals. I am aware of no other nation in the ancient world whose code of law ofered the foreigner equal access to the civil courts (Ex. 12:49), real estate ownership (Lev. 25:29–30), ecclesiastical membership (Ex. 12:48), and fellowship. The law of God served as a means of evangelism (Deut. 4:5–8).4

The Future-Orientation of Biblical Covenantalism The sacriice of the firstborn was an act governed by a worldview that was future-oriented. The Israelite was told to sufer a present loss for the sake of the covenant. The covenant imposed economic costs in the present, but it promised positive sanctions in the future. Participation in ritual sacriices and meals was an external requirement that was to encourage covenant-keepers to think in terms of costs and beneits over time. This particular sacriice – the firstborn male – was uniquely geared to imparting this message. The primary Old Covenant sign of God’s blessing in history – the irstborn son5 – had to be redeemed, and the irstborn animal had to be sacriiced, paid for, or, in the case of the donkey, redeemed by the slaying of a lamb. The sacriicial system, like the tithe, was a means of manifesting God’s future-orientation. He is sovereign over history. He brings His decree to pass. Israel was supposed to look to the future for the culmination of the inheritance. “For evildoers shall be cut of: but those that wait upon the LORD, they shall inherit the earth. For yet a little while, and the wicked shall not be: yea, thou shalt diligently 4. See Chapter 8. 5. “Reuben, thou art my irstborn, my might, and the beginning of my strength, the excellency of dignity, and the excellency of power” (Gen. 49:3). “He smote also all the irstborn in their land, the chief of all their strength” (Ps. 105:36).

436

DEUTERONOMY

consider his place, and it shall not be. But the meek shall inherit the earth; and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace” (Ps. 37:9–11). The here and now is important, for it is the locus of decision-making and responsibility, but the future is important as the locus of fulillment. The righteous man will sacriice the wealth of the present for the sake of fulillment in the future. The sacrificial system was designed to compel the public honoring of this principle by individual covenant-keepers. Participation in public rituals was supposed to reinforce men’s faith in this principle. External observance was supposed to reinforce internal acceptance; internal acceptance was supposed to reinforce external observance. This system of circular reinforcement between external and internal law-keeping is a fundamental principle of all law-making. Laws do not make men good. Man is not saved by law in a special grace sense, but good laws reinforce good ideals. Laws that most people accept as moral and legitimate create habitual patterns of behavior. Habits make certain behavioral patterns less costly to individuals, more automatic, and therefore more predictable by others. By increasing men’s predictability, good habits extend the division of labor. Other men trust their fellows to perform in predictable ways. This lowers risk. It lowers costs. Economics teaches that when the price of something valuable is lowered, more of it will be demanded. Social cooperation increases when men’s good habits become ingrained. This increases the division of labor and therefore increases total output per unit of resource inputs. Wealth increases.

Economic Class and Future-Orientation 6

A future-oriented person is an upper-class person. He makes decisions in terms of a lower rate of interest than a present-oriented person. He discounts the present value of future goods by a lower rate.7 A future-oriented person is willing to forfeit present consumption (i.e., save) for the sake of future income at a rate of interest that does not lead a present-oriented person to save. A society illed with

6. Edward C. Banield, The Unheavenly City: The Nature and Future of Our Urban Crisis (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), pp. 48–50. 7. Murray N. Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State: A Treatise on Economic Principles (Princeton, New Jersey: Van Nostrand, 1962), pp. 323–33. Reprinted by the Mises Institute, Auburn, Alabama, in 1993.

Consuming Capital in Good Faith

437

future-oriented people will have a faster rate of growth, other things being equal, than a society of present-oriented people. Israel was supposed to be future-oriented. Their assignment was to extend the kingdom of God on earth. This is every person’s assignment (Gen. 1:27–28; 9:1–17), but Israel was to honor it. Nevertheless, future-orientation was not sujcient to enable them to achieve this goal. They had to put God irst. They had to acknowledge ritually that God was the source of their blessings. It was not their future-orientation alone that provided their blessings; it was God.

Conclusion The sacriice of the firstborn animal imposed an economic loss on every Israelite family. This loss had to be borne without complaint for the sake of the future. The sacriice of the animal was to serve as a testimony regarding God’s deliverance of Israel from Egypt. It therefore was a testimony to God’s sovereignty over history. God would continue to deliver Israel if Israel remained faithful. The covenant’s negative sanctions had to be imposed on the irstborn so that the covenant’s positive sanctions would continue to be showered on Israel. For the sake of present testimony to sons and strangers, as well as for the sake of future blessings, the present loss of the irstborn or its redemption price had to be borne, preferably enthusiastically. “Every man according as he purposeth in his heart, so let him give; not grudgingly, or of necessity: for God loveth a cheerful giver” (II Cor. 9:7).

37 INDIVIDUAL Individual Blessing andBLESSING National Feasting AND NATIONAL FEASTING And thou shalt rejoice in thy feast, thou, and thy son, and thy daughter, and thy manservant, and thy maidservant, and the Levite, the stranger, and the fatherless, and the widow, that are within thy gates. Seven days shalt thou keep a solemn feast unto the LORD thy God in the place which the LORD shall choose: because the LORD thy God shall bless thee in all thine increase, and in all the works of thine hands, therefore thou shalt surely rejoice. Three times in a year shall all thy males appear before the LORD thy God in the place which he shall choose; in the feast of unleavened bread, and in the feast of weeks, and in the feast of tabernacles: and they shall not appear before the LORD empty: Every man shall give as he is able, according to the blessing of the LORD thy God which he hath given thee (Deut. 16:14–17).

This chapter in Deuteronomy recapitulates the laws governing the three mandatory national feasts. These were clearly ecclesiastical laws, meaning land laws. All three feasts had to be celebrated by the males of the nation at a central location. The theocentric principle governing these three festival laws is the national covenant, which was grounded in an ecclesiastical oath, whose visible mark was circumcision. The negative sanction attached to the law of the feasts was excommunication. The text does not state this explicitly, but the requirement of the festival laws was a journey to the central city where the priestly sacriices were to be performed. This does not mean that there was complete separation between the civil and ecclesiastical covenants. At the feast of Booths (Tabernacles), one year in seven, the entire law had to be read publicly to the assembled nation (Deut. 31:10–13). This included civil law. This event took place in the sabbatical year, the year of debt release (v. 10). Strangers had to attend (v. 12). While strangers were not citizens in 438

Individual Blessing and National Feasting

439

the sense of judges, they were beneiciaries of the Mosaic civil law. The implication is that attendance at the reading of the law, which included civil law, was required. Then what would have been the appropriate civil sanction against strangers who failed to attend? The law is silent. It was not loss of citizenship; they were not citizens. It was not expulsion from the land; they could have been property owners in the cities. Property rights were defended in Israel; this is basic to the rule of law. There does not appear to have been a civil sanction for non-attendance. Presumably, the sanction was ecclesiastical: exclusion from the right to participate at the national feasts, where the poor and strangers were to be welcomed into the family feasts. The civil covenant was not the focus of concern in the festival laws, except one year in seven. The ecclesiastical covenant, which extended to strangers who wanted to participate, was the concern. Nevertheless, there was one civil implication of the stranger’s refusal to participate in the feasts. A circumcised stranger was on the road to full citizenship. Israel allowed outsiders to apply for citizenship, i.e., membership in the congregation. Depending on which nation he came from, this took either three generations or ten (Deut. 23:3–8). Any refusal on his part to participate in the national feasts would have led to his excommunication. He would no longer have had lawful access to the Passover, which circumcised strangers possessed (Ex. 12:48). His excommunication would have revoked the covenantal validity of his circumcision. This would have delayed his heirs’ inheritance of citizenship for an extra generation. Once again, we see the unbreakable relationship governing biblical law, oath-sanctions, and lawful inheritance.

Covenantal Participation The ive representatives listed in this law were identiied repeatedly in the Mosaic law as representatives of the oppressed. The manservant and maidservant were under the jurisdiction of the family. The fatherless and the widow were not part of the family, but they were to be invited by other families to participate in the prosperity of the community. Finally the stranger or resident alien (geyr) who had placed himself under God’s law was to be invited. Verse 12 provides the reason: “And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in Egypt: and thou shalt observe and do these statutes.” Israel’s experience in Egypt was representative of injustice and oppression. What had happened to them in Egypt should not

440

DEUTERONOMY

happen to the politically and economically weak in Israel. Those who were under the law were to be treated well. The issue was the covenant. Those who were under the civil covenant were bound by oath to obey the law. The rule of law was mandatory in Israel. Israel’s righteousness before God, like every judge’s righteousness, was manifested in the courts. One law shall be to him that is homeborn, and unto the stranger that sojourneth among you” (Ex. 12:49). One law and one manner shall be for you, and for the stranger that sojourneth with you (Num. 15:16). Ye shall have one law for him that sinneth through ignorance, both for him that is born among the children of Israel, and for the stranger that sojourneth among them (Num. 15:29). Cursed be he that perverteth the judgment of the stranger, fatherless, and widow. And all the people shall say, Amen (Deut. 27:19).

These were civil commandments. They had to do with civil courts: the place where negative sanctions were imposed. But the requirement went beyond mere negative sanctions; they involved positive sanctions: “He doth execute the judgment of the fatherless and widow, and loveth the stranger, in giving him food and raiment. Love ye therefore the stranger: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Deut. 10:18–19). The laws governing the three annual ecclesiastical feasts were part of this general obligation to love the stranger. The positive sanctions of participation were ecclesiastical. Mosaic civil law did not invoke positive sanctions, since positive civil sanctions can only be funded by the imposition of negative sanctions on others.1 1. Double restitution could be considered as a positive sanction. It is the restoration of the thing stolen plus a penalty. But this negative economic sanction is imposed on a convicted malefactor, not the general public. The law considers the economic burden associated with the loss imposed by theft. These burdens are more than the mere loss of the object. The property owner’s legitimate sphere of authority was violated by the thief. The victim perceives the injustice of the theft, which adds to his estimated value of the stolen item. So, in this sense, multiple restitution is not a positive sanction; it is the restoration of the status quo ante. The victim is not given something for nothing by the civil government. He is being compensated for his lost time, his lost property, his sense of injustice, and the risk factor

Individual Blessing and National Feasting

441

Expensive Celebrations In my commentary on Leviticus, I devoted space to a consideration of the economics of the three centralized feasts. I concluded that the economic burden must have been in the range of at least 15 percent of gross income, not counting travel and lodging costs, and not counting forfeited income. Adding these costs, the total burden may have been closer to 25 percent, the estimate of Rabbinic tradition.2 This was a very heavy burden. It had to be borne in faith. But the increased wealth of the nation would have pointed to the reliability of God’s covenantal promises. The law speciically stated that the testimony of personal economic prosperity was to be considered by each celebrant in estimating what he could aford to spend at the festivals. In faith, men were to open their wallets in a common celebration three times a year. The Israelites were told that God would reward them, and that they had to celebrate this bounty. The blessings of God were guaranteed: “Because the LORD thy God shall bless thee in all thine increase, and in all the works of thine hands, therefore thou shalt surely rejoice” (v. 15b). This promise was corporate. Yet there was also the assumption of individual blessings: “Every man shall give as he is able, according to the blessing of the LORD thy God which he hath given thee” (v. 17). The individual blessings would vary; hence, the individual was required to give of his increase in celebration. He was not to hold back in his rejoicing, for God had not held back His blessings. Moses was telling them that God’s deliverance of the nation out of Egyptian bondage and wilderness wandering was the down payment on the promised inheritance. Their actual blessings in the land would verify the continuing presence of God among His people. This means that economic growth was basic to the covenant’s system of sanctions. The people would be able to aford the three national celebrations. While these celebrations would be very expensive, they would nonetheless be afordable to the poorest man in Israel. Every

imposed on him by the thief that the civil authorities might not have discovered the identity of the thief and the jury might not have convicted him. 2. Gary North, Leviticus: An Economic Commentary (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), p. 18.

442

DEUTERONOMY

man could in conidence walk away from his labors for up to seven weeks a year, depending on how far his home was from Jerusalem. The blessings would fund the celebrations. This was God’s promise of great economic blessings because the costs of celebration would be high. He was promising His covenantal blessings. These blessings would conirm His covenant. They would verify His presence among them, not just in a spiritual sense but in an economic sense. The covenant’s blessings would be visible in history. He would be visible in these blessings. Their mandatory response was to take a large portion of their blessings and reinvest this in national celebrations. They would come together in the presence of God because God had blessed them nationally and individually, as promised in the Mosaic law itself. God was with them individually in their local communities, as seen in their economic prosperity. Their mandatory response was to take a substantial portion of their wealth and squander it in celebration. In this sense, the celebrations were to serve as exercises in faith. God called on them to pour their proits back into the nation. The nation was not to be regarded as a political entity. On the contrary, the lion’s share went into celebrations. The State could not lay claim to a large portion of the nation’s wealth because that otherwise discretionary income was not legally discretionary. One important efect of this law was the binding of both the State and the priesthood.

Keeping Trim Not only were church and State to be kept trim by this law, so were the people. The mandated festivals can be considered as a national military itness program. God’s holy army would be in training. Every man had to walk to the nation’s central place of worship three times a year. Only those who were on a journey could skip two of the three feasts: Firstfruits and Booths.3 Had the celebrations been legal in their home towns, they would have been tempted to consume their capital in calories. This would have been a form of gluttony. This was prohibited by the Mosaic law. Gluttony was a mark of rebellion. Parents were required to act as prosecuting agents in a covenant lawsuit against gluttonous 3. I presume this because of the law governing Passover, which allowed a late celebration because of journeys (Num. 9:10).

Individual Blessing and National Feasting

443

sons: “And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard” (Deut. 21:20). “For the drunkard and the glutton shall come to poverty: and drowsiness shall clothe a man with rags” (Prov. 23:21). Thus, Solomon warned: “When thou sittest to eat with a ruler, consider diligently what is before thee: And put a knife to thy throat, if thou be a man given to appetite. Be not desirous of his dainties: for they are deceitful meat” (Prov. 23:1–3). There was no prohibition against eating meat. In fact, the opposite was true. The people were to enjoy the fat of the meat they brought to be sacriiced. In Moses’ parting account of God’s dealings with Israel, past and future, he focused on fat. Israelites were allowed to eat the fat of the land, including animals. But the people were not to become bloated. A nation of obese people would testify to the nation’s subordination to false gods. Moses adopted the imagery of obesity to describe the nation’s rebellious spiritual condition. For the LORD’S portion is his people; Jacob is the lot of his inheritance. He found him in a desert land, and in the waste howling wilderness; he led him about, he instructed him, he kept him as the apple of his eye. As an eagle stirreth up her nest, luttereth over her young, spreadeth abroad her wings, taketh them, beareth them on her wings: So the LORD alone did lead him, and there was no strange god with him. He made him ride on the high places of the earth, that he might eat the increase of the ields; and he made him to suck honey out of the rock, and oil out of the linty rock; Butter of kine, and milk of sheep, with fat of lambs, and rams of the breed of Bashan, and goats, with the fat of kidneys of wheat; and thou didst drink the pure blood of the grape. But Jeshurun waxed fat, and kicked: thou art waxen fat, thou art grown thick, thou art covered with fatness; then he forsook God which made him, and lightly esteemed the Rock of his salvation. They provoked him to jealousy with strange gods, with abominations provoked they him to anger. They sacriiced unto devils, not to God; to gods whom they knew not, to new gods that came newly up, whom your fathers feared not (Deut. 32:9–17).

The Mosaic law encouraged the consumption of fat, but it also mandated exercise. God’s gifts were not to be misused. Men were not to shovel their net income into their mouths. They were not to eat their own futures. In an agricultural society, wealth is understood as having to do with excess food. Being fat in such a society would have been an aspect of what today is called “conspicuous

444

DEUTERONOMY

consumption.” Fat was allowed by the Mosaic law. The language of fatness was invoked by Moses to symbolize God’s blessings. But fat was not to compromise anyone’s physical mobility. A man’s extra weight had to be paid for on journeys to Jerusalem three times a year. There was a strong incentive for the obese person to reduce his intake of food. The kind of obesity that is the result of lust for food was equated with the lust to distort one’s senses with alcohol to the point of irresponsibility.4 Fat was allowed – indeed, it was mandated at the feasts. Alcohol was also allowed (Deut. 14:26). But gluttony and drunkenness were prohibited.

Conclusion God promised covenantal blessings for Israel’s covenantal faithfulness. The national festivals were part of this system. They were expensive events that required the men of Israel to gather in one place at the same time. These festivals were God’s way of establishing a sense of national community under His law. Israel would be more than tribes and cities. Israel was a holy nation.

4. The judicial issue of drunkenness is responsibility before God. Any substance or practice (e.g., a discipline that produces a demonic trance) that distorts one’s senses so that one becomes unable to judge his surroundings responsibly must be avoided. An exception is where the individual places himself legally and physically under the authority of others, as is the case in the administration of anesthetics.

38 CASUISTRY INHERITANCE CasuistryAND and Inheritance Judges and ojcers shalt thou make thee in all thy gates, which the LORD thy God giveth thee, throughout thy tribes: and they shall judge the people with just judgment. Thou shalt not wrest judgment; thou shalt not respect persons, neither take a gift: for a gift doth blind the eyes of the wise, and pervert the words of the righteous. That which is altogether just shalt thou follow, that thou mayest live, and inherit the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee (Deut. 16:18–20).

The theocentric focus of this law is the impartial judgment of God. “Wherefore now let the fear of the LORD be upon you; take heed and do it: for there is no iniquity with the LORD our God, nor respect of persons, nor taking of gifts” (II Chron. 19:7). This was not a land law. It was universal. Men are to render honest judgments in history because God does. Their covenantal judgments in history are to conform judicially to God’s covenantal judgments in history and eternity. In rendering covenantal judgment, men are to think God’s thoughts after Him as creatures. They can do this because they are made in God’s image. The essence of man’s status as God’s image-bearer is his ability to render judgment.1 This is why Satan tempted mankind through the serpent by telling Eve to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Adam and Eve were supposed to render judgment against the serpent in terms of God’s revealed word. The covenantal hierarchy2 of God > man > creation was to be preserved by man’s representative act of rendering God’s judgment 1. You might want to commit this sentence to memory. It is important. 2. Ray R. Sutton, That You May Prosper: Dominion By Covenant (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1992), ch. 2.

445

446

DEUTERONOMY

against Satan’s representative agent, the serpent. Adam and Eve were to render judgment against Satan by refusing to follow the serpent’s advice, i.e., his false rendering of judgment against God’s revealed word. The essence of the temptation in the garden was the rendering of judgment for or against God’s revealed word, for or against the serpent’s word. Adam and Eve were to render a joint verdict of “guilty” against the serpent. His crime was having testiied falsely against God’s word. They were to impose the appropriate sanction by crushing his head. Because they refused to do this, God prophesied a son of Adam who would do this (Gen. 3:15).

Stoning and Hierarchy This raises the issue of stoning. Here are two reasons why stoning was required by the Mosaic law as the proper means of public execution. First, stoning conforms to the imagery of the crushed head. A stone is most likely to be fatal when it crushes the head. Second, stoning allows joint participation in the judicial act. Both Adam and Eve would have participated in the execution of the serpent, not just Adam. Men imposed this sanction before God revealed His law to Moses. The practice of stoning was understood by both the Egyptians and the Israelites: “And Pharaoh called for Moses and for Aaron, and said, Go ye, sacriice to your God in the land. And Moses said, It is not meet so to do; for we shall sacriice the abomination of the Egyptians to the LORD our God: lo, shall we sacriice the abomination of the Egyptians before their eyes, and will they not stone us? We will go three days’ journey into the wilderness, and sacriice to the LORD our God, as he shall command us” (Ex. 8:25–27). Again, in the wilderness, Moses despaired: “And Moses cried unto the LORD, saying, What shall I do unto this people? they be almost ready to stone me” (Ex. 17:4). The penalty against coming close to Mt. Sinai when God revealed His presence to the nation was stoning, both of man and beast (Ex. 19:13). For an animal to gore a man calls forth stoning (Ex. 21:28–29, 32). This is a breach of the covenant’s hierarchical order: man over animal. Only after these events and case laws did the Mosaic law mandate stoning against those who testiied falsely about God. False prophets were to be stoned (Deut. 13:5–11). So were members of an Israelite household who tempted other members to worship a false god (Deut. 17:2–6). Finally, an unmarried woman who had sex with another man before marriage, and who did not tell her betrothed husband about this in advance, could

Casuistry and Inheritance

447

be accused of this crime by her newly wedded husband. The penalty was stoning (Deut. 22:21). What did these crimes have in common? A violation of the covenantal hierarchy: a goring beast over a human being, a false prophet over the community, a rebellious family member over the others, a false wife over her husband. Whenever a major violation of point two of the biblical covenant took place, the appropriate sanction was stoning: crushing the head.3

Local Civil Courts To this law were attached positive sanctions: life and property. “That which is altogether just shalt thou follow, that thou mayest live, and inherit the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee” (v. 20). The State was in no position to provide the sanction of life. That was God’s prerogative. These sanctions were not civil sanctions, for they were positive sanctions. They would come in response to honest judgment. God would give Israel life and inheritance if Israel’s judges rendered honest judgment. This law governed the establishment of local civil courts. These courts could not have been ecclesiastical, for this law made no reference to priests or Levites. The ecclesiastical covenant was not here invoked by Moses. This means that the civil covenant was the focus of this law. Ojcers and judges were civil magistrates.

Hierarchy, Casuistry, and Economic Growth The Mosaic legal system, like all legal systems, was hierarchical: point two of the biblical covenant model. The issue here was authority, namely, the voice of authority. Someone must speak God’s word authoritatively and representatively in history. Rendering covenantal judgment is a representative act. This is why point two of the covenant – hierarchy, representation, authority – is always connected with point four: rendering judgment, imposing sanctions. In declaring God’s word in history, God was above Moses, Moses was

3. That such a suggestion appalls modern Christians indicates the extent to which pluralism has undermined Christian social thought. The crime of treason against God no longer is regarded as a crime by modern man; hence, the appropriate Mosaic sanction is considered barbaric. In a society in which blasphemy is a trile, stoning is an ofense.

448

DEUTERONOMY

above the civil judges, and the civil judges were above the people. God revealed His law to Moses, who taught God’s law to civil magistrates, who then served as judges. The judges were required by God to render judgment in speciic cases. This meant that they were required by God to apply the Mosaic law to disputes that would arise between men. The judges were therefore required by God to become experts in the art of casuistry: the application of general legal principles and speciic case law precedents to new situations. The general legal principles were the Ten Commandments. The case laws were those speciic biblical laws that extended the Ten Commandments to recognizable historical situations.4 By means of casuistry, the judges were supposed to bring justice to Israel. Over time, a body of judicial opinion and precedents would be accumulated which would serve as judicial wisdom. Judicial precedents would then extend the rule of law. Men would begin to think covenantally, judging their own actions in advance. This would not be judge-made law; it would be judge-declared law. God makes the law; His judges are to apply it in history and even in eternity. Jesus announced to His disciples at the Passover meal: “And I appoint unto you a kingdom, as my Father hath appointed unto me; That ye may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom, and sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel” (Luke 22:29–30). Paul announced to the church at Corinth: “Know ye not that we shall judge angels? how much more things that pertain to this life?” (I Cor. 6:3). The original revelation of the law was top-down: from God to Moses to the judges. This top-down hierarchical element was to be re-conirmed in Israel once every seven years, when the entire nation was to be assembled at a common location, and the entire law was to be read to them publicly (Deut. 31:10–13). But this event was comparatively rare. The teaching of God’s revealed law would normally have been local: by the Levites, who were judicial specialists, and by the civil judges in actual cases. The Levites were agents of God who declared God’s revelation and who served as judges in ecclesiastical disputes. The civil magistrates were ojcers ordained through the civil covenant who possessed the power of the sword: the

4. Gary North, Tools of Dominion: The Case Laws of Exodus (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990).

Casuistry and Inheritance

449

monopoly of physical coercion. They declared the civil law publicly and applied it to men’s bodies (whipping5 and capital punishment6) and their property (ines7 and restitution8).

Legal Predictability The predictability of a legal order will increase over time if judges govern in terms of God’s revealed law. Men will better be able to predict what the outcome of a legal dispute will be. When both parties are fairly certain that the law’s sanctions will be imposed on the disputant who loses the case, the person with the weaker case has an incentive to settle out of court. This reduces the number of cases that are brought to trial. A successful legal system is one in which the high predictability of the law leads to increased self-government and a reduction in the number of cases brought to trial.9 A vast increase in the number of court cases is evidence of the breakdown in the rule of law: the clogging of the courts.10 The greater the predictability of the courts, the greater the incentive for men to cooperate with each other. Why? Because the higher predictability of the judge’s application of the law’s sanctions reduces the cost of predicting the results of human action. As with any other scarce resource, as the price is lowered, more is demanded. The price of the division of labor is reduced by predictable law. The division of labor is increased by an increase in the rule of law: more and more people take advantage of the opportunities ofered by increased social cooperation. This increased division of labor raises the output of cooperating individuals, and therefore increases their wealth. The decentralized decisions of individuals become more predictable. This reduces the cost of obtaining that most precious of all scarce economic resources, accurate knowledge of the future. We can predict more accurately what other people will do 5. “Forty stripes he may give him, and not exceed: lest, if he should exceed, and beat him above these with many stripes, then thy brother should seem vile unto thee” (Deut. 25:3). See ibid., p. 443. 6. For a list of cases, see ibid., pp. 318–20. 7. Fines must be used to compensate victims of unsolved crimes, not as revenue sources for the State. Ibid., pp. 395–96, 423, 490–91. 8. Exodus 22:1–13. 9. F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (University of Chicago Press, 1960), p. 208. 10. This is the situation of the United States today. Macklin Fleming, The Price of Perfect Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1974).

450

DEUTERONOMY

when we and they abide by the rules. F. A. Hayek, the free market economist and legal theorist, puts it this way: “The maximal certainty of expectations which can be achieved in a society in which individuals are allowed to use their knowledge of constantly changing circumstances for their own equally changing purposes is secured by rules which tell everyone which of these circumstances must not be altered by others and which he himself must not alter.”11 The capitalist West is wealthy because it has been the beneiciary of the rule of law. As I wrote in Moses and Pharaoh, Hayek has made a point which must be taken seriously by those who seek to explain the relationship between Christianity and the advent of free enterprise capitalism in the West. “There is probably no single factor which has contributed more to the prosperity of the West than the relative certainty of the law which has prevailed here.”12 Sowell’s comments are especially graphic: “Someone who is going to work for many years to have his own home wants some fairly rigid assurance that the house will in fact belong to him – that he cannot be dispossessed by someone who is physically stronger, better armed, or more ruthless, or who is deemed more ‘worthy’ by political authorities. Rigid assurances are needed that changing fashions, mores, and power relationships will not suddenly deprive him of his property, his children, or his life.”13 Hayek quite properly denies the validity of the quest for perfect certainty, since “complete certainty of the law is an ideal which we must try to approach but which we can never perfectly attain.”14 His anti-perfectionism regarding the rule of the law is also in accord with the anti-perfectionism of Christian social thought in the 15 West. Christianity brought with it a conception of social order which 16 made possible the economic development of the West.

What always threatens the rule of God’s law in history is the judge who departs from the revealed law of God. The judge who substitutes his own wisdom for the law of God or the body of legal 11. F. A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, vol. 1, Rules and Order (University of Chicago Press, 1973), pp. 108–109. 12. Hayek, Constitution of Liberty, p. 208. 13. Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions (New York: Basic Books, 1980), p. 32. 14. Hayek, Constitution of Liberty, p. 208. 15. Benjamin B. Warield, Perfectionism (Philadelphia: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1958). This is an abridged version of his two-volume study, published posthumously by Oxford University Press in 1931 and reprinted by Baker Book House in 1981. 16. Gary North, Moses and Pharaoh: Dominion Religion vs. Power Religion (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1985), p. 212.

Casuistry and Inheritance

451

opinion is a threat to biblical civil justice. So is the judge who seeks bribes for rendering judgment that deviates from God’s fundamental law and constitutional laws. Bribes pervert justice. It is the court’s task to extend justice. Civil justice in turn makes possible capitalism’s increase of a society’s wealth. The positive sanction of wealth is the outcome of civil justice. In the period immediately preceding the conquest, Moses revealed this case law, which recapitulates Leviticus 19:15: “Ye shall do no unrighteousness in judgment: thou shalt not respect the person of the poor, nor honour the person of the mighty: but in righteousness shalt thou judge thy neighbour.” It recapitulates Deuteronomy 1:17: “Ye shall not respect persons in judgment; but ye shall hear the small as well as the great; ye shall not be afraid of the face of man; for the judgment is God’s: and the cause that is too hard for you, bring it unto me, and I will hear it.” Its theocentric focus was God’s judgment. God is not a respecter of persons when He judges any man. God does not look at the person’s class position, money, good looks, or any other distinguishing feature. He does not accept bribes to corrupt His judgment. He looks at His law and the person’s thoughts, words, and actions, and He judges the degree to which the person before Him has conformed to or deviated from His law. In other words, God applies His law to historical circumstances. He interprets it and makes assessments in terms of it. God practices the judicial art of casuistry. He does not wait until the end of time to render judgment. He renders preliminary judgments in history. As creatures made in His image, men are required by God to do the same: thinking God’s thoughts after Him, declaring His law, and applying sanctions in terms of His law. Men are to render righteous judgment. They do this through biblical casuistry. In our day, biblical casuistry is a lost skill. Worse; it is a skill widely derided as theocratic and therefore illegitimate. This is not merely the opinion of covenant-breakers; it is announced with equal fervor and conidence by Christians: social theorists (few in number since 1700 precisely because of this hostility to biblical casuistry), church leaders, civil leaders, and people in the pews. But there is no escape from the requirements of casuistry. If men do not render judgment in terms of God’s fundamental law – the Ten Commandments – and God’s biblically revealed constitutional laws, which have extended the Ten Commandments to real-world cases, then they must render judgment in terms of some other

452

DEUTERONOMY

law-order. Judges dare not remain silent if social order is to be maintained. Disputes will be settled: in covenantal courts or by clan feuds or on battleields. Sanctions must be imposed in order to settle disputes. The judicial question is this one: By what standard?

Sanctions and Inheritance Verse 20 reads: “That which is altogether just shalt thou follow, that thou mayest live, and inherit the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.” There can be no question about the unbreakable covenantal connection between the law’s sanctions and inheritance. The art of rendering biblical judgment is the art of deciding guilt or innocence in terms of biblical law. But this must involve judicial sanctions. To the law are attached sanctions. The imposed sanctions must it the violation. This is the biblical principle of the lex talionis: an eye for an eye.17 The context of this principle of justice was abortion: “If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely punished, according as the woman’s husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine. And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life, Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, Burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe” (Ex. 21:22–25). It is indicative of the contemporary crisis in Protestant thought that legalized abortion did not become the target of widespread Protestant political opposition until several years after the U.S. Supreme Court handed down Roe v. Wade in 1973. But after 1980, a growing minority of evangelicals began to organize against legalized abortion. It was this public issue which dragged Francis Schaefer into political activism.18 Because there can be no neutral zone in the abortionist’s ojce between a dead baby and a live one, the myth of neutrality is deinitively denied in matters of abortion. This inescapable fact of abortion persuaded Schaefer’s son to write A Time for Anger: The Myth of Neutrality.19 Whenever the myth of neutrality fades, the conflict

17. North, Tools of Dominion, ch. 12. 18. Francis A. Schaefer, Whatever Happened to the Human Race (1976); reprinted in The Complete Works of Francis A. Schaefer: A Christian Worldview, 5 vols. (Westchester, Illinois: Crossway, 1982), V, A Christian View of the West, pp. 281–410. 19. Westchester, Illinois: Crossway, 1982.

Casuistry and Inheritance

453

between rival religious worldviews escalates. The always mythical zones of neutrality between Christianity and humanism are recognized increasingly as being mythical. This pressures Christians and humanists to go their respective ways to develop their respective views of what constitutes a legitimate earthly kingdom. This in turn pressures both sides to impose their vision of the kingdom on both the political order and the social order. Theocracy is therefore an inescapable concept. It is never a question of theocracy vs. no theocracy. It is a question of which theocracy. The issue of legalized abortion has dragged evangelical Protestants into the political arena, forcing them to abandon their previous pietism-quietism, forcing them to come up with theologically precise answers to the crucial judicial and ethical question: By what standard? The moment a Christian raises this question, he must confront the issue of theocracy vs. pluralism, not just in the church and family but in civil government. This is why the issue of legalized abortion has led Christians to issue manifestoes that sound theocratic. They are theocratic. They undermine Enlightenment pluralism, which has served as the judicial basis of modern Western society since the late eighteenth century. But because modern Christians have embraced Enlightenment pluralism in the name of Christ, there is an inevitable schizophrenia in their manifestoes.20 By what standard? Anglo-American Protestants have resisted dealing with this crucial question from an explicitly biblical point of view ever since the end of Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate with his death in 1658, but legalized abortion is now forcing their hand. Peter’s injunction is before them: “But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear” (I Pet. 3:15). This hope is more than faith in the world beyond the grave. It is hope that someday, infants will not be deliberately sent to their graves, which include trash bin “dumpsters” located behind the ojces of abortionists.21 20. On the unresolved schizophrenia of Francis Schaefer’s A Christian Manifesto (1981), see Gary North, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989), pp. 180–85. 21. George Grant rummaged through one such dumpster in the late 1980’s, searching for the remains of executed children. He was chased away by a gun-bearing security guard. The guard threatened to shoot him if he did not stop. When Grant led in a car, the guard pursued him in a pickup truck in a high-speed chase. George Grant, Grand Illusions: The Legacy of Planned Parenthood (rev. ed.; Franklin, Tennessee: Adroit, 1992), pp. 11–13.

454

DEUTERONOMY

The covenantal issue of sanctions cannot legitimately be separated from the covenantal issue of inheritance. This is obvious in the case of abortion. “Who will inherit?” is the fundamental issue of the death penalty: the earthly one as well as the eternal one. Abortion imposes the death penalty on those who have done neither good nor evil (Rom. 9:11). When abortion is legalized by the civil government, abortionists become agents of the State, for only the State has the right to impose the death penalty. In the name of personal privacy for women, the U.S. Supreme Court necessarily swore in an army of executioners: mothers, physicians, nurses, and their support stafs. A civil oath – a swearing in – is unojcial and implicit in the authorization of abortion, but it is nonetheless binding. This is why an entire social order is at risk before the judgment of God when it allows its civil representatives to delegate such powers of execution to private citizens. Biblically, these executioners are no longer private citizens; they are agents of the State, which is in turn an agent of the corporate society. As with a citizens’ posse that is sworn in by a sherif, so are the executioners sworn in by the State. Members of a sworn-in posse have a delegated though circumscribed right to kill those who resist their authority. So do abortionists and their assistants in a nation that has legalized abortion. In today’s legal order, abortionists possess much greater judicial immunity from post-execution civil action than a posse does.

Justice and Positive Sanctions We return to the issue of positive sanctions: “That which is altogether just shalt thou follow, that thou mayest live, and inherit the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee” (v. 20). The positive sanctions of extended life and land were extensions of the Mosaic seed laws and land laws. These laws were the result of Jacob’s messianic prophecy regarding Judah: “The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come; and unto him shall the gathering of the people be” (Gen. 49:10). Seed laws and land laws were laws conined to Israel. They were not cross-boundary laws.22 The question arises: Were the promises of verse 20 more than extensions of the seed laws and land laws? This

22. North, Leviticus, ch. 17.

Casuistry and Inheritance

455

raises a subsidiary question: Does this connection between civil justice and personal possessions extend into the New Covenant? That is, was this law a cross-boundary law that applied beyond the bor23 ders of Mosaic Israel? Or was it conined historically and geographically to Mosaic Israel? This hermeneutical question raises the issue of covenantal continuity. Meredith G. Kline’s dictum regarding the mystery of God’s New Covenant historical sanctions comes into play: “And meanwhile it [the common grace order] must run its course within the uncertainties of the mutually conditioning principles of common grace and common curse, prosperity and adversity being experienced in a manner largely unpredictable because of the inscrutable sovereignty of the divine will that dispenses them in mysterious ways.”24 If correct, this would negate the possibility of an explicitly biblical social theory. Christians would have to look either to autonomous nature or autonomous man to provide the predictable sanctions that make possible both social cohesion and social theory. The existence of cross-boundary laws that were binding outside of Mosaic Israel, and are still binding today, is what makes possible an explicitly Christian social theory. Is there a principle of continuity between this Mosaic principle and New Covenant law? There is no doubt that the general judicial principle of not respecting persons in judgment is a cross-boundary law. Peter cited this principle in his confession to Cornelius after Peter’s vision of the clean and unclean beasts: “Then Peter opened his mouth, and said, Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons: But in every nation he that feareth him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with him” (Acts. 10:34–35). This is a fundamental New Covenant principle: For there is no respect of persons with God (Rom. 2:11). But he that doeth wrong shall receive for the wrong which he hath done: and there is no respect of persons (Col. 3:25).

23. Gary North, Leviticus: An Economic Commentary (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), pp. 642–45. 24. Meredith G. Kline, “Comments on an Old-New Error,” Westminster Theological Journal, XLI (Fall 1978), p. 184.

456

DEUTERONOMY

My brethren, have not the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory, with respect of persons (James 2:1). And if ye call on the Father, who without respect of persons judgeth according to every man’s work, pass the time of your sojourning here in fear (I Peter 1:17).

The question, then, relates to the covenantal connection between rendering civil justice and God’s external blessings. Did life and land serve as representative blessings for a broader class of blessings? Or were they narrowly circumscribed extensions of Mosaic Israel’s seed laws and land laws?

The Issue Is Inheritance The exegetical problem facing us here is to identify the covenantal basis of the extension of both long life and property ownership into the New Testament economy. I argue that the non-theonomist has the burden of proof to prove discontinuity. But the non-theonomist insists that it is the theonomist’s burden to prove continuity. So, for the sake of argument (since I know I can win it in this instance), I shall willingly bear this burden. The solution is found in Paul’s citation of the ifth commandment. “Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee” (Ex. 20:12). Paul wrote: “Children, obey your parents in the Lord: for this is right. Honour thy father and mother; (which is the irst commandment with promise;) That it may be well with thee, and thou mayest live long on the earth” (Eph. 6:1–3). The Greek word for earth applies to speciic geographical locations: “And thou Bethlehem, in the land of Juda, art not the least among the princes of Juda: for out of thee shall come a Governor, that shall rule my people Israel” (Matt. 2:6). “Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and go into the land of Israel: for they are dead which sought the young child’s life” (Matt. 2:20). The Greek word for land can also refer to the whole earth: “Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth (Matt. 5:5). “For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulilled” (Matt. 5:18). Paul’s epistle to the gentile church at Ephesus obviously was not intended to persuade them that in order for them to receive the blessing of long life, all of the members would have to move to Israel.

Casuistry and Inheritance

457

Yet this would have to be the argument of anyone who denies the covenantal continuity between the promise of long life on the land in the ifth commandment and Paul’s citation of this law to strengthen his case regarding the child’s obligation to obey his parents. The most general law governing the case law application of Deuteronomy 16:18–20 was not Jacob’s promise that Judah would bear the sword in Israel until Shiloh came (Gen. 49:10). Rather, it was the ifth commandment. Because the ifth commandment and its sanctions extend into the New Covenant era,25 Deuteronomy 16:18–20 is a cross-boundary law. Rendering civil justice in terms of God’s revealed law without respect to persons will produce the blessing of long life. Biblical civil justice will also protect private property. The word land in this passage represents inherited property in general. In fact, it asserts the right of inheritance.

Health and Wealth This passage informs us that there is an economic correlation between honest judgment and life. First, civil judges who refuse to take bribes or pervert justice thereby secure men’s inheritances. Secure inheritances represent a defense of private property, including contracts. Second, judicial respect for private property is the legal basis of free market capitalism. Third, free market capitalism consistently increases per capita wealth. Fourth, increased per capita wealth increases average life expectancy. Long life is a visible blessing which is positively correlated with increased per capita wealth. As a nation’s per capita wealth increases, so does the average life expectancy of its residents. So does their general health.26 The measurable blessing of increased life expectancy is revealed statistically in decreasing rates for life insurance premiums.27 25. The non-theonomist hastens to assure us that the sanctions of the ifth commandment do not apply in New Covenant times. But he is cut of at the knees by Paul’s citation of the entire commandment, including the positive sanctions for obedience. Paul singled out this law as the first law with a promise. He did not call into question the promise, i.e., this law’s sanctions. On the contrary, he afirmed the promise. 26. Aaron Wildavsky, Searching for Safety (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction, 1988), pp. 58–75; John D. Graham, Bei-Hung Chang, and John S. Evans, “Poorer Is Riskier,” Risk Analysis, XII, No. 3 (1992). John C. Shanahan and Adam D. Thierer, “How to Talk About Risk: How Well-Intentioned Regulations Can Kill,” Heritage Talking Points, No. 13 (Washington, D.C.: Heritage Foundation, 1966), p. 14. 27. I refer here to term insurance: payment only to insure against death.

458

DEUTERONOMY

Those theologians, such as Kline, who deny any measurable correlation between corporate obedience to God’s covenantal law and corporate blessings must demonstrate that decreasing term insurance rates are not correlated to corporate covenantal faithfulness, i.e., external obedience to God’s law. They must irst deny that the West’s increased life expectancy came as a result of widespread adherence to the stipulations in God’s law, most notably laws protecting private property (Ex. 20:15), including contract law. Then, second, they must prove it. The Mosaic law informs us, and the history of the West conirms, that the civil government’s enforcement of God’s Biblerevealed civil law increases national wealth in the long term. The continuing trustworthiness of verse 20’s covenantally linked promises – private property, honest judgment, and life – has been veriied by the history of the West, especially since the late eighteenth century, when the rule of law, Protestantism’s concept of personal responsibility and self-government, limited civil government, and eschatological future-orientation28 produced the Industrial Revolution in late eighteenth-century England, which spread within one generation to the European Continent and the United States.

Conclusion The same covenantal connections linking life, property ownership, and faithful civil judgment are found in the sanction attached to honoring one’s parents. Long life (measurable blessing) in the land (secure inheritance) for honoring parents (legal stipulation) is ajrmed in Exodus 20:12. He who would in any way deny the covenantal link between the stipulations of biblical law and visible, positive, corporate sanctions must deny the continuing validity of the ifth commandment. He must also explain why Paul’s citation of the ifth commandment and its sanctions in Ephesians 6:3 does not re-conirm Exodus 20:14. In short, he must apply an antinomian hermeneutics to the New Testament. He must argue for a radical judicial discontinuity between the two covenants, despite the fact that 28. Postmillennialism irst appeared in a comprehensive, developed form in the Protestant West in early seventeenth-century Scotland and England. The belief in the possibility of long-term compound economic growth for society did not exist prior to seventeenth-century Puritanism. This positive eschatology was secularized by the Enlightenment in the next century. Robert A. Nisbet, “The Year 2000 And All That,” Commentary (June 1968).

Casuistry and Inheritance

459

the author of Hebrews twice cites Jeremiah’s prophecy that the law will be written in the hearts of men as being fulilled in the New Covenant (Heb. 8:10–11; 10:16). Antinomianism is the denial of biblical law and its sanctions in New Testament times. It threatens the judicial inheritance of the West. This, in turn, threatens the economic inheritance of the West: the increasing per capita wealth made possible by free market capitalism. Whether this antinomianism is the scholastic variety, the Lutheran variety, the Reformed variety, or the dispensational variety, the result is the same: the undermining of covenant-keeping men’s faith in the positive corporate results of corporate covenantal faithfulness. This loss of faith then undermines the development of an explicitly biblical social theory, including economics.

39 ISRAEL’S COURT Israel’sSUPREME Supreme Court If there arise a matter too hard for thee in judgment, between blood and blood, between plea and plea, and between stroke and stroke, being matters of controversy within thy gates: then shalt thou arise, and get thee up into the place which the LORD thy God shall choose; And thou shalt come unto the priests the Levites, and unto the judge that shall be in those days, and enquire; and they shall shew thee the sentence of judgment: And thou shalt do according to the sentence, which they of that place which the LORD shall choose shall shew thee; and thou shalt observe to do according to all that they inform thee: According to the sentence of the law which they shall teach thee, and according to the judgment which they shall tell thee, thou shalt do: thou shalt not decline from the sentence which they shall shew thee, to the right hand, nor to the left. And the man that will do presumptuously, and will not hearken unto the priest that standeth to minister there before the LORD thy God, or unto the judge, even that man shall die: and thou shalt put away the evil from Israel. And all the people shall hear, and fear, and do no more presumptuously (Deut. 17:8–13).

The theocentric focus of this law is God’s ojce as a judge. God is the inal Judge.1 The settlement of disputes between men is to relect the inal settlement of disputes between God and man. In God’s court, there will be a inal settlement. Every case will be brought to a conclusion. There will be either reconciliation or permanent separation between the Judge and the judged. This aspect of this law was universal. The ojce of priest – he who ofers sacriices

1. The inal negative sanction is eternal death (Rev. 20:14–15).

460

Israel’s Supreme Court

461 2

as man’s representative – ended in A.D. 70. The question is: Has the ecclesiastical minister replaced the priest? Does the church still possess authority in supplying representatives who hand down civil judgments? This is the crucial covenantal question that this chapter must answer. If the answer is yes, then the absolute judicial separation of church and State is a false Enlightenment myth. God’s authority on the throne of judgment is unitary in the sense of His uniied being (Deut. 6:4). Yet this authority is also plural: “let us” (Gen. 1:26; 11:7). God’s court relects God’s being: both one and many. A human court is not God’s heavenly court, yet it must relect the one and the many of God’s heavenly court. The unity of the one and the many cannot be achieved through ontology: uniied being. It must therefore be achieved subordinately, i.e., representatively. This is why, in Israel’s supreme court, both church and State were represented. Israel’s voice of civil authority at the highest level was not legitimate if it was restricted to civil magistrates.

A Question of Jurisdiction No social order can survive without civil sanctions. Under the biblical civil covenant, these sanctions are exclusively negative. The State is not a supplier of positive sanctions except in its capacity as the judge of those who have committed crimes whose proper sanction is restitution. The state then transfers wealth from the criminal to the victim. But the State is not the source of the positive sanctions showered on the victim; it is only the arbitrator. It compels the covenant-breaker to return to the victim that which lawfully belongs to the victim, including compensation for his sufering and the statistical risk he bore of not discovering who had committed the crime.3 Normally, this requires double restitution (Ex. 22:4). In short, the State is the lawful enforcer. It possesses a God-given, covenantal monopoly of violence in order to enforce justice (Rom. 13:1–7). In Deuteronomy 17:8–13, Moses presented a case law application of the general principle of the hierarchy of covenantal judgment. In Exodus 18, he set up a system of appeals courts. Here he made an application of the general law of appeals. Two men have 2. This, of course, is a Protestant interpretation of the ojce. 3. Gary North, Tools of Dominion: The Case Laws of Exodus (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), pp. 511–19.

462

DEUTERONOMY

come into a local court. They are equals in inluence. This makes the case too dijcult for a local court to judge. “If there arise a matter too hard for thee in judgment, between blood and blood, between plea and plea, and between stroke and stroke, being matters of controversy within thy gates: then shalt thou arise, and get thee up into the place which the LORD thy God shall choose” (v. 8). The case was to be transferred to a higher court in which the judges were not part of the local community. In modern law, this is called a change of venue. The Mosaic law acknowledged that in dijcult cases between prominent persons, each with his own supporters, each with a strong case, local judges may not be qualiied to render judgment. The cases are too hard. This is the language of Exodus 18: “And they judged the people at all seasons: the hard causes they brought unto Moses, but every small matter they judged themselves” (v. 26). The mandated solution was to assemble a group of judges, civil and ecclesiastical, to consider the case. There is no question that Moses was here describing a civil dispute. The mandatory sanction for disobedience to the supreme court was execution. The church in Israel did not possess the power of the sword except in defending against trespassers of the boundaries around the tabernacle (Num. 18:3, 22). All of Deuteronomy 17 deals with civil law, but ecclesiastical judges played a role in the legal process. This court’s decision was inal. It had to be obeyed. Nevertheless, there is no indication that the case in question had been a matter of capital sanctions prior to the court’s inal judgment. But once this court had declared inal judgment, both participants had to obey. The person who was declared guilty had to follow the directive of the court. He was not executed, which means that this was not a capital infraction. But contumacy – presumptive resistance to the supreme court – was a capital ofense. This indicates that the supreme court’s word was judicially representative of God’s word. Its word was inal in history. But this word was not exclusively civil or ecclesiastical. It was both. The judge, as a representative of the civil covenant, declared his judgment only in association with the priests. There had to be a united declaration. This kept the State from becoming judicially autonomous. Similarly with the church: the priests had no lawful way to enforce their judgment physically without the cooperation of the civil magistrate. Autonomy was not a legitimate option at the highest judicial level.

Israel’s Supreme Court

463

This joint declaration of judgment was analogous to a joint declaration of war. The two silver trumpets had to be blown by the Aaronic priests before the princes could lead the nation into battle. One trumpet was blown initially to assemble the princes. The text does not say that the priests blew this trumpet. But not until both were blown by the priests was the princes’ decision to go into battle ratiied (Num. 10:1–9).4 The sanction of inal judgment against Israel’s enemies had to be consented to by both church and State. Any party in the civil dispute who rebelled against the terms of the joint declaration faced death. What had been a matter to be solved by economic restitution now moved to a new level of criminality. It moved from restitution through money to restitution through execution. The resisting party was to be delivered into God’s heavenly court for inal sentencing. Certain acts demand that the convicted criminal be transferred to God’s court. One of these acts was resistance to a inal determination by Israel’s supreme court. The cost of law enforcement in this case was borne by the civil government. The civil government had a cost-efective means of reducing resistance to its ojcial decisions: the threat of execution. The resisting party had considerable incentive to count the cost of his non-compliance. This cost was very high: his permanent removal from the jurisdiction of any man’s court. The formal declaration by the supreme court moved the dispute from man’s word to God’s word. The person who resisted coming to terms with his opponent prior to the supreme court’s declaration could say to himself: “I’m not going to comply. I don’t have to comply.” But the word to which he had not had to comply was the word of another individual. There had not yet been a covenantal declaration. But after the court made its inal judgment, the threat of the most permanent civil sanction was inserted into the actor’s cost-beneit analysis. He was no longer facing man’s word; he was facing God’s. He was therefore no longer facing an individual’s sanctions, such as the other party’s refusal to trade with him in the future. The negative sanction had moved from economics to life itself.

4. Gary North, Sanctions and Dominion: An Economic Commentary on Numbers (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1996), p. 29.

464

DEUTERONOMY

An Increase in Predictability Whenever this sanction was consistently imposed within the boundaries of Israel, the Israelites would have found that their lives had become more predictable. The law would have been taken seriously by everyone. An execution or two every few years would have sent a very clear message to all Israel regarding the costs of resistance to the law. This was the intent of this law: “And all the people shall hear, and fear, and do no more presumptuously” (v. 13). When large numbers of people fear the civil law, their actions become more predictable whenever the courts are predictable. The law becomes more predictable when the courts become more predictable. An increase in the predictability of the law reduces the costs of decision-making. People know generally what the law requires. They also know that the judges will impose the speciied sanctions attached to the law. The last remaining element of uncertainty is the reaction of the guilty party. Will he comply with the court’s declaration? This case law made it clear: God expected the guilty party to comply. God expected the State to see to it that the guilty party complied. The person who refused to comply with the court’s declaration would not get another opportunity to break any law. Israel’s solution to the settlement of private disputes was very diferent from Athens’ solution. In private disputes, the Athenian court did not enforce its judgments unless there was a matter of State concern involved. The matter was turned over to the victorious party for enforcement.5 Justice was available only to families strong enough to enforce the court’s decision.

Costs of Production With greater legal predictability, society reduces its costs of production. When men know what the law requires, and when they know that convicted law-breakers in the society have great incentive to comply, they can more easily predict the actions of others. This increases the predictability of other decision-makers in society. This in turn decreases the cost of cooperation. One of the most 5. G. Glotz, The Greek City and its Institutions (New York: Barnes & Noble, [1929] 1969), p. 249.

Israel’s Supreme Court

465

familiar laws of economics is this: when the cost of production of something is reduced, more of it will be supplied. Producers see an opportunity to make a proit: by increasing production, they can take advantage of the newly discovered diference between production costs and consumer prices. Therefore, by reducing the cost of predicting other people’s actions, this Mosaic law, including its speciied capital sanction, would have tended to increase the division of labor in Israelite society. This would have increased the wealth of those living under its jurisdiction. By reducing the likelihood that others would refuse to comply with the law, this law increased the likelihood that men would honor their promises. This would also have increased the value of contracts. A contract is an agreement that increases the predictability of other people’s actions in the future. The greater the expected value of a contract, the more people who would seek out others to deal with. This leads to a very important principle of Christian economics: predictable covenantal law and covenantal sanctions undergird the humanly unplanned development of a contractual society. The covenantal basis of contract law is manifested in this case law. The threat of execution for non-compliance with the State’s interpretation of what a contract requires increases the likelihood that men will take care in drafting their contracts and complying with their terms. There is nothing in the New Covenant that annuls this principle of civil court authority. There is no New Covenant principle that authorizes reduced civil sanctions for non-compliance with the supreme court’s decision. There is nothing that changes the speciied sanction. In fact, the severity of the speciied sanction – the change in venue – is what demonstrates the supreme authority of the court. To reduce the sanction is to undermine the authority of the supreme court. Any argument on the part of non-theonomists that the New Covenant has nothing to say about such matters is implicitly an undermining of civil authority and a subsidy to criminals. In any case, if the New Covenant really has nothing to say about such judicial matters, then the consistent New Covenant theologian should excuse himself from the discussion. He has nothing to say, for the New Covenant supposedly has nothing to say. On the whole, Christians in the West have willingly excused themselves from such discussions since about 1700, which is why social theory, criminal law,

466

DEUTERONOMY

and politics have become battlegrounds between left-wing Enlightenment humanists and right-wing Enlightenment humanists. Why this silence by Christians? Perhaps because they have recognized the underlying theocratic nature of this law, and all civil law. This Mosaic law had an important qualiication: Israel’s supreme civil court was neither wholly civil nor wholly ecclesiastical. The supreme court’s authority to enforce its word was legitimate only because this decision of the civil judge came only after consultation with, and the support of, the priests.

The Priests the Levites The phrase in verse 9, “the priests the Levites,” irst appears in the Bible in this verse. If we are to understand the scope of this law, we must understand the meaning of this phrase. In Deuteronomy 18, we are given a clearer picture of who these priests-Levites were. They were those Levites who served as tabernacle-temple priests. They had to reside in the city where the tabernacle was located. They were not Levites who lived in local communities. The priests ojciated at the sacriices (Deut. 18:1–8). This meant that these priests held sacramental ojces. They were ordained to special ministerial ojce, which required them to be present at the altar. In some cases, they actually sold their real estate in their home cities: “They shall have like portions to eat, beside that which cometh of the sale of his patrimony” (Deut. 18:8). The presence of priests on the nation’s supreme civil court gave veto power to the church. The supreme representative function of the supreme court could not lawfully be exclusively civil. The civil oath did not authorize exclusive judicial authority at the highest level, i.e., the inal court of appeal. This balance of authority served as a check on the State. The State’s agents could not unilaterally declare God’s law in the most dijcult cases that divided men.

Separation and Inheritance The permanent separation of covenant-breakers and God at the inal judgment leads to a transfer of inheritance: from the guilty parties to the innocent victims. The New Heaven and New Earth in its post-inal judgment, consummated form will be inhabited solely by covenant-keepers (Rev. 21:1–4; 7–8). This model of inal inheritance/disinheritance is the judicial basis of the prophecy that the

Israel’s Supreme Court

467

righteous will inherit the earth in history. “For evildoers shall be cut of: but those that wait upon the LORD, they shall inherit the earth. For yet a little while, and the wicked shall not be: yea, thou shalt diligently consider his place, and it shall not be. But the meek shall inherit the earth; and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace” (Ps. 37:9–11). That which will surely take place in history will relect the inal outcome in eternity. The postmillennial implications of these passages is obvious. Amillennialism’s theory of history as a permanent stalemate between covenant-breakers and covenant-keepers, with the church in permanent remnant status, or the church as progressively under oppression,6 is contradicted by Isaiah’s prophecy concerning the historical manifestation of the New Heaven and New Earth, in which, unlike the scene in Revelation 21:4, death will still exist. Isaiah 65:17–23 presents a promise of permanent inheritance, in which righteousness is the basis of inheritance, and therefore disinheritance by covenant-breakers is no longer a threat. The progressive transfer of inheritance in history will resemble Egypt’s transfer of wealth to the Israelites at the exodus. The inheritance of the Egyptians’ irstborn sons was transferred to God’s irstborn son, Israel. This is normative for history. So far, it has not been normal because of the repeated apostasy of the church, but that which has been normal in the past is not that which is normative. It is also not a permanent condition. There were a few cases under the Old Covenant in which there was no inheritance by Israel, where disinheritance was absolute. God imposed total destruction on a few cities. Sodom and Gomorrah are the archetypes. Lot did not inherit the wealth of Sodom. Arad’s cities were totally destroyed by Israel (Num. 21:3). Jericho was totally destroyed (Josh. 6:24). Saul lost his kingship because he refused to destroy Amalek totally (I Sam. 15:35; 16:1). But in the vast majority of cases in the conquest of Canaan, Israel inherited the capital assets of the defeated nations. This was part of God’s original plan of inheritance: it was to be achieved through the disinheritance of covenant-breakers. “And it shall be, when the LORD thy God shall have brought thee into the land which he sware unto thy fathers, to

6. Gary North, Millennialism and Social Theory (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), pp. 76–94.

468

DEUTERONOMY

Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give thee great and goodly cities, which thou buildedst not, And houses full of all good things, which thou illedst not, and wells digged, which thou diggedst not, vineyards and olive trees, which thou plantedst not; when thou shalt have eaten and be full. . .” (Deut. 6:10–11). Solomon later summarized this process: “A good man leaveth an inheritance to his children’s children: and the wealth of the sinner is laid up for the just” (Prov. 13:22).

New Testament Applications The New Testament equivalent of the priest-Levite is the ordained church ojcer who has the right to administer the sacraments and to restrict unauthorized people’s access to the sacraments. This ojcer holds the keys to the kingdom (Matt. 16:19). He has the authority to declare people excommunicate. That is, he lawfully can exercise judgment with respect to a man’s eternal inheritance. To the extent that inheritance in history is correlative to inheritance in eternity, he possesses the right indirectly to determine inheritance in history. The biblical covenant makes it clear that the righteous will inherit in history. This historical outcome is denied by pessimillennialists. This is another reason why point ive – eschatology – inluences point four: sanctions. It also inluences point two: hierarchy. This is why the modern Christian is not really neutral regarding the continuing authority of Mosaic law. He does not really believe that the New Testament has nothing to say about this, despite his initial assurances to the contrary. He insists that the New Testament has abolished all traces of the Mosaic civil law, or at least all those traces that call into question the Enlightenment’s theory of religiously neutral civil law and political pluralism, which he devoutly accepts. He rejects point ive of the biblical covenant, and therefore he rejects points two and four: the suggestion that a minister of the sacraments has any lawful advisory and veto function in a civil court. He sides with the humanists in a joint efort to deny that the church has any legitimate ojcial authority in civil judgments. Prior to 1650, such a joint declaration would have been considered unthinkable in the West outside of the tiny New England commonwealth of Rhode Island.

Israel’s Supreme Court

469

Creeds and Confessions The most important church council in history was the Council of Nicea, held in 325. It settled for all time the question of the divinity of Jesus Christ. To deny Christ’s equality with God is to deny the Christian faith. The church has accepted this declaration ever since. Yet this international ecclesiastical assembly was called to serve by the Emperor Constantine, who wanted this issue settled. It got settled theologically at the Council of Nicea, although it was not settled militarily and socially for several centuries.7 The Westminster Assembly irst met on July 1, 1643. The British Parliament had called for its creation the previous November. Parliament, not the Anglican Church, chose the Assembly’s representatives. The Westminster “divines” were in fact political appointees. The Assembly was advisory to the Parliament. The members were paid by Parliament to attend.8 The Westminster Assembly ratiied this political decision by putting the following declaration into the Confession: the civil magistrate “hath power to call synods, to be present at them, and to provide that whatsoever is transacted in them be according to the mind of God.”9 This passage was removed by the American Presbyterian Church in the revision of 1787–88, at the same time that the U.S. Constitution was being ratiied. The Whig view of the separation of church and State was ratiied in both constitutional documents: by the removal of a section in the ecclesiastical covenant, and by the inclusion in the civil covenant of a prohibition against religious test oaths for Federal ojce-holding.10

The Protestant Solution: Abdication The modern Protestant is a child of the Enlightenment in his political outlook. The political religious pluralism which was regarded as heretical by the church, East and West, for 1700 years is today universally accepted by Protestants as somehow innately Christian

7. The invading Ostrogoths were Arians. 8. Gary North, Crossed Fingers: How the Liberals Captured the Presbyterian Church (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1996), Appendix C. 9. Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), XXII:3. 10. Article VI, Section III. See Gary North, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989), pp. 385–91.

470

DEUTERONOMY

and, in the words of unitarian skeptic Thomas Jeferson, “selfevident.” The modern secular State has issued its declaration of independence from God, and American Protestants have not only agreed, they have hailed this as the very work of God in history, their source of liberation. No one has put it any more starkly than the former Presidential aide11 and convicted felon (pre-conversion) Charles Colson: “Thus two typically mortal enemies, the Enlightenment and the Christian faith, found a patch of common ground on 12 American soil.” He regards this as a great breakthrough in civic freedom. As one of modern American evangelicalism’s most respected igures, Colson’s opinion is representative. In the best-selling popular history of colonial America, The Light and the Glory, the two Protestant authors speak of “the divine origin of its [the Constitution’s] inspiration. . . .”13 Furthermore, “it is nothing less than the institutional guardian of the Covenant Way of life for the nation as a whole!”14 Yet they recognize that it is “a secularizing of the spiritual reality of the covenant. It can thus never be the substitute for a covenant life totally given to the Lord Jesus Christ.”15 This should be obvious to any Christian. But the statement is also covenantally incomplete. The crucial question is this: What is the New Covenant basis of the civil covenant in “a covenant life totally given to Jesus Christ”? The two authors did not raise this question, for the question no longer occurs to modern American Christians, even among those few who have heard the word “covenant.” Yet the father of one of the authors served as Chaplain of the U.S. Senate for years, and later became the posthumous subject of a best-selling book and a Hollywood movie.16 The “covenant life totally given to Jesus Christ” is arbitrarily conined to three spheres: personal, ecclesiastical, and familial. Without any supporting exegesis of the Bible, American

11. Under Richard Nixon. 12. Charles Colson, Kingdoms in Conlict (1987), p. 119. This book was jointly published by William Morrow, a secular publishing irm, and Zondervan Publishing House, a fundamentalist publishing irm. 13. Peter Marshall and David Manuel, The Light and the Glory (Old Tappan, New Jersey: Revell, 1977), pp. 343–44. 14. Ibid., p. 348. 15. Idem. 16. Catherine Marshall, A Man Called Peter: The Story of Peter Marshall (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951).

Israel’s Supreme Court

471

Protestants for over two centuries have assumed that the civil covenant has no legal connection to Christ, and should not. Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court has outlawed public prayer in government-funded schools (1963), as well as the teaching of creation in these schools (1991). It has legalized abortion on demand in the name of a woman’s right to privacy (1973). Christian political activists who oppose all three decisions seem to think that these decisions were in no way connected to the U.S. Constitution’s declaration of covenantal independence from God and the church in 1788. The secularization of the Supreme Court, they believe, has nothing to do with the actual wording of the Constitution. Christian activists today sufer from near-terminal naiveté. One price of Protestantism has been the acceptance of the Enlightenment’s doctrine of pluralism. Roman Catholicism laid the foundations for this capitulation by its acceptance of Stoic natural law theory by way of Aristotle. Scholasticism’s acceptance of Aristotelian logic set the precedent. The Reformers ofered no substitute, and by the mid-seventeenth century, late-medieval scholastic categories of politics were imported into the Presbyterian tradition. The footnotes in Samuel Rutherford’s Lex, Rex (1644) are illed with references to members of the Dominicans’ school of Salamanca. These men were brilliant jurists, as well as economists who pioneered concepts of free pricing, monetary theory, and interest as a time-based phenomenon that were in some ways superior to Adam Smith’s theories over two centuries later.17 In the same year that Lex, Rex was published, Roger Williams’ Bloudy Tenant of Persecution appeared. His defense of religiously neutral civil government so appalled Parliament that they ordered all copies burned. It was based on natural law theory. But before the book appeared, Williams had secured a Parliamentary charter for Rhode Island that allowed him to conduct an experiment in his theory of neutral civil government.18 That “lively experiment” in polity a century and a half later conquered the colonial American mind. Without a State church, early modern era Protestants saw no way to secure a voice in civil afairs that Christian political theory 17. Murray N. Rothbard, Economic Thought before Adam Smith: An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (Brookield, Vermont: Elgar, 1985), ch. 4. 18. Edwin Scott Gaustad, Liberty of Conscience: Roger Williams in America (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1991), p. 85.

472

DEUTERONOMY

had demanded for seventeen centuries. The rise of Oliver Cromwell in 1644 as the military master led to the extension of liberty of worship to all Protestant sects. The Independents would not tolerate an intolerant State church. Scottish Presbyterianism’s attempt to se19 cure such a monopoly was anathema to them. Cromwell’s victory made impossible the Presbyterians’ demand for a State church. The restoration of Charles II to the throne in 1660 did not reverse this toleration, although the King imposed the Act of Uniformity in 1662 which led to the departure of 2,000 Puritan ministers from their pulpits. Who should represent the church in the civil courts? This question has had no answer in Protestant nations since the late seventeenth century. Which ministers should be eligible? Which groups calling themselves churches should be eligible? This was no problem for Mosaic Israel, although it had become a problem by Ahab’s day. Mosaic Israel had only one priesthood. This answer – ministers of churches that ajrm an historic Trinitarian creed – was too narrow for Enlightenment humanists and Protestant Independents, and too broad for the Presbyterians. The Protestants have been deadlocked since the seventeenth century. The result has been the progressive secularization of the United States’ civil order: from Scholastic natural law theory to Newtonian natural law theory to Madison’s grand experiment: a Constitution stripped of any theory of law. In the opinion of the Framers, the preservation of liberty is a matter of technique rather than ethics: designing proper institutional checks and balances in the allocation of political power. But these checks and balances have steadily fallen prey to the sovereignty of the Supreme Court, which the Constitution’s authors regarded as the least powerful branch of the Federal government, but which has become the most powerful. The Supreme Court renders inal judgment – point four – on the legality of what the other two branches do. The Court therefore has become the voice of authority: point two.20 In Mosaic Israel, the supreme court could not represent one covenant; it had to represent two: church and State. This is the system of checks and balance announced by God through Moses, but

19. See Jane Lane, The Reign of King Covenant (London: Robert Hale, 1956). 20. North, Political Polytheism, ch. 10.

Israel’s Supreme Court

473

modern man, both Christian and non-Christian, regards the Mosaic judicial settlement as a source of tyranny. Judicial checks and balances are seen today exclusively as intra-civil government matters – federal, state, and local – but never as matters of inter-government relations, i.e., civil and ecclesiastical.

A Royal Priesthood The New Covenant, like the Old Covenant, rests on an oath of loyalty: allegiance to God. There are four areas where this covenant oath seals a legal bond: personal, ecclesiastical, familial, and civil. The modern Christian generally acknowledges the legitimacy of the irst three covenantal Trinitarian oaths, but as a loyal son of the Enlightenment, he denies the fourth. If the fourth covenant were honored, this principle would become a judicial reality: he who is not sealed by covenant oath (point four) may not lawfully exercise covenantal authority (point two) by invoking and applying covenant sanctions (point four). To declare covenant sanctions is to afect the inheritance (point ive) in God’s name (point one). Only those who are under the covenant through an oath possess this authority. The political question becomes: Whose covenant, whose oath? To gain the eternal blessings of God, a person must swear a covenant oath to the God of the Bible, whose Son and Messiah is Jesus Christ. To gain the blessings of the sacraments, a person must come under the authority of the institutional church. To gain the blessings of a Christian marriage, a person must have sworn oaths one and two. So also with biblical citizenship. But this is denied by most Christians today. Biblical citizenship, above all, is the authority to become a judge, either through membership in the military or as a judge. A judge includes the ojce of voter and the ojce of juror. He who is not a citizen may not vote or serve on a jury. If he has not sworn a loyalty oath to the State, he is not a citizen. If he has not also sworn the irst two oaths – personal and ecclesiastical – he is not to become a citizen in a biblical commonwealth. The Enlightenment attacked this doctrine of oath-bound Christian citizenship. Humanists sought the legal authority to impose civil sanctions on Christians in the name of another god: autonomous man. They did not wish to live inside the boundaries of God’s Bible-revealed law. So, they created a theory of political citizenship which invokes a loyalty oath only to

474

DEUTERONOMY

the State – a State devoid of any Trinitarian demarcation. Their theory of citizenship is today universally accepted by Protestantism and American Catholicism. The connection between the Mosaic Covenant’s theory of priestly participation in the supreme court and the modern Supreme Court is this: there must be representatives of Trinitarian churches on the nation’s supreme civil court. But what about local courts? There was no requirement that local civil courts include Levites or priests. The Mosaic priests were centrally located. The place of sacriice became their temporary home. This is no longer the case. There is no central place of sacriice. But there is a central place where the supreme civil court meets. This is in part a matter of technology, at least for now, but it is also a matter of personalism. There is more to courts than the formal gatherings of courts’ judges. There are personal relationships among the judges. The New Testament covenant oath is priestly. The promise of Exodus 19:6 has been fulilled: And ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation (Ex. 19:6a). But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light: Which in time past were not a people, but are now the people of God: which had not obtained mercy, but now have obtained mercy (I Pet. 2:9–10).

Peter’s language is important for political theory. The New Covenant priestly status is royal, i.e., kingly. The Protestant Reformation’s doctrine of “every man a priest,” i.e., every redeemed person a priest, is an extension of part of Peter’s declaration. But the Reformation did not ajrm the parallel doctrine: every redeemed person a king.21 This was a major theological and social omission. This political principle implies universal civil sufrage among adult church members. Tentative beginnings of this doctrine arose only in the 21. Huey P. Long, the corrupt populist governor from the poverty-stricken southern state of Louisiana during the 1920’s and 1930’s, made “every man a king” his slogan. As a U.S. Senator, he became a national igure during the Great Depression in the mid-1930’s. He was considered a potentially signiicant political threat to President Franklin Roosevelt. He was assassinated in 1935.

Israel’s Supreme Court

475

next century, particularly during the English Civil War (1642–49). The sect known as the Levellers wanted to extend the vote to all male rate-payers in church or State.22 The covenantal basis of both doctrines was announced by Peter: every redeemed, covenantally bound person is both a priest and a king. This does not deny the fact that there are still ordained ojcers in church and State who exercise greater authority than those whom they represent. Hierarchy is an inescapable aspect of the covenant. So is ordination. But the concept of the priestly-kingly believer in Christ leads to the concept of covenant ratiication in both spheres: church and State. Members of churches and citizens of states lawfully possess the veto. On regular occasions, a majority of them must be allowed to extend positive sanctions to one representative, thereby imposing negative sanctions on his rivals. The bottom-up authority of the covenant matches its top-down authority. Without the imposition of covenant sanctions, there can be no covenantal representation. Ordained representatives must truly represent both parties to the covenant: God and man. Both God and man must authorize an ojce-holder’s continuing possession of authority. Ojcers of both church and State must be held responsible by those whom they represent. God holds the people responsible for the sins of their representatives (Lev. 4).23 How, then, are the people to sanction this representation? Democratic politics is a consistent application of Peter’s announcement. The question then becomes: Who has lawful access to the exercise of the vote? The New Covenant’s answer is this: “Those who are under oath-bound covenantal sanctions to the Trinitarian God of the Bible in both church and State.” The priesthood of all believers secures the priestly status of every jury and every court whose members are all members in good standing of Trinitarian churches. Then why doesn’t this principle of the universal priesthood solve the judicial problem of church-State relations at the level of the supreme court? Why is there still a

22. William Haller, Liberty and Reformation in the Puritan Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955), p. 325. “Levelling” did not refer to property ownership. It referred to right to vote. The Diggers and the Fifth Monarchy men were the communists of the English Civil War era. 23. Gary North, Leviticus: An Economic Commentary (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), ch. 4.

476

DEUTERONOMY

necessity of a mixed court containing judges and sacramental ojcers? Because of the principle of checks and balances. There must be a division of authority. In every supreme court that lawfully imposes physical sanctions, there must be representation of the church. Someone who has the right to declare a person excommunicate must have a veto power on every supreme civil court. The civil authority must not assert its own exclusive counsel at the highest level. The checks and balances necessary to restrict civil government from becoming tyrannical must include a veto in the possession of sacramental ojcers. This is the message of Deuteronomy 17:8–12.

Conclusion Israel’s supreme civil court was to include representatives of two covenants: civil and ecclesiastical. This law authorized the priests to veto the decision of a judge. The law speaks of a joint declaration: “According to the sentence of the law which they shall teach thee, and according to the judgment which they shall tell thee, thou shalt do.” This law brought the power of the civil government in support of contracts. The threat of execution for one’s refusal to adhere to the court’s declaration placed the rebel under severe pressure to conform. This would have increased the predictability of the marketplace. Disputes over the interpretation of contracts would have ended with the supreme court’s judgment.

40 BOUNDARIES ONKingship KINGSHIP Boundaries on When thou art come unto the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee, and shalt possess it, and shalt dwell therein, and shalt say, I will set a king over me, like as all the nations that are about me. . . (Deut. 17:14).

The theocentric focus of this law is God’s ojce as King of kings. This was a land law. It governed the ojce of king, an optional ojce in Old Covenant Israel. This biblically authorized ojce has not existed since the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. In fact, it has not existed in history since the exile. Men have called themselves kings, and they have acted as kings, but they have not been legitimate, in the sense that neither priest nor prophet has been legitimate. All three ojces were Old Covenant ojces that have been completed by Christ. Moses’ assumption here was that Israel would conquer the land of Canaan. There was a strong element of prophecy: predictions accompanied by ethical commands. The laws governing kingship in Israel assumed that Israel had already conquered the land. This is another instance in the Bible where grace precedes law, which is a fundamental principle of God’s covenantal dealings with men. God would give them a military victory comparable to their deliverance out of Egypt. This victory would then serve as the historical basis of kingship. Without prior grace, there would be no earthly king over Israel. The very presence of an earthly king in Israel was supposed to remind them of the visible grace of God in history. Only because God is the sovereign master over history and the deliverer of His people in history could the Israelites ever set a king over themselves. The Israelites’ mandatory presupposition of earthly kingship was supposed to be the absolute sovereignty of God over history.

477

478

DEUTERONOMY

The Mosaic doctrine of kingship rested on this doctrine: Israel’s true king was God. This was the theocentric focus of the kingship laws. Israel broke these kingship laws when the people demanded a king four centuries later. Their motivation was not theocentric; it was humanistic. Samuel reminded them of the theocentric focus of Israel’s kingship: God’s gracious deliverance. “And ye have this day rejected your God, who himself saved you out of all your adversities and your tribulations; and ye have said unto him, Nay, but set a king over us. Now therefore present yourselves before the LORD by your tribes, and by your thousands” (I Sam. 10:19). God had revealed to Samuel that the Israelites were substituting a new covenant. This new covenant necessarily involved the rejection of the God of the Mosaic covenant: “And the LORD said unto Samuel, Hearken unto the voice of the people in all that they say unto thee: for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them” (I Sam. 8:7). Note that God told Samuel to do what they asked. God gave them enough rope to hang themselves. He told His prophet to go along with them, anointing the new king in God’s name. There would be four kings over Israel’s united kingdom, but early in the reign of the fourth king, Rehoboam, there was a revolt which divided Israel into two kingdoms (I Ki. 12). This, too, was part of God’s covenantal order: He visits the iniquity of the fathers unto the third and fourth generation of those who hate Him (Ex. 20:5). The glory of the Davidic kingdom and the wealth of Solomon’s kingdom were aspects of God’s covenantal curse on Israel: magniicent rope for a national hanging. “And it shall be, if thou do at all forget the LORD thy God, and walk after other gods, and serve them, and worship them, I testify against you this day that ye shall surely perish. As the nations which the LORD destroyeth before your face, so shall ye perish; because ye would not be obedient unto the voice of the LORD your God” (Deut. 8:19–20). When they demanded a king, they began a journey into covenantal disobedience that led to Babylon. When they returned from the exile, they never again had an Israelite as a king. Final civil authority was imposed on them from headquarters outside the land: Medo-Persia, regional Hellenism, and Rome.

Boundaries on Kingship

479

Kingship as Imitation God’s law provided for the establishment of kings in Israel. This is not to say that God required kingship in Israel. He did not. When the Israelites irst proposed a king to Samuel, the prophet warned them of the dire consequences that would surely follow. The king would tax them equal to the tithe (I Sam. 8:15, 17). This threat of looming tax tyranny did not deter them, any more than dire warnings against the establishment of a national income tax deterred voters in the early twentieth century. The people wanted a king in Israel; similarly, the people have wanted a savior State in the twentieth century, with the high tax rates necessary to fund such a would-be savior State. The twentieth century has seen tax rates far above the tithe. To get back to a mere tithe, which Samuel warned was tyranny, most of the civil governments of the modern world would have to cut taxes by three quarters. To get back to the tax level of tyrannical Egypt under Joseph (Gen. 47:26) – God’s curse on Pharaoh-worshipping Egypt through Joseph – modern welfare states would have to cut taxes by at least half. This fact is evidence that the modern world has adopted political tyranny in the name of freedom and economic justice. The modern secular world has strayed so far from belief in the God of the Bible that it regards tax tyranny as liberty. Tax reformers who call for a 20 percent national lat tax – leaving intact all state and local taxes – are dismissed by the vast majority of intellectuals and elected politicians as crackpot defenders of a near-libertarian State. Meanwhile, the modern church refuses to call for massive tax cuts in the name of the Bible. The operating alliance between secular humanists and the Old Testament-rejecting pietists has led to the establishment of the would-be Savior State, which promises healing to all mankind. This is modern man’s version of salvation by law. Christians ajrm its legitimacy in the name of their rejection of Old Testament law. They argue that the acceptance of Old Testament civil law is a form of legalism. This has led Christians, step by step, into a political alliance with modernists, whose version of salvation by humanistic civil law has become a universal faith in the once-Christian West. In the same way that the Israelites demanded a king because the pagan nations around them had kings, so have Bible-ajrming Christians voted for

480

DEUTERONOMY

politicians who have imposed tax tyranny in the name of the Savior State, i.e., the welfare State.

The Origin of the Modern Welfare State The modern welfare State was the creation of Otto von Bismarck, who advocated State-funded pensions and health insurance in the 1880’s in order to undermine the Social Democrats (socialists) and the liberals (laissez-faire) who were challenging his authority to rule over Germany’s government.1 Germany, which had by then become the center of State-funded education and biblical higher criticism, became the West’s model for the welfare State after 1890.2 Bismarck called his program “applied Christianity,” but it was actually applied force for the purpose of increasing State power. He told his biographer in 1881, “Anybody who has before him the prospect of a pension, be it ever so small, in old age or inirmity is much happier and more content with his lot, and much more tractable and easy to manage, than he whose future is uncertain.”3 He also told him, “The State must take the matter into its own hands, not as alms-giving, but as the right that men have to be taken care of when, with the best will imaginable, they become unit for work. . . . This thing will make its own way; it has a future. When I die, possibly our policy will come to grief. But State Socialism will have its day; and he who shall take it up again will assuredly be the man at the wheel.”4 In 1889, shortly after his forced retirement, Bismarck’s tax-funded pension plan was voted into law. Christians want to be like the pagan nations around them. This is especially true of Christians in college classrooms who have

1. He could not persuade the parliament in 1881 to vote for government funding of health insurance, but it did vote for State-mandated health insurance (1883) and accident insurance (1884), to be co-funded by workers and employers. But, economically speaking, workers funded the employers’ share, too. The employers would have been willing to pay the workers the same money in salaries. The payment was simply a cost of doing business. It went to insurance rather than wages. 2. A. J. P. Taylor, England’s proliic socialistic historian, wrote: “German social insurance was the irst in the world, and has served as a model for every other civilized country. The great conservative became the greatest of innovators.” Taylor, Bismarck: The Man and the Statesman (New York: Knopf, 1955), p. 203. 3. Moritz Busch, Our Chancellor (Bismarck): Sketches for a Historical Picture, trans. William Beatty-Kingston, 2 vols. (New York: Books for Libraries, [1884] 1970), II, p. 217. 4. Ibid., II, pp. 321–32.

Boundaries on Kingship

481

earned advanced academic degrees from State-funded universities and State-accredited private secular universities, which today serve as the institutional equivalent of Nebuchadnezzar’s school for the sons of conquered nations (Dan. 1). This lust of covenant-keepers to conform to the latest manifestations of covenant-breaking society has undermined the covenants from the day that the nation of Israel ratiied the national covenant in Exodus 19. The unwillingness of covenant-keepers to ilter and then restructure imported ideas, institutions, and practices by means of God’s law places them at the mercy of the ethical standards of their enemies. As dispensational author Tommy Ice once admitted, “Premillennialists have always been involved in the present world. And basically, they have picked up on the ethical position of their contemporaries.”5 This is equally true of the common forms of amillennialism. The Mosaic law mandated restraints on Israel’s kings. It placed speciic boundaries on the king. One of these was that the king not multiply wives for himself. David and Solomon self-consciously deied this law. Yet the reigns of both men brought glory and wealth to Israel. The pinnacle of Israel’s glory came during the reigns of kings who deied the Mosaic laws of kingship. David multiplied wives. Solomon multiplied wives and gold. Visible rebellion brought visible blessings: rope. The bills eventually came due. Rehoboam demanded the taxes necessary, he believed, to inance the kingdom that his father had consolidated. The visible splendor of earthly power and glory does not come cheaply. Rehoboam’s demand for higher taxes led to a successful tax revolt that divided kingship in Israel. The centralized kingdom was decentralized by political revolution. This is the inevitable fate of every kingdom in history. God the king will not tolerate indeinitely the claims of rival kings and kingdoms.

Decentralized Civil Government Kingship in the ancient pagan world was associated with divinity. The king was frequently regarded as a divine-human link. This was not merely a judicial link; it was an ontological link. The king or

5. Cited in Gary DeMar, The Debate Over Christian Reconstruction (Ft. Worth, Texas: Dominion Press, 1988), p. 185.

482

DEUTERONOMY

6

emperor was believed to participate in the being of God. Even today, the emperor of Japan is ojcially said to be a descendent of the 7 gods. This belief has historical roots, according to the Bible. There was such a divine-human king in Old Covenant history: Melchizedek, king of Salem. The Epistle to the Hebrews describes him: “Without father, without mother, without descent, having neither beginning of days, nor end of life; but made like unto the Son of God; abideth a priest continually” (Heb. 7:3). The language of this epistle indicates that Melchizedek was a theophany, in the same way that the burning bush was. He held two ojces: priest and king. This was not permitted to an Israelite king. The two ojces had to be kept separate. Kings could not lawfully ofer priestly sacriices (I Sam. 13:9–14; II Chron. 26:19). The separation of church and State was fundamental in the Mosaic law. There were two national judicial chains of command in Israel, civil and ecclesiastical. The high priest’s ojce was separate from kingship. The priesthood exercised the sword only in a defensive perimeter around the tabernacle. God’s law was divided structurally between ecclesiastical law and civil law. The centralization of power that was implied by kingship could not lawfully centralize ecclesiastical power under the State. There could be no Melchizedekan king-priest in Israel. To call for an earthly king was Israel’s public admission of political defeat. There is no question of the biblical legitimacy of kingship, for the Mosaic law established provisions governing the ojce. There is also no question that it was a second-best arrangement. The people of Israel abdicated when they had Samuel ordain a king. For four centuries, they had possessed the authority to follow or reject their judges. They also held a veto. Although Deborah’s song retroactively ridiculed those tribes that had not heeded her call to do battle against Sisera (Jud. 5:16–17), there was no question that she had not possessed lawful authority over them to compel their participation. Furthermore, without a joint declaration of war by the princes and the priests (Num. 10), Israel could not lawfully go to war. Israel 6. R. J. Rushdoony, The One and the Many: Studies in the Philosophy of Order and Ultimacy (Fairfax, Virginia: Thoburn Press, [1971] 1978), ch. 3. 7. The emperor Jimmu (660 B.C.) is said to be the grandson of Hiro Hohodemi, the son of the god Ninigi, and Toyotama, daughter of the sea god. “Jimmu,” Grolier’s Encyclopedia (1997).

Boundaries on Kingship

483

was to be ruled by princes and judges, who were to consult with the Levites. Political leadership was decentralized in Israel because their king was God. There had to be a high priest in Israel; there did not have to be a king. Visible sovereignty was supposed to be ecclesiastical far more than civil. The inal voice of civil authority was to be a corporate body: judges and priests who would declare God’s judgments in speciic cases (Deut. 17:9).8 The presence of priests on this supreme civil court was designed to keep civil authority from becoming autonomous. To maintain such a decentralized civil government, the Israelites would have to retain their conidence that God was truly in their midst and that He revealed Himself through His ordained representatives, both ecclesiastical and civil. The inauguration of a king was a public declaration that the nation no longer wanted its legal status as a thoroughly decentralized kingdom of priests. God recognized this, and He instructed Samuel to tell them this. The king would centralize tax collection and extract a tithe from them (I Sam. 8:15, 17). They did not heed Samuel’s warning. Either they did not believe Samuel or they did not care. Either they believed that they could place limits on the king’s taxing power or else they believed that the trade-of was worth it. They wanted to be like the nations around them. In Moses’ day, God knew they would eventually inaugurate a king. This is why He graciously had Moses announce tight boundaries on the king’s legitimate authority. He gave the Israelites guidelines – a blueprint – that would enable them to identify when their king was moving toward apostasy, rebellion, and tyranny. Saul, a terrible king, did not openly violate them. David and Solomon did. Rehoboam, surely a third-rate king, imposed new taxes at the beginning of his reign. For this, the Northern Kingdom seceded. God kept Israel decentralized by authorizing a divided kingdom under Jeroboam and therefore two kingly lines.

Covenantal Boundaries Deuteronomy’s irst kingly law established that only an Israelite could occupy the ojce: “Thou shalt in any wise set him king over

8. See Chapter 39.

484

DEUTERONOMY

thee, whom the LORD thy God shall choose: one from among thy brethren shalt thou set king over thee: thou mayest not set a stranger over thee, which is not thy brother” (Deut. 17:15). This law governed the nation’s civil and ecclesiastical representatives. In Israel, a joint ordination was mandatory for establishing kingship: church and State. Samuel anointed Saul, but he irst went before the civil representatives of the nation to warn them not to raise up a king: a political creation of the congregation. Later, when Solomon’s authority to reign as king was challenged by a rebellion by his brother Adonijah, the priests and the people decided in his favor. “And Zadok the priest took an horn of oil out of the tabernacle, and anointed Solomon. And they blew the trumpet; and all the people said, God save king Solomon” (I Ki. 1:39). This joint ordination procedure was even clearer in the case of the youthful Joash, who replaced the murderous Queen Athaliah. And when Athaliah heard the noise of the guard and of the people, she came to the people into the temple of the LORD. And when she looked, behold, the king stood by a pillar, as the manner was, and the princes and the trumpeters by the king, and all the people of the land rejoiced, and blew with trumpets: and Athaliah rent her clothes, and cried, Treason, Treason. But Jehoiada the priest commanded the captains of the hundreds, the ojcers of the host, and said unto them, Have her forth without the ranges: and him that followeth her kill with the sword. For the priest had said, Let her not be slain in the house of the LORD. And they laid hands on her; and she went by the way by the which the horses came into the king’s house: and there was she slain. And Jehoiada made a covenant between the LORD and the king and the people that they should be the LORD’S people; between the king also and the people. And all the people of the land went into the house of Baal, and brake it down; his altars and his images brake they in pieces thoroughly, and slew Mattan the priest of Baal before the altars. And the priest appointed ojcers over the house of the LORD. And he took the rulers over hundreds, and the captains, and the guard, and all the people of the land; and they brought down the king from the house of the LORD, and came by the way of the gate of the guard to the king’s house. And he sat on the throne of the kings (II Ki. 11:13–19).

Deuteronomy 17:15 told the people what they could not lawfully do: ordain a stranger as king. The king had to be eligible to be a judge, i.e., a citizen. Citizenship was covenantal. This citizenship principle established that only a circumcised male who was a member of the congregation, or the daughter or wife of a citizen (e.g.,

Boundaries on Kingship

485

9

Deborah), could lawfully be ordained to impose civil sanctions. He had to be under covenantal sanctions, marked in his lesh, in order to be eligible for kingship in Israel. This meant that in order for a man lawfully to impose civil covenantal sanctions, he had to be under ecclesiastical covenantal sanctions. A king’s lesh had to reveal his implicit self-maledictory oath before God, which had been taken on his behalf by his circumcising parent, who had acted as a household priest. Circumcision was a physical manifestation of what was to be an inward ethical condition. Moses had already warned Israel: “Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart, and be no more stifnecked” (Deut. 10:16). The stifnecked person was someone who would not heed God’s word. He was a rebel. The circumcised man might not be circumcised in heart, which was why Moses here revealed other marks of the circumcised heart in a man possessing supreme civil authority: one wife, no horses, and not much money. After Israel returned from the Assyrian-Babylonian exile, its supreme civil rulers would no longer be circumcised. The people had no further say over who would rule over them. The inal authority in civil government did not reside in a court in Jerusalem; it resided in some foreign capital. The history of Israel was a transition from judgeship to domestic kingship to foreign empire. Under foreign rulers, both at home and abroad, Israel was to learn the true meaning of kingship. Israel got its wish: to live as the other nations did – as a subordinate nation in a foreign king’s international empire.

Military Boundaries The horse was an ofensive weapon. Horses were the basis of both the cavalry and chariots. There were to be few horses in the king’s stable: “But he shall not multiply horses to himself, nor cause the people to return to Egypt, to the end that he should multiply horses: forasmuch as the LORD hath said unto you, Ye shall henceforth

9. She was a judge. She commanded the army, but only as a U.S. President does: as a civilian. She could not legally be drafted into the army. Only men were mustered (numbered) in God’s holy army. I conclude that her civil authority as a judge stemmed either from her husband or father, although the text in Judges does not say this. The judicial issue is circumcision: the mark of being under the covenant’s negative sanctions.

486

DEUTERONOMY

return no more that way” (v. 16). The horse was a tool of empire. Kings could not lawfully multiply them. The kingdom of God vs. the empire of man: here was the choice before Israel. Israel’s civil order was to be decentralized. Decentralized societies cannot become empires without abandoning their political decentralization. Republican Rome is the most famous example in history: when Rome became an empire, she ceased being a republic. Decentralized societies lack what every empire requires: an ofensive military force. A king or his functional equivalent is the commander of every empire. There must be a chain of command with one person serving as the inal voice of authority in an empire. The military model requires one-man rule.10 One-man rule is required in wartime, for the same reason that there can be only one captain on a ship: someone must be held personally accountable for making life-and-death decisions. When a decentralized society sufers a defensive war, this one-man rulership is temporary. A decentralized nation is dijcult to lure into an ofensive war because there is no king to promote it for his glory and many powerful local leaders who oppose it, knowing that their power will be transferred upward. Thus, when Israel anointed a king, the nation took the irst step toward empire. The next step after this was a stable of horses. Egypt had been an empire based on chariots. There were limits on what chariots could accomplish. Chariots had failed to keep Israel inside Egypt’s boundaries. No Israelite king was to send Israelites down to Egypt to buy horses or to learn the arts of horse-based warfare. Horses were forbidden to Israel’s kings because empire was forbidden. Israel would be defended by God, just as she had been at the Red Sea. Israelites were not to put their trust in horses. Some trust in chariots, and some in horses: but we will remember the name of the LORD our God (Ps. 20:7).

10. In England’s nineteenth-century naval empire, the Prime Minister served in place of the king. Today’s largest empire, the United States, does not rule directly over other nations, but rules as irst among equals in an international world order. As with England a century ago, the United States’ main international concern is commerce. The largest private U.S. banks have more long-term authority in the maintenance of this commercial empire than the politicians do, which was also the case in England’s empire.

Boundaries on Kingship

487

Woe to them that go down to Egypt for help; and stay on horses, and trust in chariots, because they are many; and in horsemen, because they are very strong; but they look not unto the Holy One of Israel, neither seek the LORD! (Isa. 31:1).

An Israelite army without horses was at the mercy of God, not the mercy of Egypt. To preserve the inheritance of Israel, the king had to conform to God’s laws, for he was the nation’s supreme civil representative. A stable full of horses would serve as a symbol of the king’s trust in military might rather than God’s preserving hand. An arms race in ofensive weaponry in Israel would testify to a national loss of faith. Men of valor seated on slow-moving donkeys or on foot would be sujcient to defend the borders of Israel and preserve the inheritance. There were other chariots on call: “And Elisha prayed, and said, LORD, I pray thee, open his eyes, that he may see. And the LORD opened the eyes of the young man; and he saw: and, behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of ire round about Elisha” (II Ki. 6:17). Chariots of ire, not chariots of horses, were to constitute Israel’s strategic defense initiative.

Marital Boundaries “Neither shall he multiply wives to himself, that his heart turn not away” (17a). Saul had only one wife (I Sam. 14:50). Ahab had only one wife, probably out of fear of upsetting her. Ahab’s kingship indicates that monogamy was no guarantee of righteousness. David had an unknown number of wives and concubines (II Sam. 5:13), in addition to his eight listed wives.11 Solomon, of course, was the world record-holder: 700 wives and 300 concubines, i.e., wives without dowries (I Ki. 11:3). The problem was, as is said of Solomon, “his wives turned away his heart” (I Ki. 11:3). The prohibition on polygamy applied in the Old Covenant only to kings. The most likely reason why the king was singled out in this regard was his access to foreign wives. These marital alliances were not merely biological; they were covenantal. They were therefore political. These wives would likely be part of military alliances with foreign kings. These marriages could be useful as military alliances. 11. Michal (I Sam. 18:27–28), Abigail (I Sam. 25:39), Ahinoam (II Sam. 2:2), Bathsheba (II Sam. 11:27), Maacah, Haggith, Abital, and Eglah (II Sam. 3:3–5).

488

DEUTERONOMY

David’s wife Maacah was the daughter of a king (II Sam. 3:3). The multiplication of foreign wives was a lure into polytheism, for with foreign wives might come foreign gods. A king’s polygamy could easily lead to polytheism. Polytheism was the obvious way for a king to reconcile in his competitive household the imported gods of his wives and their sons. Foreign wives could accept this solution, for the gods of the ancient Near East were polytheistic. This is what happened to Solomon. His wives wore him down theologically. From the viewpoint of a foreign king seeking to undermine Israel, an alliance through his daughter’s marriage to an Israelite king was ideal. This was a low-cost strategy of subversion. The Israelite king’s polytheistic example could undermine Israel in all four covenants: personal, ecclesiastical, civil and familial. The family was therefore the weak link in the religion of Israel. So concerned was God to preserve the monotheism of the Israelite family that He demanded the death penalty for any family member who tempted another member to worship a false god (Deut. 13:6–10). The prosecuting family members were to cast the irst stones after the errant member’s conviction (v. 9). This was because witnesses were required to cast the irst stones under Mosaic law (Deut. 17:7).12

Treasury Boundaries The text continues: “. . . neither shall he greatly multiply to himself silver and gold” (17b). These precious metals could be used to build monuments to kingly power: public works projects. These public works projects honor the king or the State. They must then be permanently maintained through permanent taxation, unless the State is willing to admit defeat and transfer their ownership to private organizations.13 Precious metals could be used to build up an 12. Jesus understood the implications of this civil law: “And the brother shall deliver up the brother to death, and the father the child: and the children shall rise up against their parents, and cause them to be put to death” (Matt. 10:21). “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household. He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me” (Matt. 10:34–37). He did not deny the validity of this law in His lifetime, which was a matter of inheritance in Israel. 13. The national highway system built by the U.S. Federal government in the late 1950’s and 1960’s is now becoming a major inancial drain on state and local inances as these roads

Boundaries on Kingship

489

14

ofensive army: the way of empire. They could be used in proligate moral dissipation by the king and his court.15 It was a violation of God’s law for a king to use his authority to extract so much wealth from the population that the excess revenue could be horded in the form of money.

Judicial Boundaries The king was told to become familiar with the Mosaic law. “And it shall be, when he sitteth upon the throne of his kingdom, that he shall write him a copy of this law in a book out of that which is before the priests the Levites: And it shall be with him, and he shall read therein all the days of his life: that he may learn to fear the LORD his God, to keep all the words of this law and these statutes, to do them: That his heart be not lifted up above his brethren, and that he turn not aside from the commandment, to the right hand, or to

and bridges steadily wear out. Governments did not set aside gasoline tax revenues to pay for the roads’ replacement. The consumption of capital took place over several decades. Now the budgets of these governments are constrained by massive debt and by political promises regarding welfare: the support of the poor. Even worse in this respect is the century-old underground water systems of older U.S. cities, especially in the Northeast. 14. Such hoards of precious metals do not last long in wartime; the costs of warfare are too high. But the presence of a hoard of precious metals in reserve might lure a short-sighted king into starting a war that would outlast his hoard. The problem with a war paid for by the king’s precious metals is that his army must gain a string of victories over wealthy opponents in order to replenish his dwindling supply of gold. The ofensive military campaign becomes self-reinforcing. To maintain the conquests, wealth must be extracted from the conquered peoples, who resent the imposition. The Roman Republic did not extricate itself from its military victories. The government used the wealth extracted from the provinces to maintain local control over them. Little of this wealth lowed back into Rome’s treasury except immediately after an initial military victory. Private Roman citizens kept most of the booty. Bribery and extortion became common with local governors and Rome’s senators. A. H. M. Jones, The Roman Economy: Studies in Ancient Economic and Administrative History (Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman & Littleield, 1974), pp. 115–21. The republic became an empire. Eventually, the cost of maintaining it led to bankruptcy and mass inlation. Ibid., ch. 9. 15. Isaiah warned: “His watchmen are blind: they are all ignorant, they are all dumb dogs, they cannot bark; sleeping, lying down, loving to slumber. Yea, they are greedy dogs which can never have enough, and they are shepherds that cannot understand: they all look to their own way, every one for his gain, from his quarter. Come ye, say they, I will fetch wine, and we will ill ourselves with strong drink; and to morrow shall be as this day, and much more abundant” (Isa. 56:10–12). The court at Versailles under Louis XIV and Louis XV left a mountain of royal debt and oligarchical moral debauchery for Louis XVI to deal with. He and the old order did not survive the ordeal.

490

DEUTERONOMY

the left: to the end that he may prolong his days in his kingdom, he, and his children, in the midst of Israel” (Deut. 17:18–20). First, at the time of his accession to the throne, he was to copy the law in his own hand. This meant that he had to be literate. A king in Israel could not lawfully claim that he had not read the law. He had not only read it; he had written it down. To maintain this kingly inheritance, his son would have to be able to read. This writing down of the law was a joint brain-hand exercise: suitable for memorization. Also, by writing down the law, he was submitting to the treaty of the great king. i.e., God Himself, whose laws and sanctions appear in the text. Second, the priests kept the original copy. This meant that the priests were the law-keepers in Israel. They were the ones with exclusive access to the original source document of Moses’ judicials. The king could not tamper with this document. He could not retroactively write new copies of the law in order to mislead the judges of the nation. He was not to become a forger who might later be identiied as such by some higher critic of the Bible. He was not sovereign over the law. He was under its authority, as preserved in written form by the priests. Priestly authority was superior to kingly authority in the area of law, and this was to be acknowledged by the king by his act of copying the law from the priests’ version. Third, he was required to read the law continually. He was to learn to fear God and to keep God’s law. The sign of his fear of God would be his obedience to God’s revealed law. This would keep him in his place: “That his heart be not lifted up above his brethren, and that he turn not aside from the commandment, to the right hand, or to the left” (v. 20a). Fourth, there was a positive sanction attached to this law: “. . . to the end that he may prolong his days in his kingdom, he, and his children, in the midst of Israel” (v. 20b). This was an extension of the ifth commandment’s promise: “Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee” (Ex. 20:12). By honoring God by obeying His law, the king could bring the blessings of long life and extended authority to himself and his heirs. The law speciically identiied the land as “his kingdom.” To preserve his family’s kingly line, he had to master and obey the law.

Boundaries on Kingship

491

Taxes and Control Centralization means a transfer of authority away from the individual. Taxes imposed by a central government are transmitted to an agency of government more distant from the taxpayer than local governments. The taxpayer has less inluence over the spending of this money. This means that the spending preferences of the individual are usually compromised by the collecting agency. His preferences are drowned out by the preferences of other taxpayers and special-interest political pressure groups. The central collecting agency can play of one competing group against another. This allows the civil government’s decision-makers to substitute their spending preferences for those of the taxpayers. Meanwhile, organized opposition to speciic taxes will be sporadic and difused.16 The king in Israel faced competing demands for the money he collected. There is always heavy demand for free money. Those desiring access to the king’s money might even be located outside the country. The king, as the ojcial representative of all the people, had more claims on the use of his funds than any local government faced. The spending decisions made by a king were therefore more complex. Meanwhile, the taxpayer found it dijcult to gain the king’s support for the taxpayer’s preferred project. His preferences were drowned in the noise of competition. This noise transferred greater power to the king and his agents. The more complex the problems facing the king, and the more noise there was in the competition for access to the funds, the greater the lexibility of the king in spending the taxpayers’ money. This means greater arbitrariness and less of a restraining efect by the law. The more money collected by the king, the more detailed the law book had to be to govern the allocation of the revenue. One rule of bureaucracy is this: the thicker the law book, the more arbitrary the decisions. If the law book is too thick to make it easy for anyone to coordinate the details of the law, the bureaucrat has fewer restraints on his decision-making. This is another reason why the Bible’s law book is comparatively thin – thin enough to be read to the assembled population once every seven years (Deut. 31:10–12).

16. Milton Friedman and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose: A Personal Statement (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), pp. 292–94.

492

DEUTERONOMY

The Mosaic law established a political order in which civil power was decentralized. There could be a king, but for four centuries, there wasn’t. Civil government’s decision-making was kept at the local level. So was tax revenue. This decentralization made it possible for local taxpayers to have a greater voice in the distribution of their funds. It also allowed them to place pressure on the government when taxes got too high. It was far more dijcult to restrict a distant king’s power over the purse. It took a political revolution under Jeroboam to reduce the burden of Rehoboam’s taxes (I Ki. 12). Revolution is an expensive, risky, and infrequent occurrence in the afairs of nations.

Conclusion The king, as the voice of civil authority, was not to replace the supreme court, which had to include priests. Yet because the king possessed an army and personal authority, he would inevitably become a major source of judicial interpretation. He would threaten the system of co-judgeship in which the priests served as counsellors to civil judges. The authority to declare the law in God’s name and then enforce it is the foundation of covenantal authority. The State has the power to enforce the law physically. In a covenantally rebellious society, the fear of the State is greater than the fear of excommunication. The State becomes the most feared interpreter of the law. This is why Absalom used the promise of wise judicial declaration as his primary weapon in his subversion of his father’s throne. “And Absalom rose up early, and stood beside the way of the gate: and it was so, that when any man that had a controversy came to the king for judgment, then Absalom called unto him, and said, Of what city art thou? And he said, Thy servant is of one of the tribes of Israel. And Absalom said unto him, See, thy matters are good and right; but there is no man deputed of the king to hear thee. Absalom said moreover, Oh that I were made judge in the land, that every man which hath any suit or cause might come unto me, and I would do him justice! And it was so, that when any man came nigh to him to do him obeisance, he put forth his hand, and took him, and kissed him. And on this manner did Absalom to all Israel that came to the king for judgment: so Absalom stole the hearts of the men of Israel” (II Sam. 15:2–6). Absalom promised to do what Moses could not do: render perfect justice to all comers. His ofer would not have

Boundaries on Kingship

493

been believable had the king not already undermined the supreme court’s function by arrogating judicial authority to himself, and through his own person, to the autonomous State. Foreign kings repeatedly made trouble for the Hebrews, from the day that Chedorlaomer kidnapped Lot (Gen. 14) to the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. The Pharaoh of the oppression was the archetype of what a king could become if left unchecked by law and God’s historical sanctions. There had been only one exception: Melchizedek. Abram had gone to meet him, bringing tithes to him and receiving bread and wine from him. But Melchizedek was diferent from the other kings: he was also the priest of Salem. He lawfully possessed both ojces: king and priest (Gen. 14:18). He was a royal priest. He, too, was an archetype – not for individual kingship but for corporate kingship. Israel as a nation of priests was to imitate Melchizedek. Israel was set apart by God at Sinai. The nation took an oath there to obey God’s law (Ex. 19). God then gave them His law (Ex. 20–23). At Sinai, God had prophesied that they would become a kingdom of priests (Ex. 19:6). They were not yet such a kingdom, He implied, but someday they would be. It was the fulillment of this prophecy by the church that Peter announced: “But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light” (I Pet. 2:9). Implicit in Peter’s doctrine of the institutional church as a holy nation is the call for a return to the decentralized Israel of the judges era, though without a high priest. Decentralization is to be both civil and ecclesiastical, for Jesus Christ is the high priest after the order of Melchizedek (Heb. 5:10) and therefore a king (Heb. 7:1–2). He reigns exclusively from heaven, not from an earthly holy of holies. But it took until 1918 for the Christian West to come to grips with the civil implications of the doctrine of the bodily ascension of Christ. By the end of World War I, when the kings at last departed, Christendom had also departed. It was not Christianity that inally abolished kings; it was the Enlightenment, both left wing (Communist) and right wing (democratic).

41 LEVITICAL INHERITANCE Levitical Inheritance Through Separation THROUGH SEPARATION The priests the Levites, and all the tribe of Levi, shall have no part nor inheritance with Israel: they shall eat the oferings of the LORD made by ire, and his inheritance. Therefore shall they have no inheritance among their brethren: the LORD is their inheritance, as he hath said unto them (Deut. 18:1–2).

This was a land law. It had to do with landed inheritance inside the boundaries of Israel. Inheritance through separation was basic to the Mosaic covenant.1 God separated Israel from the nations. The theocentric focus of this priestly law is God’s identiication of Himself as the Levites’ inheritance. They would inherit an ojce that allowed them geographic proximity to God’s dwelling place in the tabernacle. The cost of this inheritance was their forfeiture of any inheritance in rural Israel. God separated them for service to Him. He therefore separated them judicially from their brethren. The economic mark of this judicial separation was two-fold: their lack of jubilee-guaranteed landed inheritance and their lawful claim on the tithe. Levites could not normally inherit rural land, according to the jubilee laws. Instead, they were entitled to a tithe from their brethren. There was a reason for this: the other tribes did not have lawful access to tabernacle service. The separation of Levi from rural land was an aspect of God’s separation of the other tribes from His

1. Gary North, Leviticus: An Economic Commentary (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), ch. 21.

494

Levitical Inheritance Through Separation

495

presence. God identiied Himself as the Levites’ inheritance. The Levites’ inheritance of God was accompanied by their legal claim on the tithe: And the LORD spake unto Aaron, Thou shalt have no inheritance in their land, neither shalt thou have any part among them: I am thy part and thine inheritance among the children of Israel. And, behold, I have given the children of Levi all the tenth in Israel for an inheritance, for their service which they serve, even the service of the tabernacle of the congregation. Neither must the children of Israel henceforth come nigh the tabernacle of the congregation, lest they bear sin, and die. But the Levites shall do the service of the tabernacle of the congregation, and they shall bear their iniquity: it shall be a statute for ever throughout your generations, that among the children of Israel they have no inheritance. But the tithes of the children of Israel, which they ofer as an heave ofering unto the LORD, I have given to the Levites to inherit: therefore I have said unto them, Among the children of Israel they shall have no inheritance (Num. 18:20–24).

The connection between the tithe and liturgical service is obvious in this text. The Levites alone had control over the sacriices; therefore, they alone had a legal claim on the tithe. There was nothing voluntary about this claim on the productivity of others. As surely as an Israelite had to worship God according to the ritual requirements of the tabernacle, so did he have to pay his tithe to the Levites. His payment was for services rendered: atoning services rendered to God in the name of the people. The tithe had nothing to do with non-liturgical services to the community, such as teaching, music, or anything else. The Israelite had no independent authority to send his tithe to agents who met his social needs or anyone else’s.2 The tithe went to God through His church. No other agency had a legal claim on the tithe. This has not changed in New Testament times. What has changed is the tribal aspect of the tithe. The Levites’ inheritance was part of the tribe’s lack of inheritance in rural land. This made the tithe a matter of civil law, just as the enforcement of the jubilee year was to be civil. The Levites possessed an enforceable claim on the tithe. The church does not.

2. Gary North, Tithing and the Church (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), ch. 9.

496

DEUTERONOMY

The Geography of Mosaic Inheritance The Levites could not inherit rural land except in a very special situation, when a priest inherited land because of an owner’s broken vow of land pledged to God (Lev. 27:20–21).3 As an heir of God, a priest could inherit this land under the provisions of the jubilee. Under no other circumstances could a Levite inherit rural land. He could only lease it until the next jubilee. By separating Levites from rural land, the Mosaic law prevented the centralization of landed wealth by the one tribe that had no geographical boundaries: Levi. The Levites would have to content themselves with tithe money, oferings, and owning urban real estate, which was not under the jubilee’s provisions in non-Levitical walled cities. Within their own cities, the jubilee year did apply to Levites (Lev. 25:33). This kept Levites tied geographically to cities, which were located inside the boundaries of speciic tribal allotments. Their regional inluence would come through their urban wealth and their social position as counsellors who were experts in God’s law. It would not come through their amassing of rural land: pockets of civil inluence inside other tribal communities. There was citizenship possible inside cities, for covenant-keeping men had access to membership in God’s holy army, but their citizenship was by adoption into a tribe. If this was the tribe of Levi, its inluence was mainly indirect: not through votes inside another tribe’s council but rather through non-voting theological and judicial inluence. The other tribes were required to keep their distance from the inner courts of the tabernacle. It meant death for them to approach the holy of holies, where the Ark of the Covenant rested: death by armed Levites or death by God (Num. 3:5–10). The concentric boundaries of the holy of holies were protected by the armed representatives of the three Levitical families: Merari (outermost ring), Gershon, and Kohath (innermost ring).4 After Israel’s return from the Babylonian captivity, there was no further mention of the Ark. The holy of holies still remained holy in Israel, but there was no longer a pair of the original covenantal documents inside the Ark.

3. North, Leviticus, ch. 37. 4. Gary North, Sanctions and Dominion: An Economic Commentary on Numbers (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1996), ch. 3.

Levitical Inheritance Through Separation

497

The Bible does not say whether the tithes were collected locally, then sent to a central warehouse, and then redistributed nationally to every Levite on some pro-rated share. The high expense of transporting goods implies that Levites were paid from local storehouses. This meant that the prosperity of a local Levite was dependent on the prosperity of residents in his region. The Levite was economically dependent on the local community’s success. A Levite could volunteer for service at the tabernacle (Deut. 18:6). This service was sacramental (v. 7). Sacramental service mandated equal income for services rendered, but the Levite could also receive income from the long-term leasing out of his inheritance (v. 8). Income from sacramental service was tithe-free; income from the sale-lease of his property or other investments had to be tithed.5 If he had owned a house in a Levitical city, he could lease it out to someone else. He had the right to return and buy back his property at any time (Lev. 25:32). His house would be returned to him or his heirs in the jubilee (Lev. 25:33). The unique geographical presence of God with members of one tribe established this tribe’s legal claim on a tenth of the net income of their brethren. The text speaks of God as the Levites’ inheritance (v. 2). This inheritance was geographical, occupational, and revelational.

Geographical Separation The Levites served God inside the geographical boundaries surrounding the Ark of the Covenant: a radius of 2,000 cubits. Joshua told the invading tribes: “Yet there shall be a space between you and it, about two thousand cubits by measure: come not near unto it, that ye may know the way by which ye must go: for ye have not passed this way heretofore” (Josh. 3:4). This was the same distance of ownership of land surrounding the Levitical cities. “And the suburbs of the cities, which ye shall give unto the Levites, shall reach from the wall of the city and outward a thousand cubits round about. And ye shall measure from without the city on the east side two thousand cubits, and on the south side two thousand cubits, and on the west side two thousand cubits, and on the north side two

5. Ibid., pp. 66–67.

498

DEUTERONOMY

thousand cubits and the city shall be in the midst: this shall be to them the suburbs of the cities” (Num. 35:4–5). The Levites had to defend the Ark of the Covenant. This responsibility was in part liturgical and in part covenantal: an aspect of the oath. They lawfully possessed the authority of the sword inside the boundaries of the tabernacle area (II Chron. 23:7). Because of the holiness of the Ark, the Levites had a unique geographical calling before God and men. The Levites’ roots in Israel were tied to the Ark of the Covenant and the sacriices and defense associated with it. Land was basic to the Mosaic law’s system of inheritance. Land was part of the seed laws, which also dealt with inheritance. The Levites were God’s inheritance in Israel. God set them apart for special service to Him. He did not let them place their inancial hopes on rural land, which was the inheritance of the other tribes. This was a major advantage to the Levites, for there could be no legitimate hope in rural land if Israel kept God’s covenant law. The multiplication of the Israelite population – long life (Ex. 20:12) coupled with no miscarriages (Ex. 23:26) – would have shrunk the size of each inheriting generation’s family plot.6 We might even call this God’s plot against family plots. The Levites would have been owners of urban real estate, which would rise in value as Israelites moved from the farms and aliens moved to Israel. God placed them in the geographical centers of future economic growth, assuming that the nation kept God’s covenant. Teaching the nation to do this was a major task of the Levites. God attached a positive economic sanction to the success of the Levites’ calling. They would do well by doing good. The value of their inheritance would grow. The Levites would speak for God throughout the land. Their separation from tribal land made them a dispersed tribe. Their separation from the other tribes locally was an aspect of their separation from the other tribes liturgically.

The Levites’ Occupational Separation No other tribe could ofer formal burnt oferings to God. They were the designated intermediaries in between God and members

6. North, Leviticus, pp. 416–22.

Levitical Inheritance Through Separation

499

of the other tribes. In payment for the services associated with sacriices, the Levites were to receive tithes and oferings. The priests of the sanctuary – the holy, set-apart area – who were selected from the family of Aaron (Num. 18:1), were to receive a tithe of this tithe (Num. 18:26). This specialized and judicially restricted liturgical service had to be funded. Because liturgical service was mandatory for the renewal of both the ecclesiastical and civil covenants,7 it was funded by a mandatory tithe. This was not a voluntary payment, for attendance was not voluntary. This payment moved upward from individuals to Levites because of God’s appointment of the Levites as His covenantal spokesmen in the national hierarchy. There was a top-down low of ecclesiastical authority from God to the people, and the Levites were at the top of this earthly hierarchy. They possessed a monopoly because of their proximity to the Ark of the Covenant, which contained the two stone tablets of the law, the founding covenantal documents.8 That Levites were the nation’s senior spokesmen is indicated by the fact that they, not the State, had a speciied claim on the net income of the nation, and that any attempt on the part of a king to collect an equally large percentage of income was tyrannical (I Sam. 8:15, 17). The church, not the State or the family, was the central institution in Israel.9 The Levites’ lawful claim on covenant-keeping men’s income was based on their God-ordained monopoly of liturgical service. Their occupation was closed to members of other tribes. To become a Levite, a man had to be adopted into the tribe, and this required

7. Families also participated in the national feasts, but they did so as members of the ecclesiastical community. The feasts were not means of family covenant renewal, for there are no means of family covenant renewal. The family covenant of the marriage partners is broken only by death, either biological or covenantal. Ray R. Sutton, Second Chance: Biblical Blueprints for Divorce and Remarriage (Ft. Worth, Texas: Dominion Press, 1987), ch. 2. It is lawfully broken when children leave their parents’ household to marry (Gen. 2:24). A failure to participate in a mandatory feast did not break the legal requirements of a family, such as staying married or honoring parents. An individual Israelite was required to attend, whether or not he was a member of a family. A circumcised stranger could also attend, although to gain this privilege, any male in his household also had to be circumcised (Ex. 12:48). 8. Meredith G. Kline, The Structure of Biblical Authority (rev. ed.; Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1975), Part 2, ch. 1. 9. This is equally true today. The church extends into eternity (Rev. 21, 22). The family and the State do not.

500

DEUTERONOMY

the payment of an expensive entry fee by the adoptee on behalf of himself and every member of his family (Lev. 27:2–8).10

The Levites’ Revelational Separation The high priest had access to God’s word directly. He possessed the urim and thummim. “And thou shalt put in the breastplate of judgment the Urim and the Thummim; and they shall be upon Aaron’s heart, when he goeth in before the LORD: and Aaron shall bear the judgment of the children of Israel upon his heart before the LORD continually” (Ex. 28:30). “And he shall stand before Eleazar the priest, who shall ask counsel for him after the judgment of Urim before the LORD: at his word shall they go out, and at his word they shall come in, both he, and all the children of Israel with him, even all the congregation” (Num. 27:21). Furthermore, the priests had access to the written Mosaic law and the written revelation of the Bible. At some point, probably early in Israel’s history, these scrolls were copied down for use locally by the other Levites. The decentralized system of synagogues in Jesus’ day used scrolls of the Bible (Luke 4:17). Access to written revelation made the Levites specialists in rendering judgment, both civil and ecclesiastical. But this occupational specialization was not uniquely the possession of the Levites. Judges had equal civil authority (Deut. 17:8–13).11

The Prophet’s Separation The priesthood shared this declarative authority with prophets. More than this: the prophet had a superior authority. The prophet’s authority was greater than the king’s (II Sam. 12) and the priesthood’s. Moses’ authority as a prophet (Deut. 34:10) was greater than Aaron’s authority as a priest. But the ojce was a temporary one, and any misuse of it was a capital crime. I will raise them up a Prophet from among their brethren, like unto thee, and will put my words in his mouth; and he shall speak unto them all that I shall command him. And it shall come to pass, that whosoever will

10. North, Leviticus, ch. 36. 11. See Chapter 39.

Levitical Inheritance Through Separation

501

not hearken unto my words which he shall speak in my name, I will require it of him. But the prophet, which shall presume to speak a word in my name, which I have not commanded him to speak, or that shall speak in the name of other gods, even that prophet shall die. And if thou say in thine heart, How shall we know the word which the LORD hath not spoken? When a prophet speaketh in the name of the LORD, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the LORD hath not spoken, but the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously: thou shalt not be afraid of him (Deut. 18:18–22).

With greater authority comes greater responsibility. False prophecy was a capital crime in Israel because the prophet was the supreme judicial authority. The proof of his authority was his ability to invoke successfully God’s direct sanctions. But he was not to rule on a throne or ofer sacriices in the temple. His was not a permanent ojce. He was called by God to render supreme judgment in times of national apostasy when civil judges and Levites were not speaking God’s word, and who were therefore speaking the word of another god. His authority was based on God’s direct revelation to him and God’s imposition of sanctions invoked by him. He was the designated agent, called directly by God, who brought a formal covenant lawsuit against the nation, which included the nation’s ordained leaders. Because the prophet did not possess a permanent ojce, he had no lawful claim on anyone’s income. Such a claim is possessed only by someone who is ordained by God through a formal process of ordination. Ordination is both institutional and covenantal. It is invoked by covenantal oath. The prophet’s calling was not necessarily so invoked. The prophet was not necessarily a member of a Levitical family that possessed a lawful covenantal claim on any other family’s money. This issue has nothing to do with contractual claims, which are not established by covenantal oath. Here I am speaking of covenantal claims that can be transferred by oath to a successor. A king normally transferred to his son his legal claim on a portion of the income of the people. The son’s right of kingly inheritance had to be conirmed by ecclesiastical anointing, as Solomon’s was (I Ki. 1:39).12 A Levite could pass to his sons his legal claim to tithes 12. Jehoiada the priest rallied the Levites to defend the kingship of Joash. The Levites defended the young king by means of swords (II Chron. 23:1–8).

502

DEUTERONOMY

and oferings. A prophet did not possess any such claim; so, his son could not inherit it. The Levites possessed no claim of immediate revelation from God except through the high priest. Their expertise in the law was occupational. That is, their claim to knowledge of revelation was not a monopoly. It was shared by civil judges. The Levites had a claim on men’s income. So did civil judges. The prophet did not. God’s direct revelation to and direct calling of the prophet were not accompanied by a legal claim on someone else’s money. The ojce of Levite and judge, which did involve such a legal claim, did not imply access to direct revelation. The prophet’s authority rested solely on his possession of direct revelation from God, yet he had no lawful economic claim in his capacity as a prophet. Any assertion by a prophet of a covenantally authorized claim on someone else’s money would have constituted prima facie evidence of the illegitimacy of his call by God. Court prophets hired by the king or appointed under his authority were sure to be false prophets. Judah’s King Jehoshaphat suspected as much when he heard Ahab’s 400 prophets assure the two kings that they would be victorious over the Syrians. He asked for a second opinion. He wanted to hear from a prophet who was not on Ahab’s payroll (I Ki. 22:7). The Levites were separated by God to study His law and pronounce judgments. This separation was an aspect of the division of labor. Not only was it a generational phenomenon, unlike the prophet’s ojce, it was not monopolistic. It was shared by civil judges. Their knowledge was therefore based on specialized study rather than uniquely supernatural intervention by God. Their inheritance was based on liturgical separation, not revelational separation. Revelational separation, which the prophet possessed, was not accompanied by legal claims on other people’s income. This made the prophetic ojce not only highly risky judgmentally – imprisonment or death if you prophesied accurately to unrighteous leaders, execution if you prophesied falsely to righteous men – but risky economically. Prophesying was a calling,13 not an occupation.

13. I deine a calling as the most important work a person can do in which he would be most dijcult to replace. Only rarely is a person’s calling his occupation. My calling is to write this economic commentary. I do not get paid to do this.

Levitical Inheritance Through Separation

503

Conclusion The Levites possessed no guaranteed inheritance in rural land. They did possess a jubilee-guaranteed inheritance inside Levitical cities (Lev. 25:33). As a substitute for landed inheritance, God gave them as their inheritance a claim to a tithe on other men’s net income. This made them dependent on the productivity of other men. Their ecclesiastical claim on other men’s income was based on the liturgical monopoly which they possessed. This monopoly had a geographical aspect. Only Levites could lawfully approach the innermost sanctum of the tabernacle, and only the high priest could enter it. The Ark of the Covenant was the holiest object in Israel. It had to be defended. The Levites possessed this occupational assignment. They retained it after their return from Babylon, although the Ark seems to have disappeared. This assignment ended when the Romans destroyed the temple in A.D. 70. Their civil claim on other men’s income was based on their lawful inheritance of the tithe in lieu of rural land. This civil claim ended in A.D. 70.

42 LANDMARKS AND COOPERATION Landmarks andSOCIAL Social Cooperation Thou shalt not remove thy neighbour’s landmark, which they of old time have set in thine inheritance, which thou shalt inherit in the land that the LORD thy God giveth thee to possess it (Deut. 19:14).

The theocentric focus of this law is God’s ownership. God owned the land of Canaan. As the original owner, it was His right to determine who would manage it for Him. He could lawfully exclude anyone from occupying a piece of land, in the same way that He excluded Adam and Even from the forbidden tree. Ownership, above all, means the right to exclude.1 So does stewardship, as a form of delegated ownership. God was about to transfer stewardship over this land from the Canaanites to the Israelites. That is, He was about to use Israel to exclude Canaanites from the land they were occupying. More to the point, for Israel to inherit the land, which God had promised to Abraham, Canaanites would have to be disinherited. Inheritance/disinheritance is the fundamental theme of the Book of Deuteronomy. Because God planned to take up residence in Israel in a special way (Num. 35:34), His ownership of the land of Israel was special. He owned the whole world in general, but He owned the land of Canaan specially. “The land shall not be sold for ever: for the land is mine; for ye are strangers and sojourners with me” (Lev. 25:23). Also, He owned all nations generally, but He owned Israel specially. “But now thus saith the LORD that created thee, O Jacob, and he that formed thee, O Israel, Fear not: for I have redeemed thee, I

1. The model is God’s exclusion of Adam from the forbidden tree.

504

Landmarks and Social Cooperation

505

have called thee by thy name; thou art mine” (Isa. 43:1). He established laws on rural land ownership inside the nation’s boundaries (Lev. 25) that had not applied before, and which would no longer apply in the same way after the exile, when gentiles living in the land would be included under the jubilee laws (Ezek. 47:21–23). These laws inally ended when God ceased to dwell with Israel as a nation after A.D. 70. The disinheritance of Israel was marked by the annulment of the jubilee laws. These laws had never applied outside of the land of Israel. They had not been cross-boundary laws. They were land laws.

Permanent External Boundaries The original allocation of land to the families of the conquest generation in the days of Joshua was supposed to remain unchanged. Down through the generations, there would be subdivisions of the original properties within each family, but the external boundaries were to remain unchanged. These boundaries marked the inheritances of the original families. Moses told Israel that God would distribute each family’s inheritance through surveyors, judges, and lot-casters (Num. 26:53–56).2 God was sovereign over this casting of lots. Every Israelite family was required to honor God’s original allocation. Only after Israel’s return from the exile did God allow new boundaries for those families that had lost track of their original boundaries, or whose claims had been replaced by foreigners brought into the land by the conquering Assyrians and Babylonians. Prior to the exile, any tampering with the evidence of this original allocation was a form of theft of God’s property. God’s agents had subdivided the land, and in so doing, they had allocated the responsibilities of stewardship. The jubilee law placed limits on the permanent transfer of these responsibilities. These responsibilities (liabilities) were inseparable from the land (asset). No family could lawfully sell these assets-responsibilities or forfeit them to repay a debt.3

2. Gary North, Sanctions and Dominion: An Economic Commentary on Numbers (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1996), ch. 14. 3. The one exception was the refusal to pay a vow to a priest (Lev. 27:20–21). See Gary North, Leviticus: An Economic Commentary (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), pp. 606–609.

506

DEUTERONOMY

The jubilee land law was important for what it silently implied: in the absence of such a law, it is lawful to transfer such stewardship responsibilities. It means also that it was lawful to delegate these assets-responsibilities until the next jubilee year. Any suggestion that economic liability cannot legally be delegated or transferred is incorrect – as incorrect as the suggestion that economic assets cannot legally be delegated or transferred. The jubilee law, which was a temporary land and seed law of the Mosaic economy, testiies to the fact that economic liability and responsibility can be delegated, and in the absence of such a law, can be permanently transferred. The whole point of the dominion covenant (Gen. 1:26–28) is that God delegated a great deal of responsibility to Adam, who in turn delegated some of it to Eve, and would have delegated it to his children. It was the very legality of this transfer that gave Satan his opportunity to steal the inheritance by deceiving Eve and corrupting Adam.4 This law was repeated in Deuteronomy 27:17: “Cursed be he that removeth his neighbour’s landmark. And all the people shall say, Amen.” There had to be a public ajrmation – an amen – on the part of the people. The fundamental issue here was inheritance. The jubilee land laws were supposed to provide continuity between the original allocation and the future. There could not be any legal long-term alienation of rural land. There was an eschatological reason for this restriction on the sale of land. The Mosaic land laws were aspects of the seed laws, and the seed laws were messianic, having to do with Jacob’s prophecy regarding Shiloh (Gen. 49:10). The tribes had to be kept separate in order for Jacob’s prophecy to come true. The land laws were a means of keeping the tribes separate.5 To move a neighbor’s landmark was an act of theft. It was not an easily achieved deception in open terrain. The more accurate the measuring devices, the more dijcult the deception. The ancient world had extraordinarily accurate measuring devices, as the dimensions of the Cheops pyramid indicate.6

4. “And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression” (I Tim. 2:14). 5. Gary North, Leviticus: An Economic Commentary (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), ch. 17. 6. Peter Tompkins, Secrets of the Great Pyramid (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). See especially the appendix by Livio Stecchini. See also Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, Hamlet’s Mill: An essay on myth and the frame of time (Boston: Gambit, 1969).

Landmarks and Social Cooperation

507

The Civil Sanction Moving a landmark was an act of theft. The penalty for theft was double restitution: “If the theft be certainly found in his hand alive, whether it be ox, or ass, or sheep; he shall restore double” (Ex. 22:4). This must have been a monetary payment. The civil sanction could not have been the forfeiture of rural property. This was not any man’s right to transfer.7 A convicted criminal could not alienate his family’s land. Double restitution must have been made by the transfer of some other form of property. Judges would have been required to estimate the lease value of the land over an entire jubilee period and then apply double restitution. The present cash payment for the lease value over a 49-year period would have been close to the cash value of a permanent transfer, given the heavy discounting efects of the rate of interest on the present value of income several decades away. The theft was an attack on inheritance. Theft constituted the disinheritance of one’s neighbor. What was the value of this disinheritance? There was no market for the sale of rural land in Mosaic Israel. It was illegal to disinherit one’s heirs. There was a long-term leasehold market. The maximum term of the lease was 49 years: until the next jubilee (Lev. 25:27). How could judges have estimated the monetary value of the stolen land? First, they would have had to ascertain the prevailing leasehold redemption at the beginning of the most recent post-jubilee cycle. The attempted theft was to have been permanent, i.e., longer than 49 years. Nevertheless, the market price of a 49-year lease was close to the permanent price. Why? Because of the efect of the rate of interest. Discounting an expected stream of income by a ixed rate of interest produces a low present market price for the income expected in year 49. The higher the prevailing rate of interest, the lower the present value of future income. The more distant the income, the lower the present market price. Each subsequent year gets lower. The present market value of the expected income in year 98 is not signiicantly lower than the present market value of the expected income in year 49. The higher the rate 7. The one exception: a transfer to a priest because of a broken vow (Lev. 27:14–24). Gary North, Leviticus: An Economic Commentary (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), ch. 37.

508

DEUTERONOMY

of interest, the less signiicant the diference. Second, the judges would have doubled this lease payment: the restitution factor (Ex. 22:4). Third, they would have estimated the size of the plot stolen in relation to the property’s total size. Fourth, they would have multiplied the double restitution payment for all of the land by this percentage. If there was either price delation or price inlation in the economy, then the further back the jubilee cycle began, the more burdensome the restitution payment, either to the victim (under inlation) or the criminal (under delation). But with gold or silver as the standard, there is not much likelihood of inlation. With the silver shekel of the sanctuary as the judicial standard, the judges could have estimated what was owed with greater conidence. With a metallic monetary standard, a slowly falling price level is likely. This must have placed an extra burden on the criminal; the later his crime was discovered in the jubilee cycle, the heavier the burden. Without detailed price statistics, the judges would have found it dijcult to estimate the extent of the price delation since the beginning of the last jubilee cycle. In today’s world, there are no temporal restrictions on buying land. Judges could use the prevailing market price of the stolen land, denominated in gold, as the price to be doubled.

Graves and Boundaries There was a major diference between Israel and the other nations, including Greece and Rome: the lack of sacred land. There was no sacred land in Israel. There was sacred space: the place where the Ark of the Covenant was housed. The most sacred space in Israel was inside the Ark. After the return of the Ark from Philistia on the cart drawn by the oxen, it arrived at Bethshemesh. God’s judgment came against the residents in the early days of the Ark’s arrival. “And he smote the men of Beth-shemesh, because they had looked into the ark of the LORD, even he smote of the people ifty thousand and threescore and ten men: and the people lamented, because the LORD had smitten many of the people with a great slaughter” (I Sam. 6:19). This many deaths indicates that the whole city was involved. A generation of men died, leaving their wives without husbands. This would have drastically speeded up the inheritance process in the region. Not surprisingly, the survivors invited the people of Kirjath-jearim to take away the Ark. They did,

Landmarks and Social Cooperation

509

and it remained with them for about a century before David brought it back to Jerusalem.8 Sacred space had to do with God’s unique judicial place of residence. The idea of God’s judicially restricted presence diferentiated Israel from the other nations. Animism was rampant in the ancient world. Demons were believed to reside in the neighborhood. Their presence led to the development of a common theological outlook. Men believed that particular plots of land served as the residences of local gods and also the spirits of deceased male heads of household. Land was inalienable in ancient Greece, for the local god of a family had nothing to do with the god of another family. The domestic god conferred on the family its right to the soil. The family’s hearth, like the family’s tomb, could not lawfully be moved. Neither could either be occupied by others. Fustel wrote: “By the stationary hearth and the permanent burial-place, the family took possession of the soil; the earth was in some sort imbued and penetrated by the religion of the hearth and of ancestors.” This, he said, was the origin of the idea of private property.9 He was incorrect. Private property originated when God delegated to Adam authority over the earth, but then retained ownership of the forbidden tree. It was God’s “no trespassing” declaration that established the principle of private property. God’s right to exclude man was a boundary that man had to honor, on threat of death. God delegated no authority over that tree. Then He departed from the presence of man. His declaration of man’s exclusion, not His presence, established private property. Israel’s religion was founded on the public rejection of all other religions, including animism. Animism is a religion of local gods. The God of Israel was the God of the whole earth. He could dwell with Israel outside the land. Thus, He could threaten the Israelites with temporary exile without threatening their existence as a holy nation. “And it shall come to pass, that as the LORD rejoiced over you to do you good, and to multiply you; so the LORD will rejoice over you to destroy you, and to bring you to nought; and ye shall be plucked from of the land whither thou goest to possess it. And the 8. James B. Jordan, Through New Eyes: Developing a Biblical View of the World (Brentwood, Tennessee: Wolgemuth & Hyatt, 1988), p. 224. 9. Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome (Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor, [1864] 1955), Book I, Chapter VI, p. 67.

510

DEUTERONOMY

LORD shall scatter thee among all people, from the one end of the earth even unto the other; and there thou shalt serve other gods, which neither thou nor thy fathers have known, even wood and stone. And among these nations shalt thou ind no ease, neither shall the sole of thy foot have rest: but the LORD shall give thee there a trembling heart, and failing of eyes, and sorrow of mind” (Deut. 28:63–65). Because God is the universal God, their exile would in no way break their covenant with Him. On the contrary, their exile would conirm the covenant: predictable corporate negative sanctions in history. The Old Covenant was primarily judicial, not geographical. It had been renewed through verbal ratiication by the nation at Mt. Sinai, which was located outside the land (Ex. 19). He would still be their God in a foreign land. The fact that an invading nation – Assyria – would remove most of the population and substitute foreigners as permanent residents of the land in no way polluted the land. It was Israel’s sin that had polluted the land, not these foreigners (later known as Samaritans). In fact, Ezekiel told Israel that resident aliens would be under the jubilee land laws after the Israelites returned to the land (Ezek. 47:21–23). This geographical sequence of events would have been inconceivable in ancient Greece. The boundaries of each family’s land were guarded by large stones called Termini. These stones were regarded as gods. “The Terminus once established according to the required rites there was no power on earth that could displace it. It was to remain in the same place throughout all ages.”10 It was the same in ancient Rome. “To encroach upon the ield of a family, it was necessary to overturn or displace a boundary mark, and this boundary mark was a god. The sacrilege was horrible, and the chastisement severe. According to the old Roman law, the man and the oxen who touched a Terminus were devoted – that is to say, both men and oxen were immolated in expiation.”11 That the Old Testament rarely mentions tombs, graves, and burial points to the fact that such matters were not considered important ritually, let alone theologically. Burial was a family matter, as when Jacob buried Rachel (Gen. 35:20). There was no ojciating priest. Moses’ body was not marked by any pillar, and its location

10. Ibid., II:VI, pp. 68–69. 11. Ibid., p. 69.

Landmarks and Social Cooperation

511

was immediately forgotten (Deut. 34:6). The only reference to burial in the Mosaic law governs the death of sinners hanged on a tree: “And if a man have committed a sin worthy of death, and he be to be put to death, and thou hang him on a tree: His body shall not remain all night upon the tree, but thou shalt in any wise bury him that day; (for he that is hanged is accursed of God;) that thy land be not deiled, which the LORD thy God giveth thee for an inheritance” (Deut. 21:22–23). As for touching a grave, the infraction was minor: “And whosoever toucheth one that is slain with a sword in the open ields, or a dead body, or a bone of a man, or a grave, shall be unclean seven days” (Num. 19:16). All that was required was a ritual sprinkling (v. 18). The land of Israel was important as God’s dwelling place. It was not important as the burial place for Israelites. The crucial covenantal issue was ethics, not ritual-based piety. If the nation broke the covenant, God threatened to depart from the land. He would no longer defend them against invasion. Where a man was buried had signiicance only if he was outside the land. Joseph asked that his bones be taken out of Egypt at the exodus. This had to do with God’s promise of land to Joseph’s forefathers (Gen. 50:24–25). It was a covenantal issue, not a ritual issue. It had to do with the fulillment in history of a covenantal promise. The fact that very few Jews returned to Israel after the exile did not make gentiles of those who remained behind in Medo-Persia. Their dispersion beyond the boundaries of Israel was implied from the beginning: the promise of zero miscarriages (Ex. 23:26) and long life (Ex. 20:12) were promises guaranteeing a population explosion to covenant-keeping Israel. Israel’s geographical boundaries were not supposed to incarcerate the Israelites.

Social Peace and Cooperation The law of landmarks upheld private property. As such, it was an application of the eighth commandment: “Thou shalt not steal” (Ex. 20:15). Moving a marker was a way to steal the future value of an asset. But this asset – land – had another function: marking the boundaries of the original land distribution. A theft of land was a theft of God’s property. He had allocated the land in Joshua’s generation. This allocation was designed to separate tribes from each other, thereby honoring Jacob’s messianic prophecy regarding Shiloh.

512

DEUTERONOMY

This law governed neighbors and close relatives. It acknowledged that theft is a great temptation for those who are one’s closest covenantal associates. The threat to landed property in Mosaic Israel was either one’s neighbors or an invading foreigner. This law implied that God would be the enforcer, since slight adjustments of markers are not easily detectable. But this also implied that men were willing to risk the wrath of God for the sake of relatively minor shifts in ownership. A major alteration of a boundary would have been obvious. Either the boundary-mover was a thief for the sake of theft, since not much property was involved, or else he planned a long-run coniscation, a little bit at a time. In either case, this was serious criminal behavior. The nature of this crime would have led to family conspiracies. There can be little doubt that families on both sides of a landmark would have been well aware of its location. Generations of inherited property were at stake. Members of families would have known what would eventually be their inheritance. This is why family members would have had to conspire together to get away with such a theft. Anyone who attempted such a theft on his own who did not conspire with his family would have risked facing a family member in court serving as a witness for the victim. The sanctions against the false witness appear in the next section (vv. 15–21). For one family to tamper with the boundary markers of its neighbor meant that intra-tribal conlicts would increase. This was obviously a crime that threatened social cooperation in the community. When neighbors cannot trust neighbors not to steal, it is dijcult for a community to enjoy the division of labor. There is too much hostility and distrust. But the threat was more than inter-family conlicts; it was equally intra-family conlicts. Within the boundaries of the original land grant there would have been new landmarks, generation by generation. If the jubilee was actually enforced, then there would have been additional markers, generation by generation. Each male heir of each original conquering family was entitled to a portion of the original land. The parcels of land would have grown smaller over time in the face of a growing population. As the plots grew smaller, as testiied to by the boundary markers, the nation would have been reminded that they could place no faith in rural land as a long-term source of income. They would have to move of the land eventually. The dominion covenant could not be fulilled inside the

Landmarks and Social Cooperation

513

boundaries of Israel. Neither could it be fulilled inside the boundaries of a family’s rural inheritance. The heirs would have to be separated from their original inheritance in the land if they were to prosper economically. The markers were to testify to this covenantal reality, generation by generation.

Conclusion The defense of private property is necessary for the maintenance of social cooperation. This law, because it deals with contiguous property that is marked of by visible boundaries, deals with neighbors. The preservation of social peace in a community is a high priority. It was an even higher priority in Mosaic Israel, where the jubilee made it highly unlikely new neighbors could become permanent residents. Disputes over property could result in long-term conlicts or even feuds. Because family conspiracies would have had to underlie any plan to move a marker, this crime threatened social cooperation even more than other kinds of theft. “Good fences make good neighbours,” wrote the American poet Robert Frost. He had a good point. Moving a fence is a lot more dijcult than moving a single boundary marker. But building a fence is more expensive than sticking a marker in the ground. Unless the fence lies entirely on one person’s property, thereby reducing his available land by a greater percentage than his neighbor’s land, they must come to an agreement regarding the width of the fence, the construction materials, etc. A good fence that separates property equally along the line of the fence implies prior good relations between neighbors. The fence helps to maintain this cooperation. A fence is a manifestation of the private property order. By allowing men to exclude others, it encourages cooperation. When the fruits of this cooperation can readily be distributed in terms of the value which each party has put into the joint efort, there is an incentive for joint eforts. Boundaries around property acknowledge the owner’s right to exclude. When these boundaries are enforced by law and social custom, the individual can more safely open the gate to others. When you have the legal right to remove visitors, you can more safely invite them for a visit. Good fences, in the broadest sense, make good neighbors, in the broadest sense.

43 THE The PENALTY PERJURY Penalty FOR for Perjury If a false witness rise up against any man to testify against him that which is wrong; Then both the men, between whom the controversy is, shall stand before the LORD, before the priests and the judges, which shall be in those days; And the judges shall make diligent inquisition: and, behold, if the witness be a false witness, and hath testiied falsely against his brother; Then shall ye do unto him, as he had thought to have done unto his brother: so shalt thou put the evil away from among you (Deut. 19:16–19).

The theocentric principle here is that God is a true witness. He does not lie. God, as the supreme Judge, does not respect persons. This is a constant theme in both testaments.1 The law of God is to be applied impartially, meaning without respect to persons. The civil magistrate’s evaluation also must not be in terms of the class (money) or status (social position) of either the victim or the accused.2 Showing respect of persons in the exercise of judgment is one of the major sins of mankind, in both church3 and State. This was not a land law. 1. Deuteronomy 1:17; 16:19; II Chronicles 19:7; Proverbs 24:23; 28:21; Acts 10:34; Romans 2:11; Ephesians 6:9; Colossians 3:25; James 2:1, 9; I Peter 1:17. 2. On the modern sociological distinction between class and status, see Robert A. Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition (New York: Basic Books, 1966), ch. 5. 3. “For if there come unto your assembly a man with a gold ring, in goodly apparel, and there come in also a poor man in vile raiment; And ye have respect to him that weareth the gay clothing, and say unto him, Sit thou here in a good place; and say to the poor, Stand thou there, or sit here under my footstool: Are ye not then partial in yourselves, and are become judges of evil thoughts? Hearken, my beloved brethren, Hath not God chosen the poor of this world rich in faith, and heirs of the kingdom which he hath promised to them that love him? But ye have despised the poor. Do not rich men oppress you, and draw you before the judgment seats?” (James 2:2–6).

514

The Penalty for Perjury

515

Deuteronomy 19:16–19 presents the civil standard governing false witnesses. The standard is lex talionis: an eye for an eye. “And thine eye shall not pity; but life shall go for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot” (Deut. 19:21). That which the false witness had hoped to achieve – having the court impose a speciic negative civil sanction against his intended victim – he himself would bear. The cost of ofering false testimony was commensurate with the cost of being a victim of false testimony. The economic procedure of counting the cost was to lead to a conclusion: it was risky to become a false witness in Mosaic Israel. The more lagrant the false testimony, the riskier it became.

Witness for the Prosecution Let us begin with the witness for the prosecution in a criminal trial. The court is God’s court: the State is acting as the prosecutor on God’s behalf. The witness for the prosecution becomes an agent of this court. God delegates to the State the authority and requirement to execute people convicted of capital crimes. God identiies the witnesses as the primary agents of execution. The historically permanent civil sanction of death removes the convicted person from the local jurisdiction of the earthly court into God’s heavenly court. The witness is therefore acting as God’s designated judicial agent through the court. The biblical texts do not identify the witness speciically as a witness for the prosecution. This does not necessarily mean that the defense’s witnesses had to participate in the stoning. If a witness had conirmed the testimony of the accused, it would seem to be excessively stringent for the law to require him to participate in the execution. On the other hand, the witness serves as a defender of the court’s authority. The court has declared the accused guilty. Why shouldn’t the witness participate in the execution? On this basis: his unwillingness to participate actively in what he regards as an unjust decision. Participation would violate his conscience. He is not to rebel against the court, but he need not become an active participant.

Witness for the Defense What about witness for the defense? What if he had refused to swear? What if he was not a circumcised Israelite or a circumcised stranger? Was he permitted to testify? Here I must make deductions

516

DEUTERONOMY

based on what is required of witnesses for the prosecution, and why. I conclude that witnesses for the defense were allowed to testify to the court, whether or not they were citizens. They were required to take an oath to the court because they were the State’s sanctionsbringers. Witnesses for the defense were also under court sanctions. They were not allowed to lie under oath. What if they did? Were they under the threat of the court’s sanctions? Yes. False witnessing was not allowed. Then what was the appropriate sanction? We return to the lex talionis: eye for eye. If they deliberately testiied falsely, thereby persuading the court to release a guilty person back into society, they came under the sanctions that should have been applied to him. The court cannot prosecute the defendant a second time if he has been declared innocent by a jury,4 but it can prosecute the perjurer. This is not double jeopardy. The perjurer judicially represents the criminal whose testimony the perjurer has set free. The criminal has been set free; the perjurer takes his place. Judgment is upheld. The appropriate civil sanction is applied. The victim is not left with a sense of injustice. The person who inlicted the damage has not paid for his crime, but his substitute has. This is an application of the biblical principle of substitutionary atonement. If someone who is in a lawful position to pay the victim does so on behalf of the criminal, the victim is not to pursue the matter any further. The false witness is in a legal position to make this substitutionary payment, and the court is supposed to insist that he make it. The text does not say this speciically with respect to a witness for the defense, but the principle of the substitionary atonement makes it clear that such a substitute is legitimate. When the sanction is imposed on the false witness, the judicial matter is settled. Peace may then be restored to society. This is a major goal of biblical law. The accused should be placated when the court imposes on the conspirators the penalty that would have been imposed on him.

4. This assumes that the common law’s prohibition against double jeopardy is enforced. I regard this principle as biblical. When God declares a man not guilty, he is forever not guilty. The State in this sense is to imitate God. When double jeopardy is not honored by civil law, this restrains the State from becoming tyrannical, bankrupting innocent people by endless trials. The principle does not apply to the enforcement of ecclesiastical law. Gary North, Crossed Fingers: How the Liberals Captured the Presbyterian Church (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1996), pp. 831–32.

The Penalty for Perjury

517

Eye for Eye The Mosaic civil sanction against perjury by a witness is clear: the perjurer must sufer the same penalty that would have been applied to his potential victim. He has sought to impose civil sanctions; now those sanctions are imposed on him. There is a major practical problem here for any covenantkeeping society that would restrict the ojce of witness to citizens. The citizen in a biblical commonwealth is bound by two oaths. One of these is taken in a Trinitarian church. What about the nonbeliever? He has taken no such oath. Is he therefore prohibited from serving as a witness? If a nation’s borders (or state’s borders, or county’s borders) are open to immigrants, as they were in Mosaic Israel, then a community could become predominantly occupied by non-citizens. A non-citizen would be more likely to see a crime than a citizen would be. If the non-citizen may not testify in a court regarding what he has seen, then law enforcement becomes problematical. Criminals in the wider community of non-citizens would impose their will on the rest of society. This would place lawabiding people at the mercy of criminals. Is this the goal of biblical law? Here is a solution to this dilemma. We know that the stranger who dwelt in Israel was allowed to ofer a sacriice to God if he abided by the laws governing sacriices. This was the biblical principle of equality under the law. “And if a stranger sojourn with you, or whosoever be among you in your generations, and will ofer an ofering made by ire, of a sweet savour unto the LORD; as ye do, so he shall do. One ordinance shall be both for you of the congregation, and also for the stranger that sojourneth with you , an ordinance for ever in your generations: as ye are, so shall the stranger be before the LORD. One law and one manner shall be for you, and for the stranger that sojourneth with you” (Num. 15:14–16). This stranger was a geyr or resident alien. He did not have to be circumcised in order to ofer his sacriice to God. He merely had to live inside the borders of Israel and under the Mosaic law. If the stranger had the right to ofer a sacriice without being a citizen, then why not also the right to testify in a court? If he was willing to come under the civil sanction – eye for eye – why not allow his testimony? If he believed that he was protected by the God

518

DEUTERONOMY

of Moses, as manifested by his willingness to live under the Mosaic law, then why not accept his testimony? The biblical principle of an eye for an eye – the lex talionis – is imposed on the false witness. If he testiies falsely against the accused, and this is discovered by the judges, then he becomes subject to the penalty that would have been imposed on the victim. This threat brings civil sanctions into the picture. The witness comes under civil sanctions, which means that he comes under the laws of the civil covenant. But must he confess faith in the God of the civil covenant in order to come under its sanctions? He was required by law to cast the irst stone. Did this make him a judge? Wasn’t he imposing judgment in the name of God? Yes, but only at the instruction of the court. He did not declare judgment; he merely contributed information to those who would declare judgment. As an agent of the court, he cast the irst stone. He did not do this on his own authority. Because he was not a citizen, he did not evaluate the evidence, i.e., he did not serve as a judge. He did act on behalf of the court in casting the irst stone. This sanction would have been imposed on him had he been convicted of perjury. He was under oath-bound negative civil sanctions. He was therefore bound by an oath of obedience, irrespective of the absence of his personal confession of faith in the God of the covenant. A civil oath invoked covenant sanctions: the stones of justice. If the court convicted the accused, the prosecution’s witness would participate in the execution as one who was formally under the court’s civil sanctions. But he was already under these civil sanctions as a resident of Israel. The citizen was eligible to declare God’s judgment as a judge.5 The non-citizen did not possess this authority. A person did not have to be a citizen in order to testify. The casting of stones was not a mark of citizenship; it was a mark of subordination to the Mosaic civil covenant, including its sanctions. What was invoked by the non-citizen witness was not God’s direct sanctions, either on Israel or on him; rather, it was God’s indirect sanctions through the court. He who would be required by law to cast the irst stone would also have the irst stone cast at him if he was convicted of perjury in a

5. In modern times, a member of a jury serves as a judge: one who evaluates the law’s application to the evidence.

The Penalty for Perjury

519

capital trial. The sanction was valid for all those who came under the Mosaic civil covenant and who then committed capital crimes. This included strangers in the land. But if they subordinated themselves to these sanctions, they also had the authority to impose them, as agents of the court, though not as citizens. They served as agents of the court when they served as witnesses for the prosecution.

The Cost of Obtaining Accurate Information The punishment should it the crime. This is the biblical principle of justice that undergirds the lex talionis. Similarly, the court’s cost of obtaining accurate information should be proportional to the crime. A society that spends as much money in court to convict a bicycle thief as it does to convict a murderer is indirectly subsidizing murderers. Resources are not unlimited. Court costs are positive. If the court is spending as much to prosecute bicycle thieves as murderers, the society will experience fewer stolen bicycles and more murders. The court should not require the same thoroughness of investigation in a minor case as it does where a person’s life is on the line. A society that cannot allocate court expenses in terms of the severity of the criminal acts under examination will ind itself burdened with injustice.6 The biblical law of perjury helps to balance the court’s cost of obtaining information and the severity of the infractions. The court does not threaten a witness with the risk of subsequently being brought to trial and convicted of a capital crime for having lied regarding a minor crime. If the threat is too great, witnesses will not readily volunteer. On the other hand, witnesses in a capital crime will be hesitant to participate in a conspiracy to bring false information before the court. The court’s beneit (i.e., reduced cost) of screening out false information by means of a threat of perjury sanctions is partially ofset by its cost of not obtaining accurate information because of witnesses who are fearful of volunteering to testify under oath. 6. In November, 1996, a libel trial became the longest trial in English history: over 292 days. The lawsuit was brought by the McDonald’s Corporation against a pair of unemployed people who had accused the company of having promoted poor nutrition, exploited children, encouraged litter, mistreated animals, and destroyed rain forests. Sarah Lyall, “Britain’s Big ‘McLibel Trial’ (It’s McEndless, Too),” New York Times (Nov. 29, 1996). The couple eventually lost the case, but they had no money to pay the plaintif’s huge legal fees, as English law requires.

520

DEUTERONOMY

The Economics of Conspiracy Because false testimony is easier for one person to commit than many, this law mandates multiple witnesses for the prosecution. “One witness shall not rise up against a man for any iniquity, or for any sin, in any sin that he sinneth: at the mouth of two witnesses, or at the mouth of three witnesses, shall the matter be established” (v. 15). The testimony of one false witness is insujcient to convict the accused unless supporting impersonal evidence is very strong. But false witnesses involved in a conspiracy face a problem: they know that they are lying. They know that for their lie to be successful, the defense must not be able to prove collusion among the witnesses. But more than one person is involved in the deception. If one participant’s conscience gets the better of him, he may reveal the existence of a conspiracy. One way for the defense to encourage one of the participants in the conspiracy to admit the truth is to ofer him future immunity for his true testimony and an accusation against the others. The principle of victim’s rights allows the victim to ofer forgiveness to anyone who has victimized him. He can be selective in this judgment. If the criminal has ofered to confess his sin, the victim is in a legal position to forego the application of the biblically mandated sanctions.7 The State must honor the victim’s assessment.8 In modern law, the criminal who testiies for the State is said to ofer State’s evidence. In a case of false witness, the confessing perjurer ofers either victim’s evidence or plaintif’s evidence. Because of this possibility, the larger the conspiracy, the greater the likelihood that the conspiracy will be revealed by one of the participants. Betrayal does not require either a stricken conscience or an ofer of immunity from the victim. The very nature of the motivation of secrecy can lead to a betrayal. The sense of power that knowing a secret conveys to the participants can itself lead to betrayal. Georg Simmel wrote in 1908: “The secret contains a tension that is dissolved in the moment of revelation. This moment constitutes the acme in the development of the secret; all of its charms are once more gathered in it and brought to a climax. . . . The secret, too, is 7. Gary North, Tools of Dominion: The Case Laws of Exodus (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), pp. 294–95. 8. Ibid., p. 296.

The Penalty for Perjury

521

full of the consciousness that it can be betrayed; that one holds the power of surprises, turns of fate, joy, destruction – if only, perhaps, of self-destruction. For this reason, the secret is surrounded by the possibility and temptation of betrayal. . . .”9 The betrayer becomes a big shot – even bigger, perhaps, than what he would have been had he remained a cooperating participant in the conspiracy. A prosecuting attorney is not allowed knowingly to bring in a false witness. Neither is a defense attorney. They are agents of the court, bound by the court’s rules of procedure. A conspiracy to mislead the court brings the court’s penalty on any attorney who knowingly uses a false witness to testify. The goal of the court is to obtain accurate information. A conspiracy to mislead the court is a serious infraction. It is an assault on the court and an assault on the accused. By requiring multiple witnesses for the prosecution (accusation), the State makes possible cross examination of more than one person. Their stories can be compared and evaluated for consistency. Lies can be detected more easily. The prosecution has to prove its case. The defense has an easier time of it. The Bible does not teach explicitly that the accused must be assumed to be innocent, but the person making the accusation has a greater burden of proof. In this sense, the accused is presumed to be innocent. The two stories are not assumed to be of equal weight judicially. This would lead to a stalemate. In the case of a stalemate, the accused is not convicted. So, again, the implication is that the accused is presumed innocent.

Perjury Sanctions Threaten Both Parties If a man brings an accusation against another, and the accused says that the other man is not telling the truth, this is not necessarily the same as saying that the accuser is lying. The accuser may be misinformed. But if the accused says that the accuser is a false witness who is deliberately telling a lie, then the accused is putting the accuser at risk. The accused must not commit perjury. He must not accuse the other person of telling a lie if the accuser is telling the truth. What if the accused person resorts to perjury? What are the consequences? The lex talionis principle applies. First, if he stole something, he owes double restitution to his victim (Ex. 22:4). But if in 9. The Sociology of Georg Simmel, translated and edited by Kurt H. Wolf (New York: Free Press, 1950), pp. 333–34.

522

DEUTERONOMY

addition he has lied about the accuser, saying that the accuser has committed perjury, he has not merely stolen; he has attempted to place his accuser under penalties. The lying criminal will then have to pay double restitution on these penalties, as well as the original restitution payment. When the criminal compounds the sin, he compounds his obligation. Consider the alternative interpretation: the convicted person does not owe double restitution for his false accusation against the accuser. If his inefective lie on the witness stand goes unpunished, he owes double restitution for the original crime, which he would have owed anyway. Lying to the court would then be a rational decision: the criminal is no worse of by his false accusation against the victim, and he may reduce the likelihood of being convicted for the theft. This would subsidize lying on the witness stand. But biblical law’s goal is to reduce criminal behavior and to protect the victim. Thus, the implication of this law is that lying to the court increases risk. Double restitution on the original infraction is insujcient. It repays the victim for the original infraction; it does not repay him for the second.

Priests and Judges The conlicting parties “shall stand before the LORD, before the priests and the judges, which shall be in those days; And the judges shall make diligent inquisition.” First, the joint assembly of priests and judges constituted a representative assembly. This assembly represented God. To stand before this assembly was to stand before the Lord. The priests and judges would hand down judgments in the name of the Lord: ecclesiastical and civil. They served as spokesmen for God in history. In civil afairs, a court speaks for God. Under the Mosaic covenant, the priests had to be present in this civil assembly. Just as the priesthood’s representative agents had to blow the two trumpets in order for Israel’s holy army to be lawfully assembled and sent into battle (Num. 10:5–8), so did priests have to be present at this court. The priests had a civil function in Mosaic Israel: to ofer counsel regarding the written law. They also were in a position to excommunicate a false witness. They gathered information by being present in civil court. This did not restrict them from conducting a separate trial in a church court, but they were there to hear the evidence in civil court.

The Penalty for Perjury

523

The judges conducted the inquiry, according to this text. The priests were there to provide counsel and legitimacy, but the civil representatives conducted the investigation. The court might hand down negative sanctions. The investigatory work of the court was therefore conducted by civil ojcers. Today’s courts are strictly civil. In the United States, a witness for decades was sworn in by having him repeat an oath to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help him God, with his left hand on a Bible, Old and New Testaments, and his right hand pointed skyward. This was a Christian oath because of the presence of a Christian Bible. In the late twentieth century, this practice has been modiied. Atheists may ajrm that they will tell the truth. They need not invoke God’s name or place a hand on the Bible. They come under the sanctions of the earthly court. They do not imply through ajrmation their belief in a heavenly court. Their testimony must be accepted as equal in authority to any other witness’s testimony. This is legitimate biblically. The witness is under the court’s sanctions, just as a stranger was in Mosaic Israel. The question arises: What about the presence of a priest on the court? Covenantally, there are no priests today, for the sons of Aaron are gone, and there is no altar of sacriice. The ojce is as defunct as the ojce of prophet.10 Does this fact invalidate the Mosaic law governing civil courts? Or is there an implied continuity of ojce from Old Covenant to New Covenant? Is the Trinitarian ecclesiastical minister the covenantal heir of the Mosaic priest? Should an ecclesiastical minister or ministers be present on the court to provide counsel and legitimacy? A civil magistrate is a minister (Rom. 13:4). He speaks in God’s name. Must a civil court also include ecclesiastical ministers? To answer all this, we must irst consider the structure of Mosaic civil government.

Federalism: Mosaic vs. Enlightenment The Mosaic law provided a system of federalism between church and State. The church was part of the federal judicial order. The civil government could not unilaterally speak in God’s name when handing down formal decisions in which sanctions were

10. See above, Chapter 32.

524

DEUTERONOMY

involved. It could not unilaterally start a war nor decide between witnesses. In both cases, a representative of the church had to be present. This was true of Israel’s supreme court (Deut. 17:8–13).11 Modern federalism seeks a balance of power and authority within the divisions of civil government: executive, legislative, and judicial; national, state, and local. But modern federalism is exclusively civil. It assumes that the church has neither a legitimate claim nor any legitimating function in civil government. The biblical doctrine of the separation of church and State has become a doctrine of exclusively secular authority: the separation of supernatural religion and State. It proclaims that those ministers known as civil magistrates possess exclusive authority to speak in the name of God in civil cases. The State is said to have exclusive jurisdiction – lawspeaking – in applying physical and monetary negative sanctions. The theocracy of modern federalism is an exclusively civil theocracy. The autonomous corporate people rather than God is said to legitimize civil government. This corporate sovereign, whether Rousseau’s General Will or Madison’s “We, the People,” must be represented by a voice of authority which speaks in the name of the sovereign and him only. This sovereign is seen as exclusively natural, not supernatural. Therefore, no ecclesiastical representative is said to possess lawful authority in civil matters except insofar as he may be a citizen, like any other citizen.12 The church has no representation in the State. While there are exceptions to this general rule, such as bishops who sit in England’s House of Lords, which does not initiate legislation, the West has moved toward the elimination of church authority in civil government since the late eighteenth century. The doctrine of separation is justiied by modern, post-Enlightenment Christians in the name of protecting the church from secular inluence. But this argument cuts two ways. It is used by secularists to protect the State from Christian inluence. The idea is that there is some neutral common law that derives its authority from something broader than the Bible or Christianity. This broader judicial authority 11. See Chapter 39. 12. In the United States Constitution (1788), the outlawing of religious test oaths for U.S. government ojce-holders was the means of asserting this autonomy (Article VI, Section III). Gary North, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989), pp. 385–85, 389–92.

The Penalty for Perjury

525

is considered superior to biblical authority in the realm of politics, which today encompasses just about everything. The kingdom of politics is as comprehensive in its claims as is the kingdom of God. Christians today have accepted the majority of these claims, reserving only small zones of supposed autonomy from the kingdom of politics. These claims of immunity are constantly being challenged by the State. To accommodate the claims of the State, Christians have all but abandoned the ideal of the kingdom of God in history as a realm as comprehensive as Adam’s kingdom. The suggestion that the Great Commission extends as far as Adam’s Fall did is rejected by most Christians, for such a suggestion raises the issue of theocracy: the rule of God’s law. The Great Commission has been redeined to include the Christian family, the Christian church, the humanist-accredited college and theological seminary, and the Christian school – also state-certiied, in most cases – but not the civil government.13 This passage proves that in the Mosaic civil order, the priesthood had a role to play in civil government. To deny that this role has been transferred to the ecclesiastical ministry under the New Covenant is to argue for a covenantal discontinuity. The New Covenant’s abolition of the Mosaic priesthood is the obvious way to make such a claim. But if the abolition of the priesthood becomes the basis of the discontinuity, then some aspect of the Mosaic priesthood that was connected to animal sacriices has to be associated with civil justice. With the abolition of the sacriices, the ecclesiastical ministry has supposedly lost its role in civil justice. If, however, the basis of the priest’s participation in a civil court was the priest’s expertise in biblical law and the political need to create a federalism of covenantal authority in civil justice, then there is no civil discontinuity between the Mosaic priesthood and the New Covenant’s ecclesiastical eldership. If so, then modern humanistic civil justice is illegitimate biblically and must be reformed. The monopoly of the State – the formally secular State – over civil justice then cannot ind justiication in the Bible. This is my view. The doctrine of the complete separation of church and State has been a convenient way for Christians to escape any responsibility

13. Kenneth L. Gentry, Jr., The Greatness of the Great Commission: The Christian Enterprise in a Fallen World (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990).

526

DEUTERONOMY

for dealing with questions of civil government and political theory from an explicitly biblical viewpoint. They have preferred to defer to Enlightenment Whigs or to Enlightenment social democrats on such matters. To justify this deferral, they have adopted some version of secular natural law theory,14 long after Darwinism had completely undermined the philosophical basis of secular natural law theory.15

Conclusion The text says that the judges had the responsibility of investigating and evaluating the conlicting testimonies of rival parties. They had to decide if one person was deliberately lying. If he was, then he was to be placed under a civil sanction. The sanction was clear: whatever penalty the State would have imposed on the victim had the testimony of the false witness been believed. Equity in this instance was based on lex talionis: eye for eye. The justiication was the elimination of a public evil: “so shalt thou put the evil away from among you.” Then why were the priests there? The text does not say. I think there were three reasons. First, to provide counsel regarding God’s written law. Second, to gather information in order to declare a false witness excommunicate. There would be a double witness against false witness. Third, to provide legitimacy to the court. There had to be civil sanctions if there was civil law. The sanction was to be commensurate with the infraction. Because the sanction was the same in both cases, the rule of law was ajrmed. There could be no favoritism on the part of the court. The fear of ofering false witness was to be comparable to the fear of being convicted by false witness. The false witness had to consider the consequences of his testimony. He had to count the cost. He had to consider the damage that his testimony would cause another person. To assist him in his process of cost accounting, the Mosaic law speciied that if he was shown to be a false witness, he would sufer the same penalty that he had sought to inflict on his victim.

14. Cf. Thomas McWhorter, Res Publica (Nutley, New Jersey: Craig Press, 1966). 15. R. J. Rushdoony, The Biblical Philosophy of History (Nutley, New Jersey: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1969), p. 7.

The Penalty for Perjury

527

There is no indication that this aspect of the Mosaic law has been annulled by the New Covenant. On the contrary, the New Covenant ajrms the principle. More than this: the New Covenant order was sealed forever by God’s inal judgment against Israel’s false testimony. The false testimony given against Jesus Christ – that He was not who and what He said He was – led to the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, thereby ending forever the Old Covenant order. The Sanhedrin had sentenced Christ to death, knowing that their procedures were illegal, even in terms of their own law.16 God sentenced Old Covenant Israel to death, a sentence carried out in A.D. 70. Jesus had warned His disciples of that day, a day foreshadowed by false witnesses: “Then if any man shall say unto you, Lo, here is Christ, or there; believe it not. For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect. Behold, I have told you before. Wherefore if they shall say unto you, Behold, he is in the desert; go not forth: behold, he is in the secret chambers; believe it not. For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be” (Matt. 24:23–27). Is there continuity of the other aspect of this law, i.e., the presence of priests in a civil court’s procedure? The presence of representatives of both church and State made the covenantal implications clear. The State must not hand down judgments irrespective of the church’s interpretation of what constitutes righteous judgment. The priest was a counsellor and a legitimizer. He did not conduct the actual investigation, but he could respond to questions regarding equity.17 His main assignments in this case were to serve as a source of legitimacy for the court and to protect the citizenry from a 16. Under the Pharisees’ interpretation of Judaic law, if the court paid a witness, this invalidated his testimony. Bekhoreth 4:6, in The Mishnah, edited by Herbert Danby (New York: Oxford University Press, [1933] 1987), p. 534. The court had paid Judas 30 pieces of silver to identify Jesus, i.e., to provide witness that this was the man they planned to accuse. “Then Judas, which had betrayed him, when he saw that he was condemned, repented himself, and brought again the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders, Saying, I have sinned in that I have betrayed the innocent blood. And they said, What is that to us? see thou to that” (Matt. 27:3–4). Then the execution of Jesus took place. Judas repented of his act before the sentence was carried out. The Jews did not. Judas paid with his life (v. 5). So did Old Covenant Israel. 17. This indicates that God’s examination of Adam and Eve was done in His judicial capacity as king rather than priest.

528

DEUTERONOMY

monopolistic civil government that would refuse to acknowledge any authority but its own in rendering civil judgment. There was to be no absolute separation of church and State in Mosaic Israel. The would-be false witness was warned to count the cost of his action. This cost was the same as the cost borne by the victim of his false testimony. There was an equality of sanctions. This is why Adam’s rebellion was attempted regicide and parricide. This is why there was a death penalty attached to the eating of the tree’s fruit. Adam had in principle agreed to act as the serpent’s agent in bringing a covenant lawsuit against God by publicly challenging God’s supposedly false claim of absolute authority. By violating the tree’s boundary, he handed down judgment against God in the name of the serpent. The proof that his accusation was false was his own death. He had failed to count the cost accurately. God, on the day of judgment, will serve as a witness. If He has granted salvation by grace through faith, He will serve as a witness for the defense.

44 A HIERARCHY COMMITMENTS A HierarchyOF of Commitments And the ojcers shall speak unto the people, saying, What man is there that hath built a new house, and hath not dedicated it? let him go and return to his house, lest he die in the battle, and another man dedicate it. And what man is he that hath planted a vineyard, and hath not yet eaten of it? let him also go and return unto his house, lest he die in the battle, and another man eat of it. And what man is there that hath betrothed a wife, and hath not taken her? let him go and return unto his house, lest he die in the battle, and another man take her (Deut. 20:5–7).

What is the theocentric principle which this law exempliies? In many Mosaic case laws, the answer is immediately clear, but not in this case. The irst two laws of military exemption had something to do with the right to enjoy the fruits of one’s labor. Death on the battleield was not to separate a man from these fruits. Yet the exemptions were not permanent. In the case of a newly married man, the exemption lasted one year (Deut. 24:5). The fourth exemption, fear, I cover in the next chapter. When in doubt, it is safe in an economic commentary to invoke the general theocentric principle of God the Creator as the cosmic owner. He is entitled to a return on His assets. But is there more to this section than mere ownership? To discover a more speciic theocentric principle, I asked myself: In what way did a man’s right to enjoy a preliminary return on a long-term capital investment relect a property right of God? I came up with three plausible answers: the tithe, the irstfruits ofering, or both. The irst two laws of military non-participation were land laws: new house, new vineyard. They had to do with sacriices. These

529

530

DEUTERONOMY

sacriices no longer exist. The third exemption was a seed law: newlywed.

The Economics of the Firstfruits Ofering The problem with designating the tithe alone as God’s property right rather than the irstfruits ofering (or both), is that the tithe is God’s permanent right of return. The two exemptions were not permanent. In contrast, the irstfruits ofering was a preliminary ofering in addition to the tithe. The irstfruits ofering was a kind of down payment to God for God’s down payment on the harvest. Firstfruits were ofered three times: on the day after Passover (Lev. 23:1–12), at the feast of Firstfruits (Pentecost) (Ex. 34:22), and at the feast of Booths (Tabernacles) (Ex. 23:16; 34:22; Lev. 23:39–40). In the case of Booths, when the harvest was complete, others in the community were to be invited in to share the wealth. Thou shalt observe the feast of tabernacles seven days, after that thou hast gathered in thy corn and thy wine: And thou shalt rejoice in thy feast, thou, and thy son, and thy daughter, and thy manservant, and thy maidservant, and the Levite, the stranger, and the fatherless, and the widow, that are within thy gates. Seven days shalt thou keep a solemn feast unto the LORD thy God in the place which the LORD shall choose: because the LORD thy God shall bless thee in all thine increase, and in all the works of thine hands, therefore thou shalt surely rejoice (Deut. 16:13–15).

To understand what was involved in the law of military exemption, we must begin with a fundamental biblical economic principle: the individual serves as the economic agent (steward) of God. God had delegated to individual Israelites the task of building up the capital base necessary to increase His irstfruits. This is why a producer’s right to collect the irstfruits of a newly inished capital asset – house or vineyard – could not lawfully be challenged by the State in Mosaic Israel, even in wartime. The producer’s initial claim on the fruits of his newly completed stream of income was superior to the State’s claims on his life. This, in turn, relected God’s prior claim of irstfruits on agricultural output. The irstfruits ofering of the vineyard would be paid to the priesthood, who in turn held a veto on the war (Num. 10:8; Deut. 20:2). But why did a newly built home ofer an exemption? There was no irstfruits ofering required for dedicating a new home. Answer:

A Hierarchy of Commitments

531

an Israelite’s home was analogous to God’s home, the tabernacletemple. Although no law required it, Solomon dedicated the newly constructed house of God by sacriicing 22,000 oxen and 20,000 sheep (I Ki. 8:63). Thus, a sacriice of dedication, while not legally required, was appropriate when a man inished building his home. He could enjoy the fruits of his labor, just as God, in His capacity as a cosmic house-builder,1 enjoyed the blessings of dwelling in a new home. The irstfruits were token payments to God: a kind of down payment on the future tithe. They were a man’s statement of faith in God’s long-term future bounty, as well as thanks for God’s preliminary manifestation of blessing.

Inheritance and Battle Chapter 20 deals with military afairs. Israel’s inheritance of Canaan would be the result of military action. The physical disinheritance of the Canaanites through their execution on the battleield was to be the operational means of claiming the inheritance. Military sanctions were to be the means of this long-prophesied inheritance/disinheritance. That is, point four of the biblical covenant model, sanctions, was the prerequisite of point ive. The laws in this passage applied to a settled population: settlement in the post-conquest world. This generation as yet had no houses, no vineyards. They had not become dwellers in the Promised Land. They were still outsiders. So, this passage presumed a forthcoming victory. These laws would go into efect in Israel’s history only after the conquest. In this sense, this passage was prophetic. It assumed the transfer of the inheritance. More than this: these laws had to do with the maintenance of the individual’s inheritance, i.e., enjoying the irstfruits of house, vineyard, or wife. The focus of these laws was on preserving an inheritance. One man sows; another man is not to reap. This was to be the case in Israel for righteous men. He who sows is supposed to reap. Not even the needs of the military were to supersede this principle. Only unrighteousness is to break the legal pattern of sowing and reaping. Canaan was soon to become an example of such unrighteousness. 1. Meredith G. Kline, Images of the Spirit (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker, 1980), pp. 17–18, 20–21, 35–42.

532

DEUTERONOMY

And it shall be, when the LORD thy God shall have brought thee into the land which he sware unto thy fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give thee great and goodly cities, which thou buildedst not, And houses full of all good things, which thou illedst not, and wells digged, which thou diggedst not, vineyards and olive trees, which thou plantedst not; when thou shalt have eaten and be full; Then beware lest thou forget the LORD, which brought thee forth out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage. Thou shalt fear the LORD thy God, and serve him, and shalt swear by his name. Ye shall not go after other gods, of the gods of the people which are round about you (Deut. 6:10–14).

There is a fundamental principle of individualism in the Deuteronomy 20 passage. The defense of the individual’s legal right to enjoy the irstfruits of his labor was superior to the military defense of the nation. God had not previously instructed Moses to convey these rules of post-conquest warfare to the exodus generation. There was no need. First, they were not the fourth generation that was scheduled to inherit (Gen. 15:16). Second, He knew that they were an army of slaves: fearful of everything. They were in no spiritual condition to conquer Canaan.

No Conscription The tribes were supposed to respond to a call to military action. Yet it is clear from Deborah’s song that some tribes had not responded (Jud. 5:16–17). This indicates that the Mosaic law ofered no formal negative sanctions to the central government that would enable it pressure the tribes to assemble. The Levite whose concubine had been raped to death by the Benjaminites cut her corpse into pieces and sent them to the other tribes (Jud. 19:29). This was a form of moral suasion. There was no legal compulsion available to him. Could a tribe compel each adult male to assemble in military formation? There was no law that mandated this. The exemption laws of Deuteronomy 20 mandated that the ojcers permit any member who qualiied under the law to return home. Anyone could claim fear and thereby be exempted. Perhaps not many men would have done this, for fear of shaming themselves, but the other three exemptions were easy ways out. All three involved building toward the future, i.e., future-oriented activities. There was no shame involved in claiming one of these exemptions. What is important to

A Hierarchy of Commitments

533

understand here is the principle that a man’s demonstrated but unfulilled future-orientation – the igurative harvest sown but not reaped – was more important to Israel than his participation in the army. The building of familistic capital was more important than participation in war. The creation of streams of personal income was more important for the nation than adding numbers to the army. If a man could be exempted immediately preceding the battle, was there compulsion in assembling? That is, with exemptions so easy, what would have pressured a man to assemble and then march of to war? If there were no external, civil pressures available to the State, why would there have been these exemptions? One reason occurs: ecclesiastical pressure. I have argued elsewhere that citizenship in Mosaic Israel was based on two things: circumcision and eligibility for service in God’s holy army. If a man refused to answer the call to muster the troops, would he have lost his citizenship? That is, was mere military eligibility sujcient to maintain citizenship? Or was actual attendance at the mustering required? Deborah did not declare that members of the tribes of Reuben, Asher, and Dan had lost their citizenship (Jud. 5:16–17). They sufered the negative sanction of being written into her song of victory in an unfavorable light. They would have had the option of going home on the basis of fear, but they never even showed up. They were not willing to admit in public at the time of battle that they were too afraid to ight. This is why Deborah criticized them: not for their fear but for their unwillingness to show up and admit in public as tribes that they were too afraid to ight. The Mosaic law had no speciied negative sanctions against non-appearance. Thus, there was no lawful military conscription under the Old Covenant. There was neither a written law nor speciied sanctions that compelled anyone to answer the trumpets’ call. The State had to rely on men’s sense of duty to motivate them to answer the call. Even after responding, there was another opportunity to return home.

An Army of Holy Warriors The goal of these exemption laws was two-fold. First, no ighting man should sufer second thoughts about having completed a longterm project that he did not have time to enjoy. Second, the army

534

DEUTERONOMY

had to rely on God more than numbers. I discuss the second concern in the next chapter. The irst concern had to do with a warrior’s sense of commitment. Any warrior who had valid reasons to hold back in the heat of battle, especially ofensive battle, was told to go home. These reasons had to do with the future. He had created a capital asset that was to provide him with a stream of income: home or vineyard. He had not enjoyed any beneits from that capital asset. He had not paid the priesthood its lawful irstfruits ofering. A similar logic governed the third exemption: a wife back home. In the case of a new wife, the exemption was even more speciic: a year’s mandatory exemption. His wife’s interests were also at stake. The presumption was that the man would have time to impregnate his wife in a year. The issue of biological heirs was a major one in Mosaic Israel. This had to do with the seed laws. The levirate’s marriage provisions were associated with these laws: “If brethren dwell together, and one of them die, and have no child, the wife of the dead shall not marry without unto a stranger: her husband’s brother shall go in unto her, and take her to him to wife, and perform the duty of an husband’s brother unto her. And it shall be, that the irstborn which she beareth shall succeed in the name of his brother which is dead, that his name be not put out of Israel” (Deut. 25:5–6). Any civil leader who began making long-range plans for indulging himself in a war faced a potential veto by his army: prior capital formation. A man who expected to be called into battle could start building a house, planting a vineyard, or courting a woman if he wanted to avoid serving in the army. If he got the house built, the vineyard planted, or the girl married him before the silver trumpets were blown, he could come home after the mustering but before the battle. Preparations for unpopular wars would have increased capital formation in Israel, at least in the three areas of housing, wine, and families. While some men fought, others would be enjoying the fruits of their labors. This was a military anti-recruiting system designed to keep rulers from indulging in the sin of empire. Sitting at home by the ire, a glass of wine in hand, with your new wife on your lap surely beats slogging through the mud in a foreign war of empire. “Make love, not war” was a law governing Israelite marriage. Any call to the holiness of a cause would have to be believed by the holy warriors in order for the leaders to recruit an army. Mercenaries would not guarantee victory.

A Hierarchy of Commitments

535

A wise king of Israel would have understood this threat to his plans. “Or what king, going to make war against another king, sitteth not down irst, and consulteth whether he be able with ten thousand to meet him that cometh against him with twenty thousand? Or else, while the other is yet a great way of, he sendeth an ambassage, and desireth conditions of peace” (Luke 14:31–32). The military service exemption laws, when enforced, would have kept the kings honest. It would have kept them from high-risk international displays of their own power.

Conclusion First, citizenship in Israel was based on eligibility for service in God’s holy army.2 Second, the State did not possess inal authority over priests and citizens. Warfare was made holy by acclamation by the priesthood. Without their support, the war was illegal. There could be no numbering and no atonement money, which had to be paid to the priests (Ex. 30:12). Third, mandatory military conscription was illegal. This was a major restriction on the expansion of State power, which increases dramatically in wartime and is rarely reversed after the war.3 The hierarchy of military authority in Mosaic Israel relected the hierarchy of mandatory payments: priesthood, head of household, State. Israel as a holy army was a judicially restricted army. The army had to be called into action by priests. There were two opportunities for the priesthood to veto a war: prior to assembling the army and immediately prior to the war (Num. 10:2–8). Individuals also had a right to return home. This placed the civil rulers at a disadvantage in any schemes for building an empire. Their troops did not have to participate. There were superior claims on every warrior’s commitment. These were in part economic and in part covenantal. He did not owe a sacriice for a newly dedicated house, but such sacriice was appropriate for God’s house, so presumably it was appropriate for a man’s house. He did owe a irstfruits ofering for his newly planted vineyard. Until that debt was paid at the next national feast, he was 2. North, Sanctions and Dominion, pp. 37–39. 3. Robert Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

536

DEUTERONOMY

to depart from the battleield. He was also to return to his new bride, for her sake (Deut. 24:5) and for his (Deut. 20:7). These commitments took precedence over the State’s right to call citizens into battle. These legitimate commitments, as well as the personal beneits associated with reaping the fruits of one’s labor, did not threaten the cohesiveness of God’s “leaner, meaner” holy army. The army’s greater cohesion would have been the result of these exemptions. The warriors were to be committed to victory. But some commitments could not be relegated to secondary status, either judicially or psychologically. These commitments became the legal basis of exemption from military duty. No civil sanctions are ever legitimate against men who refuse to serve in the military, for whatever reason. The State does not possess the right to draft anyone into military service, on threat of civil sanctions, in peacetime or war. Also, no moral sanctions are legitimate against men who ofer any of these reasons for not serving: a new home, a new vineyard, or a new wife. The fourth reason, fear, I cover in the next chapter. The irstfruits ofering was a land law. It is no longer in force. To the extent that these exemptions were based on the irstfruits ofering, they are no longer in force. But the underlying principle was that a man is to enjoy a token payment on his productivity before his life is placed at risk militarily. This restriction on the State is still valid. This is God’s way of encouraging men to remain productive and future-oriented.

45 AA FEW MEN FewGOOD Good Men And the ojcers shall speak further unto the people, and they shall say, What man is there that is fearful and fainthearted? let him go and return unto his house, lest his brethren’s heart faint as well as his heart (Deut. 20:8).

Deuteronomy 20 deals with military afairs. The laws in this section governed a holy army. This army was covenanted to God. God was the commander-in-chief of this army. This is the theocentric focus of this law. Moses announced this law to the generation of the conquest, but before this generation had marched into battle. He reminded them of the theocentric framework of their assignment. They were soldiers of a living God who is sovereign over history. The section begins with a call to courage based on God’s sovereignty: “When thou goest out to battle against thine enemies, and seest horses, and chariots, and a people more than thou, be not afraid of them: for the LORD thy God is with thee, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt” (v. 1). This law was not a land law or a seed law. It was not grounded in the Mosaic sacriices or the tribal system. It was therefore a cross-boundary law: universal. This law governed God’s holy army, but the general principle upholding it – the removal of fearful men from the ranks – is a universal principle of covenantal warfare.

God’s Holy Army This holy army would ight under a dual chain of command: ojcers and priests. The priests were not merely spiritual cheerleaders whose main task was to supply extra courage to men marching into battle. They actually held a veto over the war. When the army approached the battleield, a priest was to approach the assembled

537

538

DEUTERONOMY

warriors and announce: “Hear, O Israel, ye approach this day unto battle against your enemies: let not your hearts faint, fear not, and do not tremble, neither be ye terriied because of them; For the LORD your God is he that goeth with you, to ight for you against your enemies, to save you” (vv. 3–4). A holy army was to be motivated by the words of a holy priesthood. If the priesthood failed to support this military action, refusing to encourage the army by invoking covenantally the name of God, the army could not lawfully obey any order to go into battle. This meant that the priesthood three times had a veto over the entire campaign: before the army marched of to war (Num. 10:8); when the mustered men were to pay their atonement money (Ex. 30:12), which the priests could refuse to accept; and again immediately prior to the engagement. There has been a debate in the West for over a thousand years about what constitutes righteous warfare. There is no doubt biblically how to answer this deinitively. A judicially holy war is a war fought by a nation whose Christian ministers can exercise a lawful veto on the war and who nonetheless have promoted it. If the State imprisons Christian ministers for speaking out against a war, as the U.S. government sometimes did during World War I,1 then it is not a holy war.2

Thinning the Ranks in Advance The goal of this law was to thin the ranks of God’s holy army. This is not the normal goal of any military planner. He always wants more men and equipment than he has.3 But Israel was told to trust in God, not in military strength. David, a warrior, wrote: “Some trust in chariots, and some in horses: but we will remember the name of the LORD our God” (Ps. 20:7). Isaiah wrote: “Woe to them that go down to Egypt for help; and stay on horses, and trust in chariots,

1. H. C. Peterson and Gilbert C. Fite, Opponents of War, 1917–1918 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, [1957] 1968), ch. 11: “Disciplining the Clergy.” 2. In the American Civil War (1861–65), both sides claimed to be ighting to defend Christian civilization. But in late 1864, after Atlanta fell to Northern troops, some of the South’s ministers began to call the moral legitimacy of the war into question. They began to preach about defeat as a sign of God’s judgment against slavery. Richard E. Berringer, et al., Why the South Lost the Civil War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), ch. 14. 3. This is the fundamental law of scarcity: “At zero price, there will be greater demand than supply.”

A Few Good Men

539

because they are many; and in horsemen, because they are very strong; but they look not unto the Holy One of Israel, neither seek the LORD!” (Isa. 31:1). This outlook relected Israel’s theory of holy warfare. God told the nation that He would be with them in righteous military undertakings. Their faith would be tested by their willingness to thin the ranks by means of exemptions. The very smallness of the army was to increase the nation’s faith in the coming victory. What would normally be regarded as a negative sanction was in fact a positive sanction. This Israelite practice rested on a psychological premise: a fearful man is not much of a warrior. Also, an Israelite who did not trust God’s promise to be with His people in holy warfare was surely not very holy. He would not see the army as uniquely protected by God and set apart for victory. No warrior wants to ight alongside of a fearful man. He wants to know that his lanks are covered in the line. A fearful man who holds back thereby exposes those on either side of him to added risk. Furthermore, a fearful man has not internalized the opening words of this passage: “When thou goest out to battle against thine enemies, and seest horses, and chariots, and a people more than thou, be not afraid of them: for the LORD thy God is with thee, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt” (v. 1). His doubts call into question the army’s corporate commitment to these words. God made provision for such a fear-burdened man to excuse himself and return home before the battle began. There is always fear in battle: fear of the enemy, fear of senior ojcers, and fear of being labeled a coward. Diferent men respond diferently to these fears. God told Israel not to fear the enemy. If a man feared the enemy, he was asked by an ojcer to go home. The authority of the Israelite warrior to walk away from a war meant that the rulers had to be very careful in deciding what was worth ighting for. The priests held a veto on the decision of a civil ruler to take the nation into war. The individual warrior could not veto the war, but he could veto his participation in it. He could “vote with his feet.” This placed a very serious limitation on political rulers. The rulers were to conine their military afairs to defensive wars and holy wars. The holy status of a war would be determined by the priesthood, not by the State. Any war begun by the ruler apart from the priests would not have the Ark of the Covenant present on the battleield. The senior civil ruler could not demand that any holy warrior accompany him on his march into battle. It would be his

540

DEUTERONOMY

war, not the army of the Lord’s war. He might persuade others to go into battle for the sake of spoils, but that would make his army a mercenary army. The motivation of mercenaries is personal gain. Mercenary armies are notoriously less successful than citizen armies defending their homelands. These restrictions on civil rulers meant that Israel could not become an empire while obeying God’s law. Its rulers could not easily extend their military power beyond the original boundaries of the nation. Just prior to the battle, there was to be a deliberate thinning of the ranks. The ojcers were to ofer their men a way of escape. There were four ways out of the ranks: two were explicitly economic; one was marital; one was psychological. If a man had built a new home, planted a new vineyard, married a new wife, or was afraid, he could return home (Deut. 20:5–8). The classic biblical case of deliberately thinning the ranks was Gideon’s series of screening devices (Jud. 7:3–8). The irst screening device was fear. This was the most efective device; 22,000 Israelites voluntarily departed (v. 3). They swallowed their shame and went home. They probably knew that to ight while afraid was contrary to the Mosaic law. Fearful men were not allowed to serve. Fear, not small numbers, threatened the success of the military venture. They chose not to violate His law. It was better to acknowledge their fear publicly and go home than to break God’s law and ight in fear. The commander of Israel’s army was not to rely on numbers. The army had to be numbered prior to a war because each man owed blood money – an atonement payment – to the priests (Ex. 30:12).4 This numbering was not to be used as a way for the commander to assess the likelihood of success in a military venture. Success on the battleield, this passage informs us, was entirely dependent on God. This formal procedure of thinning the ranks was the way of ajrming meaningful faith in God’s presence with the nation in holy warfare.

Rational Calculation and Cowardice This law made Israel’s army diferent from any army in history. In all other armies, senior military commanders have had to devise 4. Gary North, Tools of Dominion: The Case Laws of Exodus (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), ch. 32.

A Few Good Men

541

5

ways to keep their troops in line. They have used the negative sanctions of shame, fear of superior ojcers, harsh discipline, and ultimately the threat of the iring squad or its equivalent to keep the ranks from breaking and running under ire. These sanctions are designed to ofset the self-interested soldier’s rational desire to run. Consider the decision-making process of a soldier under ire. He makes a cost-beneit analysis based on how his decision will afect him. The question here is the degree to which individual self-interest either supports or undermines a military formation. Here is a fundamental fact of infantry tactics: there is greater risk of being killed from behind while leeing in open terrain than of being killed while standing and ighting, since the attacking troops are afraid of dying. Active resistance makes attackers less ofensiveminded, less committed to destroying all those resisting them. Fleeing opponents reduce the risk to their attackers, i.e., lowers the cost of attacking. (This was especially true when infantry faced chariots.) With any scarce economic resource, the lower the cost, the more will be demanded. The lower the cost of attacking your enemy, the more you will be willing to do it, other things being equal. Nevertheless, defensive resistance is not the least dangerous decision. The least dangerous decision, apart from negative sanctions imposed by your own forces, is to run away early while your comrades are still ighting. They keep the enemy at bay; meanwhile, you distance yourself from danger. Here are a soldier’s options. First, if the line breaks and runs, he will be left standing nearly alone – a standing duck, so to speak. This is the most dangerous option. We can call this the Uriah option. “And it came to pass in the morning, that David wrote a letter to Joab, and sent it by the hand of Uriah. And he wrote in the letter, saying, Set ye Uriah in the forefront of the hottest battle, and retire ye from him, that he may be smitten, and die” (II Sam. 11:14–15). The more courageous the soldier, the more likely that he will die if his comrades lee. A brave man with cowards on his lanks will soon be a dead man. Second, if he runs early, he reduces his risk of dying during this encounter, whether or not his comrades run away later. The sooner he runs, the better for him: those who stay in the ranks

5. Even the phrase “in line” suggests a military image: a line of troops that will not break and run under ire.

542

DEUTERONOMY

longer before running are more likely to be cut down by the initial wave of charging troops. The attackers will be busy slaughtering those close at hand. Defense takes time; meanwhile, he keeps running. Third, he stands his ground until he sees his comrades running; then he tries to run faster than they do. The least dangerous decision is to run early. The next-safe decision is to stand and ight, but only if all of your colleagues are standing and ighting. Your safety depends on the decisions of others in the line, just as theirs depends on you. Your survival therefore depends on your ability to time your light so that you run away just slightly ahead of your colleagues. In a line that is about to break, your survival depends on your speed: deciding when to run and how fast you can run compared to your comrades. The next most dangerous decision is to run late and slow. The most dangerous decision is to stand and ight after your comrades have run. The cowardly early runner is least at risk. The brave man who stands his ground alone is most at risk. The others are in between. The safety of the soldier therefore depends on the willingness of his colleagues to stand and ight, or march forward and ight, with him or without him. Some members of his unit predictably will die, whether it wins or loses. Immediate self-interest motivates each man to run away fast and early.6 The more fearful his comrades, the sooner he had better start running.7 The slower he runs, the earlier he must begin running. There is no question about it: in an ofensive war, where your nation is not being invaded, the safest thing to do is run toward home. This is why the Mosaic law screened out those who were the most likely troops to run when attacked. Fear is like a forest ire. One way to contain forest ires before they begin is to cut down and remove highly inlammable trees that might catch ire and serve as conduits for the lames.

6. David Friedman, Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life (New York: HarperBusiness, 1996), p. 7. 7. This is why esprit de corps is so important for an army. Men in arms must learn to trust their colleagues, and their colleagues must be worthy of this trust. The braver your comrades are, the safer you are. This is why an army must strive to eliminate the presence of cowards and to reduce the level of cowardice in all the other members. This is why armies award medals and activate iring squads.

A Few Good Men

543

Cowardice is a military evil second only to treason – worse even than disobeying a lawful order. Cowardice threatens every military tactic. Senior commanders employ tactics that persuade most troops to stand and ight most of the time. Military training instills the fear of sufering shame by imposing negative sanctions based on shame: the irst man to run is branded as an unjustiiable coward. Military formations have been designed to keep men from running.8 If everyone runs, the collective guilt is spread around. So, it is initial light which must be stopped, and the means of stopping it is to threaten negative sanctions. The smaller the number of those who run, the greater is the individual responsibility and individual punishment on those who run. “They won’t court martial us all if we run as a unit,” thinks the soldier, “but they may court martial me if I run and the others hold the line.” The more fearful the individual, the more likely he will run. The more fearful he knows his comrades to be, the sooner he will run. The sight of a man running away can set of a chain reaction along the line. So, the most efective way to keep men from running is to increase their courage rather than threaten them with shame. That was why God required Israel’s commanders to let fearful men go home early. They “ran” before the war began.

Israel’s Motivation Israel’s army was to operate in terms of the expectation of the positive sanction of victory rather than the negative sanction of defeat. Negative formal sanctions to overcome fear were less necessary in Israel’s holy army because those who were afraid were asked to leave before the war began. Tactically, this meant a smaller but a more determined army. A commander knew the operational size of his battleield forces before he went into battle. His forces expected victory, so they were less willing to run. Those who walked into battle expected to walk home victorious. The familiar negative sanctions to reduce the likelihood of light under ire were less necessary. An opposing commander was probably unaware of this aspect of Israel’s tactics. A frontal assault on the line normally reduces most units’ will to resist. But Israel’s front lines would be diferent. Any foreign commander launching an assault on Israel’s holy army

8. Ibid., p. 8.

544

DEUTERONOMY

in the expectation that normal defensive fear would work to his advantage would receive a lesson in defensive resistance. Israel’s troops would be far less likely to break and run. The ofensive army would sufer higher casualties than normal. By ielding a smaller army of more determined troops, God would gain the glory. This is why he told Gideon to thin the ranks (Jud. 7:2). A smaller army was a better ighting force, man for man, than any rival army because of the Mosaic policy of allowing fearful men to go home before the battle began. The Israelite commander could better calculate the responses of his troops because the fear-ridden troops had gone home. This meant that the traditional problem for military tactics – how to keep non-rugged individualism from undermining the formation – was far less of a problem for Israel.

Conclusion The text makes it clear that the goal of sending the fearful man home was to keep fear from spreading in the ranks: “Let him go and return unto his house, lest his brethren’s heart faint as well as his heart” (v. 8). By removing the faint-hearted from the ranks before the battle began, the ojcers were able to minimize the spread of fear on the battleield. They thereby increased the conidence of those under their authority. This increased the likelihood of victory . . . for a few good men and the God they represented. In a defensive war, it is far easier for the military to gain volunteers. Men know that their lives, their families, and their property are at stake. They are more likely to preserve their circumstances by joining the military than by ighting alone when the invaders arrive in force. In defensive wars, conscription is not necessary. In ofensive wars, it is not legal.

46 LIMITS EMPIRE LimitsTO to Empire When thou comest nigh unto a city to ight against it, then proclaim peace unto it. And it shall be, if it make thee answer of peace, and open unto thee, then it shall be, that all the people that is found therein shall be tributaries unto thee, and they shall serve thee. And if it will make no peace with thee, but will make war against thee, then thou shalt besiege it: And when the LORD thy God hath delivered it into thine hands, thou shalt smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword: But the women, and the little ones, and the cattle, and all that is in the city, even all the spoil thereof, shalt thou take unto thyself; and thou shalt eat the spoil of thine enemies, which the LORD thy God hath given thee. Thus shalt thou do unto all the cities which are very far of from thee, which are not of the cities of these nations. But of the cities of these people, which the LORD thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth: But thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites; as the LORD thy God hath commanded thee: That they teach you not to do after all their abominations, which they have done unto their gods; so should ye sin against the LORD your God (Deut. 20:10–18).

The theocentric framework of these laws of military conquest is God’s disinheritance of His enemies. We know from the existence of these laws of warfare that this process of covenantal disinheritance takes place in history. This is not a process conined to the trans-historical realm of the human spirit, although it does include this realm. This was a land law. These rules of warfare no longer apply because God’s exclusive residence in one holy nation no longer applies. The temple is no more. Neither are captives to be brought

545

546

DEUTERONOMY

back into the land as permanent slaves. The annulment of the jubilee land laws by the ministry of Jesus (Luke 4:17–21) has annulled 1 the permanent slaves law (Lev. 25:44–46).

Disinheritance This passage is about disinheritance. First, the disinheritance of God’s enemies could be by military action. It could involve their annihilation, as it was supposed to in Canaan, but this was a one-time event, as this passage also indicates. Those cities outside Canaan which made war against Israel would be dealt with diferently from those cities inside Canaan which Israel made war against. Second, disinheritance could be by subordination: a system of tribute, which can be monetary but can also be cultural. We see this in the modern West: a culture which once was confessionally Christian is now becoming increasingly pagan, yet it still sustains itself by drawing upon the ethical and cultural capital of Christianity. (The phrase “drawing down” might be more appropriate, as in drawing down a bank account.) The West pays covenantal tribute to God through its outward conformity to some of the laws of God. But as time goes on, it pays less and less tribute as it substitutes man’s word for God’s word. The problem it faces today is the same problem that faced a tributary in the ancient Near East: the vassal city that broke treaty with the regional monarch risked war, captivity, or annihilation. When the king’s negative sanctions were inally imposed, they could be devastating. Third, covenantal disinheritance could be by regeneration: bringing assets formerly devoted to other gods under the administration of a covenant-keeper. Ownership of the property does not change, but the legal status of the owner before God changes: from a disinherited son in Adam to an adopted son in Christ. This is the primary means of disinheritance in the New Testament era. It is the covenantal disinheritance of the old Adam and simultaneously the covenantal inheritance of the second Adam, Jesus Christ. It is the reclaiming of the world through the covenantal reclamation of the world’s lawful owners. Whatever is under the legal authority of a regenerated individual is thereby brought under the hierarchical administration of 1. Gary North, Leviticus: An Economic Commentary (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), ch. 31.

Limits to Empire

547

Jesus Christ. This comprehensive reclamation project is what has been assigned to Christians by the Great Commission (Matt. 28:18–20).2

The Whole Burnt Ofering and Disinheritance The Israelites were told to show no mercy to the nations inside Canaan’s boundaries (Deut. 7:16). These nations had practiced such great evil that they had become abominations in the sight of God. “For all that do these things are an abomination unto the LORD: and because of these abominations the LORD thy God doth drive them out from before thee” (Deut. 18:12). The language of Deuteronomy 20:10–18 indicates that every living thing inside the boundaries of Canaan was to be killed: “thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth.” With respect to the irst city to fall, Jericho, this law applied literally (Josh. 6:15–21). But it did not apply literally to the other cities of Canaan. After the destruction of Jericho, the irst city inside Canaan to be defeated, cattle became lawful spoils for the Israelites. “And thou shalt do to Ai and her king as thou didst unto Jericho and her king: only the spoil thereof, and the cattle thereof, shall ye take for a prey unto yourselves: lay thee an ambush for the city behind it” (Josh. 8:2). The word “breatheth” did not apply to Canaan’s cattle; it applied only to the human population. “And all the spoil of these cities, and the cattle, the children of Israel took for a prey unto themselves; but every man they smote with the edge of the sword, until they had destroyed them, neither left they any to breathe” (Josh. 11:14). Jericho was the representative example of God’s total wrath against covenant-breakers who follow their religious presuppositions to their ultimate conclusion: death.3 Jericho came under God’s total ban: hormah.4 This was the equivalent of a whole burnt ofering: almost all of it had to be consumed by ire. In the whole burnt ofering, all of the beast was consumed on the altar (Lev. 1:9, 13), except for the skin, which went to the ojciating priest (Lev. 7:8). Similarly, all of Jericho was burnt except for the precious metals, which 2. Kenneth L. Gentry, Jr., The Greatness of the Great Commission: The Christian Enterprise in a Fallen World (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990). 3. “But he that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul: all they that hate me love death” (Prov. 8:36). 4. James B. Jordan, Judges: God’s War Against Humanism (Tyler, Texas: Geneva Ministries, 1985), pp. 10–11.

548

DEUTERONOMY

went to the tabernacle as irstfruits (Josh. 6:24). Nevertheless, because God wanted His people to reap the inheritance of the Canaanites, He allowed them to coniscate the cattle and precious goods of the other conquered Canaanite cities. This illustrated another important biblical principle of inheritance: “A good man leaveth an inheritance to his children’s children: and the wealth of the sinner is laid up for the just” (Prov. 13:22). Canaan’s capital, except in Jericho, was part of Israel’s lawful inheritance. The Canaanites had accumulated wealth; the Israelites were to inherit all of it. This comprehensive inheritance was to become a model of God’s total victory at the end of history. Their failure to exterminate the Canaanites, placing some of them under tribute instead (Josh. 16:10; 17:13), eventually led to the apostasy of Israel and the Assyrian and Babylonian captivities, just as Moses prophesied in this passage (vv. 17–18; cf. 7:1–5; 12:30–31). The annihilation of every living soul in Canaan was mandatory. “And thou shalt consume all the people which the LORD thy God shall deliver thee; thine eye shall have no pity upon them: neither shalt thou serve their gods; for that will be a snare unto thee” (Deut. 7:16). This was a model of God’s inal judgment. But it was a model in the same way that Jericho was a model: a one-time event. Jericho was to be totally destroyed, including the animals; this was not true of the other cities of Canaan. Similarly, the Canaanites were to be totally annihilated; this was not true of residents of cities outside Canaan. In this sense, Jericho was to Canaan what Canaan was to cities outside the land: a down payment (“earnest”) on God’s inal judgment – inal disinheritance – at the end of time. This earnest payment in history on the inal disinheritance is matched by the earnest payment in history on the inal inheritance. This is surely the 5

5. Achan had secretly appropriated some precious goods in Jericho. For this, he and his family were executed. This was also the equivalent of a whole burnt ofering. Everything under his jurisdiction burned at God’s command (Josh. 7:15). This included even the precious metals that would otherwise have gone to the tabernacle (v. 24). The men were killed by stoning; then their remains were burned (v. 25). This points to the execution as a whole burnt ofering: the animal had to be slain before it was placed on the altar. The remains of Jericho were a whole burnt ofering; Achan had covenanted with Jericho by preserving the remnants of Jericho’s capital. On the execution of Achan, see Gary North, Boundaries and Dominion: The Economics of Leviticus (computer edition; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), Appendix A: “Sacrilege and Sanctions.”

Limits to Empire

549

6

case in spiritual afairs. Debates over eschatology are debates over the extent to which these earnest payments in history are also cultural and civilizational, and whether they image the inal judgment, i.e., to what extent history is an earnest on eternity.7

Mosaic Law vs. Theocratic Empire Those living outside the land were under diferent Mosaic rules of warfare. Their judgment in history would not have to be inal. The Israelites had to ofer a peace treaty to any foreign city prior to laying siege to it (v. 10). The theocentric principle here was that God ofers a peace treaty to all men who are not yet formally under His authority. If men refuse to submit while this grace period is in force, they are doomed. This period of grace is history. Once Israel began its siege, history had run out for that city. It would no longer be able to extend the dominion of its gods. The gods of that city were placed under preliminary judgment by the siege. After the defeat, the gods of that city were buried. Some of the women and children would survive, but the city, its gods, and its culture would not. Once the siege began, God’s handwriting was iguratively on the city’s walls: it had been weighed in the balance and found wanting (Dan. 5:27). Only if Israel was forced to call of the siege was there any short-term hope for that city. If Israel won, the city died. Once the siege began, it was not to be called of until the city was defeated. There might be temporary cease-ire agreements because of Israel’s temporary weakness, but once the treaty of tribute was rejected by a city, that city was doomed, according to God’s rules of warfare. Once the siege began, there could be no partial surrender, i.e., survival through paying tribute.8 6. “That in the dispensation of the fulness of times he might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven, and which are on earth; even in him: In whom also we have obtained an inheritance, being predestinated according to the purpose of him who worketh all things after the counsel of his own will: That we should be to the praise of his glory, who irst trusted in Christ. In whom ye also trusted, after that ye heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation: in whom also after that ye believed, ye were sealed with that holy Spirit of promise, Which is the earnest of our inheritance until the redemption of the purchased possession, unto the praise of his glory” (Eph. 1:10–14; emphasis added). 7. Gary North, Millennialism and Social Theory (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990). 8. Biblically, God began His inal siege of Satan’s city of man at Calvary. The church now lays siege to the city of man in history, for the latter represents the gates of hell. “And I say also

550

DEUTERONOMY

Conditional mercy was initially ofered to all those inside the walls if they surrendered before the siege began. The men could avoid a death sentence by surrendering, but there was a condition: tribute (v. 11). This is analogous to the restitution penalty owed by a thief. A lying thief who confesses before the trial begins pays a 20 percent penalty to the victim (Lev. 6:5); if he waits until after it begins, he pays double (Ex. 22:4).9 Prior confession lowers the costs of civil justice; similarly, prior surrender lowers the cost of conlict on both sides of the city’s walls, especially for the losing army. This surrender by the men would bring all those under their authority under the same covenant of surrender. The tributary peace treaty would henceforth apply to all those inside the gates of the city. This treaty secured the survival of the foreign city’s culture, for residents were not required to confess faith in God as a condition of the treaty. The Old Covenant principle of circumcision was that every male under the covenantal, household authority of an Israelite had to be circumcised (Gen. 17:12–13). Under the tributary treaty, foreign males did not have to be circumcised; this indicates that their defeat as a city-state did not place them under Abrahamic covenantal authority. They would merely pay tribute to Israel’s civil government,10 as historically defeated sons of Adam, but they would not pay a tithe to Israel’s priests. There is no evidence from Scripture that such foreign military campaigns were recommended by the prophets. They were legal when governed by Mosaic law, but they were not to become highunto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matt. 16:18). The imagery of hell is that of a city under siege whose walls cannot indeinitely hold of the attackers. Because of the failure of the church constantly to maintain this siege, the city of man is occasionally ofered temporary cease-ires. But once begun, Christianity’s siege against the city of man can never be called of. If it is incompletely sustained because of the Christians’ sin and weakness, it will later be strengthened. There is now no tributary peace treaty possible for the city of man, which refused to surrender while Christ walked the earth. The city of man will never be ofered another opportunity to surrender and survive through paying tribute. Only one thing can bring relief: surrender through conversion, which is another way to destroy the city of man. The city’s inal annihilation takes place after the inal judgment (Rev. 20:14–15). Sin retards the ability of the church to complete the operation in history. Nevertheless, the city of man will be visibly subdued in the inal days, only to launch one inal counter-attack (Rev. 20:7–9). Like Germany’s Battle of the Bulge in late 1944, this counter-attack will fail. 9. Gary North, Tools of Dominion: The Case Laws of Exodus (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), pp. 624–29. 10. Solomon collected tribute as tax money (I Ki. 4:6; 5:13–15).

Limits to Empire

551

priority activities in the life of Israel. The most famous case of a tributary nation to Israel was Moab, which revolted against Israel after Ahab died. But Ahab had been more of a foreign king than an Israelite king, with his priests of rival gods. His son Jehoram was evil, although he destroyed his father’s image of Baal (II Ki. 3:2). When Moab revolted against him, Jehoram called the king of Judah to help him subdue Moab. When the king of Judah asked Elisha to bless the campaign, Elisha said it was only for Judah’s sake that he would do so (v. 14). The campaign was initially successful, but when the king of Moab sacriiced his oldest son as a burnt ofering on the wall of the city, this created indignation against Israel within the ranks of the alliance. The invading army broke up and went home (v. 27).

Survival Through Circumcision This raises a major question regarding the siege: Could the men of a besieged city escape the inal sanction of death by ajrming the covenant and becoming circumcised? If they could, this raises the question regarding the creation of a theocratic empire through military expansion. I argue that a foreign city, once placed under siege, could surrender covenantally and thereby escape annihilation. The Mosaic law does not say this explicitly, but it does not authorize the destruction of an Israelite city unless that city had begun to worship foreign gods (Deut. 13:12–15). How could Israel lawfully annihilate a city of circumcised men who had thereby publicly ajrmed their covenantal allegiance to God? By mass circumcision, the city would have been incorporated into God’s covenant. On what legal basis could the siege be continued? Thus, I see no alternative but to conclude that Israel could have increased its borders through military action, or at least through defensive military action: chasing an invading army all the way home and then laying siege to its cities. There was a way of escape for a besieged city: surrender to the God of Israel through circumcision. Tithes and oferings to God’s temple would then be substituted for the original ofer of peace: tribute to Israel’s civil government. But the city would not be what it had been. The old city, like the old Adam, would have been destroyed. Covenantal absorption into Israel was another way of destroying a foreign city’s gods and culture. Yet God did not tell Israel to extend His covenantal reign by means of war across boundaries, once Canaan had been conquered.

552

DEUTERONOMY

The possibility existed that some cities might surrender through conversion, but the Mosaic law did not encourage this. In fact, it discouraged this. Israel faced three major barriers to the creation of a theocratic empire. The irst was judicial: a foreign city could stop the creation of such an empire merely by surrendering before the siege began. The second was cultural: if it failed to surrender on these terms, after its defeat it would no longer survive as a city. The women and children who survived the siege were then brought under the authority of Israel’s households (v. 14). In both cases, the city avoided becoming part of a theocratic empire. The third barrier was economic: to engage in a siege, Israelites had to accept the economic burden of the future victory: supporting large numbers of captive women and children. Furthermore, their wives would have to be willing to go along with this: new wives, new adopted children, new concubines, all of whom would dilute the inheritance of their own children. Israel was polygamous; a foreign war bride, conspicuous for her beauty (Deut. 21:11), would not have been welcomed with open arms by the wife back home. Built into Israel’s social system was an unojcial veto of foreign wars. Furthermore, the economies and social systems of the ancient Near East did not support widespread slavery.11 Without Israel’s permanent occupation of foreign cities, where the real estate could be used to fund the women and children taken captive, Israel could not aford to engage in foreign military conquests. The requirement that adult Israelite males attend all three annual feasts placed geographical limits on the extent of the conquest. The farther away a conquered city was from Jerusalem, the more expensive the trips to the annual feasts would be for its Israelite residents. The issue of geography posed a major problem for the Mosaic law. The festival laws would have to be reworked if the theocratic kingdom expanded; otherwise, theocratic expansion would have been impossible. How could Jews residing in a distant city have attended the festivals every year? They couldn’t. The larger the theocratic empire grew, the more impossible it would have been for all of the faithful to have walked to Jerusalem, let alone to have lodged there for a week. It seems likely that sometime after the Babylonian

11. Isaac Mendelsohn, Slavery In the Ancient Near East (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949), p. 119.

Limits to Empire

553

captivity, from which comparatively few Jews returned to Israel, the synagogue system replaced annual attendance at Passover. The Mosaic law’s festival requirements no longer were enforced rigorously on faithful men as a condition of covenantal faithfulness. There was no longer a holy army in Israel; the nation was under the administration of foreign pluralistic empires. I have argued in my commentary on Numbers that missionary activity always superseded the requirement that every Israelite male appear at Passover annually, let alone the other two annual feasts. Righteousness was more important than ritual precision in Mosaic Israel (II Chron. 30:18–20).12 Consider Paul’s absence from the feasts. He stayed in Corinth for a year and a half, teaching in the synagogue (Acts 18:8–11). The author of Acts records that “we sailed away from Philippi after the days of unleavened bread, and came unto them to Troas in ive days; where we abode seven days” (Acts 20:6). They had not been in Jerusalem for the Passover. They did not make it back to Jerusalem in time for the second Passover celebration for those who had been on journeys (Num. 9:11). Paul did try to get back to Jerusalem by Pentecost (Acts 20:16). Nevertheless, in front of the Jewish assembly, Paul announced: “Men and brethren, I have lived in all good conscience before God until this day” (Acts 23:1). No one called his assertion a lie on the basis of his failure to attend Passover that year.

Public Theology Israel’s theology was public as no other ancient religion’s theology ever was. Foreign residents living inside Israel were invited to go to a central city every seventh year and hear the reading of the law (Deut. 31:10–12). Foreigners would have been in contact with their home cities, especially if they were involved in trade inside Israel. There would have been widespread international dissemination of knowledge regarding Israel’s legal order. Any foreign city that was unwise enough to goad Israel into an attack would have known in advance about Israel’s rules of siege warfare. Foreign rulers would have known two things: 1) it was suicide not to surrender

12. Gary North, Sanctions and Dominion: An Economic Commentary on Numbers (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1997), p. 122.

554

DEUTERONOMY

before a siege began; 2) it was very expensive for Israel to lay a siege, both for time lost and the costs of assimilating the captives. This system of constrained warfare would have created incentives for foreign rulers to ind ways other than military invasion to get what they wanted out of Israel’s rulers. Israel would be unlikely to attack a foreign city without extreme provocation, such as an invasion of Israel’s territory. This fact would have tended to place a protective barrier around Israel’s borders in times of its military strength, yet at the same time, Israel’s military strength would not have become a major threat to foreign nations. Israel was under restrictions – military, marital, economic, and geographical-ritual – that would keep it a defensive power only. This meant that Israel’s military strength would have promoted foreign trade rather than foreign wars. Israel would have been too dangerous to invade militarily, yet too restricted by the Mosaic law to invade on its own initiative. Israel was the original incarnation of President Theodore Roosevelt’s famous rule of American foreign policy: “Speak softly and carry a big stick.”13 This meant that in times when Israel was mighty, these laws reduced the likelihood that Israel would engage in a systematic program of territorial conquest. It was too dijcult for Israel to retain captured territory. Israelites were required to keep separate from gentiles. Their food laws and other laws of ritual cleanliness forced this separation. Foreign cities were not places where Israelites who kept the Mosaic law would normally want to dwell. They might retain their separate identity as a captive people who were allowed to live under their own rules and leaders in ghettos, which most of them did from the Babylonian captivity until the nineteenth century, but they could not easily rule in foreign cities without breaking the Mosaic holiness laws, let alone the far more rigorous rabbinic holiness laws. Interaction with local gentiles was too restricted. So, their empire, if any, would have to be based on a system of tribute, not local law enforcement by resident Israelites. It would have been an empire of trade and taxes. Such far-lung empires are dijcult to maintain without a strong military presence, or the threat of military

13. His aggressive foreign policy belied his words: America spoke loudly under his administration (1901–1909).

Limits to Empire

555

14

reprisals, in the captive lands. This kind of foreign military presence was made dijcult by the festival laws. It took their captivity outside the land to restructure the laws of the festivals. It took life in a foreign ghetto and submission to the civil laws of other gods. This restructuring was not the product of an Israelite empire; it was the product of non-Israelite empires. A city in the ancient Near East, with its local gods, could become an empire only through the pluralism of idols. Israel alone could survive as a nation apart from a homeland without succumbing to pluralism, for Israel’s God claimed universality and exclusivity. Such a claim negated the possibility of a common pantheon of idols. But Israel could not become an empire because of the Mosaic laws of ritual separation; it could at most survive as a ghetto subculture in foreign lands.15

Women and Children The siege law required that women and children be spared after the fall of the foreign city. All of the men were to be killed. There could be no mercy for male heads of household. Their execution would have automatically placed the surviving women and children under the Mosaic covenant. There was no way for widows and orphans to build a society. The children needed protection. Their mothers were in no position to provide this.16 The law did not allow defenseless survivors to be left behind by the Israelite army, to fend for themselves or die.

14. The British Empire was the greatest exception to this rule in the history of man. But if every British ojcial had been forced to return to London every year to attend the equivalent of Passover, it is highly unlikely that the British Empire would have survived long. 15. Only in nineteenth-century Europe and the United States did Jews at last escape life in the ghetto, entering into a world of Protestant religious pluralism, two centuries after Protestantism had faded as a theocratic ideal. In this world, few men spoke authoritatively in civil afairs in the name of a supernatural god, and those few who did, such as Holland’s Abraham Kuyper, asked only for equal access for confessional Christians to State subsidies and privileges, such as tuition-free, State-certiied education. The gods of modernism have reigned nearly supreme in this culture, and Judaism went liberal and humanistic with unprecedented speed. By the mid-twentieth century, Reform Judaism could accurately be described as “Unitarianism, but with better business connections.” 16. This is why widows, orphans, and strangers were the three groups repeatedly identiied in the Mosaic law as deserving of legal protection and special consideration.

556

DEUTERONOMY

The text says that all the males were to be slain. Did this mean only the adults? Or were male children slain, too? Consider Israel’s defeat of the Midianites, which took place outside Canaan. “And Moses said unto them, Have ye saved all the women alive? Behold, these caused the children of Israel, through the counsel of Balaam, to commit trespass against the LORD in the matter of Peor, and there was a plague among the congregation of the LORD. Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves” (Num. 31:15–18). There is no textual reason to believe that this Deuteronomic law exempted boys. There would not be a resentful group of adult foreign males a generation later, all seeking revenge for the deaths of their fathers. The outcome of the siege had disinherited that society. Without any surviving male leadership, there could be no transfer of covenantal civil authority to the next generation. The war had destroyed generational continuity. Thus, all of the captives had to be integrated into Israel. This meant either adoption, including marriage, or enslavement on a massive scale. Deuteronomy 21:10–14 sets forth the laws of marital adoption for foreign military widows. Those who became permanent slaves (Lev. 25:44–46) and those who became wives were brought under the household authority of their new husbands. In lieu of being circumcised, the prospective wives irst had to shave their heads (Deut. 21:12). This was a sign of their enforced transfer of authority from their old households to new ones. It marked a covenantal transformation. This transformation was not necessarily confessional; it was geographical and institutional. The woman was removed from her surroundings and taken back to Israel (v. 12), where she was to mourn her father (dead) and mother (dead or taken captive) – but not her late husband – for a month (v. 13). Her former gods had perished in the total defeat of her city and the death of her husband and father. These gods had no jurisdiction apart from the city that had been built in their name. By carrying women and children back to Israel, the warriors either enslaved or adopted the survivors. In both instances, the survivors came under the jurisdiction of an Israelite household. The survivors would henceforth live under a hierarchy that confessed the God of Moses. There was no religious pluralism allowed in any Israelite household (Deut. 13:6–11). Thus, warfare was a form of

Limits to Empire

557

evangelism through household subordination. The victorious warriors had no choice in this matter. They were not allowed to kill defenseless women and children. To leave them behind to starve in a city without husbands would have been a form of impersonal execution. Such a deserted city would have become a target for invasion, rape, and enslavement to other cities’ gods. This was not allowed. If women and children were to be enslaved, the God of the Bible would be the master of their new households. Thus, counting the costs of warfare meant counting the costs of victory.

Immigration and Assimilation The gods of the fallen city had been deinitively disinherited, but traces of their cultural inluence would survive in the captives’ outlook and practices. Foreign war brides and older children would bring memories and habits formed under the covenantal administration of idols. Many aspects of this covenantal legacy would have to be modiied or completely overcome. This would not be an overnight transformation. The primary means of breaking these habits was language. Immigrants had to learn a new tongue. Cultures are maintained and developed through language. The inal death of a culture occurs only when no one is left who speaks its language and confesses its doctrines. The immigrant must think in new patterns and categories. He must learn a new grammar and vocabulary. The subtle transformation of a person’s thought takes place through language. The immigrant speaks with an accent; young children raised in a new society do not. The mark of their assimilation is their lack of an accent. But accents are more than inlections of the tongue; they are ways of thinking and acting. The goal of assimilation was to remove every trace of foreign accents in the cultural-confessional sense. In this sense, assimilation meant conversion. Discipline was the second major area or transformation. This would have manifested itself most continually in work. The immigrant’s daily schedules would have changed, although in an agricultural economy with a low division of labor, most of life’s basic tasks would have been familiar across national borders. There would be diferent ways of getting things done, but the same sorts of things would have to get done as had to get done in the old country. By working diferently, people adapt to new environments. The causeand-efect pattern of work – planting and reaping – is a major form

558

DEUTERONOMY

of discipline, to which are added the institutional carrot and stick. The institutional sanctions of work – “We do it this way!” – would have been the major area of discipline for most people. The longer the work day, the more disciplined the environment. The third area of transformation was dietary. The newcomers would be forced to change the eating habits of a lifetime – a discontinuity so great that few people can ever achieve it voluntarily, as evidenced by myriads of diet plans that produce only handfuls of permanently thin people in the West. The newcomers’ diets would remind them daily that they were in a new land and living a new way of life. The clean-unclean distinctions in Israel would have forced the newcomers to regard some of their familiar delicacies as abominations – abominations that testiied to theological and moral abominations in the world they had left behind. Their former way of life could not be manifested at mealtime. Most of their former foods would have been present in Israel, but not the meat-based specialties. The taste of food is governed by preparation. Men express their cultures through taste. Things would never taste the same again. Like the sense of smell, we cannot remember what things taste like until we actually place them in our mouths. New tastes, especially for children, would daily block out old memories. Celebration and liturgy were also important. Play and formal worship are not full-time endeavors. They are scheduled for certain special times. They mark a society.17 But in an agricultural society, the law and its sanctions are more readily assimilated through work than through play or liturgy. The subtle nuances of a culture relect mental habits and outlooks that are identiiable. Work, eating, celebration, and formal worship are the primary activities of life, especially in an economy with a low division of labor. The newcomers would have to learn a new language, learn to enjoy new foods, learn new songs, and learn new confessions and laws. Language and work – word and deed – would have encompassed most of the daily life of the immigrant. It was here that the assimilation process would have been most comprehensive and rapid.

17. Modern Western society is so heavily entertainment-oriented and so minimally liturgical that entertainment has virtually replaced liturgy in the lives of millions of people. Not without cause is the television set referred to as the one-eyed god.

Limits to Empire

559

Evangelism After the Captivity The development of a theocratic empire was virtually impossible for Israel under the Mosaic law. The annual festivals would have limited the geographical scope of the empire. The festivals made impossible the full-time occupation of distant foreign cities. Only after the return from Babylon, when Israel no longer was an armed holy army, could dispersion of the Israelite population take place. Evangelism by word and deed was to replace evangelism by postwar enslavement. The fact that attendance at the annual festivals was no longer enforced by excommunication after the return from Babylon is prima facie evidence that the required festivals had something to do with Israel as a holy army. Annual attendance was no longer enforced because it was no longer required. This indicates that the mandatory nature of the festivals was God’s deliberate restraint on the creation of an empire. When that threat disappeared in history, so did the requirement of attendance at each of the festivals. Israel could then evangelize by word and deed. Evangelism was clearly more important than the original Mosaic requirement of annual attendance. Until Israel sheathed its sword, it could not evangelize the world. This judicial alteration has been formalized by the New Covenant: “And, behold, one of them which were with Jesus stretched out his hand, and drew his sword, and struck a servant of the high priest’s, and smote of his ear. Then said Jesus unto him, Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword” (Matt. 26:51–52). The laws mandating the annual festivals were suspended during the Babylonian captivity and then permanently modiied after the partial return of the remnant of Israel to the land. We do not know what the new laws of the festivals were, but we know that the rigorous Mosaic festival laws were no longer enforced. This lack of enforcement made possible evangelism through the Jews’ resettlement. The religious pluralism of the pagan empires made possible Israel’s evangelization of gentiles, for it opened the gates of every city to citizens of every other city. To take advantage of this opportunity, God silently accepted the priesthood’s revocation of mandatory attendance at each annual feast. He did not bring negative sanctions against either the priests or the nation based on individuals’ non-attendance at some of the festivals.

560

DEUTERONOMY

After the return from Babylon, Israel’s evangelism – proselytizing – involved the establishment of local synagogues throughout the cities of the successive empires. There was no longer any holy army in Israel; therefore, its troops would no longer march to Jerusalem three times a year. With no army, there was no way for Jews to besiege a city. Therefore, the laws of the siege treaty were silently annulled. Instead, Jews invaded foreign cities through trade, relocation, and synagogue-building. They penetrated enemy strongholds by means of the new pluralism of the empires: Babylonian, Medo-Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman. Cities would henceforth be penetrated by walking through the gates. The saving message of the God of Abraham could be preached openly. With economic footholds inside foreign cities, there was no longer any need to threaten annihilation of a foreign city’s army should the city not surrender in advance of the siege by agreeing to pay tribute. Israel no longer had either the military power or the ecclesiastical need to issue such a threat. Evangelism by trade, preaching, and synagogue-building replaced evangelism by siege, enslavement, and war-bride adoption. The New Testament church inherited these post-Babylonian techniques of evangelism. The Mosaic laws authorizing the siege treaty had long since been annulled by the Babylonian captivity and its aftermath. The old laws were not formally annulled because God ceased to add to His written word under the Old Covenant. But accepted practices in Jesus’ day indicate the extent of the changes.18

Conclusion A foreign war was to be a rare occurrence in the life of Mosaic Israel. The costs of such warfare, which included the costs of victory, were high. The beneits, apart from tribute, were low. Warfare could be Israel’s means of evangelizing the survivors of a siege, but this would not have included males. It was only partial evangelism. The foreign war was a form of inheritance/disinheritance. The city itself would have to be destroyed unless left intact for other nations to inherit, since the festival laws made occupation by Israel unlikely. The wives and children of the disinherited city would become part of the inheritance of Israel. But this living inheritance had to be

18. A major one: the absence of family members at the Last Supper.

Limits to Empire

561

capitalized to make it productive: by providing training, food, shelter, and even adoption through marriage. There were high costs for warrior families in the assimilation process. Slavery was not a widespread institution in the ancient Near East, unlike classical Greece and Rome. The creation of pluralistic pagan empires made possible the peaceful extension of God’s kingdom in history. Their pluralism gave equal access to all submissive religions. In these covenantal conlicts among competing religions, biblical religion triumphed. The cacophony of competing religious and philosophical claims, coupled with the breakdown of classical ethics and philosophy, eventually undermined the moral confession of the Roman empire, and in so doing, undermined the civil authority of Rome.19 Christian civilization, with its non-pluralistic confession, replaced Rome’s pluralism in the West. A new empire came into existence in the fourth century and lasted for a thousand years until the Renaissance’s revival of classical religion’s occultism, art, and philosophy, followed by the Enlightenment’s revival of religious pluralism. This revival of paganism’s religious pluralism represents a revival of the civil religion of the Near Eastern and European empires: “all nations under god” – the god of the centralized bureaucratic State. Its promised new world order challenges Christ’s new world order. It cannot succeed: “And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed: and the kingdom shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand for ever. Forasmuch as thou sawest that the stone was cut out of the mountain without hands, and that it brake in pieces the iron, the brass, the clay, the silver, and the gold; the great God hath made known to the king what shall come to pass hereafter: and the dream is certain, and the interpretation thereof sure” (Dan. 2:44–45). If a besieged city visibly converted to God through circumcision, would its inhabitants then have been required to march to the festivals? Only if its adult males became citizens of Israel, meaning that they became eligible to join Israel’s holy army. They could not become eligible to serve as judges if they did not make these annual

19. Charles Norris Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture: A Study of Thought and Action from Augustus to Augustine (New York: Oxford University Press, [1944] 1957).

562

DEUTERONOMY

marches. If proselytes who lived outside the land were not part of Israel’s holy army, then they were not required to attend the annual feasts. This was the case of Jews living outside the land during and after the captivity. This meant that Israel could not create an empire through military action. Cities outside the land that converted to faith in the God of Abraham did not thereby become a part of Israel’s army or of Israel’s civil structure. They could not subsequently march against other cities and thereby pull national Israel into a conlict far from its original borders. These proselyte cities would pay their tithes to the Levites, but they could not legally extend Israel’s authority beyond the boundaries of the land which God had promised Abraham. They could extend God’s authority, but not national Israel’s. The lure of empire had to be resisted, and the great disincentive was the distance from the ojcial festival city.

47 FRUIT TREES AS Fruit Trees as Covenantal Testimonies COVENANTAL TESTIMONIES When thou shalt besiege a city a long time, in making war against it to take it, thou shalt not destroy the trees thereof by forcing an axe against them: for thou mayest eat of them, and thou shalt not cut them down (for the tree of the ield is man’s life) to employ them in the siege: Only the trees which thou knowest that they be not trees for meat, thou shalt destroy and cut them down; and thou shalt build bulwarks against the city that maketh war with thee, until it be subdued (Deut. 20:19–20).

The theocentric principle undergirding this law is the dominion covenant (Gen. 1:26–28).1 Man has been placed over nature by God to exercise dominion in God’s name, on God’s behalf, and in terms of God’s Bible-revealed law. In this hierarchical arrangement, God is sovereign as the absolute owner of the creation. He is the owner because He is the creator. Man serves God as a steward. He is a mediator: he represents God to the creation; he also represents the creation to God. Neither man nor the creation is autonomous. Both are under God’s law. Both are judged in terms of God’s law (Gen. 3). This law applied to the people of the land when they were operating outside the land. This creates a problem of interpretation. Was this law bounded by the Mosaic Covenant? Yes. Does it still apply today? Not strategically. Armies are not required by God to maintain a siege until the enemy surrenders. Under the Mosaic Covenant, they were. “And if it will make no peace with thee, but will

1. Gary North, The Dominion Covenant: Genesis (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987).

563

564

DEUTERONOMY

make war against thee, then thou shalt besiege it: And when the LORD thy God hath delivered it into thine hands, thou shalt smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword” (Deut. 20:12–13). Also, not tactically: enemy nations no longer can hide inside walled cities. There are no more walled cities. Gunpowder technology has removed them. But there is one aspect of this law that does still hold: the role of fruit-bearing trees in the dominion covenant.

The Dominion Covenant There is a hierarchy in the dominion covenant: God > man > nature. In this hierarchy, man serves God, while nature serves man. God is not dependent on either man or nature. Man is dependent on both God and nature. Man relects God as a unique creature who is made in God’s image. He rules over nature because he is diferent from nature: made in God’s image. But he is also a creature. He is part of an interdependent creation. He is required by God to acknowledge his two-way dependence and his two-way responsibility: upward and downward. This law of warfare reminded man that fruit-bearing trees sustain man’s life. For this reason, they must not be used to impose man’s death. Man relies on fruit-bearing trees to sustain his life and make his life more pleasant; they, in turn, are heavily dependent on man for their cultivation. They can exist apart from man in some environments, but man’s care makes them lourish. There is mutual interdependence between man and fruit-bearing trees. This law makes it clear that holy warfare is not just a means of inlicting death and destruction. It is a means of extending life. Holy warfare is not destruction for destruction’s sake. It is destruction for God’s sake. There is an element of disinheritance in war, but it is always to be ofset by an element of inheritance. Military sanctions are not exclusively negative; they must also be positive. If this is not the case, then the military tactics employed are illegitimate. They testify to illegitimate goals.

Laying Siege Once begun, the siege of a foreign city was supposed to be completed. “Only the trees which thou knowest that they be not trees for meat, thou shalt destroy and cut them down; and thou shalt build

Fruit Trees as Covenantal Testimonies

565

bulwarks against the city that maketh war with thee, until it be subdued.” When a city refused to covenant with God by surrendering to Israel’s holy army, it was doomed unless it covenanted with God by surrendering to Israel’s holy priesthood. Unless the men surrendered to God through mass circumcision, all of them would be executed after their defense ended (Deut. 20:13). Once they had been placed under the formal negative sanctions of God, the men of a besieged city were not to be allowed to escape this judgment apart from their complete covenantal surrender. Partial surrender was no longer an option. This meant that the Israelite army had no choice: it had to maintain the siege until the city fell. This placed a great deal of pressure on the army’s commander to ind techniques to break through the city’s defenses. He might be tempted to cut down all of the trees in the region to use as siege implements. Trees could be used as irewood. They could also be used as siege implements in four ways: as battering rams (including siege towers), as scraping implements to undermine the walls from tunnels dug beneath the walls, as tunnel supports, and to build ladders to scale the walls. Military historian Horst de la Croix writes that “the basic siege methods – battering, sapping, mining, scaling – . . . will remain the same throughout the ages.”2 The longer the siege went on, the more depleted the countryside would become, and the more tempting the surviving fruit-bearing trees would become. The language of the text is clear: the reason why the fruitbearing trees were protected was that man’s life is maintained by these trees. These trees would provide food for Israel’s troops. This pointed to the possibility that the siege might last for several seasons. The commander was to acknowledge that he and his men might be there a long time. They were allowed to eat from these trees. A commander who was conducting a winter campaign knew that his army might still be there in spring and summer. Israel’s army was to acknowledge that the extension of God’s kingdom sometimes takes longer than covenant-keepers would prefer. The siege might take years. The fruit trees would provide a blessing in the time of the harvest. It would be short-sighted to cut them down.

2. Horst de la Croix, Military Considerations in City Planning: Fortiications (New York: George Braziller, 1972), p. 18.

566

DEUTERONOMY

It would contribute to a short-run mentality: “If we can’t starve these people out in one season or less, it will be time to go home.” God was telling the army that they had to stay there and wait until that city surrendered. The fruit trees would sometimes have been visible from the walls of the city. The defenders watching on the walls could report back to their ojcers that the Israelites still had not cut down the fruit trees. This information would have undermined conidence in the leaders of the city. The Israelites were not intending to go home soon. They were prepared to sit and wait for as long as it took to defeat the city. This meant that the Israelites were determined to win. They were willing to invest whatever amount of time it would take to starve out the city. Meanwhile, they would feast on the fruit of the ield.

The Imagery of the Siege The trees were outside the boundaries of the city’s wall. This wall kept the residents of the city from feasting on the trees that provided life. In relation to the trees, the city’s wall was a defensive boundary for the Israelite army. Israel used swords to keep the deiant residents of the city away from the fruit trees that had once sustained them and delighted them. Because the city had not surrendered to Israel when the peace treaty was ofered, the men of that city would never again taste the fruit of those trees. The symbolism is obvious: this was analogous to the iery sword that kept men away from the tree of life in the garden. Yet the tree of life will again grow in the midst of a garden: the city-garden of the new heaven and new earth. “In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations” (Rev. 22:2). The barrier between covenant-keepers and covenant-breakers will have become absolute. “And beside all this, between us and you there is a great gulf ixed: so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us, that would come from thence” (Luke 16:26). The question facing covenant-breaking man is this: Can he somehow cross the barrier to gain access to the tree of life? That was the question facing the men of the besieged city. The answer was yes, but only through covenantal conformity to God through circumcision. They could

Fruit Trees as Covenantal Testimonies

567

bring the city under God’s protection. They could become Israelites: adopted sons. There was no other way that they would ever again feast on the fruit of the trees that lay outside the walls if Israel obeyed God’s laws of warfare. The imagery here was not of a circumscribed garden separated from the world by a wall. On the contrary, the imagery was a walled enclosure in which death was sure, surrounded by a world in which fruit was sweet. The kingdom of God lay outside the walls of the city; it was defended by the army of God. The kingdom of covenant-breaking man was surrounded. It was under siege. It was strictly defensive. Life lay beyond the walls of the city. The men enclosed by those walls could not gain access to life. The walls that temporarily sustained them from death by the sword also kept them away from the trees of life. Their enemies would feast on the fruit while they, determined not to surrender on terms acceptable to God, would not again taste such fruit. Their enemies would inherit.

Hope in the Future Trees that were visible from the walls testiied to those inside the walls that there was hope available, but not on their covenantal terms. There was one way of surrender. The men could circumcise themselves and their sons. They would then throw open the gates of the city to the holy army. They would plead immunity through self-inlicted covenantal wounds. There was risk, of course. The Shechemites had done this, and they had been slaughtered by two sons of Israel (Gen. 34:25). But this had been a great evil for which Jacob was greatly upset. “And Jacob said to Simeon and Levi, Ye have troubled me to make me to stink among the inhabitants of the land, among the Canaanites and the Perizzites: and I being few in number, they shall gather themselves together against me, and slay me; and I shall be destroyed, I and my house” (v. 30). Could those inside the boundary provided by the wall trust the Israelites not to take advantage of them? Would Israel obey God’s law? There was a visible test of Israel’s commitment to God’s law: fruit trees. If the trees were still standing, then Israel was still honoring God’s law. This meant two things: 1) the army of God was dug in for the long haul; 2) there was still hope for the city. Mass circumcision could still gain mercy from the invaders. But the men of the city would have to undergo pain. They would also have to surrender:

568

DEUTERONOMY

open gates. They could no longer safely put their trust in walls and gates. On the other hand, if the fruit trees had been cut down, there was hope of survival in terms of the city’s old covenant. This Israelite army was visibly a short-term army. It had not honored God’s law. It was willing to consume the trees that would feed it in due season. Here was a reason for those inside the walls to continue their resistance. Why surrender to an army that was there only for the short haul? Resistance ofered hope. Surrendering to such an army would be foolish. Such an army was ruthless with life-giving trees; it would probably be ruthless with defenders. Every man inside the city would die. Better to resist to the last man. Better to threaten unacceptable losses for an army that was not there for the long haul, one that was not committed to victory in terms of God’s law. Which would it be: Surrender to God or continued resistance? Which was the wiser course of action? Circumcision might bring permanent peace or it might bring a slaughter. Resistance might bring a military slaughter or it might bring terms of surrender for tribute’s sake, the way that some of the Canaanites survived Israel’s program of genocide (Josh. 16:10; 17:13). Fruit-bearing trees provided evidence. If they were still standing, this army was serious about God’s law. If they had been cut down, this army was not serious about obeying God. It would then be too risky to surrender by mass circumcision. It might be safer to resist longer, hoping for terms of peace based on tribute.

Inheritance and Foreign Policy By allowing the fruit-bearing trees to survive, the army was maintaining the value of the land. For land located close to Israel’s borders, this decision would have capitalized Israel’s inheritance. It left intact an agricultural inheritance. But for land located far from Israel, the income stream provided by the trees could not be capitalized by Israel. The trees were too far from Jerusalem. The journey to the festivals would be too long. The army dared not annex the city to Israel. The male residents of the besieged city had to be executed, apart from conversion through circumcision. The women and children had to be brought back to Israel. Who would then take care of the trees? After all, the trees were wealth. If left undefended, such wealth would serve as a beacon: “Come and get it!” A neighboring

Fruit Trees as Covenantal Testimonies

569

nation would not leave such wealth to rot. It would invade the empty region. The trees would provide capital for the invaders. This meant that another nation with other gods would inherit what Israel had temporarily conquered. This would bring the invading nation closer to Israel’s borders. Therefore, a major foreign policy consideration in deciding whether to place a city under siege was who its neighbors were. If the city bordered a strong nation that could pose a threat to Israel, it would be unwise for Israel to lay siege to it. Why waste Israel’s resources in a military operation that might expose the nation to greater danger later on? A short-term military success might be followed by a long-term military disaster. Why strengthen your enemies? Solution: call of the siege before beginning it. Such a foreign policy would have reduced the risks to shortterm raiders who could raid the fringes of Israel’s borders without the threat of a siege of their cities, but it would also have reduced the likelihood of full-scale invasion. Weaker cities would have bordered Israel. They might constitute an annoyance to those tribes whose land was on the borders, but these invaders would not have constituted a major threat to the nation. The preservation of the besieged city’s fruit-bearing trees forced foreign policy considerations on Israel. It forced Israel’s leaders to count the long-term costs of war. The farther away the city, the less economic incentive there was to conquer it. The more powerful the city’s neighbors, the less economic incentive for Israel to lay siege to it. Only if the city submitted to God through circumcision would beginning a siege make sense, and then only in retrospect. This was a high-risk military decision: once the siege began, the decisionmaking authority to determine who would inherit the fruit trees would move from Israel to the besieged city. Even if Israel won, knocked down the walls, and burned the city, those trees would still be standing: a standing testimony to the fruitfulness of a now-empty land. The land would not stay empty for long.

Ecology and Inheritance This law had ecological implications. The presence of fruitbearing trees had implications for birds and other fruit-eating beasts of the ield. The ecology of the land was to be honored by the invading Israelite army; they were not to become destroyers. As far as the male residents of the besieged city were concerned, the ecological care shown by the Israelites constituted a guaranteed

570

DEUTERONOMY

death sentence on the city. The Israelites’ care for God’s land meant annihilation for the men of the city. The Israelites were caring for God’s land, which meant that they would obey God’s law. God’s law told them not to pull back from the siege: “Thou shalt build bulwarks against the city that maketh war with thee, until it be subdued.” Thus, by extending life to the fruit-bearing trees, Israel’s army was extending a death sentence on the city’s males. The general ecological principle announced by this text, namely, that “the tree of the ield is man’s life,” becomes narrowly applied in the context of a siege. The tree of the ield is not covenant-breaking man’s life. Covenant-breaking man is now locked inside the walls of his city. He may be able to see life from the walls of the city, but he cannot gain access to it. The trees of the ield would become life for the covenant-keeping army that was laying siege. The trees would henceforth sustain life for the city’s executioners. The life-sustaining properties of the fruit would increase the likelihood of the death of the trees’ former owners. That which had sustained life would now indirectly threaten life. This was a matter of inheritance. The Israelite army had inherited the means of life. The forthcoming disinheritance of the men inside the city’s walls would now be made even more likely. A preservationist ecology in the context of God’s covenant lawsuit against evil ofers life to covenant-keepers and death to covenant-breakers. The beneits of a preservationist ecology must therefore be discussed within the covenantal framework of history. This raises the issue of eschatology. If history brings progressive defeat to covenant-keepers and victory to covenant-breakers, then a preservationist ecology leaves God’s enemies as the inheritors. By sustaining the productivity of the earth, the covenant-keeper provides an inheritance to future generations. But if these future generations maintain the ethics of the pre-Flood world or pre-conquest Canaan, then God, through ecological preservation and capitalization by covenant-keepers, will someday ofer to His enemies “houses full of all good things, which thou illedst not, and wells digged, which thou diggedst not, vineyards and olive trees, which thou plantedst not; when thou shalt have eaten and be full” (Deut. 6:11). The displacement of covenant-keepers can happen, of course, but only as God’s covenantal curse on His people: “Thou shalt plant vineyards, and dress them, but shalt neither drink of the wine, nor gather the grapes; for the worms shall eat them” (Deut. 28:39). But is such a

Fruit Trees as Covenantal Testimonies

571

curse permanent in history? Does it characterize covenantal inheritance and disinheritance in history? No. And it shall come to pass, when all these things are come upon thee, the blessing and the curse, which I have set before thee, and thou shalt call them to mind among all the nations, whither the LORD thy God hath driven thee, And shalt return unto the LORD thy God, and shalt obey his voice according to all that I command thee this day, thou and thy children, with all thine heart, and with all thy soul; That then the LORD thy God will turn thy captivity, and have compassion upon thee, and will return and gather thee from all the nations, whither the LORD thy God hath scattered thee. If any of thine be driven out unto the outmost parts of heaven, from thence will the LORD thy God gather thee, and from thence will he fetch thee: And the LORD thy God will bring thee into the land which thy fathers possessed, and thou shalt possess it; and he will do thee good, and multiply thee above thy fathers. And the LORD thy God will circumcise thine heart, and the heart of thy seed, to love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, that thou mayest live. And the LORD thy God will put all these curses upon thine enemies, and on them that hate thee, which persecuted thee. And thou shalt return and obey the voice of the LORD, and do all his commandments which I command thee this day. And the LORD thy God will make thee plenteous in every work of thine hand, in the fruit of thy body, and in the fruit of thy cattle, and in the fruit of thy land, for good: for the LORD will again rejoice over thee for good, as he rejoiced over thy fathers: If thou shalt hearken unto the voice of the LORD thy God, to keep his commandments and his statutes which are written in this book of the law, and if thou turn unto the LORD thy God with all 3 thine heart, and with all thy soul (Deut. 30:1–10; emphasis added).

New Testament Applications Unlike all other Mosaic laws, this law was applicable only outside the boundaries of the land. Inside, there could be no mercy shown. This law was not a cross-boundary law; it was a law governing Israel’s relations with gentiles in their land. The general principle of this law holds true in every era: “The tree of the ield is man’s life.” Because the general principle is true, this law continues to be in force. What is no longer in force, however, is siege warfare. New

3. If taken literally, this implies that Islam’s conquest of North Africa in the seventh century will not be maintained indeinitely. I take it literally.

572

DEUTERONOMY

technologies have replaced it. Men no longer lay siege to walled cities. The West’s importation of Chinese gunpowder ended that ancient military strategy in the fifteenth century: artillery ended the military beneits of city walls. Walled communities have become popular inside crime-ridden cities, but no organized enemy lays continuous siege to them. Also, military units may build defensive barriers, but these units are not cities. This law is not a law governing the use of explosives. Fruit trees may be destroyed by an artillery barrage or a bombing raid, but this is not the same as using the trees as weapons of war. Also, this is not a law against using chemical defoliants that open up terrain so that enemies cannot hide. The context of the Mosaic law of the siege was an immobile city facing a dug-in army. In the early medieval era in the West, this law would have applied to a siege. There were walled cities and castles. Armies did come and lay siege to them. They did cut down trees to use as weapons of war. These invading armies should have honored the Mosaic law of the fruit trees.

Conclusion The invading Israelite army was to honor God’s law of ecology. This was not for the beneit of the covenant-breakers who were trapped inside their own defensive walls, nor was it for their heirs, who would be carried back to Israel. This was for the beneit of the army itself during the siege and also for those foreign invaders who would occupy the land after the Israelites returned home. These inheritors would be one of three groups, if the Israelite army obeyed God’s law: 1) the Israelites themselves, but only if the city was close to Israel’s border; 2) the city’s existing inhabitants, but only if they submitted to circumcision, becoming Israelites through adoption; 3) the invading army that would march into the unoccupied land after Israel’s army had departed. Which outcome was best for Israel? The conversion of the city was best. The residents would henceforth pay a tithe to the Levites. Better that men worship God than that they die in their sins. Better that they surrender unconditionally to God while His siege is still in progress than that they die in the post-siege mass execution. God told Ezekiel: “But if the wicked will turn from all his sins that he hath committed, and keep all my statutes, and do that which is lawful and right, he shall surely live, he shall not die. All his transgressions that he hath committed, they

Fruit Trees as Covenantal Testimonies

573

shall not be mentioned unto him: in his righteousness that he hath done he shall live. Have I any pleasure at all that the wicked should die? saith the Lord GOD: and not that he should return from his ways, and live?” (Ezek. 18:21–23). This Mosaic law of the siege is still in force. The invading army is not to cut down productive trees or, by extension, burn the crops. Warriors are supposed to battle warriors. The idea that warriors are deliberately to wage war on undefended civilians as a way to weaken the opposing army is a perverse strategy. It is also a basic strategy of modern warfare, beginning with the American Civil War: Sherman’s march to the sea in 1864–65 and Sheridan’s burning of crops in the Shenandoah Valley. These were evil precedents that led to the horrors of World War II’s bombing of civilian populations.

48 DOUBLE PORTION, DOUBLE BURDEN Double Portion, Double Burden If a man have two wives, one beloved, and another hated, and they have born him children, both the beloved and the hated; and if the irstborn son be hers that was hated: Then it shall be, when he maketh his sons to inherit that which he hath, that he may not make the son of the beloved irstborn before the son of the hated, which is indeed the irstborn: But he shall acknowledge the son of the hated for the irstborn, by giving him a double portion of all that he hath: for he is the beginning of his strength; the right of the irstborn is his (Deut. 21:15–17).

The theocentric focus of this law is the principle of lawful service to God. The degree of service owed by someone to another person or group is always proportional to the amount of capital provided for him by the person or group to whom the service is owed. Jesus warned: “And that servant, which knew his lord’s will, and prepared not himself, neither did according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes. But he that knew not, and did commit things worthy of stripes, shall be beaten with few stripes. For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more” (Luke 12:47–48). The fact that much was given to the irstborn son meant that much would be required from him. Capital was promised to him by his father; thus, we conclude that he would owe his father and mother services proportional to the promised inheritance. No biblical text says this speciically, but it can be inferred from the principle of mutual obligation. How did this inheritance system work? Rushdoony describes it: “The general rule of inheritance was limited primogeniture, i.e., the oldest son, who had the duty of providing for the entire family in

574

Double Portion, Double Burden

575

case of need, or of governing the clan, receiving a double portion. If there were two sons, the estate was divided into three portions, the younger son receiving one-third.”1 The context of this law was the law governing war brides, although the principle of inheritance stated here applied beyond the war bride. It applied to Israel as a society that allowed polygamy. It was a land law. An Israelite warrior was allowed to bring home a woman from a defeated foreign city. In fact, these women had to be brought home. They would not be able to defend themselves if they stayed behind. The question was: Would they become permanent slaves or wives? That is, would they be adopted through marriage? If the captive woman consented to marry an Israelite by paring her ingernails, shaving her head, and mourning for her parents for a month (Deut. 21:12–13), it was legal for him to marry her. Immediately following these laws is the law of the double portion.

Legitimate Disinheritance: Full or Partial The eldest son had to receive the double portion under Mosaic law. This implied that he was to bear a double portion of responsibility in caring for his aged parents. But a father could lawfully disinherit a rebellious son, if he had the backing of a covenantal authority. This disinheritance could be accomplished through the civil imposition of physical death, as the very next section of Deuteronomy indicates (21:18–23). It could also be accomplished through the ecclesiastical imposition of covenantal death. Excommunication under the Mosaic law removed a man’s eligibility to serve in God’s holy army. This, in turn, removed his citizenship and his inheritance in the land. Strangers were not to inherit rural land, and an excommunicated man was a stranger, i.e., cut of from God’s people. The eldest son was to inherit a double portion. Nevertheless, the history of the patriarchs reveals something very diferent in practice: either full disinheritance or a single-portion inheritance of the irstborn son. This began with Adam, who rebelled against God, his father. Adam covenanted with Satan through the serpent by sharing a forbidden covenantal meal with his wife. He violated the 1. R. J. Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law (Nutley, New Jersey: Craig Press, 1973), p. 180.

576

DEUTERONOMY

boundary of death that God had placed around the forbidden tree. This covenantal act cost him his life. Through grace, however, God granted Adam and Eve time on earth to work out the dominion covenant (Gen. 1:26–28). Adam had two sons, Cain and Abel. Cain was the irstborn (Gen. 4:1). He was evil. His sacriice was not acceptable to God (v. 5). He then slew his younger brother. Through grace, God extended Cain’s life (v. 15), but He removed Cain from the covenant line. A third son, Seth, youngest of all, replaced Cain as the heir through which the promised seed (Gen. 3:15) would come (Luke 3:38). Noah had three sons. The eldest was Shem (Gen. 6:10). Shem’s line was the covenant line. This indicates that he had been a righteous man who did not warrant disinheritance. But Shem’s irst two sons did not extend the covenant line; Arphaxad, the third son, did (Gen. 10:24). Abraham had two sons. The elder, Ishmael, was disinherited by Abraham because he mocked Isaac (Gen. 21:9), who was the true heir of God’s promise (Gen. 17:16). Isaac was the second-born son. Isaac had two sons. The elder, Esau, sold his inheritance to his brother, Jacob, for a mess of pottage (Gen. 25:33). God had already promised Rebekah that the heirs of the elder son would serve the heirs of the younger (v. 23). That is, the covenant line would be through Jacob, not Esau.2 Jacob gained his deserved inheritanceblessing from Isaac (Gen. 27:28–29). Isaac later blessed Esau through a prophecy of Esau’s greatness, but he had nothing left of substance to give Esau (vv. 37, 39). He had given Jacob the full inheritance, leaving nothing for Esau. By giving Jacob the full inheritance, believing that Jacob was Esau, Isaac had necessarily disinherited Esau, thinking that he was disinheriting Jacob. Esau was the ethically rebellious son. He had married Canaanite wives, against his parents’ wishes (Gen. 26:34–35). After he lost his blessing, his father told him not to marry other Canaanites wives (28:9). His obedience was partial: he married a daughter of Ishmael (28:9), the disinherited son of Abraham. Esau’s pattern of rebellion was continual in the key area of covenantal inheritance: marriage. Isaac had sought to escape his 2. This prophecy extended down to the days of Christ. Herod was an Edomite, an heir of Esau: Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, XIV:I:3. He sought to destroy the promised seed. He failed. Joseph and Mary had removed themselves and their son from Herod’s jurisdiction (Matt. 2:13–15). They returned when Herod had died (v. 19).

Double Portion, Double Burden

577

responsibility to disinherit his rebellious son by disinheriting Jacob instead. This tactic backired on Isaac. It led to Esau’s complete disinheritance. The inheritance law helps us to answer the ethical and judicial question: Was it wrong for Rebekah and Jacob to deceive Isaac? The answer is no, it was not wrong. Isaac’s physical blindness relected his moral judgment. Jacob and Rebekah took advantage of his physical weakness in order to overcome his moral weakness. They were facing a morally blind old man who would not acknowledge the legitimacy of God’s prophecy to Rebekah concerning the two sons and their respective covenant lines, nor would he honor Esau’s sale of his birthright to Jacob. Isaac was willing to defy God for the sake of his delight in the taste of venison stew (Gen. 27:3–4). In this, Isaac was as short-sighted as Esau had been when he sold his birthright for a pot of stew. Rebekah was morally and legally justiied in undermining her husband’s evil plan to disinherit Jacob, and through this act of rebellion, disinherit God’s promised covenant seed.3 Jacob’s irst four sons were Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah. All were born of Leah, the unloved wife (Gen. 29:32–35). One aspect of the double portion was rulership. Jacob gave permanent civil rulership to Judah (Gen. 49:10). He had legitimate covenantal reasons for skipping Reuben, Simeon, and Levi. Reuben had deiled his father’s bed by having sex with Jacob’s concubine, Bilhah (Gen. 35:22). Simeon and Levi had slain the Shechemites after the Shechemites had submitted to circumcision (Gen. 34:25). This ruthless act of revenge had brought reproach on their father (v. 30). These sons inherited single portions. This left Judah as the primary heir, which involved exercising rulership. The promised seed’s covenant line would come through Judah (Luke 3:33).4 3. Gary North, The Dominion Covenant: Genesis (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987), ch. 19. 4. It is not clear from the text that Judah received a double portion. It is also not clear from the allocation of land listed in the Book of Joshua. Rushdoony argues that Jacob awarded a double portion to Joseph, for he gave a blessing to Joseph’s two sons. The reason for this, he says, is that Jacob was under Joseph’s care in Egypt. Rushdoony, Institutes, p. 180. The problem with this argument is that Joshua did not recognize this claim to a double portion in allocating land in Canaan. When the two tribes came to him claiming a right to the double portion – a right based on their numerical strength, not a promised double portion – Joshua told them that they would have to prove their claim on the battleield by defeating Canaanites who were armed with iron chariots (Josh. 17:13–18). That is, they would have to disinherit the Canaanites, not their brethren, to gain their double portion. Gary North, Sanctions and

578

DEUTERONOMY

The case of Judah’s sons is the most convoluted of all. His irst son, Er, was wicked. God killed him before he conceived a son of his own through Tamar (Gen. 38:7). That is, God cut of Er’s covenant line. To restore it biblically, Onan his brother had to marry her.5 But Onan was also wicked; he married her, but then refused to bear a child with her in his brother’s name (v. 9). God killed him, too. The third son was too young to marry. It is clear that Tamar was the victim of her two husbands’ evil ways. She was being denied legitimate seed. Tamar then tricked Judah into fathering twin sons with her after the death of Judah’s wife. Her son Zarah was the second-born, yet he had very nearly become the irstborn (vv. 28–30). In this case, the promised seed came through the irstborn son, Pharez (Luke 3:33). Yet Pharez was not legally the irstborn son. Shelah, the third son of Judah’s irst wife, should have been the heir. But the evil of his two older brothers, coupled with his young age, as well as the evil of his father in lying with Tamar before marriage, thinking she was a prostitute, transferred the covenant line to the surviving second-born son, Pharez. This was done by God for Tamar’s sake, who had twice been cheated by evil husbands. Through her the promised seed would come. In the case of Joseph, the irstborn son of Jacob’s beloved wife, Jacob transferred Joseph’s single-unit inheritance to Joseph’s two sons. He did this prior to his inal accounting with his other sons. Manasseh was the irstborn, but Jacob gave the blessing to Ephraim. Joseph tried to correct this, but without success. “And his father refused, and said, I know it, my son, I know it: he also shall become a people, and he also shall be great: but truly his younger brother shall be greater than he, and his seed shall become a multitude of nations” (Gen. 48:19). Jacob ofered no reason for this. The second-born son would receive the double portion of Jacob’s blessing: authority and population. But this did not necessarily imply that Ephraim would receive a double portion of Joseph’s inheritance. In

Dominion: An Economic Commentary on Numbers (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1997), pp. 223–25. 5. “If brethren dwell together, and one of them die, and have no child, the wife of the dead shall not marry without unto a stranger: her husband’s brother shall go in unto her, and take her to him to wife, and perform the duty of an husband’s brother unto her. And it shall be, that the irstborn which she beareth shall succeed in the name of his brother which is dead, that his name be not put out of Israel” (Deut. 25:5–6).

Double Portion, Double Burden

579

the land distribution under Joshua, the two sons received separate portions based on their military prowess. There is no indication in the text that Ephraim’s inheritance was double the size of Manasseh’s. Mosaic law was not formally in force prior to Moses. The patriarchs did not go to priests and civil rulers to legitimize their decisions regarding their sons’ inheritance. They made these decisions on their own authority as household priests and rulers. After Moses, however, the law mandated a system of conirmation for the father’s disinheritance of a particular son, which the next section of Deuteronomy reveals. The parents had to bring their rebellious son before the civil magistrate.

The Two Adams The New Testament provides a reason for the persistence of this pattern of inheritance among the patriarchs. Paul refers to Jesus as the last Adam. “And so it is written, The irst man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit” (I Cor. 15:45). The irst Adam had forfeited his lawful claim on the inheritance from his father, God. Adam was disinherited. But God then showed grace to Adam. On what legal basis? Because of the perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ. On this basis, God gives common grace to all mankind and special grace to His chosen people: a common salvation (healing) and a special salvation. “For therefore we both labour and sufer reproach, because we trust in the living God, who is the Saviour of all men, specially of those that believe” (I Tim. 4:10).6 Adam and his heirs have received the gift of life on the basis of the work of the second Adam. Yet even here, the true pattern exists: the irstborn son inherits. Jesus Christ is the incarnation of the second person of the Trinity. He is the only begotten son of God. “But he held his peace, and answered nothing. Again the high priest asked him, and said unto him, Art thou the Christ, the Son of the Blessed? And Jesus said, I am: and ye shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven” (Mark 14:61–62).

6. Gary North, Dominion and Common Grace: The Biblical Basis of Progress (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987), ch. 1.

580

DEUTERONOMY

Sons and Daughters Mosaic Covenant fathers had the responsibility of assessing the moral character of their sons. Their allocation of the inheritance had to conform to the law of the double portion. They could not, on their own authority, depart from this law. But the law gave no autonomous claim to rebellious sons. God’s law does not subsidize evil. Either of the other two covenantal authorities could conirm a father’s decision to disinherit a rebellious son. The civil government could enforce such a claim through execution of other, lesser, penalties for lesser infractions; the ecclesiastical government could enforce it through excommunication. This law says nothing about daughters. It was assumed that daughters would not inherit if a son was still alive at their father’s death. Why? To ind the answer, we must understand the principle of economic support. Daughters married into another family. Their ojce as helpers of their husbands meant that their eforts would go to provide support for their husbands’ parents. Wives were adopted into their husbands’ families. A father provided a dowry for his daughter in marriage. If he failed to do this, she was a concubine, not a free wife. But a son-in-law provided a bride price to the family of the bride. This kept the dowry from depleting the inheritance of her brothers. This payment exempted the bride from any obligation to support her aged parents. This obligation was her brothers’ obligation. By forfeiting any claim on an inheritance, the daughter escaped any future economic burden for supporting her parents.7 There was a balance to the Mosaic inheritance system.

Modern Times The traditional description of wives as “barefoot and pregnant” implicitly justiies a system of inheritance that passes all of the parents’ assets to sons and their wives. Daughters for millennia did not receive dowries in the form of formal education. But on the day that a family hired a tutor to teach a daughter to read, that family began to alter the economics of inheritance. As soon as the ability to read 7. Gary North, Tools of Dominion: The Case Laws of Exodus (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), pp. 253–55.

Double Portion, Double Burden

581

meant access to income-producing occupations, an investment in a girl’s education began to undermine the traditional system of inheritance. Those traditionalists who long ago opposed formal education for daughters may have sensed the revolutionary social and economic implications of what it meant to have literate women in a society. But that resistance is long gone. From the Reformation until the late nineteenth century, the ability to read in the West meant the ability to read the Bible. The Protestant religion’s individualism and its biblicism, coupled with the mass production of printed materials, made literacy cost-efective for the masses. This change in the investment-return ratio for basic education inevitably undermined the traditional system of sons-only inheritance. The daughters received a dowry through education. They were thereby brought under the biblical obligations for supplying a proportional share of parental support if their husbands failed to supply a bride price comparable to the cost of their wives’ educations. Prior to the nineteenth century, women had few options to work for money outside the home. Labor was more clearly allocated in terms of physical strength, with the resulting division of labor within the household and within society. This has changed dramatically with the extension of the division of labor and the substitution of mechanical and especially electrical power for human and animal power.8 When a woman can lip a switch as easily as a man can, the ability to use electrical tools to perform specialized labor then becomes more a matter of skill and temperament than physical strength. Also, there is not much evidence, if any, that indicates that women as a class cannot perform such highly skilled tasks as eye surgery as readily as men can. Women have entered the work force by the hundreds of millions in the West since World War II. This has been a matter of social convention. This social transformation has been going on at least on since the early nineteenth century, when unmarried women were brought into the textile industry as seamstresses. They had been involved in this industry as wool spinners from ancient times. The division of labor provided by mechanized sewing equipment 8. To this should be added the advent of popular contraception techniques. With fewer children, women have reduced their household management burdens. While they ill up their days with activities, no doubt, they bear fewer children because they believe they could not bear the added household burdens.

582

DEUTERONOMY

moved the location of their work. This was part of a social revolution, no doubt, but it was not a revolution in basic skills. It was a revolution in capital formation. As women have become a source of family monetary income, their ability to support aged parents inancially has raised the question of inheritance. Should all of their income go into their husband’s family? This raises the question of education. Who paid for their educations? Mass education has enabled women to enter ields that had been closed to them. More to the point, mass education has created new ields that did not exist a century ago. If parents pay for a daughter’s education, they provide a dowry. If the son-in-law provides no bride price comparable in value to this investment in the bride’s education, compounded at a market rate of interest as if it had been a student loan, then her parents have a moral claim on a portion of her wealth and time. To argue otherwise is to argue for the disinheritance of her brothers. If she gets equal funding in her education, but they are alone legally and morally responsible for the support of their aged parents, then the biblical principle of proportional responsibility is violated. Brothers have been decapitalized by sisters. Since 1973, family income has become stagnant in the United States. One reason is that wives have entered the work force and are forced to pay taxes into State retirement systems. The State pays for the education of daughters. It therefore taxes daughters when they enter the work force. The State collects taxes to support existing retirees. The system of proportional responsibility is honored to some degree by this system. But as taxes for retirement systems and State health care rise, the wives become, in efect, the supporters of the aged parents – and not so aged parents – of other families. The share of national income going to pay taxes today is close to the share of income earned by women in the work force. To fund the faceless aged, husbands have sent their wives out to work. This is not the way that husbands and wives think of this inancial arrangement, but the numbers reveal that this is essentially the nature of the bargain. The State has paid for the education of women – the wife’s dowry – so it collects money from women for the support of the aged. We can call this process the statist bureaucratization of the dowry.

New Testament Applications Is the allocation of a man’s inheritance still governed by Deuteronomy 21:15–17? To answer this question, we consider the fact that

Double Portion, Double Burden

583

there have been judicial alterations. First and foremost, there is no longer polygamy in New Covenant times. The church has rejected the idea that polygamy is a valid form of marriage except under highly unusual circumstances.9 Second, the Mosaic seed laws and land laws have been annulled by the coming of Jesus Christ. Land no longer has a covenantal-prophetic role to play in the history of salvation. Third, the State no longer enforces the laws against rebellious children. Whether it should or not is an issue I deal with in the next chapter. But the fact that the mandated civil sanction of execution no longer threatens a rebellious son has had efects on the administration of this law. Fourth, as we have seen, daughters now inherit. Daughters have a new legal status under the New Covenant. Females are baptized in the church. The formal mark of covenant blessings and covenant cursings is placed on both sexes. This means that, covenantally speaking, the beneits of inheritance and the threat of disinheritance are presented formally to both sexes. Covenant sanctions ultimately are sanctions of inheritance and disinheritance: in eternity, but also in history. Then what remains of Deuteronomy’s inheritance law? Only the principle of proportionality. Of those assets bequeathed to the children, there should be a double portion for the heir who accepts primary responsibility for the care of the aged parents. If all of them accept equal responsibility, then all should inherit equal portions. Similarly, the son or daughter who abandons every aspect of this family obligation thereby abandons any moral claim on a share of the inheritance. In a biblical commonwealth, this would also mean abandoning a legal claim. Parents need to make this principle clear to their children. Before the parents are inirm, they should know which children have agreed to accept which burden. This is analogous to an insurance policy. The death beneits paid to the survivors are proportional to the premiums paid. The common Western practice of parents who refuse to talk about the size of the inheritance, the details of the will, and the obligations of the children is biblically perverse. God has set forth this rule of inheritance: rewards are determined by performance. 9. When a man is converted to Christ in a polygamous culture, if he renounces his marriages to all but the irst wife, these abandoned wives would become pariahs in the society. They would have nowhere to go. I know of no denomination or missionary group which requires that a new convert do this to his wives.

584

DEUTERONOMY

This rule applies to each man’s eternal inheritance, too. “Now if any man build upon this foundation gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble; Every man’s work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by ire; and the ire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is. If any man’s work abide which he hath built thereupon, he shall receive a reward” (I Cor. 3:12–14). “Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. For he that soweth to his lesh shall of the lesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting” (Gal. 6:7–8).

Disinheritance by the State In my discussion of the ifth commandment, “Honour thy father and thy mother” (Ex. 20:12a), I pointed out that the modern messianic State has substituted its claims on men’s inheritance for the claims of the true sons. The State has become a pseudo-family, educating children according to its standards and presuppositions, funding health care, paying for men’s retirement, and so forth. To do this, the State must decapitalize the family through taxation. The State, unlike a biblically deined family, does not create wealth. It consumes wealth as it redistributes it from one group to another.10 The State is an interloper in the lawful system of inheritance. It has presented a false claim, and in the twentieth century, men have believed this claim. Through graduated taxation schemes (called “progressive”), the State places an ever-greater economic burden on the more productive members of society. The principle of the tithe is denied. The principle of theft by majority vote is substituted. The State demands the double portion, and far more than the double portion in the case of the rich, in the name of its compulsory programs of healing. This process of disinheritance rests on the covenantal principle that the State is the true son. This disinheritance honors fathers and mothers in the name of the State. It releases children from the burdens of supporting aged and sick parents. But having been persuaded of the legitimacy of this new hierarchy of responsibility, voters cannot morally resist the claim of inheritance. Who is the son who deserves 10. Gary North, The Sinai Strategy: Economics and the Ten Commandments (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1986), ch. 5.

Double Portion, Double Burden

585

the double portion? The one who provides the double portion of support for the aged parents. This means the State. The greater the percentage of support provided by the State, the greater the proportion of the nation’s inheritance that is demanded by the State. Why should men expect anything diferent? The principle of the double portion sets forth the relationship between support and inheritance. For a son to argue that he is completely responsible for his aged parents is to assert a legal and moral claim on the parents’ inheritance. The younger brothers who accept the oldest brother’s ofer have thereby acquiesced to the implication: a forfeited inheritance. Voters do not recognize the cause-and-efect relationship in the State’s ofer of support for the aged. They do not recognize the implicit legal claim which the State is making: reducing the ability of economically successful men to pass on wealth to their heirs. As voters transfer more and more responsibility to the State for the care of the aged, the State steadily becomes the substitute heir.

Conclusion The Mosaic law of inheritance speciied that the allocation of the inheritance was by legal right, not by parental discretion. The irstborn son inherited the double portion. This did not mean that a rebellious irstborn son would inherit a double portion or any portion at all. Both the church and the State had the authority to alter an inheritance through covenantal sanctions: excommunication and death, respectively. This law restricted the right of a father, on his own authority, to alter the inheritance to his sons. The biblical principle of proportional rewards and the biblical principle of proportional obligations were combined in this law. There were reciprocal obligations between fathers and sons. The promise of a double portion of the inheritance imposed the obligation of a double burden of responsibility to care for aged parents. The general principle that the irstborn son should inherit a double portion was honored in the breach from Adam to Jacob’s twelve sons. Firstborn sons did not inherit in many instances. This indicates that there was covenantal rebellion among the oldest sons, generation after generation. This pattern of the rebellious older son who had to be disinherited was continual in Old Covenant history. It culminated with the Jews of Jesus’ day, who resented the heart-felt welcome and celebration given by the Father for the rebellious but repentant younger brother (Luke 15:29–30). The younger brother in

586

DEUTERONOMY

the parable represented the gentiles. The result of this hard-hearted rebellion was the disinheritance of the eldest son. As God’s covenant-keeping irstborn son, Jesus prophetically announced the coming disinheritance of the covenant-breaking irstborn son, Old Covenant Israel: “Therefore say I unto you, The kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof” (Matt. 21:43). The gentiles would soon inherit the kingdom. The church as the gathering of the saints would soon replace Old Covenant Israel as the true son of the covenant. In our day, the State has begun to replace the family as the provider of welfare, from womb to tomb. The State asserts its right to educate the children according to its covenant-breaking religious presuppositions. It has gained this authority by ofering parents free education, i.e., taxpayer-funded education. The State ofers food for the poor, medical care for the young and the aged, and pensions for all. To fund this comprehensive messianic program of social healing, the State has taxed its subjects vastly beyond the limits of the tithe (I Sam. 8:15, 17). Men pay the State a quadruple tithe or more, while Christians pay the church far less than a tithe. One result of the rise of messianic politics has been the disinheritance of covenant-keeping children, as the State has de-capitalized the covenantal family. Another result since the 1940’s has been the wife who works outside the home: forced into the labor market in order to pay these taxes. Without the taxes provided by these working wives, State-run pension systems would already have collapsed in bankruptcy. If they do not collapse in the year 2000, these retirement programs will be revised by the politicians, but then they will collapse later, when the economy itself breaks down, or when working wives retire and demand to collect their pensions. These working women have borne few children – below the demographic replacement rate of 2.1 children per family – so a shrinking work force will be called upon to support these long-lived pensioners. The overburdened taxpaying heirs will eventually rebel politically. Finally, this system of messianic politics has led to the emasculation of the church, which has turned into a beggar.11 This cannot go on indeinitely. And, to cite economist Herbert Stein, trends that cannot continue eventually stop.

11. Gary North, Tithing and the Church (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), ch. 4.

49 EXECUTING ExecutingAa REBELLIOUS Rebellious Son SON If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them: Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place; And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard. And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die: so shalt thou put evil away from among you; and all Israel shall hear, and fear (Deut. 21:18–21).

The theocentric basis of this law is God’s threat of execution against Adam for rebelling against Him. Adam was an adult. He was living on his Father’s property. The mark of his Father’s ownership of both Adam and the world in which Adam dwelled was the forbidden tree. God declared this tree of-limits for Adam. It was not Adam’s property. Adam was under God’s authority because God was his Creator, his Father. Adam should have known that this world belongs to God. As a resident of this world, Adam was required to acknowledge God’s total ownership and universal authority, but Adam rebelled against this arrangement. He would not acknowledge God’s sovereign ownership. Consider the way in which his rebellion took place. He rebelled by eating the forbidden fruit. Consumption in this case was a sin for Adam. The modern free market doctrine known as consumers’ sovereignty, irst articulated in the mid-1930’s by W. H. Hutt,1 1. W. H. Hutt, “The Nature of Aggressive Selling” (1935), in Individual Freedom: Selected Works of William H. Hutt, edited by Svetozar Pejovich and David Klingaman (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 1975), p. 185.

587

588

DEUTERONOMY

in this instance applied to God, not Adam. God, as the tree’s owner, was a consumer: He had separated the tree and its output for Himself. This form of consumer demand is sometimes called reservation demand: demand by the present owner.2 Whatever income the tree might produce in the future belonged exclusively to God. God was absolutely sovereign over this tree. He was absolutely sovereign over all of the trees, of course, but by placing a verbal “no trespassing” sign around one representative tree, God announced His absolute ownership of the earth and its fruits. By authorizing Adam to eat from all other trees, herbs, and animals (Gen. 1:29–30), He announced His sovereign ownership: His right to share His property with others. God’s right to include Adam as a minority shareholder in the creation was publicly revealed by His exclusion of Adam from access to the tree. Adam did not accept his position as a minority shareholder. He wanted exclusive control.3 The tree was forbidden to Adam; so, eating from it was Adam’s way of expressing his rejection of God’s self-asserted authority over Adam and the creation. God then tried Adam in a court of civil law, convicted him, and pronounced the death sentence on him. Nevertheless, God then showed mercy to him by allowing him time to repent, time to bear sons of his own, and time to train them. Time had not yet run out for Adam. But this was all a matter of grace: gifts of God that Adam did not deserve. As the injured party, God had the right to extend mercy to Adam: the biblical judicial principle of victim’s rights.4 Deuteronomy 21:18–21 reveals many of the same characteristics as the account of Adam’s rebellion. There is a hierarchy of parental authority, and a son breaks it. His ethical rebellion is visible in his gluttony: rebellion through undisciplined eating. Adam ate without self-discipline. God tolerated Adam’s rebellion for a while; so do the parents in this passage. Judgment inally came on Adam: he died, 2. Murray N. Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State: A Treatise on Economic Principles (Auburn, Alabama: Mises Institute, [1962] 1993), pp. 213–14, 218. 3. He could not gain majority control. Man serves one of two masters, God or Mammon, i.e., God or Satan. Adam elected as his representative the representative of Satan, i.e., the serpent. Even when man believes that he is the President of the corporation, he is in fact operating under a would-be chairman of the board: Satan. 4. Gary North, Tools of Dominion: The Case Laws of Exodus (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), ch. 7; cf. North, Victim’s Rights: The Biblical View of Civil Justice (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990).

Executing a Rebellious Son

589

just as God had promised. So does this rebellious son. Most important for a clear understanding of this passage, Adam was an adult. So is the son in this passage. This law was not a seed law, relating to the preservation of the tribal system, nor was it a land law. It has to do with universal principles of civil justice and crime prevention. Yet some aspects of it were based on its land law status.

A Matter of Disinheritance This law was a law of disinheritance. Because a father in Mosaic Israel could not legally disinherit a son on his own authority as the head of the household (Deut. 21:15–17), the family had no autonomous means of disinheritance. This was because of the jubilee land law regarding inheritance. One or both of the other two covenantal institutions had to validate the decision of a parent or parents to disinherit a son: church or State. There had to be a joint institutional declaration against him. No one person or institution possessed the exclusive voice of authority in God’s name. There was a balance of authority in Mosaic Israel regarding disinheritance. First, there was reversible disinheritance: ecclesiastical excommunication. The excommunicated son lost his citizenship in Israel. He no longer had legal access to service as a warrior in God’s holy army. He therefore could not be a judge, bringing negative covenantal sanctions in God’s name. In this sense, the excommunicated man had become a covenantal stranger. A stranger could not inherit rural land in Mosaic Israel prior to the return from the Assyrian-Babylonian captivity. This is why excommunication was a form of disinheritance. Because excommunication extends into eternity, this was the most threatening form of disinheritance. Death would seal the priesthood’s eternal death sentence. Second, there was irreversible disinheritance: civil execution. This was the most threatening form of disinheritance in history, but it had no eternal implications. Parents and the State could not speak authoritatively regarding a man’s eternal judicial status; only the Levites could do this. Two-fold disinheritance was eternally permanent: excommunication pronounced judicial sentence historically and eternally, but with the possibility of repentance and the restoration of the

590

DEUTERONOMY

forfeited inheritance; execution removed the common grace of time that could lead to the special grace of repentance.5 The sentence of execution reduced the time available for repentance: from the judges’ announcement of the death sentence until its enforcement. For the rebellious son who was brought before the civil authorities by his parents, time had just about run out. There would be no further common grace extended to him by God through his parents.

What Was the Son’s Crime? A crime is a matter of civil sanctions. Sin may not be. The negative sanction in this case was death: the supreme civil sanction. What, then, was the son’s crime? He was a sinner, surely, but were these sins crimes? If they were crimes, why did the parents have to ile charges against him? Why hadn’t the civil authorities taken independent action against him? To ind the answers, let us go through the steps in this case. The father and mother took their rebellious son before the civil authorities. They informed the authorities of the nature of his infractions: gluttony,6 drunkenness, and disobedience to parents. Hearing this formal covenant lawsuit against the son, the authorities were required by this law to decide in favor of the parents. While they retained the right of cross-examination to verify the facts, the presumption of this law was that the parents had not testiied falsely against their son. Parents may be expected to testify falsely on a son’s behalf, but they rarely bring false charges against him, especially when the penalty is death. This law assumed that parental love was operating as a disincentive to a false accusation. The

5. On common grace, see Gary North, Dominion and Common Grace: The Biblical Basis of Progress (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987). 6. In the most popular Bible in the English-speaking fundamentalist world, the trademarked Scoield Reference Bible (Oxford University Press, 1909), there is no reference in its concordance to gluttony. There are three categories for alcohol abuse: drunk, drunkard, and drunkenness. This reveals a great deal about fundamentalism’s priorities of evil-doing. A 1997 report on the health of Southern Baptist ministers and leaders reported that of some 1,000 attendees at the 1997 Southern Baptist Convention national meeting, 60 percent of them were at least 20 percent overweight, compared with 26 percent of the general public. This was not a random sample, but it was large enough to reveal the presence of a problem. Meanwhile, none of them admitted drinking heavily. Dallas Morning News (Sept. 6, 1997), p. 6 G.

Executing a Rebellious Son

591

accusers therefore had been driven to this extreme remedy by the behavior of their son. The son was an adult. We know this because of the nature of his sins. He was a drunkard and a glutton. Drunkenness is an adult’s sin. In no society that I am aware of has the State ever legalized continual drunkenness for minors. It is clear from the text that the State had no authority to keep him from drinking excessively or eating excessively apart from this formal complaint by his parents – a complaint that necessarily invokes the death penalty. This means that the son was an adult. He would not control himself, and his parents could no longer control him. His refusal to obey them indicates that their threats no longer scared him. It also indicates that they had run out of threats. Physical punishment by his parents was no longer possible because he was an adult. Disinheritance was not much of a threat, as I shall argue, because he had already been disinherited. Another meaningful threat was for them to throw him out of the house, and I shall argue that they were unwilling to do this for a socially valid reason: their fear that he was unsafe to be in society as an autonomous agent. This leaves only the threat of execution. This, too, had failed. Judgment day had come. This son was not a criminal. If he had been, the State could act independently of the parents. He had not behaved violently against his parents. Had he done so, he would already have been executed. The case laws of Exodus set forth the laws of battery and verbal assault against parents: “And he that smiteth his father, or his mother, shall be surely put to death” (Ex. 21:15). “And he that curseth his father, or his mother, shall surely be put to death” (Ex 21:17). So, his rebellion involved a dissolute life style and disobedience to parents. This behavior had become criminal behavior, but only within the context of the family. It was the covenant lawsuit brought by his parents that transformed his sins into crimes. We know that the actions of the son were judicially criminal, for they called forth the death penalty. Yet drunkenness and gluttony are “victimless crimes.” They do not inlict physical damage on contemporaries. But they do inlict damage on the covenant line: the dissipation of the family’s inheritance. Gluttony and drunkenness are assaults on the family’s economic future because they involve the squandering of present resources. These sins of excess transfer wealth from the family that has accumulated it to families that sell

592

DEUTERONOMY

food and drink to the wastrel. The son’s addiction to wine and food threatens the continuity of family capital. His parents seek a way to put a stop to this. But is this transfer of capital a criminal matter? This son was an embarrassment to his parents, but why were his actions matters for the civil court? Why did the court have to execute him? Disobedience to parents is a negative response to positive commands. There had been no parental victim of a verbal assault. He had not stolen from them, beaten them, or in any way threatened them. He had merely ignored their instructions. He was an adult. Was he still required to obey them? On what legal basis could the State execute him? There is a two-fold general principle of biblical civil law: 1) there must be a victim; 2) the State is to prohibit public evil, not make men good. In what way were these parents victims of positive evil? In what way were the sins of drunkenness and gluttony deserving of public execution? The deciding legal issue here was continual disobedience to parents. There is no indication that drunkenness as such was a capital crime in the Mosaic covenant, nor is it a capital crime today. In fact, there is no indication that it is a crime at all. The State has no jurisdiction over drunks who are not threatening other people with bodily injury.7 The same is true of gluttony. It was not illegal to eat too much, nor is it today. Yet this son was to be executed by stoning, the sign of God’s judgment against evil men. If we eliminate drunkenness and gluttony as the joint basis of his conviction, we are left with disobedience to parents. They could not control him. He was a threat to their authority in the household. He was therefore deserving of death. His gluttony and drunkenness were evidence of his disobedience, not the judicial basis of his execution. The issue here was disinheritance: irreversible disinheritance. The parents were so convinced that he was beyond redemption that they were willing to bring him before the civil court for execution. While there is no text that required them irst to seek and gain ecclesiastical excommunication, it is likely that they had already done so. This sanction had failed to gain his obedience to them. They were now bringing him to the inal court of appeal in history in order to transport him into God’s inal court of appeal in eternity. In short, they 7. In today’s world, a drunk driver does threaten others.

Executing a Rebellious Son

593

were acting on behalf of God as lawful covenantal authorities. They were bringing a covenant lawsuit against their son.

Covenantal Authorities A parent is required by God to inlict pain on rebellious young children. “He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes” (Prov. 13:24). “Chasten thy son while there is hope, and let not thy soul spare for his crying” (Prov. 19:18). The parent’s authority to inlict pain on a disobedient child is basic to the family covenant.8 The parent possesses the legal right to impose physical sanctions. That is, he is not to be threatened with civil or ecclesiastical sanctions for beating his child, so long as the degree of punishment its the infraction. This is a fundamental principle of biblical law: the punishment must it the infraction. The family covenant does not authorize the imposition of capital punishment by a parent.9 This is why the Mosaic law required parents to take their rebellious adult son to the ojcers in the gate, i.e., the civil judges. Under the Mosaic covenant, the State clearly had the right to impose the sanction of execution on a son who was brought before it by the parents. More than this: it had an obligation to do so. Yet the son had not committed any physical violence against his parents. If he had, he would have been subject to execution independent of his parents’ formal accusations (Ex. 21:15, 17). Cursing a parent or striking a parent is considered an attack on God and His authority. For the son to escape judgment, his victimized parent would have had to publicly forgive the son for this action. But the son would have been marked as a rebel. Repeated violations would have classiied him as a habitual criminal. As we shall see, this passage implies that habitual criminals in Israel were executed. So, the mandatory execution of Deuteronomy 21 was not for a positive assault by the rebellious son. It was for his disobedience to his parents, as revealed publicly by his drunkenness and his gluttony.

8. This is why modern statist law places legal sanctions on parents who physically beat their children. The messianic State seeks to reserve this monopoly for itself, as the would-be parent of all mankind. 9. Early Roman law did authorize a father to kill his children. In this sense, legalized abortion is more Roman than Christian.

594

DEUTERONOMY

His crime was contumacy: a refusal to obey lawful authority. The parents had lost control over their son, as they admitted publicly: “he will not obey our voice.” In some fundamental way, this man threatened the social order. If the primary agents of discipline had failed, and were willing publicly to acknowledge this, then the State had to intervene. But was execution mandatory? The text indicates that it was. There seems to be no room for mercy. I have argued that this was not a means of disinheriting him. The Levites could have cut him of from his people. In fact, it seems probable that this would already have been done prior to bringing him before the civil government. The church would have cut him of from access to service in God’s holy army. This would have efectively removed his citizenship. He would have had no further rights of inheritance. Then why bring him before the judges? Wasn’t execution a form of judicial overkill? No; it was a means of making permanent his disinheritance in history. It was a means of persuading him to come to grips with the judicial meaning of his prior excommunication: the threat of eternal disinheritance. He had run out of time. He could no longer delay the day of reckoning. By bringing him before the civil court, his parents were telling him: “Behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation” (II Cor. 6:2b).

A Double Witness Both parents had to bring charges against him. This was a capital charge. “At the mouth of two witnesses, or three witnesses, shall he that is worthy of death be put to death; but at the mouth of one witness he shall not be put to death” (Deut. 17:6). In ecclesiastical proceedings for excommunication, the father had the right to bring the son to the Levites for judgment. The preceding passage deals with the eldest son of the irst wife, the unloved wife. Reuben, the son of Leah, was the model.10 Mosaic law was concerned about inheritance. There had to be a valid reason for any disinheritance. The reason was covenant-breaking. A father did not possess the independent authority to make this determination with respect to the family covenant. Excommunication had to be pronounced by an authorized ecclesiastical ojcer. 10. Jacob made this determination on his own authority as both father and household priest, since this was before there was a separate tribe of priests (Gen. 49).

Executing a Rebellious Son

595

Under such circumstances, the mother of the accused son might have opposed her husband’s judgment. She might not have been willing to bring formal charges against her son. But the father still had the right to bring such charges for the sake of preserving the inheritance. But it was not for him unilaterally to decide judicially whether his son would inherit under the Mosaic law. In contrast to the laws governing excommunication, it took a double witness to invoke the capital sanction. This was a matter of the right of inheritance: irreversible disinheritance. The parents had decided to cut of further mercy.

Preserving the Family Name This son was still under their household jurisdiction. Presumably, he had already been excommunicated. He was no longer a citizen of Israel. He was judicially a stranger in the land. But his parents still allowed him to live in their household. In other words, they were showing mercy to him, just as God had continued to show mercy to his disinherited son, Adam. The son could no longer inherit, but he might repent. The parents had not thrown him out of their household. This was a prodigal son who had not gone into another nation to spend his inheritance, for he possessed no inheritance. He was nonetheless a prodigal. Whatever assets he gained through working he spent on strong drink and food. This son was not merely a slow learner; he was a non-learner. He was not merely a son of Adam; he was a son of Cain. This was a threat to the parents: because their son was a resident in their household, they would have been liable for his actions outside the home. Household authority in a patriarchy was very great under the Old Covenant. The father was considered the head of his household. Thus, those who lived under his lawful authority placed him at economic risk. Their law-breaking might result in legal claims against him. His son’s drunken behavior might threaten the non-landed inheritance of the other children. The parents of an excommunicated son had two ways of reducing their legal liability: send him out of their household or have him removed through execution. Presumably, sending him away was the easiest way. This granted him time for his possible repentance. It would also have severed the legal tie to him which his continued presence in their household created. In this instance, however, the parents decided that he was too rebellious to be sent into society. It was therefore not just a matter of

596

DEUTERONOMY

their legal liability for his actions, which could be removed by sending him away. Something more crucial than economic liability was involved. He was a potential threat to society. He was a disgrace to the family name. To preserve the integrity of the family’s name, they could take him before the judges, present their case against him, and have him executed. The parents made a joint decision: this son deserved to die. His rebellion against them had become a way of life. His rebelliousness was a pattern of behavior. He was a habitual rebel. His drinking and eating habits testiied to this. He was in bondage to sin. He was not it to be sent into society. As his parents, they had the joint authority to make this determination. The civil magistrates were required to enforce this decision. The civil magistrates had to accept the testimony of the parents when supported by independent evidence: the son’s eating and drinking habits. They had to acknowledge the authority of the parents to protect society and the family name by removing their rebellious son from any further mercy. If parents believed that their son was both incorrigible and a threat to society, their assessment had to be honored by the State.

Supporting Family Authority Heads of household in Israel were not allowed to impose the covenantal sanctions of excommunication or execution. These covenant sanctions were outside of their lawful sphere of authority. Because the ultimate physical sanction of execution was prohibited to them, they lacked a powerful negative sanction. They also could not impose the maximum sanction of excommunication. Presumably, the Levites had already done this. Nevertheless, their son was still a rebel. They still could not control him. If the three sanctions of excommunication, revocation of citizenship, and reversible disinheritance had not thrown the fear of God into him, what would? The fear of execution: irreversible disinheritance. Without this, he could not be controlled. The parents could not impose this sanction on their own authority. But without this threat, they could not maintain control in their own household. They had to be backed up by the civil government, which possessed the authority to impose this sanction. So, in this case, the State became the supporting agency of parental authority. The parents were restrained by law from imposing the ultimate remaining sanction. Somebody had to.

Executing a Rebellious Son

597

The parents had decided that this son was not it to be released into society without being under family jurisdiction, and they were no longer willing to accept this responsibility. He was too great a liability. They could no longer control him, and they also could no longer risk keeping him under their legal authority. The church could not control him. Who could? The State. The State had to be called in to support the judgment of his parents: he was not it to stay alive. If parents were willing to say this in public, their judgment had to be honored. The State had to execute him. This was a two-fold matter of preserving family authority and preserving public safety. What was his crime? Contumacy. He had rebelled so continually against family authority that this constituted a threat to society. His family possessed the authority to tell him to quit practicing evils that fell short of public actions that were subject to civil sanctions. The State could do nothing on its own authority to stop him from excessive drinking and eating apart from this formal accusation by his parents. To keep State authority on a tight chain, the Mosaic law did not authorize the State to execute people for drunkenness and gluttony. Therefore, in order to reinforce family authority, the Mosaic law granted to parents the right to invoke the permanent civil sanction against their son. Neither covenantal institution could impose this sanction on its own authority. This kept both forms of authority in check. It took joint action on the part of both covenantal authorities to remove a rebellious son. Because of the nature of authority in Mosaic Israel, the church presumably had already imposed its ultimate sanction: excommunication. The text does not reveal this, but we can safely presume that the parents would not have resorted to this inal declaration of their inability to control their son unless the church had also failed in its attempt to support family authority.

Another Heir The heads of a household had an enormous responsibility in Mosaic Israel. They were asked to subordinate the traditional and nearly universal bonds of parental afection to the larger purpose of defending God’s law. One aspect of this defense was the preservation of family capital. A wastrel son was dissipating family capital

598

DEUTERONOMY

and, by implication, the family line. The parents were called on by God to put an end to this destruction of the family line.11 They were to call on the State to destroy the destroyer. This meant that there had to be another heir through whom family capital could be extended. This family was in a situation analogous to Adam and Eve after Cain killed Abel. While God protected Cain from execution, He also removed him from his parents’ presence. A new son, Seth, became the heir of his parents. Through Seth came the covenant line. A similar problem faced the parents of a rebellious son. If they had no other son, then they would either have to pray for one or else adopt one. The point is, it took faith in God’s plan to bring a rebellious son before the civil rulers. It took faith in the appearance of a replacement heir. Parents would have to place obedience to God’s law over bloodline inheritance in the extension of the family’s legacy through time.

Family, Society, and State This degree of religious faith is rarely present in any family. Families are normally highly protective of their members. They place members inside a shield of toleration and protection from outside criticism. They resist the intrusion of outsiders who would bring a covenant lawsuit against a member. But God’s law requires parents not only to avoid such defensive arrangements but actually to initiate the covenant lawsuit against a wastrel son. This act of covenantal judgment visibly places the family under God’s law. The State has no independent authority to initiate this covenant lawsuit. It must wait on the parents to do their duty. The magistrates must order the execution of the son on the word of the parents. The authority of the two witnesses must be respected. The witnesses act as agents of the court. Parents in Israel who refused to do their duty faced a choice: 1) continue to protect the wastrel, thereby placing family capital at risk, either through his dissipating ways or through lawsuits brought against them as responsible agents over him when he commits a crime; or 2) send him out into society on his own, thereby placing others at risk. Parents may have decided that the former decision 11. The heirs of such a man would likely become covenant-breakers. They would die in their sins.

Executing a Rebellious Son

599

was too risky for family capital, but the second choice shifted the risk to outsiders. The law was clear: parents were not to do this. They were to protect society by delivering their son up for execution. They were to subordinate family ties to the glory of God and the needs of lawabiding society. Apart from a radical transformation of men’s allegiance and understanding, it is unlikely that most family heads will ever do their duty in this regard. Rather, they will subordinate society to family ties. But when they do this, they transfer power to the State. They defer to the State the responsibility of bringing a covenant lawsuit against a known wastrel. But before the State can lawfully bring a covenant lawsuit against him, there must be a victim. He must harm someone. Thus, the unwillingness of families to subordinate their interests to God’s law leads to an increase of crime and social disorder. Those who knew that a wastrel is dangerous to society have nonetheless sent him out into society. They have washed their hands of him by sending a potential wolf among sheep. In doing so, they have raised the risk of harm to others. Parents are society’s irst line of defense against evil. This law makes it clear just how important parental responsibility is, and just how burdensome. Parents must subordinate their love for their son to the law of God and the needs of society. They must place God’s interest above family interests. Jesus said: “He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me” (Matt. 10:37). This law indicates that Jesus was drawing upon an Old Covenant principle when he announced His judgment against the cult of the family.12

Rushdoony’s Interpretation: Juvenile Delinquency Rushdoony discusses this passage in several places in The Institutes of Biblical Law. He says that this passage refers to “incorrigible juvenile delinquents.”13 He repeats this in a section dealing with the Fifth Commandment: “The Economics of the Family.”14 He discusses

12. Cf. Gary North, Baptized Patriarchalism: The Cult of the Family (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), pp. 1–3. 13. R. J. Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law (Nutley, New Jersey: Craig Press, 1973), p. 77. 14. Ibid., p. 180.

600

DEUTERONOMY

15

this law at length in the section on “The Family and Delinquency.” He cites it when discussing family authority and law enforcement. “The family very clearly has a serious role in law enforcement. The family is a law-order and disciplines its members. The nature and extent of the family’s punishing power can be seen by looking again at a text previously considered, Deuteronomy 21:18–21, the death penalty for juvenile delinquents. There are certain very important aspects to this law. First, the parents are to be complaining witnesses against their criminal son. The loyalty of the parents must thus be to God’s law-order, not to ties of blood. If the parents do not assist in the prosecution of a criminal child, they are then accessories to the crime. Second, contrary to the usual custom, whereby witnesses led in the execution, in this case, ‘the men of the city’ did. Thus, where the death penalty was involved, the family was excluded from the execution of the law.”16 But this law went beyond mere family authority, he says. It extended to society at large: the prevention of the creation of a criminal class. He writes: Third, as we have seen, incorrigible juvenile delinquents were to be executed (Deut. 21:18–21), and also all habitual criminals. Such persons were thus blotted out of the commonwealth. When and if this law is observed, ungodly families who are given to lawlessness are denied a place in the nation. The law thus clearly works to eliminate all but the godly families.17 Clearly, then, the intent of this law is that all incorrigible and habitual criminals be executed. If a criminal son is to be executed, how much more so a neighbor or fellow Hebrew who has become an incorrigible criminal? If the family must align itself with the execution of an incorrigibly delinquent son, will it not demand the death penalty of an habitual criminal in the community? . . . The purpose of this law is to eliminate entirely a criminal element from the nation, a professional criminal class. . . . Biblical law does not recognize a professional criminal element: the potentially habitual criminal must be executed as soon as he gives plain evidence of this fact.18

In the United States in the inal decade of the twentieth century, gangs of teenage boys have become the single major source of 15. 16. 17. 18.

Ibid., pp. 185–99. Ibid., pp. 359–60. Ibid., p. 380. Ibid., pp. 187–88.

Executing a Rebellious Son

601

crime. These gangs are masters of the illegal drug trade. They are spreading across the nation, replacing the Mafia and other traditional criminal syndicates. They are well organized and dijcult for law enforcement authorities to penetrate. The breakdown of family authority in the inner cities has led to a replacement institution: the gang. The gang provides community, authority, commitment, and income. It is bound by a self-maledictory covenant oath. The gang has become the primary agency of physical sanctions in the predominantly non-white inner cities. These developments were implied in Rushdoony’s analysis of this passage, which he ofered a decade prior to the public’s recognition of the plague of gang life. Yet his actual exposition is ignored by ignorant or willfully perverse Christian critics of theonomy who imagine that they are more humane than God, let alone Rushdoony. “Theonomists would execute little children!” they cry in horror, never bothering to read Rushdoony’s clear statements regarding this law, never considering the threat of juvenile delinquency to residents of inner cities. In the white middle-class safety of the suburbs,19 critics issue smug dismissals of theonomy in the name of tender little children. (When they are mugged in a parking lot, however, they call on the State to imprison these teenage thugs and throw away the key.) They impugn God by impugning Rushdoony. They ridicule God’s law by ridiculing their version of what they think Rushdoony says. They do not attempt to exegete Deuteronomy 21:18–20; they just continue to cry out, “The theonomists would execute little children.” The ancient heresy of Marcionism is with us still: the belief that an evil God gave us the Old Covenant, but a loving God gave us the New Testament. The critics of theonomy never put things quite this bluntly, but what they write and say about the capital crimes and sanctions of the Mosaic law indicates that they believe it.

Adult Contumacy My interpretation is diferent from Rushdoony’s. I do not think the son was a juvenile delinquent. He was a delinquent, but he was no juvenile. In today’s usage, “juvenile delinquent” means “a convicted

19. Possibly a temporary condition of safety.

602

DEUTERONOMY

criminal who is not old enough to be dealt with by civil law as an adult, and who is therefore under milder civil sanctions.” This was not the legal status of the son in this passage. He was not yet an identiiable criminal. He had not broken any civil laws. He had not been convicted of any crime. Here was his legal status: he was under his parents’ legal authority; he was a glutton and a drunkard; he would not obey his parents; and they could not control him by means of family sanctions. Presumably, he was also an excommunicant. He was on the road to perdition, and he was a disgrace to the family name. His parents believed that he was too dangerous to be sent into society as a disinherited stranger. Before he committed any crime, his parents brought him to the civil authorities to have him executed. This means that merely by his continual refusal to obey them, coupled with the marks of uncontrollable behavior – gluttony and drunkenness – he had committed a capital crime. This in turn means that open, wilful, publicly visible rebellion against joint parental authority is a crime equal to murder, for the civil sanction is the same. It was not gluttony and drunkenness that constituted his crime; it was his long-term rebellion against family authority while living under that authority. This was Adam’s crime, too: eating what his Father had prohibited. He died for this sin. I disagree with Rushdoony’s argument that this son was a juvenile delinquent. This was an adult who was still living in his parents’ household. I do agree with his conclusion that this law, when enforced, would restrict the formation of a criminal class. This law and its capital sanction serves as a model of the biblically mandatory hostility that a godly society must have against habitual criminal behavior. If parents are not to tolerate continual rebellion against family authority, to the point of demanding that their son be executed by stoning, how much less toleration should society show toward incorrigible breakers of the civil law! If loving parents must be willing to bring a capital covenant lawsuit against their own lesh and blood, how much more ready must citizens be to rid society of habitual criminals! If it is a capital crime for a man to drink too much and eat too much and disobey his parents in the privacy of their home, then it surely is a capital crime to be convicted of a third or fourth felony. The government should not lock up incorrigible felons and throw away the key. It should execute them. As the Bible says about the rebellious son, “And all the men of his city shall stone

Executing a Rebellious Son

603

him with stones, that he die: so shalt thou put evil away from among you; and all Israel shall hear, and fear” (Deut. 21:21). If all Israel was to fear becoming a rebellious son, surely every Israelite was to fear becoming a habitual felon.

Illegal Drugs and the Messianic State Today, men and women around the world call upon the State to deal with drug dealers. They do so in the name of their children. They cry out to the State: “We cannot control our children. They are addicted. They steal from us. They lie to us. They rebel against our authority continually. Therefore, we must arrest drug dealers, convict them, imprison them, and throw away the key!” What they do not say is this: “This our son is stubborn and rebellious; he will not obey our voice. He is a drug addict. Stone him to death. So shall other people’s sons learn to fear.” The State responds to political pressure by passing innumerable laws against addictive drugs. Nevertheless, the addiction spreads. The State takes away more and more civil liberties, especially privacy, in the name of the war on drugs. Nevertheless, this war is visibly being lost. The public believes that the sale of addictive drugs should be made illegal. What the public does not believe is that their own sons and daughters are making self-conscious decisions to spend money on substances that will addict them, knowing full well that these drugs are dangerously addictive. They see their children as ill-informed. It is the parents who are ill-informed; their children know a great deal about drugs. This is not an information problem. It is a moral problem. It is also an incentive problem: lack of fear of the legal consequences. Children in the West have wealth at their disposal greater than what the rebellious son possessed. Sons and daughters in today’s world of unprecedented wealth have great purchasing power. They are nevertheless wilfully destroying themselves, squandering their inheritance, not in some far country, as the prodigal son did, but in the bedrooms of their parents’ homes. They are perfect examples of the rebellious son of Deuteronomy 21. Here is why the drug trade lourishes: parents have given their children enormous wealth without guidance or restrictions and have sent them into the government’s tax-funded schools, which have become the primary marketplace for drugs, especially in the early stages of addiction. The modern public school is a State-funded drug

604

DEUTERONOMY

emporium. Students have accepted the religion of humanism that the public schools proclaim: the Darwinian story of man as the heir of beasts and meaningless cosmic chance. They have learned their school lessons well. They now celebrate the religion of humanism with the high ejciency tools of the “cool” drunkard: mind-altering drugs. Instead of cutting of their children’s funds, pulling them out of the public schools, and monitoring their daily activities from morning to night, parents call for more government spending on drug rehabilitation programs, more government money for drug education programs in the public schools, and more government money for drug enforcement programs. In short, they call for more of the same: more humanism, more statism, and more prisons. The parents believe in the religious precept of classical Greece, which is taught in the public schools, namely, that man’s problem is educational rather than moral, that man can be saved through law and legislation. The parents worship at the altar of the messianic State and wonder why their children are tempted by drugs. The key issue here is not the question of the legalization of drugs. That question should be dealt with by comparing the degree of addiction with other addictive drugs, such as tobacco, which have been legalized for adults. The question here is the primary locus of enforcement. The biblical locus of law enforcement is the family. The Bible acknowledges that the institution with the lowest cost of obtaining accurate information should be the initial law enforcing agent. This is obviously the family in cases of gluttony, drunkenness, and drug addiction. Any attempt by parents to shift the locus of primary responsibility to either school or State is illegitimate. Similarly, if we diferentiate between the teenage child and the adult child, calling for reduced penalties for the child because of the child’s lack of maturity – as we do with tobacco sales – then the penalty could be less than stoning. It might be public whipping: more lashes for students who had sold drugs to inance their habits than for inal users. The point is, there has to be a severe public sanction against such rebellious behavior as drug addiction. If parents are unwilling to bring their rebellious children before the magistrates in the name of God, the family’s name, and the protection of society, then we can expect the drug plague to continue along with the steady disappearance of our freedoms.

Executing a Rebellious Son

605

This passage in Deuteronomy ofers a solution: execution of rebellious heirs. But modern man is too humane for this. Too human. Too humanistic. He prefers living under the messianic State to living under biblical law. He prefers statism to family responsibility. He prefers a growing international criminal class built on drug proits to bringing a capital covenant lawsuit against his own rebellious child. He is ready to send all drug dealers to prison for decades until the day he is told that his child supported his or her habit by luring other men’s children into the heartless addiction; then he cries out for a tax-inanced drug rehabilitation program rather than prison for his supposedly victimized child. He prefers a massive and costly prison system that clearly is not working to low-budget whipping or stoning that would work very well. In the inal analysis, he would rather see his adult child stoned on drugs than stoned by magistrates. He ignores the Bible’s warnings: “Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap” (Gal. 6:7).

Conclusion The law governing the rebellious adult son was a law supporting family authority. The magnitude of the civil sanction against this son indicates the severity of the crime and the importance of preserving family authority. But this law had social implications as well. It was a law that ofered protection to society from an organized criminal class. This law was a step beyond the negative sanction of excommunication, which governed citizenship and therefore inheritance. Inheritance in Old Covenant Israel was an aspect of the seed laws and the land laws. It also had to do with eligibility to serve in God’s holy army. This law seems to have been a law governing an excommunicated, disinherited son, although no text explicitly says this. The parents had run out of negative sanctions other than sending him away from the household, which they regarded as too risky for society. They had to appeal to the State to impose the maximum negative sanction that remained to be imposed on rebels. This law had to do with three things: family authority, disinheritance, and the protection of the general public. The parents, who were legally able to remove him both geographically and legally from the economic beneits of their household, refused to do this. They must have believed that it was not safe to remove him from their judicial authority

606

DEUTERONOMY

as a member of their household. They feared that he would become a threat to society. Thus, to preserve the integrity of the family name and to protect society from a lawless rebel who had not yet become a habitual criminal but who probably would if he was out from under their authority, they brought charges against him in a civil court. The court had to impose the death penalty, given the testimony of the parents and the evidence of both his gluttony and drunkenness. There is no indication that this law has been annulled by the New Covenant. It was neither a seed law (tribal) nor a land law. There was a need for his execution in order to preserve the family’s good name and to protect society. Without the willingness of a few parents to take this extreme measure, rebellious adult sons would learn not to fear their parents. These dedicated parents, who placed God’s law, family authority, family reputation, covenantal inheritance, and social safety above their own emotional commitment to their son’s biological survival, would serve as representatives for the whole society. The actual execution of a rebellious son would reinforce parental authority in many families. These goals have not changed with the coming of the New Covenant. In today’s world, the son might be a drug addict rather than a drunken glutton. The point is, he must be visibly out of control. But there must be a two-fold witness against his rebellion. It is not sujcient that he be out of control, though not a law-breaker, for the State to execute him. It is also not sujcient for the parents to bring charges against him. There must be a two-fold witness against him: 1) two parents testifying to his rebellion and 2) publicly veriiable evidence of either his unwillingness or inability to control his own actions. There has been one major alteration in the application of this law, however. The New Covenant has increased the responsibility of daughters. Daughters are baptized. They are placed under the covenant’s dual sanctions: blessing and cursing. Daughters can inherit if they agree to bear the responsibility of caring for aged parents.20 To limit the application of this law to sons is illegitimate today. If daughters are rebellious, inancially able to become drunkards and gluttons or crack-cocaine addicts, and are still living under

20. See Chapter 48: subsection on “Sons and Daughters.”

Executing a Rebellious Son

607

their parents’ household jurisdiction, then there is no judicial reason for them not to come under this law. Ever since the publication of Rushdoony’s Institutes of Biblical Law in 1973, critics of biblical law have repeatedly focused on this law as the sign that theonomy is perverse. In private conversations, I have heard this biblical passage invoked more often than any other as evidence that theonomy is heartless and cruel. Yet the critics never cite Rushdoony’s argument that this was a law against the formation of a criminal class. Instead, they cite – and condemn – only the law itself. The critics’ theological problem is this: their belief that the Old Covenant God must have been heartless and cruel. They hold the Marcionite dogma. Again and again, we hear the refrain: “Theonomists would execute little children!”21 It is time for this misinterpretation to end. But it won’t. It is too convenient a rhetorical device for modern-day Marcionites to resist.

21. I once received a letter from a Westminster Seminary graduate who had not been ofered a job. He wanted me to hire him. He also wanted Bahnsen to hire him. He misspelled Rushdoony’s name in his ajrmation that he was familiar with theonomy, although not yet willing to subscribe to theonomy. I mentioned the possibility that I might be willing to hire him and his wife to run a day care facility. He wrote back that his wife found it odd that anyone who believed in stoning children was ready to start a day care. Needless to say, I did not hire him. His verbally clever but theologically ill-informed wife cost them an opportunity to begin a potentially lucrative and satisfying career with my money. His wife was simply repeating what has become a common misrepresentation of the theonomic interpretation of this passage.

50 LOST FOUND LostAND and Found Thou shalt not see thy brother’s ox or his sheep go astray, and hide thyself from them: thou shalt in any case bring them again unto thy brother. And if thy brother be not nigh unto thee, or if thou know him not, then thou shalt bring it unto thine own house, and it shall be with thee until thy brother seek after it, and thou shalt restore it to him again. In like manner shalt thou do with his ass; and so shalt thou do with his raiment; and with all lost things of thy brother’s, which he hath lost, and thou hast found, shalt thou do likewise: thou mayest not hide thyself. Thou shalt not see thy brother’s ass or his ox fall down by the way, and hide thyself from them: thou shalt surely help him to lift them up again (Deut. 22:1–4).

These laws governing lost property were extensions of Exodus 23:4–5: “If thou meet thine enemy’s ox or his ass going astray, thou shalt surely bring it back to him again. If thou see the ass of him that hateth thee lying under his burden, and wouldest forbear to help him, thou shalt surely help with him.” These were not seed laws nor land laws. They were cross-boundary laws. As I wrote in Tools of Dominion regarding the Exodus passage, these laws, since they deal with property, were governed by the theocentric principle of God as the cosmic Owner. He has delegated ownership of selected portions of His property to individuals and organizations, so that they might work out their salvation or damnation with fear and trembling (Phil. 2:12). Because God has delegated responsibility for the care and use of His property to speciic individuals or organizations, who are held responsible for its management, non-owners are required by God to

608

Lost and Found

609

honor this distribution of ownership and its associated responsibilities.1 This includes even the return of lost property to its owner. What these laws mandate is the public’s recognition that all ownership is delegated and therefore representative. Ownership means lawful delegated control over the use of a scarce economic resource. The stranger who inds a lost item becomes a delegated owner working on behalf of the property’s two owners: God and the delegated owner. There is a new hierarchy of ownership: God > legally responsible title holder > discoverer. The discoverer is under the greatest legal constraints governing the use of the property because he does not hold title, yet he now possesses physical control over the property. The fundamental principle of all biblical government is this: with power comes responsibility. The discoverer cannot legally escape responsibility before God, for God has transferred to the discoverer a temporary, though highly restrictive, administrative legal title. This is why the law does not identify the discoverer as a thief. Because these laws are so similar to the Exodus laws, I reproduce here much of Chapter 25 of Tools of Dominion. Some readers may not own a copy of my earlier book. It may be inconvenient for them to locate a copy. It is easy for me to reprint what I wrote there, but with a few modiications. The Exodus case laws single out enemies. These do not. The Exodus law regarding the lost animal is the stronger law because it deals with an animal owned by an enemy. The Deuteronomy version is more general: the inder may not know who owns the wandering beast. Because of his lack of information, he is required to expend resources to care for the animal until the owner claims them. The inder’s lack of information leads to expenses associated with caretaking. In this regard, this case law is also an extension of the caretaking law.2 I focus here on the law regarding the lost animal, although the same principles of responsible administration govern all forms of lost property. Consider the law of the fallen animal. It is a simple case: help the animal. It does not matter who its owner is. This assistance is a charitable subsidy to both the animal and its owner. It

1. Gary North, Tools of Dominion: The Case Laws of Exodus (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), p. 774. 2. Ibid., ch. 20.

610

DEUTERONOMY

creates good feelings. A good deed done on behalf of the fallen animal should be seen by the owner as a sign of the helper’s righteousness. It testiies to the helper’s commitment to God’s law. Because the law of the fallen animal is an uncomplicated law, I do not devote much space to discussing it. Let us consider more carefully the law governing the lost animal. There are several beneicial results of this moral law whenever it is widely obeyed. First, it upholds the sanctity of the legal rights of property owners. Second, it reasserts man’s legitimate control over the animal creation. Third, it increases the bonds of friendship among men with a common confession of faith. Fourth, the passage of time makes it easier to identify thieves. Fifth, it provides an incentive to develop marks of private ownership, such as brands on animals. This law is not a civil law. Biblical civil law invokes only negative sanctions against public evil. This is because the State is not an agent of salvation. It cannot lawfully seek to make men good. It is limited to imposing negative sanctions that will make men’s evil acts more expensive, thereby reducing the number of evil acts. If the State mandated charity, civil law would become a source of positive sanctions. But these laws, like the laws of Exodus 23:4–5, are positive, charitable injunctions.

Owner’s Rights There is a rhyme that English-speaking children chant, “Finders, keepers; losers, weepers.” When one child inds a toy or possession of another, he torments the owner with this chant. Yet his very chanting testiies to the fact that the tormenter really does not believe in his own ethical position. If he really wanted to keep the object, he would not admit to the victim that he had found it. He would forego the joys of tormenting the victim for the pleasure of keeping the object. The tormented can always appeal to his own parents, who will then go to the parents of the tormenter. In Western society, most parents know that the discovered object is owned by the loser. From time to time, someone discovers a very valuable lost object, such as a sack of paper money that dropped out of an armored car. When he returns it to the owner, the newspapers record the story. Invariably, the doer of the good deed receives a series of telephone calls and letters from anonymous people who inform him that he was a fool, that he should have kept the money. Again, this is

Lost and Found

611

evidence of the West’s dominant ethical position: the critics prefer to remain anonymous.

The Right of Disposal From a legal standpoint, the reason why the law requires the inder to return the lost item to the owner is that the owner owns the rights of use and disposal of the property. What is owned is the right to exclude other people from using the property. This “bundle of rights” is the essence of ownership. The capitalist system is not based on “property rights”; it is based on some person’s legal right to control the use and disposal of property. Nothing inheres in the property that gives these rights. There is another familiar phrase, “possession is nine-tenths of the law.” This is incorrectly stated, if by “possession” we mean physical control over some object. The possession which is nine-tenths of the law is the possession of the legal right to exclude, not possession of the physical object itself. The object does not carry this legal right with it when it wanders of or is lost by the owner. We can see this easily when we consider the case of a lost child. The fact that someone discovers a lost child obviously transfers no legal right to keep the child. The child is to be returned to the parents or to the civil authorities who act as legal agents of the parents. Possession is clearly not nine-tenths of the law. If anything, possession of a long-lost child subjects a person to the threat of being charged with kidnapping. Because God is the ultimate owner of mankind, He has delegated the legal right to control children to parents, except in cases of physical abuse by parents which threatens the life of the child. In short, parental sovereignty is nine-tenths of the law, not merely possession of physical control over a particular child. When someone who discovers another person’s property is required by God to return it to its owner, there can be no doubt concerning the Bible’s commitment to the private ownership of the means of production. Biblical moral law, when obeyed, produces a capitalist economic order. Socialism is anti-biblical. Where biblical moral law is self-enforced, and biblical civil law is publicly enforced, capitalism must develop. One reason why so many modern Christian college professors in the social sciences are vocal in their opposition to biblical law is that they are deeply inluenced by socialist economic thought. They recognize clearly that their socialist

612

DEUTERONOMY

conclusions are incompatible with biblical law, so they have aban3 doned biblical law.

Dominion Through Judgment This case law extends man’s dominion over nature: domesticated animals are not to “run wild.” They are under man’s care and protection. This reasserts man’s place under God but above the animals: point two of the biblical covenant model, hierarchy.4 A lost animal can damage other people’s property (Ex. 22:5). It can wander into a pit and get hurt or killed (Ex. 21:33–34). It can injure men or other animals (Ex. 21:35–36). To have a domesticated lost animal wandering without any form of supervision testiies against the dominion covenant. It is a sign that God’s required moral and hierarchical order has broken down. It is an aspect of God’s curse when beasts inherit the land (Ex. 23:29). In short, animals that are capable of being domesticated require supervision by man. No man’s knowledge is perfect. Men can lose control over their domestic work animals. When they do, it becomes a moral responsibility for other men to intervene and restore hierarchical order. This is done for the sake of biblical social order: 1) for the individual who has lost control over his animal and who is legally responsible for any damage that it might perform, and 2) for the sake of the animal. A domesticated animal such as an ox is a capital asset, a tool of production. Mankind’s development of tools of production is the basis of economic growth. The loss of a trained work animal reduces its owner’s ability to subdue his portion of the earth. This sets back the fulillment of God’s dominion covenant with mankind. This loss of production reduces the per capita economic growth of the whole community, even though this corporate loss may not be large enough to be perceived by men. The person who inds a lost animal is required to restore it to the owner, even though this involves economic sacriice on his part. In the long run, this implicit sanctioning of privately owned capital will produce increased wealth for all. 3. A good example of such antinomian socialist reasoning is John Gladwin, “Centralist Economics,” in Robert Clouse (ed.), Wealth and Poverty: Four Christian Views of Economics (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1984), ch. 4. See also my response, ibid., pp. 198–203. 4. Ray R. Sutton, That You May Prosper: Dominion By Covenant (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1992), ch. 2.

Lost and Found

613

The biblical imagery of the lost sheep of Israel is indicative of the central concern of the Bible: the restoration of moral and legal order, the overcoming of sin and its efects. The lost sheep in history need a shepherd. They are wandering toward destruction. God intervenes and brings them home. The New Testament imagery of Jesus as the good shepherd points to the theme of restoration. Even if biblical civil law mandated private charity – negative sanctions on one person for the sake of positive sanctions to another – it would be close to impossible to gain a court’s conviction against anyone who ignores this law and lets the animal continue to wander. There would have to be at least two witnesses. The accused person could claim that he had never noticed the animal or any other lost object. It is also dijcult to imagine what civil penalties might be attached to this law. We therefore should conclude that the enforcement of this law is based on self-government under God’s law. The person who returns a lost object to its owner is demonstrating that he has acted out of concern for God’s law, not out of concern for civil sanctions. He is a person who exercises self-government under God’s law. Again, it becomes more dijcult to entertain suspicions about his overall ulterior motives. Let us assume that the discoverer found the animal in his garden or his ields. He wants to get it away from his crops. He is not allowed by law to kill it. It is not responsible for its actions. To get it away from his crops, he must either take it down to the edge of his property and shoo it away, or else he must place it in a pen or other restrictive area. To keep from losing wealth because of its unrestricted access to his crops, he must go to the trouble of placing it under restraints. If he wants to be reimbursed for the crops it consumed or any damage it caused, he must locate its owner. The economics of a wandering beast in a biblical commonwealth provides incentives, both positive and negative, for the righteous man to become a caretaker of the lost animal. The person who steals an animal and is immediately arrested could ofer this excuse: “I found this animal wandering in the area, and I was simply returning it to its owner. I did not know who owned it, so I was taking it home until I could make further inquiries.” This excuse might work once or twice. It would not be a suitable excuse three or four times. A person who lives in a society that has developed an information reporting system, in order to avoid suspicion, must report the whereabouts of lost articles to the civil

614

DEUTERONOMY

authorities if he does not know who the owner is. Thus, as time passes, the “excuse of the wandering animal” fades. The owner who discovers his animal in another’s possession has a far stronger legal case than if this case law were not in God’s law-order. A lost animal is not supposed to remain indeinitely in another person’s possession, especially after the person who lost it announces its absence publicly. “Thou shalt bring it unto thine own house, and it shall be with thee until thy brother seek after it.”

Marks of Ownership and Reduced Search Costs This case law makes it far more likely that lost property will be immediately returned to a known owner. Thus, obeying this law increases the economic return from marking property. This is an economic incentive to extend the principle of owner’s rights. A person’s legal claim to property is secured at a lower cost through a mark of ownership. When anything can be obtained at a lower price, more of it will be demanded than before. This is why marks of ownership are important factors in extending the free market social order. When more people own property and thereby secure the stream of income that assets provide, they will ind it in their self-interest to defend the principle of owner’s rights. By marking property, the owner reduces future search costs, both his search for the animal and the inder’s search for the owner. The mark also reduces search costs for a neighbor whose crops have been eaten or ruined by a wandering beast. He can then gain restitution from the owner (Ex. 22:5). Branding also reduces search costs for the civil authorities if the animal should be stolen. By burning an identifying mark into an animal’s lesh, or by attaching a tag to its ear or other lesh, the owner increases risks for the thief. This also increases risks for those who would buy from the thief. The identifying mark makes it possible for the buyer to avoid the possibility that he will be charged with having received stolen property. Also, the mark reduces the buyer’s risk of being forced by law to return the property to the owner, leaving the buyer with neither the stolen property nor his money.5

5. The victimized buyer would have a legal claim against the thief, but the victimized property owner has irst claim: double restitution.

Lost and Found

615

God’s use of circumcision in the Old Testament era is an obvious parallel to the brand. So was the hole punched in the ear of a voluntary lifetime servant (Ex. 21:6). These were both marks of ownership. The New Testament practice of baptism leaves no visible mark, but it leaves a legal description in the records of a continuing third party institution, the church. Baptism is also a mark of God’s primary ownership. The same is true of property registration generally. Titles, deeds, and other marks of legal ownership have developed over the centuries, thereby extending the dominion of mankind through the development of the institution of private property. By identifying legal owners, society increases the level of personal responsibility. This, too, is a fundamental biblical goal.

Not a Case of State-Enforced Charity The discoverer must sacriice time and efort to see to it that the property is returned to its owner. This might be seen as a form of judicially mandated charity, one of the few examples of compulsory charity in the Bible. Compulsory charity, however, is a contradiction. Charity must always be legally voluntary. It is governed by the legal principle that the recipient has no judicially enforceable earthly entitlement to the gift. This is why the modern welfare State is careful to label its compulsory wealth-redistribution programs as entitlements. The creators of these programs want to avoid any suggestion of voluntarism, which implies that the donor has the right to refuse to make the gift. Thus, this case law is not related to charity. The owner has a legal claim on the property. He has an entitlement. The person who inds the lost property is expected to honor this legal claim, even though it costs him money or time to do so. This law requires a form of wealth-redistribution. The person who discovers lost property owes it to the owner to return it or care for it. This is a positive injunction. Yet biblical civil law, as I have argued repeatedly, does not issue positive injunctions. It does not compel anyone to do good; it merely prohibits people from doing public evil. Thus, I conclude that this law is not a civil law, but is rather a moral injunction. There is no civil sanction attached to it, nor is there any general judicial principle of restitution that would enable the judges to determine a proper sanction. The civil government therefore has no role to play in the enforcement of this law. The civil government can become involved if the person who owns the property discovers it in someone else’s possession. The

616

DEUTERONOMY

suspicion of theft immediately arises. This risk is an incentive for the discoverer to return it to its owner, in order to avoid future criminal prosecution for theft. But this is a separate issue. The case law in question should be seen as a moral responsibility placed on the individual directly by God, not as a civil statute. In all likelihood, however, the individual who inds a wandering animal owned by no known person will report this to some authority. He does not want to be found in possession of another man’s beast. To insure himself from a future lawsuit, he tells someone in authority, or at least local witnesses, that he has found a wandering animal. This shared information serves as a means of lowering the costs of inding lost animals. Because of the laws governing theft, this caretaker law increases the likelihood that the inder will go to extra efort to inform the authorities of his discovery. The local civil magistrate or Levite would then serve as a lost-and-found agency. Someone whose animal had wandered of would go to someone in authority and enquire regarding any report of a lost animal of a particular description. We can presume that the animal would not be too far from home. Even though this law of mandatory caretaking was not enforceable by a civil court, it was enforceable in God’s court. God’s court involves sanctions, positive and negative, in history. The covenant-keeper who found a lost animal would have felt moral pressure to take it to his home. He would then have had to take care of it. This was an expense that he might not have wanted. He would therefore have had another incentive to inform the authorities or in other ways get word into the community about the stray beast. What about the output of the animal? The inder was entitled to shear the sheep if he cared for it. He could sell the wool or use it. There is no indication in this text or any other that his expense in caring for a lost animal could not be recovered by the productivity of the animal. If it ate his grass, if he had to hire extra help in caring for it, if he put it in a barn to shelter it, and no man claimed it, then he was entitled to use it. If anything happened to it while he was working it, he would have been responsible. It was not his property. It was, in this sense, on loan to him. He could not misuse it, but he could use it. Whenever this law was honored in Israel, an animal could not have strayed far from its owner. Sooner rather than later, an Israelite would have done his duty and taken it home. The more faithful

Lost and Found

617

to God’s law Israel was as a nation, the sooner that someone would have taken responsibility for this lost, wandering beast. The more righteous the society was, the less distance the animal could have wandered. Widespread personal righteousness in this case meant lower search costs for the owner. This was another example of the great respect for private property in the Mosaic law.

Treasure Hidden in a Field This law seems to be contradictory to Jesus’ parable of the kingdom of heaven: “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto treasure hid in a ield; the which when a man hath found, he hideth, and for joy thereof goeth and selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that ield” (Matt. 13:44). Why isn’t Jesus’ example a case of lost property? Why isn’t the inder required to report it to the presumed owner, i.e., the owner of the ield? Because the treasure had been deliberately hidden. Jesus was challenging Old Covenant Israel to cease hiding the treasure of salvation from the gentiles.6 The kingdom of heaven is not supposed to be hidden; it is to be shared with all the world. But someone had taken the treasure and had hidden it, He said. This was similar to the action taken by the responsibility-aversive wicked servant who refused to multiply his master’s goods as a faithful steward – another kingdom parable. Then he which had received the one talent came and said, Lord, I knew thee that thou art an hard man, reaping where thou hast not sown, and gathering where thou hast not strawed: And I was afraid, and went and hid thy talent in the earth: lo, there thou hast that is thine. His lord answered and said unto him, Thou wicked and slothful servant, thou knewest that I reap where I sowed not, and gather where I have not strawed: Thou oughtest therefore to have put my money to the exchangers, and then at my coming I should have received mine own with usury. Take therefore the talent from him, and give it unto him which hath ten talents. For unto

6. Paul wrote: “For ye, brethren, became followers of the churches of God which in Judaea are in Christ Jesus: for ye also have sufered like things of your own countrymen, even as they have of the Jews: Who both killed the Lord Jesus, and their own prophets, and have persecuted us; and they please not God, and are contrary to all men: Forbidding us to speak to the Gentiles that they might be saved, to ill up their sins alway: for the wrath is come upon them to the uttermost” (I Thess. 2:14–16; emphasis added).

618

DEUTERONOMY

every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath. And cast ye the unproitable servant into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth (Matt. 25:24–30).

The person who discovers a hidden treasure is not under any obligation to inform the owner of the ield of its existence. Someone had taken steps to hide the asset. The original owner had decided to invest the treasure by hiding it. This is not the best way to increase wealth except in times of warfare or widespread theft. It is better to put the asset to work. The hidden asset is not being used productively. The inder takes a great risk by selling everything he owns to make a bid on the ield. The ield’s owner, if he knows about the treasure, may dig it up and then sell the ield – now far overpriced – to the inder. But if the ield’s owner does not know about the hidden treasure, the buyer is not under any moral obligation to tell him about it. The ield’s buyer is reclaiming the asset from the heirs of the original treasure-hider, who know nothing about the whereabouts of the treasure and who did not hide it. They have no legal claims on this property. They are not like the owner of lost property, who does have a legal claim. The treasure in the ield is not marked. It is not the responsibility of the discoverer to seek out the heirs, who may be scattered across the face of the earth, depending on how long the treasure has been hidden. The person most likely to put the hidden treasure to productive use is the treasure-inder who is willing to sell all that he has to buy the ield. The Jews had hidden God’s kingdom in Jesus’ era. They were hoarding it. They were not taking it in its pure form to the gentiles. They had encrusted it with layers of man-made law, thereby hiding it. This was hampering the growth of the kingdom. This is why Jesus also said: “Therefore say I unto you, The kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof” (Matt. 21:43). Jesus was telling His listeners that they had found the hidden treasure: the kingdom of heaven. It was time for them to commit everything they owned to the spread of the good news of redemption: to gentiles as well as to Jews. The Jews refused to admit that what they had done by way of legalism and nationalism had concealed the kingdom from gentiles. Thus, the kingdom was rightfully the property of the church, which stripped the message of redemption of its legalism and then shared it with the world.

Lost and Found

619

It was not that the kingdom had been lost; it had been deliberately hidden and kept out of plain sight. Thus, the law of lost property did not apply in the parable.

Idle Resources and Entrepreneurship The economic principle governing hidden treasure is what W. H. Hutt called the theory of idle resources. Hidden treasure is not idle if it is the object of human decision-making. It is invested in a particular way. When resources are deliberately not being used to produce goods and services, this may be because of the owners’ lack of information about how to maximize the value of the unused asset, i.e., to make it worth more in production than it is sitting idle. Or it may be because the owner is highly risk-aversive. Hutt’s economic analysis also identiies bottlenecks of information created by government policy, such as minimum wage laws or other forms of price control.7 When an idle resource is idle because no one recognizes it as valuable, or because the owner has forgotten where it is hidden, then the way to get it back into production is to allow a inder to buy it. This is an application of the Austrian school’s theory of entrepreneurship: proit as the result of the decision of an entrepreneur who bears the economic uncertainty associated with production. He believes that he possesses better knowledge regarding future consumer demand than his competitors do. He buys a productive good at a price that is lower than it would be if all producers recognized its highest future use. If his forecast is correct, and if he puts the underpriced asset to cost-efective use, then he gains his reward: an above-average rate of return on his investment. If his forecast is incorrect, or if he misallocates the resource, then he reaps losses. To maximize the spread of accurate information and the consumer beneits associated with this information, the free market social order allows entrepreneurs to buy ields containing “hidden treasure.” These ields are in the form of scarce resources that are not priced as high as they would be if other entrepreneurs knew the truth: hidden treasures are buried in them, i.e., there are beneits that consumers will be willing to pay for. These treasures are not lost 7. W. H. Hutt, The Theory of Idle Resources: A Study in Deinition (2nd ed.; Indianapolis: LibertyPress, 1977).

620

DEUTERONOMY

resources; rather, they are forgotten or ignored resources that are not being put to their maximum consumer-satisfying uses. In short, accurate information regarding the future is not the equivalent of a lost sheep that has wandered of and will be missed by the owner. It is the equivalent of a treasure buried and therefore taken out of production by a previous owner, and then forgotten. There is no moral reason why someone who inds a way to serve the public better through putting that treasure back into production should be required to broadcast this information to anyone. But he must not steal it; he must buy the ield in which it is hidden. He must bear the costs of gaining ownership.

Conclusion The lost domesticated animal is a valuable asset. To preserve the principle of private ownership, God’s law assigns responsibility to the person who inds lost property. He is to care for it until its owner appears to claim it. Because of the laws against theft, it is likely that the inder will report his discovery to someone in authority. This increases the spread of knowledge. It also tends to create a lost-and-found ojce in society. The person who lost his property in Israel had two likely sources of information regarding his lost property: the elders in the gate and the local Levite. This law was neither a seed law nor a land law. There is no more reason to assume that it no longer applies in the New Covenant than it would be to assume that the same principle of caretaking does not apply to lost children. The person who inds a lost beast is no more entitled to become its owner than he is entitled to become a parent of a lost child. In the case of a lost child, the judicial incentive to report the existence of the lost child is greater. Kidnapping is a capital crime (Ex. 21:16).8 But the same interpretive principle holds true: the inder is not allowed to become a keeper. The inder has an obligation to care for the lost beast as he would to care for a lost child. He has an analogous obligation to report his discovery, though not an equally intense obligation, given the disparity of the civil penalties for theft vs. kidnapping. This is another reason why a wandering child is unlikely to stray as far as a wandering beast.9 8. North, Tools of Dominion, ch. 8. 9. The main reason is a young child’s inability to care for itself, unlike a beast.

Lost and Found

621

This law created incentives for owners to brand their beasts. By marking them, the owner made it more likely that the beast would be returned to him by the inder. The brand made it less likely that a inder would be able to claim that the animal was his rather than the owner’s. In other words, the brand reduced the likelihood of either a permanently lost animal or a stolen animal. With the owner’s mark on the animal, the owner could claim his right of ownership. This was why circumcision marked Israel. God’s legal claim was on the male Israelite. The fact is, the image of God in man is God’s universal claim of ownership, but the covenant mark in the Mosaic law made this ownership visible to the person so marked. God’s unique claim of ownership was on an Israelite. This was the meaning of circumcision; it is also the meaning of baptism. No matter how far a “branded” covenant-keeper strays from both the protection and restraint of the institutional church, God’s mark of baptism identiies him as owned by God.

51 Nature’sROOTS Roots and Fruits NATURE’S AND FRUITS If a bird’s nest chance to be before thee in the way in any tree, or on the ground, whether they be young ones, or eggs, and the dam sitting upon the young, or upon the eggs, thou shalt not take the dam with the young: But thou shalt in any wise let the dam go, and take the young to thee; that it may be well with thee, and that thou mayest prolong thy days (Deut. 22:6–7).

The theocentric aspect of this law is the creation. God rules over nature because He created the universe. This law is clearly an aspect of the dominion covenant which God established with mankind. It is not a seed law or a land law. God gave to Adam and Eve the responsibility of ruling over the creation. “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the ish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth” (Gen. 1:26). God recapitulated this cove1 nant with Noah and his sons (Gen. 9:1–3). 1. There are extreme pietist Bible commentators who argue that the dominion covenant made with Adam was pre-Fall and does not apply to history. For example, the then-tiny and now much smaller premillennial fundamentalist denomination, the Bible Presbyterian Church, declared in 1970 that the cultural mandate (the Dutch Reformed version of the dominion covenant) has no authority in history, but is exclusively pre-Fall and postresurrection. Genesis 1:26–28 and Genesis 9 have nothing to do with culture, the denomination insisted; the command applies only to biological reproduction. Genesis 9 does not use the words “and subdue it,” and therefore the passage has nothing to do with culture in history. The idea of the cultural mandate “cuts the nerve of true missionary work and of evangelism.” For the complete document and its refutation, see R. J. Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law (Nutley, New Jersey: Craig Press, 1973), pp. 723–30. For pietists, true missionary work and evangelism apply only to individual souls, denominational reform (i.e., separatism’s church splits), and Christian families. For a refutation of this view, see Kenneth L. Gentry, Jr., The Greatness of the Great Commission: The Christian Enterprise in a Fallen World (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990).

622

Nature’s Roots and Fruits

623

Because this is a covenant under God, there is hierarchy. The hierarchy of the dominion covenant is this: God > man > woman > minor children > nature. Because it is a covenant, there are sanctions attached. This law announces a personal blessing for obedience: long life. The blessing itself points to point ive of the biblical covenant model: continuity, i.e., greater time on earth in order to extend one’s dominion over nature. The positive sanction, long life, is an aspect of inheritance: building up the capital base that a man leaves to his children. Man’s dominion over nature extends God’s grace to the creation. This grace is governed by God’s law. The principle undergirding this Mosaic case law is that the productivity of nature must be preserved by man. The individual who inds a mother bird is allowed to claim her ofspring as his lawful possession, but he must set free the mother. The mother is an instrument of productivity. She has reached adulthood. She has survived nature’s challenges to youth. Animals that were farther up the food chain did not catch her. Also, she did not starve. Because this animal is a skilled survivor, she is worth more as a productive asset than the newborns are. Man can do what he wishes with the newborn, but he must let the adult go free to reproduce again. In this we can see a pattern for man-directed ecology in general. That which is a source of wealth for man in unowned nature is to be allowed to continue to be productive.

Preserving Nature’s Organic Productivity The setting of this case law is not organized agriculture. A man comes across a bird’s nest. The bird has built it where it decided, not where man decided. The Hebrew word translated “by chance” refers to an encounter. It is frequently translated “befall.” A man has come upon the nest. This discovery was unplanned by the man. The bird was operating under the laws of unplanned nature. This is not a chicken farm. This law secures life for the mother because of the presence of the ofspring. A man may lawfully claim an isolated female bird for his own. If it is not immediately caring for its young, it is “fair game.” But what about mammals? The principle of this law is that a female with ofspring under her immediate care, and therefore dependent for survival on her care, must be set free. Modern hunting laws that protect female deer are extensions of the principle that mothers caring for their young are of-limits to hunters. Because hunters cannot

624

DEUTERONOMY

be sure if a female is caring for her young, they may not shoot any adult female. But if the hunting laws also protect the young, they are in violation of this case law. Biblically, the ofspring are fair game.2 This law protects a productive female while she is caring for her young. Her productivity in bringing ofspring into the world and caring for them must be honored. This case law protects her life. It does not do so for the sake of the existing ofspring, which may be lawfully harvested by the discoverer. My conclusion is that it does so for the sake of future ofspring. A demonstrably productive asset in nature must be allowed to continue its productivity. This interpretation is consistent with the law of fruit-bearing trees during a siege: the invading army may eat the fruit of nearby trees, but not cut them down (Deut. 20:19). Orchards planted by the enemy were treated as if they had grown on their own. They had not been planted by the invading Israelites; they were therefore to be left standing.

The Tragedy of the Commons This law governs animals found in the wild. There is no comparable law governing domesticated animals. The owner of a farm is in charge of breeding his animals. He feeds them, shelters them, and cares for them directly. They are not survivors in the wild; they are survivors in a sheltered environment. In this setting, the owner is not under any restriction regarding mothers and ofspring. He may lawfully kill the mother and eat her eggs. But will he? Probably not. After all, the mother is his property. She may not lay golden eggs, but she does lay consumable, marketable eggs. She is a capital asset that produces a stream of income. She is a proven producer. The owner probably will not kill her. Nevertheless, this female may be growing less fertile. The owner may decide that she is now it for eating. After he collects her eggs, he is entitled to wring her neck. This is not an animal that survives in the competitive environment of nature. It is an owned resource. The owner has authority over it. The diferentiating mark is ownership. Animals found in the wild are unowned. In such cases, these animals may become victims 2. It is considered “unsporting” to shoot immature deer. The problem here is that civil laws should not be enacted which go beyond the meaning and intent of biblical law. The boundaries protecting young animals in the wild should not be civil.

Nature’s Roots and Fruits

625

of annihilation by non-owners who see them as free resources. When men ind themselves in control of a free resource, they tend to overconsume it. They do not bear the costs of ownership, yet they can reap the beneits of ownership. The high beneit-cost ratio encourages them to consume the resource. After all, they are not able to collect an income stream from an animal which they encounter in a ield. It is a “now or never” situation. They can now gain the beneits of owning the asset. If they wait, they will be unlikely to appropriate this particular fruit of nature. Thus, there is an economic incentive to “overharvest” the resource. They will kill the mother and take the eggs. This result is sometimes called the tragedy of the commons.3 No one owns the wild. No one owns this particular family of animals. The costs of production are almost nonexistent to the harvester; the beneits of harvesting are high. So, he takes all of the resource. This leads to overuse of the asset: overgrazing, overpolluting, or overwhatever. Ownership provides an economic disincentive against immediate consumption. But ownership of a long-term capital asset does not exist in nature. Thus, unowned, ungoverned nature must be protected by civil law. Men, in their legal capacity as God’s corporate agents over nature, must place legal restraints on the misuse of temporarily unowned nature.4 This is for the beneit of nature and also for the beneit of men in the future, who will be able to harvest nature’s bounty. Those animals that are under mankind’s covenantal authority are to be protected against the otherwise rational economic decision by a non-owning individual to overconsume nature’s resources. 3. Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science (Dec. 13, 1968); reprinted in Garrett de Bell (ed.), The Environmental Handbook (New York: Ballentine, 1970). For a critique, see C. R. Batten, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” The Freeman (Oct. 1970). Cf. Gary North, The Dominion Covenant: Genesis (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987), pp. 208–10. 4. This means that nature is not to remain unowned. Also, it does not mean that nature should be owned by the State. The biblical case for State ownership must be made in terms of the principle of hierarchical responsibility. The defender of State ownership must show from the Bible either that the State has been authorized by God to serve as His dominion agent or that inherent in the arrangement are conditions that mandate bureaucratic administration. The judicial issue is God’s hierarchy of ownership, not some theory of nature’s rights. Nature has no rights. The idea that nature has rights independent of man as God’s dominion agent is pagan to the core. Nature has no rights, in the same sense that property has no rights. It is ironic that environmentalists who decry property rights also cry for nature’s rights.

626

DEUTERONOMY

Because this law authorizes the discoverer to harvest the ofspring, it clearly recognizes man’s legal authority over nature. The fruits of nature – in this case, the ofspring – are fair game for man. Man is not to be kept completely out of unowned nature for the sake of nature. Unowned nature is a challenge to man’s lawful dominion over nature. It testiies to the incomplete dominion of man in history.5 Nature under the autonomous dominion of beasts is so repulsive to God that He allowed Canaanites to remain in the land until the Israelites could either exterminate them or drive them out. “I will not drive them out from before thee in one year; lest the land become desolate, and the beast of the ield multiply against thee” (Ex. 23:29). For instance, the idea that a jungle is to be preserved for the jungle’s sake is an anti-biblical idea. The man-killing insects of a jungle are to be treated by man with no more leniency than a plague-carrying mosquito is, unless there is some clear ecological beneit to mankind by sparing the killer.6 This law places restraints on the tragedy of the commons. Nature’s raw productivity is to be preserved by civil law until such time as man can domesticate nature. Man subdues nature through private ownership. When land is privately owned, when animals are penned in, and when man provides a protective environment for the animals under his authority, then this law ceases to have any relevance. When the commons – commonly owned land or unowned land – disappears, so does the related tragedy of overconsumption. While it is incorrect to argue that “the only good rain forest is a dead rain forest,”7 it is biblically correct to say that the best rain forest is a privately owned rain forest. While a privately owned rain forest can become the victim of inappropriate ecological management, this is also true of a politically owned rain forest. (By the way, “rain forest”

5. This includes the oceans. The problem with oceans is that they are unowned. They are part of the commons. The result is an overharvesting of some species. 6. If burning down a forest or a jungle creates an environment in which mosquitoes multiply, and if society is unwilling or too poor to allow the use of chemicals such as DDT, then leaving the forest or jungle standing may be the best ecological policy. The mosquito historically has been man’s greatest enemy in nature. Man’s seeming victory over malariacarrying mosquitoes by the mid-1960’s has been rolled back since then. Gordon Harrison, Mosquitoes, Malaria and Man: A History of the Hostilities Since 1880 (New York: Dutton, 1978). 7. Conservative John Podhoretz claims that this phrase is the only one that gets a strong negative reaction from liberals at a Washington, D.C. cocktail party these days, so desensitized have liberals become to conservative rhetoric.

Nature’s Roots and Fruits

627

is a term that usually refers to a jungle, a far less compelling word rhetorically in public policy debates.) But there is this diference: private owners have greater personal economic incentives to preserve the productivity of an asset, as determined by consumers’ use of the asset, than a government’s salaried managers have. Also, by decentralizing ownership, the free market social order increases the likelihood that an ecological mistake will not be imposed on all of nature at the same time, which is not the case when a centralized civil government exercises direct control over the property.8 In short, fewer commons mean fewer and less wasteful tragedies.

Conclusion The fruits of nature belong to man. This biblical principle undergirds this case law: the ofspring can lawfully be harvested by the inder. But the roots of presently unowned nature belong to God. His delegated intermediary is nature itself until men establish direct ownership over tracts of nature and begin to manage them. Until then, God exercises His control over the mother hen through the operations of nature. God demonstrates His ownership by placing legal restrictions on the use of nature’s capital assets. This is why the mother hen must be set free, to breed another day. Man is not to overharvest unowned, unmanaged nature. Because man is not providing the scarce means of sustaining life for nature’s wild animals, he is not to be given free reign over both the roots and fruits of 8. An example of such mismanagement is the U.S. Forest Service’s policy, which accelerated in the 1960’s, of ighting small forest ires on Federally owned land: over 190 million acres. This policy has led to the extensive growth of underbrush and small trees, and the build-up of dead branches. This is now tinder for huge, uncontrollable forest ires that sweep through hundreds of thousands of acres at a time. The big trees perish in these huge ires. Over 6 million acres burned in the irst ten months of 1996, the worst ire season since 1952, when 6.7 million acres burned. James Brooke, “Western Wildires Near Record Season,” New York Times (Oct. 24, 1996). The government’s policy of ire suppression had been in operation since the 1920’s. Now the government’s forest managers have decided to reverse this policy. Forest managers will start deliberate ires to reduce this underbrush, hoping that these deliberately set ires do not become uncontrollable ires. Federal land managers estimate that this policy will take two or three decades to become successful. They say that ire seasons will become worse over the next two decades, until the controlled-burn program reduces the underbrush. What is interesting is that the Chief of the U.S. Forest Service, who has inaugurated this controlled-burn policy, is the irst wildlife biologist ever to be appointed to this top management position. Frank Whitmore, “When Forest Fires Help,” Parade Magazine (Sept. 22, 1996).

628

DEUTERONOMY

nature. Unless he extends a full-time system of management over nature, including the care and feeding of mother hens and their species equivalents, he is not allowed to take both the mother and her offspring in the same harvesting operation. God has placed another “no trespassing” sign around His property. It is obvious why the State cannot easily enforce this law of the unplanned encounter: it possesses insujcient information regarding any infractions. The State’s negative sanctions cannot easily be applied to those who break this law. Thus, God has attached a positive sanction to this law, one which applies to the individual. He who honors this law will receive long life. The individual reaps this reward because he is the primary locus of sovereignty for this law’s enforcement. He has exclusive information regarding his encounter; he therefore is the recipient of the blessing of obedience. This is neither a seed law nor a land law. It is a cross-boundary law. In fact, it is precisely because nature has no internal ownership boundaries that this law must be enforced: primarily by the individual; secondarily by State anti-poaching laws.

52 Rooftop Railing LawLAW THEThe ROOFTOP RAILING When thou buildest a new house, then thou shalt make a battlement for thy roof, that thou bring not blood upon thine house, if any man fall from thence (Deut. 22:8).

The theocentric reference point of this law is man as God’s image. We know this because the language of blood appears in the text. Man’s blood must not be deliberately shed, because man is made in God’s image. When a person does something which signiicantly threatens the lives of others, he is to be held legally liable (Ex. 21:18–19), except in wartime or crime prevention by an ojcer of the law. By extension, if he builds a structure which signiicantly threatens the life of another person in the normal course of afairs, he is to be held legally liable for any injury sufered as a consequence. In this case, the text is concerned with the death of the victim. The language of blood points back to the law prohibiting murder in Genesis 9. “And surely your blood of your lives will I require; at the hand of every beast will I require it, and at the hand of man; at the hand of every man’s brother will I require the life of man. Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man” (Gen. 9:5–6). A death caused by the absence of a railing around a roof is not accidental manslaughter, as it would have been under the law of the cities of refuge (Num. 35:9–29). It was murder. The civil penalty was the execution of the head of the household: eye for eye. The mere absence of a restraining device would automatically have condemned the householder judicially. There was no legally valid excuse. The risk of building a new house without a roof railing was high.

629

630

DEUTERONOMY

The language of blood places this case law under the general category of murder. Thus, this law is not strictly a land law, yet it is also not strictly a cross-boundary law, as we shall see. It is unique. Because I see this law as valid today, I use the present tense in the following analysis.

New Homes The context of the law is new construction. This law does not apply to existing houses. When the Israelites took Canaan, the Canaanites left their houses standing. Their houses became part of Israel’s lawful inheritance. An Israelite who was too poor to aford to build a railing on his roof was not to be prohibited from claiming ownership of a house with an unprotected roof. Those who ventured onto the roof of such a house did so at their own risk. The owner was not to be forced to sell the house just because he could not aford to build a railing on the roof. The principle of inheritance was of greater importance than the principle of household safety. This law balances safety with economics. If a man has the wealth to pay for building a new home, then he is not a poor man. He has capital. He is exchanging one form of capital for another. In such cases, this law announces, the builder must go to the extra expense of building a railing on his roof. The additional cost – the marginal cost – of building a railing is small in comparison to the total cost of building the house. For a little more money, the owner secures an added measure of safety for his family and guests. As a man of means, he owes this to them. It is not a great added expense. What about a buyer of an existing home that has no roof railing? He can aford to build a new home or buy an existing home. He chooses to buy an existing home. The text applies to a newly built house. But why shouldn’t the law apply to him? One reason might be that the added marginal expense of adding a railing reduces the proit from selling the house. The law would force the seller to pay for it, thereby reducing the proit from the sale, or else force the buyer to pay, thereby reducing the market for homes. In the case of the conquest of Canaan, the inheriting owner or his heirs would have faced reduced demand – lower value – for the sale of an asset which they inherited when the irst owner participated in the conquest of Canaan. That is, such a legal requirement would have reduced the net worth of the original owner or his heirs. Mosaic law did not impose such a coniscation of inherited wealth on the owner

The Rooftop Railing Law

631

or his heirs. This indicates how highly the principle of inheritance was regarded by the Mosaic law. This does impose costs on new home construction. A new home was not part of the original inheritance of Canaan. It was part of the fruits of life in the land. For the sake of protecting the life of man, this law mandated that new home builders pay attention to the risk of a cultural phenomenon: social gatherings on roofs. The law warned the man paying to have a home built: if you do not go to the added expense of building a protective railing around the roof, and someone falls from the roof and dies, this law designates the head of the household as a murderer. The risk of having such an event take place in one’s home would have to be borne by the home owner. This added cost could be avoided by putting up a railing. The new home owner had to make his decision in terms of costs either way. What if the home’s builder decides to sell the house immediately upon its completion? This raises the question of the transfer of legal liability. If the next buyer can escape the liability because he did not personally build the house, this would subsidize the construction of homes by professional home builders who have no intention of ever occupying them. This would place a competitive disadvantage on the individual who builds his own home or who pays to have it built. The professional contractor who builds a house before he has a contract from a buyer could build it less expensively. The buyer would be buying a home that he neither had built himself nor had agreed to have built for him. This would subsidize the building of less expensive, more risky homes. This would increase the likelihood of accidents. So, the home buyer would become legally liable. He would have to pay to install a railing in order to remove this liability. This law governed homes that were built in Israel after the conquest. The inheritance associated with the conquest was not under this law. The original inheritor and his heirs were not burdened by the costs of constructing a railing on a roof. The person who bought a home that had been built by a Canaanite was not required to build a protective railing. The principle of inheritance from Canaan was more important than the principle of safe housing.

Self-Government Under God’s Law This law does not mandate the creation of a civil government bureaucracy that enforces home safety laws. It announces that the

632

DEUTERONOMY

person who builds a new home must go to the expense of building a protective railing around the roof. Any home owner who fails to do this faces the ultimate penalty: execution. If someone falls from his roof and is killed, the owner must die. This law rests on selfgovernment, not bureaucratic government. It relies on the selfinterested decisions of home builders and new home buyers to defend themselves against the negative civil sanctions associated with harm. There is no indication from this law that the State is authorized to create a regulatory agency that writes safety codes that apply to home builders before they can legally ofer their homes for sale. On the contrary, this law places decision-making authority in the hands of the home builder or new home buyer. It is his decision as to how much legal risk he is willing to bear. If he wishes to avoid legal risk but also avoid the expense of building a railing, he will have to keep people of his roof. He will lose the square footage that would otherwise be available for entertaining. He makes this decision. There is a role for civil government: the enforcement of penalties after the event takes place. There is another role: announcing in advance that this penalty will be imposed. A court must convict; the State must apply sanctions after the witnesses have testiied and the court has reached a decision. The State legitimately declares in advance safety standards and the penalty for violating them, but it does not compel anyone to abide by them. We are dealing here with a discrete event: one roof, one victim of a fall. We are not dealing with a phenomenon such as pollution, in which each polluter contributes a nearly immeasurable quantity of pollution, but polluters as a group create an unpleasant or dangerous environment. The modern world is bureaucratic as no previous society ever has been, with the possible exception of ancient Egypt.1 The government regulatory agency is a ubiquitous feature of modern political and economic life. Administrative law has steadily replaced legislative law. This constitutes a legal revolution that is undermining the Western legal tradition.2 If this trend is not reversed, probably by some disaster that bankrupts most civil governments, it will put an end to freedom. The top-down bureaucratic social order – 1. “Max Weber on Bureaucratization” (1909), in J. P. Meyer, Max Weber and German Politics: A Study in Political Sociology (London: Faber & Faber, [1943] 1956), p. 127. 2. Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 34–41.

The Rooftop Railing Law

633

Satan’s model, given his lack of omniscience and his need for tight control over rebellious subordinates – will replace the bottom-up appeals court system of biblical law (Ex. 18). The centralization of economic life will continue. If God brings negative sanctions in history against rebellious societies, then we can expect a reversal, either through a religious transformation or an unexpected breakdown in civil government. The State will see its regulatory powers removed or drastically shrunk. The centralizing tendencies of political power will eventually be thwarted by the market or by the voters, though more probably the market.

The Spirit of Biblical Law The lat roof of the ancient Near East and the Mediterranean was a place where people would gather for celebrations. It was not the tapered roof of Northern Europe, which focuses the weight of snow in such a way that it slides of the roof rather than breaking through the roof. The tapered roof has the same efect on people as it has on snow: it increases the likelihood that people will slide of the roof. People do not gather together on a tapered roof to hold parties. Anyone who ventures onto a tapered roof knows that he is at risk. Climbing up a tapered roof is not part of the average person’s normal daily activities. Anyone who goes onto a tapered roof does so at his own risk. He may fall of the roof accidentally in the sense that he does not plan to fall of the roof but knows that there he may fall if he fails to take normal precautions, such as wearing shoes with non-slip soles. He may fall even with such precautions. He knows that he is doing something abnormal. He does not fall of a tapered roof accidentally in the sense of a careless act that takes place in the normal course of events. Any designer who puts a safety railing around a tapered roof is adding to the risk of dwelling inside. Snow would be retained by such a barrier. Instead of sliding of the roof, snow may crash through it, endangering those inside the building. Thus, this safety law governing Near Eastern roofs would be a dangerous law to enforce in, say, Scandinavia. A literal application of this law in Scandinavia would not decrease risk; it would increase risk. The biblical goal of this law is to increase personal safety. If this law were applied literally without respect for geography, it would sometimes produce the opposite result: a decrease in safety.

634

DEUTERONOMY

This leads us to a principle of interpretation: we must search for the intent of a law. It is not sujcient merely to obey it. To obey a law unquestioningly is to risk misapplying it. A biblical law must be obeyed until such time as skilled interpreters ind a biblical reason to apply it in some other way for the sake of the law’s intent. The spirit of the law must govern the letter of the law. This case law illustrates this hermeneutical principle better than most.

The Price of Perfect Safety A modern application of this law would impose personal liability on someone who places an abandoned refrigerator with a lock-latch in the alley behind his home without irst removing the door or the latch. A child might play hide and seek by climbing into the refrigerator and shutting the door. He would sufocate to death. Such stories were familiar throughout the 1940’s and 1950’s. Courts did not always impose penalties on the owners, and certainly not eye-for-eye penalties. By the 1960’s, such products were deemed innately unsafe by the authorities. The sale of lock-latch refrigerators was banned in the 1960’s in the United States. Doors that can be pushed open from the inside were made mandatory for producers of refrigerators. Such laws are passed primarily because judges have refused to honor the principle of holding owners personally responsible for “roofs without railings” or “uncovered pits.”3 In contrast, the Mosaic law did not require the civil government to impose ines on people who dug pits and then failed to cover them, nor did it mandate roof inspectors. It did not create an army of administrative law enforcers. Instead, it assigned individual responsibility to owners of dangerous property. The civil government let men’s fear of their legal liability serve as their incentive to make their property safer. There are economic efects of any legislation that assesses economic penalties before an accident occurs. These efects are seldom taken seriously by legislators or by the special-interest groups that lobby for such legislation. In the case of lock-latch refrigerators, the original product had deinite advantages. When the door was closed, it audibly snapped shut. The new no-lock doors sometimes fail to 3. Gary North, Tools of Dominion: The Case Laws of Exodus (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), ch. 12.

The Rooftop Railing Law

635

close tightly, but users are not always alerted when this happens because of the absence of the old snap sound. These doors are less ejcient than older doors in this respect. Unlatched doors are more easily left open by children, who ind them more dijcult to close than doors of the older design, which snapped shut easily. As a result, food rots from time to time, or at least cold air escapes, and these costs are borne by the owner. It seems certain that a few lives are saved each year by this legislation, but there never were hundreds of cases of smothered children in any year. It was a newspaper-worthy occasional event. Millions of refrigerator owners are today subjected to the statistical risk of occasionally leaving a door open and rotting a week’s food. Predictably, this cost is more dijcult to bear for lower-income families, since food costs account for a higher proportion of their household budgets. It may seem callous to compare the cost of spoiled food, no matter how much food gets spoiled, with the lives of children, no matter how few die of sufocation, but there are always inescapable costs with every desirable beneit. Legislation creates beneits; therefore, in a cursed, scarcity-bound world, it necessarily imposes costs. “Who beneits? How much? Who pays? How much?” These questions should always be asked before any piece of legislation is voted on. Guido Calabresi summarizes the range of decisions available to voters, legislators, and judges in deciding who should be made inancially responsible for accidents: “The question of who should bear the costs of a particular accident, or of all accidents, is to be decided on the basis of the goals we wish accident law to accomplish.” In short, the decision is politically open-ended. “Thus it is a policy question whether costs should be (1) borne by particular victims; (2) paid on a one-to-one basis by those who injure a particular victim; (3) borne by those broad categories of people who are likely to be victims; (4) paid by those broad categories of people who are likely to be injurers; (5) paid by those who in some way violate our moral codes (in some sense are at fault) according to the degree of their wrongdoing, whether or not they are involved in accidents; (6) paid by those who are in some actuarial sense most likely to violate our moral codes; (7) paid from the general cofers of the state by particular industry groups in accordance with criteria (such as wealth) that may be totally unrelated to accident involvement; (8) paid by some combination of

636

DEUTERONOMY

4

these methods.” Humanism ofers no simple moral, legal, or economic rule book which governs the State’s decision to impose legal liability: “. . . in considering the bases of accident law, there are virtually no limits on how we can allocate or divide the costs of acci5 dents.” When society adopts a utopian legal code which proclaims “better millions of extra dollars spent by consumers on a safer product design than just one child dead from an accident,” it thereby places an impossibly expensive burden on society — the expense of 6 seeking an impossible goal, risk-free existence. Besides, legislators honor the principle of “better millions of dollars than just one . . .” only when it is cost-efective for them as politicians, that is, only when adversely afected voters will not be numerous enough, or not sujciently well organized, to threaten them at the next election. For example, far more children are killed yearly in home ires than ever died in abandoned refrigerators. Many lives could be saved by legislating and continually enforcing the installation of smoke detectors in every home. Legislators could also require ire escape drills twice a year, with penalties on parents for violating this law. Voters today refuse to accept a level of interference in their lives by the State which the enforcement of such a ire safety law would require. So, legislators in this case ignore the principle of “better millions of dollars than just one . . .” They honor it only when comparatively few lives are threatened (e.g., asphyxiated children in abandoned refrigerators), and only a few companies need be monitored (e.g., appliance manufacturers). A similar analysis can be made of speed limits on highways. There is no doubt that highway deaths could be reduced drastically if legislators would pass a maximum speed law of 25 miles (40 kilometers) per hour and then allocate large sums of money each year to enforce the law. The same could also be said if they would establish the death penalty for any drunk driver who kills another person in an auto accident. But the public seems unwilling to tolerate such legislation. 4. Guido Calabresi, The Costs of Accidents: A Legal and Economic Analysis (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1970), p. 22. 5. Ibid., p. 23. 6. Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky, Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technological and Environmental Dangers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).

The Rooftop Railing Law

637

Conclusion The law of the roof railing applied only to houses constructed after the conquest. The law of original inheritance was superior in Mosaic Israel to the safety law of the roof. The inheritor of a home built by a Canaanite was not under the civil sanctions of this law. He who went onto a lat roof built by a Canaanite did so at his own risk. If there was no railing, he had to be extra careful. This transferred legal liability to the guests. This was a consequence of the Mosaic law’s defense of original inheritance. The conquest of Canaan was Israel’s original inheritance, and it was defended by law. The railing transferred legal liability for owning post-Canaanite homes to the owners. The owner of such a home had to consider the risk of hosting a party on his roof. If he failed to build a railing, he would lose his life in the case of a fatal fall by another person. This law therefore provided an incentive to owners to have documentation regarding original ownership. If he could not prove that his home was built before the conquest, he became legally liable. A detailed record-keeping system was not mandated by this law, but it was surely encouraged. This law was not intended to create an administrative bureaucracy of building inspectors. It was not a system of government licensing. It transferred legal liability to owners. In this sense, it reinforced the authority of the court system at the expense of the regulatory administrative law system. This indicates the presence in Mosaic legal order of an impulse hostile to administrative law. This law may make no sense in a diferent environment, such as tapered roofs or thatched roofs. It applies only to a society that has lat roofs. This law teaches us that we must consider the judicial and moral principles undergirding a particular law. In this case, the primary principle was the inviolability of Israel’s original inheritance; the secondary principle was cost-efective safety in a high-risk environment. The primary principle disappeared with the disappearance of the original housing. The secondary principle remains. This was a unique law: partially a land law – original inheritance – and partially a cross-boundary law. Once the original housing wore out, it remained a cross-boundary law, but of a peculiar kind: one which could not be applied literally in every weather environment and still maintain its goal, i.e., home safety.

53 Laws Prohibiting Mixtures LAWS PROHIBITING MIXTURES Thou shalt not sow thy vineyard with divers seeds: lest the fruit of thy seed which thou hast sown, and the fruit of thy vineyard, be deiled. Thou shalt not plow with an ox and an ass together. Thou shalt not wear a garment of divers sorts, as of woollen and linen together (Deut. 22:9–11).

These laws do not clearly reveal their theocentric principle. The irst prohibition was a law governing ritual pollution. What was the basis of this pollution? The text does not say. The law of the plowing team and the law of mixed clothing seem to be in some way related to the irst law. Separation had something to do with ritual pollution, but what? The theocentric principle seems to be God’s separation from evil. The land of Israel was holy, sanctiied. This is a typical explanation for laws of separation.1 But why were mixed seeds evil? What did they symbolize? Israel’s separation from Canaan? Israel’s separation from the nations around her? Or one tribe’s separation from another?

Leviticus and Boundaries I have already analyzed the parallel verse in Leviticus: “Ye shall keep my statutes. Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind: thou shalt not sow thy ield with mingled seed; neither shall a garment mingled of linen and woolen come upon thee (Lev. 19:19). I have decided to reprint portions of that chapter in this volume, since some readers will not have a copy of my Leviticus commentary.2 1. Samson Raphael Hirsch, The Pentateuch, 5 vols. (Gateshead, London: Judaica, 1989), V, p. 438. 2. Gary North, Leviticus: An Economic Commentary (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), ch. 17.

638

Laws Prohibiting Mixtures

639

The theocentric meaning of this passage is the meaning of the entire Book of Leviticus: God’s boundaries must be respected. This case law establishes three boundaries, each referring to a speciic economic activity: animal husbandry, agriculture, and textiles. Except for the products of mining and metalworking, these were the primary categories of economic goods in the ancient world. Leviticus 19:19 established rules for all three areas. That world is long gone. Beginning no later than the ifteenth century, A.D., and accelerating rapidly in the late eighteenth century, a series of improvements in all three areas transformed the traditional economy of Europe. The modern capitalist system – with its emphasis on private ownership, the specialization of production, and the division of labor – steadily replaced the older medieval world of the common ields. This comprehensive economic transformation was accompanied by the violation of at least the irst two, and seemingly all three, of the statutes of Leviticus 19:19. The question we need to answer is this: Was this law annulled by the New Covenant, or was the Agricultural/Industrial Revolution illegitimate biblically? I argue that the law was annulled.3

Hermeneutics Hermeneutics is the principle of interpretation. My theonomic hermeneutics enables me to do three things that every system of biblical hermeneutics should do: 1) identify the primary function of an Old Covenant law, 2) discover whether it is universal in a redemptive (healing) sense, or whether 3) it was conditioned by its redemptive-historical context (i.e., annulled by the New Covenant). In short: What did the law mean, how did it apply inside and outside Mosaic Israel, and how should it apply today? This exegetical task is not always easy, but it is mandatory. It is a task that has been ignored or denied by the vast majority of Christian theologians for almost two millennia. The question here is the hermeneutical problem of identifying covenantal continuity and covenantal discontinuity. First, in questions of covenantal continuity, we need to ask: What is the underlying 3. A preliminary version of this chapter appears in Theonomy: An Informed Response, edited by Gary North (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1991), ch. 10. See also, Gary North, Boundaries and Dominion: The Economics of Leviticus (computer edition; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), ch. 17.

640

DEUTERONOMY

ethical principle? God does not change ethically. The moral law is still binding, but its application may not be. Second, this raises the question of covenantal discontinuity. What has changed as a result of the New Testament era’s fulillment of Old Covenant prophecy and the inauguration of the New Covenant? A continuity – propheticjudicial fulillment – has in some cases produced a judicial discontinuity: the annulment of a case law’s application. I begin any investigation of any suspected judicial discontinuity with the following questions. First, is the case law related to the priesthood, which has changed (Heb. 7:11–12)? Second, is it related to the sacraments, which have changed? Third, is it related to the jubilee land laws (e.g., inheritance), which Christ fulilled (Luke 4:18–21)? Fourth, is it related to the tribes (e.g., the seed laws), which Christ fulilled in His ojce as Shiloh, the promised Seed (Gal. 3:16)? Fifth, is it related to the “middle wall of partition” between Jew and gentile, which Jesus Christ’s gospel has broken down (Gal. 3:28; Eph. 2:14–20)?4 These ive principles prove fruitful in analyzing Leviticus 19:19 and Deuteronomy 22:9–11.5 Let us ask another question: Is a change in the priesthood also accompanied by a change in the laws governing the family covenant? Yes. Jesus tightened the laws of divorce by removing the Mosaic law’s exception, the bill of divorcement (Matt. 5:31–32).6 Similarly, the church from the beginning has denied the legality of polygamy even though there is no explicit rejection of polygamy in the New Testament except for church ojcers: husbands of one wife (I Tim. 3:2, 12). Polygamy is rejected by the church on the same basis that Jesus rejected the Mosaic law’s system of easy divorce: “from the beginning it was not so” (Matt. 19:8). Did other changes in the family accompany the New Covenant’s change in the priesthood?

4. This application is especially important in dealing with Rushdoony’s theory of “hybridization.” See North, Boundaries and Dominion, Appendix H: “Rushdoony on ‘Hybridization’: From Genetic Separation to Racial Separation.” 5. There are several other hermeneutical questions that we can ask that relate to covenantal discontinuity. Sixth, is it an aspect of the weakness of the Israelites, which Christ’s ministry has overcome, thereby intensifying the rigors of an Old Covenant law (Matt. 5:21–48)? Seventh, is it an aspect of the Old Covenant’s cursed six day-one day work week rather than the one day-six day pattern of the New Covenant’s now-redeemed week (Heb. 4:1–11)? Eighth, is it part of the legal order of the once ritually polluted earth, which has now been cleansed by Christ (Acts 10; I Cor. 8)? 6. Greg L. Bahnsen, Theonomy in Christian Ethics (2nd ed.; Phillipsberg, New Jersey: Presbyterian and Reformed, [1977] 1984), p. 99.

Laws Prohibiting Mixtures

641

Speciically, have changes in inheritance taken place? Have these changes resulted in the annulment of the jubilee land laws of the Mosaic economy? Finally, has an annulment of the jubilee land laws annulled the laws of tribal administration?

Case Laws and Underlying Principles Laws governing agriculture, plowing, and textile production had to be taken very seriously under the Mosaic Covenant. The expositor’s initial presumption should be that these three laws constitute a judicial unit. If they are a unit, there has to be some underlying judicial principle common to all three. All three prohibitions deal with mixing. The irst question we need to ask is the crucial one: What was the covenantal meaning of these laws? The second question is: What was their economic efect? I argue here that the fundamental judicial principle undergirding the passage is the requirement of separation. Two kinds of separation were involved: tribal and covenantal. The irst two clauses were agricultural applications of the mandatory segregation of the tribes inside Israel until a unique prophesied Seed would appear in history: the Messiah. We know who the Seed is: Jesus Christ. Paul wrote: “Now unto Abraham and his seed were the promises made. He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, and to thy seed, which is Christ” (Gal. 3:16). The context of Paul’s discussion is inheritance. Inheritance is by promise, he said. The Mosaic law applied “till the seed should come to whom the promise was made” (Gal. 3:19). Two-thirds of Leviticus 19:19 relates to the inheritance laws of national Israel, as we shall see. When the Levitical land inheritance laws (Lev. 25) ended with the establishment of a new priesthood, so did the authority of Leviticus 19:19. The inal clause of both Leviticus 19:19 and Deuteronomy 22:11 deals with prohibited clothing. This prohibition related not to separation among the tribes of Israel – separation within a covenant – but rather the separation of national Israel from other nations. The principle undergirding second form of separation – clothing – is more familiar to us: covenantal separation.

Boundary of Blood: Seed and Land The preservation of Israel’s unique covenantal status was required by the Mosaic law. The physical manifestation of this separation was

642

DEUTERONOMY

circumcision. A boundary of blood was imposed on the male organ of reproduction. It was a sign that covenantal life is not obtained by either physical birth or through one’s male heirs. Rushdoony has written: “Circumcision witnesses to the fact that man’s hope is not in generation but in regeneration. . . .”7 To escape Adam’s legal status as a covenant-breaker, a man must re-covenant with God, a human response made possible by God’s absolutely sovereign act of regeneration. The mark of this covenant in ancient Israel was circumcision. Ultimately, this separation was confessional. It involved an ajrmation of the sovereignty of Israel’s God. This was a diferent kind of boundary from those that divided the tribes, for the tribes were united confessionally: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD: And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might” (Deut. 6:4–5). The nation of Israel was separated from non-covenanted nations by geographical and covenantal boundaries. Tribal and family units separated the covenant people within Israel. This separation was always to be geographical, usually familial,8 but never confessional. Every tribe confessed the same confession. They were divided tribally because they would have diferent heirs. Only one tribe would bring forth the promised Seed. Tribal separation was therefore based on diferences in prophetic inheritance. Israel’s tribal divisions had political implications. They guaranteed localism. This localism of tribal inheritance was the judicial complement of the unity of national covenantal confession. Tribal boundaries were part of an overall structure of covenantal unity. Family membership and rural land ownership in Israel were tied together by the laws of inheritance. A rural Israelite – and most Israelites were rural9 – was the heir of a speciic plot of ground because of his family membership. There was no rural landed inheritance apart from family membership. Unlike the laws of ancient Greece, Mosaic law allowed a daughter to inherit the family’s land if there was

7. R. J. Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law (Nutley, New Jersey: Craig Press, 1973), p. 43. 8. There could be inter-tribal marriages. Daughters received dowries rather than landed inheritance. Dowries could cross tribal boundaries. 9. This is not to say that God intended them to remain rural. On the contrary, the covenantal blessing of God in the form of population growth was to move most Israelites into the cities as time went on. See Leviticus, ch. 25, section on “The Demographics of the Jubilee Inheritance Law,” pp. 416–22.

Laws Prohibiting Mixtures

643

no son. But there was a condition: she had to marry within the tribal unit (Num. 36:8). The landed inheritance could not lawfully move from one tribe to another (Num. 36:9).10 A man’s primary inheritance in Israel was his legal status (freemanship). Land was tied to name. The land of Israel was God’s; His name was on it. The family’s land was tied to the family’s name.11 Jacob had promised Judah that his blood line would rule until the promised heir (Shiloh) should come (Gen. 49:10). Thus, the integrity of each of the seed lines in Israel – family by family, tribe by tribe – was maintained by the Mosaic law until this promise was fulilled. The mandatory separation among the tribes was symbolized by the prohibition against mixing seeds. The prohibition applied to the mixing of seeds in one ield (Lev. 19:19). The ield did not represent the whole world under the Mosaic Covenant; the ield represented the Promised Land. The husbandman or farmer had to create boundaries between his specialized breeds and between his crops. So closely were seed and land connected in the Mosaic law that the foreign eunuch, having no possibility of seed, was not allowed to become a citizen in Israel. (The New Testament’s system of adoption has annulled this law: Acts 8:26–38.)12 Leviticus 19:19 is part of the Mosaic Covenant’s laws governing the preservation of the family’s seed (name) during a particular period of history. It was an aspect of inheritance: the necessary preservation of genetic Israel. The preservation of the separate seeds of Israel’s families was basic to the preservation of the nation’s legal status as a set-apart, separated, holy covenantal entity. This principle of separation applied to domesticated animals, crops, and clothing.

Covenantal Separation Let us now consider the law prohibiting the linking of an ox and a donkey in plowing (Deut. 22:10). In Leviticus 19:19, the prohibition was against the mixing of breeds in order to develop specialized breeds. This was a seed law: there was a possibility of interbreeding. Such was not the case in the law against joint plowing.

10. The exception was when rural land that had been pledged to a priest went to him in the jubilee year if the pledge was violated (Lev. 27:20–21). See Leviticus, ch. 37, “The Redemption Price System.” 11. North, Boundaries and Dominion, ch. 17, subsection on “Family Land and Family Name.” 12. North, Leviticus, p. 471.

644

DEUTERONOMY

The ox and the donkey work diferently. They are not beasts with the same strengths and habits. To use them in a joint plowing efort is to reduce the productivity of both. Neither can achieve its proper calling before God if they are linked by a yoke in the same work efort. The yoke makes each of them a poorer servant. This prohibition was not a seed law; it was a covenantal law. Paul writes: “Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness? And what concord hath Christ with Belial? or what part hath he that believeth with an inidel? And what agreement hath the temple of God with idols? for ye are the temple of the living God; as God hath said, I will dwell in them, and walk in them; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you, And will be a Father unto you, and ye shall be my sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty” (II Cor. 6:14–18). The law against joint plowing is a law against putting covenanted people with noncovenanted people in the same covenantal institution. The issue here is theological confession. A common theological confession is the biblical yoke. Those who refuse to take a covenantal oath are not to be joined in a common covenantal task with those who take it. This law was symbolic of all three covenantal relationships in society: church, family, and State. Israel was not to join with other nations in a covenantal bond; neither were Israelites to marry foreigners. The church was to be kept pure. Modern humanistic political theory denies that this principle of separation applies to the civil covenant, but clearly it applied in Mosaic Israel. Where Israelites exercised lawful civil authority, they were not voluntarily to share political power with covenant-breakers. Those Christians who invoke Paul’s authority to prohibit marriages between Christians and non-Christians are necessarily invoking Deuteronomy 22:10. No one should assume that Paul annulled the principle of unequal yoking in the civil covenant while ajrming it in the church and family covenants. The case for Paul’s supposed annulment must be proven exegetically. Israel was under civil bondage during the captivity and after, so this law could not be applied in civil government, but this is not proof that this law has been partially annulled. Christian political

Laws Prohibiting Mixtures

645

pluralists assume that the law of unequal yoking has been partially annulled, but they do not ofer proof.13

Clothing Mixed clothing made of linen and wool was under a diferent kind of prohibition. It was illegal to wear clothing produced by mixing these two ibers. There was no law against producing mixed cloth for export, however. Why was wearing it wrong but exporting 14 it allowed? No other form of mixed-iber clothing was prohibited by the Mosaic law. Did this case law by implication or extension prohibit all mixed ibers? This seems doubtful. It would have been easy to specify the more general prohibition rather than single out these two ibers. Deuteronomy’s parallel passage also speciies this type of mixed fabric (Deut. 22:11). Then what was the nature of the ofense? Answer: to wear clothing of this mixture was to proclaim symbolically the equality of Israel with all other nations. This could not be done lawfully inside Israel. It could be done by non-Israelites outside Israel. Linen was the priestly cloth. The priests were required to wear linen on the day of atonement (Lev. 16:30–34). Linen was to be worn by the priest in the sacriice of the burnt ofering (Lev. 6:10). During and after the Babylonian captivity, because of their rebellion in Israel, the Levites and priests were placed under a new requirement that kept them separate from the people: they had to wear linen whenever they served before the table of the Lord. They had to put on linen garments when they entered God’s presence in the inner court, and remove them when they returned to the outer court. No wool was to come upon them (Ezek. 44:15–19). The text says, “they shall not sanctify the people with their garments” (Ezek. 44:19). Priestly holiness was associated with linen. Inside a priestly nation, such a mixture was a threat to the holiness of the priests when they brought sacriices before God. As between a priestly nation and a non-priestly nation, this section of Leviticus 19:19 symbolized the national separation of believers from

13. Gary North, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989). 14. In biblical law, if something is not prohibited, it is allowed.

646

DEUTERONOMY

unbelievers. Deuteronomy 22:11 is the parallel passage: “Thou shalt not wear a garment of divers sorts: [as] of wool and linen together.” Inside the boundaries of Israel, this law symbolized sacriicial separation: the tribe of Levi was set apart as a legal representative before God. In this intra-national sense, this law did have a role to play in the separation of the tribes. This is why it was connected to the two seed laws in Leviticus 19:19. It is still prohibited to mix covenantal opposites in a single covenant: in church, State, and family. But is the wearing of this mixture of these two fabrics still prohibited? No. Why not? Because of the change in the priesthood (Gal. 3). Our new covering is Jesus Christ. Paul wrote: “For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus. And if ye be Christ’s, then are ye Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise” (Gal. 3:27–29). Here it is again: inheritance is by God’s promise to Abraham. The sign of this inheritance is no longer circumcision; it is baptism. This is our new clothing. The old prohibition against mixing wool and linen in our clothing is annulled. The new priesthood is under a new covering: Jesus Christ.

The Question of Jurisdiction Was this a civil law or an ecclesiastical law? To identify it as a civil law, we should be able to specify appropriate civil sanctions. The text mentions none. The civil magistrate might have coniscated the progeny of the interbreeding activities, but then what? Sell the animals? Export them? Kill them and sell the meat? These were possible sanctions, but the text is silent. What about mingled seed? Was the entire crop to be coniscated by the State? Could it lawfully be sold? Was it unclean? The text is silent. This silence establishes a prima facie case for the law as ecclesiastical. The mixed clothing law refers to a fact of covenantal separation: a nation of priests. The Israelites were not to wear clothing made of linen and wool. Mixing testiied symbolically to the legitimacy of mixing a nation of priests and a common nation. This is why wearing such mixed cloth was prohibited. This aspect of the case law’s meaning was primarily priestly. Again, the prima facie case is that this was an ecclesiastical law and therefore to be enforced by the priesthood.

Laws Prohibiting Mixtures

647

The maximum ecclesiastical sanction was excommunication. This would have marked the law-breaker as being outside the civil covenant. He faced the loss of his citizenship as well as the disinheritance of his sons unless they broke with him publicly. Instead of a mere economic loss, he faced a far greater penalty. This penalty was consistent with the status of this law as a seed law. The prohibition of mixed seeds was an ajrmation of tribal separation until Shiloh came. An attack on tribal separation was an attack on Jacob’s messianic prophecy. The appropriate penalty was ecclesiastical: removal from both inheritance and citizenship within the tribe.

Conclusion In this chapter I have attempted to answer three questions: What did these verses mean? How were they applied? How should they be applied today? This is the three-part challenge of biblical hermeneutics. The prohibition against the mixing of seeds – animals and crops – was symbolic of the mandatory separation of the tribes. This separation was eschatologically based: till Shiloh came. The prohibition against wearing a mixed cloth of linen and wool was a priestly prohibition: separation of the tribe of Levi within Israel and symbolic of the separation of the priestly nation of Israel from other nations, i.e., a confessional separation. The law prohibiting mixed seeds was temporary because it was tribal. It ended with the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ, or, at the latest, at Pentecost. Spiritual adoption has overcome tribalism as the basis of inheritance in the kingdom of God. The gift of the Spirit, not physical reproduction, is the basis of Christians’ inheritance. National Israel was disinherited in A.D. 70.15 The kingdom of God was taken from national Israel and given to a new nation, the church (Matt. 21:43). The jubilee land laws (Lev. 25) have ended forever. So have the prohibitions against genetic mixing and mixed crops. When people are baptized into Christ through the Spirit, this new priesthood puts on Christ. The older requirements or prohibitions regarding certain types of garments have ended forever. What

15. David Chilton, The Days of Vengeance: An Exposition of the Book of Revelation (Ft. Worth, Texas: Dominion Press, 1987).

648

DEUTERONOMY

remains is the judicial boundary between covenant-breakers and covenant-keepers. This separation is eternal (Rev. 20:14–15). The biblical principle of not mixing seeds, whether of animals or crops, in a single ield applies to us only indirectly. The basic judicial application is that we must be faithful to Jesus Christ, the promised Seed, who has come in history. In Him alone is true inheritance. But there is no application with respect to tribal boundaries. The tribes of Israel are gone forever. Thus, there is no application of this verse genetically. We are allowed to breed animals and plant various crops in the same ield at the same time. The other applications of the principle of separation prohibited 1) plowing with both an ox and a donkey, 2) the wearing of mixed iber garments: linen and wool. The prohibition against plowing with diferent species relects the biblical principle of covenantal relationships: the prohibition against unequal yoking. Israel was to have no covenantal relationships with the nations around her. That law is still in force. The prohibition against mixed clothing applies to us today through baptism, for by baptism we have received our new clothing in Christ. This principle of separation still holds nationally, for it is covenantal, not tribal. It refers to the distinctions between priests and non-priests, between priestly nations (confessionally Christian) and non-priestly nations. It refers to the distinction between Christendom and every other world system. But it has nothing to do with fabrics any longer.

54 Fugitive Slave Law THEThe FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW Thou shalt not deliver unto his master the servant which is escaped from his master unto thee: He shall dwell with thee, even among you, in that place which he shall choose in one of thy gates, where it liketh him best: thou shalt not oppress him (Deut. 23:15–16).

The theocentric principle that undergirded this law is the principle of God’s sanctuary. A sanctuary is a place formally marked by boundaries for the worship of God. This does not mean that everyone who enters a sanctuary is there to worship God. It does mean that everyone inside its boundaries has unique access to God. This law seems to be contrary to the Mosaic law’s defense of private property in slaves. Foreign slaves in Israel were the permanent possession of their Israelite owners, generation after generation (Lev. 25:44–46). Furthermore, Israelite bondservants were not free to come and go as they pleased. A debtor who had forfeited payment on a zero-interest charitable loan had to serve his creditor until the next year of release – up to six years (Ex. 21:2). If an Israelite had been sold into bondage to another Israelite in order to repay a non-charitable loan, he had to serve until the next jubilee – up to 49 years (Lev. 25:39–40). If an Israelite sold himself into bondservice to a resident alien, he had to serve until the next jubilee or until one of his relatives bought him out of servitude (Lev. 25:47–52). In short, the Mosaic law upheld the right of a foreigner to retain ownership of an Israelite. This was a strong defense of private property. Contrary to Rushdoony, there was nothing even

649

650

DEUTERONOMY

remotely voluntary about remaining in temporary bondservice, let alone permanent slavery.1 This is why it took an act of extreme violence by a master to authorize a civil court to award a slave his freedom, e.g., poking out an eye or knocking out a tooth (Ex. 21:26–27). This was not a land law. If the jubilee land law authorizing foreign servitude could not be invoked by a foreign slave owner to get back his slave, surely a foreigner cannot invoke it today, after Christ has annulled the jubilee law (Luke 4:17–21), including the law authorizing inter-generational slavery (Lev. 25:44–46).

Slaves from Abroad The key words that unlock the meaning of this passage are among and gates. The escaped slave described in this passage had come to dwell among them. The words “with thee” were added by the translators. The Hebrew word for among immediately follows dwell. The Hebrew word could also be translated within, meaning within a jurisdiction. The escaped slave also had the right to choose where he would live. He could choose one gate from many gates, meaning any city. To understand this law better, we must irst consider the fact that Mosaic civil law did not compel anyone to ofer positive sanctions.2 Rather, it imposed negative sanctions for evil acts. It should be the ideal for every system of civil law to remove all positive sanctions by the State and impose only those negative sanctions authorized by biblical law. The State is to impose negative sanctions only: punishing public evil. It is not a wealth-creator; it is a wealth-redistributer. It is not safe to entrust to the State the power of making one man rich at the expense of another. It is also not moral. Second, we should recognize that slaves do not “dwell among” an individual. The language indicates that this law was addressed to a corporate group, the nation. It was a civil law. It did not compel any Israelite to grant a positive sanction to the escaped slave. What it did 1. He writes: “Thus, the only kind of slavery permitted is voluntary slavery, as Deuteronomy 23:15, 16 makes very clear.” R. J. Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law (Nutley, New Jersey: Craig Press, 1973), p. 286. 2. Restitution payments by the convicted criminal are the restoration of what is owed to the victim. The State coercively redistributes wealth back to the lawful owner. The legal owner was the victim of a crime. Under biblical law, no one has a legal claim on another person’s wealth merely because the other person is richer.

The Fugitive Slave Law

651

was to prohibit Israel’s civil authorities from imposing a speciic negative sanction on him, namely, returning him to his owner or forbidding him the right to take up residence in a city. The locus of jurisdiction was the nation, from which the slave could choose any city as his place of residence. This indicates that he had not previously been a resident of Israel. He was an escapee from servitude in a foreign household in a foreign nation. The key covenantal issue here is hierarchy. This former slave had been in bondage to a foreign master, who in turn was in bondage to a foreign god. The slave had sought deliverance from his former master. He had decided to come to Israel because it was the nation in which former slaves could be free men. Men were free in Israel because they were not in bondage to idols. This is the heart of the Bible’s message: deliverance from evil. This deliverance begins with deliverance from idolatry. In the Old Covenant, idolatry was almost universal outside of Israel.3 There was little likelihood that this slave would bring along an idol from the household of his former master. Such an idol would have been the mark of his former servitude. In any case, household or civic idols in the ancient Near East were exclusively local gods. The fugitive slave’s presence inside the boundaries of Israel testiied to their limited jurisdiction. My interpretation of this law as applying to foreign slaves has ancient precedents. The Talmud declares this fugitive to be a nonJewish slave of a Jewish master living outside the land (Gittin 45a). There is no exegetical evidence for identifying the owner as a Hebrew, but the rabbis did identify the fugitive as having immigrated into Israel. Nachmanides argued that this slave had been in bondage to a foreigner. The key issue was idolatry, he said. “The reason for this commandment is that with us he will worship God and it is not proper that we return him to his master to worship idols.”4 This statement is incorrect with respect to worshipping God, for worship was not required of any foreigner residing in Israel. He was required only to obey God’s civil laws, which did not include formal worship. But it is true that the slave had been delivered from the idolatrous 3. The one major exception was Greek rationalism, a millennium after this law was declared. But Greek rationalism was the religion of very few classical Greeks, as Socrates’ execution indicates. 4. Nachmanides, Commentary on the Torah, 5 vols. (New York: Shiloh, [1267?] 1976), V, p. 288.

652

DEUTERONOMY

rituals of his former household, in which a slave would probably have been compelled to participate. Nachmanides also argued that the slave probably had led into the camp of the Israelites during an ofensive miliary campaign by Israel against a foreign city.5 The previous section of Deuteronomy sets forth laws governing foreign campaigns (vv. 9–14). This is a plausible argument. A foreign slave would have had a much greater opportunity to lee from a foreign master during a defensive war against Israel. But this law stands on its own, irrespective of war. Any slave who could get to Israel – the Promised Land – could escape bondage. This fact would have become well known among slaves in the ancient Near East, as word of this sanctuary spread from slave to slave. Israel would have attracted other men’s slaves. Israel honored private property. Property is an extension of the kingdom of God in history. Private property is an owner’s legal immunity from fraud and violence, both private and pubic, which is granted by God and is supposed to be enforced by the State. God’s authority to grant such a legal immunity is based on His original ownership of the creation and His delegation of stewardship tasks to individuals. Every individual is responsible to God for the management of whatever it is that God has put under his authority, as Jesus’ parable of the three stewards indicates (Matt. 25:14–30) – the parable that immediately precedes His description of the inal judgment: sheep and goats. In short, private property is legally grounded in the doctrine of God’s absolute sovereignty. The foreign slave master did not acknowledge God’s authority. Therefore, his rights of property were inferior to the fugitive slave’s right to asylum in Israel. The Promised Land was to be a place of refuge, a sanctuary – a set-apart place, i.e., a holy place. Immigrant fugitive slaves were not compelled to worship God, but they did have to obey God’s civil laws. They had to honor God to this extent. Foreign gods could no longer claim jurisdiction over these ex-slaves. The power of foreign gods was broken to this extent. The former slave master was disinherited by this law. His living inheritance had led to a sanctuary. The legal defense of his inheritance under the authority of an idol was sacriiced to the principle of defending Israel’s boundaries and its sanctuary status. The biblical 5. Idem.

The Fugitive Slave Law

653

covenantal principles of God’s sovereignty, His hierarchical authority, and Israel’s boundaries were superior to pagan covenantal principles: local god or gods, an alternative hierarchy, and local jurisdiction. In efect, the Mosaic law acknowledged the right of a foreign master to proclaim his local god’s local authority. If he chose to live under such tyranny, he was entitled to do so. But this idolatrous tyranny would not extend its authority across Israel’s borders. This case law mandated that Israel’s civil government not return immigrant slaves to their foreign masters. It announced to foreign masters: “You want to worship a local god? Very well, have your own way. Your god’s jurisdiction does not extend across Israel’s boundaries. Your property rights in people’s lives do not extend across these boundaries.” This means that a foreign slave who had been purchased by an Israelite in a foreign nation would henceforth live inside a sanctuary established by God: a covenant-keeping household in a covenantkeeping nation. He could hear God’s word there. He would be circumcised (Gen. 17:12–13). He would attend Passover with the family. Through lawful purchase, he had been separated from the idolatry of his nation. Legally, the head of his new household had become his kinsman redeemer.6 Whether his new household was located in a foreign nation or in Israel, he was the property of his owner. Prior to the annulment of the law of permanent slavery by Jesus Christ’s fulillment of the jubilee law (Luke 4:18–20),7 the principle of the covenant-keeping household as a foreign slave’s sanctuary superseded the principle of the Israelite city as the foreign slave’s sanctuary.8

Oppression The Mosaic law repeatedly mentions three classes of people who deserved special consideration as deserving of justice: widows,

6. This pointed forward to Jesus Christ’s purchase of the gentiles through His death on Calvary. Covenanted gentiles now live in His household, not merely as servants but as adopted sons. Christ has become their kinsman redeemer. 7. Gary North, Tools of Dominion: The Case Laws of Exodus (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), pp. 144–47; North, Leviticus: An Economic Commentary (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), ch. 31. 8. In the New Covenant, the principle of the covenanted Trinitarian nation as a sanctuary for oppressed foreign slaves is still in efect. This includes the escaped slaves of messianic States.

654

DEUTERONOMY

orphans, and strangers. The immigrant fugitive slave was in a vulnerable position – indeed, the most vulnerable position in Israel. He could not return home without becoming enslaved again. Worse; he was a man who had run away. He would be subject to harsh penalties. Masters would have made him an example to other would-be fugitive slaves. The fugitive slave in Israel had no local family, no access to landed inheritance, no citizenship, and no place to return. He had been at the bottom of the social ladder in his home country. Except for the foreign slave permanently owned by an Israelite family, he was at the bottom of the social scale in Israel. But, economically speaking, he was potentially in worse shape than the permanent slave, who was part of an Israelite household. He had no economic safety net. What did it mean to oppress a person? Oppression as deined by the Bible is a judicial act. It involves using civil law to steal from or otherwise restrict an honest person. Oppression is a misuse of the civil law. There is no economic deinition available to civil judges to identify oppression. There is only a judicial standard.9 The biblical principle of civil justice is expressed in Exodus 12:49: “One law shall be to him that is homeborn, and unto the stranger that sojourneth among you.” The rule of law is at the heart of civil justice. To use the civil law to shape the outcome of another person’s eforts is a form of oppression. When the State structures economic results by applying the law to one group in a way not applied to all men, someone is being oppressed. The judicial defenselessness of the immigrant ex-slave was not supposed to become an opportunity for oppression. He was not to be targeted as a likely candidate for theft through judicial manipulation. His property rights were to be upheld in Israel, unlike his former master’s property rights. His former master had gained authority over him by means of another god’s laws. The God of Israel had become his liberator. Liberation in Israel was a symbol of liberation by God. It meant liberation from corrupt civil laws. The rule of God’s law gave him his liberty. It also warned him regarding the inal judgment: all men are under the same law and sanctions. All men need the mercy of God as the judicial basis of their liberation from sin and its eternal consequences: negative sanctions. 9. North, Tools of Dominion, pp. 679–80, 785.

The Fugitive Slave Law

655

Conclusion Economics is subordinate to biblically revealed religion. So is everything else. Private property is not an absolute principle. Neither is anything else. No arrangement or institution is absolute in history. Only the written word of God possesses unchangeable, comprehensive authority in history.10 No institution can legitimately claim total allegiance. Any institution that does so will fail. The more secular it is, the sooner it will fail. This is why the Communist Party failed, despite its extraordinary international expansion under Lenin and Stalin. It claimed total allegiance.11 It could not enforce this. One by one, the most eloquent of Communism’s disafected former disciples recognized it as the god that had failed, decades before it visibly failed.12 Is this case law still in force? Yes. Christian societies should be sanctuary societies, where liberty is available to all residents: liberty under biblical law. The sanctuary is bounded; these boundaries must be defended by the sword. This means that Christian societies must be defended by confessionally Christian civil governments. In short, biblical sanctuary means Trinitarian theocracy. There can be no permanent sanctuary State in history apart from Christian theocracy,13 just as there is no sanctuary in eternity apart from subordination to the King of kings. No magistrate in a Christian nation should ever send an immigrant fugitive slave back to his master. His master may be the State. Modern nations do not admit to being slave societies, even when they are. The reality of slavery, whatever it is called, should be acknowledged by the civil authorities in free societies. Immigration laws should ofer sanctuary to all those who are sufering from the judicial equivalent of slavery. The covenantal problem here is that open borders into a confessionally pluralistic nation ofer ripe fruit to dedicated disciples of 10. “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away” (Matt. 24:35). 11. Benjamin Gitlow, The Whole of Their Lives (New York: Scribner’s, 1948). 12. Richard Crossman (ed.), The God That Failed (New York: Bantam, [1950] 1959). 13. The United States was the most open sanctuary society in history. It was also socially Protestant throughout most of its history. California began to erect immigration barriers against the Chinese toward the end of the nineteenth century, when the Darwinian Progressive movement was beginning to gain political strength. The 1924 national immigration law was passed in the middle of the humanistic Roaring Twenties.

656

DEUTERONOMY

non-pluralistic foreign religions. They bring their gods with them. These gods are not local gods; they make universal claims, just as the God of the Bible does. Their disciples want to extend the authority of their non-pluralistic religions. Islam is the obvious example in the late twentieth century. When citizenship is not grounded in a public confession of faith in the God of the Bible, immigrants can work to change the pluralistic confession of the nation after they become naturalized citizens. The religion of pluralism ofers most of these immigrants equal access to the public square, once they become citizens. The result is the weakening of Christian faith in the public square and the undermining of the remnants of Christian civilization. In secular democratic nations, the war for the national confession will be fought in the nation’s bedrooms. Apart from a massive revival, comparative birth rates will determine the future national confession. In Germany and France, Islam is winning this demographic war. This is not to deny the legitimacy of open borders. Open borders were basic to Mosaic Israel. If fugitive slaves were welcomed in Israel, how much more were free men welcomed! If people who were lowest on the social scale outside the land had legal access to residency inside the land, how much more did capital-owning immigrants have access! This case law ofers additional evidence that Israel had an open doors immigration policy. People who were willing to submit to the civil laws of Israel’s God were ofered freedom inside the holy nation’s boundaries. Israel was a true sanctuary.14

14. In 1850, the government of the United States passed a fugitive slave law. This law mandated that ojcers of the United States government extradite leeing slaves to southern states. These ojcers were empowered to appoint local commissioners to assist them. These commissioners in turn were empowered to compel private citizens to join a posse comitatus to chase down fugitive slaves. No jury trials on the alleged slave’s judicial status were allowed in the North; none was authorized in the South, either. The accused was not allowed to present testimony in the North regarding his free status. A ine of $1,000, a huge sum in 1850, was imposed on anyone who aided a slave in escaping. “The Compromise of 1850,” in The Annals of America, 18 vols. (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1968), VIII, pp. 55–57. In short, the government of the United States compelled residents in the North to cooperate with slave owners in the South who had purchased kidnapped Africans from slave traders (mainly Northerners). The fugitive slave law of 1850 forced Northern moralists to break the law and help those who broke it. The enforcement of this law over the next decade steadily separated the United States into two nations: a sanctuary nation and a slave nation. The politicians found no way to reconcile these two nations. This law created the mentality of “two nations in one,” which in turn led to the Civil War (1861–65).

The Fugitive Slave Law

657

The deciding civil issue was confession of faith. Citizenship was open only to circumcised men and their wives who confessed faith in the God of Israel and who participated in Passover. Israel was not pluralistic. Long-term residence did not mean the right to vote. It meant only the right to participate without discrimination in Israel’s economy. It meant justice; it did not mean judgeship.

55 UsuryAUTHORIZED Authorized USURY Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother; usury of money, usury of victuals [food], usury of any thing that is lent upon usury: Unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury; but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon usury: that the LORD thy God may bless thee in all that thou settest thine hand to in the land whither thou goest to possess it (Deut. 23:19–20).

The theocentric principle here is that God protects His people as a shepherd protects his lock. The text speciied that the covenant-keeping lender was to imitate God by not lending at interest to a brother in the faith, i.e., a person who publicly confesses faith in the God of the Bible and who had subordinated himself to the covenanted ecclesiastical community by means of an oath-sign.1 Those who were outside of the covenanted ecclesiastical community could be lawfully treated as a shepherd would treat sheep outside his lock. These sheep did not recognize his voice. These sheep were not under his authority; therefore, they were not under his protection. What is judicially crucial here is the biblical concept of becoming a brother’s protector. The shepherd-sheep relationship implies subordination by the sheep. “The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender” (Prov. 22:7). The Mosaic law recognized that a sheep enters the debt relationship as a subordinate. As we shall see, the cause of this subordination was to be a factor in the lender’s decision as to which kind of loan is involved: charitable or

1. Under the Old Covenant, circumcision; under the New Covenant, baptism. See Ray R. Sutton, That You May Prosper: Dominion By Covenant (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1992), pp. 86–89.

658

Usury Authorized

659

business. The poor brother who had fallen on hard times through no moral fault of his own was morally entitled to a zero-interest charitable loan. This subordination aspect of a loan is universal. This law was therefore not a land law. It had implications for the Israelites’ maintenance of the kingdom grant, but its legitimacy was not based on this grant. This law indicates that God protects covenant-keepers in a way that He does not protect covenant-breakers. He regards the former as deserving of special consideration. This is a matter of inheritance: The wicked borroweth, and payeth not again: but the righteous sheweth mercy, and giveth. For such as be blessed of him shall inherit the earth; and they that be cursed of him shall be cut of. The steps of a good man are ordered by the LORD: and he delighteth in his way. Though he fall, he shall not be utterly cast down: for the LORD upholdeth him with his hand. I have been young, and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread. He is ever merciful, and lendeth; and his seed is blessed. Depart from evil, and do good; and dwell for evermore. For the LORD loveth judgment, and forsaketh not his saints; they are preserved for ever: but the seed of the wicked shall be cut of. The righteous shall inherit the land, and dwell therein for ever (Ps. 37:21–29).

There was a positive sanction attached to this law: “that the LORD thy God may bless thee in all that thou settest thine hand to in the land whither thou goest to possess it.” Moses promised that God would provide visible blessings in the land. The land was not the positive sanction attached to this law, for it would soon be their inheritance. But comprehensive blessings inside the land’s boundaries would be the result of honoring this law. There can be no doubt about this law’s importance. This law was highly speciic, but the blessings attached to it were so comprehensive that they were unspeciied.

Two Kinds of Loans In the other case laws dealing with zero-interest loans, it was the poor brother who was to be beneited. “If thou lend money to any of my people that is poor by thee, thou shalt not be to him as an usurer, neither shalt thou lay upon him usury” (Ex. 22:25). This protection extended to the resident alien. “And if thy brother be waxen poor, and fallen in decay with thee; then thou shalt relieve him: yea,

660

DEUTERONOMY

though he be a stranger [geyr], or a sojourner [toshawb]; that he may live with thee. Take thou no usury of him, or increase: but fear thy God; that thy brother may live with thee. Thou shalt not give him thy money upon usury, nor lend him thy victuals for increase” (Lev. 25:35–37). There were two deciding factors in making a zerointerest loan: the would-be borrower’s poverty and his status as legally protected. One biblical principle of interpretation is this: the more narrowly speciied text is considered authoritative over the more broadly speciied text. That which is narrowly deined is clearer. It provides more data on how the text is to be understood. We should move from the clear to the less clear, from the speciic to the general. In the interpretation of this case law, we conclude that if God had prohibited covenant-keepers from charging interest to anyone, He would not have excluded the stranger from the prohibition. Similarly, if He had prohibited covenant-keepers from charging interest to other covenant-keepers, He would not have speciied poor brethren as coming under the prohibition. There would have been no need for God to identify a smaller group among the brethren as deserving of special treatment if all brethren were equally deserving of such treatment. Not only was the economic status of the circumcised brother a criterion, so was the kind of loan. A charitable loan was morally compulsory. “If there be among you a poor man of one of thy brethren within any of thy gates in thy land which the LORD thy God giveth thee, thou shalt not harden thine heart, nor shut thine hand from thy poor brother: But thou shalt open thine hand wide unto him, and shalt surely lend him sujcient for his need, in that which he wanteth” (Deut. 15:7–8).2 To this type of loan was attached a negative civil sanction for a debtor’s failure to repay: a period of bondage that lasted until the next national year of release (Deut. 15:12). This could be up to six years of bondage. Yet it was also possible for a debtor to be enslaved for a much longer period for a failure to repay a debt: until the next jubilee year (Lev. 25:39–41). This could be up 2. Moral compulsion is not legal compulsion. The State was not to impose negative sanctions on anyone who refused to lend. God would provide positive sanctions on those with open wallets: “Thou shalt surely give him, and thine heart shall not be grieved when thou givest unto him: because that for this thing the LORD thy God shall bless thee in all thy works, and in all that thou puttest thine hand unto” (Deut. 15:10).

Usury Authorized

661

to 49 years of bondage. This raises a major question: What criteria distinguished sabbatical-year debt servitude from jubilee-year debt servitude? The irst criterion was the presence of an interest rate. If a poor man sought a morally compulsory zero-interest loan from his brother in the faith, he placed himself at risk for up to six years. At the end of that time, either the loan was automatically cancelled by law or else he, having previously forfeited repayment, was released from bondage and sent out with food and drink by his creditor (Deut. 15:13–14). A second criterion was that a charitable loan did not require a man’s landed inheritance as collateral. His collateral was either some form of goods or else his willingness to become a bondservant for defaulting. The text does not indicate that he was required to pledge his family’s landed inheritance in order to collateralize a charitable loan. If a man who possessed a rural inheritance that he could use as collateral decided to seek a non-charitable loan, he had no moral claim on the lender, nor could he reasonably expect to receive an interest rate of zero. This loan would have been either a business loan or a consumer loan. This would-be debtor was not truly poor unless his land holdings were too small to support him. The presence of jubilee-bondage loans in addition to sabbatical year-bondage loans indicates that there were commercial loans in Israel. If the interest-bearing commercial debt contract placed him at risk of bondage, then by forfeiting payment on the loan, the debtor placed himself in a much longer term of bondage. This is evidence that commercial loans were much larger than charitable loans. Such loans could be made for longer periods of time than six years. The collateral was the income stream of the land and even the individual for up to 49 years. In short, a commercial loan could place at risk the fruit of a man’s inheritance until the next jubilee.

Two Kinds of Aliens The alien or stranger [nokree] was eligible for an interest-bearing loan at any time. Loans to him were permanent; the year of release did not beneit him. “And this is the manner of the release: Every creditor that lendeth ought unto his neighbor shall release it; he shall not exact it of his neighbor, or of his brother; because it is called the LORD’S release. Of a foreigner [nokree] thou mayest exact it again: but that which is thine with thy brother thine hand shall

662

DEUTERONOMY

release” (Deut. 15:2–3). The foreigner here was an alien who either was not a property-owning resident in Israel or was not circumcised. He was not a permanent resident who had settled in a city. i.e., a sojourner. The Mosaic law distinguished between the two kinds of aliens in other ways. In the law governing unclean meat, we read: “Ye shall not eat of any thing that dieth of itself: thou shalt give it unto the stranger [geyr] that is in thy gates, that he may eat it; or thou mayest sell it unto an alien [nokree]: for thou art an holy people unto the LORD thy God” (Deut. 14:21a). The permanent resident could receive the unclean meat as a gift, but it could not be sold to him, i.e., it ofered no proit for the Israelite. In contrast, it was lawful to sell ritu3 ally unclean meat to a foreigner [nokree]. The permanent resident [geyr] was to be treated as a brother: he was not to be charged interest on a charitable loan, as we have seen (Lev. 25:35–37). He was a kind of honorary Israelite. Not being a citizen of Israel – a member of the congregation – he could not serve as a judge. If he was not circumcised, he could not enter the temple or eat a Passover meal. But as a man voluntarily living permanently under biblical civil law, he was entitled to the civil law’s protection, including the prohibition against interest-bearing charitable loans. Lending at interest was one of God’s means of bringing foreigners under the authority of Israel. “For the LORD thy God blesseth thee, as he promised thee: and thou shalt lend unto many nations, but thou shalt not borrow; and thou shalt reign over many nations, but they shall not reign over thee” (Deut. 15:6). This was an aspect of dominion through hierarchy: “The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender” (Prov. 22:7). The foreigner was fair game for a program of proitable money-lending. This included loans to poor foreigners. When a foreigner was desperate for money, an Israelite was allowed to take advantage of the situation and lend to him at interest. In contrast, the resident alien was legally protected; he was to be treated as a brother. He was already voluntarily under God’s civil law and some of the ritual laws, such as ritual washing after eating meat that had died of natural causes (Lev. 17:15). There was no need to bring him under dominion through debt. He had already acknowledged his debt to God. 3. Chapter 33.

Usury Authorized

663

Which Jurisdiction? The negative sanction for forfeiture was a period of bondage. This placed the Mosaic debt laws under the civil government. But there were no stated penalties for a lender’s refusal to lend, despite the moral compulsion aspect of the charitable loan. God promised to bring negative sanctions against the individual who refused to honor this aspect of the law (Deut. 15:9) and positive sanctions for the man who honored it (v. 10). The State is not a legitimate agency for bringing positive sanctions. As a matter of contract law, the State lawfully imposes only negative sanctions. It enforced bondage on those debtors who defaulted, but it did not compel lenders to make loans. This means that the lender was under God’s sanctions directly, while the debtor was under God’s sanctions indirectly. The lender might give him the positive sanction of a charitable loan, and the State would enforce the penalty for non-repayment. The debtor’s obligations were speciic: pay back so much money by a speciic date or sufer the consequences. The lender’s obligations were not speciic: lend a reasonable amount of money and subsequently receive unspeciied blessings from God. There was no earthly institution that could lawfully enforce speciic penalties on such unspeciic transactions. Civil law deals with speciics. This keeps the State from becoming tyrannical. The State is under law. It enforces contracts, but these contracts are narrowly speciied in advance. It is therefore not the State’s responsibility to mandate that potential lenders provide loans of a speciic size and duration to borrowers.

Not Restricted to Money Loans “Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother; usury of money, usury of victuals [food], usury of any thing that is lent upon usury.” This clause in the law makes it plain that usury, meaning a positive interest rate, applies across the board to all items lent. The phenomenon of interest is not limited to money loans. It is a universal aspect of lending, which is why the law speciies that the prohibition applies to loans in general, not merely money loans. There is an ancient and widespread error going back at least to Aristotle that interest on money loans is unproductive because money, unlike animals, does not reproduce itself. In other words,

664

DEUTERONOMY

money is sterile. Therefore, Aristotle concluded, “of all modes of ac4 quisition, usury is the most unnatural.” Yet the critics of usury have generally viewed rent on land as legitimate.5 If I loan someone 20 ounces of gold and charge him one ounce per year in interest, I am viewed as a usurer and somehow morally questionable. If, on the other hand, I let the same person use my farm land, which is worth 20 gold ounces, and I charge him one ounce of gold per year as rent, I come under no criticism. Why this diference in opinion? In both cases, I give up something valuable for a period of time. I can either spend the gold or invest it in a business venture. Similarly, I can either sell the farm or plow it, plant it, and reap a crop. In both cases, I allow someone else to use my asset for a year, with which he can then pursue his own goals. I charge him for this privilege of gaining temporary control over a valuable asset. I charge either interest or rent because I do not choose to give away the income which my asset could generate during the period in which the other person controls it. To expect me to loan someone my 20 ounces of gold at no interest is the same, economically speaking, as to expect me to loan him the use of my farm land on a rent-free basis. In fact, the thing which people conventionally call rental income is analytically an interest income. Because a payment for the use of land is seen as morally neutral, men describe the interest income generated by land by means of a morally neutral term: rent. Because a payment for the use of money is seen as morally reprehensible, men describe the interest income generated by money loans by means of a morally loaded term: usury. But the transactions are analytically identical. Interest income and rental income are the same thing: payment for the use of an asset over time. There is a tendency to see interest as something exploitative and rent as something legitimate. Interest income is not seen as productive; rental income is seen as productive. Why the diference? Probably because people think that the creation of value must be associated with the creation of goods. This outlook is incorrect, and the best

4. Aristotle, Politics, I:x, trans. Ernest Barker (New York: Oxford University Press, [1946] 1958), p. 29. 5. This would be an extension of Aristotle’s argument: “acquisition of fruits and animals.” Ibid., p. 28.

Usury Authorized

665

example is the discovery of a new idea. It is not physical. We can see this analytical error at work in a series of examples.

The Deciding Factor Is Not Material Example number one. I sell a one-year lease to my abandoned gold mine, which no longer produces any gold. I charge one ounce of gold for this opportunity. The lease-holder discovers a new deposit, digs out 200 ounces of gold in one year, and gives back my 20 ounces plus one ounce. Nobody thinks this arrangement is exploitative on my part. He gets rich, and I get my agreed-upon ounce of gold. Even if he fails to ind any gold, most people would regard my net income of one ounce of gold as legitimate. After all, I let him use my abandoned gold mine for a year. He made a mistake, but he might have struck it rich. Example number two. An inventor comes to me. He thinks that he has discovered a way to increase the output of gold mines – say, a chemical method of extracting more gold out of the ore. He does not have the money to complete his inal experiment and ile for a patent. I lend him 20 ounces of gold for a year at one ounce of gold interest. During this year, he completes the testing, iles the patent, and sells the patent for a fortune. He returns my 20 ounces plus one ounce of gold. Have I exploited him? No. But what if his inal test proves that the process does not work? Or what if he iles the patent incorrectly and someone steals his idea, leaving him without anything to show for his efort? Am I an exploiter because I demand the return of my 20 ounces plus one? I was not a co-investor in the process. I would not have shared in his wealth had everything gone well. His use of my gold did allow him to follow his dream to its conclusion, whether proitable to him or not. Example number three. What if he borrows the gold to complete tests on another invention that is unrelated to gold mining? Has the economic analysis changed? No. The borrower seeks his own ends by means of the 20 ounces of gold. Meanwhile, the lender seeks his ends: an interest payment. Each party to the transaction pursues his own individual goals. Each believes that he can beneit from the transaction.

666

DEUTERONOMY

Conclusion: the physical nature of the asset lent for a ixed payment over time has nothing to do with the analytical basis of the transaction, but it has a lot to do with people’s confusion about inter6 est. The heart of the matter is not material; it is temporal. The lender gives up something of value for a period of time, and he will not do this voluntarily without compensation unless he believes that his refusal to make a zero-interest loan to a poor brother will result in negative sanctions from God, which it did in Mosaic Israel. “Beware that there be not a thought in thy wicked heart, saying, The seventh year, the year of release, is at hand; and thine eye be evil against thy poor brother, and thou givest him nought; and he cry unto the LORD against thee, and it be sin unto thee” (Deut. 15:9). Deuteronomy 23:19–20 acknowledges the identical nature of these lending transactions irrespective of the physical composition of the items loaned. An interest payment was not to be charged on the kind of loan described here: a charitable loan to a brother in the faith. The charitable aspect of the loan was the interest income foregone by the lender. He could have used the asset to generate income for himself; instead, he lent freely and asks only that what he has lent be returned to him. He is charitable because he forfeited the income which his asset would have generated for him in the business loan market. He gave away this income to the borrower, who paid nothing for it.

Compensation for Risk It is not simply that the lender forfeits income that others would otherwise pay him to use his asset for a year. The lender also bears risk. First, he bears the risk that the loan will not be repaid. The text governing charitable loans makes this clear: “Beware that there be not a thought in thy wicked heart, saying, The seventh year, the year of release, is at hand; and thine eye be evil against thy poor brother, and thou givest him nought; and he cry unto the LORD against thee, and it be sin unto thee” (Deut. 15:9). Charitable debts became unenforceable in Israel in the seventh year. Also, all those who were in debt bondage for having failed to repay a charitable loan went free (Deut. 15:12), so the loan’s collateral in the form of the borrower’s 6. We call a mental concept “matter” when we really mean “issue” or “question.” The language of the material invades the mental.

Usury Authorized

667

future work would not be available to the lender as compensation for a default. Second, the lender bears the risk that if he lends money, the government or the central bank may inlate the nation’s domestic money supply, thereby lowering the value of the money which he receives at the end of the loan period. To compensate him for this risk, the lender adds an inlation premium to the interest rate. The threat of price inlation due to monetary inlation is one reason why self-interested lenders should organize politically to pressure the government: 1) not to increase the money supply; 2) to prohibit the central bank from doing so.7 The lender must be compensated for known risk; otherwise, he will not make the loan. In commercial loans, borrowers compensate the lender for this risk. The risk of one borrower’s default is paid for by a risk premium factor in the interest rate which is charged to all borrowers within the same risk classiication. In the case of the charitable loan to the poor brother, God becomes the risk-bearer. He ofers the lender the same shepherd-like protection in hard times that the lender ofers the poor brother in hard times. The lender’s faith in God’s protecting hand is revealed by his willingness to lend at no interest to a righteous poor brother. Also, he thereby acknowledges that God has given him his wealth: “For the LORD thy God blesseth thee, as he promised thee: and thou shalt lend unto many nations, but thou shalt not borrow; and thou shalt reign over many nations, but they shall not reign over thee” (Deut. 15:6).

Uncertainty vs. Risk 8

There is an analytical distinction between uncertainty and risk. Risk is a statistically calculable function. Certain classes of events

7. If the money is gold or silver, and there is no fractional reserve banking, there will be a slow decline in prices over time in a productive economy, since increasing economic output (supply of goods and services) will lower prices in the face of the relatively ixed money supply. The price of goods approaches zero as a limit: the reversal of God’s curse in Eden. In such a world, the lender of money reaps a small return: the money returned to him will buy slightly more than it would have bought when he lent it. In such a monetary environment, the borrower would be better of to borrow consumer goods rather than money. 8. Frank H. Knight, Risk, Uncertainty and Proit (New York: Harper Torchbooks, [1921] 1965); Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1949), ch. 6.

668

DEUTERONOMY

can be forecasted accurately, i.e., within statistical limits. The discovery of this social fact made possible the modern economic 9 world. In contrast, uncertainty cannot be measured in advance. Some kinds of events cannot be forecasted by means of statistical techniques, such as inventions or the discovery of a gem or a gem of an idea. While we all are to some degree both risk-bearers and uncertainty-bearers, there are only a few people who are professional uncertainty-bearers. We call them entrepreneurs. These people forecast the economic future and then buy and sell goods and services in terms of their forecasts in order to proit from their hopedfor accurate knowledge. When successful, they reap proits. When unsuccessful, they reap losses. Because the kinds of events they deal with have not yet been successfully converted into risk events, the market does not enable investors to deal with these events in a scientiic, analytical manner. We call such events high-risk events, but this is incorrect analytically. They are uncertain events. Lenders who seek a legally predictable rate of return lend money at interest. In contrast, investors who are willing to put their money “at risk” – really, at uncertainty – in order to share in any proits must also share in any losses. The gains and losses of entrepreneurial ventures are not predictable, or at least not predictable by most people.10 People who are uncertainty-aversive but not equally risk-aversive lend to people who are willing to bear uncertainty, but who prefer to gain the capital necessary to develop a venture by promising lenders a legally enforceable ixed rate of return. The distribution of risk and uncertainty to those who are willing to bear each of these is made possible through the market for loans. Those entrepreneurs who make statistically unpredictable breakthroughs that beneit society can be funded in their ventures by others who are unwilling to bear uncertainty but who are willing to bear some degree of risk. Without such a social institution, only two kinds of entrepreneurs could fund their ventures: 1) those with capital of their own to invest; 2) those who are willing to share their proits 9. Peter L. Bernstein, Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk (New York: Wiley, 1996). 10. An entrepreneur who has discovered a way to deal with formerly uncertain events by means of proprietary or as yet not widely recognized statistical techniques is in a position to make a great deal of money until others discover these techniques.

Usury Authorized

669

with co-owners of any discovery, and who also have the ability to persuade these investor-owners to put their money into the venture.

Conclusion The more general language of this case law – brothers in the faith – has misled commentators for two millennia. This law must be interpreted in terms of the more narrowly focused reference point of the other laws governing interest: poor brothers in the faith, as well as poor resident aliens, who have fallen on hard times through no moral fault of their own. This case law applied to charitable loans made to brothers in the faith and resident aliens who lived voluntarily under God’s civil laws. It did not prohibit interest-bearing commercial loans. It also did not apply to charitable loans to foreigners [nokree]. The prohibition against interest-bearing loans applied only to morally compulsory loans made to impoverished neighbors. By failing to understand the context of the Mosaic laws against interest-taking, the medieval church placed prohibitions on all interest-bearing loans.11 This drastically restricted the market for loans. It restricted the legal ability of people who were aversive to entrepreneurial uncertainty from making loans at interest. It thereby restricted the ability of entrepreneurs to obtain capital for their ventures. The result was lower economic growth for the entire society.

11. See Chapter 35, footnote 10.

56 Vows,VOWS, Contracts, and Productivity CONTRACTS, AND PRODUCTIVITY When thou shalt vow a vow unto the LORD thy God, thou shalt not slack to pay it: for the LORD thy God will surely require it of thee; and it would be sin in thee. But if thou shalt forbear to vow, it shall be no sin in thee. That which is gone out of thy lips thou shalt keep and perform; even a freewill ofering, according as thou hast vowed unto the LORD thy God, which thou hast promised with thy mouth (Deut. 23:21–23).

The theocentric principle illustrated here is the predictability of God’s sworn promises. God announced in Isaiah 45, a passage devoted to His sovereignty: “Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth: for I am God, and there is none else. I have sworn by myself, the word is gone out of my mouth in righteousness, and shall not return, That unto me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear” (Isa. 45:22–23). The New American Standard Version adds “allegiance” to the inal sentence. There is no escape from God’s sworn word. The reliability of God’s word is absolute. He swears by His own authority. There is no higher authority. Isaiah compared the predictability of God’s word with both the predictability and productivity of the seasons. “For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater: So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it” (Isa. 55:10–11). The element of productivity in God’s reliable word should not be ignored. Nor should the hierarchical aspect of His word, which can be seen in the words that

670

Vows, Contracts, and Productivity

671

introduce this section: “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts” (v. 9). A sovereign God speaks an authoritative, hierarchical word, and it accomplishes all that God proposes. God’s spoken words are productive in history. More than this: they are the basis of progress in history. Cause and efect in history are grounded in God’s covenants with men. Historical sanctions are applied by God in history in terms of men’s responses to His authoritative word. Dominion is by covenant.1 Covenants are established by judicial oath. The binding oath becomes the model for legally binding contracts. Contracts are tools of dominion. This was not a land law. It is a universal law. The law of the vow is still binding.

Productive Words God speaks, and the world responds. He spoke the universe into existence (Gen. 1). It is not enough to ajrm that His word is absolutely sovereign from the creation to the inal judgment and beyond.2 We must also ajrm that His word is productive. There was more to this world at the end of the creation week than there had been at the beginning. There is progress in history because of His sovereign word, which He speaks prior to the events of history and above the processes of history. What God says He will do, He brings to pass. What He brings to pass is progress. History moves toward the inal judgment, not randomly but according to God’s sovereign decree. Nothing happens that is outside His decree. In their public prayer to God, the disciples cited Psalm 2’s description of the hopeless rebellion of the kings of the earth against God, and then applied this text to the cruciixion: “For of a truth

1. Ray R. Sutton, That You May Prosper: Dominion By Covenant (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1992). 2. It is surely not enough to ajrm that His word is relatively sovereign, i.e., sovereign except for substantial gaps of historical indeterminacy commonly known as man’s free will. Pharaoh had no free will in opposing Moses: “For the scripture saith unto Pharaoh, Even for this same purpose have I raised thee up, that I might shew my power in thee, and that my name might be declared throughout all the earth. Therefore hath he mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth” (Rom. 9:17–18). Judas had no free will in betraying Christ: “And truly the Son of man goeth, as it was determined: but woe unto that man by whom he is betrayed!” (Luke 22:22).

672

DEUTERONOMY

against thy holy child Jesus, whom thou hast anointed, both Herod, and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles, and the people of Israel, were gathered together, For to do whatsoever thy hand and thy counsel determined before to be done” (Acts 4:27–28). Even in evil events there is progress in history. “The LORD hath made all things for himself: yea, even the wicked for the day of evil” (Prov. 16:4). Progress in history rests on God’s absolutely sovereign, absolutely comprehensive decree. The kingdom of God advances in terms of His prior spoken word and His present sustaining providence, which corresponds in all details to His original word.

Analogous Words and Deeds Man is made in God’s image. He speaks as God speaks, but in a creaturely, representative way. The covenantal question is this: In the name of which god does he speak? Just as he is required to think God’s thoughts after Him, so is he required to speak God’s words after Him. After a man speaks, his subsequent actions are supposed to conirm his words, for God’s actions invariably conirm His words. A man’s actions are to testify to the reliability of his words. The more reliably he speaks, the greater his productivity because of his greater value to others. Other men can make plans conidently in terms of his words. Greater predictability makes cooperation less expensive. Where the price of something drops, more of it will be demanded. The social division of labor increases as a result of the predictability of men’s words. Individual output per unit of input increases. Men grow wealthier. Greater wealth makes the tools of dominion more afordable. The vow serves as the model of a contract. The words in a vow have greater authority than the words in a promise. The vow is made before God by means of an oath which implicitly or explicitly invokes the sanctions of God in history. The individual takes the vow on his own authority. There is no intermediary institution in between God and the vow-taker. It is not like a church vow, a civil vow, or a marital vow. A covenantal relationship between God and man is conirmed by the presence of a vow to God. The oath’s sanctions serve as the link between heaven’s throne and history. This is why the person who vows before God must be sure that he fulills the stipulations of his vow. God is the direct enforcer of negative sanctions against the vow-taker who defaults.

Vows, Contracts, and Productivity

673

The Judicially Binding Authority of the Oath “For the LORD thy God will surely require it of thee”: this is an assertion of a threatened negative sanction. This threatening language identiies a promise to God as a vow. A vow is taken to God and enforced by God. The vow has covenantal authority. It is not the judicial equivalent of a contract made between men. It is a hierarchical, oath-bound contract between God and a person. He brings sanctions directly, for the oath invokes God’s sanctions. The oath is self-maledictory (“bad-speaking”), calling down God’s negative sanctions on the oath-taker should he fail to abide by the covenant’s stipulations.3 Thus, the vow has greater authority than a contract does, which invokes the State as the contract’s sanctionsbringer. A contract is not lawfully sealed with a self-maledictory oath before God. This case law is an extension of an earlier case law: “If a man vow a vow unto the LORD, or swear an oath to bind his soul with a bond; he shall not break his word, he shall do according to all that proceedeth out of his mouth” (Num. 30:2). The word for “bind” is the same one used to describe what the Philistines did to Samson. The word is also used to describe harnessing a horse to a chariot. It is as if one’s soul – the breath of life – could be tied down to a physical implement. Word and deed are bound together judicially. This bond is two-fold: verbal and historical. What a man says must correspond to the promised external deeds which he is subsequently required by God to perform. These deeds invoke God’s deeds: sanctions, either positive and negative. Cause and efect in history are covenantal. This is why the structure of the covenant is the basis of biblical social theory. Biblical social theory is inescapably judicial. Having spent four decades in the wilderness under the negative sanctions that God had applied to their fathers, the Israelites of Joshua’s generation should have begun to understand this.4 (Three thousand ive hundred years later, so should Christian intellectuals, but they rarely do.) A promise made to God is more binding legally than a promise made to man. It is sometimes lawful to break a promise to a man, for 3. Sutton, That You May Prosper, ch. 4. 4. Gary North, Sanctions and Dominion: An Economic Commentary on Numbers (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1997).

674

DEUTERONOMY

there is no absolute authority in a relationship of a man to another man, unless that promise is a covenantal vow, as in marriage. A good example of breaking a promise was Solomon’s promise to his mother: “Bath-sheba therefore went unto king Solomon, to speak unto him for Adonijah. And the king rose up to meet her, and bowed himself unto her, and sat down on his throne, and caused a seat to be set for the king’s mother; and she sat on his right hand. Then she said, I desire one small petition of thee; I pray thee, say me not nay. And the king said unto her, Ask on, my mother: for I will not say thee nay. And she said, Let Abishag the Shunammite be given to Adonijah thy brother to wife. And king Solomon answered and said unto his mother, And why dost thou ask Abishag the Shunammite for Adonijah? ask for him the kingdom also; for he is mine elder brother; even for him, and for Abiathar the priest, and for Joab the son of Zeruiah. Then king Solomon sware by the LORD, saying, God do so to me, and more also, if Adonijah have not spoken this word against his own life” (I Ki. 2:19–23). Solomon realized that Adonijah was claiming the political inheritance for himself, for he was seeking marriage with the woman who had slept by King David to warm him. Adonijah was claiming continuity. He was attempting a political rebellion. Not only did Solomon break his word to his mother, he executed his older half-brother for this insurrection against his throne. Other kings were not equally wise – pagan kings. Darius, king of Medo-Persia, was tricked into promising to execute any man who prayed openly to God within a 30-day period. His advisors had devised this tactic in order to trap Daniel, who was immediately arrested and brought before the king. “Then the king, when he heard these words, was sore displeased with himself, and set his heart on Daniel to deliver him: and he laboured till the going down of the sun to deliver him. Then these men assembled unto the king, and said unto the king, Know, O king, that the law of the Medes and Persians is, That no decree nor statute which the king establisheth may be changed” (Dan. 6:14–15). Centuries later, Herod followed in this pagan tradition with respect to his stepdaughter: “But when Herod’s birthday was kept, the daughter of Herodias danced before them, and pleased Herod. Whereupon he promised with an oath to give her whatsoever she would ask. And she, being before instructed of her mother, said, Give me here John Baptist’s head in a charger. And the king was sorry: nevertheless for the oath’s sake, and them

Vows, Contracts, and Productivity

675

which sat with him at meat, he commanded it to be given her” (Matt. 14:6–9). Both men should have broken their promises. They had been misused by those under their jurisdiction. They became vulnerable to manipulators. In contrast, Solomon recognized this misuse of his authority by Adonijah. He humiliated his misused mother by breaking his promise to her, and then he executed his conniving half-brother. Adonijah had misused Bathsheba and intended to misuse the Shunamite girl. He was imitating Satan, who had used the serpent to deceive the woman in order to undermine her husband’s lawful authority. Solomon recognized this tactic for what it was, and therefore had his brother executed. A king’s word is not God’s word. Only when God was invoked to conirm a lawful vow did the vow of a king take on the character of an unbreakable covenantal oath. What was true of a king was true for a lesser man. After the Israelites had made a covenant with the Gibeonites, who had tricked them, they upheld their words. First the vow: “And Joshua made peace with them, and made a league with them, to let them live: and the princes of the congregation sware unto them” (Josh. 9:15). Then the fulillment: “And the children of Israel smote them not, because the princes of the congregation had sworn unto them by the LORD God of Israel. And all the congregation murmured against the princes. But all the princes said unto all the congregation, We have sworn unto them by the LORD God of Israel: now therefore we may not touch them. This we will do to them; we will even let them live, lest wrath be upon us, because of the oath which we sware unto them. And the princes said unto them, Let them live; but let them be hewers of wood and drawers of water unto all the congregation; as the princes had promised them” (vv. 9:18–21). God did not bring sanctions against Israel for having allowed a Canaanitic tribe to survive. On the contrary, He allowed the Gibeonites to serve the priests in the work of the temple. “And Joshua made them that day hewers of wood and drawers of water for the congregation, and for the altar of the LORD, even unto this day, in the place which he should choose” (v. 9:27). When an alliance of Canaanite nations attacked Gibeon, presumably to make them an example for having surrendered to Israel, Gibeon called on Israel to defend them. Israel came to Gibeon’s defense and routed the Canaanites (Josh. 10). God had told the Israelites not to spare any

676

DEUTERONOMY

nation in the land. “And thou shalt consume all the people which the LORD thy God shall deliver thee; thine eye shall have no pity upon them: neither shalt thou serve their gods; for that will be a snare unto thee” (Deut. 7:16). Yet Israel was oath-bound to spare Gibeon and even come to Gibeon’s defense. This was the power of the covenantal oath under the Mosaic law. This was the authority of God’s name, lawfully invoked.

Invoking God’s Name A covenantal oath has great authority because God’s name has great authority. This was what the rulers of Israel told the murmuring congregation. “We have sworn unto them by the LORD God of Israel.” That was supposed to settle the matter. The matter was supposed to remain settled. Saul broke this oath with Gibeon some four centuries later. The Israelites living under David paid the consequences. Then there was a famine in the days of David three years, year after year; and David enquired of the LORD. And the LORD answered, It is for Saul, and for his bloody house, because he slew the Gibeonites. And the king called the Gibeonites, and said unto them; (now the Gibeonites were not of the children of Israel, but of the remnant of the Amorites; and the children of Israel had sworn unto them: and Saul sought to slay them in his zeal to the children of Israel and Judah.) Wherefore David said unto the Gibeonites, What shall I do for you? and wherewith shall I make the atonement, that ye may bless the inheritance of the LORD? And the Gibeonites said unto him, We will have no silver nor gold of Saul, nor of his house; neither for us shalt thou kill any man in Israel. And he said, What ye shall say, that will I do for you. And they answered the king, The man that consumed us, and that devised against us that we should be destroyed from remaining in any of the coasts of Israel, Let seven men of his sons be delivered unto us, and we will hang them up unto the LORD in Gibeah of Saul, whom the LORD did choose. And the king said, I will give them. But the king spared Mephibosheth, the son of Jonathan the son of Saul, because of the LORD’S oath that was between them, between David and Jonathan the son of Saul. But the king took the two sons of Rizpah the daughter of Aiah, whom she bare unto Saul, Armoni and Mephibosheth; and the ive sons of Michal the daughter of Saul, whom she brought up for Adriel the son of Barzillai the Meholathite: And he delivered them into the hands of the Gibeonites, and they hanged them in the hill before the LORD: and

Vows, Contracts, and Productivity

677

they fell all seven together, and were put to death in the days of harvest, in the irst days, in the beginning of barley harvest (II Sam. 21:1–9).

God had not forgotten the oath made by Joshua and the rulers of Israel. Saul either forgot or believed that God would no longer hold him responsible for honoring it. God did not forget what Saul did. Negative sanctions came on Israel many years after Saul was dead. David spared one heir of Saul because of his prior oath to the man’s father. The Gibeonites counted the matter closed with the execution of Saul’s grandsons. The blood of their grandfather was on their heads, for their grandfather was dead and beyond historical sanctions. In this case, a Mosaic case law was lawfully violated: “The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin” (Deut. 24:16). In the case of Achan, who committed sacrilege,5 the sons died for the sin of their father. In this case, the required sanction applied two generations later. The law governing the covenantal oath supersedes the law governing the application of civil sanctions on sons. This is evidence of the importance of the vow. There is no biblical indication that the Mosaic laws of the vow have been annulled by the New Covenant. The New Testament strengthens the authority of the vow: the Son of God has conirmed the vow. “Also I say unto you, Whosoever shall confess me before men, him shall the Son of man also confess before the angels of God: But he that denieth me before men shall be denied before the angels of God” (Luke 12:8–9). To deny Christ is to disavow Him. Paul warns: “It is a faithful saying: For if we be dead with him, we shall also live with him: If we sufer, we shall also reign with him: if we deny him, he also will deny us: If we believe not, yet he abideth faithful: he cannot deny himself” (II Tim. 2:11–13). The promised eternal sanctions – positive and negative – are grounded judicially on Christ’s inability to deny Himself, His words, and His authority.

5. Gary North, Boundaries and Dominion: The Economics of Leviticus (computer edition; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), Appendix A.

678

DEUTERONOMY

A Contract A contract does not have the same degree of authority that a lawful covenantal oath possesses. A lawful covenantal oath invokes God as the inal sanctions-bringer. A contract invokes the State as the inal sanctions-bringer. The State does not possess the same degree of authority that God does. To elevate a contract to the status of a covenant is to elevate the authority of the State over God. Any assertion of equality is a hidden assertion of superiority.6 There cannot be equality with God; there is therefore no equality of a contract with a lawful covenant. Jesus warned about invoking God or the sacred implements of God to sanction a non-covenantal ajrmation: “But I say unto you, Swear not at all; neither by heaven; for it is God’s throne: Nor by the earth; for it is his footstool: neither by Jerusalem; for it is the city of the great King. Neither shalt thou swear by thy head, because thou canst not make one hair white or black. But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil” (Matt. 5:34–37). The West’s social contract theory since the late seventeenth century has placed the State at the pinnacle of power. Some versions invoke God; others do not. In none of them does the Bible gain authority over the terms of the social contract. This places some version of neutral civil law in authority, which in turn rests on a theory of mankind’s rational corporate mind and also on a theory of the existence of universally acknowledged and binding moral standards, irrespective of the content of rival religious confessions. It also makes the State the sovereign interpreter and enforcer of the social contract’s stipulations. In Rousseau’s contractual theory, this statism is more pronounced than in Locke’s version.7 In Locke’s contractualism, there can be a theoretical appeal to God, or to a higher law, or to the sovereign people, but there is a theoretical question here: Who lawfully represents God or the higher law? The doctrine of contractual representation is necessarily a doctrine of historical representation. This is 6. Consider bigamy. The second wife asserts equality with the irst wife. The irst wife knows better. She is the loser. She has become “used goods.” She is Leah; the new wife is Rachel. 7. Robert A. Nisbet, Tradition and Revolt: Historical and Sociological Essays (New York: Knopf, 1968), ch. 1.

Vows, Contracts, and Productivity

679

the question of the voice of authority. If the king does not hear a grievance from the people, Locke wrote, “the appeal then lies nowhere but to heaven . . . and in that state the injured party must judge for himself when he will think it to make use of that appeal and put himself into it.”8 This does not settle the issue of conlicting voices in history. It merely defers it. Locke’s god in the Second Treatise is not part of a covenantal relationship which is established in terms of revealed law and predictable corporate sanctions. How, then, does the aggrieved party know if he is in the right or if God will defend his cause? By invoking the State, the parties to a voluntary private contract reduce the costs of enforcing the stipulations of the contract, but only in a society in which the civil authorities predictably uphold private contracts. This reduction in the costs of cooperation increases the likelihood of on-going cooperation among the parties to the contract. By lowering the parties’ costs of enforcing compliance, the State encourages cooperation. It increases the predictability of men’s outcomes. It thereby reduces risk (statistically predictable loss) in society by lowering the costs for men to pool risk and reduce risk’s burden on any single participant to the contract. The insurance contract is the obvious example, but the same process of dispersing risk applies to contracts in general. When the costs of gaining predictable law enforcement increase to such an extent that invoking the State’s sanctions is more expensive than the value of the expected income stream ofered by the contract, cooperation breaks down. This is why self-government is crucial for sustaining a contractual society. If the participants must resort to the State continually to gain mutual compliance, the legal costs and delays will increase so much that their cooperative venture fails. If any society relies on lawyers alone to interpret the law, the lawyers’ guild will make full use of this monopoly. The society will fail to obtain predictable justice. It will fall.

Conclusion Covenant-keepers are under the confessional vow of subordination as members of the church covenant. Beyond this, they are not

8. John Locke, Of Civil Government: Second Treatise (1690), section 242.

680

DEUTERONOMY

asked to take personal vows of service. They may lawfully do this, but they are not required to. Once a person takes a personal vow to God, he is bound by it. He must fulill its terms. “If a man vow a vow unto the LORD, or swear an oath to bind his soul with a bond; he shall not break his word, he shall do according to all that proceedeth out of his mouth. If a woman also vow a vow unto the LORD, and bind herself by a bond, being in her father’s house in her youth” (Num. 30:2–3). “When thou vowest a vow unto God, defer not to pay it; for he hath no pleasure in fools: pay that which thou hast vowed. Better is it that thou shouldest not vow, than that thou shouldest vow and not pay” (Eccl. 5:4–5).9 As with a covenantal oath, the vow is legally binding. God brings negative sanctions to those who do not comply with its terms. A contract has less authority than a vow, but it has similar aspects: a sovereign enforcer (the State), a hierarchy of enforcement (representatives), stipulations, sanctions, and continuity. This means that a contract’s terms are supposed to be honored by the participants. This theological aspect adds an element of authority to private contracts. A biblical covenantal society will eventually develop into a contractual society. Late medieval Christianity developed the legal institutions that established and have maintained the Western legal tradition.10 This should come as no surprise. Oath-bound covenantal vows before God make possible social cooperation by establishing the church, State, and family. A contract is analogous to a covenant. It has analogous efects. A contract increases the likelihood of social cooperation among men by lowering the costs of cooperating. It increases the precision of the agreed-upon deeds which men promise to perform. It also makes it legal for the State to impose negative sanctions against those parties to the contract who fail to fulill the terms of the contract. Contracts lower the costs of cooperation, thereby increasing the amount of 9. Jesus’ answer to the Pharisees went to the heart of the matter: “But what think ye? A certain man had two sons; and he came to the first, and said, Son, go work to day in my vineyard. He answered and said, I will not: but afterward he repented, and went. And he came to the second, and said likewise. And he answered and said, I go, sir: and went not. Whether of them twain did the will of his father? They say unto him, The first. Jesus saith unto them, Verily I say unto you, That the publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you” (Matt. 21:28–31). 10. Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1983).

Vows, Contracts, and Productivity

681

cooperation demanded. Increased social cooperation increases the division of labor and therefore men’s individual productivity and income.

57 Free for THE the Picking FREE FOR PICKING When thou comest into thy neighbour’s vineyard, then thou mayest eat grapes thy ill at thine own pleasure; but thou shalt not put any in thy vessel. When thou comest into the standing corn of thy neighbour, then thou mayest pluck the ears with thine hand; but thou shalt not move a sickle unto thy neighbour’s standing corn (Deut. 23:24–25).

The theocentric principle undergirding this law is that God, as the owner of the creation, had the exclusive right to specify the terms of the leases which He ofers to his stewards. His rural leasehold’s contract announced to the land owner: “You do not possess absolute sovereignty over this land. Your neighbor has the right to pick a handful of corn or grapes from this ield. Your right to exclude others by law or force is limited.” In this sense, God delegated to a farmer’s neighbors the right to enforce God’s claim of exclusive control over a symbolic portion of every ield. The land owner could not lawfully exclude God’s delegated representatives from access to his crops. The fact that he could not lawfully exclude them testiied to his lack of absolute sovereignty over his property. In the garden of Eden, God placed a judicial boundary around one tree. This boundary was there to remind Adam that he could not legitimately assert control over the entire garden. Over most of it, Adam did exercise full authority. But over one small part, he did not. It was of-limits to him. Adam’s acceptance of this limitation on his authority was basic to his continued residence in the garden. More than this: it was basic to his life. God interacted with man on a face-to-face basis in the garden. He no longer deals with man in this way. Instead, God has established a system of representative authority that substitutes for a verbal “no trespassing” sign around a

682

Free for the Picking

683

designated tree. The neighbor is God’s agent who comes into another man’s ield and announces, in efect: “This does not belong exclusively to you. As the original owner, God has a valid legal claim on it. So do I, as God’s agent.” In this text, God forbade land owners from excluding visitors from their ields. A visitor had the right to pick something to eat during the harvest season. He lawfully reaped the fruits of another person’s land, labor, and capital. The legal boundaries that delineated the ownership of a ield did not restrict access by the visitor. The visitor had a legal claim on a small portion of the harvest. He had to appear in person to collect this portion. Put a diferent way, outsiders were co-owners of a portion of every ield’s pickable crop. One question that I deal with later in this chapter is whether this law was a cross-boundary law rather than a seed law or land law.1 If it was a cross-boundary law, then God was making this law universal in its jurisdiction. He was announcing this system of land tenure in His capacity as the owner of the whole earth, not just as the owner of the Promised Land.

Exclusion by Conquest The Israelites were about to inherit the Promised Land through military conquest. Their forthcoming inheritance would be based on the disinheritance of the Canaanites. The speciied means of this transfer of ownership was to be genocide. It was not merely that the Canaanites were to be excluded from the land; they were to be excluded from history. More to the point, theologically speaking, their gods were to be excluded from history (Josh. 23:5–7). The Israelites would soon enjoy a military victory after a generation of miraculous wandering in the wilderness (Deut. 8:4). There could be no legitimate doubt in the future that God had arranged this transfer of the inheritance. He was therefore the land’s original owner. They would henceforth hold their land as sharecroppers: ten percent of the net increase in the crop was to go to God through the Levitical priesthood. This was Levi’s inheritance (Num. 18:21). Before the conquest began, God placed certain restrictions on the use of His holy land: the formal terms of the lease. As the owner 1. On the diference, see Gary North, Leviticus: An Economic Commentary (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), pp. 637–45.

684

DEUTERONOMY

of both the land and the people who occupied it, God’s restrictions were designed to protect the long-term productivity of His assets. Yet He imposed these laws for their sakes, too. Land-owning Israelites had to rest the land every seventh year (Lev. 25:4). They had to allow poverty-stricken gleaners to come onto their land and pick up the leftovers of the crops (Lev. 19:9–10; 23:22; Deut. 24:21). This passage further erased the legal boundary between the land’s owners and non-owners. Whatever a neighbor could pick and hold in his hands was his to take prior to the harvest. He had legal title to this share of his neighbor’s crop. It did not belong to the land owner. Ownership of land, seeds, and prior labor did not entitle him to that portion of the crop which a neighbor could pick and hold in his hands. That is, his prior investment was not the legal basis of his ownership. The conquest of Canaan was the legal basis of Israel’s rural land ownership. Legal title in Israel had nothing to do with some hypothetical original owner who had gained legal title because he had mixed his labor with unowned land – John Locke’s theory of original ownership.2 There had once been Canaanites in the land, whose legal title was visibly overturned by the conquest. The Canaanites were to be disinherited, Moses announced. They would not be allowed to inherit because they could not lawfully be neighbors. The conquest’s dispossession of the gods of Canaan deinitively overturned any theory of private ownership that rested on a story of man’s original ownership based on his own labor. The kingdom grant preceded any man’s work. The promise preceded the inheritance. In short, grace precedes law. The neighbor in Mosaic Israel was a legal participant in the kingdom grant. He lived under the authority of God. His presence in the land helped to extend the kingdom in history. The land was being subdued by men who were willing to work under God’s law. The exclusion of the Canaanites had been followed by the inclusion of the Israelites and even resident aliens. Canaan was more than Canaanites. It was also the land. The conquest of Canaan was more than a military victory; it was a process. The fruits of the land belonged to all residents in the land. The bulk of these fruits belonged to land owners, but not all of the fruits. 2. John Locke, On Civil Government: Second Treatise (1690), section 27.

Free for the Picking

685

In this sense, the resident who owned no land but who had legal access to the land was analogous to the beast that was employed to plow the land. “Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn” (Deut. 25:4). Although the neighbor was not employed by the land owner, he was part of the overall dominion process inside Israel. The fact that God had included him inside Canaan made it more dijcult for those who served other gods to occupy the land. A man’s access to the courts and to the fruits of the ield gave him a stake in the land, something worth defending. Israel was no pluralistic democracy. It was a theocracy. No law but God’s could lawfully be enforced by the State. Only God’s name could be lawfully invoked publicly inside Israel’s boundaries. By remaining inside the land, a resident was publicly acknowledging his allegiance to Israel’s God rather than to another god. He was acknowledging God’s legal claim on him. God in turn gave him a legal claim on a small portion of the output of the land.

Jesus and the Corn Verse 25 is the partial background for one of Jesus’ more perplexing confrontations with the Pharisees. “And it came to pass on the second sabbath after the irst, that he went through the corn ields; and his disciples plucked the ears of corn, and did eat, rubbing them in their hands. And certain of the Pharisees said unto them, Why do ye that which is not lawful to do on the sabbath days? And Jesus answering them said, Have ye not read so much as this, what David did, when himself was an hungred, and they which were with him; How he went into the house of God, and did take and eat the shewbread, and gave also to them that were with him; which it is not lawful to eat but for the priests alone? And he said unto them, That the Son of man is Lord also of the sabbath” (Luke 6:1–5). The Pharisees did not accuse the disciples of theft; rather, they accused the disciples of not keeping the sabbath. Had the disciples been guilty of theft, their critics would have taken advantage of this opportunity to embarrass Jesus through His disciples’ actions, which the disciples had done right in front of Him. The reason why they did not accuse the disciples of theft was that in terms of the Mosaic law, the disciples had not committed theft. Their infraction, according to the Pharisees, was picking corn on the sabbath. Picking corn was a form of work.

686

DEUTERONOMY

Jesus’ response was to cite an obscure Old Testament incident: David’s coniscation of the showbread. The circumstances surrounding that incident are even more perplexing to the commentators than Jesus’ walk through the cornield. David was leeing from Saul. To preserve his life and the lives of his men, he lied to a priest and coniscated the showbread, which was always to be on the table of the Lord (Ex. 25:30).3 Then came David to Nob to Ahimelech the priest: and Ahimelech was afraid at the meeting of David, and said unto him, Why art thou alone, and no man with thee? And David said unto Ahimelech the priest, The king hath commanded me a business, and hath said unto me, Let no man know any thing of the business whereabout I send thee, and what I have commanded thee: and I have appointed my servants to such and such a place. Now therefore what is under thine hand? give me ive loaves of bread in mine hand, or what there is present. And the priest answered David, and said, There is no common bread under mine hand, but there is hallowed bread; if the young men have kept themselves at least from women. And David answered the priest, and said unto him, Of a truth women have been kept from us about these three days, since I came out, and the vessels of the young men are holy, and the bread is in a manner common, yea, though it were sanctiied this day in the vessel. So the priest gave him hallowed bread: for there was no bread there but the shewbread, that was taken from before the LORD, to put hot bread in the day when it was taken away (I Sam. 21:1–6).

Jesus was implying that David had not done anything wrong in this incident, either by lying to a priest about his mission or by taking what belonged to God. David invoked the status of his men as holy warriors on the king’s ojcial business, which was why the priest raised the issue of their contact with women. David’s answer – they had had no contact with women for three days – pointed back to the three days of abstinence prior to the giving of the law at Sinai (Ex. 19:15). David, as God’s anointed heir of the throne of Israel (I Sam. 16), possessed kingly authority. Jonathan, Saul’s formally lawful heir, had just re-conirmed his inheritance-transferring oath 3. There was not enough bread to save their lives from starvation. These loaves were not, in and of themselves, crucial for David’s survival. But as one meal among many, the bread was part of a program of survival. These loaves might not be the last ones coniscated by David.

Free for the Picking

687

4

with David (I Sam. 20:42). Because of this oath, David had the authority to lie to a priest and to take the showbread for himself and his men, even though Saul was still on the throne. To preserve his life, and therefore his God-designated inheritance, David acted lawfully. David acted as Jacob had acted when he tricked Isaac into giving him the blessing which was lawfully his by revelation and voluntary transfer by Esau (Gen. 27). The priest said that there was no common bread available. This indicates that this was a sabbath day: no cooking. There was no fresh bread or hot bread, which was why the showbread was still there: it had not been replaced by hot bread. So, David asked for holy bread on a sabbath. There was no question about it: he was asking for holy bread on a holy day in the name of the king. The priest gave it to him. On what legal basis? The text does not say, but David’s invoking of Saul’s authority indicates that a man on a king’s mission possessed lawful authority to receive bread set aside for God if there was no other bread available. God had said, “thou shalt set upon the table shewbread before me alway” (Ex. 25:30). But this situation was an exception which the priest acknowledged as valid. The desire of the king’s men superseded this ritual requirement. Unlike Christian commentators,5 the Pharisees did not criticize David’s actions. Jesus cited this incident in defense of His own actions. He was thereby declaring His own kingly authority. As surely as David’s anointing by Samuel on God’s behalf had authorized him to deceive a priest and take the showbread on the sabbath, so 4. The original covenant had been marked by Jonathan’s gift of his robe to David, symbolizing the robe of authority, as well as his sword (I Sam. 18:3–4). 5. Puritan commentator Matthew Poole called David’s lie to the priest a “plain lie.” A Commentary on the Holy Bible, 3 vols. (London: Banner of Truth Trust, [1683] 1962), I, p. 565. John Gill, a Calvinistic Baptist and master of rabbinic literature, referred to David’s lie as a “downright lie, and was aggravated by its being told only for the sake of getting a little food; and especially to a high priest, and at the tabernacle of God. . . . This shows the weakness of the best men, when left to themselves. . . .” John Gill, An Exposition of the Old Testament, 4 vols. (London: William Hill Collingridge, [1764] 1853), II, pp. 196–97. Neither commentator criticized David for taking the showbread on the sabbath, which was the judicial heart of the matter. Christ sanctioned this action retroactively, which puts Christian commentators in a bind. So, they focus instead on David’s lie, just as commentators focus on Rahab’s lie, while refusing to raise their voices in protest against the signiicant ethical issue: her treason. This is a common blindness among pietistic commentators: straining at ethical gnats and swallowing what appear to be ethical camels. Cf. Gary North, “In Defense of Biblical Bribery,” in R. J. Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law (Nutley, New Jersey: Craig Press, 1973), especially pp. 838–42.

688

DEUTERONOMY

had the Holy Spirit’s anointing of Jesus authorized Him to have His disciples pick ears of corn on the sabbath. As surely as the king’s men were authorized to eat the showbread on the sabbath, so were Christ’s disciples authorized to eat raw corn on the sabbath. Jesus then took the matter a step further: He announced that He was Lord of the Mosaic sabbath. This meant that He was announcing more than kingly authority. He was declaring His messianic heirship at this point: the son of man, Lord of the Mosaic sabbath. If David, as the prophetically anointed but not-yet publicly sanctioned king of Israel, had possessed temporary authority over a priest for the sake of his lawful inheritance of the throne, far more did Jesus Christ, as messianic heir of the kingdom of God, possess authority over the sabbath in Israel. One thing is certain: the judicial issue was not corn-stealing.

A Foretaste of Bread and Wine The visitor eats grapes in the vineyard, but he cannot lawfully carry them of his neighbor’s property. He cannot make wine with what he eats. Neither can two hands full of corn make a loaf of bread. This case law does not open a neighbor’s ield to all those who seek a inished meal. A free sample of the raw materials of such a meal is ofered to visitors, but not the feast itself. This is not a harvest in preparation for a feast; it is merely a symbol of a feast to come. To prepare a feast, productive and successful people must bring to the kitchen sujcient fruits of the ield. The full blessings of God are displayed at a feast. This case law does not ofer a feast to the visitor. It ofers a full stomach to a person walking in a ield, but not a feast in a home or communion hall. It ofers sujcient food to a hungry man to quiet the rumblings of his stomach, but it does not provide the means of celebration. It ofers a token of a future feast. It is symbolic of blessings to come, a down payment or earnest of a future feast. Grapes and grain point to the sacramental nature of the coming feast: a communion meal. The two crops singled out in this law are corn (grain) and grapes. The disciples picked corn, not wheat. Corn can be eaten raw; wheat cannot. The fact that these two crops are the raw materials for bread and wine is not some random aspect of this case law. This law pointed forward to the communion feast of the New Covenant. The Mosaic Covenant was, in efect, the grain and grapes that pointed forward to the New Covenant’s bread and

Free for the Picking

689

wine. The New Covenant’s bread and wine in turn point forward to the marriage supper of the lamb (Rev. 19:9). The communion table of God brings together people of a common confession and a common community who look forward to the eschatological consummation of the kingdom of God in history at the end of time. So it was also in Mosaic Israel. The eschatological aspect of the Book of Deuteronomy, as the Pentateuch’s book of the inheritance, provides a framework for interpreting this case law. God gives to every man in history a foretaste of a holy meal to come: common grace. Not every man accepts God’s invitation. Not every man is given access to God’s table, either in history or eternity. The fellowship of God is closed to outsiders by means of a common confession that restricts strangers from lawful access to the table. But a free foretaste of the bounty of God’s table at the consummate marriage supper of the Lamb is given to all those who walk in the open ield and pick a handful of corn. A handful of this bounty is the common blessing of all mankind. This is the doctrine of common grace.6 The visitor is not allowed to bring a vessel to gather up the bounty of his neighbor’s ield. Neither is the covenant-breaker allowed access to the Lord’s Supper. The visitor is allowed access to the makings of bread and wine. Similarly, the covenant-breaker is allowed into the church to hear the message of redemption. He may gain great beneits from his presence in the congregation, or he may leave spiritually unfed. So it is with the visitor in the ield. “I take no man’s charity,” says one visitor to a ield. “Religion is a crutch,” says a visitor to a church.7 Such a willful rejection of either blessing indicates a spirit of autonomy, a lack of community spirit, and a lack of a shared environment.

Neighborhood and Neighborliness Grapes and corn remain ripe enough to eat in the ield only for relatively short periods of time. Either they are not yet ripe or they

6. Gary North, Dominion and Common Grace: The Biblical Basis of Progress (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987). 7. A good reason for not passing a collection plate in church is that visitors may believe that a token payment will pay for “services rendered.” So, for that matter, may non-tithing members.

690

DEUTERONOMY

have just been harvested. The neighbor in Israel was not allowed to bring a vessel to carry away the produce. The presumption was that the neighbor was visiting, became hungry, and ate his ill right there in the ield. This is what Jesus’ disciples did. The neighbor, unless very hungry, did not walk over to the neighbor’s house three times a day to get a quick meal. He had his own crop to harvest. If he was landless, he might come into a ield and eat. He could even bring his family. The landless person would have gained access to free food, but only briely, during the harvest season. The two crops explicitly eligible for picking were above-ground crops. This law did not authorize someone to dig a root crop out of the ground. The eligible food was there, as we say in English, “for the picking.” Were these two crops symbolic for all picked crops, or did the law authorize only grapes and corn? I think the two crops were symbols of every crop that might appear on the table of a feast. This would have included fruit trees, vine-grown berries, but almost no bread grains besides corn. This meant that the hungry neighbor had a limited range of crops at his disposal. If he was also a local farmer, then his own crop was similarly exposed. His concerted efort to harm a neighbor by a misuse of this law would have exposed him to a tit-for-tat response. If he used this law as a weapon, it could be used against him as a weapon.

The Neighbor Who was the neighbor? The Hebrew word, rayah, is most commonly used to describe a close friend or someone in the neighborhood. “Neither shalt thou desire thy neighbour’s wife, neither shalt thou covet thy neighbour’s house, his ield, or his manservant, or his maidservant, his ox, or his ass, or any thing that is thy neighbour’s” (Deut. 5:21). It can be translated as friend. “If thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend, which is as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which thou hast not known, thou, nor thy fathers” (Deut. 13:6). It was a next-door neighbor: “Thou shalt not remove thy neighbour’s landmark, which they of old time have set in thine inheritance, which thou shalt inherit in the land that the LORD thy God giveth thee to possess it” (Deut. 19:14). But did it always mean this? In Jesus’ answer to this question by the clever lawyer, He used the story of the Samaritan on a journey through Israel who helped a beaten man, in contrast to the priest

Free for the Picking

691

and the Levite who ignored him (Luke 10). Jesus was arguing that ethics, not friendship, confession, or place of residence, deines the true neighbor. The Samaritan was the injured man’s true neighbor because he helped him in his time of need. The lawyer did not disagree with Jesus’ assessment. He understood that this interpretation was consistent with the intent of the Mosaic law. This means that a law-abiding man on the road in Mosaic Israel was a neighbor. The crop owner had to treat a man on a journey as if he were a local resident. This included even a foreigner. The Greek word used to translate rayah in the Septuagint Greek translation of the Old Testament is pleision, which means “near, close by.”8 This indicates that the Jewish translators regarded the neighbor as a local resident. The neighbor was statistically most likely to be a fellow member of the tribe. Rural land could not be sold permanently. It could not be alienated: sold to an alien. The jubilee law regulated the inheritance of rural land (Lev. 25). This means that the neighbor in Mosaic Israel was statistically most likely a permanent resident of the community. Nevertheless, this law opened the ields to people on a journey, just as the Samaritan was on a journey. As surely as the Samaritan was the injured man’s neighbor, so was the land owner the hungry traveller’s neighbor. This law was a reminder to the Israelites that God had been neighborly to them in their time of need. After the exile, such permanent geographical boundaries were maintained only if the occupying foreign army so decided. Jesus walked through the cornield under Rome’s civil authority, not Israel’s. Why would God have designated these two above-ground crops as open to neighborly picking? This law made neighbors co-owners of the fruits of a man’s land, labor, and capital. The land owner was legally unable to protect his wealth from the grasping hands of non-owners. He was left without legal recourse. Why? What judicial principle undergirded this case law? What beneit to the community did this law bring which ofset the negative efects of a limitation of the protection of private property? To answer this accurately, we must irst determine whether this case law was a temporary law

8. Walter Bauer, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, trans. William F. Arndt and F. Wilbur Gingrich (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), p. 678.

692

DEUTERONOMY

governing only Mosaic Israel or a permanent legal statute for all Trinitarian covenantal societies.

Seed Laws and Land Laws Seed laws and land laws were temporary statutes that applied only to Mosaic Israel. I have argued previously that the seed laws of the Mosaic covenant were tied to Jacob’s messianic prophecy regarding Judah: “The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come; and unto him shall the gathering of the people be” (Gen. 49:10). Seed laws and land laws served as means of separating the tribes, thereby maintaining the continuity of each tribe until the fulillment of Jacob’s prophecy, which rested on tribal separation.9 The jubilee inheritance laws were land laws that were designed by God to accomplish this task. One aspect of tribal separation was the creation of a sense of unity and participation in a larger family unit. Members of each tribe were linked together as descendants of one of the patriarchs. There was an aspect of brotherliness within a tribe that was not shared across the tribe’s boundaries. There is a social distinction between brotherhood and otherhood. Boundaries mark this distinction. The main boundary for Israel was circumcision, but tribal boundaries also had their separating and unifying efects. By allowing the neighbor to pick mature fruit, the Mosaic law encouraged a sense of mutual solidarity. The local resident was entitled to reap the rewards of land and labor. The land belonged ultimately to God. It was a holy land, set apart by God for his historical purposes. To dwell in the land involved beneits and costs. One of the beneits was access to food, however temporary. The staf of life in efect was free. In harvest season, men in Israel would not die of starvation. But their source of sustenance was local: their neighbor’s ield. Would this have created animosity? Sometimes. Everything in a fallen world is capable of creating animosity. But what about the owner’s sense of justice? It was his land, his efort, and his seeds that had made this wealth possible. Why should another man have lawful access to the fruits of his labor?

9. North, Leviticus, pp. 207, 283, 556–57, 637–41.

Free for the Picking

693

One possible answer ties this law to the Promised Land. Israel was a holy land that had been set aside by God through a program of partial genocide. (God had speciied total genocide, but the Israelites had failed.) The land was exclusively God’s. It was His dwelling place. He fed His people on His land. God, not their own eforts, was the source of their wealth (Deut. 8:17). Israel’s holy status was still true in Jesus’ day because of the temple and its sacriices. But there is a problem with this explanation: strangers in Jesus’ day dwelled in the land, and in fact ruled over the land. Furthermore, Jesus identiied the Good Samaritan as a neighbor. The Samaritan therefore would have qualiied as a man with lawful access to an Israelite’s ield. The Promised Land fails as the basis of this case law. A second possible explanation is this: the tribes existed in order to complete God’s plan for Israel. Local solidarity was important for maintaining the continuity of the tribes. Problem: this law was still in force in Jesus’ day, yet the tribes no longer occupied the land as separate tribal units. The seed laws in this instance seem to have nothing to do with this case law. Third, it could be argued that Israel was a holy army. An army does not operate in terms of the free market’s principle of “high bid wins.” In every military conlict in which a city is besieged, martial law replaces market contracts as the basis of feeding the population. The free market’s principle of high bid wins is replaced by food rationing. Solidarity during wartime must not be undermined by a loss of morale. A nation’s defenders are not all rich. The closer we get to the priestly function of ensuring life, the less applicable market pricing becomes. Problem: Israel was not a holy army after the exile. It was an occupied nation. Yet this case law was still in force. There was no discontinuity in this case between the Mosaic covenant and the post-exile covenant.

The Farmer and the Grocer The Mosaic law authorized a neighbor to pick grapes or corn from another man’s ield. It did not authorize a man to pick up a free piece of fruit from a grocer’s table. What is the diference? What underlying moral or organizational principle enables us to distinguish between the two acts? In both cases, the “picker” wanted to eat a piece of fruit for free. He was not allowed to do this in the second case.

694

DEUTERONOMY

Let us consider the economic aspects of this law. Both the farmer and the grocer sought a positive return on their investments. The farmer planted seeds in the ground, nurtured the seedlings, and sold the crop to someone, possibly the grocer or his economic agent. The grocer made his money by purchasing a crop in bulk from the farmer or his economic agent, transporting it to a central location, and displaying it in a way pleasing to buyers. What was the diferentiating factor? Time? Soil? Location? Money? The diference seems to have been this: control over rural land. The farmer in Mosaic Israel worked the land. He cared for it directly. The grocer did not. The farmer proited directly from the output of this land. The grocer proited indirectly. The farmer had a unique stake in the land itself. The grocer did so only indirectly, insofar as food that was imported from abroad was much more expensive for him to buy, except in Mediterranean coastal areas and regions close to the borders of the nation. The distinction between grocers and land owners may also have had something to do with the jubilee land laws.10 Rural land was governed by the jubilee law. Urban real estate was not. Unlike urban land, prior to the exile, rural land was the exclusive property of the heirs of the conquest, though not after the return (Ezek. 47:22–23). Those who lived on the land and proited from it as farmers were required to share a portion of the land’s productivity with others, as we have seen. To this extent, the fruit of the land was the inheritance of those who dwelled close by or who wandered by on a journey when the crop was ripe.11 In this case, those farmers whose land was located close to highways would have had lower transportation costs but higher sharing costs. It is not hard to imagine that highway properties would have been ideal locations for general stores. Their produce was not subject to picking. For farmers whose inheritance bordered on highways, setting up a general store would have made good sense. During the feast of Firstfruits, they at least could have sold other items, such as wine, to accompany a free handful of

10. As I shall argue below, I do not think this was covenantally relevant: “Has This Law Been Annulled?” 11. Passover was a pre-harvest feast. Booths (Ingathering/Tabernacles) was post-harvest. So, free produce would rarely have been on the vine or stalk when these two great marches took place. Pentecost was the time of firstfruits (Ex. 23:16). Any farmer who had not yet harvested his crop would have had to share it with travellers to the Firstfruits festival.

Free for the Picking

695

corn. They could also have planted only root crops, which were not eligible for picking. This law would have strengthened the sense of community in a society that was bound by a national covenant that was tied to land. Travel would have been less costly in harvest time. Also, the local poor would have had something to eat in the harvest – a sense of participation in the blessings of God. A brief safety net was in place. To gain access to a full safety net – a lawful bag in which to put the picked produce – the poor had to work as gleaners. While the State was not authorized to send crop collectors into the ields to collect food to redistribute to the poor, the Mosaic civil law did not enforce sanctions against those who came into a ield to eat a handful of food. It was not legal for land owners to enforce physical sanctions against those who took advantage of this law. The civil law did not compel wealth redistribution in Mosaic Israel, but it deined the land owner’s property rights in such a way that the State was prohibited from bringing negative sanctions against those who entered the ield to pick a handful of the crop.

A Shared Environment Let us consider a dijcult application of this case law. Did this law open every man’s ields to wandering hordes during a famine? Times of famine have been times of great disruption of the social order. Wandering bands of hungry people fan out across the countryside. Whole populations move from region to region in search of food.12 This happened repeatedly in Europe from the late medieval era until the late seventeenth century, and well into the twentieth century in Russia.13 Similar famines have occurred in China in modern times.14 Before the advent of modern capitalism, famines were a regular occurrence. Even within capitalist society, Ireland sufered a nearly decade-long famine in the 1840’s. The absentee landlords in England did not foresee the threat to the potato crop posed by the blight at its irst appearance in 1841. Over the next decade, these landlords paid for their lack of foresight with huge capital losses; a million Irish paid with their lives. 12. For historical examples, see Pitirim A. Sorokin, Man and Society in Calamity (New York: Dutton, 1942), pp. 107–109. 13. For a list of dozens of these famines, see ibid., p. 132. 14. Pearl S. Buck’s novel, The Good Earth (1931), tells this story.

696

DEUTERONOMY

Are wandering strangers in search of food the judicial equivalent of a neighbor? Is a desperate family on the road in search of food entitled to ill their stomachs with a farmer’s corn or apples? If enough of these people were to show up at harvest time, their economic efect would be comparable to a swarm of locusts. Locusts in the Bible are seen as the judgment of God (Ex. 10:4–6; Deut. 28:38). The land owner planted a crop and cared for it in the expectation that his family would eat for another season. Was he now required to sit idly by and watch strangers consume his family’s future? Was the State prohibited by this case law from defending his interests? If so, then what would be his incentive to go to the expense of planting and nurturing his next crop? Would he even survive to plant again? Was Israel’s society beneited by opening the ields to all comers in every economic situation? Was the nation’s future agricultural output threatened by a deinition of “neighbor” that includes an openended number of strangers in search of free food? The goal of this law was the preservation of community. Its context was a local neighborhood in which families share the same environment. A crop failure for one family was probably accompanied by a crop failure for all. They were all in the same boat. Mutual aid and comfort in times of adversity were likely in a community in which every person has a symbolic stake in the community’s success. These people shared a common destiny. This law was an aspect of that common destiny. As for the Samaritan in the parable, he was not on the road for the purpose of stripping ields along the way. The Samaritan assisted the beaten man; he did not eat the last grape on the man’s vine. The Samaritan found another man on the same road. They were both on a journey. They shared a similar environment. They were both subject to the risks of travel. The threat of robbery threatened all men walking down that road. What had befallen the victim might have befallen the Samaritan. It might yet befall him. Perhaps the same band of robbers was still in the “neighborhood”: the road to Jericho. Men who share a common environment share common risks. When men who share common risks are voluntarily bound by a shared ethical system to help each other in bad times, a kind of social insurance policy goes into efect. Risks are pooled. The costs that would otherwise befall a victim are reduced by men’s willingness to defray part of each other’s burdens. But, unlike an insurance

Free for the Picking

697

policy, there is no formal agreement, nor does the victim have any legal claim on the non-victim. The beaten man had no legal claim on the Samaritan, the Levite, or the priest. Two of the three went their way. They broke no civil law, but their act of deliberately passing by on the other side of the road revealed their lack of commitment to the principle of community: shared burdens and blessings. The ethics of neighborliness is mutual sharing when the resources are available. The ethics of neighborliness did not mandate that the State remain inactive when hordes of men whose only goal is obtaining food sweep down on a rural community. The harvest was shared locally because men have struggled with the same obstacles to produce it. This law assumed a context of mutual obligations, not the asymmetric conditions in a famine, when the producers face an invasion from outside the community by those who did not share in the productive efort.

Community and Economy One of the favorite contrasts of sociologists is community vs. economy. The most famous example of this in sociological literature is Ferdinand Tönnies’ Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887), which he wrote at age 32. In this pioneering work, the author contrasted the small, medieval-type village with the modern city. He argued that the demise of the personal relationships of village life has led to the impersonal rationalism and calculation of the modern city.15 He used the now-familiar analogies of organic life and mechanical structure to describe these two forms of human association.16 He viewed the family as the model or ideal type of Gemeinschaft.17 The business irm, which is a voluntary association established for a limited, rational purpose (proit), would seem to serve well as a model for Gesellschaft.18

15. He did not argue, as Marx and other sociologists and economists have argued, that it was the rise of capitalism that undermined the village life. Robert A. Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition (New York: Basic Books, 1966), p. 78. 16. Ferdinand Tönnies, Community & Society (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft) (New York: Harper Torchbooks, [1887] 1957), pp. 33–37. 17. Nisbet, Sociological Tradition, p. 75. 18. His theme – the transition from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, from communalism to rationalism – became an integrating theme in the works of the great German sociologist, Max Weber. Ibid., p. 79.

698

DEUTERONOMY

In American history, there have been few defenders of Gemeinschaft. Thomas Jeferson heralded the independent yeoman farmer, but Jeferson was no advocate of village life. A group of intellectuals and poets known as the Nashville agrarians in 1930 wrote a brief defense of southern agrarian life in contrast to modern urbanism, but they have long been regarded at best as regional utopians, even in the South.19 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were contemptuous of “the idiocy of rural life,”20 and most commentators have agreed with them. Most commentators have been urban. The movement of vast populations from the farms to cities has been a continuing phenomenon worldwide, beginning no later than the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century. The division of labor (which was made possible by close contact in urban areas), the transportation revolution, the mechanization of agriculture, the revolution in electrical power, and government-funded road systems have combined to concentrate populations in vast urban complexes. The Bible promotes both cultures. The farms of Israel were held together as a civilization by the Ark of the Covenant, which was housed in a city. The New Heaven and New Earth are described as a city in which the tree of life grows (Rev. 22:2). In the Old Covenant, the city was supported by the farms. In the New Covenant’s imagery of the inal state, the image is diferent: the city contains the tree. The tree feeds the inhabitants. The symbolism seems to be from farm to city. This was also the thrust of the jubilee legislation: ever-smaller farms for an ever-growing population. Yet covenantally, an heir of the conquest always had his historical roots in the land. The land was his inheritance. His name was associated with the land. This judicial link to the soil ended with the New Covenant. The land ceased to be a holy place after the fall of Jerusalem. But the imagery of the tree of life, like the imagery of bread and wine, ties members of the New Covenant community to the soil. The preference of suburban Americans for carefully mowed lawns, of Englishmen and Japanese for gardens, of the Swiss and Austrians for lowers 19. I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (Baton Rouge: University of Louisiana Press, [1930] 1977). Cf. Alexander Karanikas, Tillers of a Myth: Southern Agrarians as Social and Literary Critics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966). 20. Kark Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), in Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1976), 6, p. 488.

Free for the Picking

699

growing in window gardens and for vegetable gardens all testify to man’s desire to retain his links to the soil from which he came. There is a story told about the German free market economist Wilhelm Röpke. He was living in Geneva at the time. He invited another free market economist (said by some to be his former teacher, Ludwig von Mises) to his home near Geneva. He kept a vegetable garden plot near his home. The visitor remarked that this was an inejcient way to produce food. He countered that it was an ejcient way to produce happiness.21 The division of labor is a powerful social arrangement. Specialization increases our economic output as individuals. We can earn more money per hour by specializing than by performing low division of labor tasks. But we also increase our dependence on the social institutions that have promoted the division of labor. Above all, we increase our reliance on banks, transportation systems, and other arrangements run by computers. We have delivered our lives into the hands and minds of computer programmers. This has not been wise. The payments system is governed by the fractional reserve banking. This is risky. There is an economic case for investing in a lower division of labor lifestyle with a portion of our assets and our time.22 There is more to community than ejciency. Community is more than property rights. Community in Mosaic Israel was based on a series of covenants. The right of private property was defended by the commandment not to steal, but the deinition of theft did not include eating from a neighbor’s unharvested crop. This exception was unique to the land. It applied to a form of property that was not part of the free market system of buying and selling. God was uniquely the owner of the land in Mosaic Israel. He set diferent requirements for ownership of rural land. These rules were designed to

21. Russell Kirk says that Röpke said it was Mises. In 1975, I heard the same story from another economist, Röpke’s translator, Patrick Boarman. I do not recall that Mises was the target of the remark, but he may have been. See Kirk’s 1992 Foreword to Wilhelm Roepke, The Social Crisis of Our Time (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction, [1942] 1992), p. ix. 22. This is why I moved my family out of a city of 75,000 people in 1997. I fear the efects of an international computer breakdown on the banking payments system (and everything else) in the year 2000. The fear of this threat could lead to bank runs in 1999, which would also threaten the payments system. But I am virtually alone in 1997 in predicting a social, economic, and political breakdown after 1999. We shall see soon enough if I am correct.

700

DEUTERONOMY

provide a brief safety net in an area of the economy in which it was illegal to transfer family ownership down through the generations. In the inal analysis, this law was far more symbolic than economic, for the harvest time would not have lasted very long. The sense of community had to be preserved in a system that restricted buying and selling. Those who did not own the best land or even any land at all had a stake in the success of local land owners, despite the law’s restrictions of the permanent sale of inherited property. This symbol of participation in the fruits of the land was important for a society whose members celebrated the fulillment of God’s prophecy regarding the inheritance of a Promised Land.

Has This Law Been Annulled? Is there any Mosaic covenantal principle whose annulment also annulled this law? We know that a similar law is still in force. Paul cited the law prohibiting the muzzling of the working ox, applying it to the payment of ministers. “Let the elders that rule well be counted worthy of double honour, especially they who labour in the word and doctrine. For the scripture saith, Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn. And, The labourer is worthy of his reward” (I Tim. 5:17–18). But this case law applied more generally to the Christian walk. “For it is written in the law of Moses, Thou shalt not muzzle the mouth of the ox that treadeth out the corn. Doth God take care for oxen? Or saith he it altogether for our sakes? For our sakes, no doubt, this is written: that he that ploweth should plow in hope; and that he that thresheth in hope should be partaker of his hope” (I Cor. 9:9–10). There is a down payment in history – an earnest – of the covenant-keeper’s kingdom victory in eternity. This down payment is an aspect of the inheritance. That in the dispensation of the fulness of times he might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven, and which are on earth; even in him: In whom also we have obtained an inheritance, being predestinated according to the purpose of him who worketh all things after the counsel of his own will: That we should be to the praise of his glory, who irst trusted in Christ. In whom ye also trusted, after that ye heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation: in whom also after that ye believed, ye were sealed with that holy Spirit of promise, Which is the earnest of our inheritance until the redemption of the purchased possession, unto the praise of his glory (Eph. 1:10–14).

Free for the Picking

701

The tribal system was annulled in A.D. 70. Was this law exclusively tribal? The same kinds of psychological beneits seem to apply outside the tribal context: commitment to the community, a sense of participation in the blessings of this community, a willingness to defend it against invaders. What is missing today is Mosaic Israel’s public exclusion of the names of other gods. A man’s presence in the land does not, in and of itself, testify publicly to his willingness to serve under the law of God. The mobility of rival gods is like the mobility of the God of the Bible in the Old Covenant. The universality of their claims makes them diferent from the gods of the ancient Near East in Moses’ day. To this extent, the situation has changed. But religions that claimed allegiance to universal gods appeared in the Near East and Far East at about the time of the Babylonian exile. Nevertheless, people in Israel in Jesus’ day were still allowed to pick corn in their neighbors’ ields. This law seems to be a cross-boundary law. The neighbor, deined biblically, has a legal claim to a handful of any crop that he can pick. The biblical hermeneutical principle is that any Old Covenant law not annulled explicitly or implicitly by a New Covenant law is still valid (Matt. 5:17–19).23 There seems to be no principle of judicial discontinuity that would annul this law.24

Conclusion This law applies to rural land during the harvest season but before the harvest takes place. The goal of this law is to increase the sense of community. All of its members are supposed to know that they have a small stake – a symbolic stake – in the prosperity of the land. There seems to be no discontinuity between the two covenants with regard to this law. It was a theocratic law, but whenever a nation covenants with the Trinitarian God of the Bible, this law is still in force. The modern world is politically polytheistic. It denies legitimacy to the principle of civil theocracy. It also passes legislation that

23. Greg L. Bahnsen, Theonomy in Christian Ethics (2nd ed.; Phillipsberg, New Jersey: Presbyterian and Reformed, [1977] 1984), ch. 2. 24. Because I see no judicial discontinuity between the covenants regarding this law, I conclude that the distinction between the grocer and the farmer was not based on the jubilee law, which has been annulled.

702

DEUTERONOMY

excludes neighbors from any man’s ield. It then extends the principle of exclusion to the nation itself. It creates “no trespassing” boundaries around the nation. Access to a man’s ield is analogous to access to the nation; the modern State is consistent in this regard. Immigration legislation excludes outsiders because they may become a threat to a national covenant that is not confessional. Immigrants may gain the vote and use the State to redistribute wealth. The same kind of exclusivism operates in laws legalizing abortion, which is another barrier to entry into the land. This law testiies against geographical exclusivism because it is part of a system of covenantal order that is confessionally exclusivist. Open borders are the rule for biblical theocracy: access to the visible kingdom of God in history. Here is the logic of “open borders openly arrived at.” You may freely walk into a local church; therefore, you may also freely walk into the nation in which that church operates. Any Christian who promotes closed national borders is saying, in efect, “Until some church sends a missionary to your nation, or until your entire population has access to the Internet, you must content yourself with going to hell. Sorry about that.” The message of this law is clear: access to God’s promised land is to be accompanied by access to the ields of the promised land at harvest time. This gives non-owners and non-citizens a stake in the maintenance of a biblically theocratic society. This law makes it clear that private property is not an absolute value in human society. Private property is an absolute right for God, as the boundary placed around the forbidden tree in Eden reveals; it is not, however, an absolute right for man. Nothing is an absolute right for man, for man is not absolute. This case law breaches the boundaries of rural land. Owners are not allowed to use force to exclude a neighbor from picking a handful of the crop to eat in the ield. The State may not defend owners’ legal title to this token portion of the crop. This means that they have no legal title to all of it. This is clearly a violation of libertarian deinitions of private ownership. The Bible is not a libertarian document, any more than it is socialistic. It is a covenantal document. The neighbor has lawful access to what he can pick, but the State may not lawfully come in with vessels to pick crops in the name of the people (minus 50 percent for administration).

58 Collateral, Servitude, and Dignity COLLATERAL, SERVITUDE, AND DIGNITY No man shall take the nether or the upper millstone to pledge: for he taketh a man’s life to pledge. . . . When thou dost lend thy brother any thing, thou shalt not go into his house to fetch his pledge. Thou shalt stand abroad, and the man to whom thou dost lend shall bring out the pledge abroad unto thee. And if the man be poor, thou shalt not sleep with his pledge: In any case thou shalt deliver him the pledge again when the sun goeth down, that he may sleep in his own raiment, and bless thee: and it shall be righteousness unto thee before the LORD thy God. . . . Thou shalt not pervert the judgment of the stranger, nor of the fatherless; nor take a widow’s raiment to pledge: But thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee thence: therefore I command thee to do this thing (Deut. 24:6, 10–13, 17–18).

The theocentric focus of this pledge law is the general dominion covenant, which deines man in terms of his stewardship before God (Gen. 1:26–28). A pledge is a tool of dominion. It enhances its owner’s ability to extend his dominion. A tool lowers the cost of achieving one’s goals. The pledge or collateral may sometimes be so closely associated with the individual that to remove it from him completely can undermine his deinition of himself. As a dominion law, it was not a seed law or a land law. It was a cross-boundary law.

The Dominion Covenant and Social Hierarchy The doctrine of the covenant itself is point two of the biblical covenant model. We can see this in the very structure of the Pentateuch.

703

704

DEUTERONOMY

1

The Book of Exodus is the book of the covenant. It is also the second book of the Pentateuch. The second point of the biblical covenant model is hierarchy.2 A covenant is necessarily hierarchical. God initiates it, and man responds, either as a covenant-keeper or a covenant-breaker. A covenant is not a contract between or among equals.3 There is always a superior involved: God. In the dominion covenant, God is the archetype; man is made in His image. From this we draw a conclusion: because God is not a servant of Satan, covenant-keeping man should not become a servant to covenant-breaking man. On the contrary, the opposite is the biblical ideal: covenant-breaking man is to become a servant of covenant-keeping man. Covenant-keeping steadily puts covenantkeepers at the top in history. This process is built into the creation itself. It is recapitulated in God’s law. Sometimes, however, covenant-keepers fall into dire straits through no fault of their own and must become servants of other covenant-keepers. There were rules in the Mosaic law governing such servitude. It was to be mild. The superior in the relationship was not to oppress the subordinate. Poverty and debt produce a form of servitude. “The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender” (Prov. 22:7). It is best to be inancially independent and out of debt. It goes against the biblical model of liberation when a covenant-keeper seeks to enslave fellow believers. The widow, the orphan, and the stranger were to be protected. This passage extended the Exodus passage: “Thou shalt neither vex a stranger, nor oppress him: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt. Ye shall not amict any widow, or fatherless child” (Ex. 22:21–22). These three models served in the Mosaic law as the chief examples of vulnerability. Their legitimate interests were to be upheld in civil courts and in economic transactions. The way that these groups were treated testiied to the moral condition of society. The reference in 1. “And he took the book of the covenant, and read in the audience of the people: and they said, All that the LORD hath said will we do, and be obedient” (Ex. 24:7). 2. Ray R. Sutton, That You May Prosper: Dominion By Covenant (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1992), ch. 2. 3. The great evil of social contract theory, whether Lockean or Rousseauvian, is that it is seen as a judicial bond among equals. These equals contract together to create a superior entity, the State. There is a hierarchy, but it is strictly a natural hierarchy. It is said to be governed by natural law, not supernatural law.

Collateral, Servitude, and Dignity

705

both passages to Egypt pointed back to the era in which God’s people were unfairly oppressed. The exodus generation and the conquest generation were reminded: they had deserved liberation, and God had delivered them by destroying their evil oppressors. The lesson was plain enough: they could expect similar negative sanctions for similar transgressions.

The Pledge At the very heart of the debt relationship is the pledge. The pledge serves as collateral: the debtor’s economic motivation to repay. If he fails to repay, he loses ownership of the pledge. The most important model of the pledge is God’s promise. By means of a pledge, He places His reputation on the line. If He fails to fulill His pledge, He loses His reputation. He loses His judicial status as God. This, of course, cannot be; this is why God fulills His verbal pledges. He has too much at stake not to. The irst pledge recorded in the Bible is God’s promise to Adam that in the day that Adam ate of the forbidden tree, he would die (Gen. 2:17). This promise was fulilled: Adam did die that day, judicially speaking. He died deinitively. The curse of death came on him and his heirs. Adam was a dead man walking. Death and damnation, as with life and salvation, are deinitive, progressive, and inal. The inal death is the second death of the lake of ire (Rev. 20:14). Had it not been for God’s willingness to sacriice His son on behalf of Adam and Adam’s heirs (Heb. 2:17), man’s temporal existence from that time on would have been a working out of this deinitive judicial status of death. God announced the grace of this future substitutionary atonement in His pledge to Adam regarding the coming of an heir who would crush the head of the serpent (Gen. 3:15). This grace is both common and special. That Adam still walked was proof of God’s common grace. That his son Abel ofered an acceptable sacriice to God was proof of God’s special grace. Man’s word is not God’s word. Man’s promise is not God’s promise. Man does not lawfully defend his words and his promises with the same degree of commitment with which God defends His. “It is a faithful saying: For if we be dead with him, we shall also live with him: If we sufer, we shall also reign with him: if we deny him, he also will deny us: If we believe not, yet he abideth faithful: he cannot deny himself” (II Tim. 2:11–13; emphasis added). In

706

DEUTERONOMY

short, man is a greater risk than God. Believing in man’s word is far more risky than believing in God’s word. Therefore, a wise creditor requires either collateral or imposes a higher rate of interest on a loan before he extends it. A man’s promise to repay may be merely verbal or contractual, such as with a “signature loan” or a credit card loan. Such uncollateralized loans command higher interest rates than collateralized loans because they are more risky. Borrowers are statistically more likely to default on such loans. This is why they must ofer to pay lenders a higher rate of interest in order to obtain loans. All borrowers in this statistical classiication of borrowers pay a higher rate because a higher percentage of borrowers in this class will default. The lender must be compensated for this additional risk. A collateralized loan adds security to the loan, i.e., it increases the statistical likelihood that the borrower will repay the debt. The pledge is a valuable item – at least to the borrower – that the borrower agrees to transfer to the lender, should he default on the loan. The pledge could be a tool of production. This case law speciies that if this tool is basic to the borrower’s life or productivity, it must remain with him. His means of escaping debt bondage must not be taken from him by the creditor. These pledge laws are extensions of the laws governing collateral given in Exodus: “If thou at all take thy neighbour’s raiment to pledge, thou shalt deliver it unto him by that the sun goeth down: For that is his covering only, it is his raiment for his skin: wherein shall he sleep? and it shall come to pass, when he crieth unto me, that I will hear; for I am gracious” (Ex. 22:26–27). A poor brother’s life is not to be endangered by having to surrender his coat as a pledge against debt. This law does not protect the covenant-breaker. It is not a general equity law. The covenant-breaker is to be subdued economically for the glory of God. “The LORD shall open unto thee his good treasure, the heaven to give the rain unto thy land in his season, and to bless all the work of thine hand: and thou shalt lend unto many nations, and thou shalt not borrow. And the LORD shall make thee the head, and not the tail; and thou shalt be above only, and thou shalt not be beneath; if that thou hearken unto the commandments of the LORD thy God, which I command thee this day, to observe and to do them” (Deut. 28:12–13).

Collateral, Servitude, and Dignity

707

Tools of Dominion The millstone is a miller’s source of livelihood, but it is not his source of biological life. He can make a living doing something else, but he believes that cannot make as good a living. A man is versatile. He can do many kinds of work. But a man is also limited. Each man performs certain tasks with greater skill than he performs others. Because some men are more skilled than their fellows in particular areas of production, they can perform these services less expensively than their competitors. This set of circumstances makes possible the social division of labor.

The Social Division of Labor The range of skills across the human race is stupendous. A man who has one set of skills can learn diferent skills. A man is not a machine. A machine can perform one task well. The more complex the machine, the fewer uses to which it can be put proitably. A machine that makes one item falls to scrap value if demand for that one item falls to zero and is expected to stay there by all entrepreneurs. This condition is not true of a man. He can learn new skills if the demand for his present specialized abilities should fall. Because of the highly diverse and unspeciic nature of human labor, men can gain income by exchanging their specialized labor services for other specialized services or goods. Because of the highly speciic abilities which some men possess, they can gain a higher price than their competitors for their labor services. But selling these specialized labor services is risky. If demand for a speciic labor service declines, the seller will lose income faster than another man whose more general skills rarely face an equally large decline in demand. An across-the-boards decline in demand is far less likely statistically than a decline in demand for a specialized service or product. In times of economic growth through capital investment, income rises faster for those who supply specialized labor. Why? Because their unique abilities have been empowered by specialized tools of production. This income advantage persuades additional people to specialize. The social division of labor increases when capital investment increases. Conversely, in times of economic decline, when the division of labor shrinks because of a breakdown in the money payments system, the specialist may ind that his income falls rapidly.

708

DEUTERONOMY

He must then abandon his specialty. The man who uses a specialized tool of production to gain his income is therefore more vulnerable to shifts in demand than his less capitalized neighbor. He gains his income by producing a specialized service or product. He builds his way of life – his pattern of expenditures – in terms of the income generated by his tool. If demand falls for his output, or if he loses access to this tool, his way of life will be disrupted.

No Tool, Low Output The miller has invested capital and time in mastering the tools of his trade, which in this case are a pair of millstones. He then seeks a loan. The lender demands one of the millstones as a pledge. Without his complementary tools of production, his output falls rapidly. He must revert to selling less specialized forms of labor. These services bring a lower return because there are more competitors who can underbid him in this new ield than there had been in his old ield. He has lost his competitive advantage. His ability to repay the loan falls. His self-deinition as a participant in society is undermined by the loss of his tool of production. Both his self-image and his productive role in society are threatened by the loss of his tool. This case law prohibits the lender from taking a millstone as a pledge. He is restricted in two ways. First, the lender may not legally collect this pledge in advance of repayment, which would increase the likelihood that the loan will not be repaid, thereby forcing the miller into servitude. Second, the language indicates that he may not accept the millstone as a default pledge, i.e., a transfer of ownership to the lender should the borrower default. God says: “Hands of!” To reduce the risk of the debtor’s default in the absence of the millstone as a pledge, the lender must therefore either ask for a higher rate of interest (if this is a proit-seeking loan) or else content himself with some other form of pledge, including the man’s willingness to be sold into indentured servitude. Wouldn’t the debtor’s self-image be threatened by indentured servitude? Yes. I conclude that this prohibition against taking a millstone as a pledge must have more to do with his life as a producer than his life as a free man. Under the Mosaic economy, the lender was allowed to sell the debtor into servitude or force him or his children (II Ki. 4:1–7) to come and work for him until the debt was paid of. But the lender was not allowed to take away the man’s tools of production. Without these, the debtor could not readily buy his way

Collateral, Servitude, and Dignity

709

out of servitude. Furthermore, society would lose his output as a tool-endowed, specialized producer. To enhance the debtor’s ability to pay of the loan and, if necessary, buy his way out of debt servitude, this law allowed him to retain ownership of his tools of production. As a secondary beneit to society, this law kept the producer in the work force as a specialist. To put this law into a modern setting, there is no doubt that taking an automobile tire as collateral can be a high motivational technique to get repayment from a man with only one car with only four tires (no spare). He cannot drive into town without it on Saturday night. But he also cannot drive to work or do odd jobs that would earn him extra money. Without the use of his car, he falls under the threat of permanent debt, meaning permanent bondage. This case law rejects as illegitimate the use of such collateral. The required collateral is not to be part of a man’s tool kit of dominion. If a debtor owns a sports car that is his pride and joy, as well as an old car for pulling loads of hay, it would be legitimate to take one or more tires of the sports car. The sports car testiies to his misplaced sense of priorities. Humbling his pride is diferent from breaking his spirit by bankrupting him.

The Good Life A specialized producer can shift to a less specialized occupation and still put food on his family’s table. The man without a pair of millstones is not facing starvation. Yet the language of this text indicates that the millstone was the man’s life. I conclude that the language must be referring to something other than biological life. What does this text mean? While the Hebrew word here is often used in the sense of biological life, it has other meanings. It often means a man’s chief desire. “And Hamor communed with them, saying, The soul of my son Shechem longeth for your daughter: I pray you give her him to wife” (Gen. 34:8). “The enemy said, I will pursue, I will overtake, I will divide the spoil; my lust shall be satisied upon them; I will draw my sword, my hand shall destroy them” (Ex. 15:9). “Also thou shalt not oppress a stranger: for ye know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Ex. 23:9). “But now our soul is dried away: there is nothing at all, beside this manna, before our eyes” (Num. 11:6). The use of the word in the preceding passage, which preserves open ields, is close

710

DEUTERONOMY

to the meaning in this text: “When thou comest into thy neighbour’s vineyard, then thou mayest eat grapes thy ill at thine own pleasure; but thou shalt not put any in thy vessel” (Deut. 23:24; emphasis added). A man’s heart and soul deine his life in his own eyes. “But if from thence thou shalt seek the LORD thy God, thou shalt ind him, if thou seek him with all thy heart and with all thy soul” (Deut. 4:29). “Chief desire” seems to be the meaning in this text.

Our Daily Bread A millstone is a tool of bread-making, but owning one is not a matter of life and death. It is possible to eat grain without grinding it into bread. Corn can be eaten on the cob. Wheat can be sprouted or cooked as cereal. A man need not starve because he does not own a pair of millstones to grind his grain. Bread is more than nutrition; it is symbolic of the full life. “Give us this day our daily bread” (Matt. 6:11) refers to a comfortable way of life, a good life. As such, bread is one of the sacraments.4 Where there is no millstone, there will be something important lacking: bread, which provides a sense of personal and social fulillment. This condition of dearth is a mark of God’s judgment: “Moreover I will take from them the voice of mirth, and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom, and the voice of the bride, the sound of the millstones, and the light of the candle” (Jer. 25:10). A society in which millstones are not grinding is a society under God’s wrath. This case law forbade a creditor from taking away one of the means of the good life. This law was not restricted to millers. It was more comprehensive than that. A poverty-stricken family enjoys its daily bread. It should not have this enjoyment cut of by a creditor. A covenant-keeper is not deliberately to reduce another covenant-keeper to beggary. “I have been young, and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread” (Ps. 37:25).

4. This is why fermented wine is also one of the sacraments. It is part of the full life, the good life. Being without it is a curse of God for sin. “Forasmuch therefore as your treading is upon the poor, and ye take from him burdens of wheat: ye have built houses of hewn stone, but ye shall not dwell in them; ye have planted pleasant vineyards, but ye shall not drink wine of them” (Amos 5:11).

Collateral, Servitude, and Dignity

711

Household Authority The independent head of the household should not have his authority undermined. The very term “breadwinner” indicates the importance of bread. It is a mark of authority, of productivity, to provide bread. A breadwinner who is reduced by another man’s deliberate actions to eating wheat sprouts and cereal has been stripped of his authority. The covenant-keeper is not to amict his fellow covenant member of his dignity. This is why the lender does not have lawful access to the debtor’s house. He must stand outside the boundaries of the debtor’s house and wait for the debtor to bring out the pledge. Basic to dominion is conidence in oneself and one’s future. Anything that degrades a man is a threat to his ability to fulill the terms of the dominion covenant. This applies even to corporal punishment: “Forty stripes he may give him, and not exceed: lest, if he should exceed, and beat him above these with many stripes, then thy brother should seem vile unto thee” (Deut. 25:3). A man must not be deliberately humiliated. The prohibition against taking a man’s millstone is related to this concern. A man who has been stripped of the marks of authority in his own household is not in a strong position to recover his lost productivity. He is less likely to “bounce back” from adversity. The lender is to refrain from actions that would needlessly inhibit the recovery of the covenant-keeping debtor. The extension of God’s kingdom through the corporate eforts of the covenant-keeping community must not be needlessly inhibited. The creditor knows that the debtor will be motivated to repay the debt if the creditor owns something of value. But there is a diference between owning something of economic value and something of psychological value. The debtor wants to have his pledge returned, so he works to repay the loan. But an item that is vital psychologically for a normal man’s ability to repay, such as a millstone used to put bread on his own table, is not to be taken as collateral.

Sanctions What is the State’s role in enforcing this law? First, it must refuse to enforce the terms of a contract if the contract uses the crucial tools of a man’s trade as his pledge. But should the State bring negative sanctions against a lender who actually collects such a pledge? That

712

DEUTERONOMY

is, should the State require the lender to pay double restitution to the victim of the prohibited contract? In this case, should the lender be required to return to the debtor his upper millstone, plus an additional one? One of the goals of biblical law is to protect people from the rise of an arbitrary State. If the lender who has collected his collateral from a defaulting borrower cannot predict with some high degree of accuracy whether a judge or jury will regard this collateral as an indispensable tool of the borrower’s trade, then the greater the potential penalty that can be assessed by the court, the less likely the creditor will make the loan in the irst place. If he may be retroactively required to return the pledge, he will consider this possibility when counting the cost of making the loan. The threat of double restitution increases this cost. The very unpredictability of the court reduces the size of the credit market. The court’s decision regarding the crucial nature of the pledge is inherently dijcult to predict. If the lender might be compelled to pay double restitution as a criminal penalty, he may choose not to make the loan. On the other hand, if the State is not allowed to enforce this law, this law loses its status as a civil law. Society’s wealth will be threatened by the possibility that millers will lose their upper millstones – and not merely millers. How can the two goals be reconciled, so that would-be debtors can obtain loans and society will also retain the services of skilled craftsmen? One way is for magistrates to refuse to enforce the terms of a biblically prohibited debt contract. Surely, a magistrate should not enforce a murder contract. This situation is analogous. A magistrate would require the lender to return the tool-based collateral to the borrower. But no criminal sanctions are imposed because no criminal intent can be proven. Perhaps the lender did not understand that this tool was truly crucial to the borrower’s productivity. Besides, the borrower must not be thought of as without information about his own occupation. If he failed to inform the lender about this, he must bear some of the responsibility. This is not a criminal matter. Society needs protection from an arbitrary State far more than it needs protection from grasping creditors who drive hard bargains. An arbitrary State is dangerous to men’s freedom and society’s wealth. It is not just lenders who must be placed on a tight leash; it is also State bureaucrats. To allow the State to impose criminal sanctions against a

Collateral, Servitude, and Dignity

713

creditor who has taken a tool of production as collateral from a borrower is to foster the expansion of State power. God provides a positive sanction: “it shall be righteousness unto thee before the LORD thy God” (v. 13). That is, God has made a pledge. Men can count on this. God has given His word.

The Boundaries of a Man’s Home The lender must not violate the boundaries of a debtor’s home. When the debtor brings out his pledge, either before the loan is made or after he has defaulted, the lender must wait outside the doors of the household. This makes it clear to all parties that the obligation has been met by the payment of the pledge. The lender exercises authority over the pledge. He does not exercise authority over the debtor. The hierarchy of the contract extends from the lender to the pledge. It does not extend to the debtor. This means that the debt relationship, when collateralized by a marketable asset, is limited in scope. It is, in this restricted legal sense, an impersonal relationship. The lender must content himself with collecting the pledge. He is not given authority to transgress the boundaries of the debtor’s house. The dignity of the debtor is preserved by this law. He is not to be humiliated. For a lender to march across the door of the debtor’s home is to humiliate the debtor. This is not lawful. There is a limit on the debtor’s obligation. One limit is the door of his household. This is a judicial boundary. This does not mean that the State is similarly restricted. If the debtor refuses to transfer the contract’s pledged item to the lender, then the lender has the authority to appeal his case to the State. The boundaries of the home protect the borrower from an invasion by the lender. They do not protect against the invasion of the State in defense of a lawful contract. The State, in its capacity as God’s delegated agent, possesses the authority to enforce lawful contracts. The lender has become the victim. The State must defend the victim’s rights.5

5. Gary North, Victim’s Rights: The Biblical View of Civil Justice (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990).

714

DEUTERONOMY

Burdensome Collateral “And if the man be poor, thou shalt not sleep with his pledge: In any case thou shalt deliver him the pledge again when the sun goeth down, that he may sleep in his own raiment, and bless thee: and it shall be righteousness unto thee before the LORD thy God.” This is a recapitulation of the earlier law of collateral: “If thou at all take thy neighbour’s raiment to pledge, thou shalt deliver it unto him by that the sun goeth down: For that is his covering only, it is his raiment for his skin: wherein shall he sleep? and it shall come to pass, when he crieth unto me, that I will hear; for I am gracious” (Ex. 22:26–27). The law in Exodus pledges a negative sanction: “I will hear,” meaning He will bring judgment in history.6 This pledge by God must be acknowledged by men and honored in word and deed. The lender must return life-preserving collateral every evening. This form of collateral is not a tool of production. Demanding a tool of production as a pledge is altogether prohibited. This collateral is an asset that is necessary to sustain life for part of the day. If it is freezing outside, day and night, then such collateral is prohibited by the language of verse 6, “for he taketh a man’s life to pledge.” So, this asset must be life-preserving in the sense of not humiliating a man by making him shiver through the night, i.e., removing from him the good life. Shivering through the night is the functional equivalent of not eating bread. The lender must return the collateral every night. This is a major burden on him. It is bothersome. The lower the market value of the loan and its collateral, the less willing a lender will be to demand this item as collateral. The time wasted is worth more to the lender than the loan is worth to him. He has the option of not collecting the collateral daily. But he has the option on any morning of claiming it. This right of the lender lowers the possibility of a form of fraud on the part of the borrower which I call multiple indebtedness.

6. “If thou amict them in any wise, and they cry at all unto me, I will surely hear their cry; And my wrath shall wax hot, and I will kill you with the sword; and your wives shall be widows, and your children fatherless” (Ex. 22:23–24).

Collateral, Servitude, and Dignity

715

The Restriction on Multiple Indebtedness I have covered this aspect of the laws governing collateral in another place.7 Here I expand on my earlier analysis. If his cloak is his collateral, then he can lawfully pledge it for only one loan. He can use the collateral to keep warm at night, but he may not use it to secure another loan. He cannot lawfully ofer a pledge of his cloak to half a dozen lenders, none of whom is aware that the cloak has been pledged to ive other lenders. Multiple pledges secured against the same collateral are fraudulent. Each of the lenders believes that his loan is secured by an item that is important to the borrower, an item that the borrower does not want to lose. But if it is being used to secure six loans, the debtor at some point may decide: “I can’t earn enough money to pay of all of my creditors. I am too far in debt. Why should I bother to repay any of these people?” The magnitude of his debt becomes a motivation to stop repaying. The debtor gives up. This defrauds the lenders, who believed that the pledge was an incentive for him to repay. Instead, because of multiple pledges, it became an incentive for him to go so far into debt that the loans could not be repaid. This is a misuse of the concept of collateral. Multiple indebtedness is a lure into greater debt and greater risk. By allowing the creditor to take possession of the pledge during the day, this law discourages the practice of multiple indebtedness. The pledge is still useful to the debtor, but it is also useful to the lender, not as an income-producing asset but as a chain that limits the debtor’s opportunity to go too deeply into debt.

Fractional Reserve Banking 8

The modern banking system is a fractional reserve system. Depositors (lenders) are encouraged by bankers (debtors) to deposit funds in banks. The bank ofers a rate of interest to its depositors. The banker then lends out all but a small fraction of the money deposited. He makes an interest rate return on the money lent out. He pays a lower rate to depositors. The bank earns income through the spread between these two rates. The small percentage of the deposits 7. Gary North, Tools of Dominion: The Case Laws of Exodus (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), pp. 738–40. 8. Gary North, Honest Money: The Biblical Blueprint for Money and Banking (Ft. Worth: Dominion Press, 1986), ch. 8.

716

DEUTERONOMY

kept in reserve can be used to pay to depositors who come in and withdraw their money. The banker assumes (correctly) that on most days, the amount of money deposited will be close to the amount of money withdrawn. The bank keeps a small reserve to make up any excess of withdrawals over deposits. The system rests on a lie. The bank ofers all of the depositors a guarantee: you may withdraw your money on demand. Yet it then lends the deposits to debtors who by contract need not repay for months or years. The bank is, in the investment world’s phrase, “borrowed short and lent long.” The bank cannot make good its promise of “withdrawal on demand” if too many depositors come in and demand their money on the same day. If depositors believe that a bank is in trouble – sufering from excessive withdrawals – fear spreads. A bank run begins. When this happens, a line of would-be withdrawers forms in front of a bank. Lines spread to many banks. Even if one bank can be bailed out by other banks, or the nation’s central bank, a large number of banks cannot be bailed out at once, except by printing money to hand out to depositors. The banks’ guarantee is then exposed for what it was from the beginning: no better than the banking system’s ability to fool depositors about the inherent risk in a payments system that rests on a statistical impossibility. The banking system as a whole cannot fulill its guarantee of sujcient funds for depositors to withdraw at any time. The banking system can fulill it only when most depositors believe that the banking system can fulill it. When a large number of depositors simultaneously reach the conclusion that the guarantee is not only impossible to fulill (logic should have told them this), but is about to be defaulted on, the bank run begins. When a large number of banks cannot meet their obligations, the domino efect begins. The payments system begins to collapse. An economy rests heavily on promises to buy or sell, to pay and deliver. This highly complex system of mutually interrelated obligations rests on the central promise of the banks regarding money: “You can get your money out of this institution on demand.” If the banks default on this promise, all of the other promises in the economy are at risk. When the banks cease making payments to their depositors and to each other, almost every economic promise is called into question. It is not just the banks that have made promises; everyone has made promises. Employers have made promises to employees. Suppliers have made promises to deliver goods and

Collateral, Servitude, and Dignity

717

services. Producers have invested resources in making available goods and services that cannot be sold under the new conditions. They stop making any further investments. They ire employees. The social division of labor rests on a reliable means of payment. But the fractional reserve banking system is inherently unreliable. It rests on a known lie that is called into question by depositors periodically. When this happens, the payments system breaks down. As a result, the social division of labor shrinks rapidly. This destroys the market for specialized production. The greater the degree of specialization, the more vulnerable the seller is to falling demand. Unemployment increases. Fear spreads. The downward spiral accelerates. The breakdown in the payments system has an efect very much like the efect caused by a creditor who takes the debtor’s upper millstone. In a breakdown in the payments system, the miller still owns the upper and lower millstone, but he cannot sell the output of these stones at the previous high price. There is insujcient demand at the previous price, or perhaps at any price. Yet he has built his way of life – his pattern of expenditures – on the expectation of a particular stream of income. The breakdown in the payments system dries up his stream of income. He must now seek other forms of income. This usually means producing less specialized goods or services. Yet he enters this less specialized market at a time when large numbers of other specialized producers are abandoning their occupations in an attempt to replace their dried-up income streams. We call this event an economic depression. It can come in one of three forms: a collapse of the banking system and a reduction in the supply of credit (delation), a vast increase in the money supply through the printing press (inlation), or inlation with legislated price ceilings (shortages and rationing). The breakdown in the payments system destroys the accuracy of the array of prices in the economy that had been established under the older payment conditions. It is as if all the information in a computer became erroneous.9 The crucial information previously generated by the price system is undermined by the breakdown in 9. I believe that as the year 2000 approaches, the growing threat of erroneous information in the world’s computers because of the computer programmers’ Millennium Bug will cause a breakdown in the world’s payments system. If this takes place, there will be a fearful fall in the social division of labor all over the industrialized world.

718

DEUTERONOMY

payments. The intricate web of supply and demand is shredded. Forecasts made in terms of the previous array of prices are exposed as wasteful. Capital projects are exposed as loss-generating. Promises made to employees threaten the survival of their companies. Everyone’s life style is threatened by the breakdown in promises caused by the breakdown in the payments system. This is the inevitable efect of the fractional reserve banking system. The lie is universally exposed as a lie. Statistically, this time of exposure – this day of reckoning – has to happen eventually. Yet most men are surprised when it does. Because the credit money system applies to all participants in the market, its breakdown endangers everyone. It is not a case of one debtor’s default. Such a default may temporarily undermine the payments system of those to whom he previously bought and sold, but this disruption is temporary and local. But when the banking system collapses, the efects are widespread. There is no fall-back position for the vast majority of the producers in the economy, i.e., no reserves. The reserves were in the banks. They are long gone. Only those people who enjoyed a debt-free way of life based on a low division of labor can go through the payments adjustment period without experiencing a potentially devastating psychological crisis. The Amish and especially the Hutterites may go through the payments crisis unscathed, assuming that their gun-owning neighbors and well-armed local police force protect them from thieves. Residents in the deepest bayous of Louisiana may not experience a large change in their life style. Almost everyone one else will.

Conclusion The law prohibiting a creditor from taking a man’s tools of production as a pledge supports a higher social division of labor.10 By enabling the producer to stay in his chosen line of business, this law encourages him to supply the demand of consumers more ejciently. The debtor does not forfeit his way of life, just so long as he repays his loan on time, as he promised. He retains the ability to repay his debt. A debt incurred on the basis of his previous level of income is more easily repaid when he keeps his tools of production. 10. In the United States, a man who declares bankruptcy must turn over his assets to the court, which sells them to repay his creditors. But there is an exemption: the tools of his trade.

Collateral, Servitude, and Dignity

719

The problem comes when everyone has made pledges, i.e., contracts. They have promised to buy or sell at a speciic price. They have become dependent on the promises of others to buy or sell at speciic prices. Their way of life is based on the maintenance of an expected array of prices. The breakdown in the payments system destroys these expectations. It forces men to break their promises. The fractional reserve banking system cannot indeinitely fulill its pledge to allow depositors to withdraw their funds at any time. At some point, the banking system’s pledge will be broken: depositors cannot withdraw their money, unless the money is inlated, lowvalue paper money. Everyone’s income falls because of the rapid and widespread shrinking of the division of labor. When men move from a high level of income based on a high social division of labor to a low level of income based on a reduced social division of labor, they experience a loss of dignity. The economy’s collective economic depression produces individual psychological depression. This is why fractional reserve banking is a threat to society. By violating the Mosaic law’s restriction on multiple indebtedness, fractional reserve banking places society at great risk. At some point, the statistical risk of a breakdown in the payments system produces the event. Very few people are ever prepared for it. Personal self-esteem sufers a devastating attack. Men’s dreams are wiped out. The law prohibiting a lender from entering the home of a debtor to take possession of the debtor’s pledge preserves the dignity of the debtor. It protects the boundaries of his home, which means the boundaries of his covenantal authority as the head of his household. Until he defaults on the loan, he maintains at least some degree of dignity. This is important for a man’s productivity. It is therefore important for maintaining society’s wealth. Men who have lost their self-conidence do not make efective entrepreneurs and workers.

59 WagesAND and OPPRESSION Oppression WAGES Thou shalt not oppress an hired servant that is poor and needy, whether he be of thy brethren, or of thy strangers that are in thy land within thy gates: At his day thou shalt give him his hire, neither shall the sun go down upon it; for he is poor, and setteth his heart upon it: lest he cry against thee unto the LORD, and it be sin unto thee (Deut. 24:14–15).

This was an extension of Leviticus 19:13: “Thou shalt not defraud thy neighbour, neither rob him: the wages of him that is hired shall not abide with thee all night until the morning.” Here, the sin is identiied as oppression. The theocentric focus of this passage was two-fold. First, God pays us what He has agreed to pay us, and He pays us on time; His people should imitate Him. Second, God is a protector of those who cannot protect themselves; His people should imitate Him. This was not a seed law or a land law. It was a crossboundary law. I could refer the reader to Chapter 13 of Leviticus: An Economic Commentary. This would save a lot of space. But some readers may not have a copy of the earlier commentary. I have decided to reproduce my earlier comments.

Withholding Wages Withholding a worker’s wages beyond sunset, i.e., the end of the work day, is a form of oppression. In the Leviticus passage, this was identiied as theft. Why? If the worker agreed in advance to wait longer than a working day for his pay, why should the law of God prohibit the arrangement? Or does it? The text deals with paying a debt. The employer-employee relationship relects God’s relationship to man in this respect: the employee is 720

Wages and Oppression

721

dependent on the employer. Unlike God, however, the employer is dependent on the employee to some extent. So, the employeremployee relationship is not identical to the God-man relationship, but with respect to the provision of capital, it is analogous. God provides us with an arena: life and capital. Similarly, the employer supplies an employee with capital that makes the employee more productive. The laborer has worked for a full day; the employer is required to pay him at the end of the work day. The employee has fulilled his part of the bargain. The context is clear: rapid payment for services received. God employs us as His stewards. He gives us the tools that we need to serve Him and thereby serve ourselves. He always pays us on time. So should an employer. The employer who withholds wages from his employees is making a symbolic statement about God’s relationship to man: God supposedly delays paying man what is rightfully owed to him. This symbolism is incorrect. It testiies falsely about God’s character.

A Position of Weakness The wage earner is in a position of comparative weakness, just as we are weak in comparison to God. This employer-employee relationship relects God’s supremacy as the sovereign employer and man’s subordination as a dependent employee. If the wage earner is not paid immediately, then he is being asked by the employer to extend credit to the employer. The employer gains a beneit – the value of the labor services performed – without having to pay for this beneit at the end of the work day. The Bible allows this extension of such credit during daylight hours, but not overnight.1 This law teaches that the weaker party should not be forced as part of his terms of employment to extend credit to the stronger party. God acknowledges that there are diferences in bargaining power and bargaining skills, and He intervenes here to protect the weaker party. This is one of the rare cases in Scripture where God does prohibit a voluntary economic contract. What if the worker says that he is willing to wait for his pay if he is given an extra payment at the end of the period to compensate 1. By implication, the night laborer is under the same protection: he must be paid before the sun rises. The idea is that he must be paid by the end of his work day.

722

DEUTERONOMY

him for the time value of his money (i.e., interest)? This would be an unusual transaction. The extra money earned from two weeks of interest would be minimal in comparison to the amount of the wage. In any case, to abide by the terms of this law, such a voluntary agreement would have to be a legal transaction publicly separate from wage earning as such. There would have to be a public record of its conditions. It would constitute an investment by the worker. But the worker would have to pay his tithe and taxes on this money before he could legally lend it to the employer. The law here speciies that an employer who hires an individual to work for a period of time has to have the money available to pay that individual on a daily basis at the end of each work day. This is the employer’s standard requirement. There would be no confusion about this in a Christian covenanted society. There is no doubt that in the modern world, such an arrangement is not economically ejcient. Checks must be written, checks must be delivered to individuals, account books must be kept, and so forth. If this had to be done daily, it would add to the expense of running a irm.2 The larger the irm, the more dijcult such an arrangement would be. Nevertheless, the employer is required by God to abide by this law. The question is: Can he lawfully substitute a more convenient payment scheme and still meet the requirements of this law?

Debt and Credit: Inescapable Concepts If the employer decides that it is too much trouble to pay each worker at the end of each work day, he must advance the funds for the period of employment prior to the next payday. Thus, if the average period of employment between paydays is two weeks, the employer must bear the risk of paying an individual for work not yet received. The employer must extend credit to the worker. This is another way of saying that the worker must assume a debt obligation: two weeks of agreed-upon labor services.

2. In the inal stages of the German inlation in 1923, workers were sometimes paid cash in the morning. Wives would accompany them to work, take the cash, and rush to spend it on anything tangible before it depreciated during the day. This inlation devastated workers and employers alike. On the daily payment of wages in the second half of 1923, see Adam Fergusson, When Money Dies: The Nightmare of the Weimar Collapse (London: William Kimber, 1975), pp. 149, 191.

Wages and Oppression

723

Payments for a stream of continuous services cannot be simultaneous, although this limitation will change when the use of elec3 tronic cash becomes widespread. Therefore, one of the two parties in this transaction must go into debt in this system, while the other must extend credit. There is no escape from debt and credit apart from the technology of continuous payments. What this law authorizes is an extension of credit by the worker to the employer for a maximum of one work day. At the end of the work day, the account must be settled; credit is no longer extended by the worker, so he receives his day’s wage. What if the worker is paid in advance for a week or two of labor? He then necessarily becomes a debtor to the employer. He is required to deliver the work that he has been paid to perform. This places the worker in a debt position, but it is not a long-term debt. It is not considered a form of slavery, but there is no doubt that the worker has voluntarily accepted payment in advance, and this creates an obligation on his part. This debt position is limited, however. The law’s presumption is that the employer is not going to pay a person in advance for months of work except in very rare circumstances. The Bible teaches that we are not to become indebted to others: “Owe no man any thing, but to love one another: for he that loveth another hath fulilled the law” (Rom. 13:8). This must not be interpreted in an absolutist fashion. We know this because every person is in debt to God, and also to the perfect man, Jesus Christ, as a result of Christ’s atoning work at Calvary.4 This rule of debt-free living should be interpreted in a non-utopian sense. It means that we are to avoid debt contracts that threaten our continuing legal status as free men. It does not mean that we are to become hermits who separate ourselves from a division-of-labor economy. (It surely does not mean that we are required to become household slaves.) 3. It is technically possible today to deposit money electronically into a worker’s account on a moment-by-moment basis, just as it is possible for him to spend it on the same basis, but the cost of doing so is too high to make it feasible. This cost constraint will probably change in the future as computer technology and the cost of using computer networks both decrease. Kevin Kelly, “Cypherpunks, E-money, and the Techniques of Disconnection,” Whole Earth Review (Summer 1993). Because of the operation of the computer design problem known as the Millennium Bug or Year 2000 Problem, this development will be postponed. 4. This debt always involves common grace; sometimes it also involves special grace. Gary North, Dominion and Common Grace: The Biblical Basis of Progress (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987), ch. 6.

724

DEUTERONOMY

The restraining factor against the extension of too much credit by the stronger party is the employer’s fear that the worker will either quit before his term of service ends or else not produce competent work. It is too expensive for the employer to sue the average worker for damages; court expenses plus his own time in court exceed the money owed.5 The economic judgment of the employer is the restraining factor. He suspects that he will not be repaid if he extends too much credit. What this text speciies is that the worker must not be asked to work for a week or two in order to receive his wage. There is always a risk of default on the part of the debtor, whether he is the employer or the worker. This law speciies that the risk of default for this form of debt – wages beyond one work day – must be born by the employer, not by the worker. This law prohibits a form of robbery: by the employer and also by the employer’s accomplice, i.e., the worker who can aford to accept a delayed-payment contract, thereby excluding the poorest workers from the labor market.6 The employer must not become a thief by withholding anyone’s wages.7 By forcing the employer to make restitution to his employed workers who had seen their wages withheld, the law reduces the amount of such robbery of those unseen by the judges: future workers who are too weak even to compete for the delayedpayment job.8

Worker vs. Worker An ofer by a worker to accept delayed payment gives this capital-owning worker a competitive advantage over destitute workers who need payment immediately. This law establishes that competition among workers must not involve the employer’s acceptance of such an ofer by any worker. The biblical standard of payment is speciied: payment at the end of the work day. There may lawfully be payment in advance by the employer but not delayed payment. 5. God does sue workers who default on His advance payments. Some are sued in history; all are sued on the day of judgment. Court costs are irrelevant to God. 6. Gary North, Boundaries and Dominion: The Economics of Leviticus (computer edition; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), ch. 13, sections on “A Case of Economic Oppression” and “Bargainers: Strong, Weak, and Weakest.” 7. Ibid., ch. 13, section on “What Did the Employer Steal?” 8. Ibid., ch. 13, section on “The Limits of Judicial Knowledge.”

Wages and Oppression

725

When this law is enforced, destitute workers in the community are not replaced in the labor force by less destitute workers who can aford to forego immediate payment. All workers are to be allowed to compete for jobs, irrespective of any worker’s possession of reserves sujcient to tide him over until the next payday. So, one idea behind this law is to make job opportunities available to the destitute workers in the community. Everyone who is physically able to work is to be allowed to compete for a job on a basis independent of his asset reserves. The destitute man’s poverty is not to become the basis of his exclusion from the labor market. His competitors are not allowed to use their ability to extend credit to an employer as a way to ofset his only assets: his willingness and ability to work.9

Weaker Parties The worker needs protection. An employer might hire him for a period and then dismiss him without pay. Jacob’s complaint against Laban was that Laban had changed his wages repeatedly, meaning retroactively (Gen. 31:7). To protect the worker from this sort of robbery, the Bible requires the employer to bear the risk of longer-term default on the part of a worker. The employer bears the risk that the worker may turn out to be inejcient and will have to be ired before he has fulilled his contract. The worker may even cheat the employer by walking of the job before his term of employment is over. That is the employer’s problem. He can minimize this risk by paying workers at the end of each day. In doing so, he does not allow them to become indebted to him. If he chooses to have more infrequent pay periods, then he must bear the risk of paying people in advance who turn out to be inejcient or corrupt workers. It is not immediately apparent that this law deals with the robbery of the poor by the somewhat less poor. This law seems to have only the employer in mind as the agent of theft. But the employer cannot act alone in this act of theft. He needs accomplices, even if they are unaware of their economic status as accomplices. An employer who wants to discriminate against destitute workers by forcing them to extend him credit beyond one working day cannot do so without the voluntary cooperation of other workers. He cannot 9. An apprentice who knows little or nothing about the job may lawfully work for no money or very low wages until he becomes competent.

726

DEUTERONOMY

hire people to work without daily wage payments unless some workers are willing to work on these terms. The text identiies this practice as a form of robbery, but it is not merely the robbery of those workers who voluntarily agree to accept the terms of the contract; it is also the indirect oppression of those workers who cannot aford to ofer their labor services on these terms. It is above all the oppression of those who are excluded from the employer’s work force, not those who are included. But it requires some knowledge of basic economics to discover this fact. This law’s protection of the destitute worker’s ability to bid for jobs is implicit in the text, but not explicit. On what legal basis does this law apply to the free market? Why should a voluntary contract – delayed payment – be prohibited by civil law? What makes the practice of delaying payment judicially unique, and therefore legitimately subject to interference by the civil government? Answer: the principle of priestly pricing. The closer we get to life-and-death transactions, the less valid is the economic pricing principle, “all the trajc will bear,” i.e., “high bid wins.” God does not sell salvation by means of “high bid wins.” The law against delaying the payment of wages is an application of the ethics of priestly pricing. A destitute worker is not to be excluded from any labor market by an employer’s policy of delaying payment. Delayed payment is a policy of excluding workers. There are biblical judicial limits on voluntarism.10 No employment contract contrary to this law is legal in God’s eyes. The civil laws of every nation should prohibit such delays in the payment of wages. The typical employer is trying to minimize his risk when he hires competent workers rather than substandard workers. He delays payment because he wants to see each new worker prove himself before getting paid. This delay in payment pressures workers with little capital to quit early or never even apply for the job. The practice of delaying wages is therefore primarily a screening device. It favors workers who have capital in reserve. These capital reserves serve the employer as a substitute for other screening techniques. The employer’s economic problem is his lack of knowledge about the competence of the new worker. The employer uses a delayed payment

10. This fact does not constitute a legitimizing of an open-ended socialism, including some modernized version of medieval guild socialism. Biblical law, not socialist slogans, is the source of our knowledge of such limits on voluntary exchange.

Wages and Oppression

727

scheme in order to minimize his search costs in estimating the competence of new workers. Accurate knowledge is not a zero-price resource. Employers try to obtain such knowledge as cheaply as possible. They use the new worker’s willingness to accept delayed payments as a cost-efective substitute for more detailed information regarding the worker’s abilities and his willingness to work.

Conclusion The case law deals with theft from economically weak workers and also (indirectly) the most impoverished workers in the community. The most impoverished workers are those who cannot aford to extend credit to their employer. They need to be paid at the end of the work day. The employer is required to do this or else pay them in advance for a longer term of service. This law proves that Mosaic Israel was not a debt-free society. There were creditors and debtors. A legitimate biblical goal is to reduce long-term debt, but God’s civil law does not mandate absolutely debt-free living. Debt is basic to society, for society implies a division of labor. Debt will exist in a division of labor economy until such time as an economically ejcient means of making moment-by-moment wage payments becomes universal. The employer who delays payment to his workers is defrauding them. But to do this, he is inescapably providing an opportunity for some workers to oppress their competitors. The worker who can aford to work without pay for a period is given an opportunity by the employer to steal a job away from a worker so poverty-stricken that he cannot survive without payment at the end of the day. This form of competition is illegitimate, this passage says. It is unfair competition. This passage calls it oppression. God’s civil law makes it illegal for an employer to act as the economic agent of any employee against a destitute competitor. There are very few cases of unfair competition speciied in the Bible, but this is one of them. A judge can impose a restitution penalty on the perpetrator. There is also a hidden element of oppression: the excluded workers. To become subject to civil law, oppression must be identiiable as a criminal ofense. There must be deinable criteria that make the act a crime. The indirectly oppressed, excluded worker is not the victim of a crime. Ironically, the one who has oppressed him, the employed worker, is the victim of a crime: delayed payment. Even more ironically, if the oppressor brings a lawsuit against his

728

DEUTERONOMY

assailant, the employer, he thereby makes it less likely that he and his employer will be able to oppress the weakest party: the excluded worker. He therefore may refuse to press charges. This is why I think an excluded worker or the State acting on his behalf can bring a lawsuit against the employer to have the practice stopped. If it is immoral to discriminate against the weakest worker, then what of trade union practices that exclude these same low-bidding weak parties, referred to by union members as “scabs”? Can this case law legitimately be extended to make all exclusionary trade union screening practices illegal? That is, should we deine indirect economic oppression in such a way that all exclusionary hiring practices become crimes? If we do, then we violate a fundamental biblical principle: the predictability of the civil law. The law identiied as criminal – robbery – an easily speciied act: delaying payment overnight. Only when such oppressive acts are easily speciied and prosecution becomes predictable by all parties should this case law be extended to create new civil laws. But the oppressive character of the contract should be recognized, and no legislation should be passed that imitates the “delayed payment” contract, with its exclusionary side efects. This would surely include laws mandating that employers negotiate with trade unions or laws prohibiting employers from hiring non-union replacements when the union’s members walk of the job. The element of State coercion should not be imposed for the beneit of the oppressors, i.e., workers who are members of unions that seek monopolistic above-market wages for their members by excluding others from joining or by calling on the State to forbid employers from making bargains with non-union workers.

60 Gleaning: Charitable Inejciency GLEANING: CHARITABLE INEFFICIENCY When thou cuttest down thine harvest in thy ield, and hast forgot a sheaf in the ield, thou shalt not go again to fetch it: it shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow: that the LORD thy God may bless thee in all the work of thine hands. When thou beatest thine olive tree, thou shalt not go over the boughs again: it shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow. When thou gatherest the grapes of thy vineyard, thou shalt not glean it afterward: it shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt: therefore I command thee to do this thing (Deut. 24:19–22).

The theocentric principle undergirding this law is this: God shows grace to man in history by allowing mankind access to the fruit of God’s ield, His creation. Put another way, God allows mankind inside the boundaries of His ield. Fallen man is in the position of the poverty-stricken, landless Israelite or stranger. God does not exclude externally cursed mankind from access to the means of life in history. Neither were land owners in post-conquest Mosaic Israel to exclude the economically poor and judicially excluded residents of the land. Fallen man is always a gleaner.1 God was the original land owner who sought to make the Promised Land’s blessings available to every able-bodied worker who was willing to go into the ields at the time of the harvest. This was an aspect of the dominion covenant: man as God’s steward who 1. Gary North, Boundaries and Dominion: The Economics of Leviticus (computer edition; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), ch. 11, section on “We Are All Gleaners.”

729

730

DEUTERONOMY

participates in the subduing of the earth (Gen. 1:26–28). Those who were without land or tools in Mosaic Israel nevertheless had an obligation to work. Because the Mosaic law kept rural land permanently in the possession of families that were heirs of the conquest generation, this case law opened the closed ields. The gleaners could not inherit these ields,2 but they had a moral claim on a portion of the leftovers. This was both a land law and a seed law. This passage expands on the gleaning laws of Leviticus: “And when ye reap the harvest of your land, thou shalt not wholly reap the corners of thy ield, neither shalt thou gather the gleanings of thy harvest. And thou shalt not glean thy vineyard, neither shalt thou gather every grape of thy vineyard; thou shalt leave them for the poor and stranger: I am the LORD your God” (Lev. 19:9–10). “And when ye reap the harvest of your land, thou shalt not make clean riddance of the corners of thy ield when thou reapest, neither shalt thou gather any gleaning of thy harvest: thou shalt leave them unto the poor, and to the stranger: I am the LORD your God” (Lev. 23:22). It identiies the three classes of vulnerable residents: widows, orphans, and strangers. It refers to Israel’s years as a slave in Egypt. It ofers positive sanction: “that the LORD thy God may bless thee in all the work of thine hands.” The negative sanction of bondage is contrasted with the positive sanction of God’s blessings.

Inefficiency: Yes and No The stated goal of modern economic science is to explain men’s actions in terms of the principle of income maximization, i.e., sanctions: proit and loss. For a given expenditure of scarce economic resources, how can a person maximize his personal return, however he deines “return”? Put another way, how can he avoid wasting valuable resources? How can he exchange his present circumstances for better circumstances in the future without surrendering the ownership of beneits that need not be surrendered? The farmer was warned by Moses not to seek to maximize his total return on his agricultural investment. He was not to go back to pick up the forgotten sheaf, or go through his olive orchard, beating the trees a second time, or glean the vineyard a second time. The 2. Conceivably, some poor gleaner might be the long-term heir of the property who had temporarily lost possession of his ield.

Gleaning: Charitable Inejciency

731

three examples in the text apply to the raw materials for producing bread, wine, and oil. These were the vegetable sacriices required by God (Lev. 2:4; 23:13). They were the best produce of a man’s ield. They served here as representatives of all agricultural production. Moses told owners of these crops that they should leave behind some small percentage, so that gleaners could harvest them. This meant that the Mosaic law transferred partial ownership of these unharvested crops to those who did not own the land and had not made the investments necessary to produce them. By the standards of modern economics, God was commanding land owners to be wasteful. He commanded them to leave behind for others a small portion of the fruits of their investment. He was saying clearly that members of three defenseless groups – strangers, widows, and orphans – had a moral claim on a small portion of the output of the land.3 They did not have a legal claim, but they had a moral claim. Here, the Bible’s supreme example is Ruth, who was both a stranger and a widow. Boaz let her glean in his ields (Ruth 2). This was an inejcient way to harvest crops. God was saying that it was an ejcient way to harvest souls. Poverty-stricken people who would gain access to the post-harvest ields would recognize in the land owner a willingness to forfeit a portion of his income for the sake of God’s law, which recognized the plight of the righteous poor. Word would get out among the poor: here was a man to be imitated. Down the ladder of wealth, from the richest to the poorest, the goal was to provide a boost out of poverty to the people on the rung below. But in the case of the land owner, he was required by God to reach down two rungs and provide a poor person with a way to climb out of poverty. Sometimes poverty is well deserved. Sometimes it isn’t. The goal of this Mosaic law was to pressure the land owner to identify the righteous poor in his community and provide both income and work experience for them. An ejcient man is a man who plans for the future. He counts the future costs of his present actions. A poor man is rarely an ejcient man. He is too worried about his next meal to plan ahead very far into the future. He is present-oriented. This law announced 3. In Chapter 34, on the tithes of celebration, I identiied these three groups as judicially undefended. This was because a fourth group, the Levites, were included in the list. The Levites were not necessarily poor. In this law, however, the Levites were not mentioned. Thus, I regard the classiication here as economic rather than judicial.

732

DEUTERONOMY

to the poor man: “If you are willing to work hard, you will not have to worry about where your next meal is coming from. You will then be able to plan ahead more easily.” A man who was presentoriented because of an ethical failure would probably remain poor. In contrast, a future-oriented man whose time horizons had been shortened because of his poverty was given a way to rise in his class position. Class position is based more on time-perspective than money. The present-oriented man is lower class.4

Sanctions The motivation for obedience rested on a cause-and-efect system of sanctions. In this case, the motivating sanction was supernaturally based, historically manifested, and positive: “that the LORD thy God may bless thee in all the work of thine hands” (v. 19). There was also an implied negative sanction: “And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt: therefore I command thee to do this thing” (v. 22). The oppression of Israel in Egypt was the Mosaic model for oppression. The unstated implication in this passage was that Israel’s deliverance from Egypt is the model of God’s corporate judgment in history. As God’s irstborn son (Ex. 4:22), Israel had gained the inheritance of Egypt’s disinherited irstborn sons, who had died at Passover. The message: the oppressed will eventually inherit in history. To maintain the inheritance, a person or a nation must not become an oppressor. This is a continuing theme in Deuteronomy: the ethically conditional nature of the inheritance. Without righteousness, Israel’s inheritance could not be permanently maintained. This is one of the crucial themes of the Bible. It undergirds inheritance by the New Covenant church: “Therefore say I unto you, The kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof” (Matt. 21:43). The church inherited the kingdom because Israel did not remain obedient to God’s law. The context of Jesus’ announcement of Israel’s coming disinheritance was His parable of the unjust stewards who refused to pay what they owed the land owner. He even lured the chief priests and the elders into condemning themselves in public for disobeying God: “They say unto 4. Edward C. Banield, The Unheavenly City: The Nature and Future of Our Urban Crisis (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), pp. 53–59.

Gleaning: Charitable Inejciency

733

him, He will miserably destroy those wicked men, and will let out his vineyard unto other husbandmen, which shall render him the fruits in their seasons” (Matt. 21:41). Despite Jesus’ conirmation of the Mosaic Covenant’s system of sanctions, Christians have ignored or downplayed this theme of historical inheritance and disinheritance. This is evidence of widespread antinomianism: hostility to biblical law. Christians have asserted that the Mosaic law and its sanctions, both civil and historical, have been completely annulled by the New Covenant. This has led them to a dismal conclusion: there will be no unique cultural inheritance by Christians in church history; there will be no disinheritance of God’s enemies. The meek will not inherit the earth. Jesus really did not teach Christians to expect such an inheritance, we are told. He was speaking about the millennial “Jewish church” (dispensationalism’s view). Or He was speaking allegorically about eternity (amillennialism’s view). But He could not possibly have meant that those who are meek before God will exercise dominion in history. Such a “triumphalist” outlook rests on faith in a system of predictable, corporate, historical, covenantal cause and efect, which in turn rests on a revelational moral and legal order. In short, such an outlook rests on theonomy. This outlook is not acceptable to modern Christianity.

Gleaning as a Model Because I have already covered gleaning in Chapter 11 of Leviticus: An Economic Commentary, I am reproducing that chapter here. Deuteronomy 24:19–22 identiies the poor more speciically: stranger, orphan, and widow. It also adds a reason: Israel’s time of bondage in Egypt. God had delivered Israel from this bondage. Israelite land owners were to ofer similar deliverance to the poor. Gleaning was a form of morally compulsory charity. It remains the primary moral model for biblical charity, but, as I hope to show, it is not a literal model for modern charity. In a non-agricultural society, gleaning cannot become a literal model for charity. Morally, however, gleaning is to be our guideline for charity: those in the community who have been called in the West “the deserving poor” are to be allowed to do hard work in order to support themselves and improve their condition. God expects the more successful members of a community to provide economic opportunities for such willing laborers – opportunities for service.

734

DEUTERONOMY

As with every biblical law, this law was ultimately theocentric. The beneiciaries of this law were God’s representatives in history, just as victims of crimes are representatives of God. Crime is primarily an assault on God by means of a crime against man, who is made in God’s image.5 Crime is man’s attempt to bring unlawful negative sanctions against God by bringing them against one of His representatives. Charity is analogous to crime in this respect, but with this diference: the sanctions are both lawful and positive. What a person does to the poor is counted as if he did it to Jesus (Matt. 25:32–40).

A Lawful Claim: Moral or Legal? God announced that the poor people and resident aliens in Israel were to be invited in by the land owner so that they could harvest the corners of the ield and the fallen grain. This meant that as a class, they had a moral claim on the “droppings” of production. This also meant that they had no legal claim on the primary sources of income of an agricultural community. They were invited in. There was no State-inanced welfare in Israel. It would have been dijcult for a judge or a jury to identify which individuals in the community had a legal right to bring charges against the land owner as the legal victims of his refusal to honor the gleaning laws. The text speciies no negative institutional sanction that had to be imposed on a land owner who refused to honor the gleaning laws. God is indirectly revealed as the agent who would bring negative sanctions against an individual land owner who refused to honor the gleaning laws. The State was therefore not authorized by the text to bring these sanctions against individuals on behalf of God. The sanctions were individual rather than corporate. Without the threat of God’s negative sanctions against the whole covenanted community, there was no justiication for civil sanctions. Civil sanctions were imposed in Israel in order to substitute the State’s subordinate wrath for God’s more direct wrath against the community. Furthermore, in case of a violation of the gleaning law, there would have been no easy way to determine legitimate restitution. Where there are no civil sanctions, there is no crime. To violate this

5. North, Tools of Dominion, p. 279.

Gleaning: Charitable Inejciency

735

law was a sin, not a crime. God would curse the owner directly, but the society was not at risk. Thus, civil sanctions were inappropriate.6 This law applied only to agriculture: ield and vineyard. Field and vineyard are the sources of bread and wine: Melchizedek’s meal for Abram (Gen. 14:18) and also the Lord’s Supper.7

The Economics of Gleaning: Who Paid, Who Beneited? What was the economics of the gleaning law? In a sense, the requirement that the land owner and professional harvesters leave a small portion of the crop for the gleaners made this portion analogous to the manna that God had supplied to the Israelites during the wilderness wandering. This miraculous though predictable food was a pure gift of God. Similarly, both the produce of the land and God’s grace in establishing the requirement that the land owners and harvesters share with the gleaners were signs of God’s continuing grace to the poor. The gleaners were visibly dependent on God’s grace for their survival. This had also been the case for the whole nation in the wilderness. Gleaning laws were exclusively agricultural laws. God commanded the harvesters of the ield and the vineyard to be wasteful – wasteful in terms of their personal goals, but ejcient in terms of God’s goals. They were to leave part of the produce of both the vineyard and the grain ield for gathering by the poor. This law indicates that the leftovers of the Promised Land belonged to God. God transferred the ownership of these high harvesting cost assets from the land owner and the harvester to the poor and the stranger. The owner in one sense did beneit, at least those owners who paid their ield hands wages rather than by the supply harvested, i.e., piece-rate payment. The obedient owner did not pay salaried harvesters to collect marginal pickings. This lowered his labor cost per harvested unit of crop. But the net income loss as a result of gleaning did lower his return from his land and planting expenses. There is no doubt that this economic loss of net revenue constituted a form of compulsory charity. It was a mandated positive 6. See my discussion in Boundaries and Dominion, ch. 11, subsection on “Individual Sanctions Against Disobedience.” 7. Ibid., ch. 11, section on “Bread and Wine.”

736

DEUTERONOMY

sanction. This should alert us to the fact that this law was not a civil law. It was rather a church-enforced law. The church, not the State, is to bring positive sanctions in history. The church, not the State, ofers Holy Communion. This distinction is representative of the difering functions of the two institutions. The gleaning law was also to some extent an advantage to the piece-rate harvester because he was able to achieve greater output per unit of time invested. He was not expected to spend time gathering the marginal leftovers of the crop. Marginal returns on his labor invested were higher than they would have been had it not been for this law. Nevertheless, both the owner of the land and the piece-rate harvesters did sufer a loss of total income because of this law. The harvesters saved time but gathered less. They did sufer a loss of income compared to what they would have earned apart from this law. How did piece-rate harvesters sufer a loss of total income? Because they could not lawfully gather the total crop of the ield or the vineyard. Each worker had to leave some produce behind, which means that his income sufered. This also means that the poor of the community were in part funded by the slightly less poor: the piecerate harvesters. The harvesters were reminded of the burdens of poverty. This in efect became an unemployment insurance program for the harvesters. They knew that if they later fell into poverty, they would probably be allowed to participate as gleaners sometime in the future. They forfeited some income in the present, but they did so in the knowledge that in a future crisis, they would be able to gain income from gleaning. Both the land owner and the piece-rate worker inanced a portion of this morally compulsory insurance program.

Beneits for the Land Owner The law placed a burden on the land owner. Yet this burden was in fact a form of liberation if he acknowledged the covenantal nature of the expenditure. It was analogous to the tithe. By honoring it, he was acknowledging God’s sovereign ownership of his land. This act of sharing placed him visibly in the service of the great King. That King was his protector, for he was a vassal. As with rest on the sabbath, the owner could rest conidently in the knowledge that the King would defend his interests as a vassal if he abided by the terms of the King’s treaty.

Gleaning: Charitable Inejciency

737

There was another beneit to the faithful owner, according to Aaron Wildavsky, one of the most informed experts in the world on the history of taxation.8 He was also a careful student of the Mosaic law. He wrote of the gleaning law that “Compulsiveness easily converts to fanaticism. The farmer who harvests not 99 percent of his crop but every last little bit becomes consumed by his compulsion. Soon enough excess – getting it all – becomes an overwhelming passion.”9 He quite properly identiies fanaticism as idolatry.10 The gleaning law restrained the idolatry of greed. It reminded rich men that they did not need to keep everything they managed as God’s stewards in order to remain successful. It restrained them from the passion of autonomous man: deining themselves in terms of their wealth rather than their obedience to God.

Hard Work The gleaner had to work harder than the average worker did in order to harvest the same quantity of crops. The “easy pickings” were gone by the time the gleaner was allowed into the ields. This means that he had high marginal labor costs. That is, he had to invest more labor per unit of crop harvested than the piece-rate harvester did. Assuming that the harvester’s goal was a high return on labor invested, it was preferable to be a piece-rate worker than to be a gleaner. To be a gleaner was to be in a nearly desperate condition. In the case of both piece-rate work and gleaning, most of the labor costs of harvesting were borne by the poor. The rich man did not work in the ields. But there were degrees of poverty. By far, the greater cost per unit harvested was borne by the gleaners. In modern terminology, this might be called a workfare program instead of a welfare program. The gleaner was not a passive recipient of someone else’s money. He had to work. Furthermore, marketing costs may actually have been borne by the poor. It would have been legal for the poor individual to take whatever pickings he gained from the ield and go to a store owner or other purchaser of the crop. The

8. Carolyn Webber and Aaron Wildavsky, A History of Taxation and Expenditure in the Western World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986). 9. Aaron Wildavsky, The Nursing Father: Moses as a Political Leader (University, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1984), p. 30. 10. Idem.

738

DEUTERONOMY

owner of the land did not have the right to compel the gleaner to sell the gleanings to him. This means that the gleaner was enabled to obtain a competitive market price for the output of his labor. Of course, this would have been extra work and risk for the gleaner, and it involved specialized knowledge of markets. Nevertheless, it was a right before God that the gleaner possessed. There was another great advantage to this form of morally enforced charity: it brings hard-working, ejcient poor people to the attention of potential employers. In efect, employers in Mosaic Israel could “glean” future workers from society’s economic “leftovers.” This system produced more food for the community than would have been produced apart from the law, although costs were higher than otherwise.11

Subsidizing Localism Is becoming a low-paid ield hand God’s universally required on-the-job training system? No. God no longer expects poor people to learn how to become ield laborers. In Old Covenant Israel, however, it was important that men learn to serve Him locally. God wanted to preserve localism and tribalism. The tribal system was important for the preservation of freedom in Israel. Tribalism and localism broke down attempts to centralize the nation politically. Thus, the gleaning law was part of the social order associated with Old Covenant Israel. It reinforced the tribal system. It also reinforced rural life at the expense of urban life – one of the few Mosaic laws to do so. The land owner was required by God to subsidize the rural way of life. Local poor people were ofered subsidized employment on the farms. Had it not been for the gleaning system, the only rural alternatives would have been starvation or beggary in the country. They would have moved to the cities, as hungry people all over the world do today. The jubilee land inheritance laws kept rural land within the Israelite family. If a daughter inherited land because there was no brother, she could not marry outside her tribe if she wanted to keep the land. “Neither shall the inheritance remove from one tribe to another tribe; but every one of the tribes of the children of Israel shall keep

11. North, Boundaries and Dominion, ch. 11, section on “More Food for Everyone.”

Gleaning: Charitable Inejciency

739

himself to his own inheritance” (Num. 36:9). While a rich man might move permanently to a city, the poor person was encouraged by the gleaning law to stay closer to home. Cities would inevitably have become the primary dwelling places for most Israelites if they had obeyed God as a nation. Population growth would have forced most people into the cities. The size of family plots would have shrunk as each generation inherited its portion of the land. But until Israel’s corporate covenantal faithfulness led to population growth and increased per capita wealth, each tribe’s poor members were to be subsidized by the gleaning law to remain close to the tribe’s food supplies. This law was a means of retarding the growth of an unemployed urban proletariat. The countryside was to be the place where the poor man received his daily bread. He would have to do simple agricultural labor to receive his food. This law also promoted localism rather than distant bureaucracy.12

No Subsidy for Evil Another important reason for localism was the concern of God that His resources not be used for evil purposes. Either the provider of this agricultural charity had to reside locally or else his speciied agent had to. Local residents in rural Mosaic Israel were more likely to be well known to the land owners. Presumably, the cause of their poverty was also well known to the land owners, or at least this could be discovered without much dijculty. The gleaning system reduced the subsidy of evil. The poor person who was poor as a result of his own bad habits did not have to be subsidized by the land owner and the professional harvesters who worked his ields. The land owner had the right to exclude some poor people from access to his ields. Gleaning was therefore a highly personal form of charity, since the person who was required to give this charity was also the person who screened access to the fruit of the land. This means that the gleaning law was a form of conditional charity in each individual recipient’s case, although the loss was compulsory from the point of view of the land owner. Biblical charity is always

12. Ibid., ch. 11, subsection on “Localism and Bureaucracy.”

740

DEUTERONOMY

13

conditional. Charity is not to subsidize evil, for it is an act of grace. Unconditional charity is antinomian. In a fallen world, unconditional charity will inevitably subsidize evil.

Strangers The local member of the land owner’s tribe was the primary recipient of charity, but he was not the only one. The other recipient of the grace of gleaning was the stranger. These strangers were presumably resident aliens who had fallen on hard times. They might have been hired servants who could not ind employment. They were people who did not want to go back to their home country. They were therefore people who wanted to live under the civil law of God in the Promised Land. These people were entitled to the same consideration that the poor Israelite was entitled to. It is clear that this arrangement would have increased the emotional commitment of the resident alien to the welfare of the community. He was treated justly. The land was God’s covenantal agent. This law was agricultural only. It did not apply to urban businesses.14

Conditional Charity: Moral Boundaries The owner of the farm had to acknowledge the sovereignty of God by obeying the gleaning laws. These laws were a reminder to him that biblical authority always has costs attached to it. The owner of the land had been given capital that other people lacked. He therefore had an obligation to the local poor as God’s agent, for the land itself was pictured as God’s agent.15 His obligation was to supply the land’s leftovers to the poor. In making this demand, the gleaning law placed decisive limits (boundaries) on both the poor rural resident and the State. It limited the moral demands that the poor could make on economically successful people in the community. The poor had no comparable 13. Ray R. Sutton, “Whose Conditions for Charity?” in Theonomy: An Informed Response, edited by Gary North (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1991), ch. 9. 14. North, Boundaries and Dominion, ch. 11, section on “A Law of the Land, Not the Workshop.” 15. Gary North, Leviticus: An Economic Commentary (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), ch. 10.

Gleaning: Charitable Inejciency

741

moral claim against the successful non-agricultural businessman. This law also limited the demands that the State could make on the community in the name of the poor. Biblical law speciied that the man with landed wealth should share his wealth with the deserving poor, but not the poor in general. The deserving poor were those who were willing to work hard, but who could not ind work in the normal labor markets. In short, the gleaning law had conditions attached to it. The idea of morally compulsory, non-conditional charity was foreign to the laws of the Mosaic Covenant.16 The gleaner had to work very hard, for he reaped only the leftovers. This means that his income was lower than would have been the case if he had been a professional harvester. Gleaning provides a lesson to the poor: there are no free lunches in life. Someone always has to pay. The economic terms of the gleaning system established that only the destitute members of the community would have become gleaners. If there had been any other source of income besides begging, they would have taken it. The hard work and low pay of gleaning were incentives for the individual to get out of poverty. We must always remember that the gleaning laws operated within the framework of the jubilee land laws. The poorest Israelite in the community at some point would inherit from his father or grandfather a portion of the original family inheritance. The size of that portion of land depended on the number of male heirs. Its value depended on the economic productivity of local residents who could legally bid to lease it.17 The more productive the heir, the

16. It is equally foreign to the law of the New Covenant. This assertion appalls Timothy Keller. See Keller, “Theonomy and the Poor: Some Relections,” in William S. Barker and W. Robert Godfrey (eds.), Theonomy: A Reformed Critique (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 1990), pp. 273–79. He calls for initially unconditional charity to all poor people. He argues that anyone in need anywhere on earth is my neighbor, thereby universalizing the moral claims of all poor people on the wealth of anyone who is slightly less poor. He writes: “Anyone in need is my neighbor – that is the teaching of the Good Samaritan parable.” Ibid., p. 275. He rejects the traditional Christian concept of the deserving poor (pp. 276–77). He concludes: “I am proposing that the reconstructionist approach to biblical charity is too conditional and restrictive.” Ibid., p. 278. For my response, see North, Westminster’s Confession: The Abandonment of Van Til’s Legacy (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1991), pp. 271–73. See also Sutton, “Whose Conditions for Charity?” in North (ed.), Theonomy, ch. 9. 17. The economist looks for a price to establish value. The highest market value is determined by the highest market bid by a potential buyer or long-term leaser.

742

DEUTERONOMY

18

more likely that he would be able to retain control over it. Gleaning gave the poor Israelite an opportunity to gain management and other skills as a land owner prior to the time that he or his children would be given back the original family land grant through the jubilee land law. The gleaning law provided training that could in the future be converted into family capital. The gleaning law was designed to keep poor people in the local agricultural community. The gleaning law did not apply to non-agricultural businesses or professions. It originated from the fact that God declared Himself as the owner of the Promised Land. He did not verbally claim an equally special ownership of businesses. The land, not business, was identiied as God’s covenant agent that brought God’s covenant lawsuits in Old Covenant Israel.19 Any attempt to derive a modern system of charity, public or private, from the gleaning law faces this crucial limitation. It was not intended to apply outside a farm. The modern welfare State is a perverse mirror image of the gleaning law. It disregards the moral criteria for charity and substitutes bureaucratic-numerical criteria. This has greatly expanded both the political boundaries of charity and the extent of poverty. People get paid by the State for being poor; the free market responds: more poor people. The welfare State now faces bankruptcy: the destruction of those dependent on its support.20 There are few modern applications of the gleaning law, which was a land law. Modern society is not agricultural.21 Nevertheless, there is a theological principle that undergirds gleaning: fallen man is always a gleaner. But redeemed men will progressively escape their dependence on other men’s charity as society advances through God’s grace.

Conclusion The gleaning law was part of an overall system of political economy. Many of the details of this political economy were tied to the Promised Land and the sacriicial system of that land. Localism and 18. This legal right to inherit the family’s land did not extend to the stranger until after the exile (Ezek. 47:22–23). 19. North, Leviticus, ch. 10. 20. North, Boundaries and Dominion, ch. 11, section on “Unconditional Charity: Political Boundaries.” 21. Ibid., ch. 11, section on “Modern Applications of the Gleaning Law Are Few.”

Gleaning: Charitable Inejciency

743

tribalism were both basic to the application of the gleaning law in Mosaic Israel. The authority of the local land owner to chose who would glean and who would not from among various candidates – the boundary principle of inclusion and exclusion – transferred great responsibility and authority into his hand. This kind of personalized charity is no longer taken seriously by those who legislate politically grounded welfare State policies in the modern world. Such a view of charity transfers too much authority to property owners, in the eyes of the politicians, and not enough to the State and its functionaries. But it is not the principle of localism that changes in the New Testament era; it is only the landed tribalism that changes. When the kingdom of God was transferred to a new nation (Matt. 21:43), meaning the church, the Levitical land laws were abolished. Gleaning no longer applies in the New Covenant era. The jubilee land law was annulled by Jesus through: 1) His ministry’s fulillment of the law (Luke 4:16–27); 2) the transfer of the kingdom to the church at Pentecost (Matt. 21:43; Acts 2); and 3) the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. Can we learn anything from the gleaning law? I think we can, but these lessons are essentially negative. They show us what should not be done, not what must be done, to avoid God’s negative sanctions. The lessons from gleaning are these: 1) all charity is based legally on the fundamental principle that God owns the earth (Ps. 24:1); 2) a third party has no legal civil claim on any asset that he does not own; 3) charity should not create a permanent dependence on the part of the recipient; 4) charity should not subsidize evil; 5) it should involve hard work except in cases where the recipient is medically incapacitated; 6) it should not provide living standards that are higher than the poorest workers in society are able to earn. The fundamental principle learned from the gleaning laws is this: charity in a biblical social order must not be based on the idea that the State is a legitimate institution of salvation. The State is not a biblically legitimate agency of social healing. It is an agency of public vengeance (Rom. 13:1–7). It possesses a lawful monopoly of violence. It therefore cannot be entrusted with the authority to take the wealth of successful people in order to reward the poor. If it is allowed to do this, its agents become the primary beneiciaries of the coniscated wealth. Its political and bureaucratic agents will gain power over both the poor and the economically successful. These agents will become permanent spokesmen for the ojcial beneiciaries of the

744

DEUTERONOMY

wealth, namely, the poor. They will have no incentive to get poor people as a class permanently out of poverty. A system of legal entitlements for the poor becomes a system of legal entitlements to full-time jobs for those who administer the system. This is the antithesis of the gleaning system of the Mosaic Covenant. In that system, participants had an economic incentive to get the poor back to work: the land owners, the piece-rate harvesters, and the poor themselves. It is clear what God expects from property owners: a willingness to forego maximum personal returns. They are to “leave something on the table” for the other party in any transaction between righteous people. Non-owners – the righteous poor – have a moral claim on the output of the owners. The owners are merely stewards for God, the original owner. God provides the raw materials and the social order which provide wealth. In this sense, every owner is a “free rider” in the system: a person who has not paid for all of the services rendered. Grace precedes law. Man is always in debt to God. Every creature is a free rider in the creation. The owner who maximizes output for himself and his family thereby announces his own autonomy: “My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth” (Deut. 8:17b). In a world sustained by God’s grace, this is a graceless attitude. It is an ejcient way to become disinherited.

61 UnmuzzlingTHE the Working Ox OX UNMUZZLING WORKING Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn (Deut. 25:4).

The theocentric focus of this law is God as man’s employer. What this verse reveals regarding God’s requirements for employing an ox, it also reveals about God’s relationship with man in man’s ojce as an agent of dominion. Man works for God. God allows man to enjoy the fruits of his labor as he exercises dominion on behalf of God, whether or not a man acknowledges the existence of, or the assignment by, his heavenly employer. What God allows to man, man should allow to his subordinates. This includes his animal subordinates. This was not a land law or a seed law. It was a cross-boundary law. How a man treats his ox relects how he treats workers in general. The ox is a symbol of dominion.1 It serves man as a working agent. It therefore is entitled to special protection. This is why the penalty for stealing and then either selling or destroying an ox is ivefold restitution (Ex. 22:1). For other forms of theft (except sheep), as well as for an ox or sheep found in the thief’s possession, it is double restitution (Ex. 22:4). Man is not a beast. He possesses future-orientation. The ox is not future-oriented. He eats as he works. The farmer who expects an ox to work all day without eating is expecting too much. Even in the case of a hired man, biblical law does not expect him to wait beyond sunset to receive his wages (Deut. 24:15).

1. Gary North, Tools of Dominion: The Case Laws of Exodus (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), p. 525.

745

746

DEUTERONOMY

Judicial Hermeneutics Rushdoony adopts this verse as an explanatory model for biblical interpretation.2 He does so because Paul cited this passage in two epistles. In each case, Paul extended the narrow focus of this case law to a much broader concern: the payment of Christian workers who were laboring as teachers. In the irst example, Paul reminded the Corinthians that He was an apostle. He was in authority over them. He was therefore entitled to inancial support. Am I not an apostle? am I not free? have I not seen Jesus Christ our Lord? are not ye my work in the Lord? If I be not an apostle unto others, yet doubtless I am to you: for the seal of mine apostleship are ye in the Lord. Mine answer to them that do examine me is this, Have we not power to eat and to drink? Have we not power to lead about a sister, a wife, as well as other apostles, and as the brethren of the Lord, and Cephas? Or I only and Barnabas, have not we power to forbear working? Who goeth a warfare any time at his own charges? who planteth a vineyard, and eateth not of the fruit thereof? or who feedeth a lock, and eateth not of the milk of the lock? Say I these things as a man? or saith not the law the same also? For it is written in the law of Moses, Thou shalt not muzzle the mouth of the ox that treadeth out the corn. Doth God take care for oxen? Or saith he it altogether for our sakes? For our sakes, no doubt, this is written: that he that ploweth should plow in hope; and that he that thresheth in hope should be partaker of his hope (I Cor. 9:1–10).

The ield to be plowed in this case was the world. Paul was harvesting men. The Corinthians were part of his work of harvesting. Why were they resisting paying him? As surely as an ox was entitled to eat while he worked for another, so was Paul entitled to be paid as he worked on behalf of the Corinthians. In the second example, Paul defended the right of church rulers to a double portion. “Let the elders that rule well be counted worthy of double honour, especially they who labour in the word and doctrine. For the scripture saith, Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn. And, The labourer is worthy of his reward” (I Tim. 5:17–18). Double honor in this context meant double payment, i.e., payment higher than what a comparably skilled workman 2. R. J. Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law (Nutley, New Jersey: Craig Press, 1973), pp. 11, 506.

Unmuzzling the Working Ox

747

would receive. The elder who devotes all of his time to serving the church should be well-compensated by the members. What was the biblical origin of the concept of double payment? It has to be the irstborn son’s double inheritance (Deut. 21:15–17). The church elder is to be treated as a irstborn son. He performs double service; he should receive double honor and double payment.

From Minimal to Maximal Application The law governing oxen is a Mosaic case law. These case laws are stated in a narrow context, but they are to be applied more broadly, as Paul’s examples indicate. Rushdoony describes the case-law hermeneutics: “These speciic cases are often illustrations of the extent of the application of the law; that is, by citing a minimal type of case, the necessary jurisdictions are revealed. To prevent us from having any excuse for failing to understand and utilize this concept [of case law], the Bible gives us its own interpretation of such a law, and this illustration, being given by St. Paul, makes clear the New Testament undergirding of the law.”3 Rushdoony uses Paul’s application of this case law as a hermeneutical model which has been validated in the New Covenant. Rushdoony classiies the ox law as an application of the commandment against theft. This is correct. “If it is a sin to defraud an ox of his livelihood, then it is also a sin to defraud a man of his wages; it is theft in both cases. If theft is God’s classiication of an ofense against an animal, how much more so an ofense against God’s apostle and minister?”4 Rushdoony in another place has noted that “Americans want their religion, but they want it cheap.” He regards such an attitude as a violation of this case law. The case laws apply the Ten Commandments in real-world situations. He writes: “Without case law, God’s law would soon be reduced to an extremely limited area of meaning. This, of course, is precisely what has happened. Those who deny the present validity of the law apart from the Ten Commandments have as a consequence a very limited deinition of theft. Their deinition usually follows the civil law of their own country, is humanistic, and is not

3. Ibid., p. 11. 4. Ibid., p. 12.

748

DEUTERONOMY

radically diferent from the deinitions given by Moslems, Bud5 dhists, and humanists.”

From Minimal to Zero Application The hermeneutics typically used by Christian Bible commentators and expositors is this: “If a Mosaic law is not reajrmed in the New Covenant, it is no longer binding.” In other words, a Mosaic law is guilty until proven innocent. This judicial presupposition raises the problem of bestiality, which is prohibited by the Mosaic law but is not mentioned in the New Covenant. If the person committing the act is not married, the “New Testament only” Christian faces a very dijcult problem: On what judicial basis should the act be prohibited by the State? It was prohibited under the Mosaic Covenant. Why not today? Furthermore, what is the appropriate civil penalty? It was execution under the Mosaic law (Lev. 20:15–16). Modern commentators handle this judicial problem by not considering it.6 An example of this hostility toward the Mosaic case laws is Dan G. McCartney’s essay in the Westminster Theological Seminary symposium, Theonomy: A Reformed Critique (1990). He is a professor at the Gordon-Conwell Divinity School. He forthrightly rejects all of the Mosaic case laws, thereby removing the covenantal status of civil government. “Therefore, the New Testament’s approach to the Old Testament is not an attempt to readapt or contemporize case law, in the way the Rabbis did. The law, or rather the Old Testament as an entirety, is focused on Christ, and through him it becomes applicable to believers. Thus case law is not directly applicable, even to believers; it is applicable only as a working out of God’s moral principles, an expression of God’s character revealed in Christ.”7 That is to say – and he says it – there is no binding authority of either the Mosaic case laws or their mandated civil sanctions. “Where legal questions arise, he [Jesus] is concerned with the law’s internal

5. Idem. 6. I have raised this issue before. Gary North, 75 Bible Questions Your Instructors Pray You Won’t Ask (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, [1984] 1996), Q. 26; Westminster’s Confession: The Abandonment of Van Til’s Legacy (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1991), pp. 211–14. I have yet to see any critic of theonomy deal in print with this problem. 7. McCartney, “The New Testament Use of the Pentateuch: Implications for the Theonomic Movement,” in Theonomy: A Reformed Critique, edited by William S. Barker and Robert W. Godfrey (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Academie, 1990), p. 146.

Unmuzzling the Working Ox

749

8

application, not its external enforcement.” “As we have noted, the New Testament gives no indication of the law’s sanctions as applicable to any except Christ and, through him, his people. . . . There may indeed be punishment for people within the church (2 Cor. 10:6), but this does not involve civil authority or those outside the church (1 Cor. 5:12), and its only form is various degrees of removal from fellowship (being ‘cut of’ from the people).”9 This is the theology of pietism: removing all biblical sanctions from the civil law. This in principle leaves Christians at the mercy of the non-Christians who write the civil laws and enforce them. The pietist prefers man’s civil law to God’s civil law. So does the covenant-breaker. This agreement has become the basis of an implicit operating civil alliance between Christian pietists and covenant-breakers.10 Only as the covenant-breakers extend the civil law’s jurisdiction to encompass, control, and then immobilize the church do the pietists protest. “That’s not fair! You guys promised to be neutral.” To which the covenant-breaker responds: “We are completely neutral in the area of religion. Our interpretation of neutrality says that the God of the Bible has no public authority in society. You are saying that God is relevant to some aspects of society, such as the church, or the family, or education, and that you have the right to impose economic or other sanctions in these areas. You discriminate against others who say that the God of the Bible may not lawfully be invoked as the basis of public decision-making. Understand, in our view, everything is public. Nothing is outside the realm of civil law.11 So, you are not being neutral as we deine it. You are trying to legislate morality when you create zones of exclusivism in which your economic or membership sanctions apply. We will no longer allow you to be unneutral.” Step by step, the Christians surrender the doctrine of God’s authority in history. Step by step, their enemies push them into Christian ghettos. But ghettos are never permanent. Eventually, like the Jewish ghettos of northern Europe and Soviet Asia, the residents will be removed from these ghettos and sent into diferent ghettos: concentration camps. They may not be called concentration camps. 8. Ibid., p. 143. 9. Ibid., p. 147. 10. Gary North, Moses and Pharaoh: Dominion Religion vs. Power Religion (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1985), pp. 2–5. 11. Secular humanists do insist on one safety zone: sexual activity.

750

DEUTERONOMY

They may be called government schools. But life in the ghetto is always at the discretion of those who make the laws and enforce them. There is no neutrality. There is no immunity. Two kingdoms are at war. They cannot both be triumphant in history.

Wiser Than God The vast majority of Christians have always believed that they can improve on the Mosaic law. On their own authority, they revise God’s law by coming to conclusions in the name of God that deny the speciic teachings of God’s revealed law. Then they proclaim their annulment-through-interpretation as being in conformity with “the true spirit of God’s law” or “the underlying principles of God’s law.” As part of this improvement, they reject the binding authority of God’s law. In doing so, they necessarily become advocates of some system of law proposed by one or another group of covenant-breakers. They refuse to ask themselves the obvious question: “If not God’s law, then what?” They refuse to deal with the ethical question: “By what other standard?”12 As an example, consider the assertion of Rev. John Gladwin, a defender of central planning, who later became a bishop in the Anglican Church. In a chapter in a book devoted to Christian economics, he rejects the concept of the Bible as a source of authoritative economic guidelines or blueprints. In fact, he assures us, it is unbiblical to search for biblical guidelines for economics. “It is unhelpful as well as unbiblical to look to the Bible to give us a blueprint of economic theory or structure which we then apply to our contemporary life. We must rather work in a theological way, looking to the Bible to give us experience and insight into the kingdom of God in Jesus Christ. This then helps us discover values and methods of interpretation which we can use in understanding our present social experience.”13 Furthermore, “There is in Scripture no blueprint of the ideal state or the ideal economy. We cannot turn to chapters of the Bible and ind in them a model to copy or a plan for building the

12. Greg L. Bahnsen, No Other Standard: Theonomy and Its Critics (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1991). 13. John Gladwin, “A Centralist Response,” in Robert G. Clouse (ed.), Wealth and Poverty: Four Christian Views of Economics (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1984), p. 124.

Unmuzzling the Working Ox

751

14

ideal biblical state and national economy.” He contrasts biblical law unfavorably with theology. He then goes on to praise the welfare State as an application of theological, rather than legal, insights.15 Theology informs us that “there is no escape from the need for large-scale state activity if our society is to move into a more equitable future at social and economic levels.”16 Clearly, neither the Mosaic law nor the New Testament teaches this, but theology sup17 posedly does. Whose theology? Reinhold Niebuhr’s. So, we are assured, there are no authoritative economic guidelines or economic blueprints in the Bible. On the other hand, there are numerous vague and non-speciic ethical principles which just about any Christian social theorist can invoke when promoting his recommended reconstruction of society. All it requires to baptize socialism is a series of nice-sounding pat phrases taken from the book of theological liberalism, which Gladwin ofers in profusion: “the bounds of Christian principles of human concern,” “the righteousness revealed to us in God himself,” “the good,” “structural framework of law and social values,” “gross and deepening disparities in social experience,” “spontaneity of love,” “the light of the gospel,” and “the most humane principles of social order.”18 Lest you imagine that Gladwin is an aberration, consider the fact that the two other anti-free market essayists in the book adopted the same anti-blueprint hermeneutics. William Diehl, a defender of Keynesianism’s State-guided economy, conidently ajrms: “The fact that our Scriptures can be used to support or condemn any economic philosophy suggests that the Bible is not intended to lay out an economic plan which will apply for all times and places. If we are to examine economic structures in the light of Christian teachings, we will have to do it in another way.”19 Art Gish, a defender of small communities of Christians who hold property in common, informs 14. Gladwin, “Centralist Economics,” ibid., p. 183. 15. Ibid., pp. 125–26 16. Gladwin, “Centralist Economics,” ibid., p. 193. 17. Ibid., p. 197. He cites Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932). It is an odd book to cite. It was written by the author in reaction against his youthful ling with Marxism, a book in which he proclaimed that Jesus “did not dwell upon the social consequences of these moral actions, because he viewed them from an inner and a transcendent perspective.” Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York: Scribner’s, [1932] 1960), p. 264. 18. See my critique in Wealth and Poverty, p. 200. 19. William Diehl, “The Guided-Market System, ibid., p. 87.

752

DEUTERONOMY

us that “Since koinonia includes the participation of everyone involved, there is no blueprint for what this would look like on a 20 global scale. . . . We are talking about a process, not inal answers.” The fact that these statements appear in a book on Christian economics should come as no surprise. These comments are typical of the opinions of humanist-educated Christian intellectuals. Christians who have spent their lives in humanist educational institutions, and who then have fed their minds on a high-fat diet of humanist publications, in most cases have adopted the worldview of one or another variety of humanism. They have felt emotionally compelled to baptize their adopted worldview with a few religious-sounding phrases. But just because someone keeps repeating “koinonia, koinonia” as a Christian mantra does not in any way prove that his recommended policies of common ownership will actually produce koinonia.21 What produces peace, harmony, and increasing per capita output is widespread faithfulness to God’s law. It is unwise to attempt to become wiser than God. “Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men” (I Cor. 1:25). This is why it is our job to become familiar with God’s Bible-revealed law. It, not the latest academic fad, is to be our guide, generation after generation.

20. Art Gish, “Decentralist Economics,” ibid., p. 154. 21. If you wonder what “koinonia” means, you are probably not a left-wing advocate of common ownership. Understand, I am not suggesting that voluntary common ownership is anti-Christian, any more than I am saying that voluntary celibacy is anti-Christian. Paul recommended celibacy (I Cor. 7:32–33). He did so, he said, because of “the present distress” (v. 26). Similarly, the Jerusalem church held property in common (Acts 2:44; 4:32). Shortly thereafter, a great persecution of the church began. The entire church led the city, except for the apostles (Acts 8:1). This exodus created the irst foreign missions program in church history: “Therefore they that were scattered abroad went every where preaching the word” (Acts 8:4). The fact that they had sold their property enabled them to leave the city without looking back, as Lot’s wife had looked back. So, for temporary purposes in times of great trial, voluntary celibacy and voluntary common ownership are legitimate, even wise. But to make either practice a recommended institutional model for all times and places is a misuse of historical events. The one institution where common ownership has been productive for longer than one generation is the monastery. However, it takes celibacy to make this system work for longer than a few years. As soon as there is a wife saying, “He’s earning as much as you are, but you’re far more productive,” koinonia ends. In the modern State of Israel, the kibbutz collective farms faded rapidly as important sources of national production.

Unmuzzling the Working Ox

753

Blessed are the undeiled in the way, who walk in the law of the LORD (Ps. 119:1). Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law (Ps. 119:18). So shall I keep thy law continually for ever and ever (Ps. 119:44). Let thy tender mercies come unto me, that I may live: for thy law is my delight (Ps. 119:77). O how love I thy law! it is my meditation all the day (Ps. 119:97). My soul is continually in my hand: yet do I not forget thy law (Ps. 119:109). I hate vain thoughts: but thy law do I love (Ps. 119:113). It is time for thee, LORD, to work: for they have made void thy law (Ps. 119:126). Great peace have they which love thy law: and nothing shall ofend them (Ps. 119:165). I have longed for thy salvation, O LORD; and thy law is my delight (Ps. 119:174).

Despite generations of Christians who have said that they believe in the Bible, word for word, they have not believed in the 119th psalm, the longest chapter in the Bible. They have spent their lives avoiding its plain teaching. The 119th psalm is a witness against the church. Nowhere is this clearer than in the academic ield of economics, the original social science, which was self-consciously structured by its founders in terms of theological agnosticism.22

Still in Force The law against muzzling an ox is repeated twice in the New Testament, in the context of paying church ojcers. The person who 22. William Letwin, The Origins of Scientiic Economics (Garden City, New York: Anchor, [1963] 1965).

754

DEUTERONOMY

defends a view of God’s law that mandates a New Covenant recapitulation in order for a Mosaic law to be valid can hardly dismiss this case law. What he does dismiss as unproven is Rushdoony’s insistence that this case law is a model for the others, i.e., that the Mosaic case laws have continuing validity in the New Covenant era unless annulled by the New Testament. Paul’s application of this law provides commentators with an example. The pietist prefers to operate on the assumption that unless a New Testament author applies a case law, the case law is no longer valid in the New Covenant. But Jesus’ language does not validate this assumption: “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulilled” (Matt. 5:17–18).23 The continuity of God’s law is Jesus’ hermeneutical presupposition. It is therefore the responsibility of the commentator to provide reasons for the annulment of a particular case law. He may not legitimately assume away continuity. Yet commentators write as though it is somehow the burden of the defender of the case laws to prove each case law’s continuing authority. Beginning with Tools of Dominion, I have systematically begun the discussion of each case law with a consideration of its theocentric focus. If we begin with God and His relationships with mankind, we are on more solid ground exegetically than if we begin with man, his desires, and needs. The Bible begins with “In the beginning God. . . .” not “In the beginning man. . . .” While it is possible to misconceive the theocentric focus of a law, it is also possible to misconceive the anthropocentric focus of a law. It is safer to begin with God, in whose image man is made, than to begin with man, who is continually tempted to see God as made in man’s image.24 Because of the debate over hermeneutics, the debate over this case law raises several issues. First, must this law be applied literally? If the farmer feeds the animal a diet designed by scientists,

23. Greg L. Bahnsen, Theonomy in Christian Ethics (2nd ed.; Phillipsberg, New Jersey: Presbyterian and Reformed, [1977] 1984), ch. 2. 24. Ludwig Feuerbach is a classic example of this form of theological anthropocentrism. See his book, The Essence of Christianity (1841). Cf. Gary North, Marx’s Religion of Revolution: Regeneration Through Chaos (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, [1968] 1989), pp. 28–30.

Unmuzzling the Working Ox

755

should he still obey this law? Maybe the ox likes to eat corn on the cob, plus the cob, but isn’t a scientiically designed diet better for him nutritionally? Second, to what extent is Paul’s invocation of this law a model for all other Mosaic case laws? Is Paul’s wider application of this case law to the afairs of men a model for other case laws? How can we know when we have extended the application of a law too broadly?

Literalism In modern industrial nations, only Amish and Hutterite farmers use animals to do their plowing. The legal issue of muzzling the ox never arises in the context of mechanized agriculture. But Christian missionaries work with farmers who still use oxen. What should they tell these farmers? Should the farmers muzzle their oxen or not? The ox should be paid as he works in the ield as surely as the pastor should be paid for his labor. If the farmer wants to feed his animal before taking it into the ield, that is legitimate. Perhaps then the animal will not eat so much in the ield. What is not legitimate is forcing it to work while wearing a muzzle. The animal is used to eating throughout the day. The farmer is not to force new eating habits on a work animal. If he can train the animal without using compulsion to eat at scheduled times, this is not a violation of this law. What is convenient for the farmer may become convenient for the animal. This is for the animal to decide. In any case, the animal should not be muzzled while it is working in the ield.

How Much More! The case law gives us the rule governing oxen. If it applies to oxen, how much more does it apply to men! Another case law tells us that employers should pay their workers at the end of the day (Deut. 24:15).25 This enables us to begin to apply this law in human afairs. But this is only the beginning. Paul says that the muzzled ox law also governs the payments that churches owe to ministers. In

25. Chapter 59.

756

DEUTERONOMY

other words, if it applies to day laborers, how much more to laborers in the word of God! How do we know when we have extended a case law application too far? First, when we ind another case law that places limits on us. Men are to be paid daily, by the end of the working day. So, they need not be paid hourly. Also, this law implies a lunch break. Men work with their hands, unlike an ox. They use their hands to feed themselves. So, they may not be able to work and eat at the same time. But if a man has food in his pocket and munches as he works, this is legitimate unless eating raises risks for others or himself. This law implies that he can lawfully eat a handful of uncooked corn from the stalks of the ield. This is ajrmed by another case law (Deut. 23:24–25).26 These two laws also imply that he may eat the fruit of the tree or vine as he works. The Bible comments on the Bible. The commentator must search the case laws to see if one modiies another. But searching the Bible for authoritative insights into the interpretation of any passage is the commentator’s task in every area of exegesis, not just the case laws. The a fortiori (how much more) argument is used by New Testament writers to deal with subjects other than the Mosaic law.27

Conclusion This case law governs men’s treatment of their working oxen. It also governs churches’ treatment of their ministers. In between these two applications of this law lies the general area of employers’ relations with their employees. The governing hermeneutical principle here is this: “If this law governs men’s relationships with subordinate animals, how much more does it govern their relationships with subordinate men.” There is nothing in this case law to indicate that it had something to do with either a Mosaic seed law or a land law. Paul’s extension of this law to the payment of full-time church workers indicates that it was a cross-boundary law. It applied outside the land of Israel in Moses’ day, and it still applies today.

26. Chapter 57. 27. See, for example, Paul’s discussion of the casting of of Israel and the resulting blessings to the gentiles, which he contrasts with the blessings the gentiles can expect when Israel is grafted back into the olive tree of faith. John Murray, The Epistle to the Romans, 2 vols. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1965), II, pp. 77–84 (Rom. 11:12–15).

62 Levirate Marriage MARRIAGE and Family Name LEVIRATE AND FAMILY NAME If brethren dwell together, and one of them die, and have no child, the wife of the dead shall not marry without unto a stranger: her husband’s brother shall go in unto her, and take her to him to wife, and perform the duty of an husband’s brother unto her. And it shall be, that the irstborn which she beareth shall succeed in the name of his brother which is dead, that his name be not put out of Israel (Deut. 25:5–6).

This law was a seed law. The preservation of a man’s name is clearly stated here to be the reason for this law. So, the theocentric focus of this law is inheritance. But how? The preservation of God’s name in history is not dependent on His biological issue. God is beyond the creation and history. Yet we know that every Old Covenant law had something to do with God’s relationship to man. What was it in this case? It could not have anything to do with God’s desire for biological heirs. God is not Zeus. This fact should warn us: this law had to do with covenantal inheritance, not biological inheritance. The dead brother had not left an heir. This meant that his name would be put out of Israel unless his brother intervened biologically. Why was this necessary? As we shall see later in this chapter, this law had to do with adoption and the transfer of inheritance. This was its theocentric focus. This law had a great deal to do with the family, but the family considered as a covenantal institution rather than biological. The Latin legal term, levir, refers to the brother of a husband. This Latin word has for centuries been applied to the relationship described in this text. A brother was required to bond sexually with his sister-in-law under two limiting conditions: the two brothers had

757

758

DEUTERONOMY

lived together, and one brother had died without leaving an heir. The irst limiting condition has not always been recognized by expositors. If the brothers did not dwell together, this case law was not applicable.1

Major Problems for Bible Commentators Commentators have trouble with this law, so diferent is it from today’s practices. They rarely have disciplined themselves to think covenantally, so they have trouble identifying the central focus of a law that seems so diferent culturally. The author of the section on “Levirate” in the M’Clintock & Strong encyclopedia, a conservative late-nineteenth-century work, insisted that “A wise and just legislator could scarcely have been inclined to patronize any such law. . . .”2 In writing this, the author revealed his own patronizing attitude toward God’s law – an attitude common to most Christian expositors. Many things that we would like to know about the application of this unique Mosaic ojce are not available in the text. We must surmise a great deal. For example, the text does not say that the levir had to be unmarried in order to marry the widow. Polygamy existed lawfully under the Old Covenant. On the one hand, this law was a positive ethical command; no exception based on polygamy appears in the text. On the other hand, if there was no exception based on the levir’s status as a married man, then this law mandated polygamy in a unique situation. Is this likely? We know that this law superseded the law forbidding a man to marry his deceased brother’s wife (Lev. 18:6, 16). The penalty for such a union was childlessness (Lev. 20:21), implying God’s personal intervention, but this law was given speciically so that there might be a child. There can be no doubt that this law was superior to the law prohibiting a brother from marrying his dead brother’s wife. It is possible that this law mandated polygamy in a unique situation. Yet this seems contrary to our understanding of God’s standards for marriage. Because the text does not mention polygamy, the commentator must look for hints in the passage that may ofer clues to an answer – hints that are not apparent on the irst or second reading.3 1. The Book of Ruth makes this clear, as we shall see. 2. John M’Clintock and James Strong (eds.), Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature, 12 vols. (New York: Harper & Bros., 1894), V, p. 389. 3. See below: section on “What About Polygamy?”

Levirate Marriage and Family Name

759

Seed and Name Let us begin with God. Israel was God’s son (Ex. 4:22). This meant that Israel bore God’s name. The preservation of a man’s name in Israel had something to do with the preservation of God’s name in history. But what? God was not dependent on Israel to preserve His name, yet Israel’s survival was important for God’s reputation. After the exodus generation’s attempt to stone Joshua and Caleb for having told them that God would give them victory over the Canaanites, God threatened to destroy Israel and raise up a new nation for Moses to lead. Moses reminded Him that His reputation was at stake: His promises to Israel. The issue was disinheritance: “I will smite them with the pestilence, and disinherit them, and will make of thee a greater nation and mightier than they” (Num. 14:12). Moses appealed to God’s reputation, not Israel’s legal claim: “Now if thou shalt kill all this people as one man, then the nations which have heard the fame of thee will speak, saying, Because the LORD was not able to bring this people into the land which he sware unto them, therefore he hath slain them in the wilderness” (vv. 15–16). God heeded Moses’ argument. The decisive issue was God’s reputation, not Israel’s biological survival as a nation or son. In contrast, Israel, not being God, was dependent on seed. The future of Israel was tied to God’s promise to Abraham to preserve Abraham’s seed: “Now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made. He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ” (Gal. 3:16). Again, it was God’s promise to Israel that was crucial to Israel, not God’s dependence on Israel. To fulill this promise, God had to provide inter-generational continuity, i.e., inheritance. So, to this extent, God’s reputation was reliant on Israel. This raises the theological problem of conditional vs. unconditional promises. If the promise was unconditional, then God had to see to it that Israel survived. If it was conditional, then He had the option of cutting of the nation if it rebelled. The resolution of this seeming antinomy is found in the doctrines of predestination and imputation. First, predestination: God made a promise to Abraham. To this promise were attached conditions, such as circumcision. God decreed from the beginning of time that these conditions would be met representatively by Jesus Christ. This brings us to the doctrine of imputation. God imputed Christ’s future righteousness

760

DEUTERONOMY

to Israel by grace. The future advent of the promised Seed in history was therefore the basis of Israel’s survival.4 This places the promised Seed at the center of the life of Israel. This Seed would come through Judah (Gen. 49:10). Thus, the separation of the tribes and their continuity through time was basic to God’s covenant with Israel. It was in this context that the levirate marriage law operated. It had to do with the preservation of a man’s name. The deceased brother was part of a family. This family was part of a tribe. Tribal life in Old Covenant Israel was basic to the survival of the nation, not because of some inherent beneit of tribalism but because of the promise to Abraham regarding the coming Seed. This same promise of seed had been made to Adam (Gen. 3:15), but there was no element of nationalism or tribalism in this promise. There was a fundamental element of nationalism in God’s promise to Abraham. There was a fundamental element of tribalism in Jacob’s promise regarding Shiloh – an extension of the Abrahamic promise. So, the seed laws applied inside the boundaries of Israel, but not beyond. The Adamic promise of seed applied to the world outside Israel’s borders. The same Seed – Jesus Christ – was the focus of all three promises, but their fulillment was achieved diferently.

The Kinsman Redeemer The Mosaic seed laws were inheritance laws. The levirate marriage law also regulated inheritance. The irstborn son5 would inherit the dead man’s name. Why did this inheritance of a name matter so much in Israelite society? Because the preservation of a man’s name meant that he had an inheritance in Israel’s future. He was heir to the promises that God had given to Abraham and Moses. The preservation of a man’s name was in this sense eschatological. It had to do with Jacob’s promise to Judah: “The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come; and unto him shall the gathering of the people be” (Gen. 49:10). An Israelite male was supposed to look forward to this messianic day of the Lord. Through his irstborn, he participated in Israel’s eschatology. The Israelites’ family name system was future-oriented. The irstborn seed was basic to a family’s future, just as the promised 4. See Chapter 13: section on “Ethical Cause and Efect.” 5. Or daughter, if only daughters were born.

Levirate Marriage and Family Name

761

messianic Seed was basic to Israel’s future. Both forms of covenantal seed were linked eschatologically by Jacob’s prophecy regarding Shiloh. The brother who had enjoyed the use of the family’s landed inheritance had a legal obligation: to marry his dead brother’s wife and bring an heir into the world. This law is clear: the two brothers had to have been living in close proximity. Their lives in this sense had to be intertwined. This close geographical proximity had made each brother the kinsman redeemer/blood avenger (go’el) of the other. If one of them had been killed by another man where there was no witness, the survivor had the responsibility of pursuing the perpetrator (Num. 35:19, 27). The nearest of kin judicially was the nearest of kin geographically. He would have been the person who had the greatest likelihood of overtaking the suspect on the highway as the latter raced toward a city of refuge. A brother who resided elsewhere was not the blood avenger, even if he was closer in age to the dead brother. The nearest of kin geographically was the kinsman redeemer. One of the responsibilities of the kinsman redeemer was to serve as the levir. He redeemed the name of his childless dead brother. This is what Onan refused to do for his dead brother, Er (Gen. 38:9). God then killed him for this sin (v. 10).6 Onan had enjoyed the fruits of his inheritance, which included citizenship and a name, but he was unwilling to accept the obligation associated with this inheritance, which was associated with the seed, i.e., the family’s future. One branch of the family had been cut of biologically. This threatened the name of the whole family. No branch was to be cut of in this way when two brothers lived together.

A Matter of Inheritance The laws governing inheritance were generally patriarchal, though not exclusively. “And thou shalt speak unto the children of Israel, saying, If a man die, and have no son, then ye shall cause his

6. The traditional interpretation of this verse by Roman Catholics insists that Onan’s sin was not his refusal to consummate the marriage as such, but rather his enjoyment of sex without coitus. Onanism is the Church’s euphemism for either masturbation or coitus interruptus. This interpretation of the passage is incorrect. God slew him because he had gone into Tamar and ritually deiled her, her husband’s name, and his levirate obligation.

762

DEUTERONOMY

inheritance to pass unto his daughter. And if he have no daughter, then ye shall give his inheritance unto his brethren. And if he have no brethren, then ye shall give his inheritance unto his father’s brethren. And if his father have no brethren, then ye shall give his inheritance unto his kinsman that is next to him of his family, and he shall possess it: and it shall be unto the children of Israel a statute of judgment, as the LORD commanded Moses” (Num. 27:8–11). A man’s land went to his male heirs at his death. If he had no male heirs, it went to his daughters (Num. 27:8). If he had no son or daughter, it went to his closest male relatives (Num. 27:9). This information helps us to identify who the kinsman redeemer/ blood avenger was in Mosaic Israel. There is no law that expressly says that the geographically closest adult male (though not a father) to the inheritance was a man’s kinsman redeemer, but the structure of biblical authority implies that this was the case. Biblically, the link between judicial responsibility and economic beneits is strong.7 I conclude that the geographically adjacent relative who would inherit a childless man’s legacy was the irst eligible man to marry his childless widow. He was the kinsman redeemer.

The Story of Ruth The Book of Ruth is the story of the levirate marriage in action. In the case of Ruth, no surviving brother had lived alongside her late husband. So, she had no levirate claim on her husband’s kinsman redeemer, who would have been a cousin back in Israel. When Naomi returned to Israel, she had legal standing as the wife of an Israelite. Boaz voluntarily agreed to marry Ruth if the nearest of kin to Elimelech refused. The Bible’s account is important for our understanding of the Mosaic economics of inheritance. The negotiation between Boaz and Naomi’s kinsman redeemer began with a discussion of land, not marriage. Because Naomi had no surviving heirs, her husband’s nearest kinsman was eligible to inherit her land. But since she was

7. “And that servant, which knew his lord’s will, and prepared not himself, neither did according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes. But he that knew not, and did commit things worthy of stripes, shall be beaten with few stripes. For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more” (Luke 12:47–48).

Levirate Marriage and Family Name

763

still alive, he would have to pay her for the use of the land until her death. He would pay a lease until her death, and then it would be his. He understood this. What he did not know was that there was a catch: marriage to Ruth, who could yet raise up seed in the name of Naomi’s dead husband, Elimelech. Then went Boaz up to the gate, and sat him down there: and, behold, the kinsman of whom Boaz spake came by; unto whom he said, Ho, such a one! turn aside, sit down here. And he turned aside, and sat down. And he took ten men of the elders of the city, and said, Sit ye down here. And they sat down. And he said unto the kinsman, Naomi, that is come again out of the country of Moab, selleth a parcel of land, which was our brother Elimelech’s: And I thought to advertise thee, saying, Buy it before the inhabitants, and before the elders of my people. If thou wilt redeem it, redeem it: but if thou wilt not redeem it, then tell me, that I may know: for there is none to redeem it beside thee; and I am after thee. And he said, I will redeem it. Then said Boaz, What day thou buyest the ield of the hand of Naomi, thou must buy it also of Ruth the Moabitess, the wife of the dead, to raise up the name of the dead upon his inheritance. And the kinsman said, I cannot redeem it for myself, lest I mar mine own inheritance: redeem thou my right to thyself; for I cannot redeem it. Now this was the manner in former time in Israel concerning redeeming and concerning changing, for to conirm all things; a man plucked of his shoe, and gave it to his neighbour: and this was a testimony in Israel. Therefore the kinsman said unto Boaz, Buy it for thee. So he drew of his shoe. And Boaz said unto the elders, and unto all the people, Ye are witnesses this day, that I have bought all that was Elimelech’s, and all that was Chilion’s and Mahlon’s, of the hand of Naomi. Moreover Ruth the Moabitess, the wife of Mahlon, have I purchased to be my wife, to raise up the name of the dead upon his inheritance, that the name of the dead be not cut of from among his brethren, and from the gate of his place: ye are witnesses this day. And all the people that were in the gate, and the elders, said, We are witnesses. The LORD make the woman that is come into thine house like Rachel and like Leah, which two did build the house of Israel: and do thou worthily in Ephratah, and be famous in Bethlehem: And let thy house be like the house of Pharez, whom Tamar bare unto Judah, of the seed which the LORD shall give thee of this young woman (Ruth 4:1–12; 8 emphasis added).

8. The text mentions Tamar, who had been cheated by Onan of her right to raise up seed in the name of her husband. This is a clear reference to this land transaction as an aspect of the levirate marriage law.

764

DEUTERONOMY

The kinsman wanted to buy Naomi’s land; he did not want marriage to her daughter-in-law. He did not have to marry Ruth, however. He had not lived close to Ruth’s husband on the family’s land. Neither Ruth nor Naomi had the right to spit in the man’s face. He had the right not to marry Ruth in order to raise up seed in the name of his nephew. But if he refused and Boaz did, then Boaz would become the nearest of kin to the dead brother, Naomi’s husband. Consider the reason ofered by the kinsman for not marrying Ruth. It had to do with his own inheritance. “I cannot redeem it for myself, lest I mar mine own inheritance: redeem thou my right to thyself; for I cannot redeem it.” He had hoped to inherit the land of his heirless deceased brother.9 His sister-in-law was too old to bear children. He was therefore willing to buy it from Naomi before she died. This would have given her money to live on. The land would have come to him eventually. But Boaz was proposing something else. If Boaz married Ruth, and Ruth gave birth, then Elimelech’s land would pass to the child of Ruth, who would become the family’s irstborn son. This land would be part of the name of Ruth’s dead husband. Because of Boaz’s willingness to become Ruth’s husband, the existing kinsman could gain control over Naomi’s land only by marrying Ruth. But if she bore him an heir, he could not pass this land to his own children. The land would pass to Ruth’s irstborn. Assuming that he was single, and assuming that he married Ruth, the land owned by Elimelech could not become his namesake’s land; it would become Elimelech’s namesake’s land: Ruth’s irstborn. His own lesh and blood would inherit this land, but this biological heir would not be his judicial namesake. So powerful was the concept of the family name in Israel that even for the sake of gaining control over a farm that he was willing to buy in advance of Naomi’s death, and then passing this farm to his own biological heir, the ofer did not persuade the kinsman to marry Ruth. He passed this legal opportunity to Boaz. For the existing kinsman to lose the inheritance from Elimelech through Naomi, another kinsman had to marry Ruth. Heirship could not be through Ruth as a mother; it could only be through another kinsman who would act representatively on behalf of Ruth’s late 9. The brother had fathered two sons, but both had died.

Levirate Marriage and Family Name

765

husband. Family land in Mosaic Israel went to male heirs unless there was a surviving biological daughter. Ruth could never possess an inheritance in Israel to leave to her irstborn except through the decision of a kinsman of her late husband to adopt her as a wife. Without Ruth’s marriage to a kinsman of Elimelech, the land would automatically pass at Naomi’s death to Elimelech’s nearest of kin, i.e., Elimelech’s kinsman redeemer. Elimelech’s kinsman redeemer could not build up his own inheritance if Ruth married Boaz. Boaz’s marriage would make Boaz the nearest of kin to Elimelech. If Ruth did not bear a child, the land would then pass to Boaz, for by marrying Ruth, he would become Elimelech’s nearest of kin. The existing kinsman redeemer had to approve of this transfer, which was why Boaz assembled the elders as witnesses. The existing kinsman redeemer could retain his claim on the inheritance only by marrying Ruth and then having Ruth remain barren, as she had been in Moab. If she bore a child who lived long enough to bear children to inherit, the existing kinsman redeemer and his heirs could not inherit this land. He decided that this marriage was not worth the added economic risk. If he married Ruth, and she bore him a child, all of the capital that he would invest into the land would become part of another man’s covenant line. It would be his biological child’s family line, but not his family name’s line. This is evidence that blood lines in Israel were regarded as less important than covenant lines. Family name was more important than biology.

Name Above Biology This is an extremely important theological point. Rahab and Ruth were adopted into their husband’s covenant lines. This adoption was by oath: a marriage oath. Through them came David the king and Jesus, who was a greater king. Through two foreign women, the covenant line was extended. More to the point, through these women the covenant line in Israel was extended: Judah’s. Most to the point, through them the promised Seed was born (Matt. 1:5, 16). The crucial covenant line was preserved through marriage, and, in Ruth’s case, levirate marriage to the biological heir of Rahab: Boaz (Matt. 1:5). Boaz became the kinsman redeemer of Elimelech’s line. He did this by marrying Ruth, a gentile. Only through his marriage to Ruth could he serve as the kinsman redeemer of Elimelech’s line. That is,

766

DEUTERONOMY

Boaz, as an heir in the line of Judah and, as it turned out, progenitor of Jesus the redeemer, exercised this ojce only by marrying a Moabite. Moabite males took ten generations to become citizens in Israel (Deut. 23:3). As heirs of an incestuous relationship between Lot and his irstborn daughter (Gen. 19:37), Moabites were regarded as far more perverse covenantally than Egyptians, who could become citizens in three generations (Deut. 23:7–8). But because of Boaz’s judicial role as kinsman redeemer through marriage, Ruth was adopted into the covenant line in just one generation. This was the authority of the marriage oath: adoption. Of all legal relationships biblically, adoption is the most authoritative. Through adoption, the disinherited children of Adam re-enter the family of God. Adoption is the basis of inheritance. Adoption is by covenant oath, not biology. Ruth, a gentile, was adopted into Israel’s supreme covenant line by the willingness of a man to become a kinsman redeemer to her late husband. “Moreover Ruth the Moabitess, the wife of Mahlon, have I purchased to be my wife, to raise up the name of the dead upon his inheritance, that the name of the dead be not cut of from among his brethren, and from the gate of his place: ye are witnesses this day” (Ruth 4:10). By lowering himself socially by marrying a Moabite, and by being willing to raise up seed for his brother Elimelech by way of Elimelech’s dead son, Boaz was granted an extraordinary blessing. He became the biological forefather of David and Jesus. Legally, these heirs were not part of his personal covenant line. Only through Elimelech’s name could he participate in the crucial covenant line. Only by being willing to raise up seed on behalf of another did he unknowingly place himself as the key igure in the extension of the key covenant line in Israel and, for that matter, in all of history. Boaz became the biggest covenantal somebody in his generation only because he was willing to become a covenantal nobody in the extension of Elimelech’s line. The land that he presumably bought from Naomi became the family inheritance in another man’s line. Any improvements that he made in this land became another family line’s property. By abandoning his own name covenantally, he thereby became the greatest name of his generation, a name that is listed in both of the messianic genealogies in the New Testament (Matt. 1:5; Luke 3:32).

Levirate Marriage and Family Name

767

The Imputation of a Man’s Name I have argued that this case law was a seed law. The irstborn of a levirate marital union inherited his deceased father’s name. The text implies that later-born children did not inherit the deceased man’s name.11 The inheritance was above all covenantal: part of God’s promise to Abraham. The deceased man’s name was imputed to the heir by God and by law, even though he was born of the levir. The imputation of a man’s name was the essence of his inheritance: from his fathers and to his children. God had revealed this to Abraham: “And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing: And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed” (Gen. 12:2–3). What the levirate law tells us is that the imputation of a man’s name was more fundamental than either genetic inheritance or family discipline. In the context of the continuing academic debate between “nature” (genetics) and “nurture” (social environment), neither was fundamental in Israel. What was fundamental was judicial imputation. The levir performed a redemptive act on behalf of his brother’s covenant line. This act was far more judicial than biological or social. He provided biological seed and family discipline, but the decisive factor was judicial-covenantal-eschatological, not biological or social. It was so decisive that the law prohibiting a brother from marrying his sister-in-law was suspended. Because of Boaz’s grace to Naomi through Ruth, a unique and judicially unconventional thing took place: Boaz replaced Elimelech in Israelite history as part of the covenant line of David (I Chron. 2: 11–12). In terms of the law of the levir, the family line through Ruth was Elimelech’s, but Elimelech is never mentioned in relation to David. It was Boaz’s marriage to Ruth in the name of Elimelech that secured Boaz’s place in history. As the heir of Rahab, his act of mercy grafted Rahab into the kingly line retroactively. Judicially, Boaz’s family line is irrelevant to the coming of David. Yet because of his grace shown to a gentile woman, his family name entered the most important family line in man’s history. Boaz established his 10

10. As a law governing inheritance, it was also a land law. 11. If the irstborn son died, then his ojce as name-carrier would have passed to the oldest later-born son.

768

DEUTERONOMY

name and his family line’s name in history by a merciful covenantal act which, in terms of the Mosaic law, submerged his name to Elimelech’s. Boaz, who had not even been the closest of kin to Elimelech’s son, and who had in no way been required to serve as levir, replaced Elimelech in Israel’s family lists. Jesus would imitate Boaz’s judicial precedent, not by marrying but by refusing to marry. Refusing to marry, He thereby transferred His inheritance to His kinsmen. He died on their behalf, so that they could be legally adopted into His covenant line.12 His death and resurrection have ofered to the gentiles God’s covenantal inheritance by means of adoption, just as Boaz’s willingness to marry Ruth ofered her covenantal inheritance through adoption. As the heir of Jacob’s promise (Gen. 49:10), Jesus was the true heir in Israel, the son of David the king. But Jesus was not Joseph’s biological heir. Here we see another act of mercy: Joseph’s refusal to put Mary away for fornication with another man. Joseph adopted Jesus as his irstborn son, and in doing so, gained shame for himself: the birth of his irstborn son in less than nine months after marriage. As David’s namesake and heir, Jesus transferred His kingdom to the church (Matt. 21:43). He extended His kingdom grant, not by holding onto it in history but by relinquishing it. Like Boaz, by relinquishing His covenantal claim in Old Covenant Israel – His name – Jesus secured the inheritance for his kinsmen, thereby also securing His name in history. What Boaz had done on a small scale, Jesus did on a large scale. The judicial heart of what both of them did involved a transfer of inheritance by surrendering the family name. In doing this, Jesus, like Boaz, secured His name in history.

The Mosaic Family as a Tribal Unit The seed laws and land laws existed because of Jacob’s granting of blessings in Genesis 49, and speciically, his prophecy regarding

12. “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ: According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love: Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will” (Eph. 1:3–5).

Levirate Marriage and Family Name

769

13

the coming ruler, Shiloh. They were tribal laws, not laws governing the family unit as such. Had they been laws governing the family unit as such, they would have been cross-boundary laws, universal in scope then and now. The law of the levirate marriage would still be in force. This law is no longer in force because Jacob’s prophecy was fulilled in Jesus Christ. Covenantal adoption has completely replaced the law of the levirate marriage in the New Covenant. Jesus established the model. His death, which ensured His lack of biological issue, was inherent in His plan of adoption and the transfer of kingdom inheritance. Confession of faith has replaced tribal name as the basis of biblical inheritance. Confession of faith involves adopting a new family name. “And the disciples were called Christians irst in Antioch” (Acts 11:26b). A man’s legal claim to a portion of God’s kingdom inheritance is based on his possession of Christ’s name as an adopted son. The New Covenant’s preservation of name through adoption by conversion has replaced the Old Covenant’s preservation of name through adoption by reproduction.14 What has changed, above all, is the tribal basis of inheritance. Covenantally mandated tribes no longer exist. This is why the seed laws and land laws have been replaced by the laws governing confession of faith and church membership. The church is the new nation that has inherited God’s kingdom (Matt. 21:43). It has no tribes.

What About Polygamy? I have already said that the text says nothing about the possibility that the levir was a married man at the time of his brother’s death. If he was married, was he required by law to obey this law?

13. The practice of levirate marriage existed earlier than Genesis 49. Onan’s rebellion indicates that the practice did exist, and it was a law, for God’s negative sanction came on him. Without law, there is no legitimate sanction. This was not, however, a written law. Its application was tied to the tribal units of Jacob’s family. Lot’s daughters had used a perverse application of the levirate marriage. They had deceived their father when he was drunk. Tamar similarly deceived the widower Judah, her father-in-law, but Judah had not been drunk, and she did this only after Judah had demanded that she wait for the surviving youngest brother to grow up and fulill his then-unwritten duty as a levir. She should have been released by Judah from any obligation to serve as the mother of Er’s covenantal heir. 14. The mark of adoption in the Old Covenant was circumcision.

770

DEUTERONOMY

Let us look for hints. Here is one. The law speciied that the irstborn son would inherit the deceased brother’s name. The language implies that the irstborn son inherited all of the deceased brother’s land. Land and name were linked. Under normal circumstances, all of the sons bore their father’s name. All had a claim on part of the inheritance, with the eldest brother gaining a double portion (Deut. 21:15–17). But in this case, the irstborn alone inherited the dead man’s name. That there was a irstborn implies that there could have been subsequent children. The marital union was an on-going union. Why were these later children cut out of the dead brother’s inheritance? I conclude that the sons born later would have been part of the covenant line of the biological father. They would have divided up the inheritance which he had received from his father. They were not allowed to participate in the inheritance of the irstborn because this was his inheritance through his mother’s dead husband. If I am correct, this means that the levir secured his own covenant line through marriage to his sister-in-law. He was not asked by God to forfeit his own covenant line for the sake of his brother. He was asked only to forfeit his irstborn son for the sake of his brother. His biologically irstborn son would not be his covenantally irstborn son. His biologically irstborn son would bear another man’s name. His biologically second-born son would become his covenantally irstborn son. In short, his second-born son would become his true heir, his namesake.15 If he was already married, the incorporation into his household of his sons through the brother’s wife would have reduced the size of the plots inherited by the sons of his irst wife. There is no doubt that this dilution of her sons’ inheritance would have been resisted by the irst wife. This dilution would have constituted their economic disinheritance, though not covenantal disinheritance. The children of the irst wife would not have lost their family names, only their portion of their father’s land. This would have constituted a double disinheritance. If the husband refused to take his sister-in-law, then at her death or her remarriage to a non-kinsman, her late husband’s

15. The theme of the second-born son who inherits is repeated in the Old Covenant. It points to the distinction between Adam and Jesus as the true heir of God. In this case, however, the distinction had nothing to do with sin and rebellion by the irstborn.

Levirate Marriage and Family Name

771

land would have passed to his brethren. Perhaps the levir was the only brother. From an economic standpoint, performing the duty of the levir imposed a double economic burden on the children of the irst wife: irst, the dilution of their legacy, which they would then share with the new wife’s children later-born; second, the future forfeiture of the levir’s portion of his deceased brother’s land. If polygamy was mandated by this law, then a wise wife would have recommended a move away from the jointly operated family farm until such time as a newly married brother produced his irst child. Because of the potential disinheritance aspect of the arrangement under polygamy, I conclude that this law did not apply to a brother who was already married. The biological sons of the levir would have had to forfeit too much. The irstborn son would have gained all of the dead man’s legacy, while his older half brothers and younger brothers would have had to divide up the legacy of their biological father. Such a division of property would have been too heavily weighted to the economic advantage of one son. The irstborn of a non-polygamous levirate marriage received his legacy from the dead man’s estate – biologically, his uncle; covenantally, his father. His younger brothers, if any, divided up the levir’s estate. Under such an arrangement, the second-born son would inherit the double portion of the biological father’s estate. That was clearly an advantage for him. This estate would be larger than it would have been had there been no legacy from the dead man. That was an advantage for all of the brothers. Their judicial half brother received a large legacy, but this legacy would not have been in the family had the irst man not died, so this legacy did not cost the other brothers anything that they might otherwise have inherited. The economics of the levirate marriage points to potential economic disinheritance in a polygamous arrangement. This is not proof that a married levir was not mandated to marry his sister-in-law, for covenantal concerns in Israel were to be respected over economic concerns when the two were in conlict. But in the absence of speciic language dealing with the question of polygamy, we can legitimately look for potential injustice that would have resulted from polygamy. Economic disinheritance was surely a negative factor. Because a wise wife would have had an economic incentive to recommend departure from the family farm upon the marriage of a

772

DEUTERONOMY

brother, I regard the levirate law as a law governing unmarried levirs. The economics of the arrangement under polygamy would have undermined the enforcement of the law. This would have reduced the number of levirate marriages. It seems unreasonable to suppose that God would have mandated polygamy, only to leave an obvious escape hatch for irst wives to recommend: moving the family of the family’s land for a year or two until the brother had an heir. If this law’s covenantal efects were so important that it mandated polygamy, there would have been no loophole. I conclude that it was not intended to apply to married levirs. We must consider briely the refusal of Elimelech’s relative to marry Ruth. He could have justiied his refusal by invoking the fact that his kinsman had died outside the land. Clearly, they had not been living close to each other. Instead, he invoked the economic implications of inheritance: “I cannot redeem it for myself, lest I mar mine own inheritance.” If he was not married, then in what way would marrying Ruth have been a threat to his inheritance? One answer: he was a widower with sons. Any sons born to Ruth beyond the irst would have diluted his sons’ inheritance. Another possible answer: he would have had to spend time and money in building up the land that his biologically irstborn son would inherit. So, this passage cannot be used to prove that he was married. Nevertheless, this passage also cannot be used to disprove the possibility that he was already married or was a widower with sons. It does not provide sujcient information.

Conclusion The levirate marriage law was a Mosaic seed law that increased the likelihood of the eschatological survival of all family lines within a tribe. It placed family name above immediate bloodline relationships. The irstborn of a levirate union would inherit both name and land from the deceased covenantal father, not from the biological father. The levir, as a kinsman redeemer, acted to establish his dead brother’s covenant line. In the post-A.D. 70 era, there are no covenantally relevant tribal lines, for Jacob’s prophecy was fulilled in Jesus Christ. Furthermore, in the post-ascension New Covenant era, Jesus Christ serves as the kinsman redeemer/blood avenger. This ojce exists nowhere else. There are no longer any cities of refuge. There is no longer an earthly high priest whose death liberates a man who is seeking

Levirate Marriage and Family Name

773

refuge from the blood avenger. Both in its capacity as a seed law and as a law regulating the ojce of kinsman redeemer, this law has been annulled by the New Covenant.

63 Weights and JUSTJust WEIGHTS ANDJustice JUSTICE Thou shalt not have in thy bag divers weights, a great and a small. Thou shalt not have in thine house divers measures, a great and a small. But thou shalt have a perfect and just weight, a perfect and just measure shalt thou have: that thy days may be lengthened in the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee. For all that do such things, and all that do unrighteously, are an abomination unto the LORD thy God (Deut. 25:13–16).

The theocentric focus of this law was God as the cosmic Judge who does not favor persons. He executes judgment in terms of His ixed law. Diverse weights are the equivalent of shifting law and injustice. They are a form of theft. This was not a land law or a seed law. It was a cross-boundary law. To serve as a weight or measure, a physical object must not be subject to extensive change. There will be some change, imperceptible over short or even fairly long periods, because man and his world decay. Physical objects are subject to the processes of decline. They are under the burden of cursed nature: entropy.1 But a weight or a measure is noted for its comparative permanence in a world of lux. This permanence is what gives the weight or measure its unique capability of serving as a means of comparison over time. Men can compare diferent things over time because these things can be compared to a third thing, which serves as a reference point.2 Without reference points, history would be nothing but lux. God 1. Gary North, Is the World Running Down? Crisis in the Christian Worldview (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1988). 2. For example, modern man is told by scientists that space is curved. The correct answer is: “Compared to what?”

774

Just Weights and Justice

775

and His covenant law are man’s reference points. Weights and measures are analogies to God’s covenant. By comparing the man who uses unjust weights to an abomination, this law points to the worst transgressions of the Egyptians and Canaanites. “And Moses said, It is not meet so to do; for we shall sacriice the abomination of the Egyptians to the LORD our God: lo, shall we sacriice the abomination of the Egyptians before their eyes, and will they not stone us?” (Ex. 8:26). “And the land is deiled: therefore I do visit the iniquity thereof upon it, and the land itself vomiteth out her inhabitants. Ye shall therefore keep my statutes and my judgments, and shall not commit any of these abominations; neither any of your own nation, nor any stranger that sojourneth among you: (For all these abominations have the men of the land done, which were before you, and the land is deiled;)” (Lev. 18:25–27). “The graven images of their gods shall ye burn with ire: thou shalt not desire the silver or gold that is on them, nor take it unto thee, lest thou be snared therein: for it is an abomination to the LORD thy God” (Deut. 7:25). But why is this form of theft so repulsive to God? Because it is a representative act: to identify God as a liar and false gods as truth-tellers. Using a dishonest weight is not merely theft; it is a major moral crime, comparable to idolatry. It is a deception that was representative of Satan’s deception of mankind: calling man to worship a false god. I have commented on the judicial meaning of weights and measures in Boundaries and Dominion: An Economic Commentary on Leviticus. Because it was published only electronically, I have decided to reprint part of that lengthy analysis.

******* Just Measures and a Just Society The familiar Western symbol of justice is the blindfolded woman holding a balance scale. The blindfold symbolizes the court’s unwillingness to recognize persons. The scale symbolizes ixed standards of justice: a ixed law applied to the facts of the case. Justice is symbolically linked to weights. Justice cannot be quantiied,3 yet symbolically it is represented by the ultimate determinant of quantity: a scale. An honest scale 3. See below: “Intuition and Measurement.”

776

DEUTERONOMY

registers very tiny changes in the weight of the things being weighed. A scale can be balanced only by adding or removing a quantity of the thing being measured until the weights on each side are equal, meaning as close to equal as the scale can register.4 Even here, the establishment of a precise balance may take several attempts. An average of the attempts then becomes the acceptable measure. The ability of men to make comparisons is best exempliied in the implements of physical measurement. Men adopt the language of physical measurement when they speak of making historical or judicial comparisons. For example, the consumer balances his checkbook. This does not mean that he places it on a scale. Or he weighs the expected advantages and disadvantages of some decision. The economist constructs what is known as an index number in order to compare the price level – meaning prices of speciic goods and services – in one period of time with those in another period. He assigns weights to certain factors in the mathematical construct known as an index number. He says, for example, that a change in the price of automobiles – Hondas rather than Rolls-Royces, of course – is more important to the average consumer than a change in the price of tea. This was not true, however, in Boston in 1773. So, the economist-as-historian has to keep re-examining his “basket of relevant (representative) goods” from time to time. He must ask himself: Which goods and services are more important to the average person’s economic well-being? But there is no literal real-world basket of goods; there is no literal real-world average consumer; there is no means of literally weighing the importance of anything. Yet we can barely think about making economic comparisons without importing the symbolism of weights and measures. The language of politics also cannot avoid the metaphor of measurement. The political scientist speaks of checks and balances in the constitutional order of a federalist system. These are supposed to reduce the likelihood of the centralization of power into the hands of a clique or one man. That is, there are checks and balances on the exercise of power. These are institutional, not literal. 4. There are physical limits on the accuracy of scales. The best balance scales today can measure changes as small as one-tenth of a microgram. Grolier Encyclopedia (1990): “Weights and Measures.” God’s civil law calls for equal justice, not perfect justice. Cf. Gary North, Moses and Pharaoh: Dominion Religion vs. Power Religion (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1985), ch. 19: “Perfect Justice.”

Just Weights and Justice

777

The language of measurement is inescapable. This is an implica5 tion of point three of the biblical covenant model: standards. As surely as societies create bureaus that establish standards of measurement, so God has established permanent judicial standards. Both kinds of standards must be observed by law-abiding people.

The Representative Case The preservation of just weights and measures in the Mosaic Covenant was important for symbolic reasons as well as economic reasons. As case law, it represented a wider class of crimes. It was important in itself: prohibiting theft through fraud. But there was something unique about a case law governing weights and measures: it was representative of injustice in general. “Ye shall do no unrighteousness in judgment, in meteyard, in weight, or in measure” (Lev. 19:35). The language of unrighteousness and judgment has a wider application than merely economic transactions. “Ye shall do no unrighteousness in judgment: thou shalt not respect the person of the poor, nor honour the person of the mighty: but in righteousness shalt thou judge thy neighbour” (Lev. 19:15). This states the fundamental principle of all biblical justice. To understand why weights and measures are representative of civil justice in general, we need to understand what was involved in the speciic violation. The seller can better aford the specialized weighing equipment of his trade than the individual buyer could. He is therefore in a position to cheat the buyer by rigging the equipment. But the narrowly deined crime of using rigged measures is representative of the whole character of the civil order: a violation of justice at the most fundamental level. Analogous to the businessman, the judge is not to use his specialized skills or his authority to rig any case against one of the disputants. The legal structure is regarded as a specialized piece of equipment, analogous to a scale. No one in charge of its operations is allowed to tamper with this system in order to beneit any individual or class of individuals. To do so would constitute theft. Injustice is seen in the Bible as a form of theft. This was Samuel’s message to Israel:

5. Ray R. Sutton, That You May Prosper: Dominion By Covenant (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1992), ch. 3.

778

DEUTERONOMY

And Samuel said unto all Israel, Behold, I have hearkened unto your voice in all that ye said unto me, and have made a king over you. And now, behold, the king walketh before you: and I am old and grayheaded; and, behold, my sons are with you: and I have walked before you from my childhood unto this day. Behold, here I am: witness against me before the LORD, and before his anointed: whose ox have I taken? or whose ass have I taken? or whom have I defrauded? whom have I oppressed? or of whose hand have I received any bribe to blind mine eyes therewith? and I will restore it you. And they said, Thou hast not defrauded us, nor oppressed us, neither hast thou taken ought of any man’s hand. And he said unto them, The LORD is witness against you, and his anointed is witness this day, that ye have not found ought in my hand. And they answered, He is witness (I Sam. 12:1–5).

Injustice is also linked to false weights and measures. Isaiah made all these connections clear in his initial accusation against the rulers of Israel: “Thy silver is become dross, thy wine mixed with water: Thy princes are rebellious, and companions of thieves: every one loveth gifts, and followeth after rewards: they judge not the fatherless, neither doth the cause of the widow come unto them” (Isa. 1:22–23). False measures in silver and wine; princes in rebellion against God but companions of thieves; universal bribe-seeking; oppression of widows and orphans: all are linked in God’s covenant lawsuit brought by the prophet. In Isaiah’s day, it was all part of a great spiritual apostasy – an apostasy that would be reversed by the direct intervention of God: “Therefore saith the Lord, the LORD of hosts, the mighty One of Israel, Ah, I will ease me of mine adversaries, and avenge me of mine enemies: And I will turn my hand upon thee, and purely purge away thy dross, and take away all thy tin: And I will restore thy judges as at the irst, and thy counsellors as at the beginning: afterward thou shalt be called, The city of righteousness, the faithful city” (Isa. 1:24–26). When the rulers of Israel’s northern kingdom remained unwilling to enforce God’s law representatively, generation after generation, God raised up Assyria to bring corporate negative sanctions for Him (Isa. 10:5–6). Because weights and measures are representative of the moral condition of society in general, the prophets used the metaphor of weights and measures in bringing their covenant lawsuits against individuals and nations. The Psalmist had set the example: “Surely men of low degree are vanity, and men of high degree are a lie: to be laid in the balance, they are altogether lighter than vanity” (Ps. 62:9).

Just Weights and Justice

779

Micah castigated the whole society, warning of judgment to come, for they honored “the statutes of Omri” and did the works of his son Ahab (Mic. 6:16). The LORD’S voice crieth unto the city, and the man of wisdom shall see thy name: hear ye the rod, and who hath appointed it. Are there yet the treasures of wickedness in the house of the wicked, and the scant measure that is abominable? Shall I count them pure with the wicked balances, and with the bag of deceitful weights? For the rich men thereof are full of violence, and the inhabitants thereof have spoken lies, and their tongue is deceitful in their mouth (Mic. 6:9–12; emphasis added).

The essence of their rebellion, Micah said, was the injustice of the civil magistrates: “The good man is perished out of the earth: and there is none upright among men: they all lie in wait for blood; they hunt every man his brother with a net. That they may do evil with both hands earnestly, the prince asketh, and the judge asketh for a reward; and the great man, he uttereth his mischievous desire: so they wrap it up” (Mic. 7:2–3). Daniel’s announcement to the rulers of Babylon regarding the meaning of the message of the handwriting on the wall is perhaps the most famous use in Scripture of the imagery of the balance. “And this is the writing that was written, MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN. This is the interpretation of the thing: MENE; God hath numbered thy kingdom, and inished it. TEKEL; Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting. PERES; Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians” (Dan. 5:25–28). Corrupt measures are a token – representative – of moral corruption. To be out of balance judicially is to be out of covenantal favor. The representative civil transgression in society is the adoption of false weights and measures.

Intuition and Measurement “Add a pinch of salt.” How many cooks through the centuries have recommended this unspeciic quantity? There are cooks who cannot cook with a recipe book, but who are master chefs without one. Their skills are intuitive, not numerical. This is true in every ield. There are limits to measurement because there are limits to our perception. There are also limits on our ability to verbalize or quantify

780

DEUTERONOMY

the measurements that we perceive well enough to act upon. Oskar Morgenstern addressed this problem in the early paragraphs of his classic book, On the Accuracy of Economic Observations.6 Our economic knowledge is inescapably a mixture of objective and subjective knowledge.7 That is to say, we think as persons; we are not computers. We do not think digitally. We think analogically, as persons made in God’s image. We are required to think God’s thoughts after Him. To do this, we need standards provided by God that are perceptible to man. God has given us such standards (point three of the biblical covenant model). We also need to exercise judgment in understanding and applying them (point four). This judgment is not digital; it is analogical: thinking God’s thoughts after Him. We are required by God to assess the performance of others in terms of God’s ixed ethical and judicial standards. In order to achieve a “it” between God’s standards and the behavior of others, we must interpret God’s objective law (a subjective task), assemble the relevant objective facts (a subjective task), discard the irrelevant objective facts (a subjective task), and apply this law to those facts (a subjective task). The result is a judicially objective decision. 6. Oskar Morgenstern, On the Accuracy of Economic Observations (2nd ed.; Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1963). Morgenstern wrote a book on game theory with John von Neumann, one of the most gifted mathematicians of the twentieth century. Morgenstern was aware of the limits of mathematics as a tool of economic analysis. A more recent treatment of the problem is Andrew M. Kamarck’s Economics and the Real World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983). See also Thomas Mayer, Truth versus Precision in Economics (Hampshire, England: Elgar, 1993). 7. Morgenstern writes: “All economic decisions, whether private or business, as well as those involving economic policy, have the characteristic that quantitative and non-quantitative information must be combined into one act of decision. It would be desirable to understand how these two classes of information can best be combined. Obviously, there must exist a point at which it is no longer meaningful to sharpen the numerically available information when the other, wholly qualitative, part is important, though a notion of its ‘accuracy’ or ‘reliability’ has not been developed. . . . There are many reasons why one should be deeply concerned with the ‘accuracy’ of quantitative economic data and observations. Clearly, anyone making use of measurements and data wishes them to be accurate and signiicant in a sense still to be deined speciically. For that reason a level of accuracy has to be established. It will depend irst of all on the particular purpose for which the measurement is made. . . . The very notion of accuracy and the acceptability of a measurement, observation, description, count – whatever the concrete case might be – is inseparably tied to the use to which it is to be put. In other words, there is always a theory or model, however roughly formulated it may be, a purpose or use to which the statistic has to refer, in order to talk meaningfully about accuracy. In this manner the topic soon stops being primitive; on the contrary, very deep-lying problems are encountered, some of which have only recently been recognized.” Morgenstern, Accuracy, pp. 3–4.

Just Weights and Justice

781

At every stage of the decision-making or judgment-rendering process, there is an inescapably personal element, for which we are held 8 personally responsible by God.

Objective Facts Interpreted Subjectively When we speak of objective facts, we often invoke the language of physical measurement. This is because we think analogically. Making subjective judgments is analogous to measuring things objectively. Yet we never measure things objectively, meaning exclusively objectively. It is men who do the measuring, and men are not machines – and even machines have limits of perception. We ask: “Is the balance even?” “Is the bubble in the level equidistant between two points?” At some point, we say: “It’s a judgment call.” Analogously, we ask of other men’s ofers: “Is this on the level?” Discovering the answer is a judgment call: an evaluation based on one’s observation of something that is beyond the limits of one’s ability to perceive distinctions. Consider the task of an umpire or referee in any sport. He is a person. He makes judgment calls. In modern philosophy, we ind that the major schools of thought are analogous to the umpire’s standard explanations of his decision. In baseball, the umpire “calls a strike.” He announces that the pitched baseball passed within the strike zone of the batter’s body (a variable in terms of his height) and above home plate. The batter protests. It was a “ball,” he insists: either outside his strike zone or not above home plate. The umpire ofers one of three answers. These three answers are expressions of the three dominant views of Western epistemology. “I call ’em as they are.” (Newton) “I call ’em as I see ’em.” (Hume) “They are what I call ’em.” (Kant)9

8. See Gary North, Boundaries and Dominion: The Economics of Leviticus (computer edition; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), Appendix G, “The Covenantal Structure of Judgment.” 9. There is a fourth possible reply: “Shut up. You’re only a igment of my imagination.” (Berkeley)

782

DEUTERONOMY

To make a biblically valid judgment regarding the public record of the event under scrutiny, judges must perceive the limits of the law and the limits of the records. The public record of the event must reveal (represent) an act that took place within the “strike zone” of God’s law. The actor must clearly have violated that zone – that boundary – of God’s law. In the language of the common law courts, it must have violated that boundary “beyond reasonable doubt.” The language of the law is imprecise here because the act of rendering judgment is imprecise. Yet juries decide, judges hand down punishments, and society goes on.

Intuition and Creation Intuition cannot be verbalized, catalogued, or quantiied, for by definition intuition possesses no rational structure, yet it exists nevertheless. Every philosophical system ultimately must appeal to intuition to bridge the chasm between mind and events.10 Without such a bridge, according to humanists, human choice and therefore personal responsibility disappear into one of three kinds of universe: a chaotic cosmos, a deterministic cosmos of mechanicalmathematical cause and efect, or a dialectical cosmos – mechanism infused by randomness, and vice versa.11 (All three are said to be governed by the second law of thermodynamics and are headed for the heat death of the universe.)12 There is a fourth possibility: a covenantal, providential, created cosmos. Here is the biblical solution to the problem of human knowledge: the doctrine of creation. The world was created by God so that men, made in God’s image, may exercise dominion over it. This theory of knowledge also relies on intuition: biblically informed intuition. Intuition is an inescapable concept. It is never a case of “intuition vs. no intuition.” It is always a case of whose intuition according to whose standards. Spiritual maturity is the ability to make biblically well-informed judgments. Christians must presume that intuitive judgments that

10. For case studies of this assertion in the ield of economics, see Gary North, “Economics: From Reason to Intuition,” in North (ed.), Foundations of Christian Scholarship: Essays in the Van Til Perspective (Vallecito, California: Ross House Books, 1976), ch. 5. 11. James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Viking, 1987). 12. North, Is the World Running Down?, ch. 2.

Just Weights and Justice

783

come after years of studying God’s Bible-revealed laws and making decisions in terms of them will be more reliable – i.e., more pleasing to God – than intuitive judgments that come from other traditions or that are the products of unsystematic approaches. There is no way to test the accuracy of this presumption except by observing God’s sanctions in history on those groups that are under the authority of speciically covenanted judges.13

Objective Standards God decrees everything that happens. History happens exactly as He has decreed it. He evaluates it, moment by moment, in terms of His permanent standards. This judgment is objective because God makes it, and it is also subjective because God makes it. Man is responsible for thinking God’s thoughts after Him. Man must obey God by conforming his thoughts and actions to God’s law. Men do not have the ability to read God’s mind (Deut. 29:29), but they do have the ability to obey. Men do not issue valid autonomous decrees, nor does history follow such decrees. God proposes, and then God disposes.14 The same is true of weights and measures. There are objective standards, and these are known perfectly by God. This perfect knowledge is a mark of His sovereignty. “Who hath measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, and meted out heaven with the span, and comprehended the dust of the earth in a measure, and weighed the mountains in scales, and the hills in a balance?” (Isa. 40:12). Man must seek to conform his actions and judgments to these objective standards. He does so by discovering and adopting ixed standards. Physical standards are the most readily enforced. The archetypical standards are weight and measure. Even the passage of time is assessed by means of a measure. In earlier centuries, these 13. If God’s sanctions in history are random in the New Covenant era, as Meredith Kline insists that they are, then there is no way to test this presumption. Intuition-based decisions would become as random in their efects as God’s historical sanctions supposedly are. See Meredith G. Kline, “Comments on an Old-New Error,” Westminster Theological Journal, XLI (Fall 1978), p. 184. 14. The radical humanism of Marx’s partner Frederick Engels can be seen in his statement that “when therefore man no longer merely proposes, but also disposes – only then will the last extraneous force which is still relected in religion vanish; and with it will also vanish the religious relection itself, for the simple reason that then there will be nothing left to relect.” Engels, Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science (Anti-Dühring) (London: Lawrence & Wishart, [1878] 1934), p. 348.

784

DEUTERONOMY

measures were frequently governed by weight, such as water clocks or hourglasses illed with sand.15 Measures have be perfected over time, most notably measurements of time itself.16 Occult man sees ritual as a means of gaining supernatural power for himself. Christian man sees ritual as a means of worshiping God and gaining dominion over himself and his environment, to the glory of God. Similarly, occult man sees measurement as a means of ob17 taining supernatural power. Christian man sees measurement as a tool of dominion, beginning with self-dominion. The West is the product of such a view of measurement. A man wearing a wristwatch is someone under the inluence of the Christian view of time. In the ancient pagan world, priests were the monopolists of calendars; this control was a major factor in maintaining their power.18 In the West, very few educated people understand the details of the astronomical basis of calculating time, let alone modern cesium atom clocks, but virtually everyone has ready access to a calendar and a clock with an alarm. No longer does an elite priesthood exercise power through its monopolistic knowledge of the astronomical calendar. The advent of cheap printed calendars transferred enormous power to the individual.19 Cheap calendars and clocks decentralized power, but thereby made individuals more responsible for the use of time, man’s only irreplaceable resource. The universality of the wristwatch makes it impossible for employers or sellers to cheat large numbers of people regarding time. Because access to information is cheap, time-cheating becomes more dijcult. 15. The sun dial was an exception, but it could not be used at night or on cloudy days. 16. It can be persuasively argued that improvements in the measurement of time in the late medieval and early modern eras were the most important physical advances in the history of Western Civilization, without which few of the other advances would have been likely. See David S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1983). 17. The design and construction of the Cheops pyramid stands as the most stupendous surviving manifestation of this faith in weight and measure. See Peter Tompkins, Secrets of the Great Pyramid (New York: Harper Colophon, [1971] 1978). 18. This was especially true of ancient agricultural dynasties that were dependent on rivers. Karl Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, [1957] 1964), pp. 29–30. For an extraordinary examination of ancient man’s priestly mastery of both astronomy and time, see Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, Hamlet’s Mill: An essay on myth and the frame of time (Boston: Gambit, [1969] 1977). 19. Benjamin Franklin made himself famous throughout the American colonies with Poor Richard’s Almanack.

Just Weights and Justice

785 20

In fact, the employee is far more able to cheat the employer. The employee is the seller of services. If he is paid by the hour, he is tempted to ind ways to collect his pay without delivering the work expected from him. The salaried employee cheats more easily on his time account; the commissioned salesman cheats more easily on his expense account.

Specialized Knowledge The biblical law of weights and measures teaches that the seller – the receiver of money – is identiied as legally responsible. This requires an explanation. The buyer (consumer) has legal control over the distribution of the most marketable commodity: money. He possesses greater lexibility and therefore greater economic authority in the overall economy. We speak of consumer’s sovereignty in a free market.21 Then why is the seller singled out by biblical law as the potential violator? Doesn’t greater responsibility accompany greater authority (Luke 12:47–48)? The legal question must be decided in terms of comparative authority in speciic transactions, not comparative authority in the economy generally. A seller of goods and services possesses highly specialized knowledge regarding his market. Cheating by a seller of goods and services is therefore more likely than cheating by a buyer because the seller has an advantage in information. This is why biblical law singles out weights and measures as the representative implements of justice. Physical implements of measurement can be created more easily than other kinds of evaluation devices. The existence of a precise (though never absolute) physical standard makes it relatively easy to create close approximations for 20. The most graphic recent examples of such cheating in the modern office are computer games that allow a player to tap a key on the keyboard so that a fake spreadsheet appears on the screen. When a supervisor approaches the player, he taps the key, and it then appears as though he has been studying some intricate aspect of the business: above all, a numerical aspect. 21. See below, “Competition and the Margins of Cheating.” Biblically, calling a consumer sovereign must be qualified. He possesses lawful authority, but sovereignty derives from an oath to God. Sovereignty is delegated by God. The oath calls down God’s negative sanctions, should the oath-taker break its stipulations. The consumer takes no such oath. He does not make a covenant; he makes a contract. W. H. Hutt’s term, “consumer sovereignty,” is really a misapplication, but it has become so widespread that it is difficult to abandon it. Consumer authority is closer to biblical judicial categories.

786

DEUTERONOMY

22

commercial use. The availability of devices and techniques to specialists employed as agents of the civil government, in the name of the buyers, allows the operation of checks and balances on the checks and balances. The State therefore has a greater ability to police the sellers in this area than in most other areas. On what biblical basis can magistrates police weights and measures? This is another way of asking: Where is the victim? The problem here is analogous to the problem of measuring pollution or noise. The victims are not easy to identify, for they may not know that they have been cheated. The extent of the cheating cannot easily be ascertained by the victims in retrospect. The cost of gathering this information is too high. As a cost-saving measure (the language of measurement is inescapable) for past victims and potential victims, the State imposes public standards, and sellers are required to conform. As in the case of protecting potential victims of speeding automobiles, the State establishes boundaries in advance. The police impose negative sanctions for violations of speed limits, even though the victims have not publicly complained against this particular speeder. The driver did increase the statistical risks of having an accident, so there were victims.23 They are represented by the police ojcer who catches the speeder.24

22. The U.S. National Bureau of Standards (founded in 1901, but in principle authorized by the U.S. Constitution of 1787) establishes key lengths by using a platinum-iridium bar stored at a speciic temperature. This, in turn, is based on a not quite identical bar stored by the International Bureau of Weights and Measurements in Sèvres, France. These bars do not match. Also, when cleaned, a few molecules are shaved away. Scientists now prefer to measure distance in terms of time and the speed of light. A meter is deined today as the distance a light particle travels in one 299,792,458th of a second. Time is measured in terms of the number of microwave-excited vibrations of a cesium atom particle when excited by a hydrogen maser. One second is deined as the time that passes during 9,192,631,770 cesium atomic vibrations. Malcolm W. Browne, “Yardsticks Almost Vanish As Science Seeks Precision,” New York Times (Aug. 23, 1993). 23. Gary North, Tools of Dominion: The Case Laws of Exodus (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), pp. 489–91. 24. Fines should be used to set up a restitution fund to pay victims of drivers who are not subsequently arrested and convicted. Idem. The history of civil law in the West since the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 has been the substitution of ines for restitution: Bruce L. Benson, The Enterprise of Law: Justice Without the State (San Francisco: Paciic Research Institute for Public Policy, 1990), ch. 3.

Just Weights and Justice

787

Competition and the Margins of Cheating The International Bureau of Standards was established by the General Conference on Weights and Measures in 1875. National governments covenanted with each other by the Treaty of the Meter. The nations’ governments are pledged to honor the standards agreed upon. These standards did not originate in 1875, however, nor did they originate with civil government. It does not require a treaty to establish such standards. There can be ojcial standards, but unojcial standards are far more widespread. The free market can and does establish such standards. In fact, the more technologically innovative a society is, the less likely that a civil government will be the primary creator or enforcer of the bulk of the prevailing standards. When it comes to establishing standards, the State’s salaried bureaucrats are usually playing catch-up with the proit-seeking innovators. All standards have boundary ranges. Market standards are likely to be less precise technically than civil standards, for participants in markets understand that the development, selection, and enforcement of standards are not cost-free activities. The degree of variance from a precise model or standard depends upon the costs and beneits of enforcement. It also depends on the locus of sovereignty of such enforcement: the consumers. In a free market, it is the buyer of goods and services (i.e., the seller of money) who is economically sovereign, not the seller of goods and not the State. The consumer has greater economic lexibility to take his money elsewhere than the entrepreneur or politician does. That is to say, the cost to him of seeking and obtaining an alternative ofer for what he wants to sell (money) is normally far lower than the cost to the seller of specialized goods or services to seek and obtain an alternative ofer. The seller of money has maximum liquidity. Money is properly deined as the most marketable commodity;25 hence, the consumer, as the seller of money, is economically sovereign. The seller uses implements to make measurements. No seller can do without such implements, even if he is selling services. At the very least, he will use a clock. The seller is warned by God to make sure that he uses these implements consistently as he goes about his 25. Ludwig von Mises, The Theory of Money and Credit (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, [1912] 1953), pp. 32–33.

788

DEUTERONOMY

business. Yet this is not quite true. The seller is not to supply less than the standard determines; he may lawfully give more. If he gives any buyer less than he has said he is giving, he steals from him. If he gives a buyer more than he says, he is not stealing. He is ofering charity, or giving a gift, or being extra careful, or building good will to increase repeat sales. So, the business owner is allowed to give more than he has indicated to the buyer that the buyer will receive; he is not allowed to give less. The seller need not tell the buyer that he is giving an extra amount, but he is required to tell him if he is giving less.26 The boundary, therefore, is a seller’s loor rather than a ceiling. Sellers compete against sellers; buyers compete against buyers. This is the fundamental principle of free market competition, one which is not widely understood. The buyer is playing of one seller against another when he bargains, even if the second seller is a phantom;27 the seller is playing of buyer against buyer. Buyers compete directly against sellers only when both of them have imperfect information regarding the alternatives. No one knowingly pays one ounce of silver for something that is selling next door for half an ounce. The seller will not sell something to a buyer at a low price if he knows that another buyer is waiting in line to buy at a higher price. Neither will a buyer buy at a high price if he knows that another seller waits across the hallway to sell the same item at a lower price. This being the case, it should be obvious why sellers who use false scales ind themselves pressured by market forces to re-set their scales closer to the prevailing market standard. Their competitors provide a greater quantity of goods and services for the same price. It may take time for word to spread, but it does spread. Buyers like to brag about the bargains they have bought. Even though their tales of bargains increase the number of competing buyers at bargain shops, and therefore could lead to higher prices in the future,

26. A manager or employee must be precise: to give more is to steal from the owner; to give less is to steal from the buyer. 27. The phantom buyer may walk in this afternoon. The seller is not sure. Neither is the buyer.

Just Weights and Justice

789 28

they do like to brag. This bragging gets the word out. A seller who consistently sets his scales below the prevailing competitive standard risks losing customers. This pressure does not mean that all or even most scales will be set identically, but it does lead to a market standard of cheating: competitive boundaries. The better the information available to buyers, the narrower the range of cheating. None of this assumes the existence of a standard enforced by civil government.

The Scales of Justice Much the same is true of the scales of civil justice. Word spreads about the availability of righteous civil justice. If there is open immigration, as there was to be in Mosaic Israel, it is possible for those sufering injustice to seek justice elsewhere. (This is a major advantage of federalism: those living in one state can move to another if they disapprove of the prevailing local situation. This allows the testing of ideas regarding the proper role of civil government.) The Bible assumes that word about national justice does spread: Behold, I have taught you statutes and judgments, even as the LORD my God commanded me, that ye should do so in the land whither ye go to possess it. Keep therefore and do them; for this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the nations, which shall hear all these statutes, and say, Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people. For what nation is there so great, who hath God so nigh unto them, as the LORD our God is in all things that we call upon him for? And what nation is there so great, that hath statutes and judgments so righteous as all this law, which I set before you this day? (Deut. 4:5–8).

The existence of a righteous nation in the midst of a fallen world of nations can lead to a competitive uplifting of civil justice in those nations that experience a net migration out. Emigration pressures unjust nations to revise their judicial standards. This is why totalitarian

28. There are limits to this. If the buyer has found an exceptionally inexpensive seller, especially a small, local seller who may be ill-informed about market demand, and if he expects to return to make additional purchases, he may not say anything to potential competitors. He does not want to let the seller know that there are many buyers available who are willing to pay more. There is a “bragging range.” That is, there are boundaries on the spread of accurate information. Accurate information is not a free good.

790

DEUTERONOMY

regimes place barriers at their borders. The threat of the loss of “the best and the brightest,” also known as the brain drain, is too great. The barbed wire goes up to place a boundary around the “ideological paradises.” The tearing down of the Berlin Wall in late 1989 was a symbolic event that shook Europe. It was the visible beginning of the rapid end of the legacy of the French Revolution of 1789: left-wing Enlightenment humanism.29 It was a sign that the economically devastating efects of Marxist socialism were the inevitable product of injustice.30 People in Marxist paradises wanted to escape. Given the opportunity, they would “vote with their feet.” With the Berlin Wall down, there was an immediate exodus from East Germany. Simultaneously, Western justice began to be imported by East Germany. This leavening efect was positive. Within months, East and West Germany were legally reunited. For this emigration process to serve as a national leaven of righteousness, there must be sanctuaries of righteousness. There must be just societies that open their borders to victims of injustice, including economic oppression. This is what Mosaic Israel ofered the whole ancient world: sanctuary. This was God’s means of pressuring 29. We can date the end of that tradition in the West: August 21, 1991, when the Soviet Communist coup begun on August 19 failed. Boris Yeltsin and his associates sat in the Russian Parliament building for three days, telephoning leaders in the West, sending and receiving FAX messages, sending and receiving short wave radio messages, and ordering deliveries of Pizza Hut pizza. So died the French Revolutionary tradition. Sliced pizza replaced the guillotine’s sliced necks. 30. This was the message of F. A. Hayek in his 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom, which became an international best-seller. Western intellectuals scofed at its thesis for over four decades, though in diminished tones after 1974, when he won the Nobel Prize in economics. The scojng stopped in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union’s economy. A few months before he died in 1992, Hayek was awarded the United States medal of freedom. He had outlived the Soviet Union. He also had outlived most of the original scofers. As he told me and Mark Skousen in an interview in 1985, he had never believed that he would live to see the acclaim that came to him after 1974. Few men who move against the intellectual currents of their eras live long enough to see such vindication. He died in March, 1992, at the age of 92, receiving international acclaim: “In praise of Hayek,” The Economist (March 28, 1992); John Gray, “The Road From Serfdom,” National Review (April 27, 1992). As The Economist noted, “In the 1960s and 1970s he was a hate-igure for the left, derided by many as wicked, loony, or both.” By 1992, no one remembered such scurrilous attacks as Herman Finer’s The Road to Reaction (1948). Milton Friedman, who was on the same University of Chicago faculty as Hayek, wrote that Hayek “unquestionably became the most important intellectual leader of the movement that has produced a major change in the climate of opinion.” National Review, op. cit., p. 35.

Just Weights and Justice

791

unrighteous nations to become more just. He imposed a cost on evil empires: the loss of productive people to Israel. On the other hand, widespread immigration can pressure a just society to become less just if the newcomers gain political authority. If they are allowed to vote, they will seek to change some aspects of the sanctuary nation’s legal structure. For example, they may seek to legislate compulsory welfare payments: politically coerced subsidies paid to immigrants by the original residents. It is not God’s intention to pay for a rising standard of justice in evil empires by means of falling standards of justice in covenanted sanctuary nations. His goal is to raise standards of justice everywhere. So, political pluralism is prohibited by God’s law. Sufrage (the vote) is by covenantal ajrmation and church membership, not mere geographical residence. This is why the biblical concept of sanctuary requires a biblical judicial boundary: covenantal citizenship.31 If justice produced indeterminate economic efects, and if injustice produced indeterminate economic efects, there would be no economic pressure on totalitarian regimes to tear down the boundary barriers. But justice does not produce indeterminate economic efects. Similarly, if the social world were what Meredith G. Kline insists that it is – a world in which God’s visible sanctions in history are indeterminate for both covenant-keeping and covenantbreaking – then there could be no historical resolution of the competition between civil righteousness and civil perversity. This quasi-Manichean conclusion is the implicit and sometimes explicit assumption of amillennialism.32 The leaven of justice in such a world would have no advantage over the leaven of injustice. But there is no neutrality in life; in a world of totally depraved men, such cultural neutrality could not be maintained for long. The leaven of evil would triumph. Yet it does not triumph, long term. Pharaonic tyrannies have all collapsed or become culturally impotent throughout history. This fact testiies to mankind that God’s sanctions in history are not indeterminate. Honesty really is the best policy, as Ben Franklin long ago insisted. In the competition between good and

31. Gary North, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989), ch. 2. 32. Gary North, Millennialism and Social Theory (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), pp. 76–92; ch. 5.

792

DEUTERONOMY

evil, the leaven of righteousness spreads as time goes on. Its visible results are so much better (Lev. 26:1–13; Deut. 28:1–14).

The Forces of Competition The tremendous pressure of international economic competition cannot be withstood for long. It brought down Soviet Communism. Marxist tyrannies could not gain the economic fruits of 33 righteousness without the moral roots. They could not permit a modern economy based on computers, data bases, FAX machines, and rationally allocated capital in their rigged, corrupt, fantasy world of central economic planning and iat money.34 The reality of the Russian workers’ saying under Communism could not be suppressed forever: “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.” This inescapable reality led to a falling standard of living and the eventual collapse of European Communism. The international free market has no universally enforceable standards of weights and measures, yet it operates more successfully than any other economic system in history. Private arbitration sometimes is invoked. Usually, national standards are closely observed by market participants. There are great and continuing debates over which standards should be adopted internationally, especially as international trade increases. But even without formal political resolutions to these debates, the international market continues to lourish. In the medieval world, there was an internationally recognized “law merchant,” and it has been revived in modern times.35

33. Konstantin Simis, USSR: The Corrupt Society: The Secret World of Soviet Capitalism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982). 34. On the truly fantastic nature of the Soviet economy, see Leopold Tyrmand, The Rosa Luxemburg Contraceptives Cooperative: A Primer on Communist Civilization (New York: Macmillan, 1972). 35. Benson, Enterprise of Law, pp. 30–35, 62, 224–27. See also Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1983), ch. 11. The Jews who dominate the international diamond trade make bargains without public contracts, and they never appeal to the State to settle disputes. These merchants have their own courts that settle disputes. It seems likely that they do not pay income taxes on every proitable trade.

Just Weights and Justice

793

Gresham’s Law But what about Gresham’s Law? “Bad money drives out good.”36 This is the pessimillennial view of history as applied to monetary theory. But Gresham’s Law is misleading. It has an implied condition, but only people who understand economics recognize the unique nature of this condition. The law only applies when a civil government establishes and enforces a price control between two kinds of money. Then the artiicially overvalued money remains in circulation, while the artiicially undervalued money goes into hoards, into the black market, or is exported. Bad money drives out good money only when governments pass laws that attempt to override the free market’s assessment of relative monetary values. This is not to say that there should not be civil laws against counterfeiting, but it does mean that counterfeiters must be very skilled to compete in a free market order. Laws against counterfeiting raise the cost of being a counterfeiter, thereby lowering the supply of counterfeit money. Counterfeiting applies to religion. Christians must contend with cults, but cults are imitations of Christianity. Today, we see no fertility cults that self-consciously imitate the older Canaanite religions. Bacchanalia festivals are no longer with us, at least not in a selfconsciously cultic form.37 New Age advocates may seem numerous, especially in Hollywood and New York City, but there are very few openly New Age congregations of the faithful. Religious counterfeits must take on the characteristic features of Christianity in order to extend their inluence beyond traditional borders. The rites of Christianity have many imitations around the globe, but the rites of Santeria do not.38 A wise counterfeiter will not try to pass a bill that has a picture of Groucho Marx on it. Successful counterfeits in a competitive market must resemble the original. This is why there is, over time, a tendency for covenant-breakers to conform themselves to the external requirements of God’s law until they cannot stand the contradiction 36. “Bad money drives out good money,” the law really states. Yet in a very real sense, the familiar formulation is correct: bad money does drive out good. It creates black markets, cheating, and many other evils. 37. Mardi Gras in New Orleans and Carnival in the Caribbean are such festivals. 38. Bill Strube, “Possessed with Old Fervor: Santeria in Cuba,” The World & I (Sept. 1993). This African-Cuban voodoo cult is closely associated with homosexuality. Ibid., p. 254.

794

DEUTERONOMY

39

in their lives any longer. Then they rebel, and God imposes negative sanctions, either through His ordained covenant representa40 tives or through the creation.

A Final Sovereign The Bible identiies judges as covenantal agents of God. Unlike the free market, where consumers are sovereign, the State requires a voice of inal earthly authority. This does not mean that one person or one institution has inal authority. Biblically, no institution or person possesses such authority in history; only the Bible does. But there must be someone who announces “guilty” or “not guilty.” Someone must impose the required sanctions. Civil sanctions are imposed by the State. This means that legal standards must not luctuate so widely that men cannot make reasonable predictions about the outcome of trials. If there is no predictability of the outcome, then there will be endless trials. Conlicting parties will not settle their disputes before they enter the courtroom. A society should encourage predictable outcomes; otherwise, individuals cannot be conident about receiving what the law says they deserve.41 It is because the outcomes of trials are reasonably predictable that conlicts are settled before they come to trial. Hayek’s comments in this regard are extremely relevant. He announced a conclusion, one based on decades of study of both economic theory and legal history: “There is probably no single factor which has contributed more to the prosperity of the West than the relative certainty of the law which has prevailed here. This is not altered by the fact that complete certainty of the law is an ideal which we must try to approach but which we can never perfectly attain.” He then went on to make this observation, one which relies on the concept of the thing not seen: “But the degree of the certainty of the law must be judged by the disputes which do not lead to litigation because the outcome is practically certain as soon as the legal position is 39. Gary North, Dominion and Common Grace: The Biblical Basis of Progress (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987), ch. 6: “Sustaining Common Grace.” 40. Ibid., ch. 8: “Filled Vessels.” 41. “Agree with thine adversary quickly, whiles thou art in the way with him; lest at any time the adversary deliver thee to the judge, and the judge deliver thee to the ojcer, and thou be cast into prison” (Matt. 5:25).

Just Weights and Justice

795

examined. It is the cases that never come before the courts, not those that do, that are the measure of the certainty of the law.”42 In other words, self-government is basic to all government, but predictable law, predictable enforcement, and predictable sanctions must reinforce self-government if a society is to remain productive. The clogged courts of the United States in the inal third of the twentieth century are testimonies to the breakdown of the certainty of civil law, as well as to the efects of tax-inanced law schools that have produced about a million practicing lawyers today.43

Justice in Flux There is little doubt that the proliferation of lawyers in the United States in the latter years of the twentieth century is a sign of a major breakdown of its moral and legal order. There are 18 million civil cases each year in the United States: one case per ten adult Americans. The United States in 1990 had some 730,000 lawyers, which grew to almost a million by 1999. In 1990, Japan had 11 lawyers per 100,000 in population; the United Kingdom, 82; Germany, 111; the United States, 281. Japan had 115 scientists and engineers per lawyer; United Kingdom, 14.5; Germany, 9.1; United States, 4.8. Economic output per hour, 1973–90: Japan, 4.4 percent; United Kingdom, 3.3 percent Germany, 2.8 percent; United States, 2.3 percent.44 The idea that the State can provide perfect justice is a costly myth.45 Civil government today has become what Bastiat predicted in 1850. After 1870, throughout the West, the view of the State as an agency of compulsory salvation spread. It escalated rapidly after 1900, when Social Darwinism moved from its “dog-eat-dog” phase to its State-planned evolution phase.46 Wheaton College economics professor P. J. Hill has described the process: the decline of predictable

42. F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (University of Chicago Press, 1960), p. 208. 43. In the case of lawyers, Say’s famous law holds true: production creates its own demand. The old story is illustrative: when only one lawyer lives in town, he has little work. When another lawyer arrives, they both have lots of work from then on. 44. “Punitive Damages,” National Review (Nov. 4, 1991). 45. Macklin Fleming, The Price of Perfect Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1974). 46. Gary North, The Dominion Covenant: Genesis (2nd ed; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987), Appendix A: “From Cosmic Purposelessness to Humanistic Sovereignty.”

796

DEUTERONOMY

law and the rise of the transfer society. “The idea of the transfer soci47 ety is a society where property rights are up for grabs.” The problem with such a society is that so many people start grabbing rather than producing. The rule of law is collapsing. We’ve become a society in which the rules are in lux, thereby prodding people to spend a large amount of their time and resources trying to 48 change the rules to their beneit. Our book argues that in the beginning the Constitution was a set of rules for a few areas that pretty much encouraged the entrepreneurial type of person to go out and make better mousetraps, to create wealth. Somewhere around the 1870’s the constitutional climate started changing dramatically, not by amendment but by interpretation. The Constitution became interpreted in a more casual way. There was a rise in what we call “reasonable regulations;” the Supreme Court said the state legislatures could pass any sort of regulations they wanted about economic afairs so long as they were “reasonable.” That meant, of course, that people spent a lot of time trying to get regulations written to their advantage or to the disadvantage of their competitors, because there was no clear-cut standard. And today almost nothing in the economic arena is unconstitutional. . . . Today, much of the economic game is in the political arena. It is played by getting rules on your side, or making sure that somebody else doesn’t get the rules on their side against you. The action is in Washington, D.C. It’s interesting to look at the statistics of many large companies and see how much of their time goes into lobbying, where their business headquarters are, who the big players are, etc. It turns out that it’s just as important to try to make sure that the rules favor you as it is to produce better products. Any society in which the rules are not clearly deined, whatever they are, is at risk. You need a society of stable, legitimate and just rules in order to have people productively engaged. I would put it this way: Theft is expensive. In a society where theft is prevalent people will put a lot of their eforts into protecting themselves – into locks and police guards, etc. Government can prevent theft, but can also be an agency of theft. If this is the case, then people will look to government to use its coercive arm to take from other citizens. In such a world of “legal theft” people will

47. “The Transfer Society: An Interview with P. J. Hill,” Religion and Liberty, I (Nov./Dec. 1991), p. 1. This is a publication of the Acton Institute. 48. Peter J. Hill and Terry Anderson, The Birth of a Transfer Society (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1989).

Just Weights and Justice

797

devote resources to protecting themselves and to getting government on 49 their side.

Open Entry vs. Open Access Open entry to economic competitors in a free market is not the same thing as open access to political competitors in a civil government. The free market is not a covenantal institution possessing a lawful monopoly as an ordained representative of God. Civil government is. Allowing open access for ojce-seekers within a single governmental structure is not the same as allowing rival governmental structures within the same sphere of political authority. There has to be a hierarchy of authority, meaning a chain of command, in all three covenantal governments: church, family, and State. There is no such hierarchy in a free market. The consumer’s decision is economically sovereign on a free market: to buy or not to buy. He is not comparably sovereign in a covenantal institution: to obey or not to obey apart from the threat of lawful sanctions. He is under external authority. Civil government must enforce certain physical standards of measurement, if only for purposes of tax collection. The idea that a free market can provide proit-seeking courts as a complete substitute for the inal earthly sovereignty of a civil court (assuming its widespread acceptance by family and church courts) is a myth of libertarianism. The essence of a free market system is that it does not and cannot make inal declarations. Why? Because the essence of the free market is that anyone can step in at any time and announce a higher bid. The market, if it is truly free, cannot legally keep out those who ofer higher bids. Therefore, there can be no inal, covenantally binding bid in a free market, since the market system allows no appeal to a superior, covenantally binding institution. If voluntary agreements are subsequently broken, there must be an agent economically outside of the market and judicially above the market who can sovereignly enforce the terms of the agreement. The free market is open-ended because it ofers open entry; open entry is the heart of a free market. The resolution of disputes requires the

49. Hill, “The Transfer Society,” pp. 1–2. Cf. Gary North, “The Politics of the Fair Share,” The Freeman (Nov. 1993).

798

DEUTERONOMY

presence of a representative covenantal agent who can dispense justice in God’s name. Disputes are usually resolved before they reach this inal declaration, but only because of the presence of this agency of inal declaration. And this inal court of appeal must be able to appeal to a higher court: God’s. This means that it must declare God’s law.

Victim’s Rights and Restitution The fundamental principle of biblical civil jurisprudence is victim’s rights. The State is to act as the agent of injured parties. If the injured party is unwilling to prosecute, the State is not to prosecute.50 Does this mean that the State may not prosecute the seller who is discovered cheating by means of false weights and measures? If not, why not? There are criminal cases in which there is no identiiable victim. The classic example is the case of a driver who exceeds the speed limit and does not injure anyone nevertheless imposes risks on other drivers and pedestrians. The State in this case is allowed to impose ines on the convicted speeder. The money should be used to provide restitution for those who are injured by a hit-and-run driver who cannot subsequently be located or convicted. What about the seller who uses rigged scales? The State cannot prove when this practice began; it can only prove when the practice was discovered. It probably cannot identify who was defrauded. This means that many of the victims cannot sue for damages. Should the seller not sufer negative sanctions? One possible way to resolve this dilemma is for the State to require the seller to provide discounts for a period of time to all of his past customers. The discount would be determined by the degree of scale-tampering: double restitution. If the scales were 10 percent of, then he must ofer 20 percent discounts. To make sure he does not simply raise his retail prices before he starts ofering the discounts, the State would ix his retail prices as of the day the infraction was discovered. Any customer who could show a receipt from the store would have access to the discounts.

50. North, Tools of Dominion, ch. 7.

Just Weights and Justice

799

Because of modern packaging and mass production, not many stores would come under this threat. The butcher in the meat section of a supermarket would be one seller whose scales would be basic to the business. But on the whole, modern technology transfers responsibility back to the companies that sell the packaged products to retail outlets. How, then, could the law be enforced on them? To require them to ofer a discount to a retailer does not beneit the consumer; it provides a proit to the retailer. One way would be for those who have receipts for a product to be able to buy that irm’s products for a period of time at a discount. The irm would then be forced to reimburse the retailer for the diference. This is a sales technique used by manufacturers in gaining market share in supermarkets: discount coupons. It could be imposed by the State as a penalty. This would reward those consumers who save their receipts. If this procedure is too complicated for the victims to be fairly compensated, because of the nature of the product – a “small-ticket item” – then the irm could be required to ofer discounts across the board to all future buyers of that speciic product for a period of time. The irm would also be required to identify on the packaging of that product an admission of guilt, so that the discounts would not be regarded as an advertising strategy. Finally, the discount reimbursements to retailers would not be tax-deductible as a business expense to the seller.

Evangelical Antinomianism and Humanism’s Myth of Neutrality For a scale to operate, it must have ixed standards. If it is a balance scale like the one the famous lady of justice holds, it must have ixed weights in one of its two trays. There is no escape from the covenantal concept of judicial weights. This is the issue of ethical and judicial standards: point three of the biblical covenant model. Mosaic law stated that within the boundaries of Israel, honest (predictable) weights were mandatory. It did not matter whether the buyer was rich or poor, circumcised or not circumcised: the same weights had to be used by the seller. Israel was to become a sanctuary for strangers seeking justice. The symbol of this justice was the honest scale.

800

DEUTERONOMY

Which judicial standards were mandatory? The Bible is clear: God’s revealed law. National Israel was not some neutral sanctuary in which rationally perceived natural law categories were enforced. That unique sanctuary was where biblical law was enforced. Those seeking sanctuary in Israel had to conform to biblical civil law. The metaphorical weights in the tray of civil justice’s scale were the Mosaic statutes and case laws. Because the modern Christian evangelical world is self-consciously and deiantly antinomian – “We’re under grace, not law!” – Christians emphatically deny the New Covenant legitimacy of the concept of biblically revealed laws. They assume that men can develop universal, religiously non-speciic moral standards in the same way that the world has developed universal physical weights and measurements. They prefer to ignore what the Bible reveals about covenant-breakers: those who hate God love death (Prov. 8:36b). The closer that covenant-breakers get to the doctrine of God, the more perverse they are in rejecting the testimony of the Bible. They interpret God, man, law, sanctions, and time diferently from what the Bible speciies as the standard. They ajrm rival covenantal standards. A holy commonwealth would establish the law of God as the civil standard, but modern evangelical Christians hate the revealed law of God above every other system of law. First, they ajrm as the binding standard the myth of neutrality: religiously neutral natural law. Second, they ajrm their willingness to submit themselves to any system of law except biblical law. They announce: “A Christian can live peacefully under any legal or political system,” with only one exception: biblical law. Modern Christians see themselves as perpetual strangers in the perpetual unholy commonwealths of covenant-breaking man. They deny that liberty can be attained under God’s revealed law. God’s revealed law, they insist, is the essence of tyranny. They seek liberty through religious neutrality: the rule of anti-Christian civil law. They seek, at most, “equal time for Jesus” in the satanic kingdoms of this world. They forget: the “equal time” doctrine is the lie that Satan’s servants use while dwelling in holy commonwealths. When Satan’s disciples gain civil power, they adopt a new rule: “As little time for Jesus as the State can impose through force.”

Just Weights and Justice

801

Geisler’s Norm Norman Geisler, a fundamentalist philosopher with a Ph.D. issued by a Roman Catholic university, and a devout follower of Thomas Aquinas,51 has insisted that all civil law must be religiously neutral. We must legislate morality, he says, but not religion. This means that civil morality can be religiously neutral. “The cry to return to our Christian roots is seriously misguided if it means that government should favor Christian teachings. . . . First, to establish such a Bible-based civil government would be a violation of the First Amendment. Even mandating the Ten Commandments would favor certain religions. . . . Furthermore, the reinstitution of the Old Testament legal system is contrary to New Testament teaching. Paul says clearly that Christians ‘are not under the law, but under grace’ (Rom. 6:14). . . . The Bible may be informative, but it is not normative for civil law.”52 The suggestion by those whom he calls “the biblionomists” [biblionomy: Bible law] that God’s law still applies today is, in Geisler’s words, a “chilling legalism.”53 We need legal reform, he insists. “What kind of laws should be used to accomplish this: Christian laws or Humanistic laws? Neither. Rather, they should simply be just laws. Laws should not be either Christian or anti-Christian; they should be merely fair ones.”54 There is supposedly a realm of neutral civil law in between God and humanism: the realm of “fairness.” This means that Mosaic civil law was never fair. Those who believe that the Mosaic civil law was unfair refuse to say explicitly that this is what they believe. It sounds ethically rebellious against the unchanging God of the Bible, which it in fact is. Nevertheless, this rebellious outlook is universal within Protestantism in the twentieth century; it has been since at least the late seventeenth century.

51. Aquinas, he said in 1988, “was the most brilliant, most comprehensive, and most systematic of all Christian thinkers and perhaps all thinkers of all time.” Angela Elwell Hunt, “Norm Geisler: The World Is His Classroom,” Fundamentalist Journal (Sept. 1988), p. 21. This magazine was published by Rev. Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University. Geisler was at the time a professor there. The magazine has ceased publication. Geisler resigned from the school in 1991. 52. Norman L. Geisler, “Should We Legislate Morality?” ibid. (July/Aug. 1988), p. 17. 53. Idem. 54. Ibid., p. 64.

802

DEUTERONOMY

This theory of neutral civil law denies Christ’s words concerning the impossibility of neutrality: “No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon” (Matt. 6:24). “He that is not with me is against me; and he that gathereth not with me scattereth abroad” (Matt. 12:30). The neutralists insist that Christ’s denial of neutrality does not apply to the civil covenant. Geisler writes: “God ordained Divine Law for the church, but He gave Natural Law for civil government.”55 They insist, as Geisler insists, that true civil justice can be obtained only by removing all visible traces of Christianity from civil government. This is not humanism, he insists; this is merely neutral civil justice. But there is no neutrality. There has never been a neutral kingdom of civil law, and there never will be. Facing the reality of this historical fact, this question inevitably arises: Which is worse, secular humanism or God’s law? When push comes to shove, Geisler identiies the greater evil: God’s law. “Thoughtful relection reveals that this ‘cure’ of reconstructionism is worse than the disease of secularism.”56 Christians supposedly must content themselves with living as strangers in a strange land until Jesus personally returns in power.57 The Christian antinomians’ view of civil law has implications for their doctrine of eschatology. This is why virtually all amillennialists and premillennialists defend natural law theory and political pluralism, while attacking theonomy. They see God’s people as cultural losers in history.58 The most they hope for is a cultural stalemate.59 They prefer to live meekly and impotently inside cultural ghettos

55. Ibid., p. 17. 56. Norman L. Geisler, “Human Life,” in William Bentley Ball (ed.), In Search of a National Morality (Baker Book House [conservative Protestant] and Ignatius Press [conservative Roman Catholic], 1992), p. 115. 57. A question for premillennialists: Will Jesus enforce the Mosaic law or a system of neutral natural law during His premillennial kingdom? Premillennial defenders of natural law theory refuse to address this question in print. If they answer “Mosaic law,” they have admitted that it is intrinsically morally superior to natural law. If they answer “natural law,” they sever the God who declared the Mosaic law from that law. They prefer to remain silent. 58. North, Millennialism and Social Theory, chaps. 7–9. 59. Gary North, Backward, Christian Soldiers? An Action Manual for Christian Reconstruction (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, [1984] 1988), ch. 11: “The Stalemate Mentality.”

Just Weights and Justice

803 60

rather than fight a cultural war in the name of Christ. They do not believe they can win; therefore, they deny the basis of fighting in such a war, namely, a uniquely biblical judicial alternative to humanistic law. They deny the legitimacy of Bible-revealed judicial standards that would make possible an explicitly Christian social order during the era of the church. Their antinomian social ethics is a corollary to their pessimistic view of the church’s future. God has granted them their desire: they live at the mercy of their enemies who control the various social orders of our day. But the walls of their ghettos have huge holes in them: public schools, television, movies, rock music, and all the rest of humanism’s lures. Unlike the Israelites in Egypt, who cried out to God for deliverance (Ex. 3:7), today’s Christians have generally preferred their life in Egypt to life in the Promised Land. God cursed the exodus generation: death in the wilderness. But He did not allow them to return to Egyptian bondage. Today’s Christians may grumble about certain peripheral aspects of their bondage, but they do not yet seek deliverance from their primary bonds, most notably their enthusiastic acceptance of religious and political pluralism, natural law theory, and the irst-stage humanist promise of “equal time for the ethics of Jesus.” They hate the very thought of their responsibility before God to establish covenanted national sanctuaries.

******* Fractional Reserve Banking Modern banking is based on the use of false weights and mea61 sures. Fractional reserve banking rests on fraud. It replaces a voluntary currency system that is based on a particular weight and ineness of a precious metal or some other commodity. The origin of fractional reserve banking was the issuing of a warehouse receipt for an asset – a money metal – that was not actually held in reserve. The banker issued a promise to pay gold or silver when he could not redeem all of the signed promises. The false warehouse receipt circulated as money as if it had been the actual commodity promised. 60. Gary North, “Ghetto Eschatologies,” Biblical Economics Today, XIV (April/May 1992). 61. Gary North, Honest Money: The Biblical Blueprint for Money and Banking (Ft. Worth: Dominion Press, 1986).

804

DEUTERONOMY

This enabled the issuer to charge interest on loaned funds: something (for him) for nothing (in his warehouse). The losers were those who attempted to redeem their receipts during a bank panic. The bank went bankrupt (bank + rupture), leaving him with nothing. Prior to the bank run, there were other losers: people who had to pay higher prices for goods and services because of the inlationary efects of unbacked warehouse receipts that circulated as if they were money. These receipts were used by buyers to bid up prices. Those people without access to these newly printed false receipts consumed fewer goods and services because of increased prices. The modern banking system has fraud at its heart. Because of this, everyone today is at risk of a collapse of this house of cards – false receipts. When the system of monetary payments breaks down, as it will when this fraud becomes widely perceived as a threat to men’s wealth, and the bank runs begin, all those who have planned their futures in terms of a predictable, continuous supply of iat money issued by commercial banks will ind their plans destroyed. The modern world’s unprecedented division of labor, which has been made possible by a system of payments based on commercial banks’ promises to pay, will collapse. Unemployment will soar when workers ind that their labor services are too narrowly focused to be purchased at the prices that prevailed before the banks went bankrupt. We call this event a depression. It occurs when there is an unforeseen contraction in the division of labor. This takes place when the payments system breaks down. There are negative sanctions in history for breaking God’s law. An economic depression is the economy’s built-in negative sanction against banking fraud.62 If the State refuses to enforce God’s law governing weights and measures as it applies to money and banking, then the economic system will. The justiication for having the State enforce 63 a law mandating 100 percent reserve banking is God’s threat to bring corporate negative sanctions against any society that disobeys His law.

62. Murray N. Rothbard, America’s Great Depression (Princeton, New Jersey: Van Nostrand, 1963). 63. Murray N. Rothbard, “The Case for a 100 Percent Gold Dollar,” in Leland B. Yeager (ed.), In Search of a Monetary Constitution (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1962), ch. 4. This has been reprinted as a book with the same title (Auburn, Alabama: Mises Institute, 1991).

Just Weights and Justice

805

In the modern world, central banking lies at the heart of a massive, centuries-long deception by the politicians and the bankers. Here is the essence of the arrangement. The nation-State issues a monopoly of credit creation to a privately owned bank. In exchange, the central bank guarantees to buy the State’s debt. This quid pro quo has operated continually in England ever since the founding of the Bank of England in 1694.64 It has become the world’s model for banking in the twentieth century. The world’s central bankers want to create a single central bank that issues a single currency.65 This implies the existence of a common iscal (taxing and spending) policy for the nations that are inside the international central banking system, i.e., the abolition of national sovereignty. The bankers and the politicians want the beneits of a gold standard without the restraints. They are unwilling to allow a common currency based on a commodity, most likely gold, for this would restrain the issuing of iat money and the issuing of government debt. They want the pleasant efects of gold – a predictable means of payment – without the restraints imposed by geology: the high cost of extracting this metal. They want to be sovereign over money, so that they can get something for nothing. The politicians want the State to pay below-market interest rates on its debt, and the bankers want interest payments for credit issued out of nothing, with the State’s debt certiicates as the central banks’ legal reserves – the privilege of a State-created monopoly in a nation that does not enforce God’s laws of weights and measures.

64. In the years immediately following World War II, the government nationalized the Bank of England, but management has remained the exclusive prerogative of commercial bankers. Private citizens are not allowed inside the bank, as I found out by accident in 1985, when Mark Skousen and I walked into it, thinking it was Lloyd’s Bank. A man dressed in the traditional beefeater uniform politely asked us to leave. Feigning the ignorance common to American tourists, I asked: “You mean I can’t open an account?” I was assured that I could not. 65. The scheduled date for the creation of the European Monetary Union, with its EMU currency, is 1999. This will require the reprogramming of European banks’ computers. At the same time, the world is facing a monumental disruption of computers by the “millennium bug” – the rollover from 99 (1999) to 00 (2000), which threatens to bring down the world’s banking system and the payments system. This threat to the world’s economy has only become even vaguely recognized since about 1995. It will prove impossible to reprogram the computers to meet both criteria. The economic results could be catastrophic. I began planning my personal afairs, as of late 1996, on the assumption that the results will be catastrophic.

806

DEUTERONOMY

Perhaps someday the corporate negative sanction known as economic depression will be widely recognized by political leaders and articulate voters as the inevitable result of monetary inlation, especially fractional reserve banking.66 If they fail to recognize this, then the world will continue to sufer from periodic depressions.

Conclusion “Let me be weighed in an even balance, that God may know mine integrity” (Job 31:6). The imagery of the balance scale is basic to understanding each person’s relation to God, either as a covenant-keeper or a covenant-breaker. Weights and measures are also representative biblically of the degree of civil justice available in a society. If those who own the measuring instruments of commerce tamper with them in order to defraud consumers, either speciic groups of consumers – especially resident aliens – or consumers in general, they have sinned against God. They have stolen. If the civil government does not prosecute such thieves, then the society is corrupt. The continued existence of false weights and measures testiies against the whole society. There are limits to our perception; there are limits to the accuracy of scales. This applies both to physical measurement and civil justice. Society cannot attain perfect justice. There must always be an appeal to the judge’s intuition in judicial conlicts where contested public acts were not clearly inside or outside the law. This does not mean that there are limits to God’s perception and God’s justice. Thus, there will be a day of perfect reckoning. Over time, covenantally faithful individuals and institutions approach as a limit, but never reach, the perfect justice of that inal judgment. This brings God’s positive sanctions to covenant-keeping individuals and institutions, making them more responsible by making them more powerful. Progressive sanctiication, both personal and corporate, necessarily involves an increase in God’s blessings and therefore also in personal responsibility. The State is required by God to enforce His standards. The free market social order – a development that has its origins in the twin doctrines of personal responsibility and self-government – requires 66. Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1949), ch. 20.

Just Weights and Justice

807

civil government as a legitimate court of appeal. But the bulk of law enforcement has to be individual: “Every man his own policeman.” No other concept of law enforcement will sujce if a society is not to become a society of informants and secret police. Secondarily, law enforcement must be associative: market competition. Buyers and sellers determine the degree of acceptable luctuation around agreed-upon standards. Only in the third stage is law enforcement to become civil. Here, the standards are to be much more precise, much more rigid, and much more predictable. Representative cases – legal precedents – are to become guidelines for self-government and voluntary associative government.

64 The THE Firstfruits Offering: AOFFERING: Token Payment FIRSTFRUITS A TOKEN PAYMENT And it shall be, when thou art come in unto the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee for an inheritance, and possessest it, and dwellest therein; That thou shalt take of the irst of all the fruit of the earth, which thou shalt bring of thy land that the LORD thy God giveth thee, and shalt put it in a basket, and shalt go unto the place which the LORD thy God shall choose to place his name there. And thou shalt go unto the priest that shall be in those days, and say unto him, I profess this day unto the LORD thy God, that I am come unto the country which the LORD sware unto our fathers for to give us (Deut. 26:1–3).

The theocentric focus of this law is God’s deliverance of Israel. First, He had delivered them out of Egypt (v. 8). Second, He had delivered the land of Canaan into their hand (v. 9). So, the Israelite was to say, “And no796 w, behold, I have brought the irstfruits of the land, which thou, O LORD, hast given me. And thou shalt set it before the LORD thy God, and worship before the LORD thy God” (v. 10). This was cause of celebration: “And thou shalt rejoice in every good thing which the LORD thy God hath given unto thee, and unto thine house, thou, and the Levite, and the stranger that is among you” (v. 11). God had sworn that He would deliver Canaan into their hand (v. 3). Because He had fulilled this promise of inheritance, each Israelite owed Him a irstfruits ofering. This ofering had to be brought to Jerusalem once each year (Ex. 23:16). This was the feast of Weeks or Pentecost (Deut. 16:9–10). The men of Israel owed God a trip to the central city and a token payment of the forthcoming harvest. The cost of the trip was far

808

The Firstfruits Offering: A Token Payment

809

more than the market value of the token payment. Clearly, this law was a land law. It had to do with the conquest of Canaan.

A Liturgy of Thanksgiving The Israelites had to sufer economic losses in order to demonstrate their thankfulness toward God. This passage makes it clear that this thankfulness looked back to the exodus and the conquest. In some sense, a token payment looked forward to the full harvest, but the text indicates that this was thankfulness for God’s positive corporate sanctions in the past. The Passover had to do with God’s deliverance. So did Firstfruits (Weeks/Pentecost), but this deliverance was the deliverance of Canaan into their hands. At Passover, the children were to ask what the ritual meal meant, and the father was to tell them about God’s overnight deliverance of the nation (Ex. 12:26–27). At Firstfruits, the male head of household was to declare before the priest what the meaning of this ritual was. The man bringing the ofering was required to make this historical confession: And thou shalt speak and say before the LORD thy God, A Syrian [Aramean – NASB] ready to perish was my father, and he went down into Egypt, and sojourned there with a few, and became there a nation, great, mighty, and populous: And the Egyptians evil entreated us, and amicted us, and laid upon us hard bondage: And when we cried unto the LORD God of our fathers, the LORD heard our voice, and looked on our amiction, and our labour, and our oppression: And the LORD brought us forth out of Egypt with a mighty hand, and with an outstretched arm, and with great terribleness, and with signs, and with wonders: And he hath brought us into this place, and hath given us this land, even a land that loweth with milk and honey. And now, behold, I have brought the irstfruits of the land, which thou, O LORD, hast given me. And thou shalt set it before the LORD thy God, and worship before the LORD thy God (Deut. 26:5–10).

This ofering was used to support the priests, but its economic value was minimal compared with the cost of making the journey to Jerusalem. Had this ofering been strictly economic, the priests would have done far better inancially had men been allowed to pay them the money equivalent of the journey. This indicates that what was important was the public confession, not the ofering itself. It was the cost associated with the journey that demonstrated each man’s commitment to God. This cost was the main burden.

810

DEUTERONOMY

At the same time, there was a beneit: corporate worship. “And thou shalt rejoice in every good thing which the LORD thy God hath given unto thee, and unto thine house, thou, and the Levite, and the stranger that is among you” (v. 11). Here the thanksgiving is said to be personal. This celebration was more important than the money value of the ofering. By requiring the men of Israel to come to Jerusalem to confess their thanksgiving for God’s prior deliverance of Israel, both corporately and individually, God created in His people a sense of corporate membership. The feast of Firstfruits/Weeks/ Pentecost became a celebration of God’s intervention in history to overcome impossible odds on behalf of His people. Included in this corporate celebration was the stranger (geyr). Israel’s inheritance was corporate. It was also familistic. The feast of Firstfruits celebrated both forms of inheritance. The required feast was God’s reminder to them that He, not the power of their own hands (Deut. 8:17), had gained this inheritance for them. The message was clear: to continue to maintain this inheritance, the men of Israel had to honor their dependence on God. This honoring involved corporate worship and the expenses thereof.

Token Payments for Blessings Received The main sacriice at Pentecost was not the handful of grain which the participant brought; it was the time and expense of travelling. This sacriice testified to the covenantal faithfulness of the participant. There were costs associated with this beneit: forfeited time, energy, and a handful of grain. God was extracting a great deal of productivity from his people. This was another reminder to them that their wealth did not depend on a conventional allocation of time, seed, and labor. It depended on their covenantal faithfulness. God does not need our gifts in order to extend His kingdom. He grants to His people the honor of bringing oferings to Him so that they can demonstrate the seriousness of their commitment to Him and their dependence on Him. Their public commitment was one means of securing the continuing blessings of God. It was also a way to secure each man’s commitment to the stipulations of the covenant. If a man verbally confessed that God had delivered the nation and had secured their inheritance, and then took days to walk to and from the place of confession, he had put his money where his mouth was.

The Firstfruits Offering: A Token Payment

811

When someone forfeits the ownership of capital for the sake of another person, we say that he is either buying something or being charitable. But what do we call such an expenditure when the recipient does not use the asset? There was no suggestion in Old Covenant religion that God ate the sacriices brought to Him. This made biblical religion diferent from ancient religions generally.1 But if the Israelite was sacriicing something of value, what did he expect in return? God’s favor. Then was he buying God’s favor? Was the arrangement a true quid pro quo? Could he expect to receive a stream of income if he provided a trickle of sacriice?

Job’s Dilemma This, basically, was the assumption of three of Job’s four questioners. They assumed that he had done something wrong to warrant God’s wrath. They were wrong; it was his righteousness that had gained him such adversity, by way of Satan. But Job could not understand why the amictions had come upon him. He had sacriiced on behalf of his children (Job 1:5), yet they had all been killed at a feast (Job 1:19). Where was the justice of God? That was Job’s question. God’s answer was a series of rhetorical questions that boiled down to this: “I’m God, and you’re not.” The sacriices were the Israelite’s public acknowledgment that whatever he possessed had come from God. Job asked his rebellious wife: “Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?” (Job. 2:10b). God is sovereign over all. But in chapter 3, he abandoned this testimony. The Book of Job is the account of how he regained his original confession. The theological problem here is the predictability of God’s historical sanctions. If God’s curses come as unpredictably as His blessings in response to covenantal faithfulness, the world takes on the appearance of ethical randomness. This is the world of Meredith G. Kline: “And meanwhile it [the common grace order] must run its course within the uncertainties of the mutually conditioning principles of common grace and common curse, prosperity and adversity being experienced in a manner largely unpredictable because of the

1. Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16, vol. 3 of The Anchor Bible (New York: Doubleday, 1991), p. 59.

812

DEUTERONOMY

inscrutable sovereignty of the divine will that dispenses them in mysterious ways.”2 The conclusion of the Book of Job indicates that the predictability of God’s covenant sanctions is reliable. “So the LORD blessed the latter end of Job more than his beginning: for he had fourteen thousand sheep, and six thousand camels, and a thousand yoke of oxen, and a thousand she asses” (Job 42:12). This indicates that the sanctions are not always immediate, but they are predictable. They are not random.

A Token Payment God required the beneiciaries of His blessings to acknowledge the source of these blessings. The means of acknowledgment was their assembling at a formal place of worship. Their sacriice was their formal admission that God was the source of their blessings. This implied that there would be further blessings. This was an aspect of the covenant’s system of sanctions. “But thou shalt remember the LORD thy God: for it is he that giveth thee power to get wealth, that he may establish his covenant which he sware unto thy fathers, as it is this day” (Deut. 8:18). The positive sanction of wealth ajrmed the covenant. That is, God demonstrated His commitment to the covenant by creating a predictable stream of blessings for them. By acknowledging retroactively that God had shown grace to Israel, the Israelites were securing future blessings. Grace is to be followed by a token payment. God’s grace to Israel was greater than the payment required. The token payment nevertheless was adequate to secure another round of grace. Then were they buying God’s grace? Not in the sense of full payment for services rendered. It was a token payment to God for services already rendered. This testiied to their awareness that grace was the basis of their blessings. Grace is not paid for by its recipients. Token payments are important in maintaining covenantal faithfulness. Paul wrote that man’s token payment involves everything he owns: “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacriice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service” (Rom. 12:1). Everything 2. Meredith G. Kline, “Comments on an Old-New Error,” Westminster Theological Journal, XLI (Fall 1978), p. 184.

The Firstfruits Offering: A Token Payment

813

that man can bring before God in payment for services rendered is a token payment. “So likewise ye, when ye shall have done all those things which are commanded you, say, We are unproitable servants: we have done that which was our duty to do” (Luke 17:10). So, in efect, the irstfruits ofering was a token payment of a token payment.

Conclusion The irstfruits ofering was a token payment for blessings already received: corporate blessings and personal blessings. Israelites sacriiced more wealth to get to Jerusalem than they did in surrendering ownership of a handful of grain. They acknowledged that God was the source of their blessings. They acknowledged also that their token payments were not sujcient to repay God. Their covenantal faithfulness in participating in a liturgy of thanksgiving secured for themselves a continuing stream of blessings. The historical predictability of God’s visible corporate sanctions for covenantal faithfulness was at the heart of this ritual feast. It reminded them that God could be trusted to deliver them in the future, just as He had delivered them in the past. Past sanctions testiied to future sanctions. Two festivals of Israel, Passover and Firstfruits, looked back in history to God’s deliverance of the nation, but they also looked forward to the maintenance of the kingdom inheritance. The past was prologue.

65 Positive POSITIVE Confession and Corporate Sanctions CONFESSION AND CORPORATE SANCTIONS When thou hast made an end of tithing all the tithes of thine increase the third year, which is the year of tithing, and hast given it unto the Levite, the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow, that they may eat within thy gates, and be illed; Then thou shalt say before the LORD thy God, I have brought away the hallowed things out of mine house, and also have given them unto the Levite, and unto the stranger, to the fatherless, and to the widow, according to all thy commandments which thou hast commanded me: I have not transgressed thy commandments, neither have I forgotten them: I have not eaten thereof in my mourning, neither have I taken away ought thereof for any unclean use, nor given ought thereof for the dead: but I have hearkened to the voice of the LORD my God, and have done according to all that thou hast commanded me. Look down from thy holy habitation, from heaven, and bless thy people Israel, and the land which thou hast given us, as thou swarest unto our fathers, a land that loweth with milk and honey (Deut. 26:12–15).

The theocentric focus of this law is God’s oath-bound status as the sanctions-bringer in Israel. The supplicant called on God to enforce His covenant through sanctions: “Look down from thy holy habitation, from heaven, and bless thy people Israel, and the land which thou hast given us, as thou swarest unto our fathers, a land that loweth with milk and honey.” He called for God to bless His people today, just as He had blessed their fathers. This law was revealed before God had given Canaan into Israel’s hands. God would soon demonstrate the covenantal basis of this law, namely, Israel’s victory over Canaan. The victory over Canaan would ratify this law. This was a land law, i.e., having to do with tribal celebrations.

814

Positive Confession and Corporate Sanctions

815

The laws governing the second and third tithes appear in Deu1 teronomy 14:22–23. This law was diferent. It mandated a public oath after the presentation of the third tithe, meaning the third-year tithe. This oath went beyond the presentation of the tithe. Basically, this oath was a means of covenant renewal. It belonged in point four of the biblical covenant model.

Confession and Sanctions The person had just brought his tithe into the town. He then was required to declare this tithe as representative of all the other commandments. As surely as he had not cheated God and the recipients of this holy (hallowed) tithe, so he had not broken any of God’s commandments. “Then thou shalt say before the LORD thy God, I have brought away the hallowed things out of mine house, and also have given them unto the Levite, and unto the stranger, to the fatherless, and to the widow, according to all thy commandments which thou hast commanded me: I have not transgressed thy commandments, neither have I forgotten them: I have not eaten thereof in my mourning, neither have I taken away ought thereof for any unclean use, nor given ought thereof for the dead: but I have hearkened to the voice of the LORD my God, and have done according to all that thou hast commanded me.” This was comprehensive self-testimony. It covered everything. For a man to make such a claim, he would have had to be perfect. Such perfection included making atonement and restitution for his sins. In this sense, he was to be as perfect as Job: “There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job; and that man was perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil. . . . And it was so, when the days of their feasting were gone about, that Job sent and sanctiied them, and rose up early in the morning, and ofered burnt oferings according to the number of them all: for Job said, It may be that my sons have sinned, and cursed God in their hearts. Thus did Job continually” (Job 1:1, 5). To make an ajrmation as comprehensive as the one mandated by this passage meant that the individual making it was renewing his covenant with God. This oath must have been taken in front of a

1. See Chapter 34.

816

DEUTERONOMY

Levite, for the sins in question were not merely civil crimes. He then called down God’s positive sanctions on the nation based on his ajrmation of his own atoned-for legal status. He was adding his public testimony to the nation’s covenantal request for God’s positive corporate sanctions. This of course assumed that others in Israel also were making this ajrmation. On the basis of their corporate confession, they called on God to bring positive sanctions. Was the excommunicated Israelite required to take this oath? Was the resident alien? I cannot imagine why. A man outside the ecclesiastical covenant could hardly have been required to ajrm it. Although he was required to pay his tithe as the land’s steward, he was not required to take an oath that would have been inherently false. As a noncitizen, he was in no position to call formally on God to impose positive sanctions. He was not under oath-bound ecclesiastical sanctions.

Historical Sanctions This oath was a positive confession personally and a positive confession corporately. It did not call down God’s blessings on the individual except insofar as he was under God’s corporate sanctions. The positive personal confession had to do with his obedience in the past. The positive corporate confession invoked God’s past sanctions on Israel’s behalf at the conquest as the precedent for His future sanctions. By testifying to their continuing faith in the story of God’s covenantal sanctions in the past, they ajrmed their conidence in His covenantal sanctions in the future. A loss of faith in God’s past sanctions would have been fatal for this oath. Such a loss of faith would have undermined the confession. Their faith in those sanctions also would have persuaded them to avoid confessing their own individual perfection. If they lied, they could expect no positive sanctions. They could also expect negative sanctions. To the degree that they believed in God’s past sanctions against Canaan, they should have believed in God’s future sanctions against them for disobedience. “And it shall be, if thou do at all forget the LORD thy God, and walk after other gods, and serve them, and worship them, I testify against you this day that ye shall surely perish. As the nations which the LORD destroyeth before your face, so shall ye perish; because ye would not be obedient unto the voice of the LORD your God” (Deut. 8:19–20).

Positive Confession and Corporate Sanctions

817

Once in each seven-year cycle, they were required to get right publicly with God. The outward evidence of getting right with God was their presentation of the third tithe. The third tithe was celebrated locally (Deut. 14:28). People would have known each other. This would have kept sinners more humble. Their positive confession regarding their sin-free judicial condition invoked God’s corporate sanctions: negative if they were lying; positive if they were telling the truth. The nation could not reasonably expect continued blessings if most of the confessors were either lying or ignorant of their own sins. This act of covenant renewal was preparatory for national blessings. A little over three years prior to the beginning of the sabbatical year, they called on God to provide national blessings. If their prayer was answered, they would have excess crops. This would be a source of the reserves required to store up food for the sabbatical year. A negative response from God would make these preparations much more expensive.

God’s Sanctions and Pagan Confession What God did in the past, He is willing to do in the future. There is continuity in history. The next passage ajrms that God’s goal for Israel was international acclaim: This day the LORD thy God hath commanded thee to do these statutes and judgments: thou shalt therefore keep and do them with all thine heart, and with all thy soul. Thou hast avouched [said] the LORD this day to be thy God, and to walk in his ways, and to keep his statutes, and his commandments, and his judgments, and to hearken unto his voice: And the LORD hath avouched thee this day to be his peculiar people, as he hath promised thee, and that thou shouldest keep all his commandments; And to make thee high above all nations which he hath made, in praise, and in name, and in honour; and that thou mayest be an holy people unto the LORD thy God, as he hath spoken (vv. 16–19).

The basis of historical continuity is obedience to God’s revealed law. Without obedience, there will be a negative discontinuity (Deut. 8:19–20). The twin sanctions of cursing and blessing determine discontinuity and continuity. Obedience would gain Israel a great international reputation. This means that the pagan nations

818

DEUTERONOMY

would honor Israel as a great nation. They would confess the truth about Israel and its law (Deut. 4:4–8). There would be consistency among God’s imputed righteousness to Israel, Israel’s actual performance in history, and pagan nations’ subjective acknowledgment of Israel’s objective righteousness. Two of God’s blessings in history are corporate righteousness and corporate confession, even by covenant-breakers. Although members of covenant-breaking nations had a diferent view of god, man, law, sanctions, and time, they would nonetheless confess that Israel’s success, based on the Bible’s view of god, man, law, sanctions, and time, was superior to their own. Their public confession would conform to God’s confession. They would acknowledge God’s blessings as blessings. In this sense, they would publicly abandon their own standards and declare God’s. This is why covenant law is a form of evangelism.2 Because biblical law is attached to positive corporate sanctions and continuity – long-term development – its visible results are so manifest that covenant-breakers are compelled by the evidence to confess its superiority. The pagan’s ability to recognize and confess the truth is an aspect of common grace. The objectivity of God’s corporate blessings in history overcomes the hostile confession and false perception of God and His kingdom by covenant-breakers. Isaiah prophesied this eschatological condition: Behold, a king shall reign in righteousness, and princes shall rule in judgment. And a man shall be as an hiding place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land. And the eyes of them that see shall not be dim, and the ears of them that hear shall hearken. The heart also of the rash shall understand knowledge, and the tongue of the stammerers shall be ready to speak plainly. The vile person shall be no more called liberal, nor the churl said to be bountiful. For the vile person will speak villany, and his heart will work iniquity, to practise hypocrisy, and to utter error against the LORD, to make empty the soul of the hungry, and he will cause the drink of the thirsty to fail. The instruments also of the churl are evil: he deviseth wicked devices to destroy the poor with lying words, even when the needy speaketh right. But the liberal deviseth liberal things; and by liberal things shall he stand (Isa. 32:1–8).

2. See Chapter 8, above.

Positive Confession and Corporate Sanctions

819

This does not mean that covenant-breakers are converted to soul-saving faith by the testimony of their own eyes. Conversion is by God’s special grace. Those who are not converted will, in the inal rebellion, join with Satan in an attack on what is good and successful. The objective testimony of God’s blessings on a covenantkeeping social order will enrage covenant-breakers and goad them into a inal act of destruction. This will end history. “And they went up on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city: and ire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them. And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of ire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever” (Rev. 20:9–10). When they rebel, they will rebel against a universal, triumphant civilization that is objectively so successful that it calls forth the religion of revolution.3

Conclusion The Israelites had to bring in their third-year tithes. A failure to do so would have undermined this confession. But this confession used the tithe as a model of covenantal obedience in general. They had to declare publicly, one by one, that they had obeyed all of God’s laws in the previous seven-year period. This was a covenant renewal ceremony. It called down God’s positive sanctions, but this necessarily involved the risk of negative sanctions for false oathtaking. This corporate event sealed Israel’s legal condition until the sabbatical year of release, as either a covenant-keeping nation or a covenant-breaking nation. If God withheld His blessings, they would be tempted to plant crops during the year of release. This would have brought down even greater negative sanctions. This corporate oath ceremony ceased to be required when the third tithe ceased to be required. The third tithe was a land law primarily and a seed law secondarily. This tithe was a communal tithe that united the members of each tribe in the tribe’s towns. It was a tribal law. With the cessation of Israel’s tribes in A.D. 70, this law was annulled. 3. Gary North, Dominion and Common Grace: The Biblical Basis of Progress (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987), ch. 8.

Part IV: Oath/Sanctions (27–30)

66 LANDMARK CURSE Landmark AND and Curse Cursed be he that removeth his neighbour’s landmark. And all the people shall say, Amen (Deut. 27:17).

This chapter begins with a command to set up stones on Canaan’s side of the Jordan (v. 2). These stones would have the law of God written on them (v. 3). These stones would be made into an altar on which burnt oferings (negative) and peace oferings (positive) would be ofered by the people (vv. 6–7). The Levites would then pronounce a series of curses on speciic acts (vv. 14–26). This chapter marks a shift from law to sanctions in the Book of Deuteronomy. The theocentric focus of the landmark law is God’s ojce as owner of the whole earth. He places boundaries around His property, beginning with the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This required public confession was a recapitulation of the law governing landmarks: “Thou shalt not remove thy neighbour’s landmark, which they of old time have set in thine inheritance, which thou shalt inherit in the land that the LORD thy God giveth thee to possess it” (Deut. 19:14).1 The sin of removing a neighbor’s landmark in order to enlarge one’s own inheritance involves disinheriting one’s neighbor. It is an act of theft. It violates the eighth commandment: “Thou shalt not steal” (Ex. 20:15). This was not a land law. It is universal. Moses told the people the following: after the nation had crossed the Jordan and entered the land, they were to assemble at the dual mountains of the dual sanctions, Gerizim (blessing) and 1. Chapter 42.

820

Landmark and Curse

821

Ebal (cursing) (Deut. 27:12–13). The Levites were then to declare speciic acts that would bring cursing to the violators. After each declaration, the assembled nation would respond, “Amen.” That is, the people would ratify each law and its declared curse. This would constitute an act of national covenant renewal. The new generation would renew formally what their parents had ratiied at Mt. Sinai a generation earlier (Ex. 19). This ratiication was to be corporate; all the people would participate. The law of the landmark is the only one in the list (vv. 15–26) that was explicitly economic. None of them was a land law or seed law. Two others may have had economic aspects, but they had to do with the perversion of justice: “Cursed be he that perverteth the judgment of the stranger, fatherless, and widow. And all the people shall say, Amen” (v. 19). “Cursed be he that taketh reward to slay an innocent person. And all the people shall say, Amen” (v. 25). The presumption in these two instances is that the civil law would be misused for someone’s beneit. The sought-for benefit would turn into a curse. The list of curses ended with the requirement that the entire list be ratiied: “Cursed be he that confirmeth not all the words of this law to do them. And all the people shall say, Amen” (v. 26). That is, partial ratiication would lead to a curse, and the nation was to invoke this curse. He who refused to invoke the whole of the law and its curses thereby placed himself under the covenant’s curse. This fact was publicly to be declared by all the other participants. The nation would soon exercise the democratic right of sealing the national covenant on behalf of every member of this covenant, present and future. The people could not exercise what might be called a pick-andchoose veto over God. They could not pick and choose from among a large list of provisions. They were confronted with a comprehensive list of provisions. God established the covenant. They could ratify all of its stipulations and thereby escape the curses.

Boundaries and Sanctions The landmark is a physical boundary, but it is also an ethical boundary. This corporate confession appears in a list of boundaries. The nation was required to confess that there were curses attached to violations of these ethical boundaries.

822

DEUTERONOMY

Those Christians who deny that the Mosaic law carries into the New Covenant should review this list of curses. Which of them is no longer operable? Cursed be the man that maketh any graven or molten image, an abomination unto the LORD, the work of the hands of the craftsman, and putteth it in a secret place. And all the people shall answer and say, Amen. Cursed be he that setteth light by his father or his mother. And all the people shall say, Amen. Cursed be he that removeth his neighbour’s landmark. And all the people shall say, Amen. Cursed be he that maketh the blind to wander out of the way. And all the people shall say, Amen. Cursed be he that perverteth the judgment of the stranger, fatherless, and widow. And all the people shall say, Amen. Cursed be he that lieth with his father’s wife; because he uncovereth his father’s skirt. And all the people shall say, Amen. Cursed be he that lieth with any manner of beast. And all the people shall say, Amen. Cursed be he that lieth with his sister, the daughter of his father, or the daughter of his mother. And all the people shall say, Amen. Cursed be he that lieth with his mother in law. And all the people shall say, Amen. Cursed be he that smiteth his neighbour secretly. And all the people shall say, Amen. Cursed be he that taketh reward to slay an innocent person. And all the people shall say, Amen (Deut. 27:15–25).

If all of these seem to be still in force, what about the concluding confession? “Cursed be he that conirmeth not all the words of this law to do them. And all the people shall say, Amen” (v. 26). In other words, if these laws carry into the New Covenant, what about God’s sanctions against their violation? If a man is cursed who violates them, what about the Mosaic law’s civil sanctions against such acts? On what judicial basis have these been annulled? Are these sins today less heinous in God’s eyes? Has the coming of the New Covenant made men less responsible before God than before Christ’s revelation? Is it a biblical principle that less is expected from those to whom more has been given? Or is it rather the reverse (Luke 12:48)?

Conclusion This prohibition against moving the landmark appears in a passage that speciied the judicial content of the corporate act of national covenant renewal by the conquest generation. It pronounced a curse against the person who moves his neighbor’s landmark, thereby disinheriting his neighbor and his heirs.

Landmark and Curse

823

The invocation of a curse marks each of these boundaries as covenantal. The commentator who denies that the Mosaic law applies in the New Covenant has a major problem with this passage: there is no known covenantal principle of discontinuity that annuls any of these sins. There is also no known covenantal principle that revokes their curses. Then on what judicial basis have the civil sanctions attached to these sins been annulled? This raises the issue of hermeneutics: the biblical principle of biblical interpretation.

67 ObjectiveOBJECTIVE Wealth and WEALTH Historical Progress AND HISTORICAL PROGRESS Blessed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy ground, and the fruit of thy cattle, the increase of thy kine, and the locks of thy sheep. Blessed shall be thy basket and thy store. . . . The LORD shall command the blessing upon thee in thy storehouses, and in all that thou settest thine hand unto; and he shall bless thee in the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee. . . . And the LORD shall make thee plenteous in goods, in the fruit of thy body, and in the fruit of thy cattle, and in the fruit of thy ground, in the land which the LORD sware unto thy fathers to give thee (Deut. 28:4–5, 8, 11).

The previous passage cited a long list of curses. We now come to a passage devoted entirely to God’s sanctions in history. The theocentric focus of this passage is God as the sanctions-bringer. In response to Israel’s covenantal obedience (Deut. 28:1–2), God promised to bring blessings on the nation. These blessings would include wealth. Deuteronomy 28 is a recapitulation of Leviticus 26. It announces dual sanctions: blessing and cursing. The chapter begins with blessing; it ends with cursing. The section on cursing is much longer than the section on blessing. This was not a land law. The entire passage is not a land law. Modern commentators who reject theonomy regard this passage as a land law, although they may use some other term to describe it. They do not acknowledge that these threatened corporate sanctions carry into the New Covenant. They are incorrect. These sanctions are historical. They are predictable. Covenantal rebellion by a society will lead to God’s imposition of these sanctions. This is why this passage and Leviticus 26 are among the most important in the Bible

824

Objective Wealth and Historical Progress

825

– I believe the most important – for the creation of an explicitly biblical social theory. These promises related to measurable quantities – “increase,” “plenteous” – of speciic goods: cattle, kine, sheep. “Increase” here referred to storage implements: basket, storehouses. The numerical objectivity of these reference points is crucial for this passage. These were not inward blessings. The fulillment of these covenantal promises, Moses told the nation, will be visible to the Israelites and their enemies alike. They will serve as evidence of God’s sovereignty over history through the predictability of His covenant relationships.

Visible Testimony Under the Mosaic Covenant The blessings and cursings of God under the Mosaic Covenant were sure. They were not disconnected from God’s law. There was a bedrock objectivity that united covenant-keepers and covenant-breakers. That which God regarded as a blessing, He told Israel, all men would regard as a blessing; the same was true of cursing. There was a shared universe of discourse and evaluation. This objectivity was not undermined by subjective evaluations by individuals or groups. The lists in Deuteronomy 28 were based on an agreement among subjective evaluators. The subjectivism of individual perception would not overcome the objectivity of the corporate sanctions. The nation would enjoy more. The idea of national blessings and cursings rests on the existence of objective measures. For men to make such evaluations, numerical measures must apply to the external world. To own a larger number of desirable goods is superior to owning fewer of them. However clever the methodological subjectivist may become, there is no escape from Deuteronomy 28. The objective superiority of more is assumed by God. Other things being equal, it is better to be rich and healthy than it is to be poor and sick. This passage ratiies the legitimacy of individual comparisons of national wealth. An individual may lawfully seek out evidence of superior performance of any society. At the same time, this passage does not ratify the legitimacy of government-funded comparisons of national wealth. The collection of economic or other performance data by the government, except for military-related purposes or other aspects of law enforcement, is illegitimate. To use State coercion to fund data-gathering is a form of illicit numbering. The Mosaic law made it clear that numbering was lawful only in preparation

826

DEUTERONOMY

for holy warfare. It was not to be a common activity of the State. Defenders of the central planning State can justify its ejciency only on the basis of its possession of more accurate and more relevant information than the private sector possesses. Statistics becomes a necessary justiication for socialism and interventionism. Strip the State of its access to pretended knowledge, and you thereby strip away its aura of omniscience.1 The point of Deuteronomy 28 is not that there are objective measures of economic performance that are available to State economic planners. On the contrary, the point of this passage is this: the way to wealth, both individual and corporate, is through systematic adherence to God’s Bible-revealed law. Employees of the State are not supposed to search the records of historical data for tax policies or other forms of coercion that lead, statistically speaking, to a greater likelihood of an increase in per capita wealth. Instead, they are to content themselves with the enforcement of God’s law in a quest for civil justice. When they are successful in this venture, per capita wealth will increase. Justice produces wealth. Any attempt to discover economic laws of wealth based on a detailed search of detailed economic statistics reverses the Bible’s concept of moral cause and economic efect. It places economic causation above moral causation in the advent of the wealth of nations. Adam Smith understood this; his disciples rarely have. Before he wrote An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), he wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). His moderate Deism was a desiccated version of the covenantal Presbyterianism of his Scottish forbears. His contractualism was a man-centered version of their covenantalism. His orderly world of economic causation rested on moral cause and efect in history. The seeming autonomy of his economics from morality, and of his morality from theology, is an illusion. Smith’s epistemology moved in the direction of autonomy, no doubt, but his economics was not an exercise in value-free methodology. He recognized that an economy is grounded in moral causation, for society rests on justice. “Society may subsist, though not in the most comfortable state, without

1. Gary North, Sanctions and Dominion: An Economic Commentary on Numbers (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1997), ch. 2.

Objective Wealth and Historical Progress

827 2

beneicence; but the prevalence of injustice must utterly destroy it.” Social order is not the product of immoral behavior, however proitable vice may be in the short run. “Vice is always capricious – virtue only is regular and orderly.”3 Self-interest that is devoid of love of the neighbor cannot build a civilization. “As to love our neighbour as we love ourselves is the great law of Christianity, so it is the great precept of nature that we love ourselves only as we love our neighbour, or, what amounts to the same thing, as our neighbour is capable of loving us.”4

Capital and Covenant Evaluating God’s favor to a society by an appeal to numerical measures is valid. But this evaluation must always be governed by the economist’s qualiication: “other things being equal.” The “other things” in this case are ethical. Ethics comes irst. For most people, it is better for them to be middle class than wealthy. Why? Because of the ethical temptations associated with great wealth. “Remove far from me vanity and lies: give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with food convenient for me: Lest I be full, and deny thee, and say, Who is the LORD? or lest I be poor, and steal, and take the name of my God in vain” (Prov. 30:8–9). If a person’s ethical status could be ensured irrespective of wealth, then more would always be better than less. But it is inherent in the covenantal structure of a fallen world that wealth and ethics are intertwined. Adam Smith understood this: “The virtue of frugality lies in a middle between avarice and profusion, of which the one consists in an excess, the other in a defect, of the proper attention to the objects of self-interest.”5 He lauded frugality in the name of capital formation, but not frugality to the point of greed. He praised spending by the wealthy as a source of beneit for workers, but not to the point of wasting one’s inheritance. Here is where biblical covenantalism gets tricky. On the one hand, wealth is designed to conirm the national covenant. “But thou shalt remember the LORD thy God: for it is he that giveth thee

2. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Indianapolis, Indiana: LibertyClassics, 1976), p. 167. 3. Ibid., p. 368. 4. Ibid., p. 72. 5. Ibid., p. 438.

828

DEUTERONOMY

power to get wealth, that he may establish his covenant which he sware unto thy fathers, as it is this day” (Deut. 8:18). But it can just as easily undermine the covenant: “And thou say in thine heart, My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth” (Deut. 8:17). The same numerical sanction – wealth – can become a means of grace or a means of wrath. One’s covenantal status determines which efect wealth has. The trouble is, we are not always sure about what our covenantal status is, nor are we sure what it will become under diferent economic conditions. This is why the author of the Proverbs prayed for middling wealth. It is safer.

The Tendency Toward the Middle In genetics, this tendency is called “regression to the mean.” It was discovered by Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin.6 So far, it has applied to every system we have discovered.7 Within any system, there are limits to growth of any component of that system. The system imposes these limits. Then what about wealth and poverty? God is sovereign over the poor. He raises them up – not all of them, but some of them. “The LORD maketh poor, and maketh rich: he bringeth low, and lifteth up. He raiseth up the poor out of the dust, and lifteth up the beggar from the dunghill, to set them among princes, and to make them inherit the throne of glory: for the pillars of the earth are the LORD’S, and he hath set the world upon them” (I Sam. 2:7–8). God can intervene in history to break the cycle of poverty as surely as He breaks the cycle of wealth. The question is: Is there a cycle of poverty? Is there a cycle of wealth? Do the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, “other things being equal”? This is another way of asking: Is God capricious? Does He raise up some and cast down others for no particular reason? Deuteronomy 28 denies this. God has established a structure of economic order. This structure moves most people toward the middle of a bell-shaped curve. Wealth, like weight and height, is always comparative. First, there are not many poor men in a covenant-keeping

6. Peter L. Bernstein, Against the Odds: The Remarkable Story of Risk (New York: Wiley, 1996), p. 167. 7. Ibid., ch. 10. George Gilder believes that it does not apply to the computer chip, which he calls the microcosm. We shall see. It surely applies to the proitability of high-tech manufacturing facilities that produce computer chips.

Objective Wealth and Historical Progress

829

society. “I have been young, and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread” (Ps. 37:25). Second, there are not many rich men. Capital is hard to earn and harder to retain unless the State intervenes to protect existing holders of capital from new sources of competition. If a State does this, then its national economy eventually falls behind free market societies that refuse to grant such coercive protection to special-interest groups. If a society is getting richer than its rivals, the poor inside this society may become richer than the middle class in another. Can this lead be maintained indeinitely? Or must a society, like an individual within society, regress to the mean? We begin with a statistical observation: the efects of long-term economic growth are cumulative. A small rate of growth, if compounded, creates huge efects over centuries. A slightly higher rate of growth, if maintained, creates huge disparities of wealth between nations over centuries. But huge disparities of anything within a system are what call forth the counter-efects: regression to the mean. If a nation has a competitive lead, other nations will be tempted to imitate it, assuming that the sources of its advantage become known. There is a great personal economic incentive for outsiders to discover and appropriate these secrets. Can God’s covenantal blessings be maintained indeinitely? To answer this question, we must not appeal to the Old Covenant’s category of original sin. The familiar Genesis pattern of creation, Fall, and redemption appeared continually in the Old Covenant, but the New Covenant has broken that pattern through the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ. The possibility of sustained confession and sustained economic growth does exist as a theoretical ideal. The history of the West over the last two centuries has demonstrated this possibility with respect to the economy. Men have found the secrets of widespread wealth: individual freedom, enforceable contracts, future-orientation, capital accumulation, and technology. England discovered these secrets irst. The United States replaced England as an engine of growth early in the twentieth century. Asia seems to be replacing the United States at the end. A nation is subject to the lure of autonomy: “And thou say in thine heart, My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth.” It can lose its position of leadership. Historically, every leading nation has. But the New Covenant has overcome original

830

DEUTERONOMY

sin in a fundamental way. It has made possible the Mosaic law’s ideal of long-term compound growth. It has given man a new eschatology, one which is no longer trapped by the cyclicalism of the pagan world. Linear history – creation, Fall, redemption, inal judgment – can be applied to nations and societies. Society is not organic. It does not parallel biology: birth, growth, decline, death. Society is covenantal: confession, obedience/disobedience, sanctions, inheritance/disinheritance. There is a bell-shaped distribution of wealth within a society because of the predictable outcomes of increased temptations that occur on the far ends of capital’s spectrum. At one end, the rich man is tempted to forget God. If he succumbs, he loses his wealth. Or his heirs forget to honor the moral basis of wealth-creation. They dissipate their inheritance. The process of inheritance is geared to righteousness. At the other end of the curve, the poor man who steals is eventually caught and sold into bondage under a successful person. His victim receives payment; he receives training; his buyer receives a stream of labor services. If the servant is successful and buys his way out of bondage, he re-enters society as a disciplined man, and presumably a self-disciplined man. He begins to accumulate wealth. Can a family maintain its advantage? No more than a society can. Then what about society? Must it regress to the economic mean in the international family of nations? It is possible for a covenantally faithful society to retain its advanced position until such time as: 1) it succumbs to the temptation of autonomy; 2) other nations imitate it and become even more faithful. On the one hand, sin can undermine a society. It can pull it back to the middle of the bell-shaped curve. On the other hand, the gospel can spread, bringing other nations into the growth mode. Both efects have the efect of moving a society into the middle of the curve. The deciding factor here is grace, not statistics. Then we must ask: Is there an inherent tendency built into New Covenant creation that pulls a nation to the middle of the economic curve? There was in the Old Covenant: the power of original sin. To answer this, we must appeal, not to original sin, but to eschatology. If the gospel spreads to many nations, as the postmillennialist insists that it must, then the move to the middle will manifest itself. Grace is not a national monopoly. On the other hand, pessimillennialists invoke the Old Covenant’s pattern of redemption and Fall. They are implicit defenders of a cyclical theory of national development: rise

Objective Wealth and Historical Progress

831

and fall. If they are correct, then grace will be removed from any covenant-keeping nation, and this once-blessed nation will move to the middle or even to the poverty side of the curve. Both eschatological systems declare that there is no permanent national lead possible in God’s covenantal history. Nations rise and fall, or else they rise and get overtaken, but none can maintain a permanent lead apart from its continued lead in the area of ethical sanctiication – highly unlikely, given men’s proclivity to allow wealth to corrupt them through pride (Deut. 8:17).

Visible Testimony Under the New Covenant The visible outcome of covenant-keeping is external blessing. This theme is basic to the Pentateuch. I argue that it is basic to the entire Bible. My argument is not taken seriously by Christian commentators and Christian social theorists. They argue that there has been a great discontinuity between the Old Covenant and the New Covenant. This discontinuity supposedly has broken the predictability of God’s visible responses in history to man’s obedience or disobedience. But if there has been a great discontinuity, then what of the evangelism aspect of God’s Bible-revealed law (Deut. 4:5–8)?8 Under the Mosaic Covenant, covenant-breakers could see that the outcome of covenant-keeping was superior to other outcomes. This realization was designed by God to call forth the above confession. But Christians today assume that under the New Covenant, this older relationship between obedience and wealth is gone. The covenant-breaker does not make such a confession regarding the wisdom of covenant-keeping, presumably because no such relationship exists, though possibly because he refuses to face the facts. The testimony that God gave to covenant-breakers through Israel under the Old Covenant supposedly no longer exists. The arrival of the New Covenant has supposedly left modern man with less excuse. Under the Old Covenant, foreigners could see that Israel’s law-order was superior. Under the New Covenant, they supposedly cannot see this because no nation possesses or can possess any such covenantal law order. Under the Mosaic law, in short, covenantbreakers supposedly possessed greater clarity regarding the blessings

8. See Chapter 8, above.

832

DEUTERONOMY

of the covenant, and therefore had greater responsibility for rejecting the covenant than they have today. This strange theory of covenantal responsibility is implicitly held by the vast majority of Christians today. We are asked to believe that the New Covenant has left covenant-breaking men with more excuse for their rebellion, for the clearer covenantal categories of the Old Covenant have been superseded by a less clear covenantal order. I argue that this theory of the regressive covenants is incorrect. There is progress in covenantal history. Things get clearer over time, not more muddled. The death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ in history have made the Great Commission possible (Matt. 28:18–20).9 The sending of the Holy Spirit has granted to God’s people greater understanding than Old Covenant saints possessed. “Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak: and he will shew you things to come” (John 16:13). With greater knowledge comes greater responsibility. With the spread of the gospel across national borders has come a spread of knowledge. There remain diferences between the national blessings of God and national cursings. Modern Christian academics assure us that these distinctions no longer exist. This is Meredith G. Kline’s position. It is the position of every Christian social theorist who denies the New Covenant applicability of Deuteronomy 28. I contend the opposite: it is not covenant-breakers who are blind to the diferences, but rather modern Christian academic theorists.

Social Theory Deuteronomy 28, more than any other passage in the Bible, serves as the basis for the development of a uniquely Christian social theory. If this system of predictable covenantal blessings and cursings was applicable only to the Mosaic era, then there is no possibility of a uniquely Christian social theory. Christians would have to pick and choose among various humanistic theories of social causation. This in fact is what they have been doing since about 1700. Even before then, most Christian social theorists went to the Greeks 9. Kenneth L. Gentry, Jr., The Greatness of the Great Commission: The Christian Enterprise in a Fallen World (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990).

Objective Wealth and Historical Progress

833

and Romans before they went to the Mosaic law. After 1700, they all did. There was no distinctly Christian social theory from the demise of casuistry, both Protestant and Roman Catholic, until the 1960’s.10 It was the simultaneous appearance of the situation ethics movement and the Christian Reconstruction movement that brought casuistry back to Protestant thought. Meredith G. Kline has attacked Christian Reconstruction in the name of covenantal randomness: “And meanwhile it [the common grace order] must run its course within the uncertainties of the mutually conditioning principles of common grace and common curse, prosperity and adversity being experienced in a manner largely unpredictable because of the inscrutable sovereignty of the divine will that dispenses them in mysterious ways.”11 But his criticism goes beyond the Christian Reconstruction movement. His broader target is the New Covenant ideal of Christendom. He denies that such an ideal has its roots in the New Covenant. He is not alone in this viewpoint. It is shared by virtually all of modern Protestant Christianity. The debate centers on which humanist ideal should be substituted for Christendom. In the Protestant West, academically certiied evangelicals tend to baptize left-wing Enlightenment social theory, while fundamentalists baptize right-wing Enlightenment social theory. Both groups dismiss as theocratic any judicial system that invokes the Mosaic law as a binding standard for social policy. It is generally considered legitimate to invoke the Ten Commandments, but even here, there is deep suspicion. The irst three commandments are considered of limits for civil law; the fourth is considered problematical for civil law; and ive through ten are regarded as valid aspects of the civil order only to the extent that they are enforced only as universal statements of a common-ground moral law. Both groups prefer to live under humanism’s theocracy rather than the Bible’s theocracy. Both groups proclaim, “we’re under grace, not law,” meaning that both groups baptize the rule of humanistic lawyers. Both proclaim

10. Thomas Wood, English Casuistical Divinity in the Seventeenth Century (London: S.P.C.K., 1952). On the decline of Roman Catholic casuistry in 1700, see Albert J. Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin, The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 269. 11. Meredith G. Kline, “Comments on an Old-New Error,” Westminster Theological Journal, XLI (Fall 1978), p. 184.

834

DEUTERONOMY

that God rules in history, but only through the tender mercies of covenant-breakers. Because Kline’s theology is opposed to the ideal of Christendom, it is opposed to the ideal of Christian social theory. He ofers no social theory. The same is true of his disciples. They have no theory of history. Because they regard the Mosaic law and the civil sanctions that God imposed to defend it as an “intrusion” in the history of the covenant, Kline and his followers can ofer no theory of history either before or after the Mosaic era. History is inscrutable for them, and they insist that this is history’s fault rather than theirs.

The Covenantal Structure of History The biblical covenant is an integrated system. It cannot be accurately discussed apart from all ive points. Sanctions link law and eschatology. God’s sovereignty enforces this link through hierarchy. He is over the creation, yet He acts through the creation. He is diferent from the creation, yet He is manifested by the creation. The judicial basis of His wrath on covenant-breakers and their works is two-fold: 1) original sin; 2) the fact that the creation relects God’s moral character to all men. “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness; Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse” (Rom. 1:18–20). The system of historical sanctions described in Deuteronomy 28 is the basis of men’s understanding of God’s eternal character. This system is representational. What happens in history is analogous to what happens in eternity: the extension of God’s kingdom. This extension is, irst of all, visible in history. Second, it is based on the predictable outcome of covenantal sanctions. The kingdom of God rests on the moral authority of God’s law. To argue that the kingdom’s extension in history is not predictably connected to men’s corporate responses to God’s law is to argue for the processes of history as either indeterminate (Kline) or perverse (Van Til). Van Til writes that the future will bring persecution for Christians at the hands of ever more powerful covenant-breakers.

Objective Wealth and Historical Progress

835

But when all the reprobate are epistemologically self-conscious, the crack of doom has come. The fully self-conscious reprobate will do all he can in every dimension to destroy the people of God. So while we seek with all our power to hasten the process of diferentiation in every dimension we are yet thankful, on the other hand, for “the day of grace,” the day of undeveloped diferentiation. Such tolerance as we receive on the part of the world is due to this fact that we live in the earlier, rather than in the later, stage of history. And such inluence on the public situation as we can efect, whether in society or in state, presupposes this undiferentiated stage of development.12

Van Til’s position is clear: as history develops, the persecution of Christians by the reprobates increases. The good get better, while the bad get worse. The good become less inluential, while the bad become increasingly dominant. Everyone becomes more selfconscious ethically. Spiritual darkness spreads as this self-awareness spreads. Christians should therefore be thankful that they live today rather than later. Christians are tolerated today, he says; later, they will be persecuted. Only the discontinuous end of history brings relief to Christians. This is the traditional amillennial view of the future. The good news of the gospel for a Christian theory of history supposedly is that history will end before things get so bad that the gospel is completely overcome culturally. In such a view, the inal state beyond the grave represents a radical discontinuity from history. It is not simply that corruption does not inherit incorruption. All Christians agree on this principle. So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption: It is sown in dishonour; it is raised in glory: it is sown in weakness; it is raised in power: It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body. . . . Now this I say, brethren, that lesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption. Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality. So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall

12. Cornelius Van Til, Common Grace (1947), reprinted in Common Grace and the Gospel (Nutley, New Jersey: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1972), p. 85.

836

DEUTERONOMY

have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory (I Cor. 15:42–44, 50–54).

What is signiicant for social theory in Van Til’s view of the coming eschatological discontinuity is the radical extent of the inheritance/disinheritance process in time vs. eternity. History’s supposed progressive disinheritance of covenant-keepers by covenant-breakers at the end of time becomes inheritance for covenant-keepers. For them, eternal victory is snatched out of the jaws of historical defeat. For covenant-breakers, the reverse is true. In Van Til’s version of amillennialism, eternity is not an extension of history; it is the great reversal of history. For Van Til, New Covenant history’s system of cultural sanctions is exactly the opposite of what is described in Deuteronomy 28. This is why I call his theory of common grace ethically perverse.13 My standard is Deuteronomy 28.

Epistemological Self-Consciousness Van Til argued that history will reveal an increase in epistemological self-consciousness. I have argued that he really meant ethical self-consciousness.14 Van Til’s theory of common grace raises an interesting question. If the covenant-breaker becomes more consistent with his God-denying presuppositions over time, then he must depart further and further from the truth. As an amillennialist, Van Til argued that this would increase the covenant-breaker’s power. As a postmillennialist, I argue that this would decrease his power. But the more interesting question is this: To what extent is the truth-denying covenant-breaker ready and willing to abandon his consistency for the sake of pragmatism? If Deuteronomy 28 is still in force, as I argue, then the covenant-breaker is headed for poverty. Look at the history of the Soviet Union if you want an example of covenant-breaking consistency run amok. Look at Red China’s “Great Leap Forward,” 1959–62: as many as 30 million people may have starved – the records are not clear.15 In the late 13. Gary North, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989), ch. 3. 14. Idem. 15. The most detailed account in English is Jasper Becker, Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine (New York: Free Press, 1997).

Objective Wealth and Historical Progress

837

1980’s, the Soviet Union collapsed in bankruptcy. Red China under Deng in the 1980’s abandoned socialism for the sake of economic growth. This experiment worked. Men’s desire for wealth has undermined socialism as an ideal, for they now recognize that socialism produces poverty. Socialism as a theory inally crashed and broke apart on the rocks of economic reality, 1988–1991. The world is no longer in the grip of the idea of socialism.16 When socialism faded as an ideal, it faded incredibly fast. Pragmatism overcame it almost overnight. The world looked at Gorbachev’s Russia and concluded: “Loser.” Nobody wants to be a loser. The Marxist promise of world domination loundered: in the inancial markets, in Afghanistan, and in the Persian Gulf.17 Communism’s eschatology of victory has become a joke. Without its eschatology, Commu18 nism is doomed. Its total failure was relected almost immediately in the discount book bins of the West: books on Marxism, now unsalable at retail prices. Except in university book stores, where tenured radicals are still employed, we no longer ind Marxist books ofered for sale. That ideological war is over. Marxism died with a whimper, not a bang. Left-wing Western humanist intellectuals have replaced their once-conident defenses of socialism with half-hearted ajrmations of the concept of private ownership (with extensive qualiications).19 They have grudgingly adopted more of the Bible’s truth in the name of practical reality. Pragmatism has overcome ideology. The desire for the good life has overcome the desire for political correctness among the West’s left-wing intelligentsia. Socialism became politically incorrect in the late 1980’s, despite all of the opprobrium heaped by the political and academic establishments on England’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and America’s President Ronald Reagan. Socialism has become a god that has visibly failed. No one 16. Clarence B. Carson, The World in the Grip of an Idea (New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House, 1979). 17. Iraq was a client state of the Soviet Union. Its defeat in early 1991 by the U.S. military broke the spell of the Soviet Union as a military powerhouse. In 1996, the Russian army was defeated by the army of the breakaway state of Chechenya. The Russian army has become a rag-tag force of unpaid beggars in the streets. Michael Specter, “In Triage, a Wasted Russia Sacriices Veterans,” New York Times (Jan. 19, 1997). 18. F. N. Lee, Communist Eschatology (Nutley, New Jersey: Craig Press, 1974). 19. So have left-wing Christian intellectuals. See Appendix F: “The Economic Re-Education of Ronald J. Sider.”

838

DEUTERONOMY

today wants to be known as someone who worships in socialism’s shrine. Socialism committed the ultimate sin for modern intellectuals: it became passé. At the end of history, there will be a great satanic rebellion. “And they went up on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city: and ire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them. And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of ire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever” (Rev. 20:9–10). This rebellion will be a rebellion against success, not failure. It will be a rebellion against an established Christian civilization, not against some marginalized ghetto culture. The whole point of Satan’s rebellion is to rebel. To describe this rebellion as if it will be a huge majority movement against a tiny handful of poverty-stricken, politically impotent Christians makes no sense. Covenant-breakers become less intellectually consistent over time, not more consistent. They become more pragmatic, more willing to subordinate themselves to a culture that delivers the goods – in the long run, Christian culture. Whenever they become more consistent, they produce the bad society, one that fails to deliver the goods. They want the fruits of covenant-keeping more than they want the fruits of covenant-breaking. This is why there can be social progress in history. Covenant-breakers will progressively recognize in the New Covenant what they recognized in the Old Covenant: “Behold, I have taught you statutes and judgments, even as the LORD my God commanded me, that ye should do so in the land whither ye go to possess it. Keep therefore and do them; for this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the nations, which shall hear all these statutes, and say, Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people. For what nation is there so great, who hath God so nigh unto them, as the LORD our God is in all things that we call upon him for? And what nation is there so great, that hath statutes and judgments so righteous as all this law, which I set before you this day?)” (Deut. 4:5–8). 20 At the end, they will rebel. That is why it will be the end. But to imagine that the good get weaker and the bad get stronger over time is to imagine a vain thing: the reversal – not merely the annulment – of Deuteronomy 28. 20. Gary North, Dominion and Common Grace: The Biblical Basis of Progress (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987), ch. 8.

Objective Wealth and Historical Progress

839

Conclusion Deuteronomy 28 sets forth blessings and cursings. These sanctions are national covenant sanctions. They have not been annulled by the New Covenant. Deuteronomy 28 sets forth the hope of progress in history: obedience brings inheritance; disobedience brings disinheritance. Covenant-keepers will inherit in history if they obey. The decisive issue here is not power; it is obedience. The objectivity of the blessings in history points to the power of common grace in history. Men who do not worship God nevertheless perceive the beneits of obeying God’s law. Men see with their eyes and acknowledge with their tongues that covenant-keeping brings more of the good things in life than covenant-breaking does. The objectivity of God’s historical sanctions testiies to the reality of the objectivity of God’s eternal sanctions. This is as it should be. It brings covenant-breakers under greater condemnation in history and eternity than if there were no predictability and objectivity to God’s covenant sanctions in history. There are two ways of denying the continuing authority of God’s system of covenant sanctions in history. First, by denying that the New Covenant’s corporate sanctions are continuous with the Old. This denial needs to be proven exegetically, not assumed automatically. Second, by denying that covenant-breaking men will subjectively see and acknowledge the admittedly objective structure of covenantal sanctions in history. But this attributes to covenant-breaking men a degree of continuous commitment to holding down the truth in unrighteousness far greater than their desire for the good life, which can be obtained by conforming to the external requirements of God’s law. What we have seen throughout history is that covenant-breakers are repeatedly willing to conform to God’s external laws for the sake of gaining the covenant’s objective blessings. Admittedly, they would become steadily more consistent with their own atheistic presuppositions if they could do so at zero price. But such consistency has a high price tag: economic stagnation and other unpleasant cursings. Men refuse to pay this price for too long, once they have seen that freedom works, elevating their rivals. When, at the Moscow Olympics in 1980, the Soviet elite saw what Western tourists owned, as well as what shoddy, pathetic goods the Soviet elite enjoyed, Communism’s doom was sealed. Eleven years,

840

DEUTERONOMY

an exploded nuclear reactor, a bankrupt economy, and a failed war in Afghanistan later, the Soviet Union fell. Deuteronomy 28 provides the basis of a self-consciously biblical social theory. But Deuteronomy 28 is rejected by modern Christian social theorists. This is why they refuse to provide anything explicitly biblical in the way of social theory. They baptize this or that humanist system. They reject the Pentateuch as a source of either judicial content or formal structure of social theory. “The Bible does not ofer economic blueprints,” they insist, which is why they are little more than cheerleaders for humanism rather than designers of a new civilization. “We’re under grace, not law,” they proclaim, which is why they are under humanist politicians, bureaucrats, and lawyers.

68 The Covenant OF of Prosperity THE COVENANT PROSPERITY Keep therefore the words of this covenant, and do them, that ye may prosper in all that ye do. Ye stand this day all of you before the LORD your God; your captains of your tribes, your elders, and your ojcers, with all the men of Israel, Your little ones, your wives, and thy stranger that is in thy camp, from the hewer of thy wood unto the drawer of thy water: That thou shouldest enter into covenant with the LORD thy God, and into his oath, which the LORD thy God maketh with thee this day: That he may establish thee to day for a people unto himself, and that he may be unto thee a God, as he hath said unto thee, and as he hath sworn unto thy fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob. Neither with you only do I make this covenant and this oath; But with him that standeth here with us this day before the LORD our God, and also with him that is not here with us this day (Deut. 29:9–15).

The positive sanction of prosperity is assured on the basis of covenant-keeping. The theocentric focus of this law is God as the king of the covenant. God called His people to come before Him to ratify His covenant. There is no doubt that He initiated it. They were to respond to His call. They did not call Him; He called them. This was an inter-generational covenant: “Neither with you only do I make this covenant and this oath; But with him that standeth here with us this day before the LORD our God, and also with him that is not here with us this day.” Those who would later inherit from this generation would be bound by the same covenant stipulations. That is, the stipulations remained with the inheritance. The property could not be alienated from the legal terms that had established the original right of inheritance. This was not a seed law or a land law. It was the law of the covenant: past, present, and

841

842

DEUTERONOMY

future. This includes the church and every nation in covenant with God through the church. “Therefore say I unto you, The kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof” (Matt. 21:43).

God’s Call to Prosperity “Keep therefore the words of this covenant, and do them, that ye may prosper in all that ye do.” These words constituted a call to prosperity. This was a call to dominion. It was a call to added responsibility. God expects more from those to whom He has given more than from those who have received less (Luke 12:48). Because we live in a culture that attributes enormous importance to prosperity, we may ind it dijcult to believe that men need to be called to prosperity. Nevertheless, there are cultures in which envy is dominant. To own too much is to invite reprisals. The very idea of seeking prosperity is anathema in such cultures. To set oneself apart through wealth is regarded as a transgression of fundamental cultural values. This is especially true in primitive cultures.1 This is what keeps them primitive. A similar mentality has been pervasive in American fundamentalist circles for over a century. Economic success is considered this-worldly. To pursue it is to risk being identiied as a person whose reference points are temporal rather than eternal. The same kind of hostility to wealth can be found in liberal and neoevangelical academic circles. History professor Ronald Sider’s best-selling book of the 1970’s, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger (1977), was a tract for its time. Two decades later, however, the allure of such tracts has diminished considerably. I can understand why Sider re-wrote his.2 The lure of a well-funded retirement portfolio is much greater today. A retirement fund of half a million dollars is considered too small by professors who were cheerleaders for Sider in 1977. This passage makes it plain that prosperity is a valid goal. This is why God has attached positive economic sanctions to His law. Obey Him, and you will tend to become wealthy. This tendency 1. Helmut Schoeck, Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, [1966] 1970), pp. 41, 295, 304, 305, 330. 2. See Appendix F: “The Economic Re-Education of Ronald J. Sider.”

The Covenant of Prosperity

843

may be ofset by uncharacteristic adversity, such as chronic sick3 ness, or by a calling that gains little monetary income, such as foreign missions. But on the whole, God’s people are supposed to be abnormally prosperous because they are to be abnormally obedient. God rewards obedience. This means that covenant-keepers are to exercise dominion in history. Wealth is a tool of dominion. As such, it is a legitimate goal. As surely as a tradesman seeks to own the tools that will increase his productivity, so should Christians seek to obey God’s revealed laws. God’s positive sanctions will pour down on those societies that obey Him. Men thus rewarded will ind it easier to extend their inluence into new areas or deeper into their own areas of service.

Future-Orientation The text prophesies that there will be other generations that will come under the covenant of prosperity. God was making a covenant with them, too. They might not ratify it nationally in the same way that this generation was being asked to ratify it. God would call them together to renew it every seven years (Deut. 31:10–12). He might not call them to proclaim verbally their allegiance to Him. They would not have to. Their possession of the inheritance would be proof enough that the terms of the covenant were still binding. The formal ratiication by the conquest generation would represent the heirs. If prosperity was to come to the conquest generation, why not also to each subsequent inheriting generation, as long as each would continue to uphold the terms of the covenant? The oath was binding across the generations. The covenant possessed continuity over time. Its authority would be demonstrated continually by the presence of visible sanctions. The inheritance itself was one of these sanctions. It should have been obvious to everyone that over time, Israel’s population would increase. A ixed supply of land in the face of a growing population would guarantee smaller plots for each succeeding generation. So, the inheritance was more than rural land. The economic inheritance was mainly the ability of covenant-keeping families to generate increased income. What was being guaranteed 3. Calling: the most important thing you can do in which you would be most difficult to replace.

844

DEUTERONOMY

was not land but prosperity. God had delivered into the hands of Israel the secrets of amassing wealth. Would they keep the law and extend the kingdom grant? Or would they rebel? God was setting before them a unique gift: the ability to create wealth. This process of wealth-creation could extend down through the ages. God was telling Israel that wealth was supposed to extend through the generations. This was their inheritance. It was intended to ratify the covenant: “But thou shalt remember the LORD thy God: for it is he that giveth thee power to get wealth, that he may establish his covenant which he sware unto thy fathers, as it is this day” (Deut. 8:18). God was also setting before them a theory of history that was both linear and progressive. They could extend the covenant over centuries. This kingdom grant was theirs. It would provide their heirs with blessings. These blessings would testify to the continuing presence of God and to the continuity of His covenant. Israel’s future would not be cyclical. They would not inevitably lose whatever God had given them. In fact, they could not permanently lose it, just so long as they did not break the covenant through lack of faith and lack of obedience. God was giving them a crucial tool of dominion: long-term future orientation. He was giving them the psychological basis of an upper-class mentality: faith in the future. It is this mentality that provides men with a way out of poverty.4 Neither linear time nor the concept of compound growth was common in any other ancient society. The concept of cyclical time was all-pervasive in the ancient world. What God was telling Israel was that continuity through time is provided by the covenant itself. A man’s eforts today can lead to ever-greater wealth for his heirs. But these eforts must not be limited to thrift and technological experimentation. They must also be ethical. “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD: And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. And thou shalt

4. Edward C. Banield, The Unheavenly City: The Nature and Future of Our Urban Crisis (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), pp. 48–54.

The Covenant of Prosperity

845

bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes. And thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates” (Deut. 6:4–9).

Conclusion God called Israel to prosperity. He told them that their covenant ratiication would extend to other people who were not present on that day. The covenant would carry down through the generations. The inheritance would constitute proof of the continuing validity of the covenant. This was a new mental outlook for the ancient world: linear history and progressive history. History would be afected by what Israel would do that day. History would be shaped by the covenant. From Abraham before them to unnamed multitudes after them, the covenant would bind together the generations of Israel. This covenant would include growing wealth. God was not ofering them per capita economic stagnation. He was ofering them per capita economic growth. Prosperity means expansion: of wealth, of population, of dominion, of the kingdom grant.

69 CaptivityAND and RESTORATION Restoration CAPTIVITY And it shall come to pass, when all these things are come upon thee, the blessing and the curse, which I have set before thee, and thou shalt call them to mind among all the nations, whither the LORD thy God hath driven thee, And shalt return unto the LORD thy God, and shalt obey his voice according to all that I command thee this day, thou and thy children, with all thine heart, and with all thy soul; That then the LORD thy God will turn thy captivity, and have compassion upon thee, and will return and gather thee from all the nations, whither the LORD thy God hath scattered thee. If any of thine be driven out unto the outmost parts of heaven, from thence will the LORD thy God gather thee, and from thence will he fetch thee: And the LORD thy God will bring thee into the land which thy fathers possessed, and thou shalt possess it; and he will do thee good, and multiply thee above thy fathers (Deut. 30:1–5).

The theocentric focus of this prophecy is God as a universal God rather than a local god. Moses made it clear to the generation of the conquest that there would eventually be a time of captivity and scattering in Israel’s future. This was an aspect of God’s negative historical sanctions. This would not constitute a break in the covenant. On the contrary, it would visibly ratify the covenant. The covenant’s authority, like God’s, extended beyond the geographical boundaries of Canaan. Immediately prior to Moses’ death, God reconirmed His prophecy regarding the future defection of Israel: “And the LORD said unto Moses, Behold, thou shalt sleep with thy fathers; and this people will rise up, and go a whoring after the gods of the strangers of the land, whither they go to be among them, and will forsake me, and break my covenant which I have made with them. Then my anger shall be

846

Captivity and Restoration

847

kindled against them in that day, and I will forsake them, and I will hide my face from them, and they shall be devoured, and many evils and troubles shall befall them; so that they will say in that day. Are not these evils come upon us, because our God is not among us? And I will surely hide my face in that day for all the evils which they shall have wrought, in that they are turned unto other gods” (Deut. 31:16–18). Without the promise of restoration, this passage would have constituted a prophecy of the cutting of of Israel. Moses warned them: “For I know that after my death ye will utterly corrupt yourselves, and turn aside from the way which I have commanded you; and evil will befall you in the latter days; because ye will do evil in the sight of the LORD, to provoke him to anger through the work of your hands” (Deut. 31:29). Nevertheless, there remained hope: “Rejoice, O ye nations, with his people: for he will avenge the blood of his servants, and will render vengeance to his adversaries, and will be merciful unto his land, and to his people” (Deut. 32:43). This was a land law. It applied to Israel as a holy nation where God dwelled. It was a testimony against the theology of the ancient world: local gods that dwelt in regions. This was an ajrmation of the universality of God’s rule. But this universality would be demonstrated by the captivity of an entire nation and its subsequent return to the Promised Land.

Outside the Land The inheritance included the land, but it was not limited to the land. This was why God could threaten Israel with removal from the land. He would demonstrate His authority over them by removing them from the geographical conines of Israel. This was a unique outlook in the ancient world, where local gods were tied to the soil of the family or city. The land was the place of residence of the gods. The mark of their defeat was the military defeat of the city and its destruction or captivity.1 There could be no continuity as a people apart from the religious rites, especially rites of ire, associated with the worship of family and city gods.2 1. Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome (Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor, [1864] 1955), Book III, Chapter XV, p. 207. 2. Ibid., I:III.

848

DEUTERONOMY

Israel, however, was told that at some point, the nation would be sent into captivity outside the land. The people would nevertheless retain their unique status as God’s people. They would maintain a separate existence abroad. They would eventually return to the land. The restoration of the land would be a mark of their inheritance. This promise tied them to the land because it acknowledged that God’s covenant involved more than land. Because it was more extensive than the land, their removal from land became a proof of the covenant’s authority, just so long as there would be restoration. This is what God promised. The mark of a broken covenant would be the dispersion of the Jews without restoration. If God ever extinguished the ires of the temple and refused to rekindle them, this would mean the disinheritance of Israel. If captivity was not followed by a return to the land, then the continuity provided by the covenant no longer was in force. This promise of restoration implied a means of disinheritance, should Israel and the temple not be restored to the land. This is why Jesus’ prophecy of the transfer of the kingdom to a new nation (Matt. 21:43) constituted an assault on the temple and the nation. He was saying that the Jews would be forcibly removed from the land and not allowed to return. This took place on a preliminary basis in A.D. 70 and inally in A.D. 135, after Bar Kochba’s rebellion. The 1948 creation of the modern State of Israel has been seen by dispensationalists as a partial ratiication of the Old Covenant’s promises in the New Covenant era. “In the twentieth century,” write the editors of the New Scoield Bible, “initial steps toward a restoration of the exiled people to their homeland have been seen.”3 What has not yet been seen is the restoration of temple sacriices. This makes it dijcult for dispensationalists deinitively to connect the modern State of Israel with this passage in Deuteronomy. The hope for restored temple sacriices is an important motivation for popular dispensational authors to predict – and even inance – the rebuilding of the temple, despite the fact that the site of the temple is now occupied by a Muslim mosque. They fully understand that by promoting this, they are risking war between Muslims and Jews – all the better to create the conditions for Armageddon, three and a half years after the not-so-secret Rapture. They also know that they are 3. The New Scoield Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 251n.

Captivity and Restoration

849

promoting the restoration of the temple’s sacriices. I suppose that the thought of Christians’ contributing money for the restoration of temple sacriices is no more appalling – and no less – than the idea that the future kingdom era of millennial blessings will be Jewish, with temple sacriices throughout. “. . . [T]his interpretation is in keeping with God’s prophetic program for the millennium. The Church is not in view here, but rather it is a prophecy for the consummation of Israel’s history on earth.”4 The implication is obvious: temple sacriices, as “memorials,”5 will replace the cross of Jesus Christ as the Christian memorial. Then on what basis will Passover not replace the Lord’s Supper? Christian tradition perhaps, or maybe the high cost of hotel space in Jerusalem, but surely not theology. The Book of Hebrews is unlikely to play any major role in the future millennial kingdom, except possibly in memorial services for the Church Age. “Nice try, but no cigar!”

Cursing and Blessing The restoration of Israel would not only involve blessings on the people of Israel; it would also involve cursings on Israel’s enemy. Both sanctions would still be in operation. Payday would come for those gentile nations that served as God’s rods of iron by placing Israel under the yoke. “And the LORD thy God will put all these curses upon thine enemies, and on them that hate thee, which persecuted thee. And thou shalt return and obey the voice of the LORD, and do all his commandments which I command thee this day. And the LORD thy God will make thee plenteous in every work of thine hand, in the fruit of thy body, and in the fruit of thy cattle, and in the fruit of thy land, for good: for the LORD will again rejoice over thee for good, as he rejoiced over thy fathers” (Deut. 30:7–9). Consider the implications of these verses. Because of Israel’s rebellion, God would raise up pagan nations that would bring negative corporate sanctions against Israel. Isaiah announced this in advance: “O Assyrian, the rod of mine anger, and the staf in their hand is mine indignation. I will send him against an hypocritical nation, and against the people of my wrath will I give him a charge, to 4. Ibid., p. 884n. 5. C. I. Scoield called these oferings “memorial.” Scoield Reference Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 1909), p. 890n.

850

DEUTERONOMY

take the spoil, and to take the prey, and to tread them down like the mire of the streets. Howbeit he meaneth not so, neither doth his heart think so; but it is in his heart to destroy and cut of nations not a few. For he saith, Are not my princes altogether kings?” (Isa. 10:5–8). God would raise up Assyria, a nation that would boast in its own power. But in that boast, Assyria would seal its doom. Wherefore it shall come to pass, that when the Lord hath performed his whole work upon mount Zion and on Jerusalem, I will punish the fruit of the stout heart of the king of Assyria, and the glory of his high looks. For he saith, By the strength of my hand I have done it, and by my wisdom; for I am prudent: and I have removed the bounds of the people, and have robbed their treasures, and I have put down the inhabitants like a valiant man: And my hand hath found as a nest the riches of the people: and as one gathereth eggs that are left, have I gathered all the earth; and there was none that moved the wing, or opened the mouth, or peeped. Shall the axe boast itself against him that heweth therewith? or shall the saw magnify itself against him that shaketh it? as if the rod should shake itself against them that lift it up, or as if the staf should lift up itself, as if it were no wood. Therefore shall the Lord, the Lord of hosts, send among his fat ones leanness; and under his glory he shall kindle a burning like the burning of a ire (Isa. 10:12–16).

God’s love of Israel was the basis of His corporate negative sanctions against Israel. “If his children forsake my law, and walk not in my judgments; If they break my statutes, and keep not my commandments; Then will I visit their transgression with the rod, and their iniquity with stripes” (Ps. 89:30–32). This was a mark of Israel’s sonship. “Thou shalt also consider in thine heart, that, as a man chasteneth his son, so the LORD thy God chasteneth thee” (Deut. 8:5). What God would do with Israel, the Israelites were to do to their own sons. “He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes” (Prov. 13:24). But this was not to give comfort to the rod. The implement is never greater than the user. The issue, then, is obedience. The restoration of Israel would come, but only on condition of their obedience. “If thou shalt hearken unto the voice of the LORD thy God, to keep his commandments and his statutes which are written in this book of the law, and if thou turn unto the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul” (Deut. 30:10). If not, then not. Without obedience, Israel would be transformed into a rod that God would use against His

Captivity and Restoration

851

newly adopted sons, the gentiles. This reversal of covenantal roles took place deinitively with the cruciixion of Christ. Then came the stoning of Stephen. Then came the persecution of the Jerusalem church. “And Saul was consenting unto his death. And at that time there was a great persecution against the church which was at Jerusalem; and they were all scattered abroad throughout the regions of Judaea and Samaria, except the apostles” (Acts 8:1). Finally came the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. This marked the inal cutting of of Old Covenant Israel. With the extinguishing of the temple’s ire, the Old Covenant ceased forever. The ire was applied to the temple; Roman soldiers burned it. The covenantal roles were reversed, gentile vs. Jew. The prophecy of Isaiah regarding Israel’s kindling of Assyria was reversed in A.D. 70; the rod would itself be consumed: “Therefore shall the Lord, the Lord of hosts, send among his fat ones leanness; and under his glory he shall kindle a burning like the burning of a ire. And the light of Israel shall be for a ire, and his Holy One for a lame: and it shall burn and devour his thorns and his briers in one day; And shall consume the glory of his forest, and of his fruitful ield, both soul and body: and they shall be as when a standardbearer fainteth” (Isa. 10:16–18). The light of the New Israel has served as a lame. The church is now the Israel of God (Gal. 6:16). The church inherited Old Covenant Israel’s status as God’s son, both to sufer early chastisement by the jealous older brother, who was now disinherited, and to serve as God’s ire in history.

Conclusion This prophecy continued the theme of sanctions: part four of Deuteronomy. The negative sanction of dispersal and captivity would be overcome by Israel’s return to the land. The positive sanction of re-gathering would ofset the negative sanction of removal from the land. There would be covenantal continuity for Israel outside the land. This continuity would be demonstrated for all to see by God’s restoration of Israel to her inheritance inside the land. Israel would maintain her national identity by means of the covenant and through hope of restoration. The discontinuity of dispersion would be healed by the greater continuity of restoration. The continuity of the covenant would overcome the discontinuity of dispersion. If it ever failed in this regard, the Old Covenant would come to an end.

70 LifeAND and DOMINION Dominion LIFE I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live: That thou mayest love the LORD thy God, and that thou mayest obey his voice, and that thou mayest cleave unto him: for he is thy life, and the length of thy days: that thou mayest dwell in the land which the LORD sware unto thy fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give them (Deut. 30:19–20).

The theocentric focus of this law is God as the cosmic judge of life and death. God here invoked the language of a covenant lawsuit. For any capital crime, there must be two witnesses (Deut. 19:15). He called heaven and earth to testify as His witnesses. In this covenant lawsuit, God’s witnesses for either the prosecution or the defense were heaven and earth: the creation. He is the creator of heaven and earth. God is sovereign in His court. This was not a seed law. The New Testament’s invocation of the promise of long life on earth as an application of the promised Mosaic positive sanction of long life in the land (Eph. 6:3) makes clear that this was not a land law. These words conclude the fourth section of the Book of Deuteronomy. Section ive begins with Deuteronomy 31.1 What is important in this regard is the nature of the judicial sanctions: life and death. Death is the ultimate form of disinheritance. He who is not alive cannot inherit. Life is the starting point of inheritance. We have here evidence of the unbreakable link between point four of

1. Ray R. Sutton, That You May Prosper: Dominion By Covenant (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1992), ch. 5.

852

Life and Dominion

853

the biblical covenant model and point ive. Sanctions are inseparably linked covenantally to inheritance and disinheritance. To separate the discussion of point four from point ive, and vice versa, inevitably produces a partial covenant theology.

Long Life in the Promised Land Verse 20 contains these words regarding God: “he is thy life, and the length of thy days.” He is the source of long life, which is a universally honored positive sanction. But for Israel, long life was not sujcient. The goal was life in the land. The promise of long life had a goal, “that thou mayest dwell in the land which the LORD sware unto thy fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give them.” The good life was life in the land. Here again, we see the connection between point four and point ive. Long life is a positive sanction. It is the basis of the inheritance. Dead men do not inherit. But is long life sujcient? The text speciies that the additional years given to God’s covenantally faithful servants were to be used to extend Israel’s dominion over the land. Dominion was the goal. The land was the arena. Long life was the means. But what was their tool of dominion? God’s law. God called them to obedience (v. 20). In the passage immediately preceding this one, God set forth the threat of negative sanctions. “But if thine heart turn away, so that thou wilt not hear, but shalt be drawn away, and worship other gods, and serve them; I denounce unto you this day, that ye shall surely perish, and that ye shall not prolong your days upon the land, whither thou passest over Jordan to go to possess it” (Deut. 30:17–18). To worship false gods is to commit suicide, both personal and corporate. God threatened Israel with the sanction of removal from the land. Israel’s arena of dominion would be removed. To escape this negative sanction, God called on them to choose life. This was a this-worldly frame of reference. It was also immediate. This was not pie in the sky bye and bye. “For this commandment which I command thee this day, it is not hidden from thee, neither is it far of. It is not in heaven, that thou shouldest say, Who shall go up for us to heaven, and bring it unto us, that we may hear it, and do it? Neither is it beyond the sea, that thou shouldest say, Who shall go over the sea for us, and bring it unto us, that we may hear it, and do it? But the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it” (vv. 11–14). Because the

854

DEUTERONOMY

law was close to them – imbedded in their thoughts – the covenant’s earthly blessings were also close to them. God announced this to a generation that was about to inherit the land.

Compound Economic Growth The theme of compound economic growth is basic to the Book of Deuteronomy. As the ifth book in the Pentateuch, its theme is succession or inheritance. That is, its theme is the future. God promised Israel that the nation would persevere if it remained faithful to God’s law. This perseverance was not merely a matter of linear succession; it was a matter of dominion. Dominion requires population growth. It requires personal wealth. It therefore requires compound economic growth. This is what God promised: “And the LORD thy God will make thee plenteous in every work of thine hand, in the fruit of thy body, and in the fruit of thy cattle, and in the fruit of thy land, for good: for the LORD will again rejoice over thee for good, as he rejoiced over thy fathers” (v. 9). But the basis of this process is obedience, both internal and external: “If thou shalt hearken unto the voice of the LORD thy God, to keep his commandments and his statutes which are written in this book of the law, and if thou turn unto the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul” (v. 10). To maintain the kingdom grant, Israel had to obey. Here God promised Israel expanding wealth. In verse 16, He promised biological reproduction. God therefore promised to match population growth with economic growth. Population growth was not a threat to them. It would not produce increasing misery as the number of mouths increased without a comparable increase in the food to feed them. Nowhere in the Bible can we ind a warning of increasing numbers of covenant-keeping people who are sufering hunger as a result of their increased numbers. Hunger, yes, but always in the context of an external imposition of the sanctions of death. Men are called to choose life. The more who survive, the longer they can reproduce. The more they reproduce, the faster the growth of population. By choosing life in the context of God’s covenant, men thereby choose growth. They choose dominion. They also choose responsibility, for with blessings and power come responsibility (Luke 12:48–49). The extension of covenant-keeping man’s dominion is the goal of God’s system of sanctions.

Life and Dominion

855

The intellectuals’ hatred of both population growth and economic growth in the late twentieth century is indicative of a radical hatred of life, man, and God. That the legalization of abortion has accompanied the various zero-growth movements is not surprising. The humanist world is a culture of death because it is a culture built on a lie: “And thou say in thine heart, My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth” (Deut. 8:17). This invocation of man’s autonomy is suicidal. “But he that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul: all they that hate me love death” (Prov. 8:36). Two centuries of unprecedented economic growth and population growth have disturbed many God-haters who fear hell. They fear God’s inal judgment, as well they should. They see that compound growth in a inite universe points to one of two things: the end of growth or the end of time. Seeking to avoid dealing with the latter, they deny the legitimacy of the former. The war on growth is a war on God. It is a war on man’s dominion. It is the sign of a terrible compromise with evil that we now ind Christians – generally academics who have spent their lives in humanist institutions – echoing this anti-growth propaganda. Christians today are bombarded by alien messages from morning to night if they participate in the world around them. They pick up the clichés of humanists who dominate culture today. Christians have not been taught to think biblically, meaning covenantally, meaning judicially. They cannot sort out the wheat of common grace from the chaf of ethical rebellion. They pick up slogans from God-haters who are at war with the dominion covenant. They internalize bits and pieces of an alien worldview that is at war with the biblical doctrines of God, man, law, sanctions, and time. They do not recognize that they have joined the enemies of God. They have not selfconsciously switched sides. Some have, of course: wolves in sheep’s clothing.2 But the typical Christian layman is stumbling through life in a kind of intellectual fog. He does not recognize his immediate surroundings: the bog of humanism.

2. Gary North, Crossed Fingers: How the Liberals Captured the Presbyterian Church (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1996).

856

DEUTERONOMY

Conclusion God calls on men to choose life. This passage makes it clear that at least four things are involved in choosing life: longer life spans, greater numbers of heirs, greater wealth, and an arena of service to God. Also implied are greater authority, dominion, and responsibility. This is the meaning of biblical inheritance. The positive sanction of life is contrasted with the negative sanction of death. But death in this context – the conquest of Canaan – meant removal from the Promised Land. Death meant life outside the land. It meant life under another nation’s gods and governments. Death meant the tyranny of pagan idolatry because idolatry produces death. “But if thine heart turn away, so that thou wilt not hear, but shalt be drawn away, and worship other gods, and serve them; I denounce unto you this day, that ye shall surely perish, and that ye shall not prolong your days upon the land, whither thou passest over Jordan to go to possess it” (vv. 17–18). Idolatry is the way of spiritual death. Spiritual death leads to historical disinheritance. Modern Christians, especially academic theologians, do not believe this. They insist that this historical cause-and-efect relationship ended with advent of the New Covenant. They are persuaded that historical cause and efect is either random or perverse. Either there is no relationship between idolatry and wealth or else the relationship is perverse: evil prospers and righteousness starves. Both views are antithetical to the concept of dominion by covenant, or at least dominion by God’s covenant. Both views proclaim that dominion is by man’s covenant. Because covenant-breaking man is dominant culturally today, the defender of random cause and efect proclaims the long-term victory of evil-doers by default.3 In partial contrast is the defender of perverse cause and efect in history. He insists that covenant-breaking man extends dominion because covenant-breaking man possesses the wealth formula: power religion.4 In stark contrast to both views is dominion religion, which proclaims dominion by God’s covenant. It rests on faith in the continuing applicability of God’s law. Speciically, it rests on the Book of 3. Gary North, Millennialism and Social Theory (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), ch. 7. 4. Ibid., ch. 4; cf. North, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989), ch. 3.

Life and Dominion

857

Deuteronomy, which sets forth God’s law, God’s sanctions, and the triumph of God’s people in history. Deuteronomy tells men to choose life. This does not mean life lived in the shadows of history or life lived in a pietistic ghetto, meaning life lived in fear of the enemies of God, who supposedly hold the keys to the ghetto’s door. It means a life of progressive dominion over the creation.

Part V: Succession/Inheritance (31–33)

71 COURAGE DOMINION Courage AND and Dominion And the LORD shall do unto them as he did to Sihon and to Og, kings of the Amorites, and unto the land of them, whom he destroyed. And the LORD shall give them up before your face, that ye may do unto them according unto all the commandments which I have commanded you. Be strong and of a good courage, fear not, nor be afraid of them: for the LORD thy God, he it is that doth go with thee; he will not fail thee, nor forsake thee. And Moses called unto Joshua, and said unto him in the sight of all Israel, Be strong and of a good courage: for thou must go with this people unto the land which the LORD hath sworn unto their fathers to give them; and thou shalt cause them to inherit it. And the LORD, he it is that doth go before thee; he will be with thee, he will not fail thee, neither forsake thee: fear not, neither be dismayed (Deut. 31:4–8).

The theocentric focus of this law is God as the sanctions-bringer in history. As such, we would expect this passage to be part of the fourth section of the book. Yet those commentators who have seen a ive-part pattern in Deuteronomy identify chapter 31 as the beginning of the ifth section.1 Kline treats this part of the book as Moses’ last testament. This is a reasonable way to look at it. The passage begins with Moses’ announcement of his great age: “And he said unto them, I am an hundred and twenty years old this day; I can no more go out and come in: also the LORD hath said unto me, Thou shalt not go over this Jordan” 1. Meredith G. Kline, Treaty of the Great King: The Covenant Structure of Deuteronomy: Studies and Commentary (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1963, pp. 135–49; Ray R. Sutton, That You May Prosper: Dominion By Covenant (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1992), ch. 5.

858

Courage and Dominion

859

(v. 2). In this transition passage, Moses spoke irst to the nation, but then spoke to Joshua. He was in the process of transferring his mantle of leadership to Joshua. The mark of this leadership was courage. This was a land law. It invoked the immediately concluded wars against the kings on the wilderness side of the Jordan River. It referred to the immediate conquest. The assurance of speciic victory over Canaan was tied to God’s promise to Abraham (Gen. 15:16).

“Forward . . . March!” Deuteronomy is the book of covenantal inheritance. The Book of Joshua marks a new covenant: the book of the conquest. First, God gave title to the Promised Land to Israel. Then Joshua leads the people to impose the transfer. What Moses told Joshua in his last testament, the representatives of the nation repeated to Joshua after Moses’ death. I cite the whole passage in order to prove my point. The language of courage is the language of conquest. Now after the death of Moses the servant of the LORD it came to pass, that the LORD spake unto Joshua the son of Nun, Moses’ minister, saying, Moses my servant is dead; now therefore arise, go over this Jordan, thou, and all this people, unto the land which I do give to them, even to the children of Israel. Every place that the sole of your foot shall tread upon, that have I given unto you, as I said unto Moses. From the wilderness and this Lebanon even unto the great river, the river Euphrates, all the land of the Hittites, and unto the great sea toward the going down of the sun, shall be your coast. There shall not any man be able to stand before thee all the days of thy life: as I was with Moses, so I will be with thee: I will not fail thee, nor forsake thee. Be strong and of a good courage: for unto this people shalt thou divide for an inheritance the land, which I sware unto their fathers to give them. Only be thou strong and very courageous, that thou mayest observe to do according to all the law, which Moses my servant commanded thee: turn not from it to the right hand or to the left, that thou mayest prosper whithersoever thou goest. This book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth; but thou shalt meditate therein day and night, that thou mayest observe to do according to all that is written therein: for then thou shalt make thy way prosperous, and then thou shalt have good success. Have not I commanded thee? Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the LORD thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest (Josh. 1:1–9).

860

DEUTERONOMY

Notice the judicial frame of reference: “Only be thou strong and very courageous, that thou mayest observe to do according to all the law, which Moses my servant commanded thee: turn not from it to the right hand or to the left, that thou mayest prosper whithersoever thou goest” (v. 7). The imagery here is based on a battleield formation. The leader marches at the head of his troops. He is out in front. He is the point man, fully visible to the enemy and the target of the archers. Normally, this would be suicidal. The senior military commander stays at the rear, protected by his troops. But this image is diferent. The leader is visible as the point man. At his side there is no one. His ojcers and troops are behind him. This leader has his lanks unprotected. He can be blindsided if his troops fail to rush forward to protect him. Yet this passage indicates that the warrior who marches at the head of the army is not to look to the right or the left around him – at his undefended lanks, in other words. He is not to worry about his lanks. He is to keep his eyes on the enemy who is in front of him. He is also not to look to the right or the left as a way to escape. He is to march forward, into the valley of the shadow of death. He shall fear no evil. On what basis was Joshua expected to take this forward position? Only because God was serving as his senior commander. If Joshua and Israel pleased God, they would not have to worry about their lanks. They could march forward in safety and therefore great conidence. How could they please God? By obedience. God had promised to impose the negative sanctions of the law on their enemies. “And the LORD shall give them up before your face, that ye may do unto them according unto all the commandments which I have commanded you” (Deut. 31:5). This is why the people repeated Moses’ words to Joshua: he was to stay within the narrow boundaries of God’s law. His lanks and the army’s would be undefended apart from obedience to the law. The military strategy appropriate to such a formation is called a frontal assault. It assumes that the army can penetrate the enemy’s defenses by overpowering them. Such a strategy assumes overwhelming ofensive superiority. It is not an appropriate tactic for a smaller army, let alone a guerilla band. Only if a smaller army has either some remarkable superiority in weaponry or the advantage of surprise should it attempt a frontal assault. Yet the language of Joshua 1 points to a frontal assault.

Courage and Dominion

861

Contrary to higher critics of the Bible, Israel had a very large army. In addition, God was on their side. A frontal assault was the appropriate formation. It would strike terror into the hearts of their enemies. Here was a leader who did not fear the arrow, the stone, the javelin, or the chariot.

Narrow Is the Way The covenant’s sanctions are positive and negative. In a war, the positive sanctions for one army are negative sanctions for its rival. God had already promised them victory over future enemies that had temporarily conquered them. “And the LORD thy God will put all these curses upon thine enemies, and on them that hate thee, which persecuted thee” (Deut. 30:7). How much more would He impose negative sanctions on the Canaanites, whose prophetic time had come (Gen. 15:16)! The success of Israel’s military strategy depended on ethics. Achan’s secret theft of Jericho’s banned goods led to the defeat of Israel at Ai (Josh. 7). The stoning of Achan, his family, and his animals led to the victory over Ai (Josh. 8). Yet even in this case, the strategy was not based on a frontal assault. It was based on deception, whose success in turn rested on Israel’s previous defeat. Achan’s sin had altered the army’s strategy. The path to victory was a path of righteousness. City by city, Israel was to conquer Canaan. The nation was told to obey the law – all of the law – in order to achieve military victory. The path that mattered most was the ethical path. The law hedged them in. They were not to stray outside the boundaries of the law: neither to the right or the left. In a sense, this is also a matter of military strategy: the massed formation. The ofensive army overpowers its enemy because it applies massive force to one section of the enemy’s defensive line. The ofensive army seeks a breakthrough in the enemy’s line, which will split the enemy force into two uncoordinated and fearful smaller armies. This is the strategy of divide and conquer. The enemy commander keeps reserves for just this purpose: to send them into the breach in the line. To keep his army from breaking apart, he risks the lives of his reserves. The massed formation of God’s army is also a tightly knit formation. The wedge of the leader and his troops smashes into the enemy’s defensive line, hopefully at its weakest point. The ethical

862

DEUTERONOMY

imagery of the straight and narrow path is tied to the imagery of a military formation. The ofensive army does not dissipate its force by spreading across the battleield. It concentrates its force like a battering ram. This is the imagery of the narrow path. When covenant-keepers wander of this path into sins of all kinds, the army of the Lord is weakened and scattered across the battleield. It is men’s adherence to God’s law that keeps them in a tight formation. Jesus warned: “Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that ind it” (Matt. 7:13–14).

Optimism and Victory The language of this passage is military language. This was appropriate: Moses was passing leadership to Joshua, who would soon lead the nation into battle. Joshua was to be above all a military leader. Almost all of the Book of Joshua deals with the conquest and the subsequent partitioning of the inheritance. Moses did his best to impart to the next generation the conidence which his own generation had lacked. It was their fear of their enemies’ sanctions and their insujcient fear of God’s sanctions that had kept them wandering for four decades in the wilderness. Moses had spent the inal third of his life herding fearful sheep who kept wandering of ethically. The context of this passage is the coming invasion of Canaan. Their conidence was to rest on their adherence to God’s commandments (v. 5) and His promise to previous generations (v. 7). Man’s obedience and God’s promises are linked covenantally.2 But if this is true of the life-and-death matter of warfare, how much more is it true of the other areas of life! This passage sets forth a fundamental principle of entrepreneurship: knowledge is not sujcient; there must also be action. A person who has accurate knowledge of the future must act in terms of this knowledge if this knowledge is to give him an advantage over those who do not know. In fact, knowledge without action can place the person in a worse position. He is paralyzed with fear of the future,

2. See Chapter 10.

Courage and Dominion

863

which is why he cannot act. The person who is unaware of the future but who makes decisions that will produce proits in the future is better of than the person who knew but feared to act. Ignorance is bliss compared to knowledge accompanied by fear-induced paralysis. Shakespeare places into Julius Caesar’s mouth the phrase, “Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.” The man who fears the future is at a disadvantage with the man who sees it and does not fear it. He may even be at a disadvantage with the man who does not see it and does not fear it. The fear of failure hampers the righteous man. This insight is part of the West’s folk wisdom. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.” “He who hesitates is lost.” But, of course, there are counter-insights, such as “a bird in hand is worth two in the bush.” Perhaps it is, but is it worth three? At some expected ratio, a bird in hand should be let loose so as to make possible a two-hand capture of a bushel full of birds. The man who knows the future but fails to act on his knowledge is like a race track tout who knows which horse will win but neither bets nor convinces anyone else to bet on that horse. His knowledge will not afect the pre-race betting odds, nor will it make him any money. Or he is like a military commander who knows where his enemy’s forces are, but fails to deploy his forces to take advantage of this knowledge. Similarly, a deinition of entrepreneurship that rests on knowledge of the future alone, without capital invested in terms of this knowledge, is a useless deinition. It is not enough to know the ratio of present prices to future prices. The entrepreneur must have capital available to him that will enable him to buy present goods or sell future goods in order to take advantage between the actual ratio in the future and today’s ratio, which relects investors’ inaccurate knowledge of the future. He must also have the courage of his convictions. He must put his money where his mind is. (Not where his mouth is, however. A wise entrepreneur will keep his mouth shut, since by opening it, he gives away valuable information that may afect the market’s present/future price ratio, which he plans to take advantage of.) The presence of optimism is not sujcient. There must also be accurate knowledge. Paul writes of the Jews’ condemnation by God as having been the product of zeal without knowledge (Rom. 9:31–10:4). The zeal engendered by courage can lead to destruction as readily as

864

DEUTERONOMY

knowledge without zeal. In military afairs, there has to be a willingness to engage the enemy. In entrepreneurial afairs, there has to be a willingness to engage a future diferent from what one’s competitors imagine it will be.

Conclusion Moses gave to Joshua a command: be courageous. This meant that Joshua must move forward, not being delected by concerns about what was going on at his right or his left. The same is true of our adherence to God’s law. If we stick to God’s revealed pathway, veering neither to the right nor the left, we shall be victorious. God will stand with us for His own glory, delivering His enemies into our hands. Moses made it plain that action was required. Risks had to be taken. By whom? By Joshua, above all. His courage under ire would set the pattern for his men. It was a good sign that the Israelites commanded Joshua to be courageous after Moses’ death. It indicated that they were ready to receive the long-promised inheritance. Title to the land had been transferred to them by Moses by the second reading of the law. Now it was time to collect.

72 LawAND and LIBERTY Liberty LAW And Moses wrote this law, and delivered it unto the priests the sons of Levi, which bare the ark of the covenant of the LORD, and unto all the elders of Israel. And Moses commanded them, saying, At the end of every seven years, in the solemnity of the year of release, in the feast of tabernacles, When all Israel is come to appear before the LORD thy God in the place which he shall choose, thou shalt read this law before all Israel in their hearing. Gather the people together, men, and women, and children, and thy stranger that is within thy gates, that they may hear, and that they may learn, and fear the LORD your God, and observe to do all the words of this law: And that their children, which have not known any thing, may hear, and learn to fear the LORD your God, as long as ye live in the land whither ye go over Jordan to possess it (Deut. 31:9–13).

The theocentric focus of this law is God as the giver of the kingdom grant. To maintain the grant, Israel’s priests would have to read the Mosaic law to the entire nation at the feast of Tabernacles (Booths). This was the annual week-long feast in Jerusalem that followed by ive days the day of local celebration: the day of atonement (Lev. 23:27, 34). The priests were responsible for the reading of the Mosaic law to the people, presumably Exodus 20–23. They may also have read the case laws of the other four books. This case law does not say. We might have expected that the law would have been read at Passover. Instead, it was read at Booths. Why? Because Booths was closely associated with the day of atonement. The day of atonement was the day of liberation for Israel. This law illustrates a fundamental principle of theology: grace precedes law. The day of atonement and day of release preceded the reading of the law. This was a land law.

865

866

DEUTERONOMY

The Year of Release The year of release was the sabbatical year (Deut. 15). In this year, sometime during the feast of Booths, all zero-interest charity loans to fellow Israelites and to resident aliens [geyr] were to be cancelled (Deut. 15:2). Any Israelite or resident alien who had been required to serve as a bondservant because he had defaulted on a charitable loan had to be released. He was to be given capital – food, wine, and herd animals – when he left (vv. 13–14).1 Consider the timing of the reading of the Mosaic law. Once every seven years, the entire nation was to assemble at Jerusalem. Five days earlier, the poor who still owned rural land had been released from charitable debts or any related debt bondage. As debt-free men, they came to Jerusalem to celebrate. There, they heard the law. For a newly released bondservant, the reading of the law would have reminded him of the importance of obedience. He had fallen into debt through no moral fault of his own, at least in the opinion of his creditor. The way to avoid future debt bondage was to remain obedient to God’s law, for the law promised external blessings for obedience. The law was read to a nation of free men. It provided the guidelines for remaining free. This year of release was associated with the jubilee year. In the year following the seventh sabbatical year – the sabbatical year of sabbatical years – the jubilee year was to take place. All rural land reverted to the heirs of the conquest generation. This took place on the day of atonement (Lev. 25:9). Israel’s other class of debtors regained their freedom on that day. Those who had defaulted on commercial loans had those debts cancelled and had their share of the ancestral land returned to them. Except for criminals sold into slavery to pay of debts to their victims, and except for foreign slaves (Lev. 25:44–46), the year of jubilee was to be Israel’s universal year of release. Charitable debts had been cancelled the previous year. The nation had heard the reading of the law. Then came the jubilee.

One Nation Under God Israel was truly one nation under God. This law made it clear that the entire nation was to hear the priests read the law. These laws 1. Chapter 35.

Law and Liberty

867

were civil laws, yet priests read them. More than any other passage in the Bible, this one makes it clear: there can be no absolute separation of church and State. The two institutions can be diferentiated, analogous to the ways in which the three persons of the Trinity are diferentiated, but there can be no absolute separation. When it came to God’s law, the priests were to read it publicly. Everybody residing inside the land, including strangers [geyr], was required to come to hear the law. God was the source of justice in Israel. The priests were the agents delegated by God to interpret His law. This right of interpretation was not a monopoly, but it was a legally protected service. This law makes it clear: symbolically, the institutional church was above both the family and the State in Mosaic Israel. Families were required to subordinate themselves to the reading of the law. So were civil magistrates. Fathers and magistrates may have read the law to those under their authority, but the two consummate manifestations of the law in Israel were under the jurisdiction of the priests: one public, the other private. The Ark of the Covenant, in which the two tablets of the law were kept, was in the holy of holies. This area was closed to all but the high priest, and he had legal access only once a year. The public reading of the law to the assembled nation was the other manifestation of priestly judicial superiority. The nation was under God. One proof of this was the fact that all permanent residents were under God’s revealed law. This included strangers. They were required to hear the law read in public once every seven years, and not merely listen, but also pay for a journey to the central city. They were all to participate in a national celebration of covenant renewal. This was not limited to ecclesiastical covenant renewal, for strangers were required to attend. It was a ritual of national covenant renewal in which the priests ojciated. Tribal civil leaders played no mandatory ojcial role in this ritual. A single tribe dominated: Levi. To Levi, Moses handed the care of the Ark and this assignment. This was the nation’s common tribe, the representative tribe. The Levites represented all of the tribes before God in their capacity as priests. They ofered sacriices for the nation. In this respect, Levi was a mediatorial tribe. It was at Booths that the 70 bulls were ofered annually as sacriices (Num. 29:13–32), presumably for the 70 nations that represented the gentiles, and one additional bull (Num. 29:36), presumably for Israel. The day of atonement, celebrated locally, was

868

DEUTERONOMY

immediately followed by Booths, which was celebrated nationally. Localism was followed by nationalism. The Levites were the tribe that represented the nation. They were a source of unity.

The Rule of Specially Revealed Law Moses commanded the priests to gather the people together. By what authority did he tell them this? Not as high priest, but as the nation’s prophet. He was God’s delegated intermediary between God and Israel. As such, he laid down the law. Civil law is common to all men who reside in a geographical area. The Bible teaches this. Those inside the boundaries of Israel were required to obey God’s law. The Mosaic Covenant mandated that God’s law must apply to all men equally, thereby upholding the principle that the rule of law is to be upheld (Ex. 12:49).2 Civil law in Mosaic Israel was revelational. Civil law in Israel was not the autonomous discovery of rational men searching the logic of their minds and the raw material of the creation. It was not recited publicly to the people at Booths by the king or any representative of Judah. It was recited by the sons of Levi. Was attendance required by civil law? That is, were civil sanctions applied to those who refused to attend? No negative sanction is listed in the text. There would have been an ecclesiastical sanction: excommunication. This would have threatened a stranger who participated in Passover (Ex. 12:48). It would not have threatened a resident alien who did not attend Passover. It would have threatened an Israelite, for citizenship was based on membership in God’s holy army. This was a priestly ojce, which is why they paid atonement money to the priests (Ex. 30:12–16).3 Access to the ojce of judge was based on participation in the priests’ national reading of the Mosaic law. What does this fact reveal about the authority of natural law in Israel? This: what was judicially common to residents of Israel was not confession of faith but God’s specially revealed law. Those who were not eligible to serve as judges had to obey the law anyway. They were invited to attend Booths 2. Gary North, Moses and Pharaoh: Dominion Religion vs. Power Religion (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1985), ch. 14. 3. Gary North, Tools of Dominion: The Case Laws of Exodus (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), ch. 32.

Law and Liberty

869

once every seven years in order to participate in a priestly ritual that served as national covenant renewal. Yet the stranger had not necessarily ajrmed the national covenant by consenting to circumcision. He was supposed to attend, although no civil sanction threatened him for refusing to attend. His voice had no covenantal authority in renewing the covenant, for he did not possess the legal authority to impose civil sanctions. Yet he was supposed to attend. Why should he have attended? First, to learn what the law expected of him. Second, to learn what the State was authorized to do to him if he broke the law. This national day of legal education was a means of placing restrictions on both the church and the State. The public reading of the Mosaic law gave to the listeners the means of defending themselves from evil-doers, including ojcers of church and State. Residents were to be protected from each other by the law. They were strongly encouraged to attend the festival to hear the formal reading of the law. In a society in which there was no printing and literacy was not common, this was an important way to place the authorities on a chain. Men would understand their rights – their legal immunities from the State – because they had heard the law read by priests. The State could not lawfully prohibit the public reading of the law. It was the church that had been given the authority to read the law. The priests would have a part in making access to the law easier in Israel. This limitation on civil power meant that an independent legal hierarchy was present in Israel that would serve as a check on the State. Any attempt by the State to restrict the priests from exercising their God-given authority to read the law before the nation would incur the resistance of the priests and the wrath of God.

Natural Law vs. Theocracy Natural law theory rests on the assumption that there is a source of common ethics and common wisdom irrespective of theological confession. This common system of ethics is said to serve as the basis of a common judicial system. This common legal order is supposedly accessible to all rational men, however men deine rational.4 This presumed commonality is the basis of the civil law’s legitimacy. Natural law 4. Usually, at some point in the argument, the defender of natural law theory invokes “right reason,” which is the system of reason he recommends.

870

DEUTERONOMY

is said to be grounded in the nature of man as a rational being, whether or not he was created by God. Because natural law has authority irrespective of theological confession, it is to be the basis of civil government, for civil government has authority over all men who reside in a geographical area irrespective of their confession of faith. So runs the familiar intellectual defense of natural law theory. The Christian version of natural law theory adds that it is man in his ojce as God’s image-bearer that establishes the possibility of natural law. It is God in His ojce as universal Father (Acts 17:26) rather than as the redemptive, adopting Father, who establishes civil government. The natural law theorist distinguishes between God the Creator and God the Redeemer in discussing natural law. God as Creator is universal; God as Redeemer is particular. It is God as universal who lays down the civil laws that all men must obey. The Christian defender of natural law theory argues that God placed Israel under the rule of a civil order that was particular. In God’s redemptive-historical plan, Israel’s narrow parochialism – grounded in God as redeeming Father – was the particular which temporarily superseded the universal. Why, we are not told. It just did. The New Covenant, we are told, is the triumph of the universal. The New Covenant delivers us into the hands of civil rulers whose authority does not rest on their confession of God as Father, either universal or particular. Their confession of faith need be implicit only: a confession of self-professed autonomous man as the universal. Man is the law-giver because humanity is common to man. The humanism of natural law theory is obvious. Prior to Darwin’s implicit destruction of all natural law theory, natural law theory was Western humanism’s primary judicial alternative to Christian law. Darwin destroyed men’s faith in a common legal order that is grounded in man’s reason because men are individuals caught in a purposeless evolutionary process that has no ixed ethical standards.5 Nevertheless, a few Christian social theorists still cling to a doctrine of humanistic law that has to be defended today by an appeal to biblical revelation: the doctrine of special creation. Only by invoking special creation can they save natural law theory

5. Gary North, The Dominion Covenant: Genesis (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987), Appendix A.

Law and Liberty

871

from Darwinism. But the rationality of unredeemed mankind opposes the Bible’s doctrine of special creation. So, they wind up in the peculiar position of having to ajrm the authority of biblical revelation in order to defend a theory of civil law that denies any independent civil authority of biblical revelation. They ajrm that which common reason rejects as irrational or irrelevant in order to defend a system of humanistic civil law which rests on the assumption of the authority of common reason and common ethics. God as redeemer is replaced by God as creator. God as creator is then said to legitimize the civil order of autonomous man. In this way the city of man replaces the city of God in the political theory of fundamentalists who hate biblical theocracy far more than they hate humanist theocracy. If men can govern themselves as covenant-keepers by a civil law order that is in no way grounded on God’s Bible-revealed law, then why did God require the Israelites to hear the reading of the Mosaic law? Why was national covenant renewal grounded in a public reading of the Mosaic law? If covenant-keepers today may not legitimately invoke the authority of biblical law as the basis of Godhonoring civil government, why was this insight not given to God’s covenant people prior to the advent of Roman Stoicism? Why did God’s people have to wait for Roman Stoics to discover the theory of natural law, by which they explained why Rome had the authority to create an empire out of the ruins of the Greek city-states? The Stoics provided a philosophical justiication for empire that could not be provided by the polytheism of classical religion. Yet Christians are expected to believe that God waited until the advent of the tyrannical Roman Empire in order to inform His covenant people of the sole authority of man’s universal reason in establishing civil law. He raised up Stoic philosophers rather than prophets to bring this message to the church. Furthermore, it was not until Roger Williams in the early 1640’s discovered pluralism’s principle of religiously neutral civil commonwealth that God’s church was presented with this theory in the name of Christianity.6 This implicit theory of the origins of civil freedom seems an odd one for Christian

6. Gary North, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989), pp. 249–50.

872

DEUTERONOMY

intellectuals to hold, but they do. They refuse to state it this baldly, but they do believe it. Their theory of natural law demands it. This text forces us to consider the obvious fact that in order to preserve liberty in Mosaic Israel, the nation had to hear the law once every seven years. The basis of judicial liberty was not the interior speculations of everyman. The basis of judicial liberty was obedience to God’s revealed law. What the modern Christian pluralist must maintain is that judicial liberty comes from the common-ground logic and/or experience of covenant-breaking man. It is not the Bible that presents the basis of liberty; rather, God’s enemies do. There has to be some common-ground moral vision which unites covenant-breakers and covenant-keepers, and this vision must serve all mankind as the basis of liberty. Adam’s Fall has therefore not seriously blinded men to moral truth. Covenant-keeping rational man holds back or suppresses the truth in unrighteousness (Rom. 1:18), yet somehow this process of self-imposed blindness does not undermine the outcome of his moral reason, a moral reason shared by all rational men. Covenant-breaking man’s moral and judicial speculations possess greater authority than the Mosaic law does, or than the Bible as a whole does, or so we are assured by modern defenders of natural law theory, whether Christian or pagan.

Biblical Economics Biblical economics must take a stand against the rationalist’s claim that only what is common to all men’s reason is epistemologically valid. This is the modern economist’s defense of wertfrei: value-neutral logic. He defends this nineteenth-century epistemological doctrine with greater enthusiasm and conidence than representatives of the other social sciences do. Biblical economics does not have faith in any theory of epistemological neutrality. It recognizes that any claim of epistemological neutrality shatters on the shore line of a key doctrine of modern economics: the scientific impossibility of making interpersonal comparisons of subjective utility.7 There is no common scale of values; there is no measuring device. Thus, there can be no such thing as applied economics. Between the theoretical speculations of the economist

7. This was the discovery of Lionel Robbins in 1932.

Law and Liberty

873

and the world of economic advice and policy-making there can be no connection without destroying the doctrine of subjective value. This, no non-Marxist economist wants to admit. The solution to this epistemological dilemma is an appeal to the Bible, especially the Mosaic law. It is in the doctrine of monotheism that we can discover ways of reconciling subjective value and objective value. It is in the doctrine of the Trinity that we can discover ways of reconciling the personal imputation of subjective value with the corporate imputation of objective value.

Conclusion The nation was called by God to assemble at a central city once every seven years, in order to hear the public reading of God’s revealed law. God did not call them into university classrooms to cogitate on the wisdom of the common man. He did not call them to devise systems of law that would be acceptable to covenantbreaking strangers in the land. Instead, He called them to corporate covenant renewal through hearing the priests read the Mosaic law. No passage in the Bible more clearly reveals the illegitimacy of political pluralism and its corollary, natural law theory. By undermining natural law theory, this passage also undermines the biblical case for value-free economics. A correct understanding of the law of God rests on a theory of Bible-revealed law. So does a correct understanding of the laws of economics. Law and liberty are linked by the revealed law of God. This includes political liberty and economic liberty. While natural man can, through common grace, understand a great deal, his presupposition of the availability of true knowledge apart from the written revelation of the God of the Bible is incorrect. Liberty begins with God’s grace, which includes the grace of Bible-revealed law.

73 A Song Near-Disinheritance A SONG OF of NEAR-DISINHERITANCE And the LORD said unto Moses, Behold, thou shalt sleep with thy fathers; and this people will rise up, and go a whoring after the gods of the strangers of the land, whither they go to be among them, and will forsake me, and break my covenant which I have made with them. Then my anger shall be kindled against them in that day, and I will forsake them, and I will hide my face from them, and they shall be devoured, and many evils and troubles shall befall them; so that they will say in that day. Are not these evils come upon us, because our God is not among us? And I will surely hide my face in that day for all the evils which they shall have wrought, in that they are turned unto other gods (Deut. 31:16–18).

This was not a law. It was a prophecy. God told Moses that Israel would surely rebel against Him after they entered the Promised Land. The very prosperity of that land would lead them astray. “For when I shall have brought them into the land which I sware unto their fathers, that loweth with milk and honey; and they shall have eaten and illed themselves, and waxen fat; then will they turn unto other gods, and serve them, and provoke me, and break my covenant” (v. 20). God instructed Moses to write a song. This song would provide an account of God’s deliverance of Israel – not out of Egypt but out of the wilderness. It would begin with the fourth generation’s inheritance of the land. “And it shall come to pass, when many evils and troubles are befallen them, that this song shall testify against them as a witness; for it shall not be forgotten out of the mouths of their seed: for I know their imagination which they go about, even now, before I have brought them into the land which I sware” (v. 21).

874

A Song of Near-Disinheritance

875

Singing God’s Five-Point Covenant Lawsuit The song begins with a statement of God’s sovereignty: “He is the Rock, his work is perfect: for all his ways are judgment: a God of truth and without iniquity, just and right is he” (Deut. 32:4). This is point one. Point two describes Israel’s rebellion against God’s hierarchy: “They have corrupted themselves, their spot is not the spot of his children: they are a perverse and crooked generation. Do ye thus requite the LORD, O foolish people and unwise? is not he thy father that hath bought thee? hath he not made thee, and established thee?” (vv. 5–6) Point three describes God’s establishment of the boundaries of the nations and of Israel (v. 8). He led them inside the boundaries of the wilderness (vv. 10–12). Point four describes God’s positive sanctions: food in abundance (vv. 13–14). This led to Israel’s fatness and her subsequent loss of faith: sacriicing to false gods (vv. 15–16), i.e., a new oath and new covenant. This produced negative sanctions (vv. 20–22). “I will heap mischiefs upon them; I will spend mine arrows upon them” (v. 23). Point ive, disinheritance, would not come, not for Israel’s sake but for the honor of God’s name. “I said, I would scatter them into corners, I would make the remembrance of them to cease from among men: Were it not that I feared the wrath of the enemy, lest their adversaries should behave themselves strangely, and lest they should say, Our hand is high, and the LORD hath not done all this” (vv. 26–27). But Israel would not see this as God’s motivation during her rebellion. “For they are a nation void of counsel, neither is there any understanding in them. O that they were wise, that they understood this, that they would consider their latter end!” (vv. 28–29). The arrogance of the enemy nations would bring them down. “To me belongeth vengeance, and recompence; their foot shall slide in due time: for the day of their calamity is at hand, and the things that shall come upon them make haste. For the LORD shall judge his people, and repent himself for his servants, when he seeth that their power is gone, and there is none shut up, or left” (vv. 35–36). This meant that the disinheritance that would rightfully come upon Israel would instead be replaced by a new inheritance. This would mean the disinheritance of those nations that would

876

DEUTERONOMY

serve as God’s rods of iron against Israel. “Rejoice, O ye nations, with his people: for he will avenge the blood of his servants, and will render vengeance to his adversaries, and will be merciful unto his land, and to his people” (v. 43). This ended the song of Moses (v. 44). Moses then called on the nation to obey the law: “And he said unto them, Set your hearts unto all the words which I testify among you this day, which ye shall command your children to observe to do, all the words of this law” (v. 46). Obedience is the basis of life: “For it is not a vain thing for you; because it is your life: and through this thing ye shall prolong your days in the land, whither ye go over Jordan to possess it” (v. 47). Once again, obedience is here identiied as the basis of maintaining the kingdom grant. Moses was then instructed by God to climb Mt. Nebo, so that he could see the land into which he would not be allowed to march (v. 49). Disobedience had kept him outside the land (vv. 51–52). What was true of Moses would surely be true for Israel: disobedience would undermine the inheritance.

Conclusion The chief inheritance of Israel was the law itself. “Moses commanded us a law, even the inheritance of the congregation of Jacob” (Deut. 33:4). The law was their tool of dominion, the standard of their continuing economic inheritance. Moses then blessed each of the tribes as his last will and testament, just as Jacob had done with his twelve sons in Egypt. The expulsion of the Canaanites was imminent: The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms: and he shall thrust out the enemy from before thee; and shall say, Destroy them. Israel then shall dwell in safety alone: the fountain of Jacob shall be upon a land of corn and wine; also his heavens shall drop down dew. Happy art thou, O Israel: who is like unto thee, O people saved by the LORD, the shield of thy help, and who is the sword of thy excellency! and thine enemies shall be found liars unto thee; and thou shalt tread upon their high places (vv. 27–29).

Moses then did as he had been told: he went up Mt. Nebo to see the Promised Land. Then he died. But before he died, he transferred leadership to Joshua by the laying on of hands (v. 9). This represented the transfer of inheritance to Israel.

CONCLUSION Conclusion Moses commanded us a law, even the inheritance of the congregation of Jacob (Deut. 33:4).

The Book of Deuteronomy is the Pentateuch’s book of inheritance. The ifth and inal section of Deuteronomy has to do with inheritance in the broadest sense. The primary inheritance of Israel was the revealed law of God. This was Israel’s tool of dominion.1 Obedience to the law was Israel’s basis of maintaining the inheritance and extending it in history. But it was not sujcient for Israel to maintain the inheritance; Israel had to extend it. There is a war in history between God’s kingdom and Satan’s. There is no permanent peace treaty between these two kingdoms. There is no neutrality. There can be no stalemate. Israel forgot this, which is why the kingdom was removed from her (Matt. 21:43). Modern Christians also tend to forget this.2 Moses consummated his writing of the book of the inheritance with a series of blessings, tribe by tribe (Deut. 33:6–25), just as Jacob had, almost two and a half centuries earlier (Gen. 49).3 As for the nation, Moses said, “Happy art thou, O Israel: who is like unto thee, O people saved by the LORD, the shield of thy help, and who is the 1. Gary North, Tools of Dominion: The Case Laws of Exodus (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990). 2. Gary North, Backward, Christian Soldiers? An Action Manual for Christian Reconstruction (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, [1984] 1988), ch. 11: “The Stalemate Mentality.” 3. Israel’s sojourn inside the boundaries of Egypt was 215 years. Gary North, Moses and Pharaoh: Dominion Religion vs. Power Religion (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1985), pp. 14–17.

877

878

DEUTERONOMY

sword of thy excellency! and thine enemies shall be found liars unto thee; and thou shalt tread upon their high places” (Deut. 33:29). Then he went of to Mt. Nebo to die. But before he did, he laid hands on Joshua. “And Joshua the son of Nun was full of the spirit of wisdom; for Moses had laid his hands upon him: and the children of Israel hearkened unto him, and did as the LORD commanded Moses” (Deut. 34:9). This completed the transfer of authority from Moses to Joshua. This was Joshua’s long-awaited inheritance. Deuteronomy presents a recapitulation of the Mosaic law. The inheriting generation was required to ajrm their commitment to this law. In this sense, Deuteronomy is a book of covenant renewal. This would seem to place the book under point four of the covenant: oath. But the book also involves the transfer of the judicial inheritance to the generation of the conquest. In this sense, Deuteronomy is an aspect of point ive: succession. This is another reason why I believe that points four and ive of the biblical covenant model are so intimately related. In fact, the full consummation of Deuteronomy did not take place until the Israelites had crossed over Canaan’s boundary (point three) and were circumcised (point four) at Gilgal (Josh. 5:3). Israel had to be circumcised before the historical transfer of title to Canaan could take place. The covenant oath that was implied by circumcision was mandatory prior to Israel’s receiving the inheritance of Canaan. We can say that the inheritance of the law and the reajrmation of the promise came with the Book of Deuteronomy. The historical inheritance of Canaan by Israel is described in the Book of Joshua. Circumcision conirmed confession. More than this: circumcision constituted confession. Deuteronomy sets forth the legal basis of Israel’s inheritance of Canaan. It presents God’s law and refers to the sanctions attached to this law-order. Israel’s acceptance of this covenant document was to serve as the judicial basis of the oath-sign to be imposed across the Jordan. The transfer of the law was the covenantal basis of the transfer of the inheritance. In this sense, the law was Israel’s primary inheritance: received irst. The Promised Land was the secondary inheritance: received second.

Promise and Conditions There could be no legitimate doubt that this generation would inherit. It was the fourth generation after Jacob’s descent into Egypt. “But in the fourth generation they shall come hither again: for the

Conclusion

879

iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full” (Gen. 15:16). Nevertheless, the fulillment of this promise was conditional. First, Israel formally had to subordinate the nation to God (point two) by ajrming God’s law (point three) and its historical sanctions (point four). The proof of their acceptance of the law’s historical sanctions was their willingness to submit to the oath-sign of circumcision. Without such ritual submission, they could not become true sons of Abraham and therefore heirs of the promise to Abraham. There can be no doubt here: the Abrahamic promise was conditional. Had they rejected God by rejecting His law, as manifested by their refusal to be circumcised, they would not have inherited. They could inherit the law without circumcision, and they did (Deuteronomy), but they could not inherit the land without circumcision (Joshua). This conditionality of the Abrahamic covenant creates a minor theological problem that is easy to solve. Unfortunately, it has long been dealt with by theologians as if it were a major problem that is very dijcult to solve. Here is the problem: How can a promise made by God and then sealed by His oath be conditional? If the fulillment of an oath-bound covenantal promise is conditional, then its fulillment in history seems to depend on man rather than God. Sovereignty is thereby transferred to man. How can this be? The correct and relatively simple answer is theological: the fulillment of God’s promises is secured by God’s sovereign decree. God does not predestinate in a vacuum. He does not predestinate single events within a contingent historical framework. When He announces a promise or a prophecy, His sovereign decree secures the historical conditions necessary for its fulillment. Sovereignty over history at no point is transferred to man. God retains it absolutely. The complete fulillment of the conditions is as secure as the complete fulillment of the promise. It is one of those oddities of ecclesiastical history that Calvinist theologians who call themselves covenant theologians have debated the ine points of conditional versus unconditional promises. I do not understand why. Of all theologians who should not bother to debate this topic in an either/or framework, Calvinists ought to be irst in line. It is only in Calvinism’s twin doctrines of predestination and the absolute sovereignty of God that we ind a solution to this theological problem. It is time to say it loud and clear: there is no such thing as an unconditional promise. To imagine that there is such a thing is to imagine that the covenants of God were not secured by the

880

DEUTERONOMY

perfect life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ. Everything in history after God’s cross-examination of Adam and Eve has been conditional on the work of Jesus Christ in history. Was there any possibility that Jesus would not fulill these conditions? Not a chance: “And truly the Son of man goeth, as it was determined: but woe unto that man by whom he is betrayed!” (Luke 22:22). This means, ultimately, that there is no such thing as chance. God promised Adam and Eve the following: “And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel” (Gen. 3:15). Was this promise conditional on Christ’s advent and perfect work in history? Of course. Was there any chance that the covenant’s conditions would not be fulilled by Christ? None. This promise was conditional, yet there was no possibility that these conditions would not be met. Obviously, some promises are more openly ethical and conditional than others, in the sense that the outcome of the promise can be diferent from what was predicted. This is the case with some covenant lawsuits. The best representative example is Jonah’s warning to Nineveh: “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown” (Jonah 3:4b). Nineveh believed this and repented (turned around). “And God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God repented of the evil, that he had said that he would do unto them; and he did it not” (v. 10). They repented; God also repented. But other covenant lawsuits have been predestined to come out just as God had promised: badly for the accused. “Then shalt thou say unto them, Thus saith the LORD, Behold, I will ill all the inhabitants of this land, even the kings that sit upon David’s throne, and the priests, and the prophets, and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem, with drunkenness. And I will dash them one against another, even the fathers and the sons together, saith the LORD: I will not pity, nor spare, nor have mercy, but destroy them” (Jer. 13:13–14). And so He did. Jeremiah was not to pray otherwise. God had predestined His wrath upon Israel. “And now, because ye have done all these works, saith the LORD, and I spake unto you, rising up early and speaking, but ye heard not; and I called you, but ye answered not; Therefore will I do unto this house, which is called by my name, wherein ye trust, and unto the place which I gave to you and to your fathers, as I have done to Shiloh. And I will cast you out of my sight, as I have cast out all your brethren, even the whole seed of Ephraim. Therefore pray

Conclusion

881

not thou for this people, neither lift up cry nor prayer for them, neither make intercession to me: for I will not hear thee” (Jer. 7:13–16). 4 Because the ojce of prophet ceased after A.D. 70, all covenant lawsuits today are of the Jonah variety: repentance must always be assumed to be an option for the hearers. No one lawfully brings a New Covenant lawsuit that does not ofer the option of repentance. God no longer reveals in advance the speciic outcome of a particular covenant lawsuit: blessing or cursing. In this sense, all New Covenant lawsuits are specially conditional, i.e., their outcome is unknown to man because the response of the accused is unknown to man. We must also ajrm that, judicially speaking, all covenant lawsuits, promises, and prophecies are generally conditional: there is no escape from God’s sanctions in history. What the future response of men would be was not always clear to those who heard these lawsuits, promises, and prophecies in the Old Covenant. But sometimes it was clear. For example, God did not ofer Nineveh’s option of repentance to the Amorites of Canaan. The Amorites’ iniquity would surely be illed, not emptied by means of their repentance. Yet even in this case, the Gibeonites cleverly subordinated themselves to God through subordination to Israel, and they escaped the promised destruction (Josh. 9).

Compound Growth and National Covenant Renewal Deuteronomy presents a covenant theology that allows for compound growth, both of population and economics. More than this: growth is presented as morally mandatory. Put another way, the absence of growth is seen as a sign of God’s curse. This growthoriented outlook distinguished biblical religion from all other ancient religions. The key elements of Deuteronomy’s covenant theology are found in Deuteronomy 8. First, there was a promise of population growth. This promise was conditional on Israel’s obedience. “All the commandments which I command thee this day shall ye observe to do, that ye may live, and multiply, and go in and possess the land which the LORD sware unto your fathers. And thou shalt remember all the way which the LORD thy God led thee these forty years in the wilderness, to

4. See Chapter 32, above.

882

DEUTERONOMY

humble thee, and to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart, whether thou wouldest keep his commandments, or no” (Deut. 8:1–2). Second, there was a warning attached to the promised blessing of economic growth. This is because economic growth leads to a temptation: the temptation of autonomy. “And when thy herds and thy locks multiply, and thy silver and thy gold is multiplied, and all that thou hast is multiplied; Then thine heart be lifted up, and thou forget the LORD thy God, which brought thee forth out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage; Who led thee through that great and terrible wilderness, wherein were iery serpents, and scorpions, and drought, where there was no water; who brought thee forth water out of the rock of lint; Who fed thee in the wilderness with manna, which thy fathers knew not, that he might humble thee, and that he might prove thee, to do thee good at thy latter end; And thou say in thine heart, My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth” (Deut. 8:13–17). Third, there was a declaration of the inescapability of blessings. These blessings were built into the Mosaic law. Here, in one verse, is the most important single statement in ancient literature regarding the possibility of long-term economic growth. “But thou shalt remember the LORD thy God: for it is he that giveth thee power to get wealth, that he may establish his covenant which he sware unto thy fathers, as it is this day” (v. 18). The unique blessing of the power to get wealth serves as a means of conirming God’s covenant in history. I say serves, not served. This covenant is still in force. He who denies this also implicitly denies the possibility of Christian economic theory.5 Consider the implications of cause-and-efect relationships among external covenant-keeping, visible wealth, and covenantal conirmation. The visible blessings that result from covenant-keeping are designed to increase men’s faith. Faith in what? In God and His covenant. The 5. Sometimes this rejection of biblical economic theory is explicit. See the comments of William Diehl, cited in my Preface, under “The Hatred of God’s Law.” He displayed near contempt for my heavy reliance on Deuteronomy in my biblical defense of the free market. Then he went on to deny the legitimacy of biblical economic theory: “The fact that our Scriptures can be used to support or condemn any economic philosophy suggests that the Bible is not intended to lay out an economic plan which will apply for all times and places. If we are to examine economic structures in the light of Christian teachings, we will have to do it in another way.” William E. Diehl, “A Guided-Market Response,” in Robert Clouse (ed.), Wealth and Poverty: Four Christian Views of Economics (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1984), p. 87.

Conclusion

883

covenant’s conirmation by corporate economic growth becomes a motivation for corporate covenant renewal. Greater corporate faith is supposed to produce greater spiritual maturity, which in turn is to produce greater corporate blessings. Economists call such a process positive feedback. Here we have a vision of that most wonderful of all social wonders: compound economic growth. It is possible to sustain corporate economic growth through corporate covenantal obedience. This means that the corporate limits to growth can be overcome progressively. More than this: they must be overcome. Compound economic growth is an ethical imperative because obedience to God is an ethical imperative. The compounding process results in the exponential curve: a number approaching ininity as a limit. But in a inite world, nothing grows forever. In a inite world, an exponential curve reaches environmental limits very fast. Population growth is the most obvious example. Yet we are told in Deuteronomy 8 that wealth can compound indeinitely. By this, God means initely. The ultimate environmental limit to growth is time. If growth continues over time in a world of economic scarcity, including living space, time must run out. It will run out before covenant-keeping men reach society’s physical limits to growth. This covenantal fact points clearly to the near-term consummation of history if men remain faithful to God by obeying His law. Time runs out when God’s people obey Him and reap their appropriate reward: approaching the objective limits to growth. Prior to the end of history, that which will call economic growth to a halt is not any environmental limit to growth, but rather corporate sin. “And it shall be, if thou do at all forget the LORD thy God, and walk after other gods, and serve them, and worship them, I testify against you this day that ye shall surely perish. As the nations which the LORD destroyeth before your face, so shall ye perish; because ye would not be obedient unto the voice of the LORD your God” (vv. 19–20). Or, as John describes it in the Book of Revelation, “And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea. And they went up on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city: and ire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them. And the devil that deceived

884

DEUTERONOMY

them was cast into the lake of ire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever” (Rev. 20:7–10). In short, bad guys inish last.

Eschatology Deuteronomy’s covenantal world view is rejected by humanists and most Christians. Covenant theology is impossible without eschatology. Because humanists and Christians reject Deuteronomy’s eschatology, they reject the Pentateuch’s doctrine of covenantal inheritance: “Thou shalt not wrest judgment; thou shalt not respect persons, neither take a gift: for a gift doth blind the eyes of the wise, and pervert the words of the righteous. That which is altogether just shalt thou follow, that thou mayest live, and inherit the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee” (Deut. 16:19–20). They ofer other eschatologies and therefore other covenants. Humanists reject biblical covenantalism because they reject the doctrine of inal judgment. There will be no inal judgment by God, they insist. There will be either the heat death of the universe6 or a cyclical recapitulation of the Big Bang of creation: contraction, bang, expansion, ad ininitum.7 Both of these cosmic possibilities are impersonal. The humanists’ universe is a universe devoid of cosmic personalism, for their universe was not created by God. The humanists’ rejection of inal judgment has implications for economic theory. There are two rival views: pro-growth and antigrowth. First, the typical economist insists that the limits to growth are always marginal. At the margin, there are no ixed limits to growth. There are only marginal limits to resources. Any ultimate objective limit to growth may be ignored for now – in fact, must be ignored, now and forevermore. At some price, there is always room for one more, no matter what it is we are talking about: such is the confession of the economist. The marginalism of modern subjective economic theory lends itself to a concept of growth that has no objective limits. Growth cannot go on forever, the economist may admit if pressured for an answer, but it can surely go on for another 6. Gary North, Is the World Running Down? Crisis in the Christian Worldview (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1988), ch. 2. 7. The Big Bang that follows each cosmic contraction somehow will overcome the second law of thermodynamics: entropy. The heat death of the universe will be avoided.

Conclusion

885

year. Maybe two. The mainstream economist trains himself not to think about ultimate objective limits; he thinks only about marginal limits. Eschatology – the doctrine of the last things – is anathema to him. There are no last things, only marginal decisions. Second, the anti-growth humanist asserts that mankind has become a destroyer, that nature’s limits must be honored by rapacious man, and therefore the State must impose restrictions on the use of private property because of capitalism’s insatiable quest for more. This outlook insists that there are objective limits to growth in nature, and therefore the State must restrict private individuals from pressing against these limits. Anti-growth legislation is necessary in order to avoid an inevitable collective catastrophe – there are numerous humanistic doomsday scenarios – that must occur when mankind reaches the environmental limits to growth. This eschatology is an eschatology of historical disaster. Anti-growth humanists are not concerned with the cosmic end of the world, i.e., the heat death of the universe. They do not predict the end of the world. Rather, they predict either the end of autonomous man’s attempts to subdue nature or else the end of autonomous nature. They prefer the former.8 Contemporary Christians, in contrast to humanists, are more deeply concerned about eschatology than history. They assume that eschatology is discontinuous with culture, i.e., a breaking into time that will overthrow man’s works rather than heal and extend them. In efect, they deny to the creation what Christ’s resurrected body was for history: continuous with history (recognizable) yet transcendent beyond history, as the ascension subsequently revealed to the disciples. They do not see the end of time as the death and resurrection of cursed history. Christians oppose biblical covenantalism because it places the end of history within the context of Christendom’s extension of the limits to growth. They reject any suggestion that mankind will reach objective limits to growth as a result of the spread of the gospel, the conversion of billions of people, and men’s widespread obedience to biblical law, for this scenario suggests a postmillennial eschatology that modern pessimillennialism rejects. This is why modern Christians have no explicitly biblical economic theory. Without the Bible’s doctrine of the covenant, they cannot reason both biblically and economically. 8. Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (New York: Random House, 1989).

886

DEUTERONOMY

Postmillennialism and Covenantalism Once a person accepts the continuing validity and authority of the covenantal message of Deuteronomy, it is only by arguing that the triumph of covenant-breaking society is inevitable in history that he can escape the postmillennial implications of Deuteronomy. Theologians do this, of course, but in doing so, they must appeal to the failure of Old Covenant Israel as a binding model for all history. This leads them to dismiss or at least ignore the doctrine of Christ’s bodily ascension in history, an event that conirmed the Great Commission (Matt. 28:18–20). Only by denying the possibility of progressively fulilling the Great Commission in history can anyone who accepts the covenantal authority of Deuteronomy legitimately deny postmillennialism. Such a denial inescapably rests on this presupposition: Christ’s bodily ascension plays no signiicant role in empowering the church to fulill the Great Commission through the post-ascension advent of the Holy Spirit. Such a view also denies any signiicance for the doctrine of the ascension in the development of either eschatology or Christian social theory. Ultimately, such a view substitutes the experience of Old Covenant Israel for the doctrine of empowerment by the Holy Spirit. If the biblical doctrine of the covenant includes corporate compound economic growth as a conirmation of the covenant (Deut. 8:17), then biblical covenantalism has eschatological implications. Here is the big one: the meek shall inherit the earth. Covenant-keepers who are meek before God, as evidenced by their confession of faith and their way of life – obedience to God’s Bible-revealed law – are empowered by the Holy Spirit in history to extend the kingdom of God in history. That is, they are empowered in history by the Holy Spirit to fulill progressively, though never perfectly, the terms of the dominion covenant.

The Structure of Theonomy

9

Theonomy is covenantal. The covenant is marked by ive points: God’s transcendence/presence; man’s representative, hierarchical authority over creation and under God; God’s revealed law; God’s historical sanctions, positive and negative; and covenant-keepers’ 9. Written prior to the death of Greg Bahnsen.

Conclusion

887

inheritance or succession, in time and eternity. In Chapter 19, I wrote that theonomy is not simply a matter of God’s law; rather, it is a matter of the covenant: God’s absolute sovereignty, man’s subordinate authority, Bible-revealed law’s continuity, historical sanctions’ predictability, and postmillennialism. Put as a slogan, theonomy is a package deal. On this point, I break with Greg Bahnsen, who argues in By This Standard: “What these studies present is a position in Christian (normative) ethics. They do not logically commit those who agree with them to any particular school of eschatological interpretation.”10 Logically, perhaps not; I defer here to Bahnsen’s abilities as a logician. Theologically, God’s biblically revealed law cannot be separated covenantally from sanctions and eschatology. I can appreciate Dr. Bahnsen’s dilemma. First, he believes that 11 the Westminster Confession of Faith teaches theonomy. Second, the ordination standards of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, which ordained him, are explicitly committed to what is known as “eschatological liberty,” or better put, “eschatological opinions as Confessional adiaphora,” i.e., things indiferent to the Confession’s statement of faith. Presbyterianism formally asserts the proposition that an ordained ojcer can lawfully ajrm, or refuse to ajrm, any one of at least three totally incompatible theories of eschatology, at least two of which have to be biblically incorrect and therefore heretical. In order to escape the burden of endless heresy trials and shattered churches, Reformed churches relegate eschatology to the realm of adiaphora.12 Bahnsen does not want to ight a three-front war: law vs. antinomianism; postmillennialism vs. amillennialism; postmillennialism vs. premillennialism. He formally separates his discussion of theonomy, which he believes is both the biblically mandated position and also consistent with the Westminster Confession and its two catechisms, from postmillennialism, which he believes is the biblically mandated position and therefore inconsistent, if postmillennialism

10. Greg L. Bahnsen, By This Standard: The Authority of God’s Law Today (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1985), p. 8. 11. Greg L. Bahnsen, “M. G. Kline on Theonomic Politics: An Evaluation of His Reply,” Journal of Christian Reconstruction, VI (Winter, 1979–80), pp. 200–202. 12. In this sense, Lutherans are correct when they insist that they are not Reformed. They are creedally committed to amillennialism.

888

DEUTERONOMY

really is biblically mandated, with the formal Presbyterian ideal of eschatology as a moot point theologically. The ive-point covenant model, if true, pulls eschatology into ethics and vice versa by way of historical sanctions. This may be another reason for Bahnsen’s lack of enthusiasm for Ray Sutton’s and Meredith Kline’s ive-point covenant model, especially Sutton’s, who does not relegate the covenant and its ive points to the legal status of the Mosaic “intrusion,” to use Kline’s terminology.13 I, on the other hand, am committed not only to the ive-point structure of the covenant, but also to the ive-point structure of the Pentateuch, as well as Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and the Book of Revelation.14

Conclusion I have come to the conclusion of the Conclusion to the book that concludes the Pentateuch. This project has taken me a few weeks more than 24 years, not counting this book’s index. (Now, only 61 books of the Bible to go!) The Pentateuch is structured in terms of the Bible’s ive-point covenant model. So is Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy is a futureoriented book. It deals with inheritance. It looks forward to the events chronicled in Joshua. It lays down the law a second time. The law was Israel’s tool of dominion. Now that the nation was about to inherit the long-promised land of Canaan, the law was vital. By obeying the Mosaic law, Israel could maintain the kingdom grant. If Israel rebelled, God would remove the grant and transfer it to another nation. Jesus prophesied: “Therefore say I unto you, The kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof” (Matt. 21:43). This inally took place in A.D. 70. Deuteronomy, in Kline’s words, is the treaty of the Great King.15 The question is: Was this treaty abrogated forever by Jesus, or were its stipulations merely modiied? The answer to this question divides

13. Ray R. Sutton, That You May Prosper: Dominion By Covenant (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1992), Appendix 7: “Meredith G. Kline: Yes and No.” 14. David Chilton, The Days of Vengeance: An Exposition of the Book of Revelation (Ft. Worth, Texas: Dominion Press, 1987). 15. Meredith G. Kline, Treaty of the Great King: The Covenant Structure of Deuteronomy: Studies and Commentary (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1963).

Conclusion

889 16

theonomists from their critics, whose name is legion. Theonomists insist that this treaty is still in force. God still brings a covenant lawsuit against His enemies in terms of the covenant’s laws. Theonomy’s critics deny this. But the critics have a problem with Deuteronomy 5: the recapitulation of the Ten Commandments. The section ends with this warning: “Ye shall observe to do therefore as the LORD your God hath commanded you: ye shall not turn aside to the right hand or to the left. Ye shall walk in all the ways which the LORD your God hath commanded you, that ye may live, and that it may be well with you, and that ye may prolong your days in the land which ye shall possess” (Deut. 5:32–33). If this promise of blessing ended with Jesus’ ministry, why did Paul cite the ifth commandment and reajrm its life-extending promise? “Children, obey your parents in the Lord: for this is right. Honour thy father and mother; (which is the irst commandment with promise;) That it may be well with thee, and thou mayest live long on the earth” (Eph. 6:1–3). He extended the scope of the positive sanction’s applicability from the geographical conines of Canaan to the whole earth. This is not what I would call judicial annulment. When covenant-breakers abandon the treaty of the Great King, we should not be surprised. The very concept of the Great King of the covenant ofends them. But we also ind that covenant-keepers insist, generation after generation, that they agree with covenantbreakers about the non-binding character of Deuteronomy’s laws and sanctions. They are allied with covenant-breakers against those who argue that the treaty is still in force, and that God’s corporate judgments in history are imposed in terms of its stipulations. Covenant-keepers and covenant-breakers seek a diferent treaty, with diferent laws and diferent sanctions. While they rarely agree on what this treaty might be, the terms of discourse are today set by covenant-breakers. They demand to be included in the debate, and 16. In May, 1997, a committee of the tiny Free Kirk of Scotland declared theonomy heretical. In doing so, the committee broke with the Westminster Confession. See Martin A. Foulner (ed.), Theonomy and the Westminster Confession: an annotated sourcebook (Edinburgh: Marpet Press, 1997). What remains of this once-great ecclesiastical body is an operational alliance between theological liberals, who hate the law of God, and pietists who fear institutional squabbling and who are unfamiliar with historical scholarship, especially the history of seventeenth-century Scottish theology. We have seen all this before, in the American Presbyterian Church. Gary North, Crossed Fingers: How the Liberals Captured the Presbyterian Church (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1996).

890

DEUTERONOMY

they insist that the presuppositions regarding what constitutes justice and how we can both ascertain it and impose its laws must be a neutral, common-ground endeavor. Lo and behold, the conclusions reached by the two groups are presented to the public in terms of 17 autonomous man and his moral and intellectual standards. There is no neutrality. Protestant American Christians today are willing to say this in public far more often than they were when I began writing my economic commentary on Genesis in April of 1973. This confessional reversal constitutes the beginning of a revolution in religious thought. When Christians at long last decide to follow this statement regarding neutrality to its logical conclusion – the denial of political pluralism18 – they will have begun a major journey toward theonomy. To speed up this process of self-awareness, I ask, one more time: If not God’s law, then whose? If not God’s law, then what? I suggest three choices. God’s law or chaos. God’s law or tyranny. God’s law or chaos followed by tyranny. “And Elijah came unto all the people, and said, How long halt ye between two opinions? if the LORD be God, follow him: but if Baal, then follow him. And the people answered him not a word” (I Ki. 18:21). Then came the negative sanction: “Then the ire of the LORD fell, and consumed the burnt sacriice, and the wood, and the stones, and the dust, and licked up the water that was in the trench. And when all the people saw it, they fell on their faces: and they said, The LORD, he is the God; the LORD, he is the God” (vv. 38–39). God’s people learn slowly, but they do eventually learn. The trouble is, this learning process generally requires them to sufer extensive negative sanctions.

17. When the Free Kirk’s committee declared theonomy as heretical, Scottish secular television announced this fact. The committee’s declaration was considered media-worthy. The secularists know who their real enemies are in this seemingly rariied theological debate. Secularists are not worried about theological liberals and their pietistic allies. 18. Gary North, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989).

Appendix A Modern EconomicsECONOMICS as a Form of Magic MODERN AS A FORM OF MAGIC Take the rod, and gather thou the assembly together, thou, and Aaron thy brother, and speak ye unto the rock before their eyes; and it shall give forth his water, and thou shalt bring forth to them water out of the rock: so thou shalt give the congregation and their beasts drink (Num. 20:8). And Moses lifted up his hand, and with his rod he smote the rock twice: and the water came out abundantly, and the congregation drank, and their beasts also (Num. 20:11).

In a previous situation, God had told Moses to strike a rock with his rod, and water would low out of it (Ex. 17:6). This procedure had worked exactly as promised. Now, God’s command was diferent: speak to a rock. In both cases, the Israelites would get what they wanted for no efort or payment on their part. Moses would pay the price – a below-market price by anyone’s standards. His words would bring them God’s supernatural blessing. This time, Moses struck the rock twice. He made up a ritual of his own to substitute for God’s explicit command to him. The water again lowed, but this act cost Moses entrance into the Promised Land. “And the LORD spake unto Moses and Aaron, Because ye believed me not, to sanctify me in the eyes of the children of Israel, therefore ye shall not bring this congregation into the land which I have given them” (Num. 20:12). In what did Moses’ lack of faith consist? He had substituted ritual magic for covenantal obedience. He had imagined that a ritual – a formula of some kind – would enable Israel to gain supernatural blessings from God. Israel would get

891

892

DEUTERONOMY

something for nothing. This plan worked for Israel, but Moses paid a heavy price. God wanted to teach Israel a lesson, namely, that obedience to God’s revealed word produces blessings in history, no matter how low the statistical probabilities of success appear to be. Moses substituted a diferent lesson: adherence to precise formulas is what produces blessings in history. This is the magician’s worldview.

The Economist’s Worldview Economics is a highly rationalistic social science, if not the rationalistic social science. Economists do not recommend invoking supernatural forces as a means of explaining anything or changing anything. Economics is an entirely man-centered discipline. How, then, can it be considered magical? Because economists propose a worldview that insists that wealth-creation can take place, and does take place, by means of techniques and institutional arrangements that supposedly have no necessary connection to God’s word. Economic theory substitutes formulas for biblical ethics in its explanation of how the world works. The economist proposes the magician’s quest: discovering the proper techniques for gaining external blessings apart from external conformity to the stipulations of God’s specially revealed crossboundary laws.1 If wealth-creation is governed by social laws and techniques that are independent of ethics, then man can gain something valuable apart from the costs of obedience to God. This is also the magician’s worldview. The magician seeks an arcane formula or procedure to invoke, or some other source of power over nature that he can manipulate to gain his ends, that does not ask him to change his commitment to his own self-centered ends. Modern economics is the academic incarnation of this outlook, an entire worldview that interprets most of society’s operations in terms of men’s individual solutions to one simple question: “What’s in it for me?”

1. A cross-boundary law was applicable to Israel and the nations, and it is still binding today. I do not use the phrase “natural law,” since it contains too much baggage regarding covenant-breaking man’s supposed ethical neutrality. On cross-boundary laws in Leviticus, see Gary North, Leviticus: An Economic Commentary (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), pp. 643–45.

Modern Economics as a Form of Magic

893

Post-Scholastic economics has generally asserted that wealthcreation is not a matter of ethics except insofar as a man’s willingness to conform to certain behavior patterns increases the statistical probability of his gaining voluntary cooperation from others. Wealth-creation is seen as a matter of the ejcient application of ethically neutral knowledge to the problems of scarcity. For the economist, the phrase, “honesty is the best policy,” is epistemologically meaningful only if honesty can be shown statistically to earn a rate of return above the rate of interest obtainable by investing in “risk-free” short-term government debt.

Economics and Agnosticism Ever since the late seventeenth century, economics has rested self-consciously on the methodological assumption of agnosticism regarding God. It has sought to avoid any invocation of the authority of religion. Operationally, this agnosticism is atheism. This confessionally atheistic worldview was irst extended into scholarship by the economists. William Letwin’s book, The Origins of Scientiic Economics (1963), remains the most detailed study of this intellectual development. He writes: “Nevertheless there can be no doubt that economic theory owes its present development to the fact that some men, in thinking of economic phenomena, forcefully suspended all judgments of theology, morality, and justice, were willing to consider the economy as nothing more than an intricate mechanism, refraining for the while from asking whether the mechanism worked for good or evil. That separation was made during the seventeenth century. . . . The economist’s view of the world, which the public cannot yet comfortably stomach, was introduced by a remarkable tour de force, an intellectual revolution brought of in the seventeenth century.”2 He goes on to assert that “the making of economics was the greatest scientiic achievement of the seventeenth century.”3 While the development of Newtonian physics would seem to deserve that honor, there should be no question that scientiic economics was the greatest atheistic intellectual achievement of the seventeenth century, retaining this title until Darwin’s Descent of Man (1871). Newton the physicist at least tipped his academic hat to a 2. William Letwin, The Origins of Scientiic Economics (Garden City, New York: Anchor, [1963] 1965), pp. 158–59. This book was published irst by M.I.T. Press. 3. Ibid., p. 159.

894

DEUTERONOMY

deistic unitarian god who sustained sujcient order in the cosmos to make applicable men’s knowledge of mathematics. The economists, then as now, tipped their academic hats to no god at all. Adam Smith seems to be an exception. He was a deist of some sort. This is clear from scattered passages in his book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759).4 The book is barely known, rarely read, and never discussed as a contribution to economic thought. Smith made no analytical use of its vague theology in the Wealth of Nations (1776). His famous “invisible hand”5 was a mental construct, not a god. “The hand’s going to get you” was not what he had in mind. Economists since the late nineteenth century have proclaimed the ideal of value-free economics: economic science devoid of ethical content. They have to this extent become magicians. The magician seeks something for nothing by means of ritual formulas. The economist seeks ways for society to attain “more for less”6 through insights generated by means of arcane mathematical formulas.

Equilibrium as Conceptual Magic Modern economics assures us that a society can create wealth if it implements production techniques within a framework accurately described by a series of simultaneous equations. Léon Walras, a French economist living in Switzerland in the 1870’s, described the market order in this way. Oskar Lange in the 1930’s argued that socialist central planning could match the ejciency of the free market by adhering to such mathematical equations in a trial-and-error process.7 These equations presume the economist’s concept of equilibrium: a condition in which no further economic change is possible because all of the society’s production opportunities (functions) have been maximized. It is a world without proit or loss, a world 8 without mistakes.

4. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Indianapolis, Indiana: LibertyClassics, 1976), pp. 275, 483. 5. Smith, Wealth of Nations, Cannan edition, p. 423. Theory of Moral Sentiments, pp. 304–5. 6. More precisely, he seeks to obtain more value from a given cost of resource inputs, or a given value from less costly resource inputs. 7. See Oskar Lange and Fred M. Taylor, On the Economic Theory of Socialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, [1938] 1956), pp. 72–83. This essay irst appeared in the Review of Economic Studies in 1937. 8. Israel M. Kirzner, Market Theory and the Price System (Princeton, New Jersey: Van Nostrand, 1963), pp. 246–49.

Modern Economics as a Form of Magic

895

For this to take place at any point in history, all of the participants in a free market, or the central planners in a socialist economy, would have to possess perfect knowledge, including perfect knowledge of the future. They must be omniscient. Economists do not use such decidedly theological terminology when describing equilibrium. If they were more forthright about the presumptions of equilibrium theory, they would not be taken seriously by anyone outside of their profession. Roger Leroy Miller writes: “Equilibrium in any market is deined as a situation in which the plans of buyers and the plans of sellers exactly mesh, causing the quantity supplied to equal the quantity demanded.”9 Gwartney and Stroup agree: “When a market is in equilibrium, there is a balance of forces such that the actions of buyers and suppliers are consistent with one another. In addition, when long-run equilibrium is present, the conditions will persist into the future.”10 How can such a meshing of plans occur? Through perfect forecasting: “In summary, an output rate can be sustained into the future only when the prior choices of decisionmakers were based on a correct anticipation of the current price level.”11 The phrase “correct anticipation” has to be interpreted as “perfect foreknowledge,” but the authors are too scientiic to say this. Their peers know what they really mean – equilibrium is an impossible condition to fulill – and the average student is not too inquisitive about the relationship between a theory based on human omniscience and details in the real world. Edwin Dolan writes: “The separately formulated plans of all market participants may turn out to mesh exactly when tested in the marketplace, and no one will have frustrated expectations or be forced to modify plans. When this happens, the market is said to be in equilibrium.”12 E. H. Phelps writes in The New Palgrave (1987), the English-speaking economics profession’s dominant dictionary: “Economic equilibrium, at least as the term has traditionally been used, has always implied an outcome, typically from the application of some inputs, that conforms

9. Roger Leroy Miller, Economics Today (5th ed.; New York: Harper & Row, 1985), p. 49. 10. James D. Gwartney and Richard L. Stroup, Economics: Public and Private Choice (4th ed.; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), p. 186. 11. Ibid., p. 187. 12. Edwin G. Dolan, Basic Economics (2nd ed.; Hinsdale, Illinois: Dryden, 1980), pp. 44–45.

896

DEUTERONOMY

13

to the expectations of the participants in the economy.” There seems to be perfect agreement here: a kind of theoretical equilibrium among economists. The deinitions mesh. So does their blandness. This textbook deinition of equilibrium seems so subdued and uncontroversial, even plausible. The economists’ language certainly gives the impression that equilibrium applies to a real-world phenomenon: “a situation in which the plans of buyers and the plans of sellers exactly mesh,” “when a market is in equilibrium,” and “the separately formulated plans of all market participants may turn out to mesh exactly when tested in the marketplace.” We can almost visualize a dedicated student writing down the deinition of equilibrium on an index card, to be iled away in a card box until the night before the inal exam, when the card will be retrieved and the deinition filed for 24 hours in a less permanent location. Now, for the sake of argument, let me provide a somewhat more controversial though more complete deinition of equilibrium: Equilibrium is the condition of the world economy which occurs whenever all three billion market participants on earth (not counting their non-participating children) have perfectly forecasted the supply-and-demand efects of all of the economic decisions of all of the other three billion, so that their plans mesh perfectly without error. This is why there is no incentive for plan-revision. No one has anything more to sell at the existing prices, and everyone has purchased all that he wants at the existing prices, so prices will not change as a result of anyone’s changing his mind. Equilibrium requires that every market participant forecast perfectly the economic future, which has therefore ceased to be uncertain. In short, equilibrium occurs whenever everyone on earth has previously attained what Christian theologians refer to as one of God’s incommunicable attributes: omniscience.

This note card might generate a second reading, even the night before the inal exam. Perhaps an A-level student might think to himself, “This economic condition does not seem altogether plausible.” I would go so far as to suggest that even a few of the B-level students

13. Edmund S. Phelps, “equilibrium: an expectational concept,” in The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, edited by John Eatwell, Murray Milgate, and Peter Newman, 4 vols. (New York: Macmillan 1987), II, p. 177.

Modern Economics as a Form of Magic

897

might wonder, at least briely, whether this deinition applies to the real world. (The C-level students will surely do their best to commit the deinition to memory, though without success; the others do not bother to use note cards.) Equilibrium as a concept applies only to a never-never land where men possess one of the attributes of God. This never-never land is the realm of simultaneous equations and the calculus, not people. Yet time and time again, we ind economists seriously discussing a theoretical problem in economics as if this never-never land could conceivably occur in the real world.

Lange vs. Mises Let us consider a real-world example of “applied equilibrium” thinking by economists, one which had considerable impact on the history of economic thought for half a century. In his suggested solution to Ludwig von Mises’ 1920 argument that socialist economic calculation is inherently irrational,14 Lange wrote in 1937: “Let us see how economic equilibrium is established by trial-and-error in a competitive market.”15 He asserted the ability of socialist central planners, in the absence of private ownership or private capital markets, to coordinate the economy by means of trial-and-error pricing. So conident was Lange in the real-world applicability of his solution that he began his book with a rhetorical dismissal of Mises that became far more familiar than the details of Lange’s argument. Socialists are beholden to Mises because he articulated the irrational calculation argument better than anyone else. “Both as an expression of recognition for the great service rendered by him and as a memento of the prime importance of sound economic accounting, a statue of Professor Mises might occupy an honorable place in the great hall of the Ministry of Socialization or of the Central Planning Board of the socialist state.” Less familiar is his Marxian follow up: “[E]ven the stanchest of bourgeois economists unwittingly serve the proletarian cause.”16

14. Ludwig von Mises, “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth” (1920); reprinted in F. A. Hayek (ed.), Collectivist Economic Planning (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, [1935] 1963), ch. 3. 15. Lange, Socialism, p. 65. 16. Ibid., pp. 57–58.

898

DEUTERONOMY

Lange was no vague socialist. He was a Communist. He renounced his United States citizenship in 1945 to become the Polish ambassador to the United States. In 1947, he returned to Poland to serve as an economist. In 1957, he was appointed chairman of the Polish Economic Council. He did not suggest the implementation of his 1937 solution to Mises’ challenge. Instead, he appealed to the new god – the computer – to solve the problem of coordinating scarce resources. He died in 1965.17 Nevertheless, his abandonment in practice of his own suggested solution did not penetrate the thinking of the myriad of Mises’ critics in the Western world, who continued to cite his 1937 essay as if it were gospel truth. In short, “Better to accept a defunct theory by a Communist planner in a povertystricken backward nation than to accept the legitimacy of a comprehensive theoretical criticism of socialism in general.” Ironically, it was Poland that irst broke loose from Soviet Communism’s tyranny. The Solidarity labor movement understood that Communism cannot work before certain best-selling Western economists did. The Poles began their high-risk protest against the USSR in 1981. Yet as late as 1989, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Samuelson wrote in his best-selling economics textbook: “The Soviet economy is proof that, contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, a socialist command economy can function and even thrive.”18 That same year, the Soviet Union went bankrupt in full public view, and the Berlin Wall came down.

Theory and Reality The theoretical problem with Lange’s appeal to trial-and-error as a means leading to equilibrium is that for equilibrium to occur, there must irst be omniscience by the person or persons in charge of resource allocation. There is no need for trials because there is no possibility of errors by those who possess omniscience. Equilibrium is the negation of trial and error. Now, to be fair to Lange, he must have had in mind the argument that trial and error by socialist planners is as ejcient – no, more ejcient – in reaching equilibrium than

17. Dolan, Basic Economics, p. 686. 18. Paul A. Samuelson and William D. Nordhaus, Economics (13th ed.; New York: McGraw-Hill, 1989), p. 837, cited in Mark Skousen, Economics on Trial: Lies, Myths, and Realities (Homewood, Illinois: Business One Irwin, 1991), p. 208.

Modern Economics as a Form of Magic

899

the proit-seeking decisions of resource owners. More equitable, too. Or, to paraphrase Orwell, “All equilibrium conditions are equal, but some are more equal than others.” All we need to assume, as good socialists, is “freedom of choice in consumption and freedom of choice in occupation,”19 and the central planners can bring equilibrium into existence as well as entrepreneurs can. In fact, better. “Once the parametric function of prices is adopted as an accounting rule, the price structure is established by the objective equilibrium conditions.”20 In short, what Mises and the Austrian school always insisted is impossible in history – equilibrium conditions – Lange appealed to as the solution to the problem of socialist economic calculation. For half a century, this argument was accepted by most economists as a theoretically valid dismissal of Mises, i.e., Mises’ theory of entrepreneurship in a world of economic uncertainty and subjectively imputed prices. Lange’s argument was also, by implication, a dismissal of Frank H. Knight’s 1921 classic, Risk, Uncertainty and Proit, which rested on the same theory of entrepreneurship that Mises ofered. Lange’s proposed practical solution, which was never adopted by any socialist planning agency, was regarded by his academic peers as having solved the real-world problems raised by Mises. As socialist economist Robert Heilbroner admitted in 1990, the year after the Berlin Wall came down, and the year before the Soviet Union collapsed: “Fifty years ago, it was felt that Lange had decisively won the argument for socialist planning.” It has turned out, Heilbroner belatedly admitted, that Lange was wrong, and “Mises was right.”21 Fifty years of criticism from a handful of free market economists that Lange’s solution, based on equilibrium conditions, was no solution at all, in no way afected the thinking of the majority of academic economists.22 The latter were equally committed to equilibrium as a legitimate model with which to critique free market capitalism,23 and so they refused to pay any attention to 19. Ibid., p. 72. 20. Ibid., p. 81. 21. Robert Heilbroner, “After Communism,” The New Yorker (Sept. 10, 1990), p. 92. 22. Peter G. Klein, “Introduction,” The Fortunes of Liberalism: Essays on Austrian Economics and the Ideal of Freedom, edited by Peter G. Klein, vol. IV of The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek (University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 10. 23. For example, the once-popular “perfect competition” model was used to show why capitalism fails in practice. But in the perfect competition model, there is no competition, since everyone is omniscient regarding the uses of scarce resources. See Israel Kirzner’s

900

DEUTERONOMY

Lange’s critics. What inally persuaded them was not Mises’ arguments but socialism’s visible irrationality: the bankruptcy of the Soviet-bloc nations in the late 1980’s. Kirzner has argued that what is lacking in the neoclassical economics of Walras, Marshall, and their disciples is some means of explaining how equilibrium can occur, thereby giving life to the advanced textbook world of simultaneous equations. “However, when price is described as being above or below equilibrium, it is understood that a single price prevails in the market. The uncomfortable question, then, is whether we may assume that a single price emerges before equilibrium is attained. Surely a single price can be postulated only as the result of the process of equilibrium itself. . . . The procedure also assumes too much. It takes for granted that the market already knows when the demand price of the quantity now available exceeds the supply price. But disequilibrium occurs precisely because market participants do not know what the market-clearing price is.”25 This applies even more forcefully to Lange’s socialist planning board. This line of argumentation, which is Mises’ Austrian argument, undercuts Walras as well as Lange. The economics profession has not given this idea careful consideration in its journals and textbooks. Walras was the original spinner of invisible clothing for the emperors of economics. Emperors who wear invisible clothes prefer to keep clear-eyed critics away from their parades. Invoking equilibrium when discussing economic policy-making is an exercise in conceptual magic. Equilibrium rests on the assumption of the possibility of mankind’s simultaneous omniscience. Yet neoclassical economics, including Keynesianism, invokes the equilibrium concept continually.26 24

criticisms of E. H. Chamberlin in Kirzner, Competition and Entrepreneurship (University of Chicago Press, 1973), chaps. 3, 4. 24. The most widely known response was by Hayek in Economica (1940); reprinted in F. A. Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order (University of Chicago Press, 1949), ch. 9. The most detailed criticism was by the little-known economist, T. J. B. Hof, Economic Calculation in the Socialist Society (London: William Hodge & Co., 1949). This has been reprinted by the Liberty Fund in Indianapolis. 25. Israel M. Kirzner, Perception, Opportunity, and Proit: Studies in the Theory of Entrepreneurship (University of Chicago Press, 1979), pp. 4–5. 26. The Austrians invoke it occasionally, but only as a mental construct. Mises called it the evenly rotating economy (E.R.E.). He used it only to prove that the interest rate is a universal phenomenon. One exception to this refusal to invoke equilibrium is Kirzner’s 1963

Modern Economics as a Form of Magic

901

Economic Theory vs. Ethical Value Ethical value is publicly stripped of all authority in modern economic theory.27 Those few economists who have argued that value-free economic analysis is mythical have had almost no inluence on the profession. If they have had any inluence, this topic was not the area in which they established their reputations.28 The one well-respected American economist who has argued forcefully for the reintroduction of values into economic theory, Kenneth Boulding, is regarded as somewhat eccentric for promoting the idea that ethics should be incorporated into the tools of analysis. Meanwhile, the use of high-level mathematics as a tool of theoretical analysis, especially since the days of Walras, reveals just how committed the economics profession is to arcane formulas. There is even an element of priestly ritual about this procedure. Liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who spurned mathematics, formulas, and graphs throughout his career, once revealed a little-known side of the profession. The editors of the professional journals, which are the avenues of career advancement, play a game regarding the use of mathematics. “The layman may take comfort from the fact that the most esoteric of this material is not read by other economists or even by the editors who publish it. In the economics profession the editorship of a learned journal not specialized to econometrics or mathematical statistics is a position of only moderate prestige. It is accepted, moreover, that the editor must have a certain measure of practical judgment. This means that he is usually unable to read the most prestigious contributions which, nonetheless, he must publish. discussion of perfect competition, which he said is impossible to attain. This appeared in his out-of-print upper division economics textbook, Market Theory and the Price System, pp. 108–109. He never revised this book to relect better his later studies in entrepreneurship. For a critique of the E.R.E., see Gary North, The Dominion Covenant: Genesis (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987), pp. 352–53; Tools of Dominion: The Case Laws of Exodus (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), pp. 1120–21. 27. Walter A. Weisskopf, Alienation and Economics (New York: Dutton, 1971), ch. 4. 28. Robert Heilbroner is a good example. His popular book on the history of economic thought, The Worldly Philosophers, is a standard text in both history and economics departments. It was assigned by the millions. But his essay on the impossibility of value-free economics was not published in an economics journal. Robert L. Heilbroner, “Economics as a ‘Value-free’ Science,” Social Research, XL (1973), pp. 129–43; reprinted in William L. Marr and Baldev Raj (eds.), How Economists Explain: A Reader in Methodology (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1982). The publisher did not bother to typeset this volume. It was written on a typewriter.

902

DEUTERONOMY

So it is the practice of the editor to associate with himself a mathematical curate who passes on this part of the work and whose word 29 he takes. A certain embarrassed silence covers the arrangement.”

Value Theory at an Epistemological Impasse The attempt to create an economic science as devoid of value judgments or ethics as physics has led to a theoretical impasse. This impasse was irst discussed in detail in the 1930’s, but it is almost never mentioned today because it cannot be solved, given the presuppositions of modern economics. Economists in the 1870’s30 began to abandon classical economics’ concept of objective economic value. They substituted individual value preferences for objective value. All economic value is imputed by individuals, modern economics insists. If this is true, then in order to make any kind of policy recommendation, the economist must assume that the value preferences or value scales of individuals can be compared with each other. To say that a policy beneits a lot of people assumes that the economist can compare the value scales of all of these people, or at least a statistically valid sample of them (but how can we be sure it is valid?), as well as the value scales of those who are not beneited by the policy. He must be able to total up beneits and costs. He must be able to aggregate individual value preferences. But this is impossible to do. There can be no interpersonal comparison of subjective value. This was Lionel Robbins’ conclusion in 1932, and while he partially recanted in 1938, he did not explain why he had been incorrect in 1932.31 There is no common scale of values in human action, economic or otherwise. There is no value scale. Scales are physical devices used by physicists and chemists. An idea of a “scale of values” is at best a useful teaching device. It is not only mythical, it is misleading if it is associated with actual measurement. It makes economics sound

29. John Kenneth Galbraith, Economics Peace and Laughter (Boston: Houghton Mimin, 1971), p. 41n. 30. William Jevons, Carl Menger, and Léon Walras. Cf. Karl Pribram, A History of Economic Reasoning (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), Part VI. 31. On his debate with Sir Roy Harrod in 1938, see North, Dominion Covenant, pp. 44–51; Tools of Dominion, Appendix D: “The Epistemological Problem With Social Cost.” Cf. Mark A. Lutz and Kenneth Lux, The Challenge of Humanistic Economics (Menlo Park, California: Benjamin/Cummings, 1979), pp. 83–87. These two authors are as little known as their publisher.

Modern Economics as a Form of Magic

903

like a physical science. Individual value preferences can be ranked; they cannot be measured.32 As for social value, it has no role to play in a science that denies that it is possible to make interpersonal comparisons of subjective utility. The problem, however, is that it plays an enormous role in economics. Indeed, economics as a social science is inconceivable apart from the concept of social value. Economics without a concept of social value would be like physics without a concept of mass. The quest for a value-free economic science is ultimately the quest for man’s autonomy from God and His law. It is a quest for meaning apart from “thou shalt not.” The socialist economist is less likely to indulge in this quest than the free market economist is, since he invokes the beneits and legitimacy of social justice despite all socialist economies’ declining economic output. There are “higher values” than “mere statistical output,” he insists. The State must redistribute resources in order to beneit the oppressed or whichever the favored group is. Theoretically speaking, a strictly valuefree free market economist cannot respond to the socialist by appealing to the free market’s measurable ejciency and growth without violating the principle of imputed individual value. There can be no scientiically valid measure of aggregate economic value, so there is no way to measure economic ejciency.33 This admission would undermine all discussions by economists of government economic policy. Neither the socialist economists nor the free market economists want to see this happen. To have lots of people understand that economists as scientists must remain mute in all government policy matters is not in the economists’ personal self-interest. They might lose their jobs. The economist pretends to pull a rabbit (a policy recommendation) out of an empty hat (value-free economics). But he put the rabbit in the hat before he went on stage. He has deinite value preferences. His economic analysis will relect this fact. He will defend or attack this or that government policy in terms of his preferences. He

32. Murray N. Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State: A Treatise on Economic Principles (Princeton, New Jersey: Van Nostrand, 1962), p. 222. Reprinted by the Mises Institute, Auburn, Alabama, 1993. 33. Murray N. Rothbard, “Comment: The Myth of Ejciency,” in Mario Rizzo (ed.), Time, Uncertainty, and Disequilibrium (Lexington, Massachusetts: Lexington Books, 1979), p. 90. Cf. North, Tools of Dominion, pp. 1118–19.

904

DEUTERONOMY

cannot do this as a scientist, given the impossibility of making interpersonal comparisons of subjective utility. He does so as a selfinterested propagandist who pretends to be a neutral scientist for the sake of being taken seriously by policy makers and voters. This kind of magic is prestidigitation. It is based on manipulation and illusion. Sometimes I think the primary victims of this illusion are the economists themselves, most of whom seem blissfully unaware of the epistemological subterfuge they are promoting.

The Trinity and Imputation of Value Without the presupposition of an omniscient God who imputes value subjectively in terms of a scale of values, a God who can measure value scales and make interpersonal comparisons of men’s subjective utility, there can be no economic science. Modern economic science rests unojcially on the assumption of collective value scales and preferences, and also their measurability, even though ojcially economists deny their existence. They must assume what they ojcially deny. There must be socially objective value and a socially objective value scale if there is a legitimate economic evaluation of social policy. There must be a value scale undergirding every evaluation; that is what “evaluate” means. God’s judgments are objective in the sense of being both eternal and historical. He brings visible judgments in terms of His law. These judgments are both objectively grounded and subjectively grounded in the ixed moral character of God: “For I am the LORD, I change not; therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed” (Mal. 3:6).34 God knows objectively whatever He knows subjectively, and vice versa. In Him, both subjective value and objective value reside. They reside there personally, for God is personal. A corollary to the doctrine of God as an imputing agent is this: if individual men were not made in God’s image, imputing value in a creaturely fashion, there could be no economic science. Men can impute value only because God has already done so. An individual can make useful estimates of social costs and beneits only because God makes precise calculations of social costs and beneits. 34. “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning” (James 1:17).

Modern Economics as a Form of Magic

905

Finally, there is this corollary: if men were not able to impute value corporately, even as the Triune God of the Bible imputes value corporately, there could be no social theory, including economic theory. There could be no epistemological basis for policy formation. Societies can make judgments corporately because God does. The doctrine of the Trinity is the foundation of social theory. This is all denied by the modern economist. Economics has adopted the confession of the magician, not in the sense of invoking the supernatural, but in the sense of attributing wealth-creation to value-free techniques governed by formulas. The socialist invokes State planning; the free market economist invokes private property. Both deny that wealth is the product of obedience to God’s laws. From economics, the original social science,35 has come the confessional model of all the others: “There is no necessary and sujcient god but man, either individual or collective.” The right-wing Enlightenment began with the English Whigs’ political protests against a State-established church, but the concept of an evolving autonomous social order was irst articulated by the Scottish common-sense rationalists in the mid-eighteenth century. They described society as the result of human action but not of human design.36 This model later served Erasmus Darwin and his grandson Charles as the model of biological evolution.37 The Scots’ social model was a kind of secularized Presbyterianism, even as the Continental left-wing Enlightenment social model was a kind of secularized Jesuitism. Scottish moral philosophy replaced theology (eighteenth century); then political economy replaced moral philosophy (nineteenth century); inally, economics replaced political economy (twentieth century). With each step, economics has moved further away from any concept of a divinely sanctioned moral order.

Conclusion Man lives in a world of imputed meaning, for he is a creature under God. It is God who imputes original meaning and value to 35. Political philosophy, as distinguished from political science, began its march into atheism with Machiavelli. But Machiavelli had no explicitly scientiic pretensions. 36. F. A. Hayek, “The Results of Human Action but not of Human Design” (1967), in Hayek, Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (University of Chicago Press, 1967), ch. 6. 37. The inluence here was David Hume. Hayek, “The Legal and Political Philosophy of David Hume” (1963), ibid., p. 119n.

906

DEUTERONOMY

the creation. Man is God’s subordinate, required by God to think his own thoughts after Him, in a law-abiding, creaturely manner. But this is both too much and too little for covenant-breaking man. He wants to be less than the image of God and more than the agent of God. If he is either, he becomes responsible to God. He wants autonomy from God; so, he subordinates himself to nature instead. Rejecting God’s law as a guide to human action, he inds himself entrapped by impersonal forces, which are in turn governed by (or are they merely revealed by?) impersonal formulas. Covenantbreaking man seeks out formulas as the pathways to wealth and power. Some people prefer astrological formulas; others prefer statistical averages. Fate or chance or an impersonal mixture of the two: Which will it be? “Get your bets down, gentlemen. The window is about to close.” But why do any of these formulas work? Consider mathematics, the most popular source of power-granting formulas in our day. Men master the discipline of mathematics in order to understand and control their world, rarely pausing to contemplate the utter unreasonableness of the fact that a mental construct that is governed exclusively by its own rules of logic applies in so many powerful ways to the operations of the external world.38 Economics allows the use of higher mathematics as a tool of theoretical analysis only where equilibrium conditions exist, i.e., where one or more men are presumed to be omniscient. (“Ye shall be as gods” is the applicable phrase here.) Every other use of mathematics in economics is either a simpliied hypothetical example of price ratios for the sake of teaching or else statistics applied to historical data. Yet modern economics is overwhelmingly mathematical in its formal presentations, as a survey of any three professional journals will prove (within a statistically acceptable range of error, of course) to skeptical readers. Modern economics, the original strictly humanistic social science, cannot avoid these humanist antinomies. For example, in seeking autonomy from God, modern economists propose a world in which only individuals impute value to the creation. But then

38. Eugene Wigner, “The Unreasonable Efectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics, 13 (1960), pp. 1–14. Wigner won the Nobel Prize in physics.

Modern Economics as a Form of Magic

907

they ind that these autonomous imputations cannot be aggregated: no common measure exists. It is impossible to make interpersonal comparisons of subjective utility. So, policy-making on a scientiic basis must logically be abandoned. But the economist does not want to abandon either science or policy-making, especially government policy-making, where the power is, or seems to be. So, he refuses to think about the logic of his position. The economics profession is becoming ever more self-conscious in its quest for analytical tools that abandon any trace of ethics. Many economists are even bothered by the traditional concept of choice. They may adopt indiference curves as a way to avoid the more psychological, and therefore more scientiically suspect, concept of utility. But if acting man is truly indiferent between two possible outcomes, how can he choose? Will he stand motionless, like Buridan’s ass, until the threat of deprivation pressures him to take action, at which point he abandons his indiference?39 Economists adopt cost curves, supply curves, all kinds of curves. But a curve is made up of ininitesimal points. Prices and quantities are described by curves as changing in ininitesimally small moves. But infinitesimal changes are not aspects of decision-making. On the other hand, they are subject to the calculus, which for the modern economist is surely a more important explanatory tool than human action is. Economists rest their case for economics as a science on theoretical constructs that assume that man is omniscient. But there is no human choice in a world in which man knows outcomes; there are only responses.40 Economists invoke complex mathematical formulas in their quest for knowledge and inluence, while abandoning the idea of rational human choice. Armen Alchian, a free market economist of the Chicago School, writes: “The essential point is that individual motivation and foresight, while sujcient, are not necessary” for economic theory to be true.41

39. Murray N. Rothbard, “Toward a Reconstruction of Utility and Welfare Economics,” in On Freedom and Free Enterprise: Essays in Honor of Ludwig von Mises, edited by Mary Sennholz (Princeton, New Jersey: Van Nostrand, 1956), p. 238. 40. Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1949), p. 249. 41. Armen Alchian, “Uncertainty, Evolution and Economic Theory,” in Alchian, Economic Forces at Work (Indianapolis: LibertyPress, 1977), p. 27.

908

DEUTERONOMY

Step by step, humanistic economics is abandoning man. Economics substitutes a behaviorist concept of man for the decision-maker who inhabits the real world. Man disappears in the world of simultaneous equations. God is not mocked . . . not at zero price, anyway.

Appendix B Individualism, Holism, andHOLISM, Covenantalism INDIVIDUALISM, AND COVENANTALISM And when thy herds and thy locks multiply, and thy silver and thy gold is multiplied, and all that thou hast is multiplied. . . (Deut. 8:13).

The language of mathematics infuses Moses’ discussion of Israel’s blessings. This language points to objective wealth: the multiplication of valuable things. This raises a problem for economic theory. How is value measured? How is wealth measured? If value is objective, it can be measured, but modern economic theory ojcially places the individual’s subjective valuation – economic imputation – at the heart of its theory of value. Yet modern economists have been obsessed with the intellectual challenge of establishing reliable indexes of wealth, prices, and corporate social utility. They have persuaded governments around the world to spend billions of dollars to collect economic data from private citizens and irms. In fact, this data collection has justiied the establishment of government economic planning. Without statistics, government planners could not claim the ability to plan the economy.1

1. Murray N. Rothbard, “The Politics of Political Economists: Comment,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 74 (Nov. 1960). Rothbard, “Fact-finding is a proper function of government,” Clichés of Politics, edited by Mark Spangler (Irvington, New York: Foundation for Economic Education, 1994). The essay was first published in The Freeman in June, 1961: “Statistics: Achilles’ Heel of Government.” Cf. Gary North, Sanctions and Dominion: An Economic Commentary on Numbers (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1996), ch. 2, section on “Statistics and Government Planning.”

909

910

DEUTERONOMY

Humanist economic theory has been unable to resolve the di2 chotomy between subjective value and objective value. If value is imputed subjectively by an individual, it is impossible for another individual to measure objectively this value. In fact, it is impossible for the first individual to impute cardinal numbers to his own valuation. He can only establish an ordinal ranking of values: first, second, third, etc. As Rothbard has written, “there is never any possibility of measuring increases or decreases in happiness or satisfaction. Not only is it impossible to measure or compare changes in the satisfaction of diferent people; it is not possible to measure changes in the happiness of any given person. In order for any measurement to be possible, there must be an eternally fixed objectively given unit with which other units may be compared. There is no such objective unit in the field of human valuation. The individual must determine subjectively for himself whether he is better or worse of as a result of any change. His preference can only be expressed in terms of simple choice, or rank. . . . There is no possible unit of happiness that can be used for purposes of comparison, and hence of addition or multiplication. Thus, values cannot be measured; values or utilities cannot be added, subtracted, or multiplied. They can only be ranked as better or worse.”3 If this is true, then it is scientiically impossible to make interpersonal comparisons of subjective utility. This was Lionel Robbins’ assertion in 1932.4 But if he was correct, then it is impossible for economists as scientists to make policy recommendations based on the superiority of one outcome to another. Roy Harrod pointed this out in a 1938 essay.5 Robbins then capitulated, announcing that he did accept the legitimacy of the idea of economic policy-making.6 He never reconciled his two positions.7 So far, neither has anyone else. 2. Gary North, The Dominion Covenant: Genesis (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987), ch. 4. Cf. North, Tools of Dominion: The Case Laws of Exodus (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), pp. 1093–1100. 3. Murray N. Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State: A Treatise on Economic Principles (Princeton, New Jersey: Van Nostrand, 1962), pp. 15–16. 4. Lionel Robbins, An Essay on the Nature and Signiicance of Economic Science (2nd ed.; New York: St. Martins, 1935), p. 140. 5. R. F. Harrod, “Scope and Method of Economics,” Economic Journal, XVLIII (1938), pp. 396–97. 6. Lionel Robbins, “Interpersonal Comparisons of Utility: A Comment,” ibid. (1938), pp. 637–39. 7. North, Dominion Covenant, pp. 46–50.

Individualism, Holism, and Covenantalism

911

This is the problem of epistemological subjectivism and policy-making. It applies to every social science, not just economics. It is more obvious in economics, however. The economics profession systematically avoids discussing it. Economists dearly love their role as policy experts. They do not want to admit to their students, let alone to the general public, that the foundations of modern economics make such a role scientiically fraudulent.

Welfare Economics, Ethics, and Subjectivism Whether we use the language of multiplication or the language of social utility, we are dealing with collectives. If we use such terminology to assert an increase in social wealth, we are aggregating individual utilities. But this procedure is illegitimate if economic value is exclusively subjective. Thus, we cannot move scientiically from the individual to the group on the basis of economic analysis. Conclusion: there is no such thing as welfare economics. Rothbard attempted to make this move in a 1956 essay. First, he denied the existence of total utility. “We must conclude then that there is no such thing as total utility; all utilities are marginal.”8 Second, he announced: “The problem of ‘welfare economics’ has always been to ind some way to circumvent this restriction on economics, and to make ethical, and particularly political, statements directly.”9 Third, he stated that all ethical issues are imported from outside the discipline of economics.10 Fourth, he asserted that all economic advising denies the ethical neutrality dictum.11 Then how can an economist make any statement regarding social welfare? Only on one basis: if any change increases at least one person’s utility and has not reduced any other person’s utility. This is Pareto’s unanimity rule. There is one overwhelming objection to this rule: the existence of envy. If one person is made richer by some change in the economy, and another person resents this, the beneit to the first person may be ofset by the negative feelings of the second. Rothbard in 1956 acknowledged this as a theoretical problem, but then he dismissed 8. Murray N. Rothbard, “Toward a Reconstruction of Utility and Welfare Economics,” in Mary Sennholz (ed.), On Freedom and Free Enterprise: Essays in Honor of Ludwig von Mises (Princeton, New Jersey: Van Nostrand, 1956), p. 234. 9. Ibid., p. 244. 10. Ibid., p. 247. 11. Ibid., p. 248.

912

DEUTERONOMY

it. Envy is strictly internal; it does not lead to action, and only action counts. “How do we know that this hypothetical envious one loses in utility because of the exchanges of others? Consulting his verbal opinions does not sujce, for his proclaimed envy might be a joke or a literary game or a deliberate lie.”12 Conclusion: “We are led inexorably, then, to the conclusion that the processes of the free market always lead to a gain in social utility. And we can say this with absolute validity as economists, without engaging in ethical judgments.”13 So, there is an aggregate called social utility after all. We can postulate an increase in social utility whenever we can identify a voluntary exchange: two people are better of, and no one is worse of, so long as there is no such thing as envy. Rothbard imported an aggregate into his analysis, as all welfare economists must, and with welfare economics comes ethics – the end of value-free economics. Unfortunately for the acceptability of this thesis, Rothbard later wrote a classic essay in 1971 on the importance of envy in society, especially as the basis of socialism.14 By moving envy from the realm of the merely hypothetical into the realm of the politically signiicant, Rothbard undermined his reconstruction of welfare economics. Envy does exist after all in the world of demonstrated preferences; it is a major foundation of socialism. Therefore, the economist who uses some version of Pareto’s analysis – at least two market participants are better of, while no one is worse of – in order to prove an increase in social utility yet without invoking ethics is deluding himself. He has imported ethics into economic analysis the moment the issue of envy is introduced. He has assumed that envy is ethically illegitimate and therefore cannot legitimately be used to criticize that libertarian version of welfare economics which supposedly enables an economist to assert an increase of social utility based on the existence of voluntary exchanges. Ethics, in short, becomes determinative in “value-free” economic science. This hostility to envy as a legitimate aspect of economic analysis rests on an ethical foundation.

12. Ibid., p. 250. 13. Idem. 14. Rothbard, “Freedom, Inequality and the Division of Labor,” Modern Age (Summer 1971); reprinted in Kenneth Templeton (ed.), The Politicalization of Society (Indianapolis, Indiana: LibertyPress, 1978), pp. 83–126. The essay was also reprinted as a monograph by the Mises Institute, Auburn, Alabama.

Individualism, Holism, and Covenantalism

913

Kirzner on Welfare Economics Three decades later, Israel Kirzner – a disciple of Mises and a rabbi of Orthodox Judaism15 – profusely praised Rothbard’s 1956 essay for its rejection of aggregates. “To attempt to aggregate utility is not merely to violate the tenets of methodological individualism and subjectivism (by treating the sensations of diferent individuals as being able to be added up); it is also to engage in an entirely meaningless exercise: economic analysis has nothing to say about sensations, it deals strictly with choices and their interpersonal implications.”16 Kirzner rejects the idea of “Pareto optimality” because “a Pareto-optimal move is considered to advance the well-being of society – considered as a whole.”17 He is correct; this is exactly what Pareto optimality implies. But Rothbard’s essay rested on Pareto optimality: two people being better of and no one (except the envious, who were dismissed by deinition) worse of. Kirzner completely misses the fundamental point – a highly non-individualistic point – of Rothbard’s essay: social utility is an aggregate, and this aggregate can be said to increase only because of Pareto optimality. In the essay following Kirzner’s, I set forth these challenges to Rothbard: If the economist cannot make interpersonal comparisons of subjective utility . . . as Rothbard insists, then how can he be certain that “the free 18 market maximizes social utility”? What is “social utility” in an epistemological world devoid of interpersonal aggregates? 19 If “in human action there are no quantitative constants,” and therefore no 20 index number is legitimate, then how can we say that monetary inlation produces price inflation? What is price inlation without an index number? What is an index number without interpersonal aggregation? If we cannot deine “social utility,” or price inlation, then how can we know that “money, in contrast to all other useful commodities employed in 15. Economist Aaron Levine refers to Kirzner as “Rabbi Dr. Israel Kirzner, Talmudist extraordinaire. . . .” Levine, Free Enterprise and Jewish Law: Aspects of Jewish Business Ethics (New York: KTAV, 1980), p. xi. 16. Israel M. Kirzner, “Welfare Economics: A Modern Austrian Perspective,” in Walter Block and Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. (eds.), Man, Economy, and Liberty: Essays in Honor of Murray N. Rothbard (Auburn, Alabama: Mises Institute, 1988), p. 79. 17. Idem. 18. Rothbard, Power and Market: Government and the Economy (Menlo Park, California: Institute for Humane Studies, 1970), p. 13. 19. Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State, p. 739. 20. Ibid., p. 740.

914

DEUTERONOMY

production or consumption, does not confer a social beneit when its sup21 ply increases”? How can we legitimately say anything about the aggre22 gate entity, “social beneit”?

Kirzner understands that these aggregates are illegitimate from the point of view of methodological subjectivism, and he has refrained from arguing publicly for any social policy throughout his career. He has seen that, in terms of pure subjectivism in economics, to discuss the concept of social choice is “to engage in a metaphor.”23 “To choose, presupposes an integrated framework of ends and means; without such a presumed framework allocative choice is hardly a coherent notion at all.”24 Such a statement identiies Kirzner as a very precise follower of Mises and a less precise follower of Moses. Without the concept of aggregate, corporate social curses and blessings, there can be no national covenant between God and His people. Without the idea of a series of corporate covenants there could be neither Judaism or Christianity. The covenants of Israel were judicially objective. To demonstrate this objectivity, God provided objective economic blessings that were visible to anyone who looked at the evidence. And because he loved thy fathers, therefore he chose their seed after them, and brought thee out in his sight with his mighty power out of Egypt; To drive out nations from before thee greater and mightier than thou art, to bring thee in, to give thee their land for an inheritance, as it is this day. Know therefore this day, and consider it in thine heart, that the LORD he is God in heaven above, and upon the earth beneath: there is none else (Deut. 4:37–39). And it shall be, when the LORD thy God shall have brought thee into the land which he sware unto thy fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give thee great and goodly cities, which thou buildedst not, And houses full of all good things, which thou illedst not, and wells digged,

21. Rothbard, “The Case for a 100% Gold Dollar,” in Leland B. Yeager (ed.), In Search of a Monetary Constitution (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 121. 22. Gary North, “Why Murray Rothbard Will Never Win the Nobel Prize!” in Man, Economy, and Liberty, p. 105. 23. Kirzner, “Welfare Economics,” p. 80. 24. Ibid., p. 81.

Individualism, Holism, and Covenantalism

915

which thou diggedst not, vineyards and olive trees, which thou plantedst not; when thou shalt have eaten and be full (Deut. 6:10–11). The LORD shall establish thee an holy people unto himself, as he hath sworn unto thee, if thou shalt keep the commandments of the LORD thy God, and walk in his ways. And all people of the earth shall see that thou art called by the name of the LORD; and they shall be afraid of thee. And the LORD shall make thee plenteous in goods, in the fruit of thy body, and in the fruit of thy cattle, and in the fruit of thy ground, in the land which the LORD sware unto thy fathers to give thee. The LORD shall open unto thee his good treasure, the heaven to give the rain unto thy land in his season, and to bless all the work of thine hand: and thou shalt lend unto many nations, and thou shalt not borrow (Deut. 28:9–12).

But the consistent methodological subjectivist refuses to see with his own eyes. He will not acknowledge the scientiic relevance of either corporate blessings or corporate cursings. This was Israel’s problem in Isaiah’s day. “Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, Here am I; send me. And he said, Go, and tell this people, Hear ye indeed, but understand not; and see ye indeed, but perceive not. Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and convert, and be healed. Then said I, Lord, how long? And he answered, Until the cities be wasted without inhabitant, and the houses without man, and the land be utterly desolate, And the LORD have removed men far away, and there be a great forsaking in the midst of the land” (Isa. 6:8–12). Such blindness is judicial blindness. God blinds men so that they cannot see with their own eyes. Judicial blindness is a mark of His covenantal curse. Men interpret what they see in terms of what they believe, and what covenant-breakers believe is that God does not bring corporate, objective, measurable, covenantal sanctions in history. Kirzner rejects classical economics in the name of subjectivism. He therefore rejects biblical economics in the name of subjectivism. For methodological subjectivism, there is no such thing as national wealth, economically speaking, for there is no collective. If nation A is devastated by a plague, leaving behind only one alcoholic survivor who now owns the contents of every liquor store in the nation, while nation B has not sufered such a plague, there is no way for a subjectivist economist to say which nation is now better of.

916

DEUTERONOMY

The alcoholic is clearly a happy man. Who is to say scientiically that the collective joy of nation B, which avoided the plague, is greater than the collective joy of nation A, i.e., the drunk who is feeling no pain? There is no such thing as collective joy, says the methodological subjectivist. In Kirzner’s words, “economic analysis has nothing to say about sensations.” Contrast this with Moses’ economic analysis: “And thou say in thine heart, My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth. But thou shalt remember the LORD thy God: for it is he that giveth thee power to get wealth, that he may establish his covenant which he sware unto thy fathers, as it is this day” (Deut. 8:17–18). Moses spoke this to the assembled nation, not to a private individual. Moses was raising the question that fascinated Adam Smith: the origin of the wealth of nations. Kirzner dismisses this whole question as epistemologically misguided. “During the period of classical economics it was, of course, taken for granted that a society was economically successful strictly insofar as it succeeded in achieving increased wealth. Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations expressed this approach to the economics of welfare simply and typically. It was taken for granted that a given percentage increase in a nation’s physical wealth (with wealth often seen as consisting of bushels of “corn”) meant a similar percentage increase in the nation’s well-being. From this perspective a physical measure of a nation’s wealth provides an index of that nation’s economic success, regardless of its distribution. A bushel of wheat is a bushel of wheat. Clearly this notion of welfare ofends the principles of methodological individualism and subjectivism; it was swept away by the marginalist (subjectivist) revolution of the late nineteenth century.”25 But Smith’s perception of objective national wealth was closer to the covenantal wisdom of the Bible than radical subjectivism is.26 By stripping all traces of objective value theory out 25. Kirzner, “Welfare Economics,” p. 78. 26. The phrase “radical subjectivism” is Ludwig Lachmann’s. He claimed in 1982 that radical subjectivism “inspired the Austrian revival of the 1970s. . . .” Ludwig M. Lachmann, “Ludwig von Mises and the Extension of Subjectivism,” in Israel M. Kirzner (ed.), Method, Process, and Austrian Economics: Essays in Honor of Ludwig von Mises (Lexington, Massachusetts: Lexington Books, 1982), p. 37. Lachmann was being simultaneously too modest and too arrogant. It was his lectures in defense of radical subjectivism at the 1974 South Royalton, Vermont, conference (which I attended) that split the Austrian movement into the Rothbardian and Lachmanian camps. Radical subjectivism was surely an aspect of the

Individualism, Holism, and Covenantalism

917

of economics, radical subjectivism produces an intellectual world of sustained incoherence. A handful of academic economists have trained themselves to dismiss the visibly obvious as epistemologically irrelevant.27

Dualism: Objective vs. Subjective Economics I am not speaking here of Kant’s dualism between the realm of man’s mind and the realm of physical causation.28 Mises, as a good Kantian, acknowledged the legitimacy of this dualism.29 I am speaking here of the dualism between aggregative, objective value theory and individualistic, subjective value theory. The epistemological problem with all forms of welfare economics and all forms of economic policy-making is the problem of reconciling aggregative values or preferences, whose existence is denied by extreme economic individualists, yet also invoked by them at some point, and subjective values, which are dismissed as morally peripheral by methodological holists, but which are also invoked by them at some point. This topic is avoided like the plague within the economics profession, since there has never been a widely shared humanistic solution to this dualism. The methodological individualist moves epistemologically toward complete indeterminacy. The momentary subjective states of the individual are said to lose contact with the external world and even with his own past subjective states.30 This epistemological chaos revival of Austrian economics, for it split the movement into two irreconcilable factions. Radical subjectivism was hardly the basis of Austrianism’s revival. Lachmann also invoked the work of “Shackle, the master subjectivist” (p. 38). But Shackle was never an Austrian School economist. Lachmann pretended otherwise. See Lachmann, “From Mises to Shackle: An Essay on Austrian Economics and the Kaleidic Society,” Journal of Economic Literature, XIV (March 1976). In the history of economic thought, G. L. S. Shackle is the most consistent defender of Kant’s noumenalism as an economic methodology. I regard Kirzner’s theory of entrepreneurship as Lachmanian. 27. In short, says the economist, “Your facts cannot be sustained by economic theory.” 28. Richard Kroner, Kant’s Weltanschauung (University of Chicago Press, [1914] 1956). 29. Ludwig von Mises, Theory and History: An Interpretation of Social and Economic Evolution (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1957), p. 1. 30. Lachmann writes: “The human mind can, it is true, transcend the present moment in imagination and memory, but the moment-in-being remains nevertheless always self-contained and solitary. . . . It follows that it is impossible to compare human actions undertaken at diferent moments in time.” Ludwig M. Lachmann, Capital, Expectations, and the Market Process (Kansas City, Kansas: Sheed Andrews and McMeel, 1977), p. 83.

918

DEUTERONOMY

has been defended by Ludwig Lachmann: kaleidic perceptualism. He invokes as his image of society the kaleidoscope,31 that delightful toy which uses mirrors to produce ever-changing, unrepeatable, visually fascinating, and autonomously meaningless patterns out of shifting objects. For Lachmann, as for Kirzner, it becomes impossible to speak of national economic growth or per capita economic growth.32 Yet Mises argued to the contrary: “Saving, capital accumulation, is the agency that has transformed step by step the awkward search for food on the part of savage cave dwellers into 33 modern ways of industry.” For the radical subjectivist, it is illogical to argue that an increase of per capita capital leads to greater per capita wealth. Per capita capital is “a wholly artiicial construct,” writes Kirzner.34 Yet Mises argued: “There is but one means available to improve the material conditions of mankind: to accelerate the growth of capital accumulated as against the growth in population. The greater the amount of capital invested per head of the worker, the more and the better goods can be produced and consumed.”35 Mises’ original radical subjectivism has run aground on the shoals of a far more radical subjectivism. The result of pure subjectivism is the end of meaning, not just for economics but for human thought in general. In contrast, the methodological holist moves toward central planning. The concept of social goods and social evils implies a single planning mind and a single standard of good and evil. This is what alienates the individualists. They want to preserve human freedom; the holist wants to improve the human condition systematically, meaning through central planning and coercion. The individualist does not trust the State; the holist does not trust the free market. The individualist rejects State compulsion; the holist rejects social and

31. Ludwig Lachmann, “An Austrian Stocktaking: Unsettled Questions and Tentative Answers,” in Louis Spadaro (ed.), New Directions in Austrian Economics (Kansas City, Kansas: Sheed Andrews and McMeel, 1978), p. 7. This book might well have been titled Kaleidic Developments in Austrian Economics, or perhaps The Epistemological Breakdown of Austrian Economics. 32. Ludwig Lachmann, Capital and Its Structure (Kansas City, Kansas: Sheed Andrews and McMeel, 1977), p. 37. 33. Ludwig von Mises, The Anti-Capitalist Mentality (Princeton, New Jersey: Van Nostrand, 1956), p. 39. 34. Israel M. Kirzner, An Essay on Capital (New York: Augustus Kelly, 1966), p. 120. 35. Mises, Anti-Capitalist Mentality, p. 5.

Individualism, Holism, and Covenantalism

919

even personal indeterminacy, which radical subjectivists such as Lachmann preach with fervor. The individualist wants the consumer to be sovereign; the holist wants the voter or bureaucrat to be sovereign. The individualist defends the autonomy of individual plans; the holist defends the sovereignty of the State’s plan. The individualist proclaims faith in the rationality of the market and its ability to improve the human condition. He then denies the epistemological legitimacy of any objective unit of measurement that would allow an outside observer to assess such improvement. In contrast, the holist proclaims faith in the rationality of the State and its ability to improve the human condition. He then denies the appropriateness of any unit of measurement that points to the failure of central planning to deliver the goods. Denying the relevance of socialism’s objective failure, he proclaims his faith in intangible socialist goods that provide dignity and meaning in socialism’s world of stagnant or declining economic output. Both the individualist and the holist seek justiication in a hypothetical realm of the spirit – Kant’s noumenal realm – which lies outside the domain of objective measurement, i.e., Kant’s phenomenal realm. In search of meaning, members of both schools of economic thought lee to the zone of man’s indeterminate subjective freedom: Kant’s noumenal realm. The holist seeks justiication for his views in terms of the collective “quality of life,” which cannot be scientiically measured. The individualist seeks justiication for his views in terms of the individually perceived productivity of the entrepreneurial lash of insight, which cannot be measured, taught, or even described scientiically.36

36. Kirzner’s entrepreneurial “ah, ha,” alertness, or hunch is the premier example of this light to the noumenal in search of explanations. He calls entrepreneurial alertness “the instant of an entrepreneurial leap of faith. . . .” Kirzner, Perception, Opportunity, and Proit: Studies in the Theory of Entrepreneurship (University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 163. This moment of discovery is beyond the constraints of logical cause and efect. “Once the entrepreneurial element in human action is perceived, one can no longer interpret the decision as merely calculative – capable in principle of being yielded by mechanical manipulation of the ‘data’ or already completely implied in these data.” Kirzner, Competition and Entrepreneurship (University of Chicago Press, 1973), p. 35. He speaks of the entrepreneur’s “propensity to sense what prices are realistically available to him” (p. 40). The essence of this sense is that it is beyond calculation, i.e., beyond Kant’s phenomenal realm.

920

DEUTERONOMY

Resolution: Methodological Covenantalism The methodological covenantalist inds the solution to these inherent and permanent dualisms in the concept of a sovereign, omniscient God. God has a plan. He matches ends and means. He issues a decree for history, and this decree will be fulilled. “And all the inhabitants of the earth are reputed as nothing: and he doeth according to his will in the army of heaven, and among the inhabitants of the earth: and none can stay his hand, or say unto him, What doest thou?” (Dan. 4:35). The presupposition of a sovereign God replaces the presupposition of sovereign man. To the extent that men think God’s thoughts after Him, they adopt God’s standards – His hierarchy of legitimate ends – with respect to their lives. God enables people to coordinate their plans through human action because His decree and plan are above theirs. “A man’s heart deviseth his way: but the LORD directeth his steps” (Prov. 16:9). “The king’s heart is in the hand of the LORD, as the rivers of water: he turneth it whithersoever he will” (Prov. 21:1). In Joseph’s words to his brothers, who had sold him into slavery, “But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive” (Gen. 50:20). God’s Bible-revealed law-order provides the framework of productive coordination, in economics as in other areas of life. His sanctions in history provide both the incentives and disincentives that conirm His covenant law. The methodological individualist does not begin with the presupposition of an omniscient God. Such a God would thwart the individualist’s autonomy. Neither does the methodological holist begin with God; he begins with some substitute source of planning and accurate information, most commonly the State. The idea of cosmic personalism is foreign to humanistic economics.37 Economics since the late seventeenth century has been self-consciously agnostic,38 i.e., militantly atheistic with a thin veneer of humility for academic propriety’s sake. The result is epistemological chaos, which is concealed from public view, even from the occasionally inquisitive eyes of graduate students, by a kind of embarrassed silence. 37. Gary North, The Dominion Covenant: Genesis (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987), ch. 1. 38. William Letwin, The Origins of Scientiic Economics (Cambridge, Massachusetts: M.I.T. Press, 1963).

Individualism, Holism, and Covenantalism

921

Should anyone enquire about this epistemological dualism, he will be assured that such matters are irrelevant to what economists do. And what do economists do? Economics. Then what is economics? Whatever economists do.39

Conclusion The Bible’s objective language of national wealth undermines methodological individualism. But rarely do methodological individualists pursue their position to its logical conclusion. The language of statistical averages and price indexes is common to most methodological individualists. Because biblical cosmic personalism is true, there can be a resolution to the philosophical problem of the seeming contradiction between subjective and objective knowledge. In economics, this contradiction is seen most clearly in the debates over objective and subjective value. The Bible’s objective value theory is grounded in the objective Person of God – His declarations, standards, and evaluations. God’s subjective declaration of value to His objective creation – “it is good” – and His objective declarations of blessings and cursings in history indicate that subjectivism and objectivism are correlative. They are grounded in the objective character of God’s subjective declarations. The mind of man is capable of making objective evaluations of external conditions because his mind relects God’s mind. He is made in God’s image. His evaluations become progressively accurate as they approach God’s evaluations as a limit. He thinks God’s thoughts after Him. There is corporate wealth. Men can subjectively perceive objective diferences between rich and poor nations, rich and poor corporations, and rich and poor governments. I can remember being challenged verbally by Mises in 1971 to defend my statement that we can make objectively meaningful comparisons between subjectively perceived human conditions. I said, “It is better to be rich and healthy than it is to be poor and sick.” He said, “Yes, that’s so.” This was not a great philosophical exchange, but it got to the point. That point was not noumenal. 39. These deinitions were ofered, respectively, by Jacob Viner and Frank Knight. See James Buchanan, What Should Economists Do? (Indianapolis, Indiana: LibertyPress, 1979), p. 18.

Appendix C Syncretism,PLURALISM, Pluralism, andAND Empire SYNCRETISM, EMPIRE And the fourth kingdom shall be strong as iron: forasmuch as iron breaketh in pieces and subdueth all things: and as iron that breaketh all these, shall it break in pieces and bruise. And whereas thou sawest the feet and toes, part of potters’ clay, and part of iron, the kingdom shall be divided; but there shall be in it of the strength of the iron, forasmuch as thou sawest the iron mixed with miry clay. And as the toes of the feet were part of iron, and part of clay, so the kingdom shall be partly strong, and partly broken. And whereas thou sawest iron mixed with miry clay, they shall mingle themselves with the seed of men: but they shall not cleave one to another, even as iron is not mixed with clay. And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed: and the kingdom shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand for ever. Forasmuch as thou sawest that the stone was cut out of the mountain without hands, and that it brake in pieces the iron, the brass, the clay, the silver, and the gold; the great God hath made known to the king what shall come to pass hereafter: and the dream is certain, and the interpretation thereof sure (Dan. 2:40–45).

Daniel’s prophecy to Babylon’s Nebuchadnezzar foretold the rise of a series of empires. The last worldwide political empire would be Rome’s. It would break apart. It would be replaced by a new empire, a new world order: the church, the stone cut from the mountain made without hands. There is no political empire capable of replacing the church as the basis of an integrated world order. Every self-proclaimed new world order will fail. In our day, we have seen two rival claimants to the throne of empire, each claiming to be a builder of a New World Order: international

922

Syncretism, Pluralism, and Empire

923

Communism and Western humanism. Communism visibly collapsed in August of 1991 in the failed coup by the ousted leaders of the old Communist Party in the Soviet Union. Today, in the late 1990’s, Western humanists believe that they are capable of putting together an international order based on free trade, central banking, currency manipulation, and international bureaucratic agencies with the power to control the legal framework of international production. This ideal, like the ideal of Communism, will be publicly smashed. This ideal is built on faith in political controls, which today means faith in central banking, taxation, and computers. As we approach the year 2000, with the looming breakdown of computers due to the rollover from 1999 (99) to 2000 (00), we can predict with some conidence: “The computer giveth and the computer taketh away.” Blessed be the name of the Lord.

A Common Pantheon The strategy of the ancient empires was syncretism. It still is, but today it is called pluralism. The idols of the conquered cities could be brought into the pantheon of the empire’s gods. This was Rome’s strategy. Local idols lost their exclusivity when they entered the empire’s pantheon. Rome sought to maintain the regional authority of the gods of the classical city-state by incorporating them into the Roman pantheon. By honoring the geographical signiicance of local deities, Rome sought to subordinate them all to the pantheon itself, i.e., to the empire. The Roman pantheon, manifested politically by the genius and later the divinity of the emperor, universalized the implied divinity of the classical city-state. It was the exclusivity and universalism of the God of the Bible that identiied Jews and Christians as politically untrustworthy and even revolutionary subjects. They refused to worship either the genius or the divinity of the Roman emperor. They would not acknowledge the authority of the Roman empire’s pantheon of gods. They would not acknowledge the God of the Bible as just one more regional god among many. The God of the Bible, they insisted, was above the creation and outside it. This confession was revolutionary in ancient Rome. Rushdoony explains why: “The essence of the ancient city-state, polis, and empire was that it constituted the continuous unity of the gods and men, of the divine and the human, and the unity of all being. There was thus no possible independence in society for any constituent aspect. Every element of society was a part of

924

DEUTERONOMY

the all-absorbing one. Against this, Christianity asserted the absolute division of the human and the divine. Even in the incarnation of Christ, the human and the divine were in union without confusion, as Chalcedon [451 A.D.] so powerfully deined it. Thus, divinity was withdrawn from human society and returned to the heavens and to God. No human order or institution could claim divinity and thereby claim to represent total and inal order. By de-divinizing the world, Christianity placed all created orders, including church and state, under God.”1 Rome could not coexist with Christianity. The Roman authorities recognized this fact over two centuries before the Christians did. While Christians were honest, hard-working, peace-loving citizens, they were necessarily the enemies of pagan Rome. Their God would not submit; He ordered His people not to submit. The Christians sought peace through religious pluralism, but Rome sought dominion through syncretism: the absorption of all religions into the religion of empire. Syncretism is the enemy of orthodoxy. Political pluralism – the equal authority (little or none) in civil law of all supernatural gods – is a grand illusion. It is syncretism for those Christian believers who have not yet recognized in political pluralism the syncretism that underlies it and the humanistic empire which is pluralism’s long-term goal.2 Christians of Rome called for religious toleration – the right not to worship the emperor as a condition of citizenship or even resident alien status – but Rome’s authorities knew better. They recognized what early Christians refused to acknowledge, namely, that the God of the Bible recognizes no other gods, rejects syncretism, and therefore calls for the subordination of culture to Him and His Bible-revealed law. Rome recognized early that pluralism is a politically convenient short-term illusion and a long-run impossibility. There would either be a judicially impotent religious establishment under the authority of a political priesthood or else covenant religion would govern the nation’s political oath of allegiance. The result of this early recognition was Rome’s intermittent persecution of Christians for almost three centuries, followed by the fall of Rome 1. R. J. Rushdoony, The One and the Many: Studies in the Philosophy of Order and Ultimacy (Fairfax, Virginia: Thoburn Press, [1971] 1978), p. 124. 2. Gary North, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989).

Syncretism, Pluralism, and Empire

925

and the inheritance of Rome’s infrastructure – roads, laws, and customs – by Christians in the fourth century. Rome’s syncretism failed as surely as the Christians’ early pluralism failed.

Tertullian’s Apology In the late second or early third century, Tertullian (145–220), the intellectual founder of Latin Christianity, wrote his famous Apology, a defense of Christianity as a pietistic religion of heart and hearth which should have been acceptable to Rome’s power religion. It was addressed to “Rulers of the Roman Empire.”3 It was a critique of Rome’s demand that Christians must worship the divinity of the emperor for the sake of the prosperity of the empire. He attributed to ignorance the rulers’ hostility to Christianity. “So we maintain that they are both ignorant while they hate us, and hate us unrighteously while they continue in ignorance, the one thing being the result of the other either way of it.”4 In Chapter 25, he pointed out that the complex pantheon of Rome in his day had not been the religion of the early Romans. “But how utterly foolish it is to attribute the greatness of the Roman name to religious merits, since it was after Rome became an empire, or call it still a kingdom, that the religion she professes made its chief progress! Is it the case now? Has its religion been the source of the prosperity of Rome?” On the contrary, he argued: “Indeed, how could religion make a people great who have owed their greatness to their irreligion? For, if I am not mistaken, kingdoms and empires are acquired by wars, and are extended by victories. More than that, you cannot have wars and victories without the taking, and often the destruction, of cities. That is a thing in which the gods have their share of calamity. Houses and temples sufer alike; there is indiscriminate slaughter of priests and citizens; the hand of rapine is laid equally upon sacred and on common treasure. Thus the sacrileges of the Romans are as numerous as their trophies.” The sacredness of Rome’s pantheon of gods is an illusion; the gods of Rome are idols. “But divinities unconscious are with impunity dishonored, just as in vain they are adored.” 3. Tertullian, Apology, ch. I, opening words. Reprinted in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. III (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, [1870] 1978). 4. Idem.

926

DEUTERONOMY

If this was calculated to persuade Rome’s rulers, it was an apologetic failure. Tertullian did not understand, or pretended not to understand, the inherently political nature of classical religion. The gods of Rome were thoroughly political in Tertullian’s era. This is not surprising. In classical religion, the gods of allied cities, as well as allied families and clans within a city, had always been political. They had always been creations for the sake of politics.5 Peace trea6 ties between warring cities were treaties between their gods. While the ancients believed that the gods did bring sanctions, positive and negative, in history, they also believed that these sanctions were applied to members of oath-bound, custom-bound, and ritual-bound groups: families, clans, and city-states. The heart of Roman religion was its public piety.7 Jews and Christians remained aloof from these public ceremonies, not because the rituals were public but because they formally invoked idols. On the other hand, they were persecuted, not because they refused to believe in the power of idols, but because they refused to participate in acts of public piety. The issue for Rome was the oath – formal invocation – not personal belief. The public oath ajrmed men’s obedience to representatives of the gods of the pantheon – representatives who were, above all, political agents of the emperor. In Chapter 28, Tertullian called for religious toleration generally, ajrming strict voluntarism in worship. Christians cannot in good conscience “ofer sacriice to the well-being of the emperor.” Yet for this refusal, he complained, they have been illegitimately condemned as treasonous. Roman religion was itself sacrilegious, he said, “for you do homage with a greater dread and an intense reverence to Caesar, than Olympian Jove himself.” Of course they did; the Olympian Jove was a political construct. Caesar was the earthly manifestation of Rome’s political power, and classical religion was power religion. Tertullian sought to condemn Rome’s rulers for “showing impiety to your gods, inasmuch as you show a greater reverence to a human sovereignty than you do to them.” This was naive;

5. Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome (Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor, [1864] 1955), Book III, ch. VI. 6. Ibid., III:XV. 7. Robert L. Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1984), p. 64.

Syncretism, Pluralism, and Empire

927

the heart of all power religion, from Pharaoh to the latest political messiah, is the honoring of human sovereignty.8 In Chapter 29, he argued that the gods of Rome did not protect Caesar; rather, Caesar protected the gods. “This, then, is the ground on which we are charged with treason against the imperial majesty, to wit, that we do not put the emperors under their own possessions; that we do not ofer a mere mock service on their behalf, as not believing their safety rests in leaden hands.” This was also a naive argument, yet one still revered by most Christian defenders of modern political pluralism. To pray for Caesar in the name of the pantheon of Rome’s gods was to acknowledge publicly that Caesar was the common reference point, the common spokesman, for the inherently political gods of classical culture. The syncretism of Rome’s religion was the theological justiication for the administration of Rome’s political empire: a hierarchy of sanctiied power from Caesar to the lowest ojcials in the otherwise autonomous city-states that made up the empire. This hierarchy of power was sacred, a matter of formal ritual. The source of law in society is its god.9 Caesar was the source of law in the name of the gods of the pantheon. There was no operational hierarchy above him; there was a political and military hierarchy below him. This much Tertullian understood. This was the heart of his argument against the seriousness of Roman religion. But to maintain widespread faith in the legitimacy of any social order, the authorities must foster faith in a sacred – though not necessarily supernatural – law-order, i.e., laws to which non-political and cosmic sanctions are attached. Civil authorities seek to instill the fear of the society’s gods in the hearts of the subjects of the sacred political order. This is why Tertullian was unquestionably treasonous, for he was undermining men’s faith in the higher order which the authorities insisted undergirded Rome’s legitimacy. Tertullian was challenging the civil covenant of Rome, an overwhelmingly political social order. He challenged Rome’s gods, the authority of Rome’s rulers to command allegiance to the primary representative of these gods, Rome’s law, Rome’s sanctions against treasonous Christians, and ultimately Rome’s succession in history. There was no more 8. Gary North, Moses and Pharaoh: Dominion Religion vs. Power Religion (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1985). 9. R. J. Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law (Nutley, New Jersey: Craig Press, 1973), p. 5.

928

DEUTERONOMY

revolutionary act than this. Taking up weapons was a minor infraction compared to this. In vain did Tertullian cry out for toleration, just as modern Christian defenders of political pluralism cry out vainly. “Why, then, are we not permitted an equal liberty and impunity for our doctrines as they have, with whom, in respect of what we teach, we are compared?”10 The answer should have been obvious: they – the tolerated religions – publicly acknowledged the legitimacy of the covenant of Rome’s power religion. Christianity could not acknowledge such legitimacy and remain faithful to God. Tertullian had mystical tendencies, and he spent the end of his life as a member of a cult, the Montanists, which had been founded half a century earlier by a tongues-speaking, self-styled prophet, Montanus, and two women who were also said to be prophetesses. They taught the imminent bodily return of Christ.11 After Christ’s bodily return, they taught, He would set up an earthly kingdom.12 Tertullian’s Apology was governed by an outlook hostile to time, dominion, and political involvement. His political pluralism was an outworking of his theological pietism, a pietism which eventually led him into a premillennial cult that called for asceticism, sufering, and martyrdom prior to the imminent Second Coming.13 His political pluralism was consistent with his later theology: a call, not for the victory of Christianity in history, but merely for peace until such time as Christ returns to set up a millennial kingdom. For Tertullian, history ofered little hope. Yet even so, his limited critique of Rome in the name of political pluralism and toleration went too far for Rome’s hierarchs.

Julian the Apostate The Roman authorities understood the implications of the rival religion which Tertullian preached. They were unimpressed with his arguments that Christians were the best citizens of Rome because they gave alms freely and paid their taxes.14 The Christians were by 10. Tertullian, Apology, ch. XLVI. 11. Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of Christianity (New York: Harper & Row, 1953), p. 128. 12. W. H. C. Frend, The Rise of Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), p. 254. 13. W. H. C. Frend, Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church: A Study of a Conlict from the Maccabees to Donatus (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker, [1965] 1981), p. 292. 14. Apology, ch. XLII.

Syncretism, Pluralism, and Empire

929

far the most dangerous citizens of Rome, as the last pagan emperor Julian (361–63) fully understood. The victorious Christians designated him posthumously as “Julian the Apostate.” This name has stuck, even in textbooks written by his spiritual heirs. A secret convert at age 20 from Christianity to occult mysteries, Julian took steps to weaken the Christians immediately after he attained the ojce of Emperor. Julian was the irst Renaissance ruler, a lover of Greek antiquity.15 He concealed his conversion to paganism throughout his adult life until he gained uncontested political power in 361. This is understandable, given the fact that his late cousin, the Arian Emperor Constantius, had ordered the murder of Julian’s father and mother in the year Constantine died, 337, when Julian was ive years old.16 One of his earliest acts as emperor was to establish pagan review boards governing the appointment of all teachers. Teachers henceforth would have to teach classical religion along with traditional rhetoric.17 Christians, however, were forbidden by Julian to teach such texts. He dismissed the Christians in his work, Against the Galileans: “It seems to me that you yourselves must be aware of the very diferent efect of your writings on the intellect compared to ours, and that from studying yours no man could achieve excellence or even ordinary human goodness, whereas from studying ours every man can become better than before.”18 Like today, the possession of a formal education was basic to social advancement.19 Christians had long understood this, and those seeking social advancement had capitulated to the requirement of mastering rhetoric, but in a watered-down, minimal-paganism form. Wilken writes: “For two centuries Christian intellectuals had been forging a link between Christianity and the classical tradition, and with one swift stroke Julian sought to sever that link. . . . Christian parents, especially the wealthy, insisted that their sons receive the rhetorical education, and it now appeared as though Julian were limiting this to pagans.”20 The more things change, the more things stay the same.21 15. Wilken, Christians as the Romans Saw Them, p. 171. 16. John Holland Smith, The Death of Classical Paganism (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1976), p. 93. 17. Wilken, Christians, pp. 173–74. 18. Cited in Smith, Death, p. 109. 19. Wilken, Christians, p. 175. 20. Idem. 21. Marsden, Soul of the American University, op. cit.

930

DEUTERONOMY

What Julian attempted, the U.S. Department of Education has achieved.22 So have other similar politically appointed and coercive review boards throughout the world. In a very real sense, Julian’s edict launched a dilemma that has faced the Western church since the eleventh century. If the knowledge of pagan texts is the legitimate basis of a gentleman’s education – an assumption acknowledged by the Christian West until the Darwinian educational reforms of late nineteenth century – then why should Christians seek to become gentlemen? Why should they not content themselves with the study of the Scriptures and commentaries on the Scriptures, just as Jewish scholars in the West contented themselves for eighteen centuries with the study of the Talmud? One answer: because Christians do not want to live in ghettos, having seen what ghetto living did to the Jews prior to about 1850. On the other hand, won’t exposure to classical learning undermine Christians’ commitment to the truths of Scripture, just as secular education has undermined modern Judaism? We see this continuing debate in Christians’ rival commitment to two forms of higher education: 1) the Christian liberal arts college, which has unquestionably gone humanistic and liberal in the content of its curriculum;23 and 2) the fundamentalist Bible college, which does not seek academic accreditation from State-licensed, monopolistic, humanistic accreditation organizations, nor would receive it if sought. This is the dilemma of the hypothetical but non-existent Christian law school that would teach biblical law and which therefore could not receive academic accreditation from the humanistic American Bar Association (ABA), which is mandatory for the school’s graduates to gain access to the State-licensed monopoly of pleading the law for money.24 Darwinism has replaced classicism in the modern curriculum, 22. Only in the summer of 1995 did the U.S. Department of Education allow a non-regional accrediting organization begin to ofer accreditation to colleges. The regional associations are all secular. The new association is equally secular, but its recommended curriculum is more traditional, rather like late-nineteenth-century pagan college education. 23. James D. Hunter, Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation (University of Chicago Press, 1987). 24. This is the dilemma of Regent University’s law school, which received provisional accreditation by the ABA on the basis of its dean’s public commitment to an as-yet undeveloped, updated version of James Madison’s pre-Darwinian, eighteenth-century political pluralism, and which in 1993 ired the dean and promised to adopt a more mainstream curriculum. “Titus Breaks His Silence,” World (Feb. 5, 1994). The dean was Herbert Titus, who wrote an appendix in R. J. Rushdoony’s book, Law and Society, vol. 2 of Institutes of Biblical Law (Vallecito, California: Ross House, 1982).

Syncretism, Pluralism, and Empire

931

and college graduates are not so much gentlemen as bureaucrats, but the dilemma is in principle the same. The solution is the biblical covenant, which provides Christians with revelational standards of evaluation that are to govern both the form and the content of education, but Christians have never believed this strongly enough to establish biblical guidelines for education. The answer, in short, is theocracy – “God rules through God’s rules” – but this suggestion is as abhorrent to modern pietistic Christians as it was to Julian.

Modernism’s Gods Modernism’s gods are the lineal descendants of the gods of the Hellenistic world: inluence, wealth, and sophistication. They are gods of a systematically secular civilization: politics, economics, and education. Their confessional demands are not so clearly stated as the traditional gods of Canaan were. They ofer so many beneits and seem to demand very few formal sacriices. They ofer the universally pursued fruits of the division of labor in every ield. They invite into their company all those who are willing to endure intellectual separation from the communities in which they were born. They demand this separation, initially, only in those areas of life that produce wealth and social advantages. They rigidly segregate the realm of formal worship from the world of economic productivity and civil service. They relegate the confessional world of revealed religion to the fringes of culture. They condescendingly allow the regularly scheduled formal worship of these culturally banished gods, but these schedules are limited by custom, and sometimes are banned by law (e.g., tax-funded anything in the United States). Modernism’s gods are like the gods of classical humanism, for they are part of the creation. Modernism denies judicial signiicance to anything outside the space-time continuum. Modernism’s gods are gods of man’s professed autonomy. Unlike the gods of classical humanism, they are universal gods that honor no geographical boundaries. They are idols of the mind and spirit. They ofer power, wealth, and prestige to those who are willing to submit to their impersonal laws. They serve as the foundations of empire: man’s empire. They claim the allegiance of all who would be successful. Because they are impersonal gods, their various priesthoods can comfort the worshippers of personal gods by assuring them that the honoring of modernism’s gods in no way dishonors the religion of

932

DEUTERONOMY

any traditional god. In so arguing, the priests of the gods of modernism proclaim the universal reign of humanism’s kingdom, a reign unafected by the competing claims of the worshippers of traditional deities. Behind the competing dogmas of the great religions is the agreed-upon god of numerical relationships. Above the cacophony of claims by the priests of the gods of revelation is the transiguring promise of compound economic growth. The traditional priest takes your money and gives you assurances of eternal peace; the banker takes your money and gives you three to ive percent, compounded. The many-colored robes of a hundred priestly orders cannot compete with the dazzling white smocks of the scientiic priesthood. Or so it seems. It takes a highly sophisticated skeptic to perceive that the relevance of numerical relationships cannot be explained logically,25 that compound economic growth cannot continue indeinitely in a finite world,26 and that science places man on a meaningless treadmill of discovery in which every truth will be superseded, in which there is no long-term security of belief.27 The reality of the permanent conlict between God and the gods of modernism can be seen in the outcome of their respective historical sanctions. Jews, as the original covenant people, regard themselves as heirs of the covenant. If any people should be immune to the lure of false gods, they believe, they are that people. Yet the worship of the gods of modernism has made great inroads in the Jewish community. They have trusted the modern State, only to be repeatedly betrayed by it.28 They have trusted the economy, only to be blamed as malefactors and conspirators because of their economic success.29 They have trusted education, only to have lost their 25. Eugene Wigner, “The Unreasonable Efectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics, XIII (1960), pp. 1–14. Wigner won the Nobel Prize in physics. 26. Gary North, “The Theology of the Exponential Curve,” The Freeman (May 1970). 27. Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation” (1919), in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), p. 138. 28. Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State (University of Chicago Press, 1993). 29. Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The myth of the Jewish world-conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (New York: Harper & Row, 1967); Albert Lee, Henry Ford and the Jews (New York: Stein & Day, 1980); Sheldon Marcus, Father Caughlin: The Tumultuous Life of the Priest of the Little Flower (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), pp. 146–79. Primary sources include Maj.-Gen. Count Cherep-Spiridovich, The Secret World Government or “The Hidden

Syncretism, Pluralism, and Empire

933

confessional identity. The phrase, “I’m a Jew,” today masks an absence of any agreed-upon theological or judicial content. Over time, one begins to perceive that Jews are over-represented in the ranks of mathematicians, bankers, scientists, Hollywood celebrities, and in other ields. Meanwhile, there do not seem to be many rabbis who still defend the infallibility of the ive books of Moses. In fact, the relationship seems to be inverse: the fewer the number of Torah-ajrming rabbis, the more Jews are visible in leadership positions inside the priesthoods of modernism. Is this inverse relationship a perverse relationship? So it seems.30

Pietism and Politics “Fewer Torah-ajrming rabbis, more successful Jews.” Because of the visible success of the Jewish minority in the West, this observation is easy to make. But the same inverse relationship seems to operate in Christian fundamentalist circles, although in the opposite form: “More Bible-believing ministers, fewer successful Christians.” There are reasons for this. Many fundamentalist Christians conclude that success in this world is a spiritual trap to be avoided, a goal to be shunned. “Politics is dirty. Riches are a trap. Too much education is a bad thing.” Premillennial dispensationalism has called into question the time available to Christians to pursue projects that rely on long-term compounding for success. As Rev. J. Vernon McGee put it in the early 1950’s, “You don’t polish brass on a sinking ship.” In recent years, this success-rejecting presupposition has been called into question in some charismatic circles.31 Meanwhile, as American fundamentalist Christians have become politically active since 1976, they have steadily abandoned their commitment to dispensationalism. This is especially true of Hand” (New York: Anti-Bolshevist Pub. Assn., 1926); John Beaty, The Iron Curtain Over America (Dallas: Wilkenson 1951); William Guy Carr, Red Fog Over America (2nd ed.; Toronto: National Federation of Christian Laymen, 1957); Carr, Pawns in the Game (4th ed.; Los Angeles: St. George Press, 1962); Olivia Marie O’Grady, The Beasts of the Apocalypse (Benicia, California: O’Grady Publications, 1959); Wilmot Roberston, The Dispossessed Majority (rev. ed.; Cape Canaveral, Florida: Howard Allen, 1972), ch. 15; Richard Kelly Hoskins, War Cycles – Peace Cycles (Lynchburg, Virginia: Virginia Pub. Co., 1985). Most of these anti-Semitic books are out of print. They were always little-known, privately published, and consigned to the far-right fringe of American conservatism. 30. See Appendix D, “The Demographics of American Judaism.” 31. The “positive confession” movement is the most obvious example.

934

DEUTERONOMY

32

fundamentalism’s national leaders. They rarely speak about eschatology any more, and when they do, what they say about the future is at odds with what their multi-million dollar organizations are do33 ing. An eschatology that conidently preaches inevitable failure in history for Christians is inconsistent with Christian political mobilization. The goal of politics is to win, not lose. Also, the rise of the independent Christian education movement since 1965 has been accompanied by the idea that Christian education should be better than secular education, which places a new degree of responsibility on Christians to develop superior curriculum materials. While fundamentalists have proven incapable of doing this, especially for students above the age of 15, they at least have understood that the task is necessary. But after three centuries of having to choose between right-wing Enlightenment humanism and left-wing, Protestant Christians are not in a position to ofer a well-developed alternative. Fundamentalists have generally chosen right-wing humanism – Adam Smith, James Madison – but they have at best baptized it in the name of vague biblical principles. They have not shown exegetically how the Bible leads to right-wing humanism’s policy conclusions. Calvinists and Lutherans never adopted such a comprehensive world-rejecting outlook, where at least middle-class success has been assumed to be normative, but they have also been deeply compromised by humanist education, especially at the collegiate level. Calvinist and Lutheran leaders and churches have gone theologically liberal and then politically liberal with far greater regularity than fundamentalist leaders and churches have. The gods of the modern world, being universal in their claims, imitate the universalism of the kingdom of God. They undergird the kingdom of man. Their profered blessings are not uniquely tied to the land as the gods of the ancient world were. These gods are not placated by sacred oferings of the ield. They are placated only by confession and conformity: the ajrmation of their autonomous jurisdiction within an ever-expanding realm of law – civil, private, or 32. I predicted this in my essay, “The Intellectual Schizophrenia of the New Christian Right,” Christianity and Civilization, 1 (1982), pp. 1–40 33. The classic example is Beverly LaHaye, who runs a huge political action organization, Concerned Women for America. Meanwhile, her dispensational husband Tim writes books about the imminent rapture.

Syncretism, Pluralism, and Empire

935

both. Their priestly agents ofer positive sanctions to those who conform covenantally: the traditional human goals of health, wealth, power, fame, and security, as well as the great lure of the twentieth century, low-cost entertainment. The last goal has become necessary to ofset the side efect of the irst ive: boredom. America’s mainline Protestant denominations have sufered the same fate confessionally during the same period.34 Catholicism resisted the trend until the mid-1960’s, but this resistance collapsed al35 36 most overnight, 1965–66. The evangelicals are also succumbing. Only fundamentalists, charismatics, and a handful of Calvinists and Lutherans, especially those committed to Christian education through high school, are maintaining their resistance by proclaiming late eighteenth-century right-wing Enlightenment humanism as an ideal. Church growth is taking place in those American churches that are resisting the liberal humanist tide. This has been true since the late 1920’s,37 the very period in which liberal Protestant church growth peaked in the United States.38

Conclusion The ancient empires adopted syncretism as a way to hold together the political order. Just as the syncretistic gods of the families and clans in Greece and Rome entered into the common pantheon of the city-state, becoming political gods, so did the gods of conquered city-states enter into the pantheon of the Roman Empire. The welcoming of these gods into the Roman pantheon undermined the ritual-theological foundations of the Roman Republic. Empires in the ancient world required the subordination of local gods to the political order. 34. William R. Hutchison, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1976). 35. Malachi Martin, The Jesuits: The Society of Jesus and the Betrayal of the Church (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987). For a representative primary source, see A New Catechism: Catholic Faith for Adults (New York: Herder & Herder, 1967). It was released by the bishops of the Netherlands in 1966. 36. James D. Hunter, Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation (University of Chicago Press, 1987). 37. Joel A. Carpenter, “Fundamentalist Institutions and the Rise of Evangelical Protestantism, 1929–1942,” Church History, 49 (1980), p. 65. 38. Robert T. Handy, “The American Religious Depression, 1925–1935,” ibid., 29 (1960), pp. 3–16.

936

DEUTERONOMY

This is in principle no diferent in modern pluralism. What has changed is the local character of the participating gods. They have become universalistic, mimicking the God of the Bible. The modern pantheon is not illed with idols. Pluralism acknowledges all religions as equal, just as syncretism acknowledged all idols as equal. But in both cases, this equality was the equality of subordination to the god of politics. This god is the supreme god of every empire. The anti-Christian leaders of the modern world are now campaigning for the creation of a New World Order. This is another move in the direction of empire. It will not come to pass. God will bring a cacophony to match this new tower of Babel. This time, the confusion of computer languages rather than human languages will probably be the means of thwarting the move to empire.

Appendix D of American Judaism: Study in THEDemographics DEMOGRAPHICS OF AMERICAN JUDAISM: Disinheritance A STUDY IN DISINHERITANCE For I would not, brethren, that ye should be ignorant of this mystery, lest ye should be wise in your own conceits; that blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in. And so all Israel shall be saved: as it is written, There shall come out of Sion the Deliverer, and shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob: For this is my covenant unto them, when I shall take away their sins (Rom. 11:25–27).

Jews worry a lot about their corporate future. The continuing recurrence of this fear has been unique to Jews. Members of no other ethnic group have gone into print so often to proclaim the possibility that they might disappear as a separate people.1 As Otto Scott, of Irish descent, once remarked: “Can you imagine an Irishman worrying in public about this possibility?” Yet, eschatologically speaking, this Jewish fear is legitimate. Paul in Romans 11 teaches that the Jews will eventually disappear as a separate covenantal confessional group and be welcomed into the church.2 They will, alongside many other ethnic groups, retain their cultural accents and dialects, 1. See, for example, Alan M. Dershowitz, The Vanishing American Jew: In Search of Jewish Identity for the Next Century (Boston: Little, Brown, 1997). 2. “And they also, if they abide not still in unbelief, shall be graffed in: for God is able to graff them in again. For if thou wert cut out of the olive tree which is wild by nature, and wert graffed contrary to nature into a good olive tree: how much more shall these, which be the natural branches, be graffed into their own olive tree?” (Rom. 11:23–24). Cf. Charles Hodge, Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, [1864] 1950), p. 365; Robert Haldane, An Exposition of the Epistle to the Romans (Mad Dill Air Force Base, Florida: MacDonald Pub. Co., [1839] 1958), pp. 632-33; John Murray, The Epistle to the Romans, 2 vols. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1965), II, pp. 65-103.

937

938

DEUTERONOMY

but the grammar of their confession will be Trinitarian. They will cease to be Jews. Nevertheless, until this happens, Jews will successfully maintain their separate covenantal identity as a people. The question is: Which Jews? The answer is: Jews who both understand and apply the covenantal principle of inheritance and disinheritance. Judaism, in the sense of adherence to the teachings of the Talmud, is a minority religion even in the State of Israel. A minority religion’s greatest threat is not genocide. It is intermarriage. Genocide is not a comparable threat, as the early church learned in the Roman empire. It is never complete because it is always geographically and temporally bounded: this group of adherents in this region persecuted by this State for this period of time. Genocide reinforces the sense of solidarity among the targeted victims, especially irst-generation refugees. Genocide creates a reaction: among the victors, who eventually grow weary of the bloodshed and grow embarrassed by the world’s reaction; and among the victims, who adopt social strategies of survival. Threats strengthen the will to resist. Seduction weakens it.

The Sociology of Seduction Seduction is the Jews’ problem – seduction in the broadest sense, but also in the narrowest. The seduction that threatens a confessional religion more than any other is marital seduction: the confessionally mixed marriage. God warned Israel about this: “For thou shalt worship no other god: for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God: Lest thou make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land, and they go a whoring after their gods, and do sacriice unto their gods, and one call thee, and thou eat of his sacriice; And thou take of their daughters unto thy sons, and their daughters go a whoring after their gods, and make thy sons go a whoring after their gods” (Ex. 34:14–16). Note: Moses did not warn the daughters not to marry Canaanite husbands; he warned the men not to marry Canaanite wives. Women were seen as the seducers of covenant religion. Judaism has always viewed seduction as asymmetrical covenantally: woman have the upper hand in mixed marriages. Judaism has been structured to take advantage of this aspect of the mixed marriage: it deines a Jew as someone born of a Jewish mother. The mother’s love of her children, which is the most powerful and universal social force there is, is harnessed to the judicial deinition of what constitutes

Demographics of American Judaism: Study in Disinheritance

939

a Jew. A Jewish woman may be seduced away from her parents’ plans, but she is not automatically disinherited. She is held less responsible than her brothers in this area of life. She does not bear the mark of the Jewish covenant: circumcision. Her lesh does not testify against her marriage vow, as it does with a maritally seduced Jewish male. She surrenders less than he does. Her status as a Jew is transmitted to her children, if they confess the faith. This gives her a great incentive to rear her children as Jews, if possible. Her husband, whose faith was sujciently weak to enable him to marry someone outside his faith, is not in a strong position to oppose her. This asymmetric condition is relected in the statistics of religious training among the children of mixed marriages: Jews with others. In 1971, 86 percent of the children of Jewish mothers and gentile fathers were reared as Jews, while only 17 percent of the children of Jewish fathers and gentile mothers were reared as Jews.3 In the mutual seduction of a mixed marriage, American Jewish women have retained the upper hand. This is why the negative sanction of disinheritance of sons has always been crucial for the survival of Judaism. Jewish daughters have seldom inherited, so the threat of disinheritance has not been equally great. The Mosaic law allowed daughters to inherit only when there was no son (Num. 36). So, Judaism’s threat of disinheritance has been aimed at keeping sons in line. Jewish daughters have always had less to lose and more to gain than their brothers when entering into mixed marriages. Because Jewish women did not inherit money, and because their children could inherit their mothers’ judicial status, the gentiles’ seduction of Jewish women has never been the same degree of threat to the survival of Judaism. It is the seduction of sons that has been the primary threat. To defend against this, Judaism imposed harsh sanctions. When it ceased to impose them, it began a march into self-annihilation through seduction. But who is the chief seducer? Not Christianity or any other confessional supernatural religion. Christianity cannot adopt mixed marriages as tools of evangelism; such marriages are forbidden. They break the covenant, which is necessarily confessional. For the 3. This was the finding of the National Jewish Population Study of 1970–71, reported by U. O. Schmelz and Sergio Dellapergola, “Basic Trends in American Jewish Demography,” in Steven Bayme (ed.), Facing the Future: Essays On Contemporary Jewish Life (n.p.: KTAV Publishing House and American Jewish Committee, 1989), p. 92.

940

DEUTERONOMY

humanist, however, marriage is not seen as a covenant based on a mutual oath before God. It is seen as a cultural institution based on a breakable oath before the State, and the State is seen as religiously neutral. The humanist therefore sees no confessional problem with mixed marriages, for marriage is not a covenant based on a shared confession of faith. He encourages confessionally mixed marriages as a means of undermining the testimony of both partners to their children. This is why humanism is the supreme threat to Judaism – Judaism’s greatest threat in history. Unlike supernatural-confessional religions that are also threatened by seduction and which oppose mixed marriages, humanism proclaims the equality of all supernatural religious confessions – an equality of cultural irrelevance. Humanism seeks to seduce the sons and daughters of every supernatural religion. Thus, humanism is an equal opportunity seducer: men and women of all faiths are equally its targets. The ideal of the confessionally mixed marriage has led, step by step, to the ideal of the sexually mixed college dormitory. The humanist believes in the ejcacy of seduction. He believes that in the competition between lust and the covenant, lust will win in the 18-24 age population. He believes that the children of Israel, if given the opportunity, will rise up to play. This is why humanism constitutes the greatest threat to Judaism in its history. A majority religion can survive the assaults of mixed marriage much longer than a minority religion can. There are more candidates for marriage for the members of a majority religion. A minority religion cannot aford the temporary luxury of tolerating mixed marriages. This is especially true of American Jews, who are experiencing birth rates well below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per family. “If Jews, who in most parts of the United States constitute a tiny minority, were to choose their spouses at random, hardly any endogamous Jewish couples would be formed at all.”4 Humanism calls on all partners to choose their marital partners on a confessionally random basis, and to encourage this, humanism has created the most powerful marriage bureau in history: the tax-funded secular university. No group has responded with greater enthusiasm to the siren call of the secular university than the Jews, a topic I shall discuss later in this essay. 4. Ibid., p. 91.

Demographics of American Judaism: Study in Disinheritance

941

The Ghetto and Cultural Identity European Jews prior to the Napoleonic wars (1798–1815) were isolated inside their own autonomous communities: ghettos. Some of these ghettos were urban; others were in small towns. When religious discrimination began to be repealed by law in the irst half of the nineteenth century, Jews began to venture out of the ghetto, both intellectually and geographically.5 The Jewish community’s abandonment of traditional Judaism began at that time. A division appeared between reforming Jews and defenders of Talmudic knowledge. Historian Paul Johnson writes: “The pious Jew – and there could be no other – did not admit the existence of two kinds of knowledge, sacred and secular. There was only one. Moreover, there was only one legitimate purpose in acquiring it: to discover the exact will of God, in order to obey it.”6 Reform Judaism rejected this outlook; it sought to bring Jews into the world around them. It appeared in the second decade of the nineteenth century.7 The term “Orthodox Judaism” did not appear until the second quarter of the nineteenth century. The term was coined by Reform critics of traditional Judaism.8 In Germany, legal discrimination against Jews faded steadily after 1820 and was gone by 1880.9 Legal equality brought legal integration into the gentile community. Secular law revoked the long-standing special legal situation of Jews, where rabbis and elders possessed the authority to impose civil sanctions on members of the Jewish community. This separate legal status went back to the late Roman Empire. Israel Shahak writes of European Jewry in general: “This was the most important social fact of Jewish existence before the advent of the modern state: observance of the religious laws of Judaism, as well as their inculcation through education, were

5. Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), Part 5. 6. Ibid., p. 327. 7. Ibid., pp. 332–33. 8. I. Grunfeld, “Samson Raphael Hirsch – The Man and His Mission,” in Judaism Eternal: Selected Essays from the Writings of Samson Raphael Hirsch, 2 vols. (London: Soncino, 1956), I, p. xxiii. Grunfeld says that Hirsch accepted this term of opprobrium and, through his leadership, transformed it into an acceptable self-definition. 9. Hasia R. Diner, A Time for Gathering: The Second Migration, 1820–1880, vol. 3 of The Jewish People in America, 5 vols. (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 17.

942

DEUTERONOMY

enforced on Jews by physical coercion, from which one could escape by conversion to the religion of the majority, amounting in the circumstances to a total social break and for that reason very im10 practicable, except during a religious crisis.” Paralleling this change in the Jews’ legal status was an increase in animosity against them, although they never constituted more than 1.3 percent of the German population.11 Social discrimination against Jews in Germany remained common, culminating with the systematic Nazi persecutions, 1933–45. In contrast, there was almost no social discrimination against Jews in the United States prior to the Civil War (1861–65). Jews had lived in North America as a culturally assimilated people from the mid-seventeenth century. Since the mid-eighteenth century, they had become part of American urban life: in clothing, hair styles, and architecture.12 In New York, Jews became eligible for citizenship as early as 1715, although this was unique in pre-Revolutionary America.13 They had never received a separate grant of authority to impose civil sanctions on deviant members of the synagogue. As a result, Jews were far more integrated into American life than their counterparts were in Europe prior to the 1820’s. Sephardic Jews from Spain and Portugal and Ashkenazic Jews from Germany and Poland lived together from the beginning in New Amsterdam. This continued when it became New York City in 1664. They worked out an agreement on common worship and rule, 1728–1825; elsewhere in America, separate synagogues were common.14 American Jews were a tiny percentage of the population. In 1820, there were about 2,700 Jews in America.15 The overall American population in 1820 was 9.6 million.16 Until 1840, there was no ordained, functioning rabbi in the United States, i.e., someone who had graduated from a recognized rabbinical school or who had been 10. Israel Shahak, “The Jewish religion and its attitude to non-Jews,” Khamsin, VIII (1981), p. 28. See also Diner, Gathering, p. 18. 11. Diner, Gathering, p. 9. 12. Eli Faber, A Time for Planting: The First Migration, 1654–1820, vol. 1 of The Jewish People in America (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), ch. 4. 13. Ibid., pp. 100–1. 14. Ibid., pp. 60–61, 125. 15. Ibid., p. 107. 16. Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1975), I:8, Series A 1–5.

Demographics of American Judaism: Study in Disinheritance

943 17

certiied by a talmudic scholar of distinction who had been licensed. By 1840, the number of Jews in the United States had risen to 6,000. In 1848, there were 50,000.18 As a means of comparison, consider that in 1840, there were 17 million Americans; in 1850 there were 23 million.19 20 Then, in the 1850’s, came the steamship. This changed both the volume and pattern of immigration: from northern Europe to eastern, central, and southern Europe. The great waves of immigration hit America from all over Europe, not just Protestant northern Europe. American demographics changed rapidly. Among the tens of millions of immigrants were millions of Jews. Total immigration of Jews to the United States was no more than 150,000 as of 1880.21 From 1860 to 1880, more of these came from eastern Europe than from Germany.22 There were about 240,000 Jews in America in 1880.23 Of these, 200,000 were from Germany.24 Over the next 45 years, some 2.5 million Jews arrived, with the vast majority from eastern Europe, especially Russia.25 From 1880 to 1920, one-third of all the Jews in Eastern Europe emigrated, and over 80 percent of them came to the United States.26 Diner argues – implausibly, in my view – that this new immigration was not fundamentally diferent from the old: same Judaism, same immigration motivation, i.e., economic opportunity.27 This is the equivalent of saying that, culturally speaking, New York City’s Episcopalians were not fundamentally diferent from the Baptists of the American frontier. Even this comparison understates the diference: the Episcopalians were separated from the Baptists by the Allegheny mountains; the Sephardic Jews, assimilated into the German-Polish Jewish community from

17. Jacob Rader Marcus, “The Handsome Young Priest in the Black Gown: The Personal World of Gershom Seixas,” Hebrew Union College Annual, XL-XLI (1969-70), p. 411. 18. Diner, Gathering, p. 56. 19. Historical Statistics, loc. cit. 20. Diner, Gathering, p. 43. 21. Ibid., p. 233. 22. Ibid., p. 53. 23. Ibid., p. 56. 24. Gerold Sorin, A Time for Building: The Third Migration, 1880–1920, vol. 3 of The Jewish People in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 2. 25. Dinar, Gathering, p. 233. 26. Sorin, Building, pp. xv, 1. 27. Diner, Gathering, pp. 232–33.

944

DEUTERONOMY

28

1841 to 1920, were separated from the Russian Jews by a horse car29 riage ride and the money to purchase it. The hostile reactions of the gentile community after 1870 marked a change in its opinion regarding the perceived diferences of the new immigration, not merely the latter’s increased volume but its social characteristics. In the 1870’s, Jews began to be kept out of exclusive resorts and social clubs, and Jewish girls were excluded from certain eastern women’s colleges, but this was the extent of the discrimination.30 (In the 1990’s, social club exclusion is all that remains, and just barely.) After 1900, social discrimination against Jews increased.31 After World War I, it increased dramatically.32 This exclusion relected social opinion within the Jewish community. Sorin comments: “The farther west in Europe one’s origins, the 33 higher one’s status.” He calls this “the geographical origins rule.” The great reversal came in 1945 in reaction to the defeat of the Nazis. Anti-Semitism became unfashionable within educated circles, which more and more circles became. It had never been consistent with the religious pluralism of American life, the “live and let 28. Jacob Rader Marcus, “The Periodization of American Jewish History,” Publication of the American Jewish Historical Society, XLVII (Sept. 1957–June 1958), p. 129. 29. Stephen Birmingham, “Our Crowd”: The Great Jewish Families of New York (New York: Harper & Row, 1967); Birmingham, The Grandees: America’s Sephardic Elite (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). Birmingham titles Chapter 16, “The Jewish Episcopalians.” There has been a reaction to this view among a few Jewish historians. Some of the authors and the general editor of The Jewish People in America (1992), which was funded by the American Jewish Historical Society, reject the familiar periodization of Jewish immigration to America: Sephardic, German-Polish (Ashkenazic), and eastern European. This periodization scheme, familiar to American Jewish historians by 1900, was defended by Marcus, “Periodization of American Jewish History,” op. cit., pp. 125–33. With respect to the final wave of immigration, 1880 to 1920, I do not see how its overwhelming eastern European character can be denied. Marcus dates the beginning of the east European Jewish immigration: 1852 (p. 130). This correlates with the advent of the steamship. He dates the triumph of the Russian Jewish tradition: 1920 (p. 130). Simon Kuznets, one of the most respected statisticians in American history and a Nobel Prize winner in economics, remarks that from 1820 to 1870, fewer than 4,000 Jews immigrated from Russia and 4,000 from Poland. From 1881 to 1914, two million Jews immigrated, and over 1.5 million were from Russia: 75 percent. Kuznets, “Immigration of Russian Jews to the United States: Background and Structure,” Perspectives in American History, IX (1975), p. 39. Only 15,000 Jews arrived from Russia in the decade, 1871–80. Ibid., p. 43. 30. John Higham, “Social Discrimination Against Jews in America, 1830–1930,” Publication of the Jewish Historical Society, XLVII (1958), p. 13. 31. Ibid., pp. 13–19. 32. Ibid., pp. 19–23. 33. Sorin, Building, p. 2.

Demographics of American Judaism: Study in Disinheritance

945

live” attitude which has been characteristic of American culture – an application of nineteenth-century Americans’ laissez faire outlook. The Nazi ideology had been defeated on the battleield, and this reduced the appeal of the old inconsistency. Discrimination was replaced by toleration, and toleration by acceptance, in one generation: 1945 to 1975. But this acceptance has a confessional premise: “My religion is as good as yours, and all religions should be limited to home and congregation.” The day that this confession is widely believed by members of a minority religion is the day that it moves toward assimilation. A Baptist can aford to confess this in a Methodist culture, or visa versa, but for a Jew in a humanist culture, such a confession is suicidal. It undermines the traditional answers to the question: “What is a Jew?” A new answer now comes back: “A Unitarian with better business connections.”

Jews and the Gods of Modernism Throughout the nineteenth century, Jews actively began to pursue the gods of the gentiles around them: gods of marketplace. They got rich in Germany in that century, moving from poverty in 1820 to middle-class amuence by 1880.34 The same upward movement of Jews took place in America. There was even less discrimination here. The common goal of Americans was making money. De Tocqueville wrote in 1835, “I know no other country where love of money has such a grip on men’s hearts. . . .”35 Access to the free market was open to all except slaves in the antebellum South. Jews, who had been small traders in Europe, it in well. They lourished. Like the members of many other ethnic groups, Jews wrote home to relatives in Europe about America’s economic opportunities and the lack of religious discrimination. The waves of immigration grew larger. In the twentieth century, another group of cosmopolitan gods became a temptation for Jews: gods of the academy. For about 25 years, 1920 to 1945, the prestigious American private colleges, universities, and medical schools placed quotas on the number of Jews.

34. Diner, Gathering, pp. 12–13. 35. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, edited by J. P. Meyer (12th ed.; Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor, [1848] 1969), p. 54.

946

DEUTERONOMY

36

(The University of Chicago was an exception.) Yet even in this case, discrimination was fairly lax. At Columbia University in New York City, the Jewish student population had climbed to 40 percent by 1920.37 The school’s move farther away from the Jewish parts of the city in 1910 failed to reduce the lood of Jewish students when a subway line down the West side was constructed shortly thereafter. Quotas imposed in 1921 reduced this percentage to 22 percent in 1922.38 Harvard’s Jewish population, enhanced by “tram” commuters from Boston, climbed to 20 percent in 1920. The school’s president then announced a quota of 10 percent. This decision was formally repealed by a special committee in 1923, but Harvard’s new policies of accepting more students from the Midwest pushed Jewish enrolment back to 10 percent by 1930.39 There were far fewer Jews living in the Midwest. Jews had long possessed legal access to tax-supported American schools and universities that came into existence after the Civil War. At the City College of New York in 1920, between 80 and 90 percent of the students were Jewish. At the Washington Square campus of the private New York University, the igure was 93 percent.40 In the 1930’s, Jews constituted 3.5 percent of the American population – the high point – and 10 percent of its college population. The same drive for education had been present in Europe for a century.41 Jews have lourished in this humanistic academic environment. Statistically, the biological heirs of Ashkenazic Jews are the most intelligent ethnic group in the United States.42 Herrnstein and Murray comment: “A fair estimate seems to be that Jews in America and Britain have an overall IQ mean somewhere between a half and a 36. Diner, Gathering, p. 22. This school has been described as a Baptist institution where atheist students study Thomas Aquinas taught by Jewish professors. My assessment is that their Jewish professors are also atheists. 37. Henry L. Feingold, A Time for Searching: Entering the Mainstream, 1920–1945, vol. 4 of Jewish People in America (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 15. 38. Idem. 39. Ibid., p. 18. 40. Ibid., p. 15. 41. Ibid., p. 14. 42. M. D. Storfer, Intelligence and Giftedness: The Contributions of Heredity and Early Environment (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1990), pp. 314–23; cited in Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press, 1994), p. 275.

Demographics of American Judaism: Study in Disinheritance

947

full standard deviation above the mean, with the source of the diference concentrated in the verbal component. . . . But it is at least worth noting that their mean IQ was .97 standard deviation above the mean of the rest of the population and .84 standard deviation above the mean of whites who identiied themselves as Christian.”43 These are statistically signiicant diferences. The result has been the exceptional success of Jews in higher education and in the professions, which are screened by means of academic performance. “My son, the doctor” and “My son, the lawyer” are not just quaint phrases of proud but formally uneducated Jewish mothers in the 1920’s through the 1940’s. They are representative summaries of the success of Jews in entering the State-licensed professions, an ethnic penetration way out of proportion to their percentage in the overall population. But there has been a heavy price to pay: initially, the undermining of confessional Judaism; secondarily, the undermining of cultural Judaism. The West’s universities have made the same Faustian bargain to all: come to be certiied, but give up your claims in the classroom to academically relevant knowledge based on revelation.44 The Jews, as a minority based on religious confession, and as a minority with a competitive edge based on intelligence, have had the most to gain economically from this bargain, and the most to lose confessionally. For any religious group self-consciously to adopt a dualism that proclaims “two paths of knowledge” is to risk losing its best and brightest to the world of autonomous humanism. The seeming universalism of humanism’s ideology ofers to its initiates the power and productivity of the division of intellectual labor. To become a participant in this intellectual division of labor, the initiate need only abandon those aspects of his religious worldview that are irreconcilable or not readily shared with the segregating ideals of rival faiths. Jews have responded to this ofer with greater enthusiasm and success than any other religious group in the West.45 43. Idem. 44. A good example of an Orthodox Jew who accepted the bargain is a Harvard Law School professor, Alan Dershowitz, whose study of the effects of secularization reveals the plight of American Jewry: at the present rate of intermarriage, there will be no trace of the Jews in a century. Alan M. Dershowitz, The Vanishing American Jew: In Search of Jewish Identity for the Next Century (Boston: Little, Brown, 1997). 45. See Irving Greenberg, “Jewish Survival and the College Campus,” Judaism, XVII (Summer 1968).

948

DEUTERONOMY

Edward Shapiro comments on the efect of secular values on Jewish professors. Most Jewish professors had only a slight relationship to Jewish culture and Judaism. Data collected by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education in 1969 revealed that while 32 percent of professors with a Protestant background and 25 percent with a Catholic background were either indiferent or opposed to religion, 67 percent of Jewish professors were indiferent or opposed to religion. And while 16 percent of Protestant professors and 23 percent of Catholic professors considered themselves deeply religious, only 5 percent of Jewish professors deined themselves as such. In comparison to other Jews, Jewish academicians observed fewer Jewish rituals, were more hostile to religion, ajliated with Jewish communal institutions less frequently, and intermarried more often. . . . Just as its investment in formal education was greater, so American Jewry spent more time, energy, and money than any other American ethnic or religious group in cultivating and analyzing its intellectuals. There must be something seriously wrong with American Jewry, it was argued, if it could not retain the loyalty of its brightest and best-educated members. The alienation of the Jewish intellectual from the American Jewish community occasioned much wringing of hands. There was, however, little that could have been done to bring Jewish intellectuals back to the fold. The sermons of rabbis and the proclamations of Jewish organizations could hardly convince intellectuals and academicians to abandon their secular and universalist outlook.46

So, by worshipping in the shrines of secular culture, Jews are disappearing as a separate religious force. They are a political force, but not a religious force. Their separate legal status, which was an aspect of the judicial discrimination against them in Christian civilization, had enabled them to preserve their separate religious status for almost two millennia. With the coming to power of the gods of secular humanism – politics, money, and education – Jews left the ghetto and entered the public square to worship with their votes, their taxes, and their children. The public schools have become the established churches of Western civilization. Like the gentiles around them, Jews have tithed their children to the State.

46. Edward S. Shapiro, A Time for Healing: American Jewry since World War II, vol. 5 of The Jewish People in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), pp. 112, 113.

Demographics of American Judaism: Study in Disinheritance

949

Since at least the 1930’s, a majority of American Jews has consistently voted to allow the State to extract an ever-greater percentage of their income.47 The saying is, “American Jews have the income of Episcopalians and the voting record of Puerto Ricans.”48 As an Orthodox and politically conservative rabbi has put it, “many non-observant Jews desperately pursue liberalism as a way out of their covenant. This is the true purpose of liberalism and Jews are its chief champions because it alone ofers an escape from having to accept Jewish law – the Torah.”49 One Jewish leader in the American inancial community has said of the Jewish New York elite of the 1820–1920 era: “Our Crowd is deader than a doornail. Ninety percent have disappeared and few are Jewish anymore.”50 This problem is not conined to the United States; European Jews are also disappearing through assimilation.51

The Disappearance of Non-Observant Jews “If present trends continue,” wrote sociologist Ernest van den Haag in 1969, “in the year 2000 there will have never been more handsome, better-endowed synagogues in America, nor so many; nor so few Jews.”52 He argued that the intermarriage problem threatens the survival of American Judaism.53 This theme was not even mentioned in sociologist Marshall Sklare’s 1957 anthology, The Jews: Social Patterns of an American Group. But in April, 1964, Sklare sounded a warning in the Jewish publication, Commentary, in an article titled, “Intermarriage and the Jewish Future.” He sounded it even louder in a second Commentary

47. Nathaniel Weyl, The Jew in American Politics (New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House, 1968), ch. 12. 48. Cf. Peter Steinfels, “American Jews Stand Firmly to the Left,” New York Times (Jan. 8, 1989). 49. Daniel Lapin, “Why Are So Many Jews Liberal?” Crisis: A Journal of Lay Catholic Opinion (April 1993). 50. Alan Greenberg of Bear, Stearns & Co. Cited in Jean Bear, The Self-Chosen: “Our Crowd” is Dead (New York: Arbor House, 1982), p. 23. 51. Bernard Wasserstein, Vanishing Diaspora: The Jews in Europe Since 1945 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1996). 52. Ernest van den Haag, The Jewish Mystique (New York: Dell, [1969] 1971), p. 181. 53. Ibid., ch. 16.

950

DEUTERONOMY

54

article (March 1970): “Intermarriage and Jewish Survival.” A 1971 study showed that the rate of intermarriage was over 30 percent.55 In 1973, Reform Judaism, the largest and most liberal branch of American Judaism, made its last public pronouncement opposing such intermarriage. It has subsequently accepted the new reality and has tried to deal with it.56 In these mixed marriages, only 20 percent of the spouses convert to Judaism. Three-quarters of the children in families in which the spouse fails to convert are not reared as Jews. Very few of these children marry Jews.57 One Jewish historian has called this “the demographic hemorrhaging of American Jewry.”58 The birth rate for Jews is one quarter to one-third less than for gentiles. It is the lowest ethnic birthrate in America.59 Meanwhile, “Of the major American religious groups, the Jews consistently placed last in surveys of religious attendance and belief.”60 As Van Den Haag predicted, synagogue attendance declined in the 1970’s and 1980’s. This was especially true in Conservative synagogues, the group positioned between the liberal Reform Jews and the Orthodox Jews.61 Edward Shapiro ended his book, the ifth in a ive-volume history, The Jewish People in America, with this forlorn hope: “Jews have survived one crisis after another, and perhaps they will also survive the freedom and prosperity of America.”62 In 1996, the World Jewish Congress, held in Jerusalem, issued a demographic report, State of World Jewry. It reported that in the United States, over half of all Jews who married in the 1980’s married a non-Jewish partner. About one-quarter of the children of such mixed marriages are reared as Jews.63 As with all academic matters, this view is controversial and has critics within the Jewish academic community. The demographic data are not sujciently comprehensive to be sure. But in a carefully reasoned, highly qualiied essay, two Jewish scholars conclude that 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

Shapiro, Healing, pp. 234–35. Ibid., p. 235. Ibid., pp. 238–39. Ibid., p. 253. Ibid., p. 239. Ibid., p. 243. Ibid., p. 254. Ibid., p. 255. Ibid., p. 257. Religious News Service, reported in Christian News (Feb. 12, 1996), p. 9.

Demographics of American Judaism: Study in Disinheritance

951

the pessimists have the trends on their side. American Jews are not reproducing at a rate high enough to replace themselves. Whites in general are in the same situation; Jews, however, reproduce at a rate lower than whites in general. They have the lowest rates of reproduction among whites in the United States. The replacement rate is 2.1 children per family. In the mid-1980’s, Jews had a rate of under 1.5; whites in general, 1.7.64 Mixed marriages by the mid-1980’s were in the range of 30 percent. The authors comment that “the inferred U.S. rate of 30 percent for individuals means that 45 percent of all couples with at least one Jewish partner are mixed.”65 Few of the non-Jewish spouses convert to Judaism.66 This leads to the disinheritance of Judaism. The authors report on a remarkable inding. “A study in Philadelphia covering three generations found that mixed marriages in one generation entailed greater percentages of mixed marriages and increasingly smaller percentages of Jewish children in the following generations. If both parents of the Jewish respondent whose marriage was mixed had been Jews, 37 percent of the grandchildren were Jews; if the grandparents had been a mixed couple, none of the grandchildren were found to be Jewish in this particular study.”67 By the late 1990’s, intermarriage was at the 50% rate. Charles Krauthammer writes that more Jews marry Christians (he means gentiles) than marry Jews: about 52%.68 With only one in four of the children of these mixed marriages being reared Jewish, the future is grim for the survival of Judaism in America. “A population in which the biological replacement rate is 70 percent and the cultural replacement rate is 70% is headed for extinction. By this calculation, every 100 Jews are raising 56 Jewish children. In just two generations, 7 out of 10 Jews will vanish.”69 He concludes that the future of Judaism is dependent on the survival of the state of Israel. The Jews have put most of their eggs – in both senses – in one basket.70 But, given that nation’s dependence on its technological superiority 64. Schmelz and Dellapergola, “Basic Trends,” Facing the Future, p. 75: Table 1. 65. Ibid., p. 91. 66. Ibid., pp. 91–92. 67. Ibid., p. 93. 68. Charles Krauthammer, “At Last, Zion: Israel and the Fate of the Jews,” Weekly Standard (May 11, 1998), p. 24. 69. Ibid., p. 25. 70. Ibid., p. 29.

952

DEUTERONOMY

militarily, the Year 2000 computer problem points to a monumental crisis looming in the very near future. We can begin to understand why Jews prior to the irst World War excommunicated adult children who converted to another religion, mainly Christianity. They would hold burial services: symbols of covenantal death. They would cut these defecting children out of their lives. They would not see their grandchildren grow up. They sufered the terrible pain of disinheriting their children, especially their sons, for the sake of the preservation of the religion of Judaism. It was a matter of survival. Today, the religion of Judaism has been progressively (in both senses) replaced by the culture of Judaism – a culture without a public confession that invokes a supernatural God. Today, most American Jews do not believe that the God of the Bible brings covenantal sanctions in history for or against Jews on the basis of the community’s use of sanctions against covenantal disinheritance. Tolerance has made mixed marriages acceptable. The defecting children are not cut of through the equivalent of excommunication. The grandchildren are not cut of. But the grandchildren are unlikely to bear children who will be reared as Jews. Under the conditions of mixed marriage, the great grandchildren of Jewish couples will not be Jews. Refusing to disinherit children who marry outside the faith, they disinherit Judaism instead. Covenantal tolerance within Jewish families produces heirs with a diferent confession of faith. This produces extinction of the original confession. Jews are a minority faith. Tolerance within the covenantal bond of marriage leads to absorption. If confession is not seen as more fundamental than sexual attraction, and therefore not a matter of corporate sanctions, the minority faith will disappear. The contest between passion and confession, if left to youth to decide, will lead to the demise of confession. If the surrounding population is larger than those doing the confessing, the aging minority confessors will not be replaced. The rise of a far more self-conscious Orthodox Judaism, which recruits actively in the secularized Reform Jewish community, has gained considerable publicity. It is not clear yet that this activism has produced any statistically signiicant change in the religious commitment of most Jews. The high birth rates among Orthodox Jews may in time reverse the larger Jewish community’s demographic decline, but in the late twentieth century, American Judaism is slowly disappearing. Jews are a rapidly aging group: the oldest of all American ethnic

Demographics of American Judaism: Study in Disinheritance

953

71

groups. This demographic fact is masked by the high visibility of Jewish political involvement and inluence in national politics. The rise of Jewish national political inluence since the end of World War II has paralleled the rise of inluence of the farm bloc. The smaller the number of people actually represented by each bloc, the greater its highly concentrated and well-funded political inluence. Both are down to about two percent of the population.72 The rise of the gay rights movement after 1970 is an even better example. Homosexuals are a tiny minority – under one percent of the population – yet they have enormous political inluence in the United States. As AIDS has reduced the number of homosexual men since the early 1980’s, their political inluence has increased dramatically. Alan Dershowitz refers to an article in the October 1996 issue of Moment magazine. The article reports that, given present birth rates, by the fourth generation, 200 secular Jews will have produced ten great-grandchildren, while the same number of Orthodox Jews will have produced more than 5,000.73 It is clear what will happen unless covenantal attitudes regarding the future are reversed. Non-observant Jews in the United States will simply disappear. What we see here is a fulillment of Moses’ warning, three and a half millennia later. “Ye shall not go after other gods, of the gods of the people which are round about you; (For the LORD thy God is a jealous God among you) lest the anger of the LORD thy God be kindled against thee, and destroy thee from of the face of the earth” (Deut. 6:14–15). The eighteenth century saw the construction of modernism’s political temple by the Enlightenment, right wing and left wing. The acceptance of the legitimacy of this temple by the churches began the erosion of the ideal of Christendom.74 The entrance of Jews into this temple in the nineteenth century was the beginning of a great apostasy for Judaism. The leaders of both religions concluded that there could be a reconciliation of confessions through the adoption of a neutral, common-ground confession: humanism.

71. Thomas Sowell, Ethnic America: A History (New York: Basic Books, 1981), p. 95. 72. In 1991, Jews were 2 percent of the population. Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1994 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1994), Table 85. In 1993, agriculture employed 2.5 percent of the work force. Ibid., Table 641. 73. Dershowitz, Vanishing American Jew, p. 25. 74. Gary North, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989), Part 3.

954

DEUTERONOMY

This common confession – politics, money, and education – seemed to ofer a new era of economic growth, which in fact occurred. But with Western society’s unprecedented increase in economic output has come a rise in philosophical despair, war, crime, decadence, family dissolution, and suicide.

Conclusion Jews who live outside of the State of Israel sufer from a major problem: they do not face organized opposition. Dershowitz titles chapter two of The Vanishing American Jew, “Will the End of Anti-Semitism Mean the End of the Jews?” Jews do not face an armed majority that seeks their destruction. In the State of Israel, they do. Organized opposition has always been a major factor in the preservation of the Jews’ identity as a separate people. Western society was confessional. Jews did not share this confession. The ghetto was the solution for both sides. (For the anti-Talmudic Karaites, a ghetto within the ghetto was the solution.)75 With the demise of the ghetto and the rise of Reform Judaism, the old barriers began to disappear. So did the Jews’ old opposition to gentile culture. Jews had built efective cultural defenses against the conversion of individual Jews to rival religions, especially Christianity. But few Jews in 1850 perceived that secular humanism is a rival religion; even fewer perceived this in 1950. Christianity and Islam had a place for Jews as Jews, but outside the corridors of power. Humanism has a place for Jews as humanists inside the corridors of power. “Come one, come all,” cry the humanists, “but you must leave your revelational civil laws outside the common Temple of Understanding.” Jews in unprecedented numbers have succumbed to the siren song of social participation and leadership on these confessional terms.76 The cost has been high: escalating absorption. This has always been a threat to Jews. What is unique about humanism’s theology of absorption is its theology of a common confession based either on 75. This was the case in twelfth-century Constantinople, according to Benjamin of Tudela, whose Book of Travels is a major primary source document of the era. Some 2,500 Jews lived in a fenced-off quarter: 2,000 Talmudists and 500 Karaites. A fence separated the two groups. Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), p. 169. 76. Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State (University of Chicago Press, 1993).

Demographics of American Judaism: Study in Disinheritance

955

natural law theory or evolutionary political participation. Judaism must now ind ways to maintain itself apart from the shawmah Israel. The words of shawmah Israel – “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD” (Deut. 6:4) – are still intact, but they have been revised in spirit: “Hear, O Israel, we are not gentiles.” But there are two simple, all-too-familiar phrases that have proven incredibly powerful in negating the efects of this revised shawmah Israel. First, “Grandma, I won a scholarship to college.” Grandma is dutifully proud. This is followed a few years later by, “Grandma, I’d like you to meet my iancée.” Pride is then accompanied by a sense of loss and a sense of foreboding. Both the sense of loss and the sense of foreboding should have accompanied the irst announcement. Pluralism has a program of assimilation. First, it ofers the ballot. Then it ofers the full-tuition scholarship. Then it ofers the co-ed dorm. Then there is the sound of wedding bells – if things go well.77 Then there is the sound of the pitter-patter of little feet. That sound, delightful as it is, has steadily drowned out the sound of the shawmaw Israel. Then how can the Jews be preserved until the time of the great eschatological conversion? Only by their abandonment of their toleration of mixed marriages and by their abandonment of small families. Jews do not evangelize the general population; hence, there are no workable survival strategies except population growth and the disinheritance of those within the community who abandon the shawmaw Israel. Jews cannot persevere as humanists. The Reform and Conservative Jews will be replaced by the Orthodox. The demographics of Reform and Conservative Judaism will lead to their replacement by the Orthodox. Orthodox Jews rely on confessional prophylaxis, not biological. Liberal religion is having the same efect on American Protestantism’s mainline denominations as it had a century ago on Europe’s. Why should Reform and Conservative Jews think they are immune?

77. The other possibility is the silent scream of the aborted child.

APPENDIX E Free Market Capitalism FREE MARKET CAPITALISM [This essay appeared in the 1984 book edited by Robert Clouse, Wealth and Poverty: Four Christian Views, published by InterVarsity Press. It was the irst essay. Within a year, InterVarsity Press pulled the book. It sold 6,000 copies to my company, Dominion Press, at 25 cents each. The book’s editor wrote to me saying that he could not understand this; the book had been selling well. I like to think that it was my essay and my three rejoinders to the statists who wrote the other three essays. I like to think that I was a great embarrassment to them. The neo-evangelicals who ran IVP were politically liberal, as their publication of D. Gareth Jones’ pro-abortion book, Brave New People (1984), indicated. IVP soon suppressed that book, too, because of a successful public relations campaign by anti-abortion Christians. The English branch of IVP kept it in print, which tells you something about the evangelical community in England. I have retained the format in which my essay was originally submitted, including IVP’s footnoting style. I include it in this book because it reveals the extent to which I relied on the Book of Deuteronomy, a fact noted at the time by one of the other essayists, William Diehl, who dismissed my essay because of this.] Ye shall do no unrighteousness in judgment: thou shalt not respect the person of the poor, nor honour the person of the mighty; but in righteousness shalt thou judge thy neighbour. (Lev 19:15, KJV).1 I have been young, and now am old; yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread. (Ps 37:25)

1. All of my citations of Scripture in this essay are from the King James Version.

956

Free Market Capitalism

957

The topic of wealth and poverty should not be discussed apart from a consideration of the law of God and its relationship to the covenants, for it is in God’s law that we ind the Bible’s blueprint for economics. Biblical justice, biblical law, and economic growth are intimately linked. The crucial section of Scripture which explains this relationship is Deuteronomy 28. There are external blessings for those societies that conform externally to the laws of God (vv. 1–14), and there are external curses for those societies that fail to conform externally to these laws (vv. 15–68). And it shall come to pass, if thou shalt hearken diligently unto the voice of the LORD thy God, to observe and to do all his commandments which I command thee this day, that the LORD thy God will set thee on high above all nations of the earth: And all these blessings shall come on thee, and overtake thee, if thou shalt hearken unto the voice of the LORD thy God. Blessed shalt thou be in the city, and blessed shalt thou be in the ield. Blessed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy ground, and the fruit of thy cattle, the increase of thy kine, and the locks of thy sheep. Blessed shall be thy basket and thy store. . . . The LORD shall establish thee an holy people unto himself, as he hath sworn unto thee, if thou shalt keep the commandments of the LORD thy God, and walk in his ways. And all people of the earth shall see that thou art called by the name of the LORD; and they shall be afraid of thee. And the LORD shall make thee plenteous in goods, in the fruit of thy body, and in the fruit of thy cattle, and in the fruit of thy ground, in the land which the LORD sware unto thy fathers to give thee (Deut 28:1–5, 9–11).

Deuteronomy 28 is an extension and expansion of chapter 8, in which the relationship between law, blessings, and the covenant is outlined. God was about to bring his people into the Promised Land, as the fulilment of the promise given to Abraham. The “iniquity of the Amorites” (Gen 15:16) was at last full. The Canaanites’ era of dominion over the land was about to end. On what terms would the Hebrews hold title to the land and its productivity? Deuteronomy 8 spells it out: covenantal faithfulness. This meant adherence to the laws of God.2

2. On the question of Old Testament law in New Testament times, see Greg L. Bahnsen, Theonomy in Christian Ethics (Nutley, N.J.: Craig Press, 1977).

958

DEUTERONOMY

Deuteronomy 8 reveals to us the foundations of economic growth. First, God grants to his people the gift of life. This is an act of grace. He sustained them in the years of wandering in the wilderness, humbling them to prove their faith – their obedience to his commandments (v. 2) – and providing them with manna, so that they might learn that “man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the LORD doth men live” (v. 3b). A 40-year series of miracles sustained them constantly, for their clothing did not grow old, and their feet did not swell (v. 4). He also provided them with chastening, so that they might learn to respect his commandments (vv. 5–6) – the way of life. Second, God provided them with land, namely, the land lowing with milk and honey (vv. 7–8): “A land wherein thou shalt eat bread without scarceness, thou shalt not lack any thing in it; a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills thou mayest dig brass” (v. 9). This also was an act of grace. Life and land: Here are the two fundamental assets in any economic system. Human labor, combined with natural resources over time, is the foundation of all productivity. The third familiar feature of economic analysis, capital, is actually the combination of land plus labor over time. (The time factor is important. From it stems the economic phenomenon of the rate of interest: the discount of future goods against the identical goods held in the present.3 (Warning: I use footnotes to add explanatory material, to keep from cluttering up the text too much.) The original sources of production are land and labor.4 If the Hebrews were willing to dig, the land would produce its fruits.

3. Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, 3rd ed. (Chicago: Regnery, 1966), chap. 18. Let me give an example of the “discount for time.” If I were to announce that you have just won a new Rolls-Royce, and that you have a choice of delivery date, today or one year from today, which delivery date would you select (other things being equal)? You would want immediate delivery. Why? Because present goods are worth more to you than the same goods in the future. You might accept the Rolls-Royce a year from now if I paid you a rate of interest, in addition to the car. In fact, at some rate of interest you would accept the later date, unless you have a terminal disease, or an unquenchable lust for a Rolls-Royce. 4. Murray N. Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State, 2 vols. (1962; reprint ed., New York: New York Univ. Press, 1979), I, pp. 284–87, 410–24. See esp. chap. 6. This book was republished in 1993 by the Mises Institute, Auburn, Alabama.

Free Market Capitalism

959

So much for the gifts. What about the conditions of tenure? They were not to forget their God. They were not to “accept the gift but forget the Giver,” to use a familiar expression. The very fulness of the external, visible, measurable blessings would serve as a source of temptation for them: When thou hast eaten and art full, then thou shalt bless the LORD thy God for the good land which he hath given thee. Beware that thou forget not the LORD thy God, in not keeping his commandments, and his judgments, and his statutes, which I command thee this day: Lest when thou hast eaten and art full, and hast built goodly houses, and dwelt therein; and when thy herds and thy locks multiply, and thy silver and thy gold is multiplied, and all that thou hast is multiplied; Then thine heart be lifted up, and thou forget the LORD thy God. . . . (Deut 8:10–14a)

God provides gifts: life and land. He also provides a law-order which enables his people to expand their holdings of capital assets (the implements of production) and consumer goods. But these assets are not held by men apart from the ethical terms of God’s covenant. The temptation before man is the same as the temptation before Adam: to forget God and to substitute himself as God (Gen 3:5). It is the assumption of all Satanic religion, the assumption of humanism, the sovereignty of man. God warned the Israelites against this sin – the sin of presuming their own autonomy: And thou say in thine heart, My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth. But thou shalt remember the LORD thy God: for it is he that giveth thee power to get wealth, that he may establish his covenant which he sware unto thy fathers, as it is this day. (Deut 8:17–18)

These words lay the foundation of all sustained economic growth – and I stress the word sustained. While it is possible for a society to experience economic growth without honoring God’s law, eventually men’s ethical rebellion leads to external judgment and the termination of economic growth (Deut 28:15–68). It is this concept of God as the giver which underlay James’s announcement: “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.” (Jas 1:17) If men whose society has been (and therefore is still) covenanted with God should fall into this temptation to forget God and to

960

DEUTERONOMY

attribute their wealth to the might of their own hands, then God will judge them: And it shall be, if thou do at all forget the LORD thy God, and walk after other gods, and serve them, and worship them, I testify against you this day that ye shall surely perish. As the nations which the LORD destroyeth before your face, so shall ye perish; because ye would not be obedient unto the voice of the LORD your God. (vv. 19–20).

The Paradox of Deuteronomy 8 God has given us an outline of the covenantal foundations of a holy commonwealth.5 This is as close as the Bible comes to a universally valid “stage theory” of human history or economic develop6 ment. Long-term economic growth is based on men’s honoring the explicit terms of God’s law. The stages are as follows: 1. God’s grace in providing life, land, and law 2. Society’s adherence to the external terms of God’s law 3. External blessings in response to this faithfulness 4. Temptation: the lure of autonomy 5. Response: a. Capitulation that leads to external judgment; or b. Resistance that leads to further economic growth The covenant is supposed to be self-reinforcing, or as economists sometimes say, it ofers a system of positive feedback. Verse 18 is the key: God gives his people external blessings in order “that he may establish his covenant which he sware unto thy fathers. . . .” The promise would be visibly fulilled by their entry into the Promised Land, thereby giving them conidence in the reliability of God’s

5. On the holy commonwealth ideal in early American history, see Rousas J. Rushdoony, This Independent Republic (1964 reprint ed., Fairfax, Va.: Thoburn Press, 1978), esp. chap. 8. 6. Daniel’s interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream about the great image was historically speciic: four human empires (Babylon, Medo-Persia, Macedonia, and Rome), followed by the ifth Empire, God’s (Dan 2:31–45). This was not an “ideal type,” to use Max Weber’s terminology, nor was it a developmental model. Hesiod’s seemingly similar construction (Greece, 8th century, B.C.) – from the Age of Gold to the Age of Iron – was, in contrast, an attempt at constructing a universal model of the process of decay in man’s history. Hesiod, Works and Days, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1959), lines 109–201. The Bible’s developmental model is based on ethics – conformity to or rebellion against God’s covenant – not metaphysics, meaning some sort of inescapable aspect of the creation.

Free Market Capitalism

961

word. God’s law-order is reliable, which means that men can rely on biblical law as a tool of dominion, which will enable them to fulill (though imperfectly, as sinners) the terms of God’s dominion covenant: “And God blessed them [Adam and Eve], and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the ish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth” (Gen 1:28). This covenant was reajrmed with Noah (Gen 9:1–7). It is still binding on Noah’s heirs.7 The paradox of Deuteronomy 8 is this: Blessings, while inescapable for a godly society, are a great temptation. Blessings are a sign of God’s favor, yet in the ifth stage – the society’s response to the temptation of autonomy – blessings can result in comprehensive, external, social judgment. Thus, there is no way to determine simply from the existence of great external wealth and success of all kinds – the successes listed in Deuteronomy 28:1–14 – that a society is facing either the prospect of continuing positive feedback or imminent negative feedback (namely, destruction). The ethical condition of the people, not their inancial condition, is determinative. Visible success is a paradox: It can testify to two radically diferent ethical conditions. Biblical ethical analysis, because it recognizes the binding nature of revealed biblical law, is therefore a fundamental aspect of all valid historiography, social commentary, and economic analysis. An index number of economic wealth is a necessary but insujcient tool of economic analysis. The numbers do not tell us all we need to know about the progress of a particular society or civilization. We also need God’s law as an ethical guide, our foundation of ethical analysis.

Ethics and Economic Analysis A great debate has raged for over a century within the camp of the economists: “Is capitalism morally valid?” Marxists and socialists ask this question and then answer it: no. “But capitalism is ejcient,” respond the defenders of the free market. A few of the defenders also try to muster ethical arguments based on the right of

7. Gary North, The Dominion Covenant: Genesis (Tyler, Tex.: Institute for Christian Economics, 1982).

962

DEUTERONOMY

individuals to control the sale of their property, including their la8 bor services, without interference from the civil government. This sort of ethical analysis has not convinced many critics of capitalism. They reject the operating presupposition of free market economic analysis: methodological individualism. As methodological collectivists, they deny the right of men to use their property against the “common good.” Problem: Who deines the common good? (The Christian answers that the Bible deines the common good, and sets forth the institutional arrangements that will achieve it. The Bible teaches neither collectivism nor individualism; it proclaims methodological covenantalism.)9 Another problem: Even if the common good can be deined by humanistic social commentators, who has the right to enforce it? Finally, can the State,10 through its bureaucracy, enforce the common good in a cost-efective manner? Will the results resemble the ojcial ethical goals of the planners? What kinds of incentives can be built into a State-planned economy that will enable it to perform as ejciently as a proit-seeking free market economy?11 The fundamental issue is ethical. The question of ejciency is a subordinate one. Few Marxists or socialist scholars seriously argue any longer that the substitution of socialist ownership of the means of production will lead to an increase of per capita output beyond what private ownership would have produced. The debates today rage over what kinds of economic output are morally valid. Also, who should determine what “the people” – whoever they are – really need? The free market, with its system of private ownership and freely luctuating prices? Or the civil government, with its system of

8. Murray N. Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1982). 9. Gary North, “Methodological Covenantalism,” Chalcedon Report (Oct., 1977), published by the Chalcedon Foundation, Box 158, Vallecito, California, 95251. 10. I capitalize the word “State” where I am referring to the new god of twentieth-century socialism. I distinguish this from “state,” meaning a regional agency of civil government in the United States. 11. One of the finest books ever written in economics covers these questions in detail: Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions (New York: Basic Books, 1980). Sowell is an ex-Marxist, so he knows the arguments well. See also Ludwig von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (1922; reprint ed., Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Press, 1981). This was first published in the United States by Yale University Press in 1953.

Free Market Capitalism

963 12

political competition and lifetime bureaucratic functionaries? The real debate is a debate over ethical issues, something that economists have tried to hide or deny since the seventeenth century.13 Economist William Letwin, who is wholeheartedly enthusiastic about this supposed triumph of value-free economics, does admit that there are difficulties with this outlook: “It was exceedingly difficult to treat economics in a scientific fashion, since every economic act, being the action of a human being, is necessarily also a moral act. If the magnitude of difficulty rather than the extent of the achievement be the measure, then the making of economics was the greatest scientific accomplishment of the seventeenth century.”14 15 Apparently even more important than Newton’s discoveries! This faith in analytic neutrality has been reaffirmed by the developers of the two most prominent schools of free market economic analysis, Milton Friedman and Ludwig von Mises.16 12. Gary North, An Introduction to Christian Economics (Nutley, N.J.: Craig Press, 1973), chap. 20: “Statist Bureaucracy in the Modern Economy.” 13. “The distinction between moral and technical knowledge is elusive. . . . From the standpoint of any science the distinction is absolutely essential. A subject is not opened to scientiic enquiry until its technical aspect has been sundered from its moral aspect. . . . [T]here can be no doubt that economic theory owes its present development to the fact that some men, in thinking of economic phenomena, forcefully suspended all judgments of theology, morality, and justice, were willing to consider the economy as nothing more than an intricate mechanism, refraining for the while from asking whether the mechanism worked for good or evil. That separation was made during the seventeenth century. . . . The economist’s view of the world, which the public cannot yet comfortably stomach, was introduced by a remarkable tour de force, an intellectual revolution brought of in the seventeenth century.” William Letwin, The Origins of Scientiic Economics (1963; reprint ed., Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday/Anchor, 1965), pp. 158–59. 14. Ibid., p. 159. 15. Letwin does not actually say this. Perhaps he forgot about Newton. Or perhaps he was referring solely to social science when he named economics as “the greatest scientiic accomplishment of the seventeenth century.” Or possibly he really meant what he wrote, which boggles the mind. 16. Mises writes: “In considering changes in the nation’s legal system, in rewriting or repealing existing laws and writing new laws, the issue is not justice, but social expediency and social welfare. There is no such thing as an absolute notion of justice not referring to a deinite system of social organization. It is not justice that determines the decision in favor of a deinite social system. It is, on the contrary, the social system which determines what should be deemed right and what wrong. There is neither right nor wrong outside the social nexus. . . . It is nonsensical to justify or to reject interventionism from the point of view of ictitious and arbitrary absolute justice. It is vain to ponder over the just delimitation of the tasks of government from any preconceived standard of perennial values.” Mises, Human Action, p. 721.

964

DEUTERONOMY

One reason why the critics have been so successful in their attack against the academic economists’ hypothetically neutral defense of the free market is this: Hardly anyone in the secular world really believes any longer that moral or intellectual neutrality is possible. This is why Christian economics ofers a true intellectual alternative: it rests on a concept of objective revelation by a true Person, the Creator of all knowledge and the Lord of history. The Bible ajrms that neutrality is a myth; either we stand with Christ or we scatter abroad 17 (Matt 12:30). The works of the law – not the law, but the works of the law – are written on every human heart (Rom 2:14–15).18 No man can escape the testimony of his own being, and nature itself, to the existence of a Creator (Rom 1:18–23). Socialists deny the possibility of neutral economic analysis, and their criticism has become far more efective as humanistic scholarship has drifted from faith in objective knowledge into an evergrowing awareness that all human knowledge is relative. (Marxists still believe in objective knowledge for Marxists, but not for any other ideological group.)19 Since all intellectual analysis is tied to a man’s operating presuppositions about the nature of reality, and since these presuppositions, being pre-theoretical, cannot be disproven by logic, the socialist critic’s logic is also undergirded by his equally unprovable presuppositions.20 (There is a problem for Milton Friedman, in a classic essay on epistemology, writes: “Positive economics is in principle independent of any particular ethical position or normative judgment.” Friedman, Essays in Positive Economics (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1953), p. 4. For a critique of the hypothesis of neutrality in economics, see Gary North, “Economics: From Reason to Intuition,” in North, ed., Foundations of Christian Scholarship (Vallecito, Calif.: Ross House Books, 1976). 17. On the impossibility of neutrality, see the writings of Cornelius Van Til, especially The Defense of the Faith (rev. ed.; Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1963). 18. For a discussion of the similarities and diferences between “the law” and “the works of the law” written on human hearts, see John Murray, The Epistle to the Romans, 2 vols. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1959), I, pp. 74–76. 19. Marxists believe in objective truth – proletarian truth – but they hold that all other approaches are intellectual defenses of a particular class perspective. All philosophy is class philosophy – a weapon used by one class against its rivals. Since history is objectively on the side of the proletariat, there can be objective truth for Marxists only. See Gary North, Marx’s Religion of Revolution (Nutley, N.J.: Craig Press, 1968), pp. 61–71. Reprinted in 1989 by the Institute for Christian Economics. 20. Compare Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientiic Revolutions, rev. ed. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1970). See also Imre Lakatos and Alan E. Musgrave, eds., Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1970). The works of Herman Dooyeweerd, the Dutch legal philosopher, deal extensively with the pre-theoretical

Free Market Capitalism

965

non-Christian subjectivist thought, however: the breakdown of ob21 jective science.) Even a few economists are slowly coming to face the implications of subjectivism with respect to objective, neutral analysis, but not many, and their books are not yet inluential. These men tend to be associated with “new left” economics, and the “establishment” is not impressed.22 As Christians we must always maintain that ethics is basic to all social analysis. We must make clear what most professional economists prefer to ignore: It is never a question of analysis apart from ethical evaluation; it is only a question of which ethical system, meaning whose law-order: God’s or self-professed autonomous man’s? Because the Bible provides us with a comprehensive system of ethics, it thereby provides us with a blueprint for economics.23

Biblical Law and Exploitation The prophets came before Israel and called the people back to the law of God. The people did not respond; the result was captivity. The law of God, when enforced, prevents exploitation. The case-law applications of the law are therefore to be honored. Even the supposedly obscure case laws often have implications far beyond their immediate setting. For example, “Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn” (Deut 25:4). Paul tells us that this law gives us a principle: “The labourer is worthy of his reward” (1 Tim 5:18b). Christ also said that the laborer is worthy of his hire (Lk 10:7). In short, if we must allow our beasts of burden to enjoy presuppositions of all philosophy: In the Twilight of Western Thought (Philipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1960); A New Critique of Theoretical Thought, 4 vols. (Presbyterian and Reformed, 1954). 21. Stanley L. Jaki, The Road of Science and the Ways to God (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1978), chap. 15. 22. See, for example, Walter A. Weisskopf, Alienation and Economics (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1971); Mark A. Lutz and Kenneth Lux, The Challenge of Humanistic Economics (Menlo Park, California: Benjamin/Cummings, 1979). Lux is a clinical psychologist, not an economist, and Lutz taught at an obscure college. Benjamin/Cummings is not a familiar name in publishing. I am not berating these men, their publisher, or their employers, though I do not share their economic views. I am pointing to the dijculty of getting such views discussed within the normal channels of the economics profession. The economics profession has not adopted the forthright acceptance by these men of the obvious implications of subjectivism for the neutrality doctrine. 23. David Chilton, “The Case of the Missing Blueprints,” Journal of Christian Reconstruction, VIII (Summer, 1981).

966

DEUTERONOMY

the fruits of their labor, how much more should human laborers enjoy the fruits of their labor! Problem: Who decides how much to pay laborers? The church? The State? The free market? The Bible is quite clear on this point: Laborers and employers should bargain together. The parable of the laborers in the vineyard is based on the moral validity of the right of contract. The employer hired men throughout the day, paying each man an agreed-upon wage, a penny. Those hired early in the morning complained when others hired late in the day received the same wage. In other words, they accused their employer of “exploitation.” This was an “unfair labor practice.” His answer: Friend, I do thee no wrong: didst not thou agree with me for a penny? Take [that which] thine is, and go thy way: I will give unto this last [laborer], even as unto thee. Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own? Is thine eye evil, because I am good? (Matt 20:13–15)

Wasn’t he morally obligated – and shouldn’t he have been legally obligated – to have paid more, retroactively, to those hired early in the day? No. When they were hired, he ofered them the best deal they believed they had available to them. He was “meeting the market.” Had a better ofer been available elsewhere, they would have accepted it. Alternatively, should he have paid less to the men hired later in the day? No. He owed them the wage he had agreed to pay. Those hired in the morning had not known that a job would be available later in the day at the same wage. They faced economic uncertainty. (Economic uncertainty about the future is an inescapable fact of human action in a world in which only God is omniscient. Any system of economics that in any way ignores or de-emphasizes the economic efects of uncertainty is innately, inescapably erroneous, for it relies on a false doctrine of man.) They took the best ofer that any employer made. If they had been omniscient, they might have waited, lounged around for almost the whole day, and then accepted an eleventh-hour job ofer. “A full day’s pay for an hour’s labor: what a deal!” (An analogous approach to salvation: refuse to accept the Gospel in your youth, so that you can “eat, drink, and be merry,” and then accept Christ on your deathbed. “A full life’s worth of salvation for a last-minute repentance: what a deal!”) But

Free Market Capitalism

967

men are not omniscient. So they act to beneit themselves with the best knowledge at their disposal.24 The employer had done them no wrong. Their eye was evil. Christ used this parable to illustrate a theological principle, the sovereignty of God in choosing men: “So the last shall be irst, and the irst last; for many be called, but few chosen” (v. 16). The employer had a job opportunity to ofer men; God ofers salvation in the same way. The employer paid a full day’s wage to those coming late in the day. If this action of the employer was wrong, then God’s analogous action in electing both young and old (“late comers” and “early comers”) to the same salvation is even more wrong. But this is the argument of the ethical rebel; Paul dismisses it as totally illegitimate. “What shall we say then? Is there unrighteousness with God? God forbid. For he saith to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion” (Rom 9:14–15). One of the most important facts of economics is this: Employers compete against employers, while workers compete against workers. Employers do not want rival employers to buy any valuable economic factor of production at a discount. Those who hire laborers do so in order to use their services proitably. They have no incentive to pass along savings to their competitors. If a worker’s labor is worth ive shekels per hour to two diferent potential employers, and the worker is about to be hired by one of them for four shekels, the second employer has an incentive to ofer him more. He will ofer him enough to lure him away from the competitor, but not so much that he expects to lose money on the transaction. The free market’s competitive auction process therefore ofers economic rewards to employers for doing the morally correct thing, namely, honoring the biblical principle that the laborer is worthy of his hire. Similarly, workers compete against workers. They want jobs. If an employer is ofering a job to one employee for more than another person is willing to work for, the second person has an incentive to step in and utter those magic words: “I’ll work for less!” He underbids the competition. (When I say “underbid,” I mean underbid

24. Again, consult Sowell’s book, Knowledge and Decisions, for a detailed analysis of this issue. Also, see the classic study by Frank H. Knight, Risk, Uncertainty and Proit (1921; reprint ed., New York: Augustus M. Kelley, Pubs., n.d.).

968

DEUTERONOMY

in terms of money; I could also say that he overbids his competitors in terms of the hours of labor that he ofers the employer for a given wage payment.) The free market’s auction process ofers an incentive to workers to ofer employers “an honest day’s labor for an honest day’s pay.” In short, the free market ofers economic rewards to laborers for doing the morally correct thing, just as it ofers employers. Very, very rarely do employers and workers in a modern industrialized economy compete head to head. These instances take place when neither the worker nor the employer has a good idea of his own competition, or when one of the two is ignorant. Laborers may not know the going wage rate. Employers may not know if other workers are available for the money they are willing to pay. So it becomes a question of negotiation, the same kind of negotiation that Esau and Jacob transacted for Esau’s birthright (Gen 25:29–34). There is nothing wrong with competitive bargaining, as I explain in chapter eighteen of my economic commentary on the Bible, The Dominion Covenant: Genesis. Normally, competing ofers are well known to all parties; advertising has made information on pricing and services widely available. “Help wanted” signs and classiied ads do more for the income of the majority of laborers than all the trade unions in the land – legalized monopolies established by one group of workers to deny the legal right of other workers to compete against them.25 Nevertheless, where there are gaps in men’s information, men must pay to improve their knowledge. Information is not a zero-cost good. Any system of economic analysis which ignores or de-emphasizes this economic fact of life is innately, inescapably erroneous. When a society guarantees men that they will be allowed to keep the fruits of their labor, it promotes the spread of information. Men can aford to invest in the expensive process of improving their knowledge. They are able to capitalize their eforts. If they are successful in improving their knowledge about competing economic ofers, either as employers or laborers, they reap the rewards. Members of society are the beneiciaries, since better knowledge means less waste – fewer scarce economic resources expended to achieve

25. Gary North, “A Christian View of Labor Unions,” Biblical Economics Today (April/May 1978), published by the Institute for Christian Economics.

Free Market Capitalism

969

given economic ends. The ends are set by competing bidders in the “auction” for consumer goods and services.26 It should be recognized from the beginning that a deeply felt hostility toward the moral legitimacy of the auction process undergirds the socialist movements of our era.

Predictable Law The Bible instructs a nation’s rulers not to respect persons when administering justice (Deut 1:17). Both the rich man and the poor man, the homeborn and the stranger, are to be ruled by the same law (Ex 12:49). Biblical law is a form of God’s grace to mankind; it is to be dispensed to all without prejudice. This is the implication of Leviticus 19:15, which introduced this chapter. The predictability of the judicial system is what God requires of those in positions of authority. Predictable (“inlexible”) law compels the State and the church to declare in advance just exactly what the law requires. This allows men to plan for the future more ejciently.27 “Flexible” law is another word for arbitrary law. When a man drives his automobile at 55 miles per hour in a 55 m.p.h. zone, he expects to be left alone by highway patrol ojcers. The predictability of the law makes it possible for highway rules to be efective. Men can make better judgments about the decisions of other drivers when speed limits are posted and highway patrol ojcers enforce them. The better we can plan for the future, the lower the costs of our decision-making. Predictable law reduces waste. The Hebrews were required by God to assemble the nation – rich and poor, children and strangers – every seventh year to listen to the reading of the law (Deut 31:10–13). Ignorance of the law was no excuse. At the same time, biblical law was comprehensible. It was not so complex that only lawyers in specialized areas could grasp its principles. The case laws, such as the prohibition on muzzling the ox 26. Gary North, “Exploitation and Knowledge,” The Freeman (January 1982), published by the Foundation for Economic Education, Irvington, New York, 10533. 27. Perhaps the most eloquent and scholarly work that argues for the connection between predictable law, human freedom, and economic productivity is the book by the Nobel Prize winner in economics, F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1960), esp. the irst 15 chapters. See also his trilogy, Law, Legislation and Liberty (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1973–80).

970

DEUTERONOMY

as he treaded out the corn, brought the general principles down into concrete, familiar terminology. In this sense, biblical faith is essentially a democratic faith, as G. Ernest Wright argues, for it can be laid hold of with power by the simplest and most humble. We are surrounded by mystery, and ultimate knowledge is beyond our grasp. Yet God has brought himself (Deut 4:7) and his word to us. We can have life by faith and by loyal obedience to his covenant, even though our knowledge is limited by our initude. One need not wait to comprehend the universe in order to obtain the promised salvation. It is freely ofered in the covenant now.28 The law of God gives to men a tool of dominion over an otherwise essentially mysterious nature, including human nature – not dominion as exercised by a lawless tyrant, but dominion through obedience to God and service to man.29 For example, consider the efects of the eighth commandment, “Thou shalt not steal.” Men are made more secure in the ownership of property. This commandment gives men security. They can then make rational (cost-efective) judgments about the best uses of their property, including their skills. They make fewer mistakes. This lowers the costs of goods to consumers through competition. Christian commentators have from earliest times understood that the prohibition of theft, like the prohibition against covetousness, serves as a defense of private property. Theft is a self-conscious, willful act of coercive wealth redistribution, and therefore it is a denial of the legitimacy and reliability of God’s moral and economic law-order. The immediate economic efect of widespread theft in society is the creation of insecurity. This lowers the market value of goods, since people are less willing to bid high prices for items that are likely to be stolen. Uncertainty is increased, which requires that people invest a greater proportion of their assets in buying protection services or devices. Scarce economic resources are shifted from production and consumption to crime ighting. This clearly lowers per capita productivity and therefore per capita wealth, at least among law-abiding people. Theft leads to wasted resources.

28. G. Ernest Wright, “Deuteronomy,” in The Interpreter’s Bible, vol. 2, p. 509; cited by R. J. Rushdoony, Institutes of Biblical Law, vol. 2, Law and Liberty (Vallecito, California: Ross House Books, 1982), p. 413. 29. Rushdoony, Law and Society, pp. 403–6.

Free Market Capitalism

971

The internal restraints on theft that are provided by godly preaching and upbringing help to reduce crime, thereby increasing per capita wealth within the society. Godly preaching against theft is therefore a form of capital investment for the society as a whole (what the economists call “social overhead capital”), for it releases scarce economic resources that would otherwise have been spent on the protection of private and public property. Such preaching also reduces the necessary size of the civil government, which is important in reducing the growth of unwarranted State power. What is true about the reduction of theft is equally true concerning the strengthening of men’s commitment to private property in general. When property rights are carefully deined and enforced, the value of property increases. Allen and Alchian, in their standard economics textbook, have commented on this aspect of property rights: For market prices to guide allocation of goods, there must be an incentive for people to express and to respond to ofers. If it is costly to reveal bids and ofers and to negotiate and make exchanges, the gains from exchange might be ofset. If each person speaks a diferent language [as they did at the tower of Babel], if thievery is rampant, or if contracts are likely to be dishonored, then negotiation, transaction, and policing costs will be so high that fewer market exchanges will occur. If property rights in goods are weaker, ill deined, or vague, their reallocation is likely to be guided by lower ofers and bids. Who would ofer as much for a coat likely to be stolen?30 The authors believe that the higher market value attached to goods protected by strong ownership rights spurs individuals to seek laws that will strengthen private-property rights. Furthermore, to the extent that private-property rights exist, the power of the civil government to control the uses of goods is thereby decreased. This, unfortunately, has led politicians 31 and jurists to resist the spread of secured private-property rights.

There is no question that a society which honors the terms of the commandment against theft will enjoy greater per capita wealth than one which does not, other things being equal. Such a society rewards honest people with greater possessions. This is as it should be. A widespread hostility to theft, especially from the point of view of 30. Armen A. Alchian and William R. Allen, University Economics: Elements of Inquiry, 3rd ed. (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1972), p. 141. Italics in the original. 31. Idem.

972

DEUTERONOMY

self-government (self-restraint), allows men to make more accurate decisions concerning what they want to buy, and therefore what they need to produce in order to ofer something of value in exchange for the items they want. Again, I cite Allen and Alchian: The more expensive is protection against theft, the more common is thievery. Suppose that thievery of coats were relatively easy. People would be willing to pay only a lower price for coats. The lower market price of coats will understate the value of coats, for it will not include the value to the thief. If the thief were induced to rent or purchase a used coat, the price of coats would more correctly represent their value to society. It follows that the cheaper the policing costs, the greater the ejciency with which values of various uses or resources are revealed. The more likely something is to be stolen, the less of it that will be produced.32

When communities set up “neighborhood watches” to keep an eye on each other’s homes, and to call the police when something suspicious is going on, the value of property in the community is increased, or at least the value of the property on the streets where the neighbors are helping each other. We want sellers to respond to our ofers for goods or services. At the same time, we as producers want to know what buyers are willing and able to pay for our goods and services. The better everyone’s knowledge of the markets we deal in, the fewer the resources necessary for advertising, negotiating, and guessing about the future. These resources can then be devoted to producing goods and services to satisfy wants that would otherwise have gone unsatisied. The lower our transaction costs, in other words, the more wealth we can devote to the purchase and sale of the items involved in the transactions. One transaction cost is the defense of property against theft. God graciously steps in and ofers us a “free good”: a heavenly system of punishment. To the extent that criminals and potential criminals believe that God does punish criminal behavior, both on earth and in heaven, their costs of operation go up. When the price of something rises, other things being equal, less of it will be demanded. God raises the risks (“price”) of theft to thieves. Less criminal behavior is therefore a predictable result of a widespread belief in God’s judgments, both 32. Ibid., p. 239.

Free Market Capitalism

973

temporal and inal. When the commandment against theft is preached, and when both the preachers and the hearers believe in the God who has announced his warning against theft, then we can expect less crime and greater per capita wealth in that society. God’s eternal criminal justice system is lawless, and it is also inescapable, so it truly is a free good – a gift from God which is a sign of his grace. This is one aspect of the grace of law.33 It leads to increased wealth for those who respect God’s laws.

Compulsory Wealth Redistribution The Bible says, “Thou shalt not steal.” It does not say, “Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote.” A society which begins to adopt taxation policies that exceed the tithe – ten per cent of income – thereby increases economic uncertainty, as do other types of theft, both public and private. This increase in uncertainty may be even more disrupting, statistically, than losses from burglary or robbery, because private insurance companies can insure against burglary and robbery. After all, who can trust a civil government which claims the right to take more of a person’s income than God requires for the support of his kingdom? What kind of protection from injustice can we expect from such a civil government? The next wave of politically imposed wealth redistribution is always dijcult to predict, and therefore dijcult to prepare for, so the costs of production increase. When Samuel came before the Hebrews to warn them about the evils of establishing a king in Israel, he thought he might dissuade them by telling them that the king would take a whopping ten per cent of their production (1 Sam 8:l5). They did not listen. (And, for the record, neither have Christians listened to warnings against the forty and ifty per cent taxation levels of the modern welfare State.) The Pharaoh of Joseph’s day imposed a tax of twenty percent (Gen 47:24–26). Egypt was one of the great tyrannies of the ancient world.34 It was probably the most massive bureaucracy in man’s his35 tory until the twentieth century. Yet every modern welfare State – 33. Ernest F. Kevan, The Grace of Law: A Study in Puritan Theology (1963; reprint ed., Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House, 1983). 34. See the study by Karl Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven: Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1957). 35. Lewis Mumford, “The First Megamachine,” Daedalus (1966); reprinted in Lewis Mumford, Interpretations and Forecasts: 1922–1972 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,

974

DEUTERONOMY

meaning every Western industrial nation in the late twentieth century – would have to cut its total tax burden by at least half in order to return to the twenty per cent level of Egypt in Joseph’s day.36

Foreign Aid: State to State Foreign aid means an increase in taxes in one nation, so that money can go to other nations. State-to-State aid must go through ojcial, bureaucratic channels. Only in major emergencies – famines, loods, earthquakes – do foreign governments allow Western nations to bring food and clothing directly to their citizens. They understand the obvious: The increasing dependence of citizens on goods from a foreign civil government increases their direct dependence on that foreign civil government. He who pays the piper is in a position to call the tune. Oddly enough, intellectual proponents of increased State welfare fail to recognize what leaders in Third World nations understand immediately, namely, “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” With the beneits come controls and future political or diplomatic obligations. When the United States sends food under Public Law 480 (passed in 1954), to India, the Indian government, not private businesses, allocates it – or whatever is left after the rats at the docks and in the storage facilities consume approximately half of it. (Rats and sacred cows in India consume half of that nation’s agricultural output.37 It would take a train 3,000 miles long to haul the grain eaten by Indian rats in a single year.38) There is a great temptation for government ojcials of underdeveloped nations to use this food to free up State-controlled capital which is then used to increase investments in heavy industry – investments that produce visible results that are politically popular –

1973). See also Max Weber, “Max Weber on Bureaucratization” (1909), in J. P. Meyer, Max Weber and German Politics: A Study in Political Sociology (London: Faber & Faber, 1956), p. 127. 36. For a discussion of why Joseph’s imposition of a twenty per cent tax in Egypt was not part of God’s law for Israel, see Gary North, Dominion Covenant: Genesis, chap. 23. 37. Robert M. Bleiberg, “Down a Rathole,” Barron’s (11 August 1975), p. 7. By 1975, the United States had sent to foreign nations agricultural goods worth about $25 billion. 38. The estimate of Dr. Max Milner of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He says that in one recent year, rats in the Philippine Islands consumed over half the sugar and corn, and ninety per cent of the rice crop. “Over 40% of the World’s Food Is Lost to Pests,” Washington Post, 6 March 1977.

Free Market Capitalism

975

projects that cynics refer to as pyramids. These large-scale industrial projects are in efect paid for by the food subsidies sent by the West. Without the free food sent by the West, these uneconomical, large-scale projects would be out of the question politically. Even worse, foreign aid enables governments to spend heavily on military equipment that will be used to suppress political opponents or other Third World nations – themselves recipients of Western foreign aid.39 What would happen if the West were to stop shipping food at below-market prices? Local farmers in the recipient nations have been hurt – or in some cases, driven into bankruptcy – by the West’s below-production-cost food, so they have reduced investments in the agricultural system. These nations have become increasingly dependent on the West’s free food. If the subsidies were to cease, the agricultural base might be insujcient to provide for the domestic population, for agricultural output has been reduced as a result of taxpayer-inanced cut-throat competition from Western governments that gave away the food. At the same time, if the subsidies were to cease, heavy industry projects could also go bankrupt (or, more accurately, may lose even more tax money than they lose already, and therefore become political liabilities). Let us not be naive about the political impetus for shipments of American farm products under Public Law 480. The farm bloc and the large multinational grain companies are major supporters of the compulsory “charity” of foreign food aid, just as farmers favor the food stamp program. Farmers can sell their crops to the U.S. government at above-market prices, and then the government can give the food away to people who would not have bought it anyway. Politicians like the program also because the U.S. government uses the promise of free food as a foreign policy lever.40 Government subsidies to Agriculture have become a way of life in the United States, as have government controls on agriculture.41 We know that foreign governments are hostile to what they refer to as “Western control,” when private foreign capital comes into 39. P. T. Bauer, Equality, the Third World and Economic Delusion (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1981), p. 94. 40. For background on the political support for Public Law 480 and the program’s use as a tool of American foreign policy, see Dan Morgan, Merchants of Grain (New York: Viking, 1979), pp. 100–2, 122–28, 258–68. 41. William Peterson, The Great Farm Problem (Chicago: Regnery, 1959).

976

DEUTERONOMY

their nations. Why this hostility? Because pro-socialist political leaders in underdeveloped nations resent the shift of sovereignty from civil government to the private sector, both foreign and domestic. Yet these same ojcials beg for more State-to-State aid from the West. Why? Because they control the allocation of this form of economic aid after it arrives. The question of foreign aid, like all other forms of compulsory economic redistribution, raises questions of sovereignty. Should we recommend increased taxes in Western nations in order to “feed the starving poor” in foreign nations? Is this what Christ meant by loving our neighbors? Are Western tax revenues really feeding the starving poor, or are they inancing the bureaucratic institutions of political control that have been created by pro-socialist, Western-educated political leaders who dominate so many of the Third World’s one-party “democracies”? Are poor people in the West being taxed to provide political support to wealthy politicians in the Third World? Does the Bible teach that State-to-State wealth transfers are ethically valid? Or does the Bible require personal charity, or church-to-church charity – charity which is not administered by foreign politicians? These are fundamental questions regarding sovereignty, authority, and power. In the construction of the kingdom of God on earth, should we promote the increased sovereignty of the political State? Samuel’s warning is clear: no (1 Sam 8). Any discussion of government “charity” – compulsory wealth redistribution – must deal with this issue of sovereignty. Other questions, closely related to the preceding ones, are these: Is the poverty of the Third World the fault of the West? Is the Third World hungry because people in Western industrial nations eat lots of food? Does the West, meaning Western civil governments, owe some form of reparations (restitution) to Third World civil governments?

“We Eat; They Starve” Consider the words of theologian-historian Ronald Sider, whose best-selling book, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, has become one of the most inluential books on seminary and Christian college campuses all over the United States. His introduction to the book sets forth the problem:

Free Market Capitalism

977

The food crisis is only the visible tip of the iceberg. More fundamental problems lurk just below the surface. Most serious is the unjust division of the earth’s food and resources. Thirty per cent of the world’s population lives in the developed countries. But this minority of less than one-third eats three-quarters of the world’s protein each year. Less than 6 per cent of the world’s population lives in the United States, but we regularly demand about 33 per cent of most minerals and energy consumed every year. Americans use 191 times as much energy per person as the average Nigerian. Air conditioners alone in the United States use as much energy each year as does the entire country of China annually with its 830 million people. One-third of the world’s people have an annual per capita income of $100 or less. In the United States it is now about $5,600 per person. And this diference increases every year.42

I can remember reading textbooks written in the 1950s that ajrmed the wonders of American capitalism, and that pointed with pride to the fact that 6 per cent of the world’s population produced 40 per cent (or 33 per cent, or whatever) of the world’s goods. But that argument grew embarrassing for those who proclaimed the supposed productivity of socialism. Socialist nations just never caught up. So capitalism’s critics now complain that 6 per cent of the world’s population (Americans) annually uses up one-third of the world’s annual production, as if this consumption were not simultaneously a process of production, as if production could take place apart from the using up of producer goods. This is word magic. It makes productivity appear evil. It is true that Westerners eat a large proportion of the protein that the world produces each year. This has been used by vegetarian socialists to create a sense of guilt in Western meat-eating readers of socialist literature. You see, our cattle eat protein-rich grains. “Cornfed beef” is legendary – or notorious, in the eyes of the critics. Because of this, argues Dr. Sider, the “feeding burden” of the United States is not a mere 210 million (the number of human mouths to feed), but 1.6 billion.43 “No wonder more and more people are beginning to ask whether the world can aford a United States or a Western Europe.”44

42. Ronald Sider, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger (Downers Grove, Illinois: Inter-Varsity Press, 1977), p. 18. This book was co-published by the liberal Roman Catholic publishing house, the Paulist Press. Unquestionably, it represents an ecumenical publishing venture. Presumably, it relects the thinking of a broad base of Christian scholars. 43. Ibid., p. 152. 44. Ibid., p. 153.

978

DEUTERONOMY

(Outside of college and seminary campuses, not many people seem to be asking this question, as far I can see. Certainly the Haitian boat people and Latin American refugees aren’t asking it. Neither are Jews who are emigrating from the Soviet Union.) The psalmist proclaimed a poetic truth about God’s ownership of the world by identifying these words as God’s: “For every beast of the forest is mine, and the cattle upon a thousand hills” (Ps 50:10). But “liberation theologians” are not impressed. Dr. Sider informs us: The U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that when the total life of the animal is considered, each pound of edible beef represents seven pounds of grain. That means that in addition to all the grass, hay and other food involved, it also took seven pounds of grain to produce a typical pound of beef purchased in the supermarket. Fortunately, the conversion rates for chicken and pork are lower: two or three to one for chicken and three or four to one for pork. Beef is the cadillac of meat products. Should we move to compacts?45

Must we rewrite the words of the psalm (with the seven-to-one ration in operation): “For every chicken of the forest is mine, and the soybeans upon seven thousand hills”? Perhaps the greatest irony of all is that a 1982 study by the U.S. Department of Agriculture indicates that low-income Americans – the people whom liberation theologians supposedly want to deliver from “oppressive institutions” – eat more meat per capita than high-income Americans. Blacks consume more meat per capita than other racial groups do.46 Thus, the “less meat” program would reduce one of the prime pleasures of the poor in America. Unquestionably, Third World populations sometimes sufer protein deiciencies. But any program of “social salvation through protein exports” is going to encounter problems that the wealthredistributionists seldom consider. People’s food is fundamental to their culture. Trying to stay on a diet has confounded millions of Americans. Eating habits are very dijcult to alter, even when the eater knows that he should change. An education program to get Third World peasants to change their diets is going to be incredibly expensive, and probably futile. “Rice-eating people would often 45. Ibid., p. 43. 46. Associated Press story, Tyler Morning Telegraph, 18 December 1982.

Free Market Capitalism

979

rather starve than eat wheat or barley, which are unknown to them,” writes biologist Richard Wagner.47 This problem goes beyond mere habits. Sometimes we ind that people’s diets have conditioned their bodies so completely that the introduction of a new food may produce biological hazards for them. This is sometimes the case with protein. Wagner comments: Another even more bizarre instance was seen in Colombia, where a population was found with a 40 percent infestation of Entamoeba histolytica, a protozoan that generally burrows into the intestinal wall, causing a serious condition called amoebiasis. However, despite the high level of Entamoeba infestation, the incidence of amoebiasis was negligible. The answer to this puzzle was found in the high-starch diet of the people. Because of the low protein intake, production of starch-digesting enzymes was reduced, allowing a much higher level of starch to persist in the intestine. The protozoans were found to be feeding on this starch rather than attacking the intestinal wall. If this population had been given protein supplements without concurrent eforts to control Entamoeba infestation, the incidence of amoebiasis would probably have soared, causing more problems than the lack of protein.48

Cultures Are “Package Deals” When a foreign culture introduces a single aspect of its culture into the life of another, there will be complications. This single change serves as a sort of cultural wedge. As the historian Arnold Toynbee puts it, “In a cultural encounter, one thing inexorably goes on leading to another when once the smallest breach has been made in the assaulted society’s defenses.”49 Changing people’s eating habits, apart from changing their understanding of medicine, costs of production, agricultural technology, risks of blight, marketing, and an indeterminate number of other contingent aspects of the recommended change, is risky when possible, and frequently impossible. Third World peasants often recognize the implications of a particular “cultural wedge” perhaps better than the Western “missionary” does: It may have a far-reaching impact on the culture as a whole – 47. Richard H. Wagner, Environment and Man, 3rd ed. (New York: Norton, 1978), p. 523. 48. Ibid., pp. 518–19. 49. Arnold Toynbee, Civilization on Trial and The World and the West (New York: World, 1958), pp. 286–87.

980

DEUTERONOMY

an impact which traditional peasants may choose to avoid. Unless the opportunity ofered by the innovator is seen by the recipient as being worth the risks of unforeseen “ripple efects,” the attempt to force a change in the recipient’s buying or eating habits may lead to a disaster. Or, more likely, it will probably lead to a wall of resistance. Missionaries, whether Christian or secular, whether sponsored by a church or the Peace Corps, had better understand one fundamental principle before they go to the mission ield: You cannot change only one thing. One of the classic horror stories that illustrates this principle is the Sub-Sahara Sahel famine of the 1970s. This arid and semiarid area is vast. It stretches across the African continent, and it includes the nations of Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Chad, Ghana, Niger, Upper Volta, Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, and part of Kenya. For l5 years, from the early 1960s through the mid-1970s, the West’s civil governments poured hundreds of millions of dollars into this region. Yet between the late 1960s and 1974, hundreds of thousands of people starved, along with twenty million head of livestock. They are still starving. Why? As with most agricultural tragedies, there was no single cause. The area gets little rain: perhaps twenty-ive inches in its southernmost regions, tapering of to an inch per year closer to the Sahara. The nomads needed water for their herds, as they had from time immemorial. The West gave them the water. Here was a totally new factor in the region’s ecology. It destroyed them. This was one major cause. The other cause was the absence of enforceable property rights in land. The nomads did not assign speciic plots to specific families. No one was made personally and economically responsible for the care of the land. “All trees, shrubs, and pasture are common-access resources, so no individual tribesman has an incentive to conserve them, or add to their stock. No individual can reap the returns of planting or sowing grass, which hold the soil together and prevent ‘desertiication.’”50 Beneath the rock and clay and sand, there is water. A subterranean lake of half a million square miles underlies the eastern end of the Sahara. Drilling rigs can hit water at one thousand or two thousand feet down. These boreholes were drilled with Western

50. John Burton, “Epilogue,” in Steven N. S. Cheung, The Myth of Social Cost (San Francisco: Cato Institute, 1980), p. 66.

Free Market Capitalism

981

foreign aid money at $20,000 to $200,000 apiece. About ten thousand head of cattle at a time can drink their ill. Therein lies the problem. Claire Sterling describes what happened: The trouble is that wherever the Sahel has suddenly produced more than enough for the cattle to drink, they have ended up with nothing to eat. Few sights were more appalling, at the height of the drought last summer [1973], than the thousands upon thousands of dead and dying cows clustered around Sahelian boreholes. Indescribably emaciated, the dying would stagger away from the water with bloated bellies to struggle to ight free of the churned mud at the water’s edge until they keeled over. As far as the horizon and beyond, the earth was as bare and bleak as a bad dream. Drought alone didn’t do that: they did. What 20 million or more cows, sheep, goats, donkeys, and camels have mostly died of since this grim drought set in is hunger, not thirst. Although many would have died anyway, the tragedy was compounded by a ierce struggle for too little food among Sahelian herds increased by then to vast numbers. Carried away by the promise of unlimited water, nomads forgot about the Sahel’s all too limited forage. Timeless rules, apportioning just so many cattle to graze for just so many days within a cow’s walking distance of just so much water in traditional wells, were brushed aside. Enormous herds, converging upon the new boreholes from hundreds of miles away, so ravaged the surrounding land by trampling and overgrazing that each borehole quickly became the center of its own little desert forty or ifty miles square.51

In Senegal, soon after boreholing became popular (around 1960), the number of cows, sheep, and goats rose in two years from four million to ive million. “In Mali, during the ive years before 1960, the increase had been only 800,000. Over the next ten years the total shot up another 5 million to l6 million, more than three animals for every Malian man, woman, and child.”52 It is not just Americans and West Europeans who raise and eat “protein on the hoof.” The traditional nomad way of life is dead. Western specialists know it; the nomads know it. They live in tent camps now, dependent on handouts from their governments, which in turn rely heavily on the West’s foreign aid programs. The West and the nomads

51. Claire Sterling, “The Making of the Sub-Sahara Wasteland,” Atlantic (May, 1974), p. 102. 52. Ibid., p. 103.

982

DEUTERONOMY

forgot to honor (and deal with) this principle: You cannot change only one thing.

Cultural Transformation The goal of charitable organizations that deal in foreign aid should be to bring the culture of the West to the underdeveloped nations. By “the culture of the West,” I mean the law-order of the Bible, not the humanist, secularized remains of what was once a lourishing Christian civilization. This means that these organizations cannot be run successfully by cultural and philosophical relativists. Missionaries should seek to impart a speciically Western way of looking at the world: future-oriented, thrift-oriented, education-oriented, and responsibility-oriented. This world-and-life view must not be cyclical. It must ofer men hope in the power of human reason to understand the external world and to grasp the God-given laws of cause and efect that control it. It must ofer hope for the future. It must be future-oriented. To try to bring seed corn to a present-oriented culture that will eat it is futile. With the seed corn must come a world-and-life view that will encourage people to grow corn for the future. It does little good to give these cultures Western medicine and not Western attitudes toward personal hygiene and public health. It does little good to send them protein-rich foods if their internal parasites will eat out their intestines. The naive idea that we can simply send them money and they will “take of into self-sustained economic growth” cannot be taken seriously any longer.53 To attack the West because voters are increasingly unwilling to continue to honor the tenets of a naive faith in State-to-State aid – faith in the power of political coniscation, faith in the power of using Western tax revenues to prop up socialist regimes in Third World nations – is

53. W. W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1960). This was a best-seller on college campuses in the early 1960s. For a critique, see the essays by several economic historians in Rostow, ed., The Economics of Take-Of into Sustained Growth (New York: St. Martin’s, 1963).

Free Market Capitalism

983

54

unfair. P. T. Bauer of the London School of Economics has made the study of economic development his life’s work. He has emphasized what all economists should have known, but what very few acknowledged until quite recently, namely, that in the long run, people’s attitudes are more important for economic growth than money. His list of what ideas and attitudes not to subsidize with Western capital is comprehensive. No program of foreign aid, public or private, should be undertaken apart from an educational program to reduce men’s faith in the following list of attitudes: Examples of signiicant attitudes, beliefs and modes of conduct unfavourable to material progress include lack of interest in material advance, combined with resignation in the face of poverty; lack of initiative, self-reliance and a sense of personal responsibility for the economic future of oneself and one’s family; high leisure preference, together with a lassitude found in tropical climates; relatively high prestige of passive or contemplative life compared to active life; the prestige of mysticism and of renunciation of the world compared to acquisition and achievement; acceptance of the idea of a preordained, unchanging and unchangeable universe; emphasis on performance of duties and acceptance of obligations, rather than on achievement of results, or assertion or even a recognition of personal rights; lack of sustained curiosity, experimentation and interest in change; belief in the ejcacy of supernatural and occult forces and of their inluence over one’s destiny; insistence on the unity of the organic universe, and on the need to live with nature rather than conquer it or harness it to man’s needs, an attitude of which reluctance to take animal life is a corollary; belief in perpetual reincarnation, which reduces the signiicance of efort in the course of the present life; recognized status of beggary, together with a lack of stigma in the acceptance of charity; opposition to women’s work outside the home.55

54. Examples of socialist (centrally planned) economies that have been propped up by U.S. government aid are Costa Rica, Uruguay, El Salvador, and Ghana. See Melvyn B. Krauss, Development Without Aid: Growth, Poverty and Government (New York: New Press, McGraw-Hill, 1983), pp. 24–32. Another example is Zaire (formerly the Belgian Congo). Consider also that government-guaranteed loans, as well as below-market loans through such agencies as the Export-Import Bank, constitute foreign aid, for banks loan investors’ dollars to high-risk socialist nations that would otherwise not have been loaned. The Soviet Bloc has done exceedingly well in this regard for decades. On this point, see Antony Sutton, Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development, 3 vols. (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution, 1968–73). 55. P. T. Bauer, Dissent on Development (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 78–79.

984

DEUTERONOMY

A long sentence, indeed. If the full-time promoters of Western guilt understood the implications of what Bauer is saying, there would be greater hope for both the West and the Third World. What he describes is essentially the very opposite of what has come to be known as “the Protestant Ethic.”56 What is remarkable is the extent to which ideologically motivated guilt-manipulators have adopted so many of the very attitudes that Bauer says are responsible for the economic backwardness of the Third World. Yes, the West continues to eat. The Third World inds it dijcult to grow sujcient food. But Christians in the West are supposedly complacent. They are well-fed, while their “global neighbors” go hungry.57 It appears that the ancestors of “rich Christians” and rich Westerners in general were very smart: They all moved to those regions of the world where food is now abundant. The Plains Indians, before Europeans came on the scene, experienced frequent famines. There were under half a million of them at the time.58 Yet, somehow, European immigrants to the Plains arrived just in time to see agricultural productivity lourish. They now consume more than their “fair share” of the food, and their only excuse is that they produce it. This, it seems, is not a good enough answer – certainly not a morally valid answer. The West needs to come up with a cure for the hungry masses of the world, but not the one that worked in the West, namely, the private ownership of the means of production. Ronald Sider has a cure – if not for the world’s hungry masses, then at least for the now-guilty consciences of his readers, not to mention the not-yet-guilt-burdened consciences of the American electorate. “We ought to move toward a personal lifestyle that could be sustained for a long period of time if it were shared by everyone in the world. In its controversial Limits to Growth, the Club of Rome suggested the igure of $1,800 per year per person. In spite of the many weaknesses of that study, the Club of Rome’s estimate may be

56. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958). This book appeared originally as a series of scholarly journal articles in 1904–05. See also S. N. Eisenstadt, ed., The Protestant Ethic and Modernization (New York: Basic Books, 1968). 57. Sider, Rich Christians, p. 30. 58. R. J. Rushdoony, The Myth of Over-Population (1969; reprint ed., Fairfax, Va.: Thoburn Press, 1978), pp. 1–3.

Free Market Capitalism

985

59

the best available.” And which agencies should be responsible for collecting the funds and sending them to the poor in foreign lands? United Nations channels.60 Private charity is acceptable – indeed, it is better than the United States government, which sends food and supplies to “repressive dictatorships”61 – but not preferable. We need State-enforced “institutional change,” not reliance on private charity, because “institutional change is often morally better. Personal charity and philanthropy still permit the rich donor to feel superior. And it makes the recipient feel inferior and dependent. Institutional changes, on the other hand, give the oppressed rights and power.”62 But if the United States government is not really a reliable State to impose such institutional change, what compulsory agency is reliable? He neglects to say. The one agency he mentions favorably in this context is the United Nations – the organization which has formally indicted Israel as a “racist” nation, and which welcomed the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Yassir Arafat, pistol on his hip, to speak before the membership.63 It is interesting that the Club of Rome drastically revised its nogrowth position in 1976,64 and in 1977, the year Rich Christians was published, the Club of Rome published a pro-growth, pro-technology study.65 As William Tucker observes, “When you’re leading the parade, it’s always fun to make sudden changes in direction just to try to keep everyone on their toes.”66 Of course, it was favorable to vast State-to-State foreign aid programs.

59. Ronald J. Sider, “Living More Simply for Evangelism and Justice,” the Keynote Address to the International Consultation on Simple Lifestyle, England (17–20 March 1980), mimeographed paper, p. 17. 60. Sider, Rich Christians, p. 216. 61. Idem. 62. Sider, “Ambulance Drivers or Tunnel Builders” (Philadelphia: Evangelicals for Social Action, n.d.), p. 4. 63. For a critical analysis of Sider’s views, see David Chilton, Productive Christians in an Age of Guilt-Manipulators: A Biblical Response to Ronald Sider, rev. ed. (Tyler, Tex.: Institute for Christian Economics, 1982). The book is now in the third edition, reprinted in 1996. 64. Time, 26 April 1976. 65. Jan Tinbergen (coordinator), RIO – Reshaping the International Order: A Report to the Club of Rome (New York: New American Library, Signet Books, 1977). 66. William Tucker, Progress and Privilege: America in the Age of Environmentalism (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1982), p. 193.

986

DEUTERONOMY

A Zero-Sum Economy? A zero-sum game is a game in which the winners’ earnings come exclusively from the losers. But what applies to a game of chance does not apply to an economy based on voluntary exchange. Unfortunately, many critics of the free market society still cling to this ancient dogma. They assume that if one person proits from a transaction, the other person loses proportionately. Mises objects: . . . the gain of one man is the damage of another; no man proits but by the loss of others. This dogma was already advanced by some ancient authors. Among modern writers Montaigne was the irst to restate it; we may fairly call it the Montaigne dogma. It was the quintessence of the doctrines of Mercantilism, old and new. It is at the bottom of all modern doctrines teaching that there prevailed, within the frame of the market economy, an irreconcilable conlict among the interests of various social classes within a nation and furthermore between the interests of any nation and those of all other nations. . . . What produces a man’s proit in the course of afairs within an unhampered market society is not his fellow citizen’s plight and distress, but the fact that he alleviates or entirely removes what causes his fellow citizen’s feeling of uneasiness. What hurts the sick is the plague, not the physician who treats the disease. The doctor’s gain is not an outcome of the epidemics, but of the aid he gives to those afected. The ultimate source of proits is always the foresight of future conditions. Those who succeeded better than others in anticipating future events and in adjusting their activities to the future state of the market, reap proits because they are in a position to satisfy the most urgent needs of the public. The proits of those who have produced goods and services for which the buyers scramble are not the source of losses of those who have brought to the market commodities in the purchase of which the public is not prepared to pay the full amount of production costs expended. These losses are caused by the lack of insight displayed in anticipating the future state of the market and the demand of the consumers.67

The “Montaigne dogma” is still with us. The economic analysis presented by Ronald Sider assumes it. He can be regarded as a dogmatic theologian, but his dogma is Montaigne’s. Consider for a moment his statistics, such as the Club of Rome’s assertion that $1,800 a year

67. Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, pp. 664–65. Italics in original.

Free Market Capitalism

987

would just about equalize the living standards of the world. The Club of Rome assumes tremendous per capita wealth in the hands of the rich – so much wealth, that a program of compulsory wealth-redistribution could make the whole world middle class, or at least reasonably comfortable. But the capital of the West – roads, educational institutions, communications networks, legal systems, banking facilities, monetary systems, manufacturing capital, managerial skills, and attitudes toward life, wealth, and the future – cannot be divided up physically. Furthermore, there is little evidence that it would be sujcient to produce world-wide per capita wealth of this magnitude, even if it could be physically divided up and redistributed.68 If we divided only the shares of ownership held by the rich – stocks, bonds, annuities, pension rights, cash-value life insurance policies, and so forth – we would see a market-imposed redistribution process begin to put the shares back into the hands of the most ejcient producers. The inequalities of ownership would rapidly reappear. The important issue, however, is the Montaigne dogma. It views the world as a zero-sum game, in which winnings exactly balance losses. Then how do societies advance? If life is a zero-sum game, how can we account for economic growth? A free market economy is not a zero-sum game. We exchange with each other because we expect to gain an advantage. Both parties expect to be better of after the exchange has taken place. Each party ofers an opportunity to the other person. If each person did not expect to better himself, neither would make the exchange. There is no ixed quantity of economic beneits. The free market economy is not a zero-sum game. We understand this far better in the ield of education. For example, if I learn that two plus two equals four, I have not harmed anyone. In the area of knowledge, we all know that the only people who lose when someone gains new, accurate knowledge are those who have invested in terms of older, inaccurate knowledge. Could anyone seriously argue that the acquisition of knowledge is a zero-sum game (except, perhaps, in the case of a competitive examination)? Would anyone argue that we should suppress the spread of new, accurate knowledge in order to protect those who have made unfortunate investments in terms of old information? 68. Gary North, “Trickle-Down Economics,” The Freeman (May 1982).

988

DEUTERONOMY

What should we conclude? The Third World needs what all men need: faith in Jesus Christ and his law-order. The Third World needs the increased economic output that is the inevitable product of true conversion to Christ. It needs a new attitude toward the future (optimism). It needs a new attitude concerning the power of biblical law as a tool of dominion. It needs to abandon the bureaucratic State agricultural control systems that pay farmers only a fraction of what their agricultural output is worth, with the diference going into State treasuries. It is not uncommon for West African governments to pay producers as little as ifty per cent of the market value of their crops.69 What the Third World needs is what we all need: less guilt, less civil government, lower taxes, more freedom, and churches that enforce the tithe through the threat of excommunication – not a “graduated tithe,” but a ixed, predictable ten per cent of income. (A “graduated tithe” means a graduated ten per cent, which is contradictory. It is a political slogan, not a theological concept. It certainly is not a standard for State taxation: 1 Sam 8).

Land Reform We are told endlessly that Latin American nations need land reform. The government is supposed to intervene, coniscate the landed wealth of the aristocracy, and give it to the poor. This is a variation of Lenin’s old World War I slogan, “peace, land, bread.” Is such a program legitimate? Is it practical? The Bible has a standard for land tenure: private ownership. First, how can we respect this principle and still expand the holdings of land by the peasants? Second, how can we keep agricultural output from collapsing when unskilled, poor peasants take over land tenure? The answer to the irst question is relatively simple in theory: We need to adopt the biblical principle of inheritance. All sons receive part of the inheritance, with the eldest son obtaining a double portion, since he has the primary responsibility for caring for aged parents. Rushdoony’s comments are important: The general rule of inheritance was limited primogeniture, i.e., the oldest son, who had the duty of providing for the entire family in case of 69. P. T. Bauer, Dissent on Development, pp. 401–3.

Free Market Capitalism

989

need, or of governing the clan, receiving a double portion. If there were two sons, the estate was divided into three portions, the younger son receiving one third. . . . The father could not alienate a godly irst-born son because of personal feelings, such as a dislike for the son’s mother and a preference for a second wife (Deut 21:15–17). Neither could he favor an ungodly son, an incorrigible delinquent, who deserved to die (Deut 21:18–21). Where there was no son, the inheritance went to the daughter or daughters (Num 27:1–11). . . . If there were neither sons nor daughters, the next of kin inherited (Num 27:9–11).70

By instituting the biblical mode of inheritance, the great landed estates of the Latin American world would be broken up. The civil government would immediately gain the support of the younger sons of the aristocracy. Land holdings would get smaller. Those sons who choose not to farm can sell their land to productive peasants, or if the poor people have no capital initially, hire them as sharecroppers. (In a capital-poor society, such as the American South immediately after the Civil War, sharecropping proved to be an economically sound arrangement.)71 The sons can buy the necessary capital, assuming they do not inherit it. With each death, the land holdings get smaller. Will this lead to the destruction of productive, large-scale agriculture? Not if it is really productive. The size of land holdings could be increased by purchase by productive farmers. Also, corporations could be set up that would issue shares of stock to owners. The holders would leave shares of stock to their heirs, not the actual land. Then heirs could sell these shares to other people, including members of the rising middle class. Without single-inheritor primogeniture, there could be a rising middle class. One of the preludes to the American Revolution, especially in southern colonies, was the abolition of the English version of

70. R. J. Rushdoony, Institutes of Biblical Law (Nutley, N.J.: Craig Press, 1973), pp. 180–81. 71. Blacks much preferred sharecropping to working for wages on white-owned farms: Roger Ransom and Richard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 67–70.

990

DEUTERONOMY

72

eldest-son primogeniture. Puritan New England never did adhere to eldest-son primogeniture. Historian Kenneth Lockridge writes: The leaders of the [Massachusetts Bay] colony relected a general awareness of the unique abundance of the New World in the novel inheritance law they created. In England, the lands of a man who left no will would go to the eldest son under the law of primogeniture, whose aim was to prevent the fragmentation of holdings which would follow from a division among all the sons. The law arose from a mentality of scarcity. It left the landless younger sons to fend for themselves. In New England the law provided for the division of the whole estate among all the children of the deceased. Why turn younger sons out on the society without land or perhaps daughters without a decent dowry, why invite social disorder, when there was enough to provide for all?73

There was never a landed aristocracy in the New England because of this policy. Primogeniture and entail (prohibiting the heir from selling the land) disappeared in all but two colonies prior to the American Revolution. I ofer this example of one possible social and economic reform to demonstrate how relevant biblical law is for all societies, and how a deviation from biblical law has led, over centuries, to the creation of a ticking time bomb in Latin American nations. Instead of broadly based private property in land, and the development of a responsible middle class, Latin American nations now face the likelihood of Marxist revolution, with the State, not the people, gaining control over the land. As Rushdoony remarks, “The state, moreover, is making itself progressively the main, and in some countries, the only heir. The state in efect is saying that it will receive the blessing above all others. It ofers to educate all children and to support all needy families as the great father of all. It ofers support to the 72. Robert Nisbet, the conservative American sociologist, concludes that the abolition of primogeniture and entail (ixing land to the family line) was an important symbol of the American Revolution. He admits, however, that few of the colonies in 1775 were still enforcing these laws. Nisbet, “The Social Impact of the Revolution,” in America’s Continuing Revolution: An Act of Conservation (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1975), p. 80. Nisbet cites Frederick Le Play and Alexis de Tocqueville as sources for his opinion on the importance of the abolition of primogeniture and entail, pp. 82–83. 73. Kenneth A. Lockeridge, A New England Town, The First Hundred Years: Dedham, Massachusetts, 1636–1736 (New York: Norton, 1970), pp. 71–72.

Free Market Capitalism

991

aged as the true son and heir who is entitled to collect all of the inheritance as his own. In both roles, however, it is the great corrupter 74 and is at war with God’s established order, the family.”

Conclusion God’s law is clear enough: The family is the primary agency of welfare – in education, law enforcement (by teaching biblical law and self-government), care for the aged. The church, as the agency for 75 collecting the tithe, also has social welfare obligations. The civil government has almost none. Even in the case of the most pitiable people in Israel, the lepers, the State had only a negative function, namely, to quarantine them from other citizens. The State provided no medical care or other tax-supported aid (Lev 13 and 14).76 The balance of earthly sovereignties between the one (the State or church) and the many (individuals, voluntary associations) is mandatory if we are to preserve both freedom and order. The Bible tells us that God is both one and many, one Being yet three Persons. His creation relects this unity and diversity. Our social and political institutions are to relect this. We are to seek neither total unity (statism) nor total diversity (anarchism).77 Biblical law provides us with the guidelines by which we may achieve a balanced social order. We must take biblical law seriously.78 The most efective social movements of the twentieth century’s masses – Marxism, Darwinian science, and militant Islam – have held variations of the three doctrines that are crucial for any comprehensive program of social change: providence, law, and optimism. The Christian faith ofers all three of these, not in a secular framework, but in a revelational framework. The failure of Christianity to capture the minds of the masses, not to mention the world’s leaders, is in part due to the unwillingness of the representatives of Christian orthodoxy to

74. Ibid., p. 181. See also Gary North, “Familistic Capital,” in the forthcoming book, The Dominion Covenant: Exodus (Tyler, Tex.: Institute for Christian Economics, 1984), forthcoming. [The book was eventually titled, Moses and Pharaoh: Dominion Religion vs. Power Religion, 1985.] 75. James B. Jordan, “Tithing: Financing Christian Reconstruction,” in Gary North, ed., Tactics of Christian Resistance (Tyler, Tex.: Geneva Divinity School Press, 1983). 76. Gary North, “Quarantines and Public Health,” Chalcedon Report (April 1977). 77. R. J. Rushdoony, The One and the Many: Studies in the Philosophy of Order and Ultimacy (1971; reprint ed., Fairfax, Va.: Thoburn Press, 1978). 78. Greg L. Bahnsen, Theonomy in Christian Ethics.

992

DEUTERONOMY

preach all three with uncompromising clarity. The world will stay poor for as long as men cling to any vision of God, man, and law that is in opposition to the biblical outline. We need faith in the meaning of the universe and the sovereignty of God. We need conidence that biblical law ofers us a reliable tool of dominion. Finally, we need an historical dynamic: optimism. We need a positive future-orientation for our earthly eforts, in eternity of course, but also in time and on earth. People need to surrender unconditionally to God in order to exercise comprehensive dominion, under God and in terms of God’s law, over the creation.79 There is no other long-term solution to long-term poverty. God will not be mocked.

79. Gary North, Unconditional Surrender: God’s Program for Victory, 2nd ed. (Tyler, Tex.: Geneva Divinity School Press, 1983). See also Roderick Campbell, Israel and the New Covenant (1954; reprint ed., Tyler, Tex.: Geneva Divinity School Press, 1982).

Appendix F The THE Economic Re-Education of Ronald J. Sider ECONOMIC RE-EDUCATION OF RONALD J. SIDER To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them (Isa. 8:20).

I began this economic commentary project in the spring of 1973: monthly essays in the Chalcedon Report. I escalated it in August of 1977, when I moved to Durham, North Carolina. At that time, I began to devote ten hours a week, 50 weeks a year, to this commentary project. I still do. I am writing these words in late August, 1997. In that same year, 1977, another historian, Ronald J. Sider, had his book, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger: A Biblical Study, copublished by the Paulist Press (liberal Roman Catholic) and InterVarsity Press (neo-evangelical Protestant). The fate of these rival publishing projects throws light on contemporary Protestant evangelical theology. In mid-1997, a 20th anniversary edition of Sider’s book appeared. On the cover, it proclaims: “Over 350,000 copies in print.” Most of these copies were the irst edition. The original publishers surrendered control over it in 1990, when Word Books picked it up and issued the third edition. Publishers do not surrender books that are still selling well. The second edition was forced on Sider in 1984 by David Chilton’s book, Productive Christians in an Age of GuiltManipulators (1981), which I hired Chilton to write and which ICE published. Sider prudently refused to mention Chilton in that second edition . . . also in the third edition and the latest edition. In a Christianity Today interview, published in the same issue as an obituary for David Chilton (April 28, 1997), Sider made it clear that he no longer is of the same opinion as he had been in 1977.

993

994

DEUTERONOMY

“The times have changed, and so have I” (p. 68). Furthermore, “I admit, though, that I didn’t know a great deal of economics when I wrote the irst edition of Rich Christians” (pp. 68–69). Or, he could accurately have added, the second and third editions. It is clear who his nemesis has been since 1981, the unnamed David Chilton: “I had no interest in trying to psychologically manipulate people into some kind of false guilt” (p. 68). No, indeed; he wanted to manipulate them based on their true guilt. That is what his book was all about. But then came the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Times have changed, and so has he. Better put, the New York Times has changed, and so has he. He read the headlines in the Times, and he saw the light. He counted all those who are still ojcially in favor of socialism, and he saw the light. It was not David Chilton’s arguments that persuaded him; it was a shift in liberalism’s climate of opinion, and therefore academic neo-evangelicalism’s opinions. The Sider fad began to fade about the time ICE published Chilton’s book. This is what fads always do: fade. A fad that does not fade is not a fad. If it lingers on, it becomes either a harmless curiosity or a cult. Chilton’s writing style – he was a master of clarity as well as rhetoric – his mastery of the Bible,1 and his mastery of free market economics turned Sider’s book into a retroactive embarrassment. I heard the following on many occasions: “I don’t believe everything in Sider’s book, but don’t you think Chilton went to extremes?” Obviously, I didn’t. I loved it. Strong rhetoric catches people’s attention. This was true of Sider’s irst edition, too. He used very strong rhetoric – most of which has disappeared from the 1997 edition. If strong rhetoric is backed up by proof, it will accomplish its task far more efectively than the verbal equivalent of lukewarm oatmeal. Chilton’s book was designed to teach biblical free market principles by means of a public dissection of an anti-free market tract. I can think of no book that has been more successful in this regard. His book has sold better than any book that ICE has published. I thought at the time that it was an almost perfect book. I still do.2 1. I used to sit in an ofice next to his. I would yell, “David, where is that passage about. . . ?” He would yell back, “It’s somewhere in the middle of chapter [ ] of the Book of [ ].” It always was. 2. The fatter revised edition is longer and a bit harder to read, for it had to respond to Sider’s second edition, the one that included “a response to my critics,” except Chilton.

The Economic Re-Education of Ronald J. Sider

995

Let me use an analogy. To stop a group of amateur sportsmen from going over a waterfall in a rented motor boat, you have to yell really loud and wave your arms at them. They may complain later about all the undigniied shouting and waving, but they may pull over to the shore. Even Sider has pulled over, although not because of Chilton’s shouting or mine. His ideology’s outboard motor just broke down – a familiar experience with socialist products. He has publicly tossed this burnt-out motor overboard. He deserves credit for this. (But no cash.) He has surely foregone eating beef, as he has always recommended. He has now eaten a large portion of crow. But another full plate sits there on the side of his desk. He needs to consume that one, too, by writing: “David Chilton was basically correct in his criticisms of my economic views. I have adopted many of his proposals, including the following: . . . .”

Sider Led an Ideological Exodus We are all familiar with the student who goes of to college and comes home after the irst year spouting liberal nonsense that he learned in the classroom. This phenomenon has been around since the days of classical Greece. Aristophanes wrote a comedy about such a youth: Clouds. A young man goes of to Socrates’ academy and comes home a know-it-all jerk. Students usually get over this phase by age 30 unless they go to graduate school. In grad school, the damage to both common sense and moral sense can become permanent. The Christian version of this tale is the youth who comes home spouting nonsense and quoting the Bible out of context to defend his views. Maybe he quotes Israel’s jubilee law (Lev. 25) as a model of State-directed wealth-redistribution. No one told him that the jubilee’s legal basis was genocide: the destruction of an entire civilization by the Israelites, i.e., wealth-distribution by military conquest. No one told him that the same jubilee law authorized the permanent enslavement of foreigners and their children (Lev. 25:44–46). He insists that he is still a Christian, but he declares that a Christian can be a liberal: an in-your-face, in-your-wallet, tax-collector’s gun-in-your-belly kind of liberal. He announces, in so many words, “You’ll have to pay; government gets to spend the money on the poor (after skimming of 50% for handling); and it’s all in the name of Jesus. Jesus loves a cheerful taxpayer.”

996

DEUTERONOMY

With the publication of Rich Christians in 1977, Ronald Sider became the Moses of the American Protestant evangelicals’ version of this kind of home-from-college liberal. (John R. Stott had already begun serving this role in England.) The trouble was, Sider never came home from college: he was still there – teaching. He led the neo-evangelicals in a unique kind of exodus: out of the fundamentalist prayer closets of their youth. “Free at last; free at last!” Dressed in tweed jackets with the obligatory leather patches on the elbows, an army of Christian college and seminary professors followed him into the wilderness of a toned-down liberation theology – liberation theology for people without machine guns or a taste for martyrdom. They thought they were on the cutting edge of a new, caring kind of Christianity. They imagined that they were headed into the Promised Land of social relevance and political inluence. They believed that their students would follow them. The students did, too, for about three years. Then they changed their minds, voted for Ronald Reagan, and went into real estate development or the brokerage business. (This, too, shall pass, but that is another story.) The original version of Rich Christians was a tract for the times. They were rotten times, ideologically speaking. The economic debate, as far as Christian intellectuals knew, was between Keynesians and Marxists. Not today. Everything has changed. Marxism is dead. Keynesianism is in its terminal stages, taking tiny, halting steps like an octogenarian with a walker. Sider has recognized this, and he has turned back toward what he used to call Egypt. “No, no: the Promised Land lies in this direction!” Most of this army turned back in the 1980’s, and they have bought up all the choice real estate. Only Sider’s ojcer corps, still dressed in the same tweed jackets, remains with him. Will they keep following him, or will they continue to wander in circles? Were it not for the manna of academic tenure, they would have died of starvation two decades ago.

Revisions Sider begins his revised edition with this admission: “My thinking has changed. I’ve learned more about economics.”3 So have his former readers. Socialist radicalism has fallen out of favor all over 3. Ronald J. Sider, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger: Moving from Amuence to Generosity (Dallas: Word, 1997), p. xiii.

The Economic Re-Education of Ronald J. Sider

997

the world. The climate of opinion in the liberal media changed in 1991. Ron Sider has changed right along with it. I think of Joe Sobran’s warning: he would rather be in a church that has not changed its beliefs in 5,000 years than in one that spends its days hujng and pujng to catch up with the latest shift in media opinion. The 20th edition is barely recognizable. It even has a new subtitle: Moving from Amuence to Generosity. The earlier editions had been subtitled, A Biblical Study. The new subtitle is less pretentious. It also sounds more private than statist, which relects the book’s perspective. Here is an example of how much the book has changed. You may also remember Sider’s call to statist action on behalf of the poor. That is because God is on the side of the poor: “. . . the God of the Bible is on the side of the poor just because he is not biased, for he is a God of impartial justice.”4 What does he say now? “Is God biased in favor of the poor? Is he on their side in a way that he is not on the side of the rich? Some theologians say yes. But until we clarify the meaning of the question, we cannot answer it correctly.”5 This is followed by a chapter that backpeddles away from the irst edition. In his 1985 edition, Chilton summarized Sider’s policy recommendations, and he ofered footnotes from Rich Christians for every point: national (state) food policy, (state to state) foreign aid, a guaranteed national income, international taxation, land reform, bureaucratically determined “just prices,” national health care, population control, and the right of developing nations to nationalize foreign holdings.6 In the 1997 edition, foreign aid is mentioned briely.7 But even here, Sider cites reports on how recipient governments have misused this aid in the past. Sider uses the same kind of bureaucratic examples that Chilton used against his early editions.8 As for the recycled oil money loaned to the Third World, “Too much of what was loaned was spent on armaments, ill-planned projects, or wasted because of ojcial corruption.”9 He still mentions land reform, but 4. Ronald L. Sider, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger: A Biblical Study (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1977), p. 84. 5. Sider, Rich Christians (1997), p. 41. 6. David Chilton, Productive Christians in an Age of Guilt-Manipulators: A Biblical Response to Ronald J. Sider (3rd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, [1985] 1996), p. 35. 7. Sider, Rich Christians, pp. 31–33. 8. Ibid., pp. 258–59. 9. Ibid., p. 154.

998

DEUTERONOMY

10

only briely. He wants lower tarifs against foreign products. He is adamant about this.11 This was Chilton’s suggestion.12 As he has become more cautious – openly so – he has dropped almost all traces of his previous toying with socialism and statist coercion. The new edition is not the same book. It is not even a irst cousin of the irst three editions. His new edition is basically a retraction of the earlier editions – a kind of belated apology to the 350,000 buyers of his book who bought intellectually damaged goods. But he still refuses to mention Chilton’s book, even in the bibliography. He reminds me of Winston Smith in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, who dutifully dropped inconvenient historical information into the “memory hole.” Nevertheless, the new bibliography contains some very good books by such ine free market scholars as P. T. Bauer – to whom Chilton dedicated the third edition, since Bauer was a big fan of Productive Christians13 – George Gilder, Brian Grijths,14 Julian Simon, and Cal Beisner. Unfortunately, he does not actually quote from any of these authors in his 37 pages of endnotes, except to attack Bauer as an extremist.15 He quotes mainly from UNICEF, other United Nations agencies, and the World Bank. He still avoids citing economists generally and free market economists speciically. But at least his bibliography gives the illusion that he has thought through the reasons why his irst three editions were wrong. How did this happen? I attribute it to a dramatic shift in the climate of public opinion. This climate of opinion was beginning to change in 1981, when Chilton’s book appeared and when I debated Sider at Gordon-Conwell Divinity School. But it was not yet changing among Christian academics. They follow the lead of secular humanist opinion leaders, usually by about ive to ten years. I was not well received by the faculty of Gordon-Conwell (or at any other seminary, now that I think of it). 10. Ibid., p. 260. 11. Ibid., pp. 147–50, 244–45. 12. Chilton, Productive Christians, pp. 101–103. 13. He called Chilton on the phone at least once to tell him how much he liked the book. Chilton had initially thought it was someone who was pulling a trick on him. 14. When I visited him in 1985 – the day that Margaret Thatcher’s think tank hired him as an advisor – Prof. Grijths told me that he had not heard about Christian economics until he read my Introduction to Christian Economics. 15. Sider, Rich Christians, p. 307.

The Economic Re-Education of Ronald J. Sider

999

Harbinger and Fad Sider’s book was part harbinger, part fad. It was a harbinger of things to come because, in 1977, Protestant evangelicals were just barely coming back into American politics as an identiiable voting bloc. The 1976 Presidential candidacy of Southern Baptist and Trilateral Commission member Jimmy Carter had made acceptable the label “evangelical” in the political arena. A majority of white Southern Protestants actually voted against Carter, but hardly anyone recognized this in 1977 or even today. The pundits incorrectly attributed his victory to the unpredicted appearance of the evangelicals.16 From the era of the media-orchestrated humiliation of fundamentalist Christianity at the Scopes’ “monkey” trial in 1925 until the election of 1976, American evangelicals had been conspicuous by their absence.17 They generally opposed politics, or at least identiiably Christian participation in partisan politics. Roman Catholics did that sort of thing, it was widely believed, “and you know what we think about Catholicism!” For decades, political liberals who controlled the theologically liberal National Council of Churches had chided fundamentalists, calling on them to get out of their prayer closets and get active in politics. They got their wish answered in 1980: the election of Ronald Reagan, whose personal commitment to salvation through faith in Christ was never proclaimed by him in public, and by his defeat of Carter, whose public commitment to Christ was considered media-worthy, but whose personal commitment was to theologians such as Paul Tillich. The National Council crowd never knew what hit them. Reagan stood firm, at least rhetorically, against the NCC’s version of the eighth commandment: 16. He won mainly because Gerald Ford had been a Vice President who came into ojce because of Richard Nixon’s 1974 resignation under a cloud of scandal. Ford immediately pardoned Nixon for unnamed crimes that Nixon had not been tried for. Then the 1975 recession hit. Meanwhile, the newly created Trilateral Commission went looking for a political unknown who could be palmed off on the scandal-weary American voters as an outsider. It worked, but only for one election. 17. See Gary North, Crossed Fingers: How the Liberals Captured the Presbyterian Church (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1996), chaps. 7, 9. Cf. George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 184–86; Ralph Reed, After the Revolution: How the Christian Coalition is Impacting America. (Dallas: Word, 1996), p. 53. Note that Reed’s publisher is also Sider’s.

1000

DEUTERONOMY

“Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote.” He was re-elected in 1984. The NCC has never recovered. Like some emphysemic middle-aged athlete still dreaming of his glory days, the NCC continues to issue study guides and newsletters. No one pays any attention. After my debate with Sider at Gordon-Conwell, a reporter privately asked me what I thought of Sider. I told him that I appreciated Sider for softening up the market for my work. I told him that Sider was preparing the way for evangelicals to get involved in social action and politics, but that my economic opinions, not Sider’s, were representative of the broad mass of evangelical opinion.18 That statement had been veriied the previous fall, with Reagan’s defeat of Carter. Sider had been part of the minority of white evangelicals who were favorable to Carter’s worldview and hostile to Reagan’s. Sider’s fame was fame based on the opinion of classroom professors and liberal arts editors, what I have referred to as the Wheaton College–Christianity Today–Calvin College axis. This cloistered nonproit community of liberal arts graduates is part of the modern chattering class, but it never has relected the opinions of donors in the pews. The man in the pew always knew that socialism is simply Communism for people without the testosterone to man the barricades. I have maintained for over two decades that neo-evangelicals pick up fads that have been discarded by secular liberals. Sider’s book is proof. The tenured academic community of Christians was mildly socialistic when the American media were. Now they are mildly free market, just as the media are. What caused the change? The failure of the Soviet Union. Mr. Gorbachev admitted in the late 1980’s that his nation was economically bankrupt. This stunned the West’s academics. They had always insisted that the USSR had a growing economy. Only a handful of free market economists had questioned this.19 In 1991, Gorbachev was unceremoniously thrown out of power. So were the Communists. They had neither money nor power by August 21, 1991, the day the Communist coup against Boris Yeltsin failed. With neither money nor power, Communism

18. With respect to political opinions, I say the same thing about Ralph Reed. An international economic collapse, coupled with the bankruptcy and break-up of every national government larger than Jamaica’s, would speed things theonomy’s way nicely in the United States. 19. Marshall Goldman was one of them.

The Economic Re-Education of Ronald J. Sider

1001

fell out of favor in the West overnight. The secular humanist West worships money and power. Lose these, and you’re instantly passé. Overnight, discount book bins illed up with Marxist books written by and for the college market. Marxists in the Western academic community found that their peers were laughing at them. Never before had this happened. They had always been taken seriously. Why? Because the Communists had the power to terrorize people without threat of retaliation, and Western liberals have great respect for this degree of power. They had raged for decades selectively only against military dictatorships in small nations – dictatorships that might be overthrown. Now the “impersonal forces of history” had turned against the Communists. This was bad news for tenured professors who had publicly worshipped the forces of history, as reported by the Times. They rushed in panic to get on board the last train out of socialism’s world of empty promises and emptier souls. They have now become born-again democratic capitalists. What is a democratic capitalist? Someone who has modiied the eight commandment as follows: “Thou shalt not steal quite as much as before, except by majority vote.”

The Echo Efect: Neo-evangelicalism Sider’s book was partly a fad because it promoted a kind of warmed-over political liberalism that suited the times. Jimmy Carter had just been elected President of the United States. He was a political liberal, and he was a self-proclaimed evangelical, despite his commitment to neo-orthodox theologians. Two years later, Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister of Great Britain. In 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States. Those two politicians restructured political rhetoric in the West. They made political conservatism acceptable. More important, they made liberals look both weak and silly. They oversaw major shifts in public opinion, even among intellectuals. In the year after Reagan’s retirement,20 the Berlin Wall was torn down, and the East German troops did nothing to stop it, as if in response to Reagan’s words to Mikhail Gorbachev: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that 20. Required by the U.S. Constitution; had he run again, he would almost certainly have been elected a third time.

1002

DEUTERONOMY

wall.” Gorbachev sat tight. Two years after that, he was thrown out of ojce, along with Communism. Overnight, the liberation theology fad died. Marxism became passé – the ultimate humiliation in the modern intellectual world. This was the year after the third edition of Sider’s book appeared, which sank without a trace. Ronald Reagan had destroyed the climate of opinion that had made Ronald Sider’s book a best-seller among college-educated Christian evangelicals. Reagan had destroyed Sider’s market as surely as David Chilton had destroyed Sider’s arguments. Sider admits as much: “Communism has collapsed. Expanding market economies and new technologies have reduced poverty. ‘Democratic capitalism’ has won the major economic/political debate of the twentieth century. Communism’s state ownership and central planning have proven not to work; they are inejcient and totalitarian.”21 This was what David Chilton had argued back in 1981. Sider writes: “One of the last things we needed was another ghastly Marxist-Leninist experiment in the world.”22 Yet in 1977, he ofered this bold-faced, capitalized question: IS GOD 23 A MARXIST? He never answered this question; instead, he wrote several pages on how God “wreaks horrendous havoc on the rich.”24 Now, he has answered his own question. This is progress. It took him only twenty years.

The New, Improved Version Dr. Sider has admitted that he didn’t understand much about economics in 1977. That was clear to Chilton and me when we inally got around to reading his book in 1980. Now he has changed his tune. In his new book, for example, he continues to call for a “graduated tithe.” But he says this is strictly personal; he does not mention the State.25 He assures us: “Certainly it is not a biblical norm to be prescribed legalistically for others.”26 Throughout the book, he calls for private Christian charity – exactly what Chilton

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

Sider, Rich Christians, p. xiii. Ibid., pp. 182–83. Sider, Rich Christians (1977), p. 72. Ibid., p. 77. See Chilton, Productive Christians, p. 267. Ibid., pp. 193–96. Ibid., p. 193.

The Economic Re-Education of Ronald J. Sider

1003

had called for. He makes a few gratuitous genulections toward government intervention, but mainly in the most conventional areas, 27 such as public health matters and education – activities that the typical Southern Baptist layman would agree with. Most revealing, he has stripped his book of confrontational rhetoric against the free market or in favor of big government. His rare negative rhetorical lourishes are now directed against Marxism. This edition is marked by academic caution. It is an apology rather than an apologetic. Chilton’s arguments did not change Sider’s mind. By the time Communism fell, making anti-capitalism passé, he had written two revisions without even mentioning Chilton or his other free market critics. Even now, in his third revised edition, he has provided not one reference to Chilton’s book, and not one to me or this commentary. The climate of opinion has not changed that much! It was not logic or the Bible that changed Sider’s mind. It was the change in the climate of secular academic opinion. He was not prepared to swim upstream. Neo-evangelicals always swim downstream with the liberal current, for liberals can impose academic sanctions. I have been swimming upstream since I was 14 years old, when I attended a lecture by the anti-Communist Fred Schwarz in 1956. Bit by bit, inch by inch, I have seen the intellectual tide of opinion turn – not 180 degrees, but at least 110. Even Schwarz was surprised at how fast it turned after 1989.28 He had been swimming upstream since the mid-1940’s. Swimming upstream is the price of overcoming evil in an era in which evil is entrenched. It is the price of launching a paradigm shift. Sider’s earlier editions were subtitled, A Biblical Study. He has now moved away from that sort of unacceptable positioning. He now writes: “When the choice is communism or democratic capitalism, I support democratic government and market economics.” Not quite. When the choice was between Communism and market economics, he was not ready to attack Marxism, and he attacked the free market with a vengeance. It was only after the academic world was laughing at Marxists that he made his choice.

27. Ibid., p. 237. 28. Frederick Schwarz, M.D., Beating the Unbeatable Foe (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1996), ch. 38.

1004

DEUTERONOMY

He goes on to say, “That does not mean, however, that the Bible prescribes either democracy or markets.”29 To argue, as I have and Chilton did, that decentralized constitutional democracy and the free market are exactly what the Bible prescribes, is just too theonomic for Dr. Sider.30 Today, Ron Sider is closer to the biblical truth, but not on the basis of the Bible, and not on the basis of economic logic, which is as absent in his 1997 edition as it was in 1977.31 He dismisses my defense of the free market32 as little more than an extension of Adam Smith, whom he correctly identiies as an Enlightenment thinker.33 He refuses to tell his readers about this commentary or my public attack on right-wing Enlightenment political theory.34 He does not mention theonomy’s commitment to searching for judicially binding social blueprints in the Bible. He does not inform his readers that free market economics as a discipline began, not with the Enlightenment, but with the late-medieval scholastic school of Salamanca, a fact that I have tried to get people to understand ever since I published Murray Rothbard’s article on the topic in 1975.35 These scholastics used rationalism, not the Bible, to defend their case; so did the late-seventeenth-century mercantilists;36 so did Smith; so does the entire economics profession. So what? Does he think that his favorite economists in 1977 – there were not many

29. Idem. 30. My position on biblical law and economics is stated in Chapter 50, above: “Biblical moral law, when obeyed, produces a capitalist economic order. Socialism is anti-biblical. Where biblical moral law is self-enforced, and biblical civil law is publicly enforced, capitalism must develop. One reason why so many modern Christian college professors in the social sciences are vocal in their opposition to biblical law is that they are deeply inluenced by socialist economic thought. They recognize clearly that their socialist conclusions are incompatible with biblical law, so they have abandoned biblical law.” 31. There is nothing on the price mechanism as a means of coordination, nothing on the division of labor, nothing on entrepreneurship as the source of proits, etc. 32. See above, Appendix E. 33. Ibid., p. 92, note 5. 34. Gary North, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989). 35. Murray N. Rothbard, “Late Medieval Origins of Free Market Economic Thought,” Journal of Christian Reconstruction, II (Summer 1975), pp. 62-75; Rothbard, Economic Thought before Adam Smith: An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (Brookield, Vermont: Elgar, 1985), ch. 4. 36. William Letwin, The Origins of Scientiic Economics (Cambridge, Massachusetts: M.I.T. Press, 1963).

The Economic Re-Education of Ronald J. Sider

1005

cited in his footnotes – and non-economists were not also heirs of the Enlightenment? As with his academic peers, and virtually the entire Christian world, he hates theonomy, yet he implies that the Enlightenment left an unreliable legacy. To which I ask, one more time: If not biblical law, then what? Sider has ajrmed what all of his academic peers ajrm: the Bible ofers no judicially binding economic, political, and social blueprints. But at least in this edition, we ind no traces of his original inlammatory, anti-free market rhetoric – the outlook and rhetoric that made his book a best-seller. There is also no hint at the existence of some as yet-unpublished plan that might make statism work. He knows that statism will not work. He cannot tell us theoretically why this should be true. He shows no familiarity with Mises’ 1920 article on the economic irrationality of socialist planning.37 That article was always the most important theoretical critique of socialism, which socialist economist Robert Heilbroner inally admitted in 1990 was correct.38 Anti-Communism is pragmatic if it is not based on economic theory, or biblical law, or some other moral grounds. Sider now rejects Communism as evil. Why did he wait so long? I contend that it was because the climate of secular liberal opinion had not shifted. Until secular pragmatists saw that the Communists could no longer maintain their terrorist apparatus, they rejected all economic criticisms of Communism that were based on its inherent irrationality and/or its moral evil. Until that point, the West’s liberal media rejected all uncompromisingly anti-Communist authors and opinions as biased and unscholarly.39 How much civil government is appropriate? We just do not know, Sider says. “We need intensive study of how much and what kind of government activity promotes both political freedom and economic justice. Through painstaking analysis and careful experimentation, we must discover how much government can work within a basic market framework to empower the poor and restrain

37. Ludwig von Mises, “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth” (1920), in F. A. Hayek (ed.), Socialist Economic Planning (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, [1935] 1963), ch. 3. 38. Robert Heilbroner, “After Communism,” The New Yorker (Sept. 10, 1990), p. 92. 39. Jean-Francois Revel, The Flight from Truth: The Reign of Deceit in the Age of Information (New York: Random House, [1988] 1991).

1006

DEUTERONOMY

40

those aspects of today’s markets that are destructive.” Notice what is the framework: markets, not government. Guilt for poverty must now be shared internationally, perhaps like foreign aid. “As we saw in chapter 7, North Americans and Europeans are not to blame for all the poverty in the world today. Sin is not just a White European phenomenon.”41 What of the efects of multinational corporations? “For the purposes of this book, however, we do not have to know the answer to 42 the question of their overall impact.” Some of them do damage; others do not. (This is sociology’s only known law: “some do; some don’t.”) What of colonialism? “It would be simplistic, of course, to suggest that the impact of colonialism and subsequent economic and political relations with industrialized nations was entirely negative. Among other things, literacy rates rose and health care improved.”43 This, from the man who wrote in the second edition, “It is now generally recognized by historians that the civilizations Europe discovered were not less developed or underdeveloped in any sense” (pp. 124–25). He goes on: “It would be silly, of course, to depict colonialism as the sole cause of present poverty. Wrong personal choices, misguided cultural values, disasters and inadequate technology all play a part.”44 They do, indeed – Chilton’s point in 1981. Well, then, is there enough food being produced in the Third World today? Is the Third World facing famine? Here, too, we just do not know. The World Bank says there is no threat. Lester Brown – whose pessimistic assessment was prominent in the 1977 edition – says there is a threat. “The inal verdict? Non-specialists like you and me cannot be sure.”45 Here is what we can be sure of: this is not the Rich Christians that sold 350,000 copies. Sider ofers reworked versions of his old “institutionalized evil” and jubilee year chapters, but his heart just isn’t in it. Reading the 1997 edition of Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger is like going to your college class’s 20th reunion and running into the campus radical, who is there mainly to sing the old songs. He cannot remember half

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

Ibid., p. 236. Ibid., p. 228. Ibid., p. 176. Ibid., p. 135. Ibid., p. 136. Ibid., p. 165.

The Economic Re-Education of Ronald J. Sider

1007

of the words, but he can still hum most of the tunes. A good time will be had by all – all 350,000. It is a shame that David Chilton died a few weeks before the new version of Sider’s book appeared. Because of the efects of his irst heart attack, he could no longer remember most of what he had read, even his own books. I can imagine what he would have said about the 1997 edition. “This is pretty sloppy theology, and its economics is really muddled, but it probably won’t hurt anything. At least he calls for the tithe as morally binding.46 The good thing about the book is that people will not be able to remember anything unique about it. That will put them on my level. Still, I wonder who this guy Sider is.” Was.

Who Is the Targeted Audience? Every author should decide who his targeted audience is before he begins to write. He must also decide the time frame for this particular book’s inluence. Some books are tracts for the times. Others are written for the long haul. Some are aimed at large numbers of buyers. Others are aimed at opinion leaders. For example, my commentary series has done well for a commentary, i.e., all volumes are still in print,47 but none has sold as many as 10,000 copies; only two have sold well enough to be reprinted. Yet this commentary will still be read by some opinion-makers in a hundred years. I say this in complete conidence. Why? Because pastors are always looking for help in dealing with problem passages, and the Pentateuch is illed with problem passages. Commentaries survive, in contrast to best-selling Christian books on contemporary issues. Recall that prior to the late 1960’s, there were almost no books on contemporary Christian issues written by and for fundamentalists, and very few for academic evangelicals. This, too, is an aspect of the climate of opinion. One idea or slogan in a book may long outlast the sale of the book, but who can successfully predict this? Not an author, surely. Not his publisher, either. Think of Malthus’ formulation in his 46. Sider, Rich Christians, p. 204. This was Chilton’s position: Productive Christians, pp. 52–56. 47. I thank God for donor-subsidized publishing.

1008

DEUTERONOMY

anonymous irst edition of Essay on Population (1798): humans increase geometrically, while food supplies increase arithmetically. The idea was silly, the evidence was nonexistent, and the author dropped the phrase in subsequent editions. Nevertheless, it is the one thing most people who remember Malthus remember about him. In contrast, another suggestion by Malthus, rarely associated with his name, was that nature produces huge numbers of ofspring that perish. This idea was picked up six decades century later by an unknown naturalist, Alfred Wallace, and applied in a wholly new way: some of the survivors survive because of unique biological traits, and these traits are passed on to their ofspring. This insight became the basis of Wallace’s formulation of the concept of evolution through natural selection. He suggested this to Charles Darwin in a letter. Darwin instantly saw that Wallace was about to beat him to the punch. Darwin had seen the same passage in Malthus and had reached the same conclusion, but he had hesitated for two decades to publish his researches. Darwin then decided that joint credit was better than no credit at all. He convinced Wallace to publish a jointly signed article in 1858. It had no inluence at all. A year later, Darwin’s Origin of Species appeared. His publisher had not expected the book to sell well. His publisher was wrong. As it has turned out, Wallace received none of the credit and is long forgotten except among specialized historians. And all of this came as a result of Parson Malthus’ observation about a factor in population dynamics. So it goes in the world of publishing. How can a book survive the free market’s competition?48 There is ierce competition today in the oceans of new book titles that get printed each year. The general rule is that a book that hits the best-seller list rarely retains inluence. It is too much a product of its time, i.e., tied too closely to the prevailing climate of opinion. It becomes a best-seller because it is an expression of the prevailing views of the day. Even if it is in opposition, it is within the dominant culture’s acceptable boundaries of public discourse.49 But any climate of opinion can and will

48. The book market is a free market. While college textbooks are subsidized indirectly by State-funded tuition, rarely does anyone change a deeply felt opinion because of something he read in a textbook. Nobody goes back to read his college textbooks (as distinguished from intelligent monographs or classics assigned in upper division classes). 49. Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind and William Bennett’s Book of Virtues are recent examples of such opposition books: the irst, an eloquent defense of classical education

The Economic Re-Education of Ronald J. Sider

1009

change dramatically from time to time. That is why we call it a climate. The best-sellers of one era are seldom read in the next, except by historians who are trying to explain how such mediocre books could have prospered. The fable about the hare and the tortoise applies well to books whose authors hope will change people’s opinions and keep them changed. This thought comforts authors whose books have not sold well.50 The trick here is keeping your book(s) in print. Slow sales kill books, especially in an age in which inventory taxes place negative sanctions on marginally proitable titles. The back list that was once the bread and butter for publishers has been undermined by taxation policies. The advent of CD-ROMs that can be produced on demand, and Internet Web sites that may some day prove proitable for downloaded books, should help to keep book titles alive until their day dawns (if ever). The bankruptcy and then collapse of the modern welfare State will also help. That day is coming, and coming fast.51

Conclusion I am writing for future generations of Christians that at long last become fed up with the results of compromises with humanism, whether right-wing or left-wing. I say to them: to the law and to the testimony; trust and obey, for there’s no other way; you can’t beat something with nothing. I say a lot of things. Given the length of this book, I have said too much already. But this much I feel morally compelled to say: over the last two decades, I have learned that it is far safer to trust in the Bible than in the climate of opinion, especially tenured Christian academic opinion. Better to write and then see one’s irst (and last) edition appear on a remaindered book discount list than to become a best-selling author, only to publish a disguised retraction two decades later with the belated admission: “Well, it sounded good at the time.”

written for conservatives who have never had to trudge through that barren humanist ordeal; the second, a compilation of rewritten children’s stories for grandmothers to give as Christmas presents to public school children who would be bored stif by them if they ever bothered to read the book, which is unlikely. 50. There is always the hope of becoming another Herman Melville, who quit writing iction at age 38 because of low book sales. “Quit now, while you’re not ahead.” 51. The Year 2000 computer problem.

1010

DEUTERONOMY

INDEX INDEX

Aaron, 1, 16, 19, 891 Abel, 100, 209, 576 abortion, 177–78, 297, 362, 452, 453 Abraham circumcision, 181 conditional promise, xix–xx, xxvi, 97, 99, 326, 879 Eliezer, 288 God’s name, 280 Promised Land, 184, 367 promises (3), 300–1, 304 Absalom, 492 accreditation, 93 Achan, 548n, 677 acropolis, 364 Adam adoption, 766 authority, 279, 375 common grace, 279 covenant, 160, 269-70 covenant lawsuit, 375 death, xxvii, 269 Eden (headquarters), 368 entropy, 193–95 excluded property, 509 family, 298 genocide, 160 God’s pledge, 705 imputation, xxiv Jesus &, 283 judgment by, 446 legal status, 642 mercy to, 588 minority shareholder, 588 naming, 279

prodigal son, 283 promise to, xxvi rebellious son, 587 rendering judgment, 445–46 adiaphora, 252, 340, 887 Adonijah, 674 adoption Adam, 766 biblical sonship, 297 bondage &, 281 circumcision, 118 citizenship, 496 imputation &, xxv inheritance &, 6 Israel, 280–81 judicial sonship, xxiii most important, 766 New Covenant, 289 New Testament, 643 Rahab, Ruth, 765–66 replacement, 289 replaces levirate, 769 tribalism vs., 647 younger brother, 209 Africa (famine), 980 Agag, 331 age of gold, 313 agnosticism, 893 agriculture, 307–16, 989 Ahab, 166, 310, 374, 551 Ai, 861 Akiba, 291 alchemy, 170 alcoholic, 915–16 aliens (see strangers)

1011

1012

DEUTERONOMY

alliance, 92 Amalek, 19, 160 Amalekites, 274, 302, 330–31 American Scientific Affiliation, 92 amillennialism, 314, 524–25, 835 Amish, 36–37, 718, 755 Ammonites, 263, 267 Amorites, xviii, 22, 52, 267, 270 Anakim, 257, 262 analogical knowledge, 780–81 ancient city, 166 angels (stars &), 333 animals clean, 392 domesticated, 612, 624 lost, 608–10, 612–14 offspring in wild, 623–24 sacrifices, 260–61 unowned, 624–25 animism, 509 animism’s god, 14 annihilation, 332, 346 ant, 104 antinomianism annulment of Mosaic law, 733 anti-sanctions, 459, 733 evangelicalism, 800 Gladwin, John, 750 hermeneutics, 748–49 intrusion by God, 99–100 anti-poaching laws, 628 apprenticeship, 145, 146, 148 Arad, 246 Aristotle, 471, 663–64 Ark of the Covenant, 161, 496, 497–98, 508–9, 539, 867 army citizenship &, 496, 561–62 cowardice, 543 cross-boundary law, 537 discipline, 541 fearful men, 539 holy warriors, 533–34 mercenaries, 539–40 running away, 540–41 shame, 543 small, 539 thinned ranks, 538–40, 543

ascension church’s condition (O.T., N.T.), 369 civilizational model, 232 curse &, 200–1 eschatology, 369 Great Commission, 205–6, 232, 338 linear history, 232 social theory &, 200–1, 370–71, 886 theological liberalism, 370 victory in civilization, 232 Asia, 423 assimilation, 557–58, 561 Assyria, 105, 290, 850 astrology, 332 astronomy, 310–11 atheism, 340 Athenians, 330 atonement, 182–83, 274, 865–66 attitudes, 983, 988 auction, 967–69 auction process, 967–69 authority complexity &, 34–36 costs, 740 delegated, Chap. 3, 49 God’s, 279 household, 711 judicial, 31 locus of, 34–35 naming, 279 transfer of, 65 autonomy God’s attitude, 241 idolatry &, 157, 242 maximization, 744 natural law &, 90 neutrality &, 341 quest for power, 240 temptation, 882, 959 value free economics, 903 Aztecs, 363 Baal, 175, 551 Baal’s name, 363 Babel, 936 Babylon, 259, 290 Bahnsen, Greg, 887–88 balance of trade, 422

Index Banfield, Edward, 41 Bank of England, 805 banking, iv, 715–19, 803–6 baptism clothing, 646, 648 inclusion, 292 owner’s mark, 615, 621 Baptists, 129, 590n Bar Kochba, 82–83, 291 Barthianism, 371n baseball, 781 Basques, 81 bastardy, 88–89, 134, 210 Bathsheba, 674, 675 battle trumpets, 274 battlefield formation, 860 Bauer, P.T., 983, 998 beasts of the field, 324, 326 Beelzebub, 167 bell-shaped curve (wealth), 828, 830 Berlin Wall, 790 Berra, Yogi, 264 bestiality, 748 Bethlehem, 334 Bible & oath, 523 Bible & textbooks, iii Bible as fragments, 5, 89–90 Bible Presbyterian Church, 622n biblical law, 753–56 bicycle thieves, 519 bidding, 967–68 Big Bang, 884 bird, 623–24 birthright, 25 Bismarck, Otto, 480 bitter herbs, 118 black power, 134n blemished firstlings, 430 blessings compound, 228 covenant, 227 objective, 818 temptation, 961 blood, 100, 629 blood avenger, 761 blueprints, 750–52 boarding school, 322 Boaz, 762–68

1013

Bob Jones University, 91 bondage (jubilee), 424 bondservant (liberation), 119, 423–26 Booths (feast of), 399, 416, 438, 530, 865, 867 borders, 655–57, 701 boredom, 935 Boulding, Kenneth, 901 boundaries gates, 119 God’s field, 729 home, 713 Israel’s, 58 judicial (king), 489–90 Leviticus, 639 magic, 376 marital (king), 487–89 military (king), 485–86 nations’, 60–61 original distribution, 505 private property, 59, 63 standards, 787 tree (garden), 682, 820 violation, 388 walls, 566–67 Boy Scouts, 147 branding, 614, 621 brass, 214 bread, 223, 351, 688, 710, 711 breadwinner, 711 breakdown, iv bribes, 40, 292–93, 451, 457 bride price, 580 British Empire, 555n building codes, 251 Bureau of Standards, 787 bureaucracy, 308–10, 491, 632 burial, 510–11 Burke, Edmund, 354, 356 burnt offerings, 350 Bury, J.B., 230 Bush, George, vii butterflies, 163, 165 butterfly effect, 163n buyers (competition), 788 Caesar, 926–27 Cain, 40, 100, 209, 576

1014

DEUTERONOMY

Calabresi, Guido, 635 calculus, 907 Caleb, xiii, 48, 52 calendar, 309–10, 415, 784 Calvin, John, 395 Calvinism, 99, 187, 934 Calvinists, 126, 129, 879–80, 934 Canaan annihilation, 335 common grace, 170 covenantal law, 269 demons, 166 disinherited, 548 division of labor, 171, 179 excluded gods, 683 gods defeated, 371–72 gods of, 358, 362–65, 683, 685 groves, 337, 339 homes, 630 immoral, 257–58, 335 inheritance/disinheritance, 168–72 local gods, 329, 338 no mercy, 335–36 polytheistic, 348–49 progressive degeneracy, 269 warfare, 335 Canaanites covenant law, 269–70 destruction, 345–46 disinheritance, 684 disinherited sons, 209, 268 extra time, 22 forfeited inheritance, 21 losers, 276 magic, 169 wicked, 266–68 Canada, 81 capital accumulation, 422 components of, 958 derivative, 958 growth, 24, 30 per capita, 918 capital punishment, 42–43, 460, 462–63, 590, 593 capitalism (division of labor), 141, 611 captivity conditional inheritance, 249

confirms the covenant, 104, 846 land law &, 245, 847 Moses prophesied, 96, 101–2, 846, 848 partial disinheritance, 101, 248, 255 punishment fits crime, 96 restoration, 848 sanction, 106, 846 carburetor, 193 cards, 193 Carthage, 80 case law, 641 casuistry, 448, 451, 833 causation, 169, 826 celebration (costly), 442 census, 825–26 centralization (taxation), 491 chance, 880 chariots, 103, 265, 486, 538 charitable loan (see loan: charitable) charity conditional, 739–40 foreign aid, 976 gleaning, 733 Sanger vs., 178 Sider vs., 985 voluntary, 420, 615, 976 chastening, 208–10 chemistry, 170 Chemosh, 363 children (teaching), 319–21 Chilton, David, 993, 994, 998 China, 79, 836–37 choice, 907 Christ (legal title), 368 Christendom ideal of, 135, 340 productivity, 173 rejected, iii, 344, 371, 833 tool of dominion (law), ii Christian Coalition, x, 253 Christian Reconstruction, vi–viii Christian school, 321–23 church attendance, 339 bonds, 426–27 compound growth, 24 defeat?, 369–70 disinheritance (Darwinism), 366

Index eschatology of victory, 370 God’s son, 851 heir of promise, 28 international, 173 Israel of God, 851 lending prohibition, 429 new information, 173 superior authority, 867 title &, 495 tortoise (hare), 28 victory, 128–29 war &, 275 church & state, 524–26, 867 (see also separation) churches (debt), 427 circumcision adoption, 118 boundary of blood, 642 conditional promise, 127, 181 confession &, 878 covenant renewal (Gilgal), 11, 16 curse, 287 ethical, 286, 295 Gilgal, 1, 210, 285–86 heart, 286, 319 inheritance of land, 181–83, 210, 879 king, 485 oath-sign, 182, 210, 287 obedience &, 287 Passover &, 112 promise, 127 regeneration sign, 642 sanctions, 287–88, 879 siege, 551, 565, 567 cities (Levitical), 496, 497 citizenship adoption, 496 army eligibility, 533, 535 biblical, 473–74 circumcision, 485 covenantal, 484–85 holy army, 496 judgeship, 473–74 oath, 211, 296–97 stranger, 435, 439 City College of New York, 946 civil law (negative sanctions only), 440, 650 Civil War, 275

1015

class, 41, 436–37 classical education, 231, 929–30 classroom, 321 climate of opinion, 1003 Clinton, President, vi cloak, 425, 428, 715 clocks, 784 clothing, 641, 645–46 Club of Rome, 984, 985, 987 collateral, 703, 706, 712, 714 colleges, 90 Colson, Charles, 341, 344, 470 Columbia University, 946 commandments, 289 commentaries, 5 commerce, 389–91 committee, 50, 51, 53, 57 common confession, 342 common grace Adam, 279 Canaan, 170 denial of, 272–73 healing, 337 inheritance &, 23–24 meal to come, 689 miracles (wilderness), 190 natural law &, 271–73 social theory, 272 stranger, 434 visible blessings, 839 wealth, 23 wilderness miracles, 190 commons, 624–27 commentaries (Bible), 1007 Communism, 354–55, 792, 923 (see also Marxism) Communist Party, 655 comparative religion, 364 competition, 788–89, 792, 967 complexity, 34–36 compound growth cessation of, 28–29, 236 covenant renewal, 881–84 covenantal continuity, 843–44 eschatology, 235–36, 830 inheritance, 24 Israel, 136 limits, 87–88, 233, 235

1016

DEUTERONOMY

New Testament, 829–30 sin, 22 slow but sure, 27, 28, 66–67, 236 victory, 27–29 computer chips, 136–37, 234 concubine, 580 conditional promises, 879–80 conditionality, 98–100 confederacy, 275 confession (incorporation), 357 confidence, 434 conquest covenant &, 131 covenantal, 305 earth, 228 God’s strategy, 48–49 land law, 18, 65 language, 859 legal title, 248–29 model for history, 327 Old Covenant, 367 population growth &, 184 preaching, 326 representative, 212 conscience, 75 conscription, 532–33, 536, 544 conspiracy, 520–51 consumer, 54–56 consumer’s sovereignty, 587–88m 785n continuity compound growth, 843–44 conquest, 305 covenantal, 304, 324, 843–44 dominion, 305 eternity, 338 exodus generation rejects, 303 growth, 305 inheritance, 304, 338 messianic prophecy, 248 negative sanctions, 822 oath, 677 sanctions, 817 contract cooperation &, 680–81 covenant &, 28, 678 morally valid, 966 murder, 712 parable of vineyard, 966

predictability, 465, 672, 679 reduced costs, 679 social, 678–79 State &, 678 vow as model, 672 contumacy, 597 cooperation, 680–81 copper, 214 corn, 688 corporation, 54 cosmic language, 259 cosmic personalism, 165, 920, 921 cosmos, 165–67 costs counting, 105–7, 263–65 evil estimates, 274 feasts, 353 holiness, 392 production, 464–66 counsellors, 50–51, 53–54, 55, 57 counterfeiting, 793 courage, 69–71, 126, Chap. 71 court, 34, 38, 75, 447, 461–63, 516, 519, 522–23, 795 covenant Adam’s, 111 Adamic, 269–70, 298 blessings, 227, 442 broken, 848 church history, 366 churches’ rejection, 158 civil (see oath: civil) conditionality, 98–100, 879 confessional, 111 conquest, 305 conquest &, 131 continuity, 88, 94, 111, 118, 314, 324, 843–44 contract &, 678 corporate, 914 curses, 821–23 denial, 831 discipline, 324 economic growth, 218, 225, 227–28 education, 150–52 eschatological, 312, 366, 886 ethical-judicial, 296 faithfulness, 812

Index growth, 313 Horeb, 84 integrated system, 834 land and more, 848 lawsuit, 151, 248, 374 model, xvii, 3, 150–52, 287–88, 875–76 new, 115 oath, 111, 287, 300 positive feedback, 960 progressive clarity, 831–32 prosperity, 841–45 ratification, 475, 845 redemption, 281 renewal (see covenant renewal) representation, 475–76 sanctions, 127 social theory &, 185–86 stipulations, 821 ultimate resource, 215 United States Constitution, 470 witness, 100 see also contract covenant-breaking, 25–28, 30, 187 covenant-keeping, 25, 67, 129–30, 139, 215, 326–27, 831 covenant lawsuit (song of Moses), 874–76 covenant renewal Abraham’s family: entrance into, 118, 130 compound growth, 881–84 Deuteronomy, 878 Gilgal, 1, 11, 16 inter-generational, 111 mountain oath, 820–21 pre-conquest, 841, 843 reading the law, 16, 871 third-year oath, 815, 817 covenant theology, 129–30, 435–36, 884 covenantal forgetfulness, 216–222, 245, 302 covetousness, 120 cowardice, 543 creation, xiv, 15 creativity, 215, 219 Cree Indians, 81 creeds, 469 crime, 42–43, 593–94, 601, 734 criminal class, 600, 602, 605 Cromwell, Oliver, 472 crumbs, 272

1017

cults, 793 cultural echo, 134 cultural evolution, 76, 78 cultural wedge, 979 cup of iniquity, 271–72 curriculum, 93 curse (invocation), 822–23 curves and points, 907 cycle (Great Reversal), 229 cycle of poverty, 828 cycle of wealth, 828 cyclical nature, 227 cyclical time, 844 Daniel, 674 Darius, 674 Darwin, Charles, 91, 870–71, 905, 1008 Darwin, Erasmus, 905 Darwinism academic victory, 199–201 cosmic discontinuity, 196–97 entropy argument, 195–98 natural law, 526, 870–71 social, 795 triumph, 366 Dothan, 247, 301 daughters, 580–83, 606, 738–39 David, 283, 686, 687 day of the Lord, 258–59, 262, 267, 276 death, 13, 162, 206, 269–70, 856 Deborah, 482, 485 Deborah’s song, 333, 532 debt avoidance, 723 charitable loan (see loan: charitable) collateral, 706 covenant-breakers, 25 credit &, 723 economic growth, 88 employer to worker, 721–22 Esau, 25 free men, 723 hierarchy, 421 home’s boundaries, 713 inescapable, 722–24, 727 multiple, 428, 715–18 pledge, 705–7, 718–19 present-oriented, 25

1018

repayment, 429 rest, 415 servitude, 649 subordination, 658 to God, 185, 744 worker to employer, 722 year of release, 866 Decalogue, 77–78, 121 decay, 774 decentralization, 35, 486 decreasing returns, 234 decree, 99, 671, 879 defeatism, 340 deism’s god, 14 delegation, 33 deliverance (Israel’s), 17 democracy (Christians’ faith in), iii democratic capitalism, 1001 demons, 163, 164, 166–67 Deuteronomy covenant renewal, 878 eschatological, 689 free market &, xxiii future-orientation, 2 lays down the law, i name of book, 1 postmillennial, 886 themes, xiii, xviii, xxiii, xxx “these words”, 1 unknown book, i Dewey, John, 323 diaspora, 152, 413 Diehl, William, xxviii–xxix, 751 diet, 223, 978–79 dietary laws annulled in N.T., 128 captives/slaves, 558 health?, 386 resident aliens, 387 Rushdoony, vii (see also meat) diminishing returns, 234 discoveries (spread of), 173 disinheritance annihilation, 546 captivity, 248, 255, 290 church (Darwinism), 366 cosmic language, 259

DEUTERONOMY

covenant-breakers, 25–26 definitive (Canaan), 211 dispersion, 848 dissipation, 67 father’s authority, 589 final, 548 gods of Canaan, 358, 359 imputed, 211 inescapable concept, 48 irreversible (execution), 589–90, 592 Jewish sons, 939 joint sovereignty, 589 law &, 153 military action, 546 New Covenant era, 546 progressive, 211 rebellious son, 589 regeneration, 546 reversible (excommunication), 589 Satan, 359 State, 584–85 total (genocide), 467 tribute, 546 warfare, 560 dispensationalism, 8–12, 260–61 dispersion, 851 disputes, 34 division of labor apprenticeship &, 146 banking &, iv, 699, 804 Canaan’s, 171, 179 capital investment &, 707–8 committee, 51 computers, 699 decentralization, 35 genocide vs., 168 good habits, 436 immigration &, 175 means of payment, 717 pagan gods/men, 239 predictable law, 449 predictability, 672 wealth, 141 women employees, 581–82 divorce, 128 Dolan, Edwin, 895 dominion costs of, 273

Index economic growth, 854–55 Israel’s, 72, 853 long life, 853 money-lending, 421–23 social theory, 273 dominion covenant definition of man, xiv, 703 eschatology, 244 hierarchical, 564, 623, 703 multiplication, 228, 233 trees, 564 donkey, 432, 644 doorposts, 318, 319 dowry, 580–81, 582 draft (see conscription) drug addiction, 252 drugs, 252, 603 drunkenness, 252, 590, 591–92, 597 dualism, 74–75, 90, 92, 186, 917–19, 941 Duhem, Pierre, 231–322 Durocher, Leo, 273n Dutch, 321 ear, 426 earnest, 548–49 earthquakes, 251 East Germany, 339 Eastern mysticism, 241 echo effect, 134 ecology, 569–71 economic growth attitudes, 135 biblical, 313–16 compounding, 170, 829 confession, 829 covenant-keeper, 67 covenant-keeping, 242, 842 covenantal, 218, 225, 227, 882–83 cumulative, 829 Deuteronomy, 854, 882, 958 division of labor, 170 dominion, 854–55 ethical imperative, 243, 315, 883 festivals, 441 finitude, 883 ghetto, 135 God’s law, 960 hatred of, 854–55, 885

1019

normative, 315 rate of, 141–42, 829 sanctions, 441 temptation (autonomy), 882 economic planning, 54, 56 economic pragmatism, 355 economics agnosticism, 28, 893 autonomy, 28 biblical, 872–73 blueprint, 965 dualism = objective/subjective, 917–19 equilibrium, 894, 900, 901 ethics rejected, 901 formulas, 892, 901, 905 humanist, xiv, 884–85 magician’s quest, 892 mathematics, 901–2 methodological covenantalism, 920–21 methodological holism, 918–19 methodological individualism, 917–18 methodological subjectivism, 915 neutrality, 963 perfect knowledge (see omniscience) reductionism, 176 scarcity, xiv–xvi subjectivism, 902–4 value-free, 901–2, 903, 912 welfare, 911 Edelstein, Ludwig, 231 Eden, 368, 682 Edom, 59 education accreditation, 93, 929–30 apprenticeship, 145, 146 bureaucratic, 148 certification, 92, 929 Christian, 93–94 classical, 929 compulsory, 322 covenant model, 50–52, 324 covenantal continuity, 89 daughters, 580–82 dowry, 580–82 Dutch, 322 feminized, 145–50 graduate school, 148 home schooling, 149–50

1020

DEUTERONOMY

humanist indoctrination, 322–23 illegal drugs, 603–4 Julian the Apostate, 929 Latin, 145–46 modern, 145 myth of neutrality, 148–49, 322–23 tax funded, ix efficiency, 731–32, 699, 730–31, 903, 961–62 Egypt autonomy, 120 bureaucracy, 309, 379 chariots, 486 hydraulic economy, 308–10 Joseph, 293 sabbath, 119–20 slavery, 378–79 spoils of, 59–60, 467 Egypt’s sons, 58, 467, 732 election, 126 electricity, 581 Eli, 149 Eliab, 283 Eliezer, 288 Elijah, 175, 374, 382 Elisha, 487, 551 emigration, 413, 790 empire avoided coasts, 63 centralization, 486 evangelism &, 559–60, 561 festivals vs., 559 Israel in bondage, 103 legal barriers, 552 military exemption vs., 534–35 offensive military, 486 plural idols, 555 (see pantheon) pluralism, 561 politics as divine, 936 syncretism, 156, 174, 332, 363, Appendix C warfare, 155–56 employer (delayed wages), 721–22 England, 141 Enlightenment, 470, 473, 526, 1005 entitlements, 615, 744 entrepreneurship, 619–20, 668, 862–63, 919n entropy cursed, 194–95

defined, 191–92 Eden, 193, 195 ethics &, 199 Fall, 194 pessimillennialism &, 200–1 social, 198–204 envy, 294, 295, 842, 911–12 Ephraim, 578 epistemological self-consciousness, 836 equilibrium, 894 equinoxes, 230 Esau, 25, 58, 209, 267, 576, 577, 968 eschatology Christendom, 885 compound growth, 830–31 covenant, 366 covenant theology &, 884 dominion covenant, 244 down payment in history, 327 economists vs., 885 fifth great debate, 366 fundamentalism, 933–34 headquarters, 368 inheritance &, 301–2, 326, 367, 368 natural law theory, 802 no neutrality, 340 politics &, 934 sanctions, 327 seed line, 367 social theory &, 7–8 theonomy, xxvii, 129 three views of, xix Establishment, xi, 374 eternity, 226 ethical dualism, 74–75 ethical self-consciousness, 836 ethics economic analysis &, 961–65 entropy &, 199 envy &, 912 primacy, 827 ritual &, 286 social analysis, 965 eunuch, 643 evangelicals, 90–91 evangelism (see law: evangelism) evil, 202 evolutionism, 365–66

Index excommunication (disinheritance), 589, 594, 596 execution, 42–43, 589–90, 594–96 exercise mandated (festivals), 442–44 Exodus, 15–16, 122, 704 experimentation, 85 exponential curve, 233, 235, 883 exports, 422 eye for eye (see lex talionis) face to face (Moses/God), 109–110 facts’ interpretation, 264 fads, 90, 994, 1000 family Adamic, 298 capital, 597–98 covenant, 297–98, 598 de-capitalized, 586 landmarks, 512–13 name, 764, 765–68 State, 584 toleration by, 598 welfare, 991 famine, 695–97, 980 fat, 443–44 fate, 332 fear faithfulness, 285 inevitable concept, 40–41 military exemption, 532 nature, 398–99 warrior, 539–43 feasts blessings of God, 441–42, 688 by invitation only, 411 central location, 399, 400, 414 cost, 441 costs of attending, 810 economic demand, 403 eschatological, 311 exercise, 442–43 foreign conquest, 552–53 land laws, 438 liturgy of thanksgiving, 813 marriage supper of the lamb, 689 name, 596 national, 35, 53, 438–42 peace, land, bread, 351

1021

prelude to, 688 sabbatical year, 419 stranger, 439 temple, 414 tribal vs. national, 349 federalism, 524, 789 Federalist, 51, 177 festivals, 399, 414, 559 (see also feasts) field (meaning of), 643 final judgment Darwinism, 197–98 genocide, 159 humanist economic theory, 884 inheritance, 327 limit to growth, 26 final sovereignty, 794 finders, keepers, 610 fines, 786, 798–99 finitude, 233, 235, 243, 883 Finn, Huckleberry, 147 fire, 336, 627n fire codes, 636 firstborn, 574, 760 firstborn animals, 430–35 firstborn son, 209, 283, 431, 575–79, 585–86, 770 Firstfruits deliverance of Israel, 808 economics of, 530 public confession, 809 retroactive thankfulness, 809–10 flag, 343 flanks, 860 flowers, 193 food laws barrier to entry, 393 ecclesiastical, 396 health, 394 land laws, 393 land’s holiness, 394 food prices, 140 foreign aid, 421, 974–76 foreigners, 61–63, 73 forest fires, 627n forgeries, 2, 82, 121 forgetfulness (see covenantal forgetfulness) formulas, 891–92, 901, 906

1022

DEUTERONOMY

fourth generation, xix–xx, xxii, 20, 22, 49, 113–14, 130–31, 181–83 fractional reserves, 715–18 Franklin, Benjamin, 154 free lunches, 741 free market auction, 967–69 biblical, xxviii, 956–92 Deuteronomy &, xxviii multiple goals, 55 open entry, 797–98 Pentateuch, xxix free society, 296 frontal assault, 860 frontlets, 317 fugitive slave law (U.S.), 656n future-orientation, 106, 435–37, 843–45 Gaia, 100 Galbraith, J.K., 901 Gamaliel, 291 gang, 148, 601 garden of Eden, 193–96 gates, 119, 650 Gates, Bill, 217 Gates, Frederick, 93 Geisler, Norman, 801–2 General Education Board, 93 General Will, 354 generation-skipping, 133 generations, 24, 26 Genesis, 365 genocide Amalek, 160 disinheritance, xviii, 5, 6, 159–60 division of labor &, 168 economic inheritance, 345–46 final judgment &, 159, 548 geography vs., 938 Hormah, 160 idolatry, 345–46 incomplete, 246 intermarriage, 938 Jericho, 160, 467 jubilee law, 995 magic &, 166 moral necessity, xviii, 548 one-time event, xxix, 346–47, 548

partial, 167 gentiles, 283, 286, 289, 296 geometry, 172 Germany, 176 ghetto, 135, 147, 328, 930 ghettos, 749–50 giants, 53, 87, 262–63, 267 Gibeonites, 338–39, 675, 676, 677, 881 Gideon, 540 Gilder, George, 233n, 234 Gilgal, 1, 210, 285 Gill, John, 403n Gish, Art, 751–52 Gladwin, John, 750–51 gleaning agriculture only, 735, 742 conditions, 741 ecclesiastical, 735–36 fallen man, 742 hard work, 737–38 harvester’s returns, 736 jubilee laws, 741–42 land law, 730 lessons, 743 liberation, 736 localism, 738–40 morally compulsory, 733–35 manna, 735 New Covenant, 743 no subsidy for evil, 739–40 training, 742 tribalism, 738 unemployment insurance, 736 welfare State vs., 742 workfare, 737 gluttony, 252, 442–43, 590, 591–92, 597 God adopter, 280–81 animism, 14 authority (dual), 279 autonomy, 241 capricious?, 828 court, 461 creator, 122, 285 decentralization, 35 decree, 98, 671, 879, 920 deism, 14 deliverer, 226

Index disinherit rival gods, 358 doctrine of, 365 fear of, 39, 40, 84, 143, 165, 285, 300 giver, 221 historical declaration, 16 honor of, 278 house builder, 531 imputing value, 904–6 Israel’s inheritance, 280 Israel’s owner, 277 jealous, 96, 247 judge, 39, 451, 460, 514 imputing agent (value), 904–5 king of the covenant, 841 kingdom grant, 865 lawgiver, 72, 125 name, 757 name on Israelites, 279–81, 759 objective/subjective value, 904 omniscience, 47, 920 owner, 58, 285, 504–5, 588, 608–9 owner of Israel, 348 paid first, 430 presence, 844 plural, 348–49 provider, 221 Red Sea &, 122 reputation of, 278 residence, 509, 511 sanctions-bringer, 15, 17, 245, 814, 824, 858 sovereign, 300 sovereignty, 165, 336, 670, 920 strategist, 56 tree’s owner, 588 universal, 76, 846–47 vetoing, 52 whose side?, 274–75 wiser than, 750 witness, 514, 528 word of (see word of God) worship, 373 gods of modernism, 157 gods’ names, 172–73 gold, 488, 489n gold mine, 295–96, 665 golden age, 231, 313 golden calf, 268, 280, 283, 284

1023

Goliath, 262 good life, 709–10 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 355, 1000 grace law &, 112, 183, 184–85, 973 merited, 183 normal events, 190 precedes law, 184–85, 205, 360 sin &, 186 theme (3), xxiii wrath &, 359–60 grammar, 169 grandparents, 88, 133–34 grapes, 688 grasshopper, 104 graves, 510–11 Great Commission ascension, 201, 205–6, 338, 886 civil government, 525 conquest, 228 disciple the nations, 324 fulfilled in history, 206 holy land &, 393–94 ninety percent, 315–16 pessimillennialism, 200–1 reclamation project, 547 Great Depression, 133 Great Reversal, 229, 836 Great Tribulation, 342 Great Year, 231, 311, 313 Greece, 227, 510 Greeks (cyclical history), 230 Gregory VII, 366 Gresham’s Law, 793–94 grocer, 693–95 groves, 337, 339 growth, 24–27, 235, 829–30, 855, 881 Gwartney, James, 895 habits, 436 Hagar, 99 Harrod, Roy, 910 Harvard University, 946 harvester, 736 hay fever, 195 Hayek career, 790n complexity, 35

1024

DEUTERONOMY

legal predictability, 450, 794–95 rule of law, 450 victimless crimes, 251 headquarters, 367 healing, 200, 337 health, 23, 386, 394 hear, 144 hearing, 85–87, 158, 264–65 heat death, 137, 191–92, 884 heat loss, 191–92 heaven and earth, 100, 101 Heilbroner, Robert, 899, 901n heir, 66–68, 182, 764 hell, 40, 250 Hellenism, 155, 174, 364, 377 Henry IV, 366 hermeneutics antinomian, 748–49 biblical law, 753–56 continuity, 754 discontinuity, 639–40 goals, 639–40 maximal, 747 narrow>broad, 660 Herod, 674–75 Hesiod, 960n Hezekiah, 105 hidden treasure, 617–20 hierarchy civil, 19 debt, 421–22 dominion covenant, 564 judgment, 447–48 judicial, 31 lender over debtor, 422 multiple, 35 parental, 20 revelation, 448 stewardship &, 18 stoning, 447 higher critics, 2–5, 121 history, 153, 161, 227, 228, 310–12, 834–35, 844–45 holidays, 415 holiness, 387–89, 392 holy army, (see army) holy of holies, 388, 496 Holy Spirit, 832

holy wastefulness, 399 home, 531 homosexuality, 174 honesty, 154 Hong Kong, 215, 217, 219, 220 Horeb, 18, 84, 108 Hormah, 160, 246, 274 hormah, 547 horses, v, 103, 485–86 Hughes, Archibald, 314 human action, 99 human sacrifice, 361 humanism god of (3), 948 kingdom, 932 man’s sovereignty, 959 marriage covenant, 940 seducer, 940 humanist-pietist alliance, 252–53 Hur, 19 Hutt, W.H., 587, 619 Hutterites, 718 (see also Amish) Huyghe, Patrick, 79 hybridization, 640n hydraulic economics, 309 Ice, Tommy, 11, 255, 481 ideas, 76 ideological kidnapping, 322 idle resources, 619–20 idolatry ancient & modern, 365 Canaan, 103, 163 captivity as judgment, 107 classical politics, 926 continuity of being, 238–39 death, 856 demons, 163 Hellenism, 377 immigration &, 174 Jeroboam, 349–50 judicial representation, 155, 163, 166, 167, 238 maximization, 737 military defeat, 155–56 nature & history, 377 pantheon, 555, 923 post-exilic, 103, 105

Index slave’s escape, 652–53 something for nothing, 240 thorns in eyes, 168 transcendence, 377 wealth &, 856 illegal drugs, 252, 603 illegitimacy, 134 immigrants, 174, 293, 294n, 301–2 immigration, 175, 297, 557–58, 656, 702, 789, 791 imputation Adam or Christ, 188 grace & good works, xxiv judicial name, 867 kingdoms, xxiv name, 767 perfection, 188 righteousness, 126 Seed of Israel, 759–60 incorporation, 352–53, 357 indexes, 909, 913 individualism, 532 (see also methodological individualism) indulgences, 366 inefficiency, 730 inflation, 508 information, 785–86, 968 inheritance adoption &, xxiii, 6 blood-line, 296 Canaan, 168–72, 337, 631 circumcision &, 181–83 common grace &, 23–24 compound, 228 conditional (Canaan), 249 confession (Joshua), 68 confession of faith, 769 corporate, 228–30 costs of festivals, 810 covenant renewal &, 111 covenantal, 304, 757 daughters, 580, 642–43 definitive, 326 delayed, 20 dissipated, 87 double portion, 574–86 earth, 130 ecology, 669–71

1025

Egypt, 467 eschatology, 301–2, 326, 367, 368 ethical, 325 extension of, 876 family kinship, 762 father’s authority, 585 final judgment, 327 firstborn, 574–86 four factors, 856 genocide, 345–46 gentiles, 249 God’s sanctions &, 6, 66 grace &, xxiii–xxiv grandchildren, 468 Greek world, xxiii Israel as God’s, 277 Jesus’ heirs, 768 land, 102, 248 law, 95, 248, 876, 877, 878 law’s sanctions, 314, 452 legal status, 643 Levites, 494–503 linear history, 229 literacy, 580–81 loss of, 69 maintenance, 180, 531 meek, 886 money, 58 name, 767 neutrality &, 173 oath, 182, 296 obedience/assigning, 182 oppressed, 732 outside the land, 847 permanent, 314 predestination &, xxiii predictable, 186 primary, 643, 876 progressive, 326 promise/granting, 182 proportionality, 583 rebellious son, 580 righteousness, 732 roof law, 637 Rushdoony, 574–75, 988–89 Ruth, 762–65 sabbath, 122 sanctions &, 5–7, 66, 325, 454

1026

DEUTERONOMY

secured, 6 separation (geographical), 494 slavery &, 281 strangers, 249 theft vs., 507 tribal, 642 two methods, 6 verbal, 84 war brides, 575 younger son, 283 injustice as theft, 777–78 intellectuals, 355 interest, 389, 421, 507, 664–66 intermarriage, 950–54 International Bureau of Standards, 787 interpersonal comparisons, 907, 917 intuition, 779–83 investment, 28 Isaac, 99, 687 Isaac’s wells, 294 Ishmael, 576 Islam, 176, 365, 656 Israel Adam’s curse, 225 adopted, 225, 280–81 Amalek &, 160 apostasy, 368–69 Ark of Covenant, 353 authority, 72 barriers to empire, 552 calendar, 309–10 captivity, 101–2, 104, 106 centrality of worship, 349 chastened by God, 207 common confession, 353, 357 common law, 868 cutting off, 851 death sentence, 527 defeat in history, 369 diaspora, 152 disinherited in AD 70, 281, 732 doubted God’s promise, 167 Eden, 413 England &, 141 evangelism, 560 exile, 509–10 false testimony, 527 first born son, 732

forgiveness, 246 frontal assault, 860–61 God’s inheritance, 277–78 God’s name on, 278–81, 759 God’s reputation, 278, 759 God’s son, 208–210, 225, 279–81, 759, 850 grace to wrath, 359–60 holy nation, 509 idolatry, 103, 105, 107, 173 immigration, 295–96 judicial status of, 394–95 law as common ground, 868 localism, 348 lost sheep, 613 mediatorial status, 281 military defeat, 335 money-lending, 421–23 nation, 118 oath, 118, 357 open borders, 175, 295–96 owned by God, 277 plurality, 348 political dependence, 103 post-exilic, 103, 363 pre-eminence through law, 72 rebellion prophesied, 874 remnant, 248, 249 sacred fire, 336 sacred space (Ark), 508 sacrificed meals, 349 sanctuary, 653, 800 seed, 759 (see also seeds) segregated tribes, 641–42 slavery, 117–18, 281 State of (1948), 390, 848 Supreme Court, 460–76 trade, 422–25 tribute, 102 under God, 866–68 unrighteousness, 266–68 urbanization, 739 voluntarism, 63 welfare society, 223 Israelites bondage, 423–24 circumcision, xxvi diaspora, 413

Index disinheritance, 409 fourth generation (see fourth generation) holy, 388, 389 inheritance, xxvi lack of faith, 20 non-confrontation, 48 priests to nations, 389 strategy, 57 third generation (see third generation) trading nation, 62 urban, 409, 412–13 wandering, 22 Italy, 339 Jacob, 25, 312, 576, 577, 578, 687 Jaki, Stanley, 230 James, 182 Japan, 423 Japanese pottery, 79 Jefferson, Thomas, 698 Jericho, 156, 547, 548 Jeroboam, 349–50 Jerusalem (siege), 259–60 Jesus Adam &, 283, 579 ascension (see ascension) atonement (see atonement) bigamist?, 261 Boaz &, 768 bread, 223 deliverance, 124 God’s name, 280 grace, 383–84 incarnation, 17n jubilee law, 653 judicial representative, xxvi lawful heir, 182 messiah, 282 miracles, 226 parables, 266 prophetic office, 380–81 sabbath, 685–88 second Adam, 579 welfare State, 223 Jethro, 31–32, 37 Jews assimilation, 945, 949, 954–55 branch, 390n

1027

City College of New York, 946 Columbia University, 946 discrimination against, 942, 944–45 emigration, 943 ghettos, 941, 954 gods of modernism, 932 Harvard University, 946 intelligence, 946–47 intermarriage, 950–54 liberals, 949 minority, 942 Napoleonic Wars, 941 price of success, 947 pursuit of wealth, 945 rival modern gods, 945–46 seduction vs. Threat, 938 State &, 932 success, 933 Job, 811–12 John the Baptist, 674–75 Jonah, 374, 880 Jonathan, 686 Jordan, James Deuteronomy’s structure, 2 grace precedes law, 184–85 maintaining the grant, 361 Moses as sovereign, 14 Jordan River, 2 Joseph, 312, 578 Joshua encouraged by Moses, 21 forward position, 860 instructions to, 858–60 military leader, 862 third generation &, xiii, 30 transferred authority, 66 Josiah, 121 jubilee bondage, 423–24 dating, 310 day of atonement, 866 delegation of stewardship, 506 land laws, 505–6 Levite’s cities, 496 post-exilic, 396–97 slavery, 281 Judah, 577, 578, 643 Judah the Prince, 292

1028

DEUTERONOMY

Judaism culture, 952 dualism, 947 humanism’s threat to, 940 liberalism, 933 minority religion, 938, 940 mixed marriage, 939–40 mother’s religion, 938–39 nineteenth century, 555n seduced sons, 939 seduction (confessional), 938–40, 947 split, 941 Judas, 527n judges, 32, 39, 40, 102, 105, 445–48, 452, 794 judgment, 445–48, 780–81 judicial blindness, 265–66, 915 judicial theology, 248 Julian the Apostate, 928–30 jungle, 244n, 626 Jupiter, 332 justice common, 73–74 daily, 32 economic effects, 791 eye for eye (see lex talionis) impartial, 445 liberty, 43–45 Mises’s view, 963n political theory, 250–53 quantification, 775 sanction, 251–52 scale, 775–76 universal goal, 73 wealth, 826 juvenile delinquency, 599–601 Kant, Immanuel, 161, 234, 240, 917, 919 Karaites, 954 Keller, Timothy, 741n Keynes, J.M., 224 kibbutz, 752n kidnapping, 620 king, 489–90 kingdom antinomian, 341 circumcision, 287–88 emigration, 413

empire vs., 486 eschatology, 327 grant, 87, 98, 113–14, 183–85, 888 hoarding, 618 inheritance/disinheritance, xvi, 288, 327 maintaining the grant, 288, 360–61 perpetual, 259 pessimillennialism, 341 pietists, 341 political, 525 realm/reign distinction, 341 two stage theory, 341–42 warfare, 324–25 kingship ancient, 481–82 believers, 474–75 centralization, 483 horses, 485–86 joint ordination, 484 judicial, 489–90 land law, 477 literacy, 490 Melchizedek, 482, 493 rebellion, 478 second-best, 482 theocentric, 478 treasury, 488–89 treaty, 888–89 wives, 487–88 World War I, 493 kinsman redeemer, 760–61 Kirzner, Israel aggregate utility, 913 “Ah, ha”, 919n anti-classical economics, 915 equilibrium, 900 Mises and Moses, 914 moment of discovery, 919 social choice = metaphor, 914 Kline, Meredith, 13–14, 153–54, 455, 458, 791, 810–11, 833 knowledge, 55 Koinonia, 752 Korah, 247 Kristol, Irving, 43 Laban, 725 labor contracts, 722–29

Index Lachmann, Ludwig, 916n, 917n, 918 land capital &, 958 commerce, 390 covenantal status, 390 familial, 351 holiness of, 389–90 life &, 958 Locke, John, xv name, 643 purity of, 392 rest, 119 sacred, 508–9 sacrosanct, 290–92 seed laws, 498 tool of dominion, ii land laws annulment, 393–94 anti-rural, 413 conquest, 18 feasts, 438 food laws, 393–96 jubilee, 427 military exemptions, 529 sabbatical year, 419, 427 seed laws &, 506, 692–93 self-destruct clauses, 412 land reform, 988–91 landmark, 504, 506–7, 511–13, 820 Lange, Oskar, 894, 897–98, 899 Latin, 145–46 law Adamic vs. biblical, 272–73 Adam’s heirs, 270 administrative, 632 capital asset, 114 case, 641, 747–48 civil, 868 comprehensive, 317 confirms grace, 185 constancy, 111 conversation, 317 covenantal continuity, 111 deliverance &, 17 discontinuity, 640–41 disinheritance &, 153, 269–70 evangelism, Chap. 8, 434–36, 559–60, 818, 831

1029

evangelism &, 72 flexible=arbitrary, 969 foreigners, 61–62, 73, 75–76 God’s, 73, 144 grace &, 112, 183, 184–85 grace of, 973 historical sanctions, 269 history, 153 impersonal, 241 inheritance, 95, 248, 876, 877, 878 intent, 634 internalize, 318–20 invocation, 821 Israel’s inheritance, 95 learning, 144–45 liberty &, 43–45, 872 manipulative nature, 241 natural, 74, 89–90, 241 opposition to East and West, 241 oral, 291 pagan & modern, 241 personal, 17 predictability, 44, 449–50, 464–65, 969–73 primary inheritance, 878 protects minorities, 75–76 public reading, 861–69 ratification, 821 recapitulation, 115 rule of, 61–62, 440, 450–51, 796 salvation by, 223 sanctions, 249–53, 269, 327 sovereignty, 254 spirit/letter, 634 tool of dominion, 876, 877 trade, 62 work of, 74, 271 “law of 73,” 136 lawyers, 795, 833 laying on hands, 291 legalism, 377 legislation, 635 Letwin, William, 893, 963n Levellers, 474–75 Levi, 280–81 levirate marriage annulled, 769, 772–73 eldest son’s name, 770

1030

DEUTERONOMY

judicial, 767 kinsman redeemer, 762 levir, 757 name/inheritance, 754, 767 polygamy &, 769–72 redemptive, 767 replaced by adoption, 769 Ruth, 762–65 seed law, 534, 757, 767 Levites bread, 351 celebration, 351, 358, 398 cities of, 497–98 inheritance, 406, 494–503 judges, 448, 474 lawful inheritance, 405–7 national, 352–53 national feasts, 349 participation, 407 priests, 465 rural land, 494–96 separation, 494–503 third, 403–4 tithe, 400–5 urban, 496, 498 urban wealth, 496 Leviticus, 639 Lex, Rex, 471 lex talionis, 452, 515–16, 517–19 liability, 506, 629, 631, 634 liberation, 119, 123 liberation theology, 996, 1002 liberty, 43–45, 281 licensing, 637 life/land, 853 life span, 24, 126–28, 131, 132, 194, 323–34, 498 limits to growth, 24–27, 136–38, 142, 233, 243–44, 884 linear history, 227, 228–29 linen, 645, 647 liquor, 399, 415 literacy, 580–81 loan allocating risk, 668 bondage, 425, 660, 663 charitable, 418, 425–26, 429, 659–60, 666

collateral, 424, 661 commercial, 428 foreign, 421–23, 661–62 interest-free, 425–26, 661 medieval church, 669 moral compulsion, 660–61 obligatory, 427–28 risk premium, 667 stranger, 661–62 lobbying, 796 localism, 738–40, 743 Locke, John, xv, 678–79, 684 long life, 24, 456–57, 623, Chap. 70 Lord’s Supper, 261, 396 lost sheep, 612 Lot, 342 loyal opposition, xi Luther, Martin, 74, 186 Lutheranism, 186, 934 lying, 686 Madison, James, 177, 524 magic “as above, so below,” 163, 164, 167 confession, 375 escaping limits, 379 feasts, 164 genocide (Canaan), 166 illusionists, 164 invocation, 163, 164, 376 priestly, 163, 164 risk to magician, 379–80 ritual over ethics, 380 something for nothing, 168, 379 voodoo, 163, 376 magician, 379–80, 384, 892 Maimonides, Moses, 1n Malthus, T.R., 139–40, 1008 management, 54 managers (scarce), 32 manna, 16, 189, 224, 735 maps, 78 Marcion, xxviii Marcionite dogma, 601, 607 market research, 57 marriage (mixed), 939–40 Marxism, 56, 217–18, 790, 792, 836–37 mathematics, 169, 172, 901–2, 906

Index maximization, 730, 737, 744 Mayans, 79 McCartney, Dan, 748–49 measurement, 779–83, 825 measures, 774 meat celebration, 443 foreigners, 387–91 land law, 386 land laws, 393 price, 393 unclean, 392 mediator, 16 Medo-Persia, 259 meek, 436, 886 Melchizedek, 482, 493 memory, 26n Mendenhall, George, 2 Menninger, Karl, 43 mercenaries, 539–40 mercy, 160, 335–36 methodological collectivism, xv, 918–19, 962 methodological covenantalism, 962 methodological individualism, xiv–xv, 917–19, 962 mezuza, 318 middle class, 139, 827 Midian, 114 military, Chap. 45, 550–51 military service, 529–36 military strategy, 50, 55 milk, 386 milk & honey, 139–40 Miller, Roger Leroy, 895 millstone, 707–9, 710, 717 miracle, 189, 190, 192–93, 225, 235 Miriam, 16 Mises, Ludwig von, 917, 918, 921, 963n, 986, 1005 Mishnah, 292 Mishneh Torah, 1 mixed seeds law, 639 Moab, 551 Moabite, 766 mobility, 390 modernism (gods of), 161, 931–33 Moneta, Wyoming, 80 money

1031

counsel &, 55 defined, 59 division of labor, 717 dominion, 421–23 inheritance, 58 lending, 421 sterile, 664 Montaigne dogma, 986, 987 Montanism, 928 Moore’s law, 137, 233 Morgenstern, Oskar, 780 Morris, Henry, 193, 195–96 Moses Adam Smith &, 916 author, 2 covenant renewal, 118 delegated agent, 14, 868 faith in formula, 892 faith in ritual, 891 future-oriented, 105 glory, 110 God’s friend, 109 health, 121 judge, 31–32, 34, 37 last testament, 858 mediator, 15 memory, 121 prophecy, 101 prophet, 15, 378, 868 punishment of, 65–66 replacement patriarch, 277–78 rod, 891 signs & wonders (snakes), 378 song of, 874–76 tent of, 31 mother’s milk, 386 Mt. Nebo, 878 multiplication, 33–34, 233–35 multitude of counsellors, 50–51, 55 murder contract, 712 name biology &, 765 cut off, 761 gods of Canaan, 362–65 invocation, 362 seed &, 759–61 Nashville agrarians, 698

1032

DEUTERONOMY

National Council of Churches, 999–1000 natural law assumption, 869–70 autonomy, 272 Christian defenders, 525, 870–71 common grace &, 271–73 condemnation, 270 Darwinism vs., 525 Enlightenment, 253, 525 Geisler, 801–2 history of, 271 humanism, 253, 254, 870–71 legitimacy through reason, 869–70 Lutheranism, 186–87 Madison, 177 predictability, 250 social theory, 253 sonship, 210, 297 spurious, 74 see also dualism natural resources, 215–17, 295 nature, 311–13, 626–27 negotiation, 968 neighbor, 683–84, 690–91 Nero, xi–xii neutrality autonomy &, 341 economics &, 963 education, viii Geisler, Norm, 802 humanist version, 749 inheritance &, 173 interpersonal comparisons, 872–73 myth, x, 148–49, 341–43, 452–53 pluralism, 341 political, 800–3 scarcity vs., xiv waning faith, 924 New Bible Commentary, 3 New Heavens, 314 New Mexico, 77–78 New World Order, 922–23, 936 Newton, Isaac, 92, 893–94 Nicea, 469 Nile, 308, 313 Nineveh, 105 nirvana, 241 Nisbet, Robert, 232, 458n, 990n

Noah, 233 nomads, 980 nostalgia, 133 numbering, 825–26 oath Abram/Abraham, 303–4 citizenship, 517 civil, 178, 294n, 296, 298, 357, 470–71, 473 civil court, 523 contract &, 672–73 corporate blessings, 815–17 covenantal swearing, 300 inheritance, 686–87 land &, 389–90 mathematics (Pythagoras), 172 national incorporation, 357 rival, 178 rival god: State, 344–45 sign, 287 sonship, 210, 297 vow, 673 wealth &, 172 witness, 517 obedience circumcision &, 287 God as owner, 285 God’s promises, 862 hearing, 86–87, 158 inheritance, 180–82 sonship &, 286 objectivity, 783–84 occult man, 784 occultism, 378 Og, 17, 262 Old Covenant order, 260, 281 older brother, 283 Olmecs, 79 Olympics, 56 omniscience, 47, 895, 896, 904, 907, 966–67 Onan, 769 Onanism, 761n onions, 225 Ontario, Canada, 81 opportunity, 36 oppression, 75, 653–54, 720–28

Index optimism (tool of dominion), 844, 862–64 ordination, 501 ownership bird, 624 branding, 614, 621–22 bundle of rights, 611 corporate, 54 covenantal, xiii delegated, 609 diffuse, 55 fundamental question, xiv inequality, 987 legal basis, xv nature, 626 original, xvi owner’s rights, 610–12 right to exclude, 504, 611, 682 self, xiv–xv shared, 691 soil, xv stewardship, 18, 504 transfer of Land, 18 ox, 644, 685, 700, 745–46, 965–66 Paganism, 238–40 pantheism, 241 pantheons, 174, 330, 364, 355, 923–27, 935–36 parable of the laborers, 966–67 parables, 266 parents corporal punishment, 593 education, 149–50 proportional inheritance, 583–84 testimony against son, 590–91 Pareto optimality, 912–13 Passover deliverance from Egypt, 85 foreign missions, 553 liberation, 118 rite of passage, 118 wilderness, 112 peace, 513, 516 peace offer, 545 peace treaty, 549 Pentateuch, ii, xvii–xviii, 3 Pentecost, 309, 530, 808 perfection, 806, 815

1033

perjury, 514–28 perpetual motion machine, 191, 192 pessimillennialism, 7–8, 128–29, 198, 200–4, 802–3 Peter, 394–95 Pharaoh, 117, 119, 120, 378 Pharisees, 260, 291 Phelps, E.H., 895 Philistia, 161 philosophy, 124, 227, 377 photography (authority), 85 physics, 136–37 pierced ear, 426 pietism, 91, 749, 831, 928 pinch of salt, 779 pledge, 705–7, 718–19 plots, 498 plowing (joint), 643–44 pluralism abortion &, 453–54 Christian, 340, 344–45, 453, 470–71 Enlightenment, 453 grand illusion, 924 illegitimate, 873 immigration, 175, 655–57 loss of faith, 339 neutrality, 341 revival, 561 Rome, 923–27 syncretism, 156, 173, 923 theocratic, 175 point man, 860 police uniform, 383 political idolatry, 350 political pluralism, 252–53 political religion, 175, 926 political theory, 250–53, 271, 357 pollen, 195 polygamy, 487–88, 552, 583, 755, 769–72 polytheism, 488 poor, 213 population, 29, 34, 135–38 population growth conditional on obedience, 881–82 conquest &, 184 dominion, 854 economic growth &, 29, 854 Egypt, 293

1034

DEUTERONOMY

end of time, 235–36 hated of, 855 immigration, 29 Israel, 136, 140, 843 new covenant, 139 urbanization, 413 West, 29 pork, 392, 394 positional goods, 237 positive confession, 814 positive feedback, 228, 883 postmillennialism, xxvii, 129 potter, 97 poverty debt release, 419 deserving poor, 741 escape by gleaning, 731 escaping, 220 representative examples, 733 sabbatical year, 213–15 power, 240, 378, 1001 power from below, 163, 169 power religion, 856, 926–27 pragmatism, 837, 839 prayer breakfasts, 350n preamble, 13–14 predestination, xx–xxiv, 99, 279, 879 predictability, 44, 449–50, 464–65, 670, 672, 679, 712, 794 premillennialism, vii–viii, xix present-orientation (see time-preference) price inflation, 913–14 price system, 35, 55 prices (priestly), 726 priesthood authority, 490 calendar, 308–10 change in, 640 Egypt, 312, 313 linen, 645 liturgical service, 499 new (Aaron), 111 political, 156 reading the civil law, 867 royal, 473–74 rural land, 496 supreme court, 466 veto over war, 537–38

war &, 535 priests, 466, 474, 490, 522–26, 527, 645 primitive cultures, 842 primogeniture, 990 prison, 44–45 private property, 509, 652, 655, 702 prodigal son, 283, 585–86 progress, 228–31, 671, 672, 839 promise Abrahamic, 879 conditional, xix, 126, 267, 759, 879 conditions, 127 Darius, 674 God’s decree, 879 grounded in law, 187 heirs of, 114 judicial basis, 187 predestination, xxvi, 879–80 Solomon/Bathsheba, 674, 675 vow, 675 Promised Land death, 856 double portion, 208 lease’s terms, 683–84 leftovers, 735 legal title, 248–49 life, 853 Promised Seed &, 367 resources, 216 secondary inheritance, 878 title to, 684 transfer of ownership, 18 weather, 307 Promised Seed, 367 property, 509, 752n property rights disposal, 611 enforced, 971 lost child, 611 not absolute, 682 property’s value, 971–72 trade, 64 wilderness, 63–64 prophecies (messianic), 247, 248 prophecy conditional, 100, 247 circumstances, 879 conditional/unconditional, xx

Index ethical, 257–58 ethical boundaries, 376 messianic, 247, 249 predestination &, 99 sanctions, 376 three-fold, 326 prophet annulled, 101, 373, 380–83, 881 authority, 381–82 Bible vs., 382, 383 court, 502 Establishment vs., 374 false, 380, 382–83, 385, 501 income, 501–2 Jesus, 380–81 job, 97–98 Moses, 15, 378, 500 murdered, 381 ordination, 501 orthodoxy, 375–76 role, 373–76 sanctions, 382–83 signs & wonders, 374–75 temporary office, 501 test of, 380 prosperity (called to), 841, 842 prostitution, 176n proxy fights, 54 public education, viii, 89, 91, 93, 603–4, 948 Public Law 480, 974 public opinion, 57 public theology, 553–54 purity, 390–93 pyramids, 975 Pythagoreanism, 172 quantum, 139, 233–35 Queen Athalia, 484 quest for more, 123 railing, 629 railing law, 631–32 rain, 307 rain forest, 244n, 626–27 randomness, 153–54 rats, 974 real estate, 60 Rebekah, 577

1035

rebellious son Adam, 587 addictions, 592 adult, 591, 602–3 civil action, 592–93 contumacy, 595, 597, 602, covenantal disobedience, 592 criminal class, 600, 602 day of reckoning, 594 disobedience to parents, 592 dissolute, 591 glutton, 590, 591 habitual criminal, 593–94, 600 parental testimony, 590–91 prodigal, 595 Rushdoony’s view, 599–601 son of Cain, 595 stranger, 595 threat to society, 596, 597, 606 Red China, 836–37 Red Cross, 275 Red Sea, 122, 125, 265 redemption, 281, 326, 370 Reed, Ralph, v–xi, 253n referee, 781 Reform Judaism, 555n refrigerators, 634–35 Regent University, 930n regression to the mean, 828–31 regulation, 632–33 rehabilitation, 46 Rehoboam, 481, 492 remnant (captivity), 248 rendering judgment, 781–83 rent, 664–66 reservation demand, 588 resident aliens, 294 respect for persons, 39–40, 42, 455–56 responsibility, 53 rest, 119, 123, 124 restitution execution, 463 landmark, 507 perjury, 521–22 redemption, 45 status quo ante, 440n, 461 victim’s rights, 798–99 restoration, 847–48, 850–51

1036

resurrection, 193, 338 Reuben, 595 revenge, 42, 44, 46 revival, 89, 94 Rhode Island, 471 Ricardo, David, 32 rich men, 829 right or left, 125–26 risk loan, 666–67 man’s word, 706 pooled, 696–97 predictability, 679 railing law, 632 uncertainty &, 667–69 rituals, 163, 784, 891 roaring twenties, 133 Robbins, Lionel, 902, 910 rock, 19, 65, 109 Rockefeller, John D., Sr., 93 rod, 19 Roe v. Wade, 452 Roman Empire, 489n, 924, 926 roof, 629, 633–34 Röpke, Wilhelm, 699 Rothbard, Murray, 910, 911–14 Rousseau, J.J., 354, 356, 524, 678 rules, 796 Rushdoony, R.J. circumcision, 642 de-divinization of State, 923–24 dietary laws, vii inheritance, 574–75, 988–89 muzzled ox, 746–48 rebellious son, 599–601 smorgasbord religion, xxix society’s god, 254 State as heir, 980–81 tithe, 352n voluntary slavery, 650n Ruth, 762–65 Sabbath Christ, 124 corn field, 685 Egypt’s violation, 119 enough!, 123 God’s authority, 122

DEUTERONOMY

hermeneutics, 640n inheritance, 122 Israel’s history, 122 land, 119 liberation, 119–20 New Testament, xxi reasons, 116–7 rest, 119, 124 subordinates, 120, 123, 886 year, 866 sabbatical year, 401, 419, 427, 866 sacraments (Reformation), 366 sacred cows, 974 sacred/profane (boundary violation), 388 sacred space (Ark), 508 sacrifice, 330, 361, 431, 437, 812 sacrifices (animal), 260–61, 431–36, 495 sacrilege, 677 Sadducees, 260 safekeeping property, 608–10 safety laws, 629–37 Sahel, 980–81 Salamanca (school of), 471, 1004 salvation by law, 223 Samaritan, 690, 696 Samuel, 149, 374, 478, 479, 482 Samuelson, Paul, 56 sanctification (progressive), 228 sanctions annulled, 749, 839 captivity, 96, 846 charity, 420 chastening, 208–9 circumcision, 210, 287–88 civil, 734 common grace, 839 continuity, 822, 839 corporate, 249–53, 255 counselors, 55–56 covenantal, 127 crime &, 734 day of the Lord, 259, 276 death, 269 delay, 105 denial, 104, 839 disinheritance, 66 economic growth, 441 eye for eye, 452, 515, 517 (see also

Index lex talionis) foreign nations, 849–50 healing, 200 historical, 791 inescapable concept, 250 inheritance &, 5–7, 66, 325, 454, 839 inheritance/disinheritance, 5–7, 325 law &, 249–53, 269, 327 lawless, 269 long life, 24, 456–57, Chap. 70 love, 850 military, 564 national, 839 Nineveh, 105 numerical measures, 825 oath, 814–16 objective, 825, 839 outside Israel, 291 parental, 593 past, 813, 816 perjury, 515, 518–19 political theory, 250–251 predictable, 273, 811–12, 825 prophet, 781–83 ratification, 846 representation, 475 rival, 273 second commandment, 270 sins (corporate), 255 social theory &, 250 society’s god &, 254 State’s, 663 suffering, 210–11 theonomy &, 207–8 victory of church, 128–29 witness, 518–19 sanctuary, 649, 652, 653, 655, 791, 800 Sanger, Margaret, 177–78, 297 Santeria, 793 Sarah, 99 Satan bureaucratic kingdom, 633 crushed head, 447 disinheritance, xvi disinherited, 359 fallen angels, 359 prince, 163 rebellion, 838

1037

Saul, 160, 331 saving, 229 scale, 775–76, 789–92, 798–99, 902–3 scarcity, xiv–xvi, 213–14 Schaeffer, Francis, 342 Schlossberg, Herbert, 377 schools, 89, 90, 91, 94 Schrödinger, Erwin, 204–205 Schumpeter, Joseph, 356 Science, 85, 157, 169–170, 230–32 Scofield, C.I., 8–9, 91 Scopes trial, 92 Scott, Otto, 937 Scottish ecclesiocracy, 472 Scottish Enlightenment, 253–54, 905 search costs, 614, 616, 726–27 second commandment, 229 secrecy, 520–21 secret society, 172 seduction, 930–40 Seed (prophetic), 278–80, 367, 641, 760 seed, xxiii–xxiv, 247–49, 641, 759–61 seed laws, 498, 506, 530, 692–93, 760, 769 seeds (mixed), 647 “seeing is believing,” 85–86, 264–66, 303 self-government, 795, 807 self-ownership, xiv–xv seller, 785–86, 788 sellers’ competition, 788 semika, 291 separation church & State, 482, 524–27, 867 clothing, 645–46 inheritance, 494, 497–98 laws of, 638 prophetic, 500–1 revelation, 500 tribal, 641 Septuagint, 1, 78 Seth, 576, 598 shame, 543 sharecroppers, 683 shared meal, 433–36 shaved head, 556, 575 Shechemites, 577 Shiloh, 247, 248, 311, 315 shooting, 33

1038

DEUTERONOMY

showbread, 686, 687 sickness as curse, 23, 27 Sider, Ronald climate of opinion, 994, 997, 998, 1003 coercion is best, 985 consumption in America, 977 eating crow, 995 fad, 994 memory hole, 998 reduced life style, 984–85 revised edition, 993 rhetoric, 994, 1003, 1005 tract for 1970’s, 842 siege annulled, 572 assumption, 557–58 barriers to, 552 circumcision, 551 foreign policy, 569 imagery, 566–67 irreversible, 565 long term, 567–68 outside the land, 549 strategy, 563 trees, 565–66 tribute, 550 women & children, 555–57 signs & wonders, 374–75, 376, 378 Sihon, 2, 6, 13, 17, 106 silliness, 214 Simmel, Georg, 520–21 sin compounding, 22 comprehensive, ii costs of, 104–5 cultural power, 369–70 grace &, 186 father/son, 20–21 original, 258 reign of, ii representative, xxiv–xxv sanctions (corporate), 255 slave (foreign), 649, 651, 652 slavery, 275, 281, 995 (see also bondservant) slaves, 117–18 smallpox, 244n smell, 193 Smith, Adam

deist, 826, 894 Deuteronomy 8, 180 middle class wealth, 827 moral causation, 826–27 Moses &, 916 Presbyterian model, 826 smorgasbord religion, xxix snakes, 378 snow (roof), 633 social contract theory, 678–79, 704n social disorder, 35 social forces, 250 social order, 37, 594, 599, 827 social policy, 903–4 social theory amillennial, 369–71 anti-theocratic, 853 ascension &, 370–71, 886 baptized, 833, 840 Christian, 254, 273 common grace doctrine, 272 covenantal predictability, 185–87 creationism, 190–91 denial of, 834 Deuteronomy 28, 825, 832–34, 840 discontinuity (O.T., N.T.), 831 dispensationalism vs., 11–12 dominion &, 273 entropy &, 190–91, 198 eschatology &, 7–8, 198, 369–71 imputation by God, 905 judicial, 673 lack of, 328 modern, 252 Mosaic, 29 natural law, 254 pessimillennialism, 200–4 political theory, 250 Protestant, 254 Rousseau, 354 sanctions &, 250 Scottish, 254 social forces, 250 State/society, xv Trinity, 905 social utility, 914 socialism, 34–35, 56, 379, 751, 837–38 society/State, xv, 698

Index Sodom, 342 soil, xv solitaire, 193 Solomon, 487–88, 674, 675 Somary, Felix, 356n something for nothing, 168, 240, 377–80, 383–84 son (see rebellious son) sonship adoption, 297 biblical inheritance, 208–9, 297 chastening, 850 circumcised heart, 286, 299 firstborn, 208–10 God’s name, 280 Mosaic covenant, 282 oath, 210, 297 obedience &, 286, 289 servitude, 280–84 stranger, 289 see also rebellious son Sorokin, P.A., iv sovereignty consumer, 54–56, 587–88 counselors, 53 creation, 15 final, 794 (see final sovereignty) flag, 343 God’s uniqueness, 14–15 inheritance as proof, 100 man’s (natural law), 254 original, xvi–xvii parental, 611 visible, 483 Soviet Union, 37, 354–55, 792, 836–37, 840, 1000 Sowell, Thomas, 450 sowing and reaping, 531–32 soybeans, 978 Spain, 295–96 specialization (education), 149–50 speed limits, 636 speeding, 798 spies, 47–48, 52, 53, 67, 87, 110, 113, 263–64, 273 spoils, 60, 114 stages theory, 960 standards (boundary ranges), 787

1039

stars, 333, 334 State arbitrary, 712 Christians’ view of, iii contract, 678, 679 covenant lawsuit, 598 crime, 42–43 disinheritance, 584–85 double portion, 584–85 god of, 344–45 healing, 43, 479, 743 heir, 990–91 membership, 298 monopoly of violence, 461 negative sanctions only, 440n, 461, 663 peace, 251 pseudo-family, 584 representation, 524 salvation by law, 223, 479 shared meal, 433–34 social contract, 678 sovereignty, 524 substitute heir, 585 victimless crime, 252 wealth-consumer, 584 welfare, 223–24 see also separation: church & State Stein, Herbert, 586 Sterling, Claire, 981 stewardship, 18, 506, 530, 563 Stoics, 871 stones into bread, 223–24 stones (pillar), 820 stoning, 446–47, 518–19 strangers adoption, 296 agricultural costs, 409 alien, 661–62 citizenship, 435, 439 dietary law, 387 Egypt, 293 feasts, 434–35 flourish, 293 gates, 119 hearing the law, 867, 869 holiness, 387 joint meals, 433–34

1040

DEUTERONOMY

loans to, 425 meat, 386–93 permanent resident, 662 reading the law, 867–69 sacrifice, 517 sonship, 289 usury, 659–60 post-exilic, 249 rich, 294, 295 rural land, 409–10 testimony of, 75–76, 517–18 third tithe, 405 two types, 388, 658–60, 662 witness, 517–18 strategy, 51, 57, 861–62 Stroup, Richard, 895 subjectivism, 902–3, 910–19 subordinates, 123 success, iii, 126, 157 suffering, 210–11 suffrage (vote), 474–75 suicide, xiv supreme commander, 50–51 Sutton, Ray, xvii suzerainty treaties, 4, 14 Suzuki, D.T. 240–41 Switzerland, 61 swollen feet, 189, 192, 206 symbolism, 248 syncretism 156, 173, 923 Tabernacle, 530 Tabernacles (feast), 399, 865 (see also Booths) tablets, 123 tactics, 47, 52 Talmud, 260, 292, 930, 938 Tamar, 578, 769n tares, 261 taxation acceptance of, 479 arbitrary, 491 centralization, 491 control, 491–92 graduated, 584 parental support, 582 Rehoboam, 481 Samuel on, 479 theft, 973

tithe &, 479, 973–74 teachers, 320 teaching, 319–21 technology, 169 temple, 291, 848 Ten Commandments, 77–78, 116, 121, 318, 451, 889 (see also Decalogue) Tertullian, 925–28 textile industry, 581 thankfulness, 221, 809–10 theft case laws, 747 costs of, 796 God vs., 973–73 injustice, 777–78 internal restraint, 971 land, 507–8 majority vote, 584 preaching against, 971, 973 private property, 970 sanction, 507 taxation, 973 wealth redistribution, 970 theocracy, v, 453, 475, 524, 655, 833, 931 theology, 365–71 theonomy covenantal, xxvii, 886–87 package deal, 207–8 postmillennialism, xxvii, 129 rebellious son, 607 structure, 886–87 thermodynamics entropy, 191–92 finitude, 235 first law, 191 second law, 191 third generation, 19–22, 48–49, 67–68, 117, 302–3 thirst, 19 thousands, 26 thrift, 168 time arrow, 191, 235 astronomical, 235 cyclical, 310–11 end of, 138 eschatological, 310–12 finitude, 233

Index fixed supply, 143 growth &, 136–37 limit to growth, 142, 235 linear, 310–12 measuring, 784 population growth &, 235–36 see also history) time preference, 41–42, 44, 106 timidity, 305 tire, 709 tithe celebration, 398–417 civil taxes?, 399–400 collection, 497 first (Levites), 400 graduated, 988, 1002 Great Commission, 315–16 Levites, 352, 353, 400, 405–407, 494–95 Levites’ inheritance, 406, 416, 495 local storehouses, 497 mandatory, 495, 499 poor, 405 representative obedience, 815 rural, 401–402 second, 399, 401–403, 408 third, 403–5, 814, 817, 819 third year, 399, 414 token payment, 812–13 toleration, 924, 926–28, 952 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 697 tools, 707–9 tortoise and hare, 28 trade balance of, 422 empires, 63 foreign, 422 foreigners in Israel, 61–62 God’s law, 73 meat, 390 positioning, 63 routes, 62–63 untainted, 337 wealth, 62 wilderness, 59–61 world, 76–83 traders Celtic, 81–82 Hebrew, 82

1041

justice, 73 North America, 77 tragedy of the Commons, 624–27 transfer society, 796 transportation, 403 treasure (hidden), 617–20 treasures, 326 treaty, 888–89 tree of life, 566, 698 trees, 563–73, 588, 682 tribalism, 349, 642, 738, 760, 769 tribute, 102, 546, 550, 562 Trinitarianism, 365 Trinity, 356, 904–5 triumphalism, 340, 733 trumpets, 264, 463 trust & obey, i Turks (Germany), 176 tutor, 580 tyranny, 45, 269 Tyrmand, Leopold, 217 ultimate resource, 169, 215 umpire, 781 uncertainty, 667–69, 966, 970 unclean animals, 432–33 unclean meat (see meat) unclean status, 388 unconditional promise, xx uniform, 383 uniformitarianism, 143, 197 University of Chicago, 946 unjust stewards, 732–33 urbanization, 413, 697–99, 739 USSR, 37, 56, 217, 354–55, 379 usury gold mine, 665 poor brothers, 669 rent &, 664–66 sheep, 658 strangers, 661–62 value, 903, 909–10 value scale, 902–3 Van Til, Cornelius, 264, 320–21, 834–36 Vatican II, 395 vegetarian socialists, 977 Venus, 332

1042

Vesta, 336, 361–62 victimless crimes, 251–52 victims, 44 victim’s rights, 40, 44, 520, 798 victory, x, 128–29, 543–44, 861 virgin birth, 99 voluntarism, 726 voodoo, 163, 376 voting (politics), 474–75 vow continuity (N.T.), 677 contract &, 672 legally binding, 679 predictability, 670 sanctions, 673 wages, 720–28, 966 wall, 566–67, 590 Wallace, A.R., 1008 Walras, Léon, 894, 900 Walvoord, John, 360n war (declaration of), 274–75 warfare Canaan, 335 captives, 556–57 costs, 560 defensive, 554 discipline, 540–41 disinheritance, 546, 560 empires, 332, 549–55 executing males, 545 extends life, 564 inheritance, 360 mercenaries, 540 one man, 486 outside Canaan, 549 post-exilic, 560 priests, 463, 535, 539, 540 rules (Moses), 265 siege, 549, 564–66 spoils, 337 supreme commander, 50 trees, 563–73 trumpets, 463 zero-sum game, 48 warrior, 534–36, 539–40 washing, 388 waste, 730, 731

DEUTERONOMY

water, 308–11 wealth call to, 842–43 common grace, 23 confirming the covenant, 812 creation, 893 distribution, 828–31 ethical, 844 ethics &, 313 idolatry &, 856 measure of, 909 national, 915–17, 921 obedience, 314, 843 objective, 824–25 purpose, 225, 227 Sider, Ronald, 842 social, 911 temptation, 238 visible, 825–27 wealth formula, 140–42, 215, 218, 829, 831, 844 weather, 307 weights analogical language, 776–79 banking, 803–6 covenantal analogies, 774–75 idolatry &, 775 justice, 777, 799–800 representative of morals, 778–79 welfare economy, 223 welfare (family), 991 welfare State administration, 744 gleaning vs., 742 healer, 743 immigration &, 296–97 impersonal, 743 origin, 480–81 rule of law, 796 taxation, 479 third tithe, 410 voting, 176 Wells, David, 91 West, 28–29 Westminster Assembly, 469 wheat & tares, 261 white horse (man on), iv–v whole burnt offering, 547–49

Index Wildavsky, Aaron, 737 wilderness, 222–23, 324, 326 Williams, Roger, 252–53, 471, 871 witness covenantal, 100–2 defense, 515–16 execution, 595 false, 515, 518, 526 prosecution, 515 Wittfogel Karl, 309 wool, 646 Word of God analogical language, 317 authority, 317 deeds &, 317 Van Til, 321 work faith &, 325 imputed, xxv

1043

gleaning, 737 negative sanction, 117 thermodynamics, 192 World War I, 493, 538 World War II, 573, 581 wrath to grace, 313 wristwatch, 784 Wyoming, 80 Year 2000, iv, 805n, 923, 952 yoke, 644 zero-growth movement, 236–38, 243, 885 zero-sum economy, 986–88 zero-sum game, xviii, 48, 987 Zionists, 390 zoning, 238