Testament, Volume 13 #6

Economy Based on Love of Neighbour

When God called our spiritual ancestors out of well-managed slavery in Egypt, the summoned, startled people set out on an exodus whose depths took generations to unfold. There is an important aspect of this journey that we tend to ignore: God called our ancestors into an entirely new economic relationship with one another, embodying the great commandment of love of neighbour. This theme is strong in the book of Exodus. It is central to Deuteronomy and Leviticus. The prophets, who arose mostly after the paradigmatic covenant economy had already been betrayed and abandoned, always longed for its presence and its moral fruits.

To a degree that minds accustomed to modern capitalism can barely imagine, the covenant economy was egalitarian, neighbourly and grateful.

Every family in Israel had its own land. Not a lot of land, but not a trifle either--enough, with careful labour, for subsistence, celebration and sustained sharing. That was an astonishing development, and Israel knew it was astonishing.

They lived with the memory of successful, dominant Egypt, full of control agents and storehouse-cities and slave-labour motivators and centralized planning. Egalitarian landowning would have seemed ridiculous to the pharaonic imagination. Ordinary families in Canaan didn't get to own land either. It simply wasn't the way of things in the ancient Near East. But in Israel, a whole ring of radical laws and a wonderful cycle of liturgical-agricultural feasts were developed to support the difficult goal of letting every family have--and keep--its own land base.

Of course, some people were more "successful" than others, even in an economy that started out by giving everyone a roughly equal stake. But religious law limited the gap that could open between "hot shots" and others in the covenant economy.

The law prohibiting the taking of interest on a loan is an obvious example. So is the law insisting that a debt must be cancelled if a fellow Israelite has been unable to repay it within seven years (the original "sabbatical year"). Even more radical is the jubilee law, the famous command in Leviticus that returns land to the family of the original owner every fiftieth year.

The passion for limited, more or less egalitarian family ownership reflects the underlying goal of the covenant economy: the maximization not of profit or production but of human development. (And environmental harmony, too, but that's another article.) The life of responsible, effortful freedom within community was prized above "competitiveness" or "efficiency."

The covenant lifestyle was seen to include not only responsible work but also contemplative gratitude for a particular piece of God's creation: one's own inheritance, experienced as gift from God and fruit of salvation history. The economy was ordered so that it could contribute to a covenant lifestyle. Israel deliberately subordinated ambition and "market forces" to this human and religious good.

Laws, feasts and customs wove neighbourliness into every strand of economic life. Landowners in the covenant economy were urged "not to reap your field to its very border, neither shall you gather the gleanings after your harvest....Leave them for the poor and for the stranger." Feasts of God were celebrated by the lavish social sharing of first fruits. You thanked God by feasting on God's gifts, received through your work on God's land; but you shared your feast with "your manservant and maidservant, the Levite, the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow who are within your towns."

Some of the commands of the covenant economy must have been supremely difficult to observe. The poignant description in Leviticus 25 of the obligation to share your work (not only your surplus!) with "your brother who becomes poor" is a good example. So that the less successful can still be respected contributors to society, you welcome them onto your land to "live beside you" and "serve with you" until the jubilee year. That's a lot more demanding than giving a handout!

This ancient, vulnerable economy inspired by love of neighbour was persecuted in every generation of its brief existence, from the brutal Midianite raiding parties in Gideon's time to the elitist and alienating schemes of King Solomon the Export-Oriented. But epiphanies of God's Reign in history are always persecuted, as Jesus' "Beatitudes" make very clear.

Reviving the memory of the covenant economy is particularly urgent now, when an insane rhetoric of unlimited competitiveness has destroyed almost every strand of deliberate community and neighbourly accountability in an economy altogether given over to Mammon. For it is only by struggling daily against the awful moral distortion of present-day economic "rationality" that we can live as modern covenant people.

Janet Somerville is associate editor of Catholic New Times in Toronto and a contributing editor of Compass.