Ruth - Immigration and Welfare
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Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Bryan Broome.
It’s good to see you on this fine morning. We usually do our recordings in the weekday evenings but we’re recording in the morning today, which is kind of fun, so we’ll see if that changes the energy level of our conversation at all.
Today we’re talking about Ruth. We talked a little bit last week about the Christmas-y of Ruth, the love story, the biblical imagery, the foreshadowing, the orchestration of events to bring us the Messiah. Today we’re going to look at the societal background of Ruth, the practice of gleaning, immigration and welfare policy, to see if we can determine some principles of justice and compassion and things like that.
Yes, there was a time when 1984, Brave New World, and Fahrenheit 451 sounded like fairy tales.
Jumping in then – If you were here last week, you heard maybe for the umpteenth time the story of Ruth, but something that many Christians aren’t quite as familiar with because they haven’t read the Old Testament very much is the whole socio-economic background of the story.
Here is a foreigner, an immigrant, coming into Israel. Now, is she an immigrant? Well, yes and no. Technically she’s married or was married to an Israelite, which should count for some kind of citizenship.
She’s like a green card holder, but the temptation will be to see her as an outsider. Her accent will be different. Although I don’t know exactly the nature of a Moabitess language, I don’t think anybody else does either. Her great-great-ancestor 400 years earlier had been Lot, who spoke Hebrew after a fashion, but there were no doubt some Canaanite influences, so probably the Hebrew she spoke would be accented, a little non-colloquial but rather formal and odd at times.
She would dress differently, wear make-up differently. There would be customs and such that would not make sense to her initially, and in that sense she experienced a lot of things that immigrants coming to the United States today experience, trying to communicate with people speaking really fast in idioms they don’t understand.
On top of that, the nation she came from, Moab, although distantly related to Abraham, had not been nice to Israel. When Israel had come out of Egypt some 300 years earlier, depending when this is set exactly – it might have been more like 150 – Israel had come to the borders of Moab and asked for bread and been denied. That makes the whole story ironic, that Naomi and her family fled Bethlehem ‘the house of bread’ to go to Moab, which had always denied them bread, so there’s all that.
Moab had also had a hand in that whole thing of hiring Balaam to curse them, and at some point, possibly just before this – and this may explain the famine – Moab had invaded Israel. Remember the whole story of Ehud. So Ruth had a lot going against her, even if officially she was the widow of an Israelite. Perceptions could have been very, very negative here, but there were no immigration restrictions in Israel. There’s nothing in the law about fencing out people who want to come.
Now, there are some things that made it more complicated that we’ll talk about in a bit. But simply coming in and even settling down in and of itself was not forbidden, was not illegal. In fact, the Bible assumes throughout that if God’s people are walking with him faithfully, if they’re keeping covenant, that Israel will be a place of justice and peace, agricultural blessing, and opportunity. It will be a place people will come, and many will come for the name of the Lord your God, Moses says.
There was the mixed multitude even coming out of Egypt at the very beginning, and he’s constantly referring to the stranger that is among you.
Yeah, so it was an assumption that this would happen. And I’m going to say this now so maybe you can help me remember later. The Puritan idea of a ‘city on a hill’ factors into this to some extent, primarily as it influenced American foreign policy later, not so much as the Puritans themselves understood the idea, which is two different things. But ideas are not responsible for what people do to them as time passes.
So Ruth is coming and the welfare policies of Israel were wide open to immigrants. At first that sounds anti-libertarian, anti-conservative, and terribly frightening to a lot of Americans.
Because the welfare policies amounted to, “You’re invited to go out and work real hard and keep whatever you have, but we’re not paying you. What do you think?”
It’s your time. The one thing that was required by the law but not necessarily enforced by the state, although the church might have enforced it, was this practice of gleaning that we’re going to look at here in a second. It was the opportunity to go into the field of another after they were done with their first round of harvesting.
You didn’t get to go in in the middle. It wasn’t your field. You couldn’t just walk in whenever you want – well, actually you could, but you couldn’t walk in with harvesting tools.
No, nor could you even bring say a basket until the harvesting was done. One of the odd details of the law that recognizes God’s sovereignty over human ownership was that since they’re God’s fields, God says if you’re walking through an apple orchard and you want to grab an apple as you go, that’s perfectly fine.
We have an example when the Pharisees accused the disciples of working on the Sabbath. They were walking through wheat or barley fields and grabbing a snack and threshing it, and no one said, “Hey, that’s theft.” Everyone knew that was perfectly fine. You just couldn’t put it in your pockets or put it in a basket or something, so there was that. Nobody needed to starve in Israel. All you had to do was take a really long walk through fields that were ready to harvest.
Aside from that, gleaning was something that happened when the initial harvester was done. God required that the owner of the field not go back and get every last piece. If they forgot something out there, leave it. So this is an intrusion on natural property rights, but it’s ordained by God, not by the state, and there is no evidence that the state had any authority to enforce it. God enforced it.
You want to go on having good harvests? It’s kind of like the tithe. You want God to bless you? You better walk with him. You better imitate your Heavenly Father who does good to all and makes the sun to rise on the just and the unjust and sends rain upon all.
The church might have had some hand in enforcing it if there was a consistent abuse and refusal, but short of that it was mostly a matter between the landowner and God, which meant that the landowner retained enough title to say, “You, but not you. You’re a troublemaker, get out. You’re the deserving poor, you can come in.” We talk about the deserving poor in My Fair Lady and such.
Let me go ahead and read two of the passages where the gleaning laws show up. There are one or two more, but this should do it. This is from Leviticus 19:9.
And when ye reap the harvest of your land, thou shalt not wholly reap the corners of thy field, 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.
When thou cuttest down thine harvest in thy field and hast forgot a sheaf in the field, 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.
That is to say that is one of the reasons for which he commands them, and one which should resonate with them. “You were slaves. You were poor. You were destitute. There were times when it was hard to eke out a living. You should understand and you should be willing to open your hand to these people who need food.”
The three categories keep showing up: the stranger (foreign immigrant), the fatherless (orphans) and the widow (a woman who’s lost her husband and may have no family to support her).
The first responsibility would fall to the family. Widows shouldn’t have to be out there if they have family members, but not everyone did, and not all family members are godly. So there’s the basic principles of gleaning. It means you go out and do what’s undone.
I also wanted to just point out, looking forward there’s a lot of gospel representation in that kind of set-up, not only for the believer, where it’s an expression of trusting God that he’s going to bring enough provision that you’ll be able to provide for yourself and make a profit by selling what you harvest in the first pass.
Without having to pick up every little last thing, you’re going to be okay.
Exactly. God will provide for you enough that you can also bless others by leaving behind the rest. But then also the fact that it’s kind of pointing I think in a picture to the overflowing blessing that the new covenant brings. In picture form it’s basically saying, “Look, we bless people so much that it overflows into the destitute as well.”
Also if you’re thinking of yourself in this kind of “simul justus et peccator” kind of mindset, that means you are benefiting from the overflow of the gospel because you’re fatherless, apart from God obviously. You’re without support. You’re a widow, in typology anyway.
Exactly, and you’re a stranger from God, apart from God bringing you into his family.
Thank you. Let me add to that now that you’ve opened the door. By the way, there was a phrase in there I did not get.
Okay, I feel uneducated, thank you. Once you slowed it down I might have been able to get the Latin, but I had not heard that before, but of course it’s a glorious truth.
Our visiting pastor last week or the week before greeted us, “Hello sinners!” and everyone said, “Hello!” He said, “Hello saints!” and everyone said, “Hello!”
Oh, that’s lovely. I had one classmate in a Greek seminar in college, where the professor, Dr. Eric Hutchinson came in and said, “Hello, weirdos!” and this student dropped the class immediately. He was like, “Okay, bye.”
Anyway, let me take Bryan’s beautiful, wonderful, accurate analogy or extrapolation from the text, because the section I just read said, “You were bondmen.” Let’s consider what that means. We were in bondage to sin and death, and that’s not something we’re imposing on the text. That’s something God draws out from one end of scripture to another – the house of Egypt, the house of bondage. “I have delivered you. I redeemed you,” the language of redemption. So as those who have been redeemed from sin…
Yes, so we should be joyfully willing to share, first of all, that very redemption with people, those overflowing gospel blessings, and in addition or at the same time, because it’s not truly in addition, it’s just an extension, the earthly blessings that attend kingdom life.
Like everything Bryan just said, God provides for our soul, but on all levels, both what we often call spiritual and that which we often call material, but for the whole man that we should be more than willing to share those.
That’s exactly what Jesus is saying in the passage I alluded to earlier, “Love your enemy.” Why? Because God does. Be like your Heavenly Father. He’s good. He was good to us when we were his enemies, when we were children of wrath even as others.
So this overflowing gospel abundance – let’s keep the focus there, not just common grace, whatever that is, but this special grace overflowing through God’s people into the surrounding culture should move us to want to help people, not because of common humanity exactly, although that’s part of it because we’re all in the image of God, but because we are beggars who have found food, telling other beggars how to find food.
If we’re willing to do that and we can’t actually reach into our larder and pull out a real piece of bread and hand it to someone who’s starving, there’s something wrong with us.
Exactly. “Be warmed and filled. Yes, Snoopy, be warmed and filled. Be of good cheer, Snoopy,” while Snoopy is still shivering in the snow. It’s easy to be like that. We’re getting ahead of ourselves, but that’s fine.
Well, we’re getting ahead of ourselves by talking about the heart of the issue, because if we start talking about immigration and welfare without talking about the gospel, we’re going to end up in neo-conservatism land.
That was wonderful, and in the process I forget exactly what I was going to say next, but I mentioned our common humanity. We’re all made in the image of God.
The figure that we use for evangelism as beggars telling other beggars where to find food, that has to be key for us. That has to be at the heart of a Christian welfare theology, the gospel itself. If we don’t start with the gospel we end up off-track into some kind of conservative or libertarian plan for the economy.
Yeah, and then we would have to try to backtrack and do it. Again, I really appreciate it, Bryan, that you brought that up when you did, because it’s not in the original notes I made. Shame on me, because now I’m tempted to go back and rewrite them. It is basic that we are talking about God’s goodness to us in the gospel, as it ought to overflow to those about us.
The temptation here, as elsewhere, is when God says, “Do this and I will bless you.”
No, that’s not what it means – context, context, context. The context is God’s overwhelming grace to Israel. “Be like your Father in heaven,” is what Jesus tells us. The Sermon on the Mount is not law in that sense. It is kingdom life for those who are already Jesus’ disciples. It is what it means to be in that circle of blessing. If you are blessed of God, if the Holy Spirit is at work in you, you will want to imitate your Father and these are the kinds of things you will be doing.
When Israel was at her best, when God was at work, when she was faithfully following her Lord, when she was believing the promise of Messiah, Israel would be a wonderful place to live for anybody, and thus the immigration and thus the gleaning laws. It was a very practical way for landowners or farmers to say, “God has been good to me. Come and share the bounty” – again, an echo and extension of gospel living. But with this, there’s still “Thou shalt not steal” and the very principle of stewardship.
The farmer owns, under God, the land and he’s responsible to see that it’s not abused and that people working on it are not abused. You have the troublemaker who comes in and tries to harass the ladies who are working, or tries to grab their stuff. No, you kick him out.
The New Testament requires, “If one will not work, neither shall he eat.” That’s the basic principle, but it’s easy in what we pretend is godly materialism – covenant living, “Do this and live” –
“Okay, that says that there’s this guy in the street and he’s obviously not working, so I should obviously not give him anything ever, and if you do you’re an idiot. You’re only perpetuating his poor work ethic.”
That’s not what that’s saying. It’s saying you should not put him on permanent welfare in your church and require nothing of him. It doesn’t mean that you can’t take a water bottle and hand it to the guy who’s standing out there sweating to death and say, “Here, have this,” or even hand over what’s left of your hamburger from McDonald’s and say, “Not very nutritious, but maybe you’ll like it.” There’s nothing in scripture that forbids those kinds of things.
I know people who are like, “You know that guy is just faking it!” Well, he may well be, but I don’t know that and God’s not going to curse me because I was generous. How generous is God to people who He knows actively hate him, and yet he keeps doing good things for them for Jesus’ sake, for the broader growth and spread of the kingdom and its effects beyond the moment.
As we look at this, the farmer has to consider these kinds of things. “I need my land to be safe when people are gleaning, so some people can’t come, but some questionable people I may let in if I can keep an eye on them, because I’ve got a soft spot. God’s convicting me about this,” or whatever.
It’s easy to turn it into a bureaucratic checklist kind of mentality, where once you’ve checked all the boxes and met all the qualifications, then you can go in, then you can do this. Then we’ll weigh it on the way out to make sure you have your fair share. Eventually it turns into, “You’ve done the boxes, you’ve done the checking, okay, go ahead,” and he drives out a truck or two, because we forgot something in our regulations and they get abused.
The thing about gleaning is when it is done right it is inevitably personal. It’s the farmer’s land. He’s not going to want just anybody on it. He’s going to want to know what’s going on there, because it is his stewardship. It is his responsibility. So that’s some of what goes on here.
It is not a government- or state-run welfare system. It is, in some sense, a free choice of those who have farmlands. The farmer is not free from all responsibility. In fact, he’s forced to a greater responsibility because it is his land and he is responsible for what happens, so he’s got to keep an eye on who comes in and who goes out and who he doesn’t let in. He needs to know names. He needs to know backgrounds.
“I’ve just been through the formal elders-at-the-gate check-in point. See my card? It’s green and clear.”
You had to actually know the guy. “That’s just old Sam, you know. He could work harder, but he’ll work for what he gets here. But that guy? Yeah, he’s trouble. Tell him to leave, and if you need help I’ll help you make him leave.”
I’ve seen this in the swing dance community. I haven’t been doing much swing dancing lately, but back when I went to a lot of workshops and things, there was one about organizing your scene and sort of the pedagogical side of it, and one of the points is, “This is a social thing. You will have people there who are there to be creepy. Part of your job in running the scene is to boot the creeper out of the place.”
It’s kind of ironic to me because a lot of the people who are, I guess you would say, high up in the swing dance world are very leftist, so they see the necessity of booting the creeper from their own scene where they have people to protect, but they don’t necessarily see the necessity of it on the level of who’s allowed in our community as a whole. It was just kind of ironic.
Also, when you take this form of welfare and basically turn it into a landowner-directed way of doing things, you also avoid the propensity of governmental oversight. It’s basically the principle that the closer to home things are being run, the less likely there is for abuse, oversight, misappropriation of funds, etc. In that limited sense of the word, it’s a very libertarian type of set-up for welfare.
You still have the social pressure, more or less, of a society that’s like, “Jim’s not letting people glean from his fields. He’s kind of a jerk.”
Yeah, and your pastor may come and talk to you about that. “This is what God did for Israel. You need to remember this.”
It’s also good because instead of somebody just being on the dole for government cheese or whatever – I think that’s a fun way of phrasing it, anyway – there’s also a potential for them to actually grow and have character change. It sounds uncaring to say that it’s a good thing for someone to suffer for their poor character traits, but it actually is because it might help them become better characters.
Also it’s not just the power of hard work to change people. It’s forcing them into contact with other members of the community who can share the gospel, which will actually change their hearts.
It’s an opportunity for God’s Spirit to work through circumstances. It’s a lot like spanking your kid whom you love. A spanking does not generate new character, but the spanking gets the kid’s attention and he realizes, “This is not a fun path.”
There’s a passage in Jeremiah where God tells Israel, “Taste the bitterness of your sins. Look at your wickedness. See that it is indeed a bitter thing that you’ve forsaken the living God.” An unconverted soul can understand the horrible situation, the pain that sin has brought him to. Now, that does not mean he will convert. It just means he knows, “This stinks. I’ve done something wrong. I made a mistake somewhere,” just like a spanking. “That was not a good idea. I don’t think I really want to do that again,” but that’s short of a heart change.
As Emily says, if you’re out there watching the owner and you’re working alongside a lot of people who actually want to be out there because they don’t want a handout, they want to provide for themselves, they want the self-respect of knowing that what they brought home was not a handout, it was something they worked hard for – because gleaning is hard work, much harder than the first round of harvesting – that is an opportunity for character change to happen through the gospel, and even in some outward forms for some. “Just putting 2 and 2 together, I want to get out of here so I better start working a little harder.”
Yes, and that’s hardly saving, but it’s something. Again, the Bible does say, “If anyone does not work, neither shall they eat.” This is that being put into application in the old covenant.
There’s more to the welfare system, and we probably should address it now just to get it out of the way. Another thing is the mandatory – and mandatory meaning not state-enforced but God-enforced – principle that if your brother/neighbor/fellow Israelite, even possibly the God-fearing stranger in your midst, is really poor and comes and asks for a loan, assuming that his character is good, you’re supposed to give it, and you’re supposed to give it without grudging, and you’re supposed to give even if it hurts a little bit.
Yes, interest-free absolutely. He’s got six years to pay it back, and if he doesn’t then you’re supposed to forgive it. That’s huge.
Again, since it’s not government-enforced it does become in some regard a matter of personal discretion. Is this guy poor because of illness? Because of accident? Because of fire, flood, or blood? Or has he simply been lazy for a long time?
Okay, maybe he’s been lazy for a long time, but do I see a change in character and a real rededication to try to make things right? Or is it simply this guy’s a jerk? He’s a lazy good-for-nothing, but he has the sweetest most wonderful wife and really cool children and I want to help them, so I’m going to take a chance.
That again puts it back at the level of personal discretion and personal faith in one’s own walk with the Lord as to what God requires of you here now, and no one else gets to tell you what that is. Again, if your pastor and elders see a consistent Scrooge-like tendency to never help anybody, they probably should talk to you and, under certain circumstances, some kind of church discipline might be in order, but that’s going to be extreme.
Yeah, good stewardship does not trump this principle of helping your neighbor. It’s not as though you are obliged to do the thing that is the best financial decision numbers-wise. It’s like, you have seven years. After that it doesn’t matter. Get it through your head and your heart that it does not matter.
It doesn’t matter. God will take care of it and God will reward you on every level that he knows to be appropriate and necessary to your needs. It may not be that you’ll get it all back, or you’ll get it all back 10-fold or some nonsense like that. This is not a ‘name it and claim it’ health and wealth kind of gospel. This is simply the real gospel that says God has been good to you so be good to other people, while not neglecting your own responsibilities.
Your family does come first, but that’s feeding and clothing and housing your family, not necessarily your third trip to Disneyland this year. Again, those are things that you’re going to have to answer to God for. I’m down on that third trip to Disneyland, but maybe that’s just me. Maybe under some circumstances that is important. I don’t know, and God judges and not me, so that’s the wonderful thing of it, the personal freedom here.
The enemies of freedom will say, “But if you trust people to do that, they won’t give anything.” It’s amazing how liberals who in theory believe in the goodness of the human heart suddenly mistrust it when it comes to us leaving the ordinary citizen to dole out his money as he will. Then suddenly the common guy is greedy and a capitalist and – what’s the wonderful opening line for Scrooge – “a grasping covetous old sinner.”
The Bible does not assume that human nature is good, but it does assume that where God’s people are covenanted together in a society and God’s Spirit is at work and the gospel is being preached, there is going to be a general trend toward giving stuff to people who actually need it, and we can trust that. We can trust freedom. We can trust God’s people with freedom, and we can even trust people who are not covenantally committed to God, but are living within the sphere of their society happily by choice, that even they might do some good things.
So you go to your unconverted neighbor and say, “I’m collecting for this charity,” and it’s amazing how many times they’ll write a check, and sometimes a bigger check than the Christian neighbor would. This is where common grace properly understood comes in. This is the overflow of the effects of the gospel, as people learn, “There’s something beyond me, and being nice is one of them and I want to be nice.” It may be a self-help kind of gospel they’re living out, and yet it does produce a certain kind of outward charity and that’s a good thing.
Also, if you want the quote about Scrooge, I pulled it up. I love the words. “He was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge, a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner, hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had struck out generous fire. Secret and self-contained and solitary as an oyster.”
I’ve always wondered why he says oyster and not clam, but that’s something else. There’s our tribute to the Christmas season, in case one does not become obvious someplace along the line here. But Christmas is over by the time listeners hear this.
We’ll have to talk about Epiphany sometime. Most people have no idea what it is, because we’re Americans and we don’t do that.
The second thing is the 3rd-year tithe – well, both tithes together. Every year you were to tithe, and since Israel was an agricultural society, it generally wasn’t every week for the farming community. It was at the end of each harvest, and they would take their tithes to the Feast of Tabernacles and tithe then. People who lived in cities and made their money elsewhere could tithe weekly, as they chose. Under the new covenant, Paul recommends laying aside every week as God has prospered, but doesn’t set down a lot of tight regulations for how that works exactly.
One of the functions of the normal tithe was to help out people who had legitimate needs, the legitimate poor, the deserving poor. The tithes were given to the elders, so the elders would have oversight, just to make sure that you’ve got your head screwed on right. “No, it doesn’t go to your wayward daughter who is out carousing all night,” or “You don’t like him much? But you know what, God is working in him. We would like to be able to help him.” So you have advice and oversight from your elders in one direction or another.
This is a little bit of a sidenote, but as you mentioned Paul kind of shifts the focus to weekly, but then Paul is talking mostly to the Christians in particular cities rather than people in the country, which ties into this whole theme of beginning in the garden and ending in the city.
Thanking you for complicating it yet again. There’s more here than I realized going in. Remember to get us back on that, because we do have to talk about it. The gleaning laws applied to the agricultural districts. They didn’t apply to the cities.
So there was that, but every third year – and this can be taken in a number of ways, and I don’t have a firm position so do what you want with it – in some fashion, either as a separate tithe or as a distinct use of the tithe in the third year, the tithe was dedicated to the poor, which meant that every third year the deserving poor would get a shot in the arm. They’d get a windfall. It wasn’t every year, though, which meant that you’d get a fairly large sum of money, one assumes, but it’s this year.
Now we need forward thinking. We need future orientation. There are possibilities here. If I am literally incapable of working and there’s nothing I can do with just my hands and my mind, and I really can’t do anything, then I need to parcel out that money over the course of three years. That’s going to take some planning and some self-restraint and self-control. I can’t go out and binge it all, buy a new TV and a new car and then suddenly I have nothing for the next three years.
On the other hand, if I am able to work and my poverty is not because of some debilitating illness or accident but it’s because of some temporary setback, I can now say, “Okay, three years. I can use this as capital and I can begin investing it in some kind of family business, buy some tools or something with which I can earn more money.”
Again, the temptation will be, “Wow, I got a lot of money from the government. I got a stimulus check. I can just spend it all right now and stimulate the economy and do good to all people.” No, that’s not how this is supposed to work. There is call here again to future orientation, hard work, planning and thinking, and maturity, as so much of this is, because next year you’re not going to get that special handout, so you have to think ahead.
Of course, the basic charity in all of this that I skipped over is that of family. Paul says if anyone will not provide for his own, he’s denied the faith and is worse than an infidel. In the context there it’s actually talking about grandchildren taking care of the grandparents, although the application is much broader, of course.
If there are widows, let their family take care of them if they have sons or grandsons or nephews, the King James says. Charity begins at home most literally. If they are church members, you are to require it of them and that goes first, then the church, and then in the final step in the new covenant the church takes up for those who are widows indeed, Paul calls them. He has a detailed list of virtues and track history that these widows have to conform to. They have to have served God. They have to have been full of good works and hospitality. They have to be seeking God with prayers.
Then in such extreme cases where there’s absolutely no one else to take care of them, the church can put them on the roll. There was an office or status of widow in the church, where the church paid everything. But Paul sets some hard restraints on it, like an age restraint and the admonition that, “If you can get married, get married.” This is for those who are truly, truly destitute.
So Christianity, and biblical Judaism before, does have a lot in place that we would consider a welfare system, but of course the thing that is absent is any kind of government coercion, government planning, government oversight – government here meaning state. There’s family government. Church government is involved to some extent. But the first line is self-government, stewardship of one’s own property, and then the broader concept of family government, where you take care of your own and then you share what your family has earned with those who are in true need.
Paul sums up the commandment, “Thou shalt not steal” as “Let him who stole steal no more, but rather let him labor with his hands the thing that is good, that he may have to give to him that needeth.” So thou shalt not steal, according to Paul, means 1) stop stealing.
And we often stop there, but stop stealing. 2) Work hard with your hands and your mind and whatever else, and 3) so that you may have. When I’m teaching this, students will often miss that part. They’ll jump to, “so you can give it.” There’s something in-between there. You have to have it. You have to have not blown it all on wine, women, and song, or your favorite hobby.
Yeah. It’s not there just to spend and make comfortable people more comfortable, including yourself. It is there in part to share with people who need it.
Again, oftentimes our liberal friends are correct in their criticism of people who adopt a capitalist mentality. Now, I’m distinguishing a capitalist mentality as we know it from capitalism. Capitalism is an economic system. Of course, it does not provide for the poor. It is a description of how the market works. Providing for the poor is not part of the bargain as such. It takes the gospel to move people to provide for the poor, so trying to stretch capitalism to be a religion is a mistake of huge proportions, as is stretching socialism to be a religion, but that kind of comes with the territory.
Their basic assumption is that the economic situation will change people’s hearts and lives, and thus their giving habits or spending habits or whatever. Christianity says, “No, describing the market is not the same thing as telling you how you ought to live.” We keep these things distinct and realize, “Yes, you earned this. That does not mean that it is yours absolutely. God gave it to you. God owns it and God can tell you what to do with it.”
The future orientation applies here also. It’s not just to those who are in need and have to budget the pennies that they have. It’s that you don’t know how God is going to give you opportunity to bless other people in the future, to be prepared for when that opportunity arises.
I may have left out something. If you can think of something else, jump in. We’ve talked about the family. We’ve talked about the tithe and the 3rd-year tithe. We’ve talked about gleaning. We’ve talked about 0% charity loans. These were to cover basic necessities so that someone could either feed himself or get the necessary capital to start feeding himself and his family.
Notice all the things that today welfare in the broad sense covers that aren’t here. There’s nothing here specifically about medicine, except insofar as you might want to use some of this money to get well so you can go work.
Yeah. There’s nothing here about education. There was no centralized educational system in Israel, any more than there was a centralized medical program. These were things that were either extensions of family life, functions of family – mom teaches the kids at home, and when they reach a certain age you send them to the rabbi to learn the Torah properly, or maybe you have an uncle or an aunt or a grandmother, or maybe you get together a co-op of people, or there were the Levitical schools. You want to turn out scholars? Then send them to other scholars.
There were all kinds of choices, but they were all free-market, and so our libertarian friends should applaud that one, and the same thing with medicine. There was nothing that told you how to go about that.
But Jesus does say, to the consternation of many, I suspect, “They that are whole need not a physician, but they that are sick.” Jesus acknowledged that doctors are a thing and at least potentially a good thing, and you may actually need one. But he doesn’t say that therefore the state should provide one because this is a real and genuine need. It’s not a state function, any more than education is a state function, no more than welfare is a state function.
At this point we’re talking about old covenant life, and this may be the point to shift gears a little, so let me sum up. Here are things that Israel did and things Israel did not do. The underlying principle is it’s all God’s stuff. God should work in you a willing heart; therefore, you should prepare to be willing and to give wisely.
If you are in poverty, you should be willing to receive responsibly and plan ahead and try not to stay in poverty. You should try to pay off loans and such, and you should be willing and desirous of working, rather than receiving handouts, if you can. The Bible recognizes that sometimes you can’t.
Begging was a legitimate thing in Israel, but generally beggars would be known to the elders of the gates. I don’t know if there was an official license. I think there was by Jesus’ time, but we’re not told how that worked. Again, they were small communities. The elders would know, “Yeah, that’s Sam. He could work just fine. He has a bad back every Thursday.”
Of all the beggars that I can think of in the New Testament, mostly they couldn’t walk. They weren’t just there because they had nothing to do.
We’re not told about Lazarus specifically, but I think given Abraham’s appraisal of him we can assume that he was physically incapable of caring for himself, so even begging can be a thing. The church put widows on its rolls and paid completely for them. You could have a godly beggar who really honestly can’t do anything, and he’s going to still ask to be in church/synagogue every Sabbath day, and the church is going to arrange to get him there. So you know this guy and you know his needs are legitimate.
Again we’re back on personal knowledge, personal responsibility, so those are things that carry over pretty easily. However, as we said, gleaning is something that worked in the agricultural parts of Israel. It didn’t work in the cities, nor is there any requirement for the cities to find some form of imitation, although it’s possible.
When Goodwill originally started out in American society – and I don’t know to what degree it still does this – but the goal was, “Go collect people’s castoffs and let disabled people work on them and repair them,” so they would actually be working. You were gleaning off people’s stuff and people would actually work, and out of that would come both money for themselves and money to perpetuate the program. That’s kind of gleaning.
There are records of immigrants who came to America having nothing, and their first thought was, “America is so rich. Look at all their junk they just throw out. I’m going to start collecting it. Wait, they appreciate me taking it away. I will now charge them for collecting it.” We think of garbage collectors sometimes as a low calling, but it’s not.
Right, because most people don’t think they want to do it. Now the trucks do all the work for you. When I was a kid, trucks didn’t do all that much. We had big beefy guys who would get out and they would pick up those trashcans and they would sling them up into the maw of the truck’s back and flip the switch to do the crunching. Now the guys just sit in the truck and kind of look out and punch some buttons, which is fine.
We’re not inclined to think of this as a profitable – and sometimes not even as a respectable – occupation, but it most certainly is, because you know what happens when we have garbage strikes in say New York or Chicago or even Sacramento. It gets real gross real fast, and suddenly we find out how important these people are to the happiness and cleanness of our daily lives.
This was not something that Americans, with all of their stuff, were quick to adopt, so foreigners and immigrants came in and did it, and some of them got really rich off of it. So that’s something you could do, but practically in terms of what the law actually says, since there was no requirement for that and no particular incentive to do that, the place to be would be on a farm.
In this sense, rather than the cities – as they have from the time of Rome, perhaps earlier – drawing people to the cities where there are bread and circuses, Israel’s policies would push them back on into the fields where there’s hard work.
Now, that was the old covenant. When we come to the new covenant, there’s nothing said specifically about this kind of thing. As you say, Paul wrote mostly to churches in big cities. He talks about taking care of widows, but he does not specify even in passing or in allusion anything about gleaning.
The closest thing might be, “You shall not muzzle the ox while he’s treading out the grain.” That’s just, “Pay people for the work they do.”
The gleaning system operated only in the countryside. There was no corresponding system for Israelite cities. The net effect would have been to drive the most desperately poor out of the cities and into the fields.
This reinforced Israel’s tribal arrangement of land, and the Promised Land, together with its tribal divisions, played a key role in the promise of Messiah. The Promised Land was Emmanuel’s land (quoting from Gary North). 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.
God is no longer concerned with the location, distribution, and separation of tribes of Israel because Emmanuel has come, so any attempt to cut and paste is kind of beside the point. We aren’t an agricultural society. It would have been interesting to look ahead and see how many farmers there are now versus how many farmers there were 100 years ago.
In fact, I’ve heard the statistics in the last week. I think one of my girls maybe was doing a paper on it or something. The change is significant. We don’t need as many farmers because of improvements in technology in farming, but we still need food. We still need farms, but the shift has been, as you say, away from the garden and toward the city.
God kind of held that back in the old covenant, but when we get to the new covenant the emphasis throughout the gospels is Jesus goes from village to village and town to town, unlike John, the last of the Old Testament prophets, who goes out into the wilderness and calls people to him. Jesus goes to the people in their towns and villages.
The apostles go to major cities, and most of the cities they go to we still know about today. Some of them still survive, like Rome. Some of them we have the archeological ruins of. We know these were big cities, so they moved toward populated, cultivated, civilized, economically developed areas as the gospel expanded.
So to cut and paste is not the ideal, but understanding the underlying principles is. I have a list here, and you can see if I missed something.
The poor, even the deserving poor, don’t have a legal claim on anyone else’s property.
God’s law doesn’t give the state the authority to redistribute wealth – that is, steal from taxpayers – in order to alleviate poverty.
Charity works best where the one who gives knows the character and needs of the one who receives.
The best sort of a welfare system is one that allows and requires the deserving poor to work for their food or money and rewards them according to their diligence.
Farmers and urban businessmen would do well to see how they might make their unused resources available for modern forms of gleaning. Notice the tentativeness there.
Those who give to the poor should discriminate on the basis of moral character, not ethnicity or national origin.
I had thoughts as you were going through them, but I don’t think they are essential principles. They were just sort of commentary.
That’s all right. I’ve said the phrase ‘deserving poor.’ We need to talk about the deserving poor, especially since My Fair Lady gives an entire section to it. The deserving poor means people who want to work and who have real needs, not people who don’t want to work and want a lot of drugs and alcohol. Eliza’s father in My Fair Lady complains, “I’m the undeserving poor, but I still have the same needs and wants as everyone else.” Yeah, well, you’re dealing with a God who has a standard nature of holiness and justice.
And it takes humility to be willing to submit your life to the judgment of someone else to determine whether you are diligent, honest, upright, and hard-working.
So back to this issue of immigration, then. In Israel you could come from another country. In Ruth’s case, she had married into Israel so legally was entitled to more than others, although again there might be the local prejudices, but by her faith and hard work she overcame those prejudices, by and large.
You could come and you could conceivably buy a house in a town. You could certainly rent one. You could rent and lease property out in the fields, but because of the jubilee laws you could not buy land. You could buy it for a time, which we would call leasing, but in the jubilee it would revert.
You could become an Israelite by circumcision, attending the three required feasts, and by pledging to fight in the militia as needed, with a couple of exceptions. Edomites and Egyptians took three generations before they were allowed to do what we would call hold office or vote in Israel, because there’s a recognition here that culture matters. Just because you’re here doesn’t mean you get the nature and the culture of this covenanted society.
So just as the church does not ordain novices and does not even necessarily ordain somebody who came to Christ late in life and is trying to figure it all out, we wait and ordain those who have shown themselves mature in the faith and settled and not given to weirdness. The Bible seems to say it’s okay to do that kind of thing politically, too.
The United States does this to a limited extent. We expect new immigrants to go through citizenship classes, and many come out understanding American history and culture far better – at least they used to – than the products of our public school system. You can think of 12 Angry Men and the immigrant, apparently a Czech but he sounds Italian, who talks about the glories of being able to be on a jury and all that.
There were many things you could do if you were adopted into a tribe. Then you could own land, because you might inherit it as part of the tribal system or at the jubilee. So there were restrictions on what coming in meant. You could be there, a God-fearer and a foreigner, a stranger, recognized as such, and do business and profit and grow rich and be protected by the equal laws that governed Israel, without ever actually becoming someone who could do what we would call vote or hold office. But those were possibilities open to you, if not in your generation then perhaps three generations later.
There’s an assumption that everyone understands what it means to be ‘in Israel’ versus ‘out of Israel.’ This is not an absence of borders. There’s a very clear definition of who’s in and who’s not.
Absolutely. The Promised Land had very distinct borders, and Israel was authorized to defend her borders from outside assailants, including roving bandits and such. But anybody could come across and trade and leave. Anybody could come across and stay if they could find a place to stay, but they were required to submit to the laws. They didn’t get to do whatever they wanted, and exile was a possibility if you violated Israel’s laws.
But by coming you did not get government welfare. You did not get government education. You did not get government health policies. You had to work, but you had the freedom to do it. This is what we can hold up at least as the beginnings of a model for immigration and welfare in these United States.
We’re not anywhere near ready to do it, but showing people, “Yes, the libertarians have some right ideas. The liberals have some compassion or something,” or think they do, and some of them really do. But simply feeling compassion is not the same thing as doing the compassionate thing. The tender mercies of the wicked are cruel. We have to consider what God considers to be merciful, and sometimes that means working really hard and sweating and doing without.
Well, it’s difficult to stop there but we have to stop sometime. Do we have any recommendations to wrap up? I have one. I can go first if you want.
I’m going to recommend an app called You Need a Budget (YNAB). One of the things I do on the side is financial coaching, which is not telling people which investments to buy or anything like that. It’s just walking alongside people and helping them figure out their budget and their goals and how that works.
YNAB doesn’t pay me, and I kind of wish they would because I really am a fan, but my favorite app is You Need a Budget. It’s great, especially if you are married and need a convenient way to communicate about money with your spouse. Because it’s electronic, you can each have access to where dollars are.
One of the best strengths of this app is that it’s not retrospective, like say Mint, which is not my favorite app by a long shot. It’s very popular, but the idea of Mint is you can look back and see where all of your money went, and YNAB is much more about telling your money where to go. It’s putting dollars that you already have into categories so that you can be working toward your goals, so I really recommend YNAB. It’s not free. I think it works out to something like $5/month, but we’ve found it very worth it in our family.
I’ll go next. E. Calvin Beisner, years ago now, although he’s updated it, wrote a book called Prosperity and Poverty: The Compassionate Use of Resources in a World of Scarcity. It’s a wonderful book. It’s a book that if we could afford it we would use as a textbook at our school, instead of simply capitalistically borrow a lot of what he’s done.
Of course, he’s hardly original. He’s also borrowed with credit from a lot of writers who I know. He’s one of the few who gives a tip of the hat to people like R. J. Rushdoony and Gary North, saying, “I don’t buy into their whole system, but here’s some points where they’re looking at biblical law and there’s some stuff to learn here,” so I appreciate that.
It’s the compassionate use of resources. He understands it’s not all about how I get to keep my money and you don’t get any of it, but how God blesses us so that we can bless others. It’s written I would say at about a college level, although some of my students have been able to wrestle with it and profit from it, and he’s written a number of other books along these lines that you may find a blessing. He’s a professor at Covenant College.
I’m going to go ahead and take a left turn from both of those genres of recommendations and recommend a YouTube channel. It’s a cooking channel, basically. It’s this guy named Ethan Chleblowski, which will be in the show notes.
I ended up bingeing a bunch of his episodes this week because I had free time and I was very excited to do some of the things he suggests regarding meal planning, and also just very fun kinds of recipes like braised short ribs as a weeknight reheated meal, and pierogis from scratch. For those who don’t know, pierogis are I think Polish versions of dumplings, so they’re delicious like all dumplings are.
So that’s my recommendation. He also gives really basic nutrition breakdowns of the nutrients and stats like carbohydrates and fats and all that kind of stuff that goes onto a nutrition label when you buy it in the store, but you can’t do that when you’re making it yourself.
In particular, one recipe that I’m excited to try is risotto-style pasta, where you just cook the pasta in a wok with a small amount of water and let the water absorb all the starch and reduce down into the base for a sauce, then add cheese and meat and vegetables and stuff, and basically work it into something very – yes, that was my exact reaction watching the video, Greg.
I haven’t had breakfast and now I am suddenly so hungry. That sounds great.
Thank you guys, so much, for this conversation. It’s been a delight. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband.
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