Jeremy Rosen
Making Sense of the Bible: Can its Ancient Text be Relevant Today? Leviticus 25:24, Real Estate

Jeremy Rosen | Making Sense of the Bible: Can its Ancient Text be Relevant Today? Leviticus 25:24, Real Estate | 02.14.24

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- Hello everybody. We are today on Leviticus 25:23 and we have been passing through a whole lot of ethical, moral issues that have historically determined Israelite life at the time, some 3,000 years ago when they were primarily an agricultural society and yet there are, shall we say, generalised ideas that we can deduce from these laws that have some relevance today and the part we’re about to read now really illustrates this situation. We’re dealing primarily with poverty. And poverty comes, of course, in various situations, sometimes forced on us from the outside, sometimes as a result of our own either incompetence or laziness. And here verse 25 starts off with this phrase, unusual phrase in Hebrew, “When your brother ,” now the English translation is, gets into trouble in straights but laterally means to bring down something, to decline for whatever reason could be health. And one of the ways of dealing with that in those ancient times was to take a position as a servant or as a paid slave in inverted commas and sell yourself to somebody else.

For the other person, it was an act of charity very often, but taking care of a person and maybe his wife and children who have fallen on hard times. Nowadays we don’t think of bringing people into our homes so much as an act of charity although in recent months there’s been a lot of that of people welcoming refugees, people who have been driven out of their homes or have had to evacuate into their homes and giving them hospitality. So in that sense, this is a modern manifestation of this except that this involves a kind of what was called a Hebrew slave, an , which to us the idea of slave is a very negative term but the Torah keeps on insisting that we are all slaves, we are slaves of God in the sense that we are subservient to somebody of a higher spiritual or maybe sometimes simply a higher physical level. So when your brother, and notice how this term says, your brother, somebody you should care about, somebody who’s related to, somebody who should have some responsibility for. And as a result, he doesn’t just sell himself, but instead he’s selling his property.

So he may have some property which is in those days, tribal property which the whole of the tribe in a sense was responsible for so that if somebody sold the land outside of the tribe, it was the tribe’s job to get that back. And so it says here in verse 25, so he’s fallen on bad times and instead of selling himself, he is selling his property. And so the nearest relative has an obligation to redeem what his brother has sold. So you have the idea of a gael. Now the word gael, gaal is used quite commonly in the liturgy as , God who releases Israel but the term gaal has different meanings and different understanding. It literally comes from the word to uncover, to open your ear, give me your ears would be translated , I want to open up your ears to hear. I want this as what the does. It removes that, we are removed from slavery in Egypt that takes us out of servitude, to freedom. So gaal literally means changing a situation and therefore the nearest person has to change the status of the land bring it back to where it was before. Now then what happens in verse 26?

What happens if there’s no relative or nobody knows him. but all of a sudden he does better, he invested in the stock market or he went gambling and he’s got money, and now he can pay and buy the land back. So this gives him an obligation and a priority. It’s not as though the guy who’s bought it can now refuse to sell it back. And so you calculate how many years the sale has gone through for and you refund what’s left to the man who he sold it to. And therefore the land returns to its inheritance, which means to where it belonged originally. in verse 28. And if for any reason he was unable or never had the possibility ever so to speak of paying it back what he sells will remain in a possession of the buyer until the jubilee year. And we’ve mentioned this jubilee year, the 50th year, everything went back in history, so to speak, in ancient Israel to its original tribal origin. Of course, the tribes in a sense were scattered first of all by the north, by the Assyrians in 720 BCE, and then again by the Babylonians in 586 BCE. And so from that time onwards, there was no tribe inheritance anymore and this law, which was important first of all when they come into the land of Israel and settle now has fallen into abeyance.

But it makes an important principle. And the important principle is as we mentioned last week briefly, this idea of permanence and impermanence. We don’t accept that any state has to be so permanent that it can’t be something that is changed. And so now we turn to real estate. Now we turn forgetting the principle of inheritance that we want to divide the land up, the tribal land up fairly so that no tribes become dominant and yet in course of fact, in history they did, some did do better than others. So you can’t, in the Marxist sense, expect everybody to be at exactly the same level and the same achievement and everything has to be equally divided out because some people will take care and some people won’t take care. So we now come into a new principle and this principle in verse 29 draws a distinction between real estate in a city and real estate in the country and in a way that makes sense, agricultural land is there to produce food and on the other hand, a house in the city is just there for accommodation. So let’s look at verse 29, . If a person sells a dwelling house in a walled city, , you can redeem the sale. In other words, you can ask for your money back so to speak and cancel the sale until the end of the first year.

Throughout that year you can go back on the sale. The question is why? Why would you have to make wait a year for the sale of a dwelling house in a walled city? So historically, one looks at this and says, well, walled cities often were walls that included habitation inside. There’s the famous story of when Joshua sent the spies into Jericho in order to see what the lie of the land was before they could invade. And they went into the city of Jericho and they took accommodation with this lady called Rahab in the walls of the city. And when they are being chased to by the local police, she lets them down from the wall of the city and that’s how they can escape through the window. And in recompense for that, when the Jews invade, they tell her to put a red scarlet thread in the window so that they will know not to bomb her apartment and enable her to escape. So you see that the walls of the city also included homes and therefore in a sense, they were in danger because the bombardment would hit the outside walls first. And so in a sense, it’s like buying an apartment and not knowing there’s an airport nearby or buying an apartment and not knowing there are very, very noisy neighbours around or something of that kind next door to a school which makes a noise every day when the school kids come out.

Whatever it is the house in a busy city or in a wall city, you need to know what the environment is, what the risks are, and that’s why you have a whole year to go back on the sale. But if on the other hand there is no redemption by the end of that year, the end of verse 13, then the house in the city which has a wall goes out permanently to the owner of that person and doesn’t go out with the jubilee. So it shows that when it comes to real estate in a city, you can make a permanent acquisition, although you’ve got to give time to change. But on the other hand, it’s different from when you buy agricultural land in the countryside. And so verse 31 goes on to say, if there are houses in the villages, with no wall protecting them, they’re considered to be agricultural land in agricultural territory and as in agricultural territory, that has to return to the tribal ownership beforehand. And this indicates something else. This is also indicating the difference between those people who live on agricultural territory and make a living out of it and those who may be merchants or some other occupation which doesn’t involve owning tribal land. But there are also going to be such things as cities of the Levites.

Now cities of the Levites had a different role altogether. There were a small number of priests and priests were by and large the Kohanim were expected to live primarily around the temple. And if they weren’t around the temple, they would go somewhere further away, maybe out of the country altogether. But the Levites had a much wider role in society than the priests and there were special cities for the Levites which functioned normally. But in fact, the cities of the Levites were also what are called cities of refuge, cities where somebody would go to, if they’d either be charged with a crime but not yet convicted or alternatively had killed somebody, whether accidentally or otherwise, and there was a danger of a vendetta and out of protection they would flee to the cities of refuge and stay there under the protection of the Levites. So the Levites performed this very important function in terms of criminal law. And then as we’ll see later on the laws of how long they stay there for when they could be released and what the procedure the judicial procedure was but the main thing was that a criminal or a suspected criminal or somebody fearful for their lives could go there with their families and be accommodated and provided for and sustained in these Levite cities.

So they played a very important part in those days. And again, for the last what, 2,500 years, we haven’t had cities of refuge or Levite cities. So what we learned from this is something about the nature of the attitude to the penal system that prisons are not a healthy solution. But anyway, because of this, sometimes you need people to be restrained, of course you do, and not to threaten the public and therefore there is the option of keeping people under supervision but not this general penal system that we have in most countries today. So in going back these areas, we say if we go to the verse, where are we? 33. 32, , cities of the Levites. The houses that the cities included in them, if somebody sells, they could always be redeemed. So that facility is there. And therefore when somebody redeems something from the Levites, And this city that is sold is released in the Jubilee, the Leviim have the right to have this property back because they are performing an important role for the nation. And the cities around the Levite cities that were there to provide for agricultural needs for food and to some extent as a kind of area of ride in the area of refuge, they never get sold.

Okay, so now we’ve dealt with selling real estate and property and we’ve recognised the right to first of all to change your mind under certain conditions and also the idea that nothing should be permanent. The permanence is a religious phenomenon but outside of the religious phenomenon, that’s to say the Levite cities which were special, every all property had to go back originally to its tribal sources. Now, in fact, there is no law that applies nowadays as a result of these biblical laws, but they do indicate that the Bible was worried about anybody having too much control over too much territory or indeed too much property. And therefore this idea of trying to level things out to some extent without becoming a communist was an important lesson of social responsibility even in real estate. And so now we move on to the next stage. 35, when your brother has another example have lost his ability to support himself And therefore he comes to spend time with you And you are supporting him then Also strangers and those people from outside the community and they should live with you.

In other words, you have an obligation to support people whether they’re strangers passing through or your brother or your neighbour to support them. And so often people look at the Bible and they say, this is all talk about loving a neighbour that’s only a Jew about supporting and giving charity that’s only a Jew. That’s not the case. Time and time again when we talk about charity and support, it’s everybody who comes within your area and consider to be needy. But here’s another issue that we’ve come across before. 36, the law of interest. In the Bible, lending money was considered to be a charitable obligation and lending money to support people to look after themselves was the main source of charity outside of the agricultural, giving some of your crops to the poor. And therefore because it is considered, shall we say, a charitable obligation, therefore it’s not something you should be making a profit out of. And so much of money lending nowadays is indeed something that really causes people extreme harm and pain because the levels of money lending interest outside of banks, I mean you might say bank interest is horrible, but when you go to private loan sharks, it’s horrendous. And this is one of the main reasons why very often poor people, even in so-called rich countries, are unable to lift themselves out of the poverty trap.

So we are saying that when somebody needs your help and needs money, you should not ask for interest. And in addition to that, you shouldn’t give your food as though this is something that is a commercial agreement rather than a charitable agreement. I am the Lord your God,, this is something that God says, this is an important principle for me. I’m saying this, whether it makes sense to you or not, I’ve taken you out of the land of Egypt to give you the land of Canaan to be a good God-fearing people who are charitable and care about others and you’d better obey otherwise, as we’re going to see shortly, you’re going to get into trouble. And once again, we repeat some important principles about the nature of somebody who becomes an indentured servant. Once again, verse 39, When your brother has fallen on hard times. and he’s sold to you. you mustn’t treat him as an ordinary slave. You mustn’t treat him like a slave. You should rather treat him as somebody who is hired to do a job and is living with you on similar terms to you. And can never work for you permanently.

There’s always got to be an opportunity for release. And when he goes out He and his children and his wives who have been supported by you during all this time have been living with you, they may well go, they should go out, And he should return to his original family and to the original land which he came from. , everybody is my slave says, God. I took you out of Egypt. You should never sell another person in the community as ever as a slave and treat him as slaves were treated in those societies right up until the last couple of hundred years in the West and still to this day elsewhere. Whatever it is, in verse 43, , don’t treat him aggressively, don’t bully him, don’t force him. You should respect God. You should realise that there’s in a sense somebody or some rule or some law or some constitution that is imposing restrictions on how you can treat people who are in a sense subject to you. And those servants and maid servants, the Hebrew slaves should be with you. But there is an option, (speaking Hebrew). From other people who deal in slavery all the time and sold people, slaves in markets, (speaking Hebrew). You are allowed to acquire slaves or servants from them.

But even though as we are going to say there are restrictions. , in verse 45. And also when people come and live amongst you and they have children they want to sell or want to sell themselves and from these families that are born in that area, they can also become part of your inheritance. In other words, there are people from outside who can become your slaves and remain slaves until they are released. But as we are going to see there are restrictions. They have to abide by certain religious laws and they have to be treated according to those religious laws as well. But in the case of somebody from outside of the community, you can pass them on from one generation to another to inherit them and they might stay with you forever. Whereas when it comes to the native Israel, your brothers, you must not treat them aggressively in their sale. And so we do have a distinction here, which is a problematic distinction. I want to tell you something very interesting that there was once I was friendly, I won’t go into too many details of a very wealthy Jewish Indian family who lived for several generations in India and had acquired slaves in India that were regarded as their slaves and treated as their slaves.

When they came to England, they lived in their compound. They were still technically not according to English law of course, but now they were still technically religiously and this was a religious family, they were slaves coming from India and the master of the house made a deal with them and said, if you go to Yeshiva in Israel or in England in Gateshead and you study there, I will remove any of your status, religious status as a slave and give you your freedom. That’s a very interesting little anecdote but it shows how the notion of slavery has persisted and still persists in certain parts of the world. Okay, verse 47, If a resident gets to be poor, and similarly, your brother is in pain. And is sold on to another non-Jewish resident after he’s sold, anybody can act as a redeemer. any relative can. It doesn’t matter whether in 49 it is or any other led family connection can redeem him. And then you, somebody who himself might have been in a poor strait can redeem, anybody can. and you calculate in verse 50, the years that you are working to sell and right up to the jubilee and equivalent compensation is paid to annul the slave.

And verse 51, if there are still years remaining to the contract, then that can be redeemed to and if only there are few years, it doesn’t matter. Whatever it is, you calculate how much is left and you could always go on redeeming. And in a sense, a person will be no more than somebody who is hired and can’t be treated badly. And if nobody after all these years manages to free him, then they all go free. Because says, God, I am the master so to speak, this whole of Israel, are my slaves. , I took them out of the land of Egypt they have to see themselves as having an obligation to me rather than to other people. But if they have to go to other people, well that’s fate life and we have to make life as easy as we possibly can for them. Now here we come to the end of these series of laws and we return to the whole question of curses and blessings. Now this part that we are going to read from verse three of chapter 26 is paralleled later on in the book of Deuteronomy and is sometimes known as the (indistinct), the rebuke, the warning that is given to the children of Israel.

Look, I’ve given you all these laws from important things to less important things, to how you deal with nice things, with bad things, how you are supposed to care about other people and treat them nicely. And now I want to warn you guys, the whole purpose of you having the land of Israel is because the people who were there before were not behaving ethically and well. You are now supposed to be setting an example for the country and indeed for the world of how to live an ethical, good, and caring life. And it’s going to be based on both the relationship between you and God as the authority and between you and other human beings. Now we start off with this phrase, if you follow my laws, all the commandments I give the rains will fall at the right time. and the earth will give produce fruitfully. the tree of the field will give its fruit. and your threshing, in other words, the way you produce, you get the corn and you harvest it and you get the corn, the kernel to come out of the husk.

This process will go on permanently. There’ll be one harvest from the next you’ll always be satisfied, you’ll have enough food to eat and and you will dwell safely on your land. , verse six, I’ll make sure there’s peace on the land. You’ll live on the land that and you won’t be terrified nothing is going to disturb you. and I’ll make sure no wild animals invade. And the sword will never come through your country. , your enemies will pursue you. , they will fall by the sword. , and only five of you will be able to drive off 100 and only 100 of you will be able to drive off 10,000 and your enemies will fall. I will turn towards you verse nine. You have lots of children. I will establish my covenant with you. You’ll be able to eat grain that’s been stored for a long time, could have so much you’ll be able to put it in storage. And you will remove the old corn out of the store houses to make room for new and you’ll be able to sell it cheap or export it. I will dwell… I will dwell in you. And I will not reject you. I God will walk amongst you. I be your God you’ll be my nation, my people. I’m the Lord your God. Who took you out of the land of Egypt. For you to be slaves to me. And I will break the yoke of those who oppress you. Go forward standing upright and confident and not crushed.

Wow, that is heavy duty. And I’m sure we all have a serious problem with this statement. Are you really telling me that if we behave, then the reigns are going to come at the right time? And are you really telling me that we are going to be protected all the time? This sounds improbable. And unless what you say is as some people want to put it. If it doesn’t happen that way that’s because we are not all behaving well and because too many of us are behaving badly. Now of course, as a rationalist, I have a problem with this. I was made to feel a little better when I discovered that there were declarations of the Assyrian and Babylonian kings who when they came onto the throne, made a declaration to their people, almost identical to these words that they are guaranteeing that if everybody is loyal to them, they will do everything to protect them.

But of course we know this has rarely happened. There have been a couple of moments when good kings, whether might say David or Solomon or maybe King Hezekiah and various others were in charge of Israel and things were going well and the borders were expanding and they weren’t subject to war. But look at the Bible basically their constantly being attacked, constantly under pressure, constantly divided and as you look at the prophets constantly corrupt. They are not behaving the way the Torah asks them to behave. And therefore it is possible to say that since ever since the beginning of the Torah, we have not all been behaving well. There’s this myth that we were all righteous or all religious in the past, but we weren’t. There’s always been conflict and fighting of the sort that exists today within the Jewish community. And therefore in that sense we have never been able to give God the chance to prove that God will do all these things. And then the question is, what then is the nature of reward and punishment?

And here this seems to indicate very clearly that if you do what God wants, God will reward you. But on the other hand, he’s saying this to the nation, not to the individual. It’s the nation that counts. And it’s the nation that in a sense determines it’s fate. It’s the politicians who decide there are a lot of very good people in the United States of America, but there are a lot of corrupt and disgusting politicians who are in many cases and I’m not referring to one party or another, dragging America down from the sort of ethical vision that the fathers of the Constitution envisaged. And one might say the same thing about Israel too and certainly about Europe and wherever we look. And therefore, although this sounds so improbable when we actually stop and look at it, the fact is that’s how life seems to work. That good people working hard, at least for themselves, are able to provide a sense of living the good life.

But they can’t do it for everybody else. We should support other people but that doesn’t mean to say we can dominate other people. We should look after the poor and those who need our support. That’s an obligation. But we can’t be held responsible for the whole of society even though I will come eventually to a part of the Torah which implies we are responsible for the rest of society, but sadly we fail and we are selfish, self-centered people. And unfortunately that applies to religious as well as to non-religious and no group is perfect. But this formula that we are seeing here, which is repeated, which goes over and over and over again, which offers blessings and then offers what we call curses, was the normal language of those days just as the oath of God was a way of frightening people into behaving. So in one sense it’s no different to what happens when there’s a policeman around and you behave yourself.

Of course that doesn’t happen anymore in New York or in much of the United States where of course the role of the policeman now has fallen down or has at any rate being degraded. And I’m not saying part of the police force has not been corrupt, every human body is being corrupt. But you have a situation in New York where you can beat up a policeman in the streets in front of everybody. We’ve come across a pretty poor pass. So that is where we have the actual blessing. Next week we will conclude with what the curses are in part two of this, which parallel all the blessings. And so who is one of the major examples of what I’m talking about has this whole declaration that I am now the king you must serve me and ab obey me. And if you do as I tell you to do, everything will be fine and I’ll protect you. But if you ignore me, I’ll smash you and destroy you and make your life hell.

So at that we will stop the screen sharing and we will come to the questions and answers and see where we go from there.

Q&A and Comments

So Susan says verse 25 of 27 is the computation based on difference from seven years. There are two computations here. There’s the computation in the seven year system in which you have to go free at the seven year. What has not been mentioned here is another law which says that assuming at the end of the seven years you want to stay, you like it, you don’t want to go out into the white big, bad world, you may then stay on until the jubilee and then you may go free. But that means that even during that period, there could always be redemption.

Q: Arlene says, if reclaiming land in Jubilee year what’s a realistic price? What if the land has increased or decreased in value in the last 50 years? A: There was an important word in there that I didn’t mention and thank you for mentioning it. The word is (indistinct), to calculate. And therefore the obvious answer is there was a calculation and calculation will have done by the courts. All these issues are controlled by what are called, , the judges. And there was a judicial system which evaluated everything, whether it was injuries or whether it was redemptions or whether it was arguments of any kind, as in our days and having courts was considered to be the first thing. And in fact, what’s interesting is that even before the 10 Commandments, it is Jethro the father-in-law of Moses who comes along to visit them and sees that he’s trying to be the judge of everybody and he says, “This is not going to work. You’ve got to set up a system of elders of Zekenim and of judges who will be able to administer the whole of the nation. One person, a single dictator can’t do it. And certainly not without a legal system.”

Susan, some Jewish communities have free loan agencies. This is true. This is what’s called in Hebrew. , short for being kind. Free loan systems are an essential of every religious community in which you lent to the poor for free because this is the requirement. The laws of lending for interest, it’s easy to say, it was easy to say at a time, an agricultural time, but by the time you get to the second millennium, and we are dealing with Greek merchants and Roman merchants, this was a problem that many people could only make a living using interest. And so as with other examples, they had to find a way around the law. And the way they found around the law was to say, “No, I’m not paying interest. I’m making you a partner in my business and I’m paying you a partnership fee.” Now this basically is what Islam has, what is Sharia compliant also like the biblical law is against interest, it doesn’t allow interest. And yet as you know, the Muslims lend for interest as much as anybody else. And Sharia compliant is rather similar to what became known in Torah as this is an an Aramaic term. is business the Hebrew word is to be busy doing something and means permission. has now come back after being ignored for many, many years. And in most Haredi communities, they’re using it in the same way that Islam uses it for them.

Shelly, what does it mean in chapter 25:37, which says, after no interest, do not give your food for interest. No profiteering precisely, that’s what it means. Profiteering from people who are needy and need food or need something, don’t benefit by charging interest. Treat this within the framework of charity. Thank you Carla and Solomon. Thank you for interpretation clarification.

So no this is not much to talk about this week and therefore there are no more questions. We will call it today and hope to see you next week. Thank you and goodbye.