Due Cause for “Alas”
Photo by Nima Izadi on Unsplash
Israel departed from Sinai with the final command of the Decalogue’s tenth law still in the air. The three-fold “covet” continued to ring in Israel’s ears:
You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor (Exodus 20:17).
It turned out that this divine prohibition is the premise of much of the prophetic indictment of predatory power in eighth-century Israel. That is a long time after Sinai, but not so long that the ear-ringing could persist among Israel’s poets. The prophetic critique, drawn from the command, is a reprimand and a warning to aggressive confiscatory powers in Israel that we preoccupied with transferring wealth and property (land) from vulnerable peasants to the centers of acquisitive urban greed:
Ah, you who join house to house,
who add field to field,
until there is room for no one but you,
and you are left to live alone
in the midst of the land!
The Lord of hosts has sworn in my hearing:
Surely many houses shall be desolate,
large and beautiful houses, without inhabitant.
For ten acres of vineyard shall yield but one bath,
and a homer of seed shall yield a mere ephah (Isaiah 5:8-10).
Alas for those who devise wickedness
and evil deeds on their beds!
When morning dawns, they perform it,
because it is their power.
They covet fields, and seize them;
houses, and take them away;
they oppress householder and house,
people and their inheritance (Micah 2:1-2).
The prophets unerringly portray a system of usurpation that over time had transferred wealth and property into the possession of a powerful few at the expense of the large peasantry.
In what follows, I propose to juxtapose this biblical analysis of acquisitive greed and wealth transfer offered by D. N. Premnath, Eighth Century Prophets: A Social Analysis (2003) and the contemporary expose of predation by Matt Kennard, The Racket: A Rogue Reporter vs the Masters of the Universe (2015). The juxtaposition of these two books shows the way in which the ancient concern of Sinai is readily pertinent to our current global crisis of wealth, poverty, and debt. The connection between the two bears sustained attention. There are, to be sure, limits to what can be accomplished through the pastoral preaching and teaching of the church. But I pursue this juxtaposition in the conviction that the church can go far in establishing the terms of our social discourse concerning the matter, and when the church defaults in silence on this responsibility, the conversation is soon co-opted by nefarious interests that want us not to notice the way in which the ancient text provides critical standing ground for our contemporary context. The articulation and establishment of such biblical terms requires stamina and resolve, but the matter isn’t complex or hard to grasp. The biblical attestation concerning property, wealth, and social power readily provides a lens through which to see what is happening among us, even if it is on a scale unimagined in ancient times.
The church and its pastors can readily engage in a socio-economic analysis that has in purview both ancient text and contemporary practice. In biblical testimony, along with the “tales” of Achan (Joshua 7) and Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5), the most compelling dramatization of class warfare is the confrontation between Ahab with his vast royal power and Naboth in his peasant vulnerability (I Kings 21). The land-grab by the usurping king is illustrative of the greed of the powerful that Premnath so well notices and documents. This narrative concerning political-economic leverage would be routine and hardly noticed, if the narrative did not finish with the fateful appearance of Elijah (vv. 17-29). Left without Elijah, Naboth would be no more than a nameless victim of predation. But Elijah’s intrusion introduces a fresh dimension into the narrative, namely, that both the predatory king and the vulnerable peasant live in a world governed by the justice-invoking God, YHWH. The reality of this God in the narrative assures that Naboth cannot be dismissed as merely a nameless victim. The prophetic intrusion into the narrative keeps the story open for fresh resolve. The work of divine justice is here postponed and delayed. But it is not nullified. And so it is registered that Jezebel, Ahab’s colluding queen, had to give answer for the state murder of Naboth (II Kings 9:30-37). The logic of the Deuteronomist is that such inescapable closure to the royal violence must occur.
The contemporary counterpoint to this ancient prophetic tale is well articulated by Kennard. The premise of his book is that a “class war” is being waged and the poor are losing (54). This is a sober reiteration of the jocular quip of Warren Buffet that “my side is winning the class war.” The current effective mode of waging that war is through appropriation of goods, resources, and management of resources, the transfer of wealth and property away from public ownership and supervision into the eager hands of the powerful few who are skillful at covertly monopolizing public reality for their own gain. Among the efforts at privatization, Kennard notes especially the privatization of water:
In 2000, the so-called “Water Wars”, centered in the city of Cochabamba in the middle of the country {Bolivia], had pitched the local communities en masse against the government and the World Bank which had overseen the privatization of the water industry and resultant soaring prices. Police had been instructed to arrest people collecting rainwater to avoid the new prices they could not afford (pp. 182-83).
Beyond water, privatization includes a monopoly of land ownership.
The land distribution has led some analysts to describe the set-up as akin to “semi-feudal provinces dominated by semi-feudal estates.” Five percent of the landowners control over 90 percent of the arable land (183).
Such a circumstance is a clear counterpoint to the harsh realities articulated by Isaiah and Micah.
Kennard deftly looks behind this alarming data to the causes and justifications for such displacement of peasant communities. He identifies the forces that make such displacement possible. With reference to Honduras he names the convergence:
neoliberal economics, the support for the military institution, the hysterical anti-leftist ideology (172).
This triad has sought to legitimize neoliberal economics as the only possible way to manage the economy, and has mobilized that ideology to make such practice inescapable and beyond challenge. The presence of a strong military that operates at the behest of the ownership class assures the maintenance of public order in the face of predation. Kennard sees, moreover, that this combination of factors is an expression of “US imperial power” that is characteristically on the side of the predators and indifferent to the needs and requirements of the peasant population. The unchecked greed, moreover, gives rise to unsustainable luxury and self-indulgence that is everywhere on exhibit among the ownership class as an echo of the old phrasing “ease in Zion” (Amos 6:1-6). Such exhibits of course evoke deep hostility, but a strong military suffices to check any emergence of a serious threat to the monopoly. It is for good reason that Kennard terms the predation a “racket” wherein huge tracts of owned agricultural land has displaced peasant farm production. In the short run, such agribusiness is no doubt productive and prosperous. But such agribusiness does not and cannot care for the land. Thus we may, over time, see a reiteration of the indictment of Isaiah that the land will not be endlessly productive when it is uncared for. There can be no doubt that a peasant farmer cares for the land of family inheritance more attentively and more wisely than agribusiness is ever wont to do.
Thus it turns out that the tenth commandment is not merely about neighbor envy, nor about the have-nots yearning for what the haves possess. It is rather a dire warning against economic practices and land policies that permit the strong to occupy and control more and more of creation at the expense of needy neighbors, and at a cost to the wellbeing of creation. We may notice that British “laws of enclosure” in the 18th and 19th centuries gave impetus and expression to private ownership of land, and took away from the peasant community the right to use and forage from such lands. The laws are the front edge of the process whereby everything is privately owned and practiced in a way that denies access and resources to a needy population that previously could use and benefit from the land. And of course, the pressure toward privatization continues among us with pressure for the privatization of schools and of health care practice to the diminishment of the public good and public concern for the growing population of the needy among us. The parallels to the old prophetic critique are so clear and shrill that one need only recite them to see their continuing pertinence to our present circumstance. The needs of the working poor are so acute that they can readily produce competition and fighting for low-paying jobs, to the benefit of the ownership class. What stands out in Kennard’s analysis is the fact that the strong interventionist propensity of the US government is characteristically and predictably on the side of the predators, and against the needs of the populace.
Serious redress of such an arrangement is of course not easy. But before he finishes, Kennard offers a commentary on the economic crisis in Bolivia, the most economically staggered economy in South America. He sees enormous hope in the leadership of Evo Morales and his movement, MAS, that has insisted upon and implemented land reform. In such a reform, many of the great landfundia have been broken up to permit peasant cultivation of some land where small farmers can produce a viable living. It is of course no surprise that Morales and his movement have evoked immense hostility and opposition, not least from the US government with its military muscle.
Thus the impetus for redress from land practices of monopoly and displacement requires precisely land reform and the capacity to reassign land to peasants who can manage on small acreage. It requires no imagination at all to see that this confiscation is a replay of the old scandal of land monopoly in ancient Israel with the force of covenant being fully on the side of a neighborly economy of small tracts of land without the monopoly of large ownership.
It will not surprise the reader that I write these lines to urge and insist that the church now, in its preaching and in its practice, might step into the conflict between the imposition of the power of great wealth from above and the assertion of public ownership of the engines of our common wellbeing. We in the church have developed a long-running practice of preoccupation with spiritual, other-worldly matters. But such a long-running habit, well reflected in the common lectionary, is difficult to maintain in the face of scripture itself. Thus it is my hope that in this urgent time, we break such a habit and attend to the main claims of scripture. Most of us are not very brave or knowledgeable about such worldly matters. At the very least, we will do well to let the congregation have access to the texts that voice urgent assumptions about the political economy. For the most part, these texts have been disappeared from our purview and our common reading. We may, however, consider the most elemental claims of faith and see how they impact our economic reasoning.
Consider the Ten Commandments as a case in point. Off the top of my head, this much seems obvious:
-The first commandment is an insistence that our singular loyalty is to the Lord of the Exodus, the great emancipator from economic enslavement:
I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slaves; you shall have no other gods before me (Deuteronomy 5:6-7).
We may wonder why it is that we have, in general, come to prefer the version of the commandment in Exodus 20:1 and its claim for the creator over the emancipator God of Deuteronomy 5.
-In the second commandment, we have a prohibition against “idols,” false articulations of reality among us that take the form of ideology that skews reality always again in our favor.
-The fourth commandment is an insistence that the truth of our life is not in our work, our achievement, or in our accumulation, but in rest and gratitude that provides and insists upon a respite from the world that demands endless productivity. Implicit in such an affirmation is a readiness to settle for less consumer goods, and a resolve to live more modestly.
-The tenth commandment of coveting is a prohibition of usurpation from the neighbor of what we would like for ourselves.
We have learned to take the commandments privately and individualistically, and even that is worth the effort. What is required here, however, is that we see the commandments as policy statements for the management of public resources among us in which the public has access to and benefit from public goods. The combination of the Exodus narrative and the Sinai commandments assures that our focus is on public economic matters. A privatized gospel is an easy comfort, but it is hardly worth the effort.
My primary preoccupation in scripture these days is the collection of narratives concerning Elijah and Elisha where the deep issues of economic neighborliness are acutely joined. Elijah and Elisha are repeatedly cast in a role that is juxtaposed to the ruling house of Northern Israel which, for the most part, remains unnamed and unacknowledged. We may see that this juxtaposition concerns a trajectory of inexplicable social transformation and a trajectory of greedy impotence on the part of the royal house. It is the vulnerability of the prophets that strikes one in the narratives. They have no protection and are endlessly at risk. But their vulnerability seems to be a precondition of their amazing transformative capacity. Conversely the royal house specializes in greed; its greed goes with it impotence so that the kings are uniformly unable to make any difference in the lives of their communities. I am alert to this remarkable contrast because the church in our culture is increasingly vulnerable and without claim or resources. I risk the guess that it is exactly through such vulnerability that God gives transformative energy in the community. We are put on notice about the seductions of power and the potential of vulnerability, precisely a counterpoint to the affirmation that the foolishness of God is wise and the weakness of God is strong (I Corinthians 1:25).
