What Naboth Teaches Us Today Part III
From my initial exposition of the story of Naboth’s vineyard, we can retain three important learnings:
The narrative concerns a dispute between two systems of land ownership, inheritance and possession.
The dispute between land systems is rooted in a dispute between YHWH and Baal. YHWH is the champion of land as inheritance; Baal is the sponsor of land as possession that leads, in turn, to commoditization.
This unequal struggle between these two land systems is interrupted by the sharp, critical appearance in the story of Elijah who is a truth-speaker, who exposes the unsustainable folly of royal patterns concerning commoditized owners.
On the basis of these learnings, I want to reflect on an earlier book by Fred Pearce, The Land Grabbers: The New Fight over Who Owns the Land (I commend this book as well to you). The question of who owns the land is an urgent one among us even as it is an ancient question. As early as King David in the Old Testament, the question is posed by Abner, the general who led the forces of Saul who posed a threat to King David. He puts the question directly to the king:
To whom does the land belong? (II Samuel 3:12)
I take the question by Abner to be a mocking challenge to the king: “So you are a king; act like one and claim the land!” It was an old practice that kings could preempt property from others according to their own will and whim (see II Samuel 10:9-10). The contemporary mode of that practice is that those with money and power characteristically can have property that belongs to others, whether by paying huge irresistible prices (gentrification!) or by “eminent domain” and other legal acts. Land tends to gravitate toward those who have socioeconomic, political leverage.
Who knew?
The gist of Pearce’s book is that he traces a most remarkable contemporary economic reality whereby nation states that lack adequate food resources are in process of buying up the land of others and using it to produce food that is exported back to the home state. This practice is most prevalent among the oil rich states of the Persian Gulf. The leader among those states who have money but lack food resources is Saudi Arabia. The Saudis tried to grow food and operate dairies in their desert land, but it was too expensive and required too much of the limited ground water. As an alternative, the Saudis turned to Africa and have bought up huge tracts of land for food production to be exported for the Saudi population. And, of course, because the Saudis are rich in oil they have the resources to offer extravagant prices for land that local leaders in Africa cannot resist.
The outcome of such a policy is at least two-fold. On the one hand, the practices of local agriculture are disrupted. As more food is produced for export, less food is available for the local population. On the other hand, the urgency of production means that the land is exploited and overused and thereby depleted, thus in contradiction to traditional farming methods that allowed the land its normal processes of recovery and restoration. Thus, the land grabbers may secure food, but they do so at an enormous cost for the indigenous population and for the land.
It is a clear case of land as possession and not as inheritance. The example of the Saudis is reiterated by many other cases that Pearce fully documents. In practice, the old question of Abner to David is given: the land belongs to those who have means and resources. Those who have long occupied the land are profoundly vulnerable to the pressure of such demand (as vulnerable as Naboth!) and are without means to resist or to protect their land.
I suggest that we may pause, in light of the Naboth narrative, to reflect on the “land grabbers” who have skewed the political economy. Ahab, in the narrative, is such a land grabber. To be sure, he only wanted land for a “vegetable garden” (I Kings 21:3). The assumption of Jezebel (and derivatively of Ahab), however, is that they could have possessed much more of Naboth’s land, as much as they wanted, by the privilege of the royal office. Ahab grabbed only a little, but Naboth would be helpless if the king had grabbed a lot more of his inheritance.
We may reflect, for a moment, on two well-known and dramatic land grabs. The first is the coming of white Europeans to the Americas. While the arrival of white Europeans in the Americas is a complex narrative that admits of many “explanations,” the simple fact is that it was a moment in which to seize, occupy, and possess land that was home to others.
Long behind that historic land grab that gave it important impetus is the papal decree of 1493 called “The Doctrine of Discovery.” That papal declaration handed the new world over to Spain and gave Spanish adventurers and the Spanish government the right to occupy the land and to possess its resources, and the freedom to either convert the “natives” to Christianity or to kill them if they did not conform. The “doctrine” assumed that a land “discovered” by Europeans could be occupied and possessed, with permission to dispose, as deemed necessary, of the extant population. While the “doctrine” is very ancient and pertained only to Spain, in practice it was soon generalized to apply to all Europeans in their colonizing reach.
By the 1820s, moreover, the “doctrine” was written, by the Supreme Court, into U.S. jurisprudence that became the basis for the aggressive “removal” policies of President Andrew Jackson. The “Doctrine,” alas, remains technically in effect even today! The outcome of the action of the land grabbers was a genocide in the United States, all on the basis that white Europeans who occupied the land had entitlement to the land by “discovery” and could remove present inhabitants as necessary either by death or by relocation.
The notion of U.S. exceptionalism, already articulated by Cotton Mather, provided the ideological grounds for the policies and actions of the land grabbers, all made religiously legitimate and resounding with patriotic piety. That ideology of exceptionalism made appeal and reference to the great land grab of the Bible that has echoed in subsequent legitimacy.
Second, as a basis for the legitimacy of the white European land grab, the biblical narrative of the Book of Joshua has provided theological grist and grounds for such action by Europeans in the New World. In the Bible (as in the biblical commentary of Cotton Mather), the narrative of the land grab is given theological foundation as the performance of the promise of God. Thus, in the Bible behind the book of Joshua is the promise to Abraham and his heirs of a new land given by God:
“Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land I will show you.” (Genesis 12:1)
“To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates, the land of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Raphaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, and Girgashites, and the Jebusites.” (Genesis 15:18-21)
“And I will give to you, and to your offspring after you, the land where you are now an alien, all the land of Canaan, for a perpetual holding; and I will be their God.” (Genesis 17:8)
The articulation of “Greater Israel” is traced out in the promise of chapter 15. That articulation is one that continues to haunt the contemporary state of Israel with its dream of a “greater Israel.” The promise to Abraham affirms that the land is a gift given by God to Abraham’s family. By the time of the book of Joshua, of course, what is given now must be taken, so that the promise is transposed in the text to an effective land grab. The Bible is never able to reconcile the generosity of what is given to the forcibleness of what is taken, any more than Americans can reconcile “the discovery” of the new land with the violent disposal of indigenous people.
In her recent brilliant commentary on the Book of Joshua, Carolyn Sharp (Joshua: Smyth & Helwys Bible Commentary 2019) meets the issue of genocide in the Book of Joshua head on:
Joshua is a genocidal and colonizing text. What drives the plot is the project of the Israelite army taking territory from the indigenous Canaanite inhabitants, killing or enslaving them as necessary for Israel to establish permanent control of the material resources and political spaces represented by the regions of Canaan. The book of Joshua proclaims the rightness of militarized colonization, grounding its inevitability and blessedness in God’s purposes and enacting genocidal warfare in its narratology at the level of character development, discourse, and plot. Within Joshua, we read a justification designed to overcome the implied audience’s horror at the planned annihilation of indigenous noncombatants. (44)
We must acknowledge the violence prompted by means of the coercive rhetoric of Joshua, nearly as pervasive as the violence of events narrated in chapter after chapter. Throughout the book, it is claimed over and over again that to be faithful, the covenant people must give themselves, fully and unflinchingly, to the ideology of militarized colonization and the merciless extermination of indigenous peoples. Those who support the genocidal ideology are portrayed as glorious heroes, as is the case with Joshua and Caleb. (53)
It is clear that land grabbing is at the heart of the biblical narrative (whatever may be historical reality), even while it is given eager theological justification.
There is no doubt, moreover, that the land-grabbing of the book of Joshua became a warrant for the land grabbing of white Europeans, not only in America but in New Zealand and Australia as well. The cry for Lebensraum, made familiar to us by Hitler, is a very old cry that is a deeply engrained in the modern world and our U.S. place with it. Along with “living space,” land is essential for a secure food supply. Thus in her analysis of the expansion of Charlemagne in the eighth-ninth centuries Janet Nelson comments:
The state that inspired him [Charlemagne] was the Christian Roman Empire; a very large state that depended crucially, like all empires, on management of food supplies (Janet Nelson, King and Emperor: A Life of Charlemagne (2019), 297; see also James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States).
Modern states like Saudi Arabia simply continue the practice to do what they deem necessary to assure a reliable food supply, including grabbing the land of others. In the lore of my German antecedents coming to the new world, there is a report of a letter that an early German immigrant, Duden, wrote back to Germany. In the letter, he urged immigration to the new world, precisely to Missouri, because the land was so fertile that one can “grow two potato crops in one season.” Talk about a secure food supply! In many cases of that requirement of new land for more food, acquisition requires wholesale violence. In the case of my antecedents in the new land, this featured systemic violence against Native Americans.
In light of the tradition of aggression for the sake of land and food now being pursued by modern nation states, Pearce turns his attention to the traditional peasant alternative to such aggressive land grabbing in the pursuit of food. His contention is that traditional farming done by agricultural peasants is the most productive of food and the most generative of good land:
Smallholder farming is the solution rather than the problem [says Jules Pretty), a success story waiting to happen. Small farms have great potential to increase their output—but also to raise the incomes and improve the livelihoods and skills of their operators. (301)
In one specific case in rural Nigeria, a peasant farmer asserts:
Crops grow much better with manure … I don’t use chemical fertilizer at all … We can double our yields here easily and improve the environment at the same time. (299)
The contrast between peasant farming and big industrial farming is clear and unambiguous:
Simple measures of tons of grain per acre may suggest big is best. But small farmers bring many other things to the kitchen table. Official statistics often ignore the fact that they use every corner of their plots, planting kitchen gardens where mechanized farms have vehicle yards. They gather fruits from hedge rows. They have chickens running in the yard. They feed animals on farm waste and apply the animals’ manure to their fields. They raise fish in their flooded paddies. Big farmers may have access to more capital. But ultimately their purpose is to generate returns for that capital—to please their investors, rather than to feed families. (295)
In response the former president of the Rockefeller Foundation comments:
[A green revolution] will be driven by smallholders—the 33 million smallholders in Africa with less than two hectares. The people from whom that continent gets 90 percent of its food. It is their productivity that we have to improve. (295)
It is easy enough to ponder this data from Pearce and return to the Naboth story. Let Ahab and Jezebel be a stand-in for big industrial farming, while Naboth a smallholder peasant who treasures his “two hectares” as his inheritance.
The contrast is clear among us now as it was clear then. Of course it is a great leap from Ahab who only wanted a vegetable garden to the present aggression of nation states for food. This is no doubt an over read of the Naboth narrative. But even with his modest claim of Naboth’s property, Ahab embodies the reach of Baalism for self-sufficiency that propels the modern states.
Thus, the Naboth story is a paradigmatic tale that anticipates the contest between two ways of life that now occupies our world economy.
The narrative eventually comes to the role of Elijah. Without him, Ahab could have prevailed and Naboth would have been readily forgotten. So it is among us. Without prophetic alertness marked by courage, the commoditization of land and of people and smallholders will be promptly forgotten. It is the ilk of Elijah who must intervene in order to preclude such prevailing and such forgetting. Pearce quotes a United Nations commentator:
There is a cultural prejudice against peasants … They are seen as backward, not worthy partners. These ideas are self-fulfilling. (293)
Yet another author could assert:
The chief scientist’s planned revolution stands a good chance of making the poor poorer. Big farms and big investment risk exacerbating the trends that bring hunger amid plenty. We could have both more food and more famines. (293)
Biblical faith has a great stake in the role, identity, and vocation of Naboth. He is the point person for a modest way of life that takes seriously the possibilities and the limits of the land as God’s created order. We learn only late and always again that the created order cannot be outflanked with impunity. This is the great nonnegotiable truth voiced by Elijah. No impunity for exploitative pursuit of the land or its “inheritors!” (See Psalm 37:11, Matthew 5:5)
Walter Brueggemann
Walter Brueggemann
Walter Brueggemann is surely one of the most influential Bible interpreters of our time. He is the author of over one hundred books and numerous scholarly articles. He continues to be a highly sought-after speaker.
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