Clergy and Educators

ICJS Scripture Forum, 2005-2006
Session #2

Scripture Forum
Session #2
Chizuk Amuno Congregation
November 11, 2005

Texts:
     Leviticus 25:35-55
     Matthew 18:23-35

Cleaning up old business:

• Several members of the group felt it would be worth revisiting some of the issues discussed in the first session; and one participant suggested that, for those who were not at the first session, it would be helpful to know where the energy was.
• Response: In the Amazon.
• Explanation: "The Amazon" is code for parsing out who the commands [in Ex. 22:21-27] belonged to. Is there some kind of gradation to the commands about caring for the stranger, and for the widow and orphan who cry out to the LORD? Who are the stranger, the widow, and the orphan? And by ex-tension, what are the implications of these questions for our thinking about how we are to
  be both within and without our communities? The question asking whether the widow was only the widow within Israel took the group to the Amazon.
• Remark: You can summarize by asking: Who is the object of the obligation in the text, and are there different levels of obligation, depending on the object?
• Continuing explanation: That same discussion carried over into the New Testament text [Luke 3:7-14], asking whether "brood of vipers" included soldiers and tax collectors, whether they are a subset or a different set of people, and, therefore, whether their obligations for them are the same as the obligations of the "brood of vipers."
• Remark: In effect, the question in the Lukan text is the opposite of the one in the Exodus text. It's not to whom are we obliged, but who is obliged and what is the nature of the obligation.



• The review switches to methodology: There was a fair amount of discussion about the interpretive process to be used by the group, about how participants are to approach the discussion.
• Explanation: We kept flip-flopping in terms of how we were dealing with the text, shuffling between the text and the implications of the text. We tried to decide whether we should continue to do that, or have one discussion about the text itself and follow it with another discussion about the implications of the text. It isn't clear whether consensus was reached on this issue or not.
• Remark: There is also the question of whether we are to leave behind all the other tools that we bring to a text in terms of historical knowledge or different interpretations of other parts of the text. How does all that fit together, and when is it appropriately introduced into the conversation?
• Conclusion: We did decide to start with the words we have, the text itself, and not to move beyond it until we agreed we were ready to do so.

The first text: Leviticus 25:35-55 (NRSV translation)

If any of your kin fall into difficulty and become dependent on you, you shall support them; they shall live with you as though resident aliens. Do not take interest in advance or otherwise make a profit from them, but fear your God; let them live with you. You shall not lend them your money at interest taken in advance, or provide them food at a profit. I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, to give you the land of Canaan, to be your God. If any who are dependent on you become so impoverished that they sell themselves to you, you shall not make them serve as slaves. They shall remain with you as hired or bound laborers. They shall serve with you until the year of the jubilee. Then they and their children with them shall be free from your authority; they shall go back to their own family and return to their ancestral property. For they are my servants, whom I brought out of the land of Egypt; they shall not be sold as slaves are sold. You shall not rule over them with harshness, but shall fear your God. As for the male and female slaves whom you may have, it is from the nations around you that you may acquire male and female slaves. You may also acquire them from among the aliens residing with you, and from their families that are with you, who have been born in your land; and they may be your property. You may keep them as a posses-sion for your children after you, for them to inherit as property. These you may treat as slaves, but as for your fellow Israelites, no one shall rule over the other with harshness. If resident aliens among you prosper, and if any of your kin fall into difficulty with one of them and sell themselves to an alien, or to a branch of the alien's family, after they have sold themselves they shall have the right of redemption; one of their brothers may redeem them, or their uncle or their uncle's son may redeem them, or anyone of their family who is of their own flesh may redeem them; or if they prosper they may redeem themselves. They shall compute with the purchaser the total from the year when they sold themselves to the alien until the jubilee year; the price of the sale shall be applied to the number of years: the time they were with the owner shall be rated as the time of a hired laborer. If many years remain, they shall pay for their redemption in proportion to the purchase price; and if few years remain until the jubilee year, they shall compute thus: according to the years involved they shall make payment for their redemption. As a laborer hired by the year they shall be under the alien's authority, who shall not, however, rule with harshness over them in your sight. And if they have not been redeemed in any of these ways, they and their children with them shall go free in the jubilee year. For to me the people of Israel are servants; they are my servants whom I brought out from the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God.

The discussion begins:

• Introductory remarks: I hope that you all had a chance to read Leviticus 25 in its entirety so that you have an overarching sense of the context of this passage. Leviticus 25 at large deals with laws surrounding the sabbatical year and the jubilee, so the economic discussion we have in this text is in certain ways related to the overarching context of the jubilee economy.
• Question: I'm trying to understand the relationship between this form of slavery and chattel slavery. If you own slaves and they have children, are the children by extension your slaves?
• Response: If they're foreign slaves, yes. (See vv. 45-46.)
• Question: What is the import of your question?
• Response: I'm interested in knowing if the concep-tion of slavery that is formulated and authorized here mirrors the practice of slavery in this country. Because significant arguments were built on the basis of reading biblical texts to find a warrant for the authentication of chattel slavery that took place here, I'm wondering if a text like this would have been utilized in support of that argument. That's pulling us outside the text, but it's what was animating my question.
• Remark: Perhaps if we want to pull that back into the text, we could try to excavate the parameters of slavery as they are described in this text in order to begin to answer your question authen-tically.



• Question: I have a question about v. 35: "If any of your kin fall into difficulty and become dependent on you, you shall support them; they shall live with you as though resident aliens." What does that mean? Do kin change status when they be-come dependent? And what's the implication?
• Response: I think this might have to do with possession, or occupation, of land. When the land is divided up amongst the tribes, the members of the tribes get it, and they can pass the land on to the next of kin. Property cannot be bought and sold because it's got to stay within the tribal structure in order for the tribal structure to be preserved. Someone who must sell himself or temporarily give up his land would have a status similar to a resident alien because a resident alien could never truly own property.
• Reaction: So everything that accrues to a resident alien or a stranger, a ger in the land, now accrues to this person, or to this group of people because they've fallen into difficulty and become depend-ent?
• Response: I'm not sure that the text is saying they have "equal status," but just as you would support a resident alien -- who doesn't have property -- within your midst, allowing that person to earn a living or to exist in the society, so you must take care of your own kin who have fallen into a similar situation in which they don't possess property.
• Reaction and question: That piece I understand, but I thought there was a stratification here. If you're a member of the people Israel, then there's a certain status that accrues to you. If you're a resident alien, then you have a different status. So my question is, do these people literally change status by reason of falling into difficulty and be-coming dependent? Even though they are Israel, are they treated differently?
• Rabbinic response: Not that I know of.
• Biblicist's response: I would say that they would still be obliged by the same religious laws.
• Response: Then v. 35 is unintelligible. I don't know what this verse is doing.
• Response: I think he's probably on the right track concerning the status of the resident alien as literally somebody who is without property, al-though I'm trying to justify that. I don't know other laws for folks who don't have property.
  But I do think that you shouldn't overread the significance of resident aliens. Not only that, but I think, more significantly, that v. 36 suggests that the impoverished Israelite does not in any real way change status because he immediately returns to his status as kin in vv. 36-37 ("Do not take interest in advance or otherwise make a profit from them ... You shall not lend them your money at interest taken in advance.") I would imagine those laws generally pertain to other Israelites and not to resident aliens. So the way in which they have become as a resident alien is most likely limited to the fact that they don't have property, but I don't know what else goes along with how you treat somebody who doesn't have property.
• Question: Couldn't there also be the simple reading of "don't take advantage of them," meaning you can't use this as a way to put yourself ahead, you can't make money off their problem? It seems to me that the subject is still the broader "you" of Israel, not those who fall into difficulty. So the text is not so much talking about the kin as about those who are responding to the people who have fallen into difficulty.
• Remark: I hear this, without the historical context of the whole chapter, as a guarantee that, in fact, their status doesn't change. In other words, they are not to be sold as slaves. They have guaran-tees here rather than diminution. It's a kind of hedging around what you might do because of their economic dependency.
• Question: Doesn't v. 35 suggest an affirmative obligation? It's not simply that you're not to take advantage of them, but "you shall support them, and they shall live with you . . ." To my mind, that's more than "I won't take advantage of you."
• Question: Do we see from v. 35 to v. 39 a pro-gression in terms of a continuation of financial difficulty to the point where somebody has to become an indentured servant rather than just receiving some assistance?
• Response: I think if you look at the whole move-ment of the text, you can make a case that the text is actually demonstrating how the laws are actively working against someone's being in that sustained position long.
• Remark: We're talking about between point "x" and the next jubilee.
• Response: But even between point "x" and the next jubilee, there are caveats where they may
  be redeemed over time; and even when they are redeemed, the price of the sale will be rated as the time of a hired laborer (v. 50). There are checks to keep them from becoming too im-poverished.
• Response: That's a guarantee on the right of redemption for somebody sold into slavery to a foreigner; in other words, an alien. I was initially talking only about the relationships within the people. So, we're forty years after the jubilee and the family falls into difficulty, they're receiving some assistance. Ten years later they're at the point where they have to basically sell themselves. So for the next thirty years, they're in a state of indentured servitude. But once the jubilee comes, then presumably, you would reset to how the land was previously set.
• Rabbinic reaction: I think the jubilee is intended to restore things to their supposedly natural order. An Israelite is not supposed to be a slave. The land is supposed to belong to certain families, certain tribes. But what happens over time is
  that you get a little problem here, a little problem there, and things start to slip out of whack. Then the jubilee comes along and everything gets re-stored. There is a tension in Tanakh, especially in the Torah, because I think the text struggles with the fact that redemption from slavery in Egypt is so central to Israelite identity, yet Israelite soci-ety is a society in which slavery still exists as an institution. How do you deal with that huge ten-sion? The approach seems to be that, ultimately, an Israelite can never be a slave again because an Israelite is a slave to God; but people who are not Israelites are going to be slaves, and you have to try to treat them as best you can.
• Remark: One major contrast is between the Ca-naanite slave and the Israelite slave. When you think about the resident alien, I think it's impor-tant to remember that these people were in the process of becoming Israelites. There was no such thing as religious conversion or taking out citizen-ship of any kind. The only way you could become something other than what you were born is through acculturation. So the first generation couldn't make it. The second generation born among the Israelites made it; they were consid-ered Israelites. If you were a slave and you left your children, those children in the course of time became Israelites.
• Remark: The text is making what we would still hear today as a fairly radical statement in that you are obligated to take care of people who've become dependent. There's a pretty clear line between how you're supposed to be as opposed
  to how you've been being or how you might want to be.
• Question: Is it the case that every one of these resident aliens would have been en route to citizenship, or could there have been a category of those who simply were merchants or traders? Perhaps they were Egyptian and had no intention of becoming Israelite citizens, but they wanted to do business there with the people in the land. Would there be a category for those folks as well?
• Rabbinic response: I don't know. If they chose to live among them, not just for business, there could have been.
• Question: When the jubilee restores, what does
  it restore to? What is the natural order that the jubilee is to restore to? I think that would put this somewhat in context for me.
• Response: First of all, as I understand it, there's a question as to whether the jubilee was an actual institution or a theoretical, sort of idealistic insti-tution, which is interesting in and of itself. But I think the idea of it was to restore things to the way they were supposed to be. All the land that was apportioned originally when the Israelites came into Eretz Yisrael returns to whichever family, whichever clan was supposed to hold
  that land. The person who has over time fallen into financial difficulty and has had to become an indentured servant is restored to full economic and personal freedom, because indentured servitude is an improper status for an Israelite.
• Remark: I understand the jubilee to be a theo-retical construct. It became very appealing, but practically, how would you implement it?
• Remark: The jubilee has liturgical value as well. I don't mean just rabinically. Restoring the folks to the original property of the tribes is significant because it is in that place, as v. 38 basically says, that they then recall that the land to which they have been restored is God's land. The jubilee be-comes an occasion to -- I hate to say the word "testify" -- that God has given them the land. So being restored to the land has liturgical signifi-cance. It's important for them to be there so that they can say, "This is not our land. This is the land that God gave us."
• Remark: And were the jubilee observed, they would not till the soil for two straight years --
  the forty-ninth year and the fiftieth year.
• Remark: [The jubilee] seems unlikely in all of its details.
• Response: I guess I'm less concerned about how you would implement it or whether it's even possible to implement such a thing, and more interested in the idea that the jubilee is to govern the way you're supposed to think. That's far more appealing to me as a construct.
• Response: Also how you're supposed to act. I catch the underlying dynamic in this text as, here's the ideal: You are the people of God, you are in the land, and you have these covenant obligations to the land and to each other. But as life unfolds in the economy and society, different things happen, inappropriate statuses occur, problems come up. That's going to happen, but there has to be some way to get back to the ideal. So you have some instructions along the way, e.g., you don't charge interest. I think the whole dynamic of the text is to move people in
  the direction of getting back to who they were created to be and how they are to act.
• Reaction: I think that's right. I think it's less sig-nificant to concern ourselves with whether or not the jubilee is a practical institution, but to see the residue of that institution in the very economics that are here. The inability for a Jew to ever be a servant for a sustained period of time is predicated on the notion of the jubilee, which is to say, the jubilee works backwards. You're saying we're al-ways economically moving toward it, or the future of the jubilee is what informs our economic condi-tions currently. And the very fact that Jews won't be able to be slaves in a certain way is only pos-sible because of the forthcoming jubilee. Maybe.
• Response: I was reading the whole text as a challenge to live up to who you are. You had a responsibility to the land, to each other, to your kin, to the resident aliens. The reason you had this is because you were free and you were given this land. There's an ideal way you are to be, and you are always trying to be that.
• Reaction: If it's a dynamic thing that this is how you should be acting between jubilees, it doesn't matter in fact, right? It isn't like, here we are, we've got thirty-seven more years, so let's op-press some more people because we've got time. If it's meant as a sort of internal corrective toward the jubilee, then to live ideally would mean that when the jubilee year occurred, there would be nothing to restore. If you were living completely the way God intended you to live in the land, the difference between what gets restored in the jubilee and what there was in the forty-seventh year would be small. It would be a dynamic kind
  of living toward that.
• Rabbinic reaction: I think you're idealizing the text too much. There is an ideal, and you strive for it, but the notion implied in what you're saying is that if you don't, there's some sinfulness in it.
• Response: No, I didn't mean anything negative. I meant something quite the reverse, something quite positive, that you would be living ...
• Reaction: [There's a problem] even when you say "you." There's no "you" here. The jubilee year has to do with a system. An individual, regardless of how he lives, is still governed by the system. You're talking about an individual as opposed to
  a system.
  (After this exchange, a number of people began talking over one another.)
• Question: If this is part of the law, then what is the procedure by which we say, "[these com-mandments represent] an ideal that would be nice, but probably was never implemented," versus the ten commandments that people want to carve into stone and put in the courtyard? "Don't covet" is pretty idealistic. Do we say, "Well, no one really does that; that was never really implemented, but ideally ..."?
• A different rabbinic response: I think the answer would be that the laws that are laid out in the chapter are applicable all the time because you want to keep the dissonance to a minimal level, and the way you do that is by following these
  laws year in and year out.
• Reaction: You not only want to keep the dis-sonance to a lower level, you want to keep the economic chaos that would result from the real implementation of the jubilee at a lower level. You can only imagine what would happen if you paid no attention to the approach of the jubilee. You said, "Let's oppress people for thirty-seven more years," but what it really ought to be is, "As the jubilee is approaching, let's make sure we've got as little dissonance as possible so that we don't have to make major adjustments."
• Response: I think you're right.
• Remark: Verses 50 and 51 illustrate that point because they talk about computing in terms of how many years are left until the jubilee year.
• Reaction to earlier remark: But what I heard in your comment is that if folks lived according to
  the system in the best of all possible ways, it would almost make the jubilee unnecessary. And what I heard [the rabbi] attempting to do was to reinstate not only the calendrical position of the jubilee, but also to recognize that its calendrical position represents an institutional significance that won't go away regardless of how well we actually adhere to the laws. No optimal adherence to these laws will render the jubilee unnecessary. I know there's somewhere to go with that claim, but I'm not sure exactly where. I know that if I don't go with, I going to run the risk of a kind of realized eschatology around the notion of the jubilee, and we can't afford to do that.
• Response: What does that mean, "We can't afford to do that"?
• Response: That would be an imposition on the
  text that is not natural to it. There is nothing in this text that suggests to me that if we try hard enough to do these sorts of things, then we'll be so prepared for the jubilee that, basically, condi-tions now will look just like the jubilee. I don't see that in this text, but I did hear that suggestion in your reading.
• Another response: I see that, too, in vv. 48 and 49. It doesn't say, "You should redeem them." It says someone may redeem them. There's not a command to say you should not let them fall into difficulty. There is a realization that people will fall into difficulty, and they might even fall into more difficulty. Rather than idealize the situation to say that these things should never happen, the text tells you how to respond when they do.
• A third response: All this is happening against the backdrop of a covenant relationship between God and a particular people in a particular land in which prosperity, security, and the idea that starting over in the jubilee year are not present in the text because God is promising to take care of His peo-ple and guaranteeing that He will be abundantly blessing them. Economic scarcity is not going to be an issue, so this text has to do with how folks are going to deal justly with one another.
• Objection: Okay, but I'm completely stuck. We can talk about God's providence and the covenant, but if we say at the beginning that this never hap-pened, then what are we talking about?
• Response: We do know historically that kings did offer releases. We know they did it in Mesopo-tamia, and ...
• Reaction: But that's not this.
• Response: Right. But they did issue debt releases, and one of the things that I think this text does -- understanding that background and that it's the king's prerogative to issue releases at the begin-ning of his reign or his own jubilee or whenever he felt like it -- this text reinforces the notion of God and His relationship to His people; namely, they are His people, He is still the King of His people, the land is His land, and He can declare releases. From a practical perspective, the only way they can really reinforce the notion that God has de-clared a release is by making it a regular institution that happens every fifty years.
• Response: I understand that, but if [the jubilee] doesn't happen, then what are you doing? You're saying theoretically God would like this, or theo-retically this says something about who God is.
  But it has no bearing whatsoever ...
• Immediate reaction: Why are you saying it doesn't happen?
• Remark: Historically speaking, it never did, right?
• Response: We don't have evidence of it in Israel, but historically we know that kings issued releases elsewhere, that there was a notion of release, and that it was actually a good thing for the economy. This text probably wasn't even written when the Israelites were in the land anyway.
• Objection: But I would hear that today as civil religion. I realize we're way outside the text, but we talk about American values that are like the Mesopotamian precedent, but if the people of
  God aren't implementing this as part of their way of living ...
• Response: They're not not doing it. The reason they're not doing it is because there are conditions that have to apply for them to do this; namely, for the jubilee to be active, all the tribes have to be dwelling in the land of Israel. Whether or not they observed the jubilee during the First Temple period when the tribes were all dwelling in the land is not known. During the Second Temple period not all the tribes were technically dwelling in the land; and certainly since the year 70, the required conditions have not obtained.
• Reaction to previous comments: I think we have to get away from the idea that the jubilee is a chaotic system. It doesn't sound chaotic to me at all. It returns the land, it goes back to the tribal structure that was initially set up. They don't just say, "Okay, if this piece of land is worth a hundred thousand shekels, you sell it for a hundred thou-sand shekels." No, you measure the price of the land based on how much time is left in the jubilee. Everything seems to be carefully calculated. I don't think it's right to read it as a chaotic system.
• Question: I want to get a little clarification on where the earlier argument ["if we say it never happened"] was going. If the jubilee is a theo-retical construct that wasn't implemented, then does the ideal have behavioral consequences? Does the way in which this text articulates a vision, if that's what this is, have practical ramifications in terms of how the society con-ducts itself? The dynamic seems to be tied into the Sabbath, and the Sabbath has everything to do with this constant reminder that the land as well as the people ultimately belong to God. That carries with it economic implications in terms of the way in which one relates to other people and to the land. If you understand everything as be-longing to God, that understanding brings with it an overlay of obligation that is not insignificant.
  It seems to me that you were pressing the be-havioral ramifications.
• Response: I'm not questioning its relevance or its idealism or what it could represent in terms of behavior and transformation. It just seems to be
  a different way of talking about law.
• Remark: But don't you think this text and the one from last time are also trying to have the people make a statement about creation -- that there's enough? That, of course, also says something about God as Creator. It's a statement about who God is and about the nature of creation in itself. It seems to me that that is a theological statement that underlies the economic justice text.
• Remark: The jubilee clearly has liturgical over-tones. Earlier in the chapter (vv. 8-9) it says, "You shall count off seven weeks of years, seven times seven years, so that the period of seven weeks of years gives forty-nine years. Then you shall have the trumpet [shofar] sounded loud; on the tenth day of the seventh month -- on the day of atonement -- you shall have the trumpet sounded throughout all your land." Everything is hallowed. This isn't just economy or some kind of restoring for the sake of bookkeeping. It has to do with the fact that God is implicated in the econ-omy of communal life.
• Remark: At the end of 2 Chronicles, when they're talking about the reason for the seventy years of exile, the seventy years are linked to the jubilee. It's a kind of catching up of all the Sabbaths that were not kept in the land. So there is an under-standing that God took the jubilee seriously even if the people did not, and God is giving the land the opportunity for the jubilee. Whether it was real or not, there is an implication here that God wanted it to be real and expected it to be real.
• Remark: There was an earlier verse, not in this text, that I thought was important: "The land
  shall not be sold in perpetuity." The reason given for this was, "the land is mine" and "you are but aliens" (Lev. 25:23). I think that carries over to this whole text.
• Remark: I don't know if I think this is chaotic, but
  I think I would find it difficult to live with. Fifty years might not be so much for a community, but it is a long time for individual people or individual families. In the individual sense it seems potentially very disruptive. Do I own this or not? What does it mean that the land is God's? Maybe I would have known that my home could go somewhere else at the fiftieth year, but what do I do with that? That requires a different sense of connection and reli-ance upon God than I have. That's a little confessional, I think.
• Response: That's part of the liturgical value of the jubilee as it's now announced during Yom Kippur. The shofar blast is what begins the jubilee, and it's supposed to have that theological and liturgical disruptive character to it. You're putting it into real terms, but I want to raise a question about the liturgical and theological significance of it because I think that significance may be some-thing other than what we would necessarily think. The liturgical value lies in the notion that Jews be restored both to their property and to their work; there's a liturgical posture to work. This does have overtones of the sabbatical year, but it also has labor overtones that may be counterintuitive to some people: The best way that I can worship God is by having a job and having land. That is, property ownership and economic self-subsistence are necessary preconditions for my being able to worship God, as opposed to a value that says I have to give everything up in order to be able to worship God. Economic restoration and the result-ing abundance help me to worship God, not denial or letting go of things.
• Response: But there is a tension in the text. On the one hand, it points to a theology of work within the context of God's abundance. On the other hand, restoration has the potential to be somewhat disruptive. It may be a good disruption; I don't know.
• Remark: Poor people would love this text.
• Reaction: The king would not necessarily love this text. There are a number of aspects in this text that go directly against the royal interest, right down to the fact that the tribes go back to their tribal territory. We know from 1 Kings, where Solomon establishes his districts, that there was an effort in ancient Israel to realign the borders. That district list breaks up the whole tribal system. So in many ways, this text could be understood as a challenge to the establishment.
• Response: It's certainly a challenge to the monar-chy. The overlay of monarchy is what would really blow this out of the water, and isn't that in fact what Samuel tried to warn people about when they wanted a monarch? He warned them that a king would make slaves of them, conscript them into the army, do all kinds of terrible things.
• Response: And Samuel explicitly says, "God is your King."
• Remark: That to me is the hook here. It isn't that you're not going to be a slave. The issue is, who are you going to be a slave to, and who is king? The last verse here speaks to that: "For to me the people of Israel are ... my servants." It's not so much overthrowing the idea of monarchy as it is challenging the notion of who is the king Israel serves. The jubilee is set up to keep that notion present. The seduction was to have an earthly king because everybody else had a king. The text keeps saying, "You belong to Me; you're different," and Israel didn't want to be different.
• Remark: There's an interesting question, too, of when this text was written and whether it's a statement against the kings of Israel and Judah,
  or a statement against the Babylonian kings.
• Response: If it's a statement against the kings of Israel, that certainly has a very different valence than if it's a text against the kings of Babylon or Assyria. If it's against the latter, then three cheers. But if it's against the former, what is that all about?
• Remark: The kings, regardless of who they are,
  are not the only folks who could potentially lose here. There's a kind of economic equilibrium within the community that sought to be sustained. If somebody has to become a slave within your community, then you don't take interest from them. There are balances. An individual can't
  take advantage of somebody who's becoming impoverished. There's a kind of distributive jus-
  tice here that isn't just a critique of potential monarchical abuses.
• Response: There is a nodding courtesy here to the wealthy and the people who would be buying be-cause the price is adjusted based on the jubilee. They don't get ripped off; they don't have to overpay.



• Can we start making some hermeneutical moves about what if any significance a text like this might have in terms of the assessment of our own economic structures? It strikes me that this is so out of sync with the economic realities that we're up against today that I would have a difficult time understanding how you would translate this into a mandate for reform or debt reduction or debt removal. I'm not sure the ideal that's being articulated here is in any way compatible with what sustains the people who hold our mortgage.
• Response: What we've seen through the whole history of the Judeo-Christian faith is that there has been a continual effort to reexamine the literature -- the Hebrew Bible, the New Testa-ment, and the rabbinic literature -- and to try to reapply it for the times in which people were then living. At our last meeting, we were trying to de-fine who the widows and orphans were. Some of us thought that widows in the Amazon would be included, while others felt the text applied only to Israel. I believe that the text applied just to Israel, but if you read the whole Hebrew Bible you would have to revisit that issue. The people started writing the Bible when they were in the land and had a monarchy, but it wasn't completed until the Second Temple period, when they were never truly independent. By that time they had to reevaluate who was included in the covenant, who they wanted in the covenant. The covenant begins to open up and appeal to different people. Similarly, in the New Testament, there are certain Gospels that have more universal appeal and are trying to attract different audiences. It's our job to take the Scriptures and to try to find ways of applying them.
• Rabbinic remark: I would just make sure that your last payment on your mortgage doesn't fall in the jubilee year.
• Response: That's sort of funny, and it's not.
  The text implies something not so funny in
  that comment. So how does this text live in
  the community?
• Response: Without getting into specific political comment, it seems to me that one message in this text is that you do not oppress the poor and you make possibilities for the future for the poor. That's why the poor would love the jubilee: There's a possibility of getting out of the situation in which they find themselves. You have to look at the poor and ask what counts for oppression and what counts for the possibility of liberation.
• Additional response: The text also doesn't blame the poor for being poor.
• Reaction: I don't know what it means to say we're going to liberate you who are poor.
• Response: Two examples that come to my mind are the people who are looking at the issue of the ratio of workers' pay to CEOs' pay, and the issue of the oil company profits. In the case of the former, it's gotten to the point where people not only don't get a raise, but they have to be laid off so the CEO's bonus can be paid. And in the latter case, the oil companies are not going to give money back to people who can't pay their bills because the companies are obligated to their stockholders. What does that mean?
• Another response: Returning to the idea of abundance, that presumes a natural balance is being preserved, that people are letting the land rest every seven years, and that there's a balance of population for what the earth can sustain. The present reality is nothing remotely like that, so to presume that you can make ideal claims on people as to how to share the abundance there is when there is so little sharing just won't work. Globalism is in direct conflict with our understanding of what we should have and what we should be giving up. I just heard that Senator Grassley, commenting on the oil profits, said "I don't want to change my lifestyle in any way or have any claims on myself. We have to find different solutions to this prob-lem." I think those are our values. We are the ones in this text who might have to give something up, if we're really talking about this in a global sense.
• Remark: The Catholic Church tried this several years back in the "Jubilee Project." The idea was to forgive third-world-country debts to level the playing field because those countries are never going to get out of debt. That project came out
  of this text.
• Response (to remarks made just before the note on the "Jubilee Project"): The question is whether or not we have hermeneutical permission to make the leap that you're trying to make, and you're arguing that we don't because conditions that would make this possible are missing in our en-vironment. What we have to understand is that the economic possibility in the text is sustained by a fabric of other considerations, e.g., that you can trust the people with whom you are working. Part of the reason you can trust those folks is because there's a theological assumption at play. That is, part of the reason why you can work to give your slave a future is because you know that you, too, are slaves before God. There are many assump-tions built into this system that permit the system to work, assumptions that we cannot make, so it is very difficult for us to take any one of these little pieces of advice and try to activate them in our world without having the benefit or the sup-port of the entire rubric.
• Response: But I don't think that we're let off the hook either. We can't even get to this text. If it is an ideal thing and wasn't being implemented when it was written, people were still thinking that they should be able to do this. We've never even got-ten to the point where we have the conditions to make it happen. I think there is a demand implied in that, to get to that point.
• Response: Except that the text says private prop-erty is okay, and the accumulation of property is not sinful. But it has limits, and the text is impos-ing limits. It's not insignificant to say there is such a thing as private property.
• Objection: I'm not sure that the text suggests there's private property, because private property entails the assumption of ownership, and owner-ship is only God's prerogative.
  (Many participants began speaking at the same time in response to this comment.)
• One response: This text is about people, not about land.
• Another response: There is private ownership in the fact that if I own it, it's not yours, and I have rights as a property owner.
• Response: But what's underscored over and over here is that your claims are always provisional.
• Response: That's correct, but the fact that it be-longs to God has to do with how you're allowed to exercise your right to private property in an eco-nomic sense. That's a major statement. The text is not railing against wealth or ownership. It's talk-ing about what ownership entails if you're living your life in God's presence.
• Reaction: But I don't think this text envisions that Israel would be wealthy in the way that America is wealthy, or that the rest of the world would be impoverished in the way that it is. The issues are so far beyond what this text is envisioning.
• Response: Sure, but the question had to do just with the United States. And don't forget that every seven years there was a reminder that the jubilee was on its way. People didn't suddenly realize in the fiftieth year that it was there.
• Remark: It seems to me that the underlying premise is that each person or each family unit ought to be self-sustaining, and that's why the sense of dependency becomes an urgent problem. Since the underlying presumption is that each person ought to be able to sustain himself, then even the slave might prosper and be able to re-deem himself. But that underlying premise that each individual somehow should be able to pros-per sounds like the stuff I hear on the radio.

The discussion on Lev. 25:35-55 wrapped up with a brief exchange concerning the appropriateness of bringing ownership of land into the discussion. The only owner-ship named in the text is the owning of slaves; and redemption concerns the redemption of slaves, not land. (The land is dealt with earlier in the chapter.)

Transition to the New Testament text:
A request was made with regard to reading assignments that the specific verses to be discussed be indicated in the assignment. That request led to the following com-ment.

• Last time we started two verses after the bestial-ity law. One of the things I see we're doing, and that we have to do if this is going to have any significance for us and for the people with whom we work, is to free ourselves from a literal reading of the text. A principle we need to keep in mind in discussing every law in the biblical text is to understand that we're in a very different context. We were able to be free with this text, and yet we know that outside there are a lot of people who do not free themselves from the literal interpretation of the text (e.g., the bestiality laws).

The second text: Matthew 18:23-35 (NRSV trans.)

"For this reason the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves. When he began the reckoning, one who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him; and, as he could not pay, his lord ordered him to be sold, together with his wife and children and all his possessions, and payment to be made. So the slave fell on his knees before him, saying, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.’ And out of pity for him, the lord of that slave released him and forgave him the debt. But that same slave, as he went out, came upon one of his fellow slaves who owed him a hundred denarii; and seizing him by the throat, he said, ‘Pay what you owe.’ Then his fellow slave fell down and pleaded with him, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you.’ But he refused; then he went and threw him into prison until he would pay the debt. When his fellow slaves saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed, and they went and reported to their lord all that had taken place. Then his lord sum-moned him and said to him, ‘You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?’ And in anger his lord handed him over to be tortured until he would pay his entire debt. So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart."

The discussion continues:

• Immediate reaction to the reading: Oyvavoy.
• Question: Do you want to explain why you said that?
• Response: I'm not very familiar with the text in its context, but just reading it now, I wonder if it's a dig at the idea that the Jews had a commandment from God to have a jubilee year to forgive debts, with the idea that God is really forgiving them their debts; yet in their everyday lives they're charging interest and doing other things to their fellow citizens.
• Another rabbinical response: I read it a little dif-ferently. The motive force for release in Matthew is pity. The motive force in Leviticus is law, it's a commandment. Here, while it may not be optional, given what happens if you don't observe it, you're supposed to have pity. It's an emotion. In Leviti-cus, it doesn't matter how you feel. This is required by law.
• Reaction: I don't see pity as the dynamic that drives this text I find it incoherent, but that's different from its driving dynamic being pity.
  Just before we get to this parable there is a question of how often one is to forgive -- thinking in economic terms, it would be a question of how often one is to release people from their debts. The answer is not just seven times, but seventy times seven; which is to say, there is no end to the work of making sure that people are not so burdened with debt that they can't function. It seems to me that text is pressing the issue of repairing the imbalances between people so that no one is locked into a position of being in another's debt.
• Response: What you're arguing is that there is an imperative -- almost an unconditional imperative
  -- in the text that's expressed by "seventy times seven." Even if it is true that there is an impera-tive here and the action is not premised on pity, it's still noteworthy that in Leviticus the forgive-ness of debt is calendrical. You forgive debt either according to the sabbatical or according to the jubilee, I don't recall, but forgiveness is not spontaneous, done at any moment. There's a temporally legislated occasion for the forgiveness of debt. In the New Testament text, even if there is an imperative, there still isn't a calendrical association, which leaves open a certain range of possibilities. You seem to suggest that you're always commanded to forgive debt, but if you're always commanded to forgive debt, then you always run the risk that at any given time you might not forgive. Leviticus tells you when to forgive debt, and you're not obliged to do it at another time.
• Remark: What I find incoherent about the text is that just before it, Jesus is talking about how forgiveness is to be extended without limit, yet
  at the end of the story, the slave is thrown into prison. So the very practice of forgiveness that was articulated earlier is contradicted.
• Response: But that's because God is telling you to do something, and if you don't do it, God will pun-ish you.
• Another response: Or it's just something about the nature of forgiveness. If you experience forgive-ness, that changes you, changes your heart. Therefore, you are enabled to be forgiving and
  you do forgive.
• Objection: Except that isn't what happened.
• Response: Exactly, and that's what I'm saying.
  I'm reacting to the comment that this story contradicts the teaching about forgiveness without limit. It's not just, "I forgive you." Something has happened to you, and you in
  turn forgive.
• Response: So forgiveness becomes an operational category only if the person who's a recipient of forgiveness responds appropriately.
• Response: I think that's the distinction I would make. God, or I, or whoever, attempts to forgive someone, but whether or not he or she experi-ences forgiveness is something else.
• Objection: But "seventy times seven" is not debt forgiveness, it's forgiveness within the community when someone in the community sins against you.
• Remark: And the story is so hyperbolic. If you talk about the jubilee being unworkable, ten thousand talents is ten thousand times what? The footnote says that a talent was worth more than fifteen years of a laborer's wages. That's an astronomical sum, and the likelihood of anybody forgiving that debt is also astronomically remote. The hundred denarii is a pittance by comparison. So the parable is not discussing an economic theory so much as it is trying to dramatize the lack of a forgiving heart. On the other hand, sin is conceived of as debt in a lot of Matthew's discussions. Sin is incurring obli-gation. It's interesting to see the relationship between people conceived of almost as an eco-nomic transaction.

At this point requests were made by Jewish participants to identify the players in the parable, the crime with which the slave is being charged, and who's doing what. One of these participants immediately identified the king as God. He explained that in the Jewish tradition it is common to find a parable about a king, and the king is always God. He assumed the same was true for this parable and that each of the characters stands for something specific and identifiable. A Christian partic-ipant agreed that the king is God in general interpretation, but that it was also possible that in the telling of the story the king the hearers could have had in mind was the tetrarch of Galilee, who was given to arbitrary actions. These comments elicited an explan-ation of the difference between a parable and an allegory: In an allegory there is a one-to-one corre-spondence between the characters and identifiable people, so that the focus becomes the interaction of the people. A parable does not have the same one-to-one correspondence. Instead, it's a story that has a point to teach. So the king in this parable does not necessarily have to be God. The argument over this point continued for a while longer with Jews and Christians on both sides of the debate.

• An attempt to settle the debate: Let's grant that this parable follows the response to the question of how many times one is to forgive, so it's sup-posed to illustrate the answer "seventy times seven": Because you are supposed to forgive seventy times seven, the kingdom of heaven can be compared to this [story]. Is that fair enough?
• Question: Is economics the point, or is economics used to ...?
• Immediate response: Economics has nothing to do with this passage. This is an economic illustration to make a theological point.
• Question: The theological point being ...?
• Response: The theological point being: As much as God has forgiven you, how on earth can you pos-sibly not forgive your brother?
• Remark: Let alone your sister.
• Question: You say this is making a theological point. What is the behavioral impact of forgiving somebody? Is it an economic impact?
• Response: It potentially could be, but not neces-sarily. I think it has to do with whether or not you hold something against that person. Do you bind or loose [see Matt. 18:18]? Are you willing to say that person is free and, therefore, that you are free of the grudge or resentment that you were holding?
• Response: Then this would be a story in which we are not to imitate God.
• Response: Well, no. We're supposed to not imitate the servant who refused to forgive his neighbor.
• Response: But the king does not forgive. How do you make sense of v. 34?
• Response: The context is that this one servant has been forgiven a great deal. In light of that, how can he not forgive someone who comes to him with the same request for mercy? The issue here is the disparity between the two slaves.
• Remark: According to this example, the debt is not forgiven unconditionally. Forgiveness is conditioned upon another action, so God doesn't forgive un-conditionally.
• Remark: There is an economy of forgiveness here that has to do with conditions and obligations.
• Response: But this doesn't mean that you can't lend somebody money and expect it to be repaid.
• Response: I don't know that. We didn't do for this text what we did for the first one, which is to try to deal with the text within itself and then make a theological point about it. If we're going to honor this text, I would like us to try to work with it before we move to metalessons. So, you've got a king who wants to settle accounts with his slaves. One of the slaves is in to him for so much that there is no way under heaven that the release can be made. Ten thousand talents is an impossible debt. The king orders him to be sold because he knows the slave can never repay the debt. And not only the slave, but his wife and his children and all his possessions.
• Question: Does it matter that the word changes from "king" to "lord"? Is that just semantics?
• Response: "Lord" (kyrios) can refer to the rela-tionship between a servant and his master.
• Remark: So the person who is under this severe debt makes a disingenuous claim in saying, "Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything." It's very clear that that's an impossibility.
• Response: One could lay "disingenuous" on that, but another possibility is desperation.
• Response: But he's saying something that he knows in point of fact he cannot make good on.
• Response: But desperate people say things like that.
• Another response: Maybe he's thinking he never could have conceived of getting into that kind of debt, but he did.
• Response: Who among us when caught doesn't try to figure a way to barter ourselves out of it?
• Response: True, but there is something surreal in the whole chapter. What shepherd leaves ninety-nine to go after one? What king in his right mind lends ten thousand talents to a slave?
• Remark: If we thought Leviticus wasn't possible, none of this is remotely possible. If you want to ask what king would do it, then we shouldn't read the rest of the story. There is something to be said about the fact that what's going on here is a story about something that seems so out of the realm of our logical understanding that we want
  to just blow it off.
• Response: I would argue that it's not [out of the realm of our logical understanding] if we think about what happens to people who have no
  health insurance.
• Response from the participant who spoke of the chapter as "surreal": My position is that if I'm there and Jesus starts telling this story, I'm going to say, "Yeah, sure, but go ahead. I want to hear where you're going with this."
• Response: The one hook of plausibility would be that Jesus' hearers were accustomed to arbitrary exercise of near complete power by the ruling class. That's a little bit of reality among all the hyperbolic numbers.
• Remark: You could accept the interpretation as being disingenuous and yet say that the king is reacting in an extraordinary way, not only forgiv-ing a debt of ten thousand talents but doing it in the face of a claim that he knows is disingenuous.
• Response: I think that's right.
• Remark: In the comparison to health insurance [interrupted at this point by a loud chorus of protests], I just want to make that parallel that you can release the person from the financial burden entirely, you can make an arrangement for regular payments, or you can go after him with a collection agency. It's not just prosecution or absolute forgiveness. There is something in be-tween. I think it's noteworthy that the king doesn't take an in-between option; he com-
  pletely releases the slave of the debt.
• Reaction: Out of pity. Not because of the logic of the response.
• The narrative continues: The king, his lord, forgives him his debt. That same person, whose debt beyond understanding has been completely forgiven, is owed by a fellow slave a debt that could be met -- three month's wages. But he seizes that slave by the throat and orders him to pay. When the slave begs him for mercy as he had begged the king, the one who had been forgiven refuses and throws his fellow slave into prison until he pays his debt. This distresses the other slaves and they report it to the king. It's interesting that when the king first forgives the enormous debt, there is no rider, there are no expectations. But when the slave is returned to the king, there is
  an expectation that wasn't met: "Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?"
• Remark: He also doesn't sell his fellow slave, or go and collect the money. He puts the guy in prison, where there is no opportunity for the slave to buy himself out of his debt.
• Remark: If I were like the wicked slave and the question were put to me, my response would be, "No, why should I? You never made that a con-dition of my debt release. Now you're saying there's an implicit string, like I should have known something." "And in anger his lord handed him over to be tortured until he would pay his entire debt"
  -- tortured for eternity, which is absurd. "So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you,
  if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart." What is that?
• Response: Maybe pity is far more operative here than I realized.
• Remark: It's not just pity. The emotions here are very deep. The king has a visceral compassion for his servant who promises to pay an impossible debt; and when that servant fails to forgive in turn the king's anger is "wrath."



• Remark going back to an earlier concern: You were unsettled at the way this text might be read with an anti-Jewish polemic at work. I would take another leap and see the text as an anti-Roman polemic. For example, the king is God and the person who is next in line, if you will, is the Roman Empire. Everybody else underneath the Roman Empire owes a lot of money. In that desperate situation, the way in which the Roman Empire comports itself is to torture, to subject others to intensive persecution. What the text is saying is have hope, because Rome's inability to even comprehend forgiveness as a category, to live as though forgiveness is even a possibility, is going to have consequences. In the end of days, Rome is going to get it.
• Question: What in this text leads you to say that?
• Response: The text can't come right out and say that Rome is going to get it in the neck because the community would be subject to [reprisals]. So it has to code the attack on Rome.
• Response: You can't necessarily justify the assumption of a coded attack on Rome, but you can see the distance between vv. 34 and 35. I don't see this as an anti-Jewish text at all. I see it as a text that's begging for some kind of law. This is a text where we have social and economic dis-order, and what it's ultimately saying is that the missing piece is forgiveness. Verse 34 tells what will happen to the extent that forgiveness is not a part of the economy or the social order: There will be a kind of judgment. If you don't incorporate an imperative of forgiveness into your understanding of social relations, you're going to get the con-fusion that you have here: kings who have slaves who owe things they can't pay, slaves who are trying to take vengeance on other slaves. All of the disorder here has a corrective, which may be the command to forgive seventy times seven times.
• Question: Matthew's community fifteen or twenty years after the destruction of the second Temple is a community made up of Jewish and gentile followers of Jesus. What did the Jewish followers of Jesus, with the Tanakh in their head and their heart, hear in this text?
• Rabbinic response: I see that there was a trans-actional economic element in the relationship with God: You offered some of your wealth as your worship. After the Temple was destroyed, that economic transaction was no longer possible, and the transaction had to be through a different venue. In this parable the venue is forgiveness.
• Remark: I don't read this text as an allegory of the Roman Empire, but I read it as a rejection of the Roman law about throwing people into prison. You did that so they couldn't abscond with their money while you looked for it, and you tortured them so they would tell you where it was. This text is call-ing for something more Torah-related, which is forgiveness.
• Objection that goes back to earlier remarks about the social fabric and community: Here's what doesn't compute for me: The characters in this parable do not constitute community.
• Response: The two servants do, presumably. They're colleagues.
• Response: They're colleagues?! They're not colleagues. It's always a relationship of dis-proportionate power.
  Open rebellion breaks out at this point, with the result that no individual voice is heard for some time.
• Response continues: There are three levels operating here: There's the king; there's a slave, who is a servant or a hired hand or whatever, who is under the king's debt; and there's a third cate-gory of slave underneath that slave. That's not a community.
• Objection: There is a community. Perhaps the community is comprised of the fellow slaves who tell the king that something is wrong.



• Shifting the conversation: What I'm interested in doing is having these texts read alongside of each other. It strikes me that this is a text that is concerned ultimately with power structures, structures in which the disparities become so great that after a certain time, the playing field has to be leveled. To what degree is the Matthew text addressing this imbalance [as the Leviticus text does]?
• Response: I would argue not much at all. I think this text is frankly irrelevant to that question.
• Another response: I think the two texts have a link in that both indicate responsibility for others within the community. It is the intercession of the fellow slaves that brings the injustice of the second slave's imprisonment to the attention of the king. Other than the king, everybody in the story is a fellow servant or slave (Greek: doulos). They're all slaves, so everybody is really on the same level, and it's the community that brings the injustice to the attention of the authority that can redress it. The same responsibility is implied in the twenty-fifth chapter of Leviticus.

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