352 - God's People in God's Land: Family, Land, and Property in the Old Testament

God's People in God's Land: Family, Land, and Property in the Old Testament

By Christopher J. H. Wright

Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1990. 270 Pp. $16.95.

The author of this study tries to integrate the sociological approach to the subject of Old Testament property rights and the legal approach to that subject and to meld these two approaches with theological conceptions of Israel's faith to produce a genuinely ethical perspective on these matters. Accordingly, the various topics and texts taken up are examined for their social, legal, and religious significance.

Wright's study is divided into three parts. The first part examines the importance of the family as the social unit in which, as Wright evocatively states it, Israel's relationship with its God was " 'earthed' and experienced." The land was understood as both divine gift and under divine ownership. Divine ownership of the land is asserted for

354 - God's People in God's Land: Family, Land, and Property in the Old Testament

the sake of protecting the family and the land, with the family as both the basic unit of Israel's society and the basic unit of Israel's land tenure. In addition, the family is also the basic locus of Israel's relationship with God, where teaching, catechism, and consecration occur.

The second part examines the rights and responsibilities of the property owner. Wright stresses that the rights of the property owner (inalienability of family land, security of boundaries, prohibitions against theft) are based not on abstract principles but on the relationship with God that the property owner had as a member of God's people and the fact that the ongoing of that relationship was dependent upon continued economic viability. The responsibilities of the property owner had ultimately to do with acknowledging in the concrete the reality of divine ownership of the land, especially through such mechanisms of social charity as the fallow year and the jubilee year.

Just as the second part focuses on nonhuman (land) property relations, the third part focuses on human property relations, specifically relations with wives, children, and slaves. With regard to wives, Wright argues against the oft-stated position that wives were regarded as property. He tentatively concludes that the wife was viewed as an extension of her husband in the eyes of the law, that is, they were seen as "one flesh." With regard to children, it is clear, in Wright's view, that children were counted legally as property of the head of the house, but that this property relationship was limited by a greater concern in the Old Testament for the responsibility of the father for his children than for the rights that the father held concerning them. With regard to slaves, a distinction is made between "class slaves," who were slaves in perpetuity and who made their living through the sale of their services to a master, and "debt slaves," who, in theory, might return one day to land ownership.

The chapters that conclude each of the three parts attempt to draw some sort of relevance from the preceding study. The kinship structure of ancient Israel becomes the type for New Testament koinonia. The Old Testament rights and responsibilities of the property owner become paradigms for the different but comparable contexts of rich and poor today. One notes the great concern of the New Testament for the dependent, and one is forced by both Old and New Testament to search for comparable situations in our own world in which to apply the paradigms of the Old Testament attitudes toward the dependent.

Two criticisms can be leveled at Wright's study. The first one, which he readily acknowledges, is that, for all its distance from his days as a student at Cambridge, this book still bears the mark of a dissertation. It is preoccupied with the discussion of other scholars, and three chapters are appended by excurses on matters of some remove from the center of his discussion. As a consequence, the reader sometimes loses sight of the thread of his argument and often must wait for the concluding sections of each chapter to see it fully.

356 - God's People in God's Land: Family, Land, and Property in the Old Testament

The second criticism is more fundamental. Throughout, Wright cites and analyzes a wide range of texts-legal, cultic, prophetic, hymnic, narrative; preexilic, exilic, postexilic. While frequently noting the varying social and temporal locations of these texts (where such can be determined), Wright, in the end, wants to speak of a single Old Testament attitude toward matters of property ethics. Finally, "Israel" is made to stand for all parts of the community in all of its places in history. One of the things which biblical studies in the last thirty years has concluded is that such a thing cannot be done. When one says "Israel," one must specify which Israel in which time is meant. Wright's study, in the end, fails to satisfy because it does not make such distinctions with sufficient clarity and care.

JEFFRIES M. HAMILTON

Westminster /John Knox Press
Louisville, Kentucky