CHAPTER X

THE CONFLICTING STANDPOINTS

The struggle that convulsed the ancient Hebrews was a conflict between the standpoints of nomadism and civilization.— There is a fundamental difference between the standpoint of nomadism and the standpoint of civilization. This difference is involved in the general contrast between society in motion and society at rest. It is concretely illustrated by the treatment of property in land; for manifestly, one of the distinctions between society in motion and society at rest is in the attitude taken up with reference to external nature.

The very circumstances of nomadic life make it impossible to reduce the earth itself to private or individual property. In the wandering clan, a given territory or district belongs to all in common. Although two clans may, by agreement, respect each other's rights to wander in certain parts of the wilderness, each clan or tribe holds its territory as a common possession. Thus it was among the American Indians, who knew nothing about private property in land before the European settlement; and so it is among all the wandering races of mankind. With reference to the Indians of New England before the coming of the English, we read:

The Indian did not need much government, and his manner of life did not admit of his being much subjected to its control. . . . . Personal ownership of land was a conception which had not risen on his mind. . . . For the protection of life and of hunting-grounds against an enemy, it was necessary that there should be unity of counsel and of action in a tribe.. The New England Indians had functionaries for such

purposes; the higher class known as sachems, the subordinate, or those of inferior note or smaller jurisdiction, as sagamores.1

The primitive group moves about in search of food, and holds together for purposes of defense. The welfare of the individual is merged in that of the clan. The good fortune of the clan is necessarily the good fortune of all its members; and in the same way, the suffering of the clan is felt by all its members. Although a clan may attack and plunder another group, its very breath of life is justice between its own people. Thus, the English traveler Doughty says of the desert Arabs, among whom he lived:

The nomad tribes we have seen to be commonwealths of brethren. . . . They divide each other's losses. . . . . The malicious subtlety of usury [interest] is foreign to the brotherly dealing of the nomad tribesmen. . . . . Their justice is such, that in the opinion of the next governed countries, the Arabs of the wilderness are the justest of mortals. Seldom the judges and elders err, in these small societies of kindred, where the life of every tribesman lies open from his infancy and his state is to all men well known.2

Since the territory over which the clan roams is regarded as the common storehouse of provision for everybody in the group, the clan's ideas about "justice" and "right" come to be insensibly and subtly bound up with its relation to the soil. There is, of course, no direct and conscious connection in the group mind between justice and common property in the land. Yet these ideas hang together in a way which the individual member of the group may not be able to state clearly, but which he feels instinctively and profoundly.

Palfrey, History of New England (Boston, 1858), Vol. I, pp. 36, 37, 38; (italics ours), except last two words; cf. Vol. III, p. 138; Vol. IV, pp. 364, 419; cf. Morgan, Ancient Society (New York, 1878), p. 530. Most of the contentions and troubles arising between Indians and white men have turned around land cases, in which the rights of the two races have been the subjects of dispute. Cf. Reports of the Indian Rights Association (Philadelphia, Arch St., various dates), passim.

2 Doughty, Arabia Deserta (Cambridge), Vol. I, pp. 345, 318, 249.

It was in this atmosphere that the nomadic ancestors of the Israelites lived, moved, and had their being. The great bulk of those that settled in the highlands of Canaan retained their clan organization for a long time, and were forced to continue upon a very crude economic level. They carried some of their primitive social justice, or mishpat, clear through the times of the "Judges" and the highland kingdom under Saul; while after the establishment of the composite Hebrew monarchy under David, the more backward and remote classes in the nation were still greatly influenced by the ideas and practices of the desert ancestors.

Having glanced at the tendencies which the nation got from the Israelite forefathers, we will now refer to the usages and ideas coming from the other side of its ancestry. The Amorites occupied the cross-roads of ancient Semitic civilization. Their social system was intimately connected with the usages of trade and commerce; and they had left the atmosphere of the desert clan far behind. The Amorites, like the Babylonians, Assyrians, Phoenicians, and Egyptians, had long ago reduced land to the category of private property. The civilized oriental believed in law, morals, justice, mishpat (whatever term we may use in this connection); but his ideas about such things were a mystery to the more backward Semite of the desert and the hills. All the long-settled and civilized races of the Semitic world regarded the soil as an item of commerce, falling within the general category of "property"; and they carried this principle to its logical issue, just as we do in the modern world. They bought, sold, and rented that which the nomad looked upon as the common foundation of life. They made the soil the basis of security for mortgage loans; and the nomad knew little about the mystery of mortgages, and abhorred what little he knew. They charged interest on mortgage loans; and the nomad thought all interest was wicked. Finally, when

mortgages were not paid, the civilized Semite foreclosed by legal process, taking over the property, and sometimes the person of the debtor; and at this point, the mind of the nomad ceased to follow the logic of the situation. While the Amorites were swallowed up in the mass of the Hebrew nation, their point of view, and the gods, or Baals, connected with that point of view, remained as factors in Hebrew life and history.

Thus we see how two different standpoints confronted each other during the development of Hebrew nationality at the point of coalescence between Israelites and Amorites. It should be understood that the differences about landed property do not by any means exhaust the case between the morals of nomadism and civilization. The nature of the Hebrew struggle is disclosed only in part by the conflict over the proper treatment of land. For this is but one item in the whole circle of usages and ideas coming under the head of mishpat.1

'It can hardly be by accident that the Amorite Araunah, of Jerusalem, and the Hittite Ephron, of Hebron, readily dispose of their soil (II Sam., chap. 24; Gen., chap. 23), while, on the other hand, the Israelite peasant Naboth is greatly scandalized by Ahab's proposal to buy his patrimonial real-estate. "Yahweh forbid it me!" cries Naboth (I Kings 21:1-4). The differences of standpoint cropping out here can hardly be explained as arising from the particular situations. The drift of the Old Testament goes to show that the Israelites brought into the Hebrew nation the idea that the soil was inalienable; whereas, the Amorites, like the Babylonians and Egyptians, had left this idea behind, and regarded land as a lawful item of commerce. One of our critics attempts to make the point that the sentiment against alienation of land in Israel could not be an heirloom from nomadic days, because in the nomadic period there is no land to be alienated. But land is inherited in the nomadic state as much as under settled civilization, though in a different way. Nomadic social groups are always identified with certain districts which the clan, or tribe, holds in common as its absolute property over against other groups. Thus, a given district is continuously "inherited" by the clan from itself. We find this usage among the desert Arabs, the Australian aborigines, the Germanic barbarians, the American Indians, etc. But as nomads pass over into civilization, there is no social machinery by which the soil can be administered as the common property of an entire clan; so the sense of identity with the soil contracts into the family groups whereof the clan is composed; and it becomes a crime, in the eyes of the more primitive classes in the community, to remove a neighbor's landmark. This feeling never operates perma

In the early narratives of the Hebrew social struggle, the land question is prominent.-According to the accounts in I Samuel, the "perversion" of mishpat was one of the causes that led to the setting-up of the Israelite monarchy itself.

And it came to pass, when Samuel was old, that he made his sons judges over Israel. . . . . And his sons walked not in his ways, but turned aside after lucre, and took bribes, and perverted mishpat. Then all the elders of Israel gathered themselves together, and came to Samuel unto Ramah; and they said unto him, Behold, thou art old, and thy sons walk not in thy ways. Now make us a king to judge us like all the nations (I Sam. 8:1, 3, 4, 5).1

In reply to their demand, the people are told that the social system, or mishpat, of the kingdom will not be satisfactory. The central feature of Samuel's warning is, that the king will take away the best of their fields, their vineyards, and their oliveyards, and give these lands to the nobles that surround the throne (vs. 14). Along with this, the people will be heavily taxed and reduced to slavery. In other words, we have here a picture of the concentration of landed property, in which the national soil comes into the grasp of the nobility. This, of course, involves the depression of an increasing number of the people into the lower social class. It is this feature of the situation that the prophet Isaiah has in mind when he nently to stop the reduction of land to individual proprietorship, nor to overcome the concentration of the soil in the hands of an aristocracy.

The process of land concentration had gone so far in Egypt and Babylonia during prehistoric times that when these countries emerge into the light of history their soil is already in the hands of a small upper class. (Cf. Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt [Chicago, 1906], Vol. I, p. 259; Vol. II, pp. 6, 9, 277; Vol. IV, p. 405; and Goodspeed, History of the Babylonians and Assyrians [New York, 1906], pp. 71-78.)

1 I Sam., chap. 8, in its present shape, comes no doubt from a time later than that of Samuel; but it admirably summarizes one aspect of Hebrew history from first to last. The supposition is not in any way impossible that Samuel knew about the mishpat identified with the kings, or meleks, in the neighboring Amorite cities; and it is highly probable that he knew about the unhappy experience of Israel with the half-Amorite Abi-melek, of Shechem (Judg., chaps. 8 and 9). Samuel's prejudice against the term melek, together with family interest, would be sufficient to give a historical basis for the narrative in which he warns the people against the kingdom.