Sale of Land

(Leviticus 25:14 - 25:34)
 "When you sell land to any of your own people, or buy land from them, do not cheat one another.  When you buy land from a neighbor, the price should be based upon the number of years since the last Jubilee Year.  The seller must take into account the number of years until the next jubilee.  The more years there are until the next jubilee, the higher the price, the fewer the years, the lower the price.  The reason for this is that the person selling you the land is actually selling a certain number of harvests.   Show respect to your god by not cheating each other.  Thus says your god Jehovah.

"Observe my statutes and obey my decrees and you will live securely in the land.  The land will produce bountiful harvests, you will be able to eat your fill and live in security.  But you might ask, 'What will we eat on the seventh year, since we are not allowed to plant or harvest crops during that year?'  Rest assured that I will so bless your fields on the sixth year that the land will yield a crop that will last for three years.  When you plant your fields in the eighth year you will still be eating the large crop from the sixth year. (In fact you will still be eating it when the new crop is being harvested on the ninth year!)

"You cannot sell the land permanently, for it belongs to me; you live upon it only as a resident alien would.  When land is purchased, the right of the seller to buy it back must be honored.  If one of your fellow Israelites falls into poverty and is forced to sell a piece of family property, a close relative should have the opportunity to reclaim it for him.  If there is no family member to do so, but the original owner acquires enough wealth to buy it back, he may do so from the person he sold it to, after figuring a discount for the number of years to the next Jubilee.  In this way, the original owner may return to his land.  If, however, he cannot afford to pay for his land, it must remain with the new owner until the next Jubilee Year.  At that time the property will revert to the original owner, who can live again on his own land.

"Anyone who sells a dwelling in a walled city has the right to reclaim it up to a full year after the purchase.  During that year he has the right to buy it back, but if it is not bought back within the year, then the sale of the dwelling will become final.  It will become the permanent property of the buyer and not to be returned in the Jubilee Year.  However, a dwelling in a village, that is, an unwalled settlement, is to be treated like any other property in the countryside.  It may be bought back anytime by the original owner and must be returned to him in the Jubilee Year.

"Members of the tribe of Levi retain the right to buy back any house in the towns belonging to them.  Real estate sold by the Levites or property in the towns belonging to them must be returned to them during the Jubilee Year, since the property in their towns are their sole inheritance in Israel.  The pastureland around the Levite towns may not be sold at all and is their permanent possession."

Notes
1.  Laws concerning the disposition of land seem absurd to promulgate at a time when the migrant Israelites own no land and will not do so for several decades.  But the chickens are being well counted before they hatch and the far-sighted Jehovah is supposedly establishing the ground rules long before the game is to be played. (Pardon the mixed metaphor!)  It must be reiterated that Levitical law was obviously not established with a divine wave of the hand on Sinai, but evolved over many generations, many hundreds of years.  To give custom and human-devised law authority, it is made out to be the command of the national deity -- standard practice among ancient and primitive societies.

2. Jehovah guarantees that there will be good harvests on the sixth year so that on the seventh year the land may lay idle.  Really!  Jehovah will apparently continually manipulate and manage the weather to benefit the Israelites and that bountiful harvests are assured if the Israelites follow his will.  The idea that God (or, more commonly, the gods) actively controls climatic conditions and that every "act of God" is divinely ordained is an old one.  For it has always been difficult for man to acknowledge that the venting of Nature's wrath, a drought, a flood, a hurricane, or a tornado, is simply a purposeless, random event.  A companion to this view is that the righteous, those favored by the gods, will be rewarded with good fortune: crops yields are in direct proportion to the piety of the farmer.

3.  Property and land ownership was regarded differently in Hebrew society than it is today.  Firstly, all the land belongs to Jehovah.  No one else can really own the land.  (This is not conceptually dissimilar to monarchial nations where the crown technically owns all the land.)  In most cases, an Israelite merely holds purchased property for a period of time, but families do seem to have permanent ancestral rights over certain tracts of land.  It is to be assumed that upon settlement in Canaan there will be allotments of land to tribes, clans, and families, rather the way William the Conqueror divided up England after the Conquest.  Any sale of these allotments will be more like a leasing agreement with the land reverting to the original owner after a period of time, here, by the advent of the Jubilee Year that occurs every 50 years.  The original owner has the right to terminate at his discretion what is tantamount to a lease.  The difference, though, between this arrangement and a lease is that here the "leasee" must make the entire payment up front.  In modern terms, it would work like this:  Pete wants to expand his farm and would like to plant wheat on a tract of land owned by Joe.  He is willing to pay $1000 a year for the land.  That's OK with Joe.  Since it’s 12 years until the next Jubilee Year, Pete must fork over to Joe $12,000.  He can then farm the land for 12 years.  At the end of that time he must give it back to Joe.  If Joe decides he wants the land back after 6 years time, he has the right to rescind their agreement, but he must give Pete $6000 to get his land back.  If he can't afford to do so, he has to wait until the Jubilee Year when it will be returned to him without charge.  This was an agrarian plan not without merit.  It prevented the disenfranchisement of the poor and the creation of a permanently landless and, therefore, restive and disgruntled class of people, yet it did not impede those who were ambiguous, hard-working, and savvy from acquiring wealth.  Ownership of land has been a sticking point in many, if not most societies, ancient and modern.  Special problems are created when the indigenous population owns all the land, but is idle, while hard-working, ambitious immigrants are barred from owning property, or, when the ambitious immigrants buy up all the land and leave the indigenous people landless and destitute.  The Hebrews found an admirable way of avoiding these extreme situations.

4.  We see this early on in the history of civilization a difference between the city and the country/small town.  Final after a period of a year are sales of dwellings in cities (in ancient and medieval times, any settlement that had a wall around it), unlike the sale of dwellings in towns, or of farmland and pastures.  Cities have always attracted immigrants, foreigners, merchants, and travelers, a turnover of a diverse population.  Different rules had to be in force.  This is also due to the fact that city-dwellers probably didn’t own farmlands or pastures upon which they could subsist.  The prosperity of even these ancient cities would depend upon the ability of its inhabitants to buy and sell freely, to transfer property and real estate.

5. The Levites, the tribe from which the priests of Jehovah come, would not receive the same sort of land allotment the other tribes did.  They could, therefore, claim special, compensatory privileges.  They made sure that they could, since it is they who are writing the rules, as is evidenced by the name of this book.