“Carousel” (2014), acrylic and marker on paper (photo by Orestes Gonzalez)
The myth that wealth is always the result of hard work was recently exposed in an article that pointed out that fifteen billionaires under age thirty inherited their wealth. It is projected that within the next two decades, over $5.2 trillion will be inherited by more than one thousand people. The current 2,781 billionaires account for $14.2 trillion, which is more wealth than every country but the United States and China. And in 2024, we have 141 new billionaires as wealth disparity continues to grow.[1]
Meanwhile, those of us living in the dying embers of the British Empire, otherwise known as the Commonwealth, have observed an untaxed wealth transfer in the monarchy. Although King Charles pays income tax, just as his mother Queen Elizabeth did, he avoided the 40 percent tax applied to assets greater than £325,000 (US$405,000). The Crown has an estimated £15.2 billion (US$19 billion) in assets. Some of these assets have been accumulated via the ancient practice of bona vacantia in which the residents of the Duchy of Lancaster who die without a will or known next of kin have their assets transferred to the duchy. Only a small amount of this transferred wealth goes to charity; the rest goes to the king.[2] And, indeed, the Crown has a long history of collecting wealth for itself or, at the very least, facilitating the transfer of wealth to the already rich. Take King Henry VIII, for example, who exerted religious and royal authority by confiscating monastic properties and selling them to the wealthy as a way to finance his wars.[3]
This transfer of wealth is related to the history of enclosure, a process in which the British state sold public lands to private owners who often enclosed those fields in networks of rock wall. Like most writers on this subject, Tom Williamson highlights capitalism, with it markets, specializations, and ideas of private property, as the driver of enclosure, even while recognizing that significant enclosure occurred during the medieval period. Likewise, Jason Moore describes new technology, cheap labor (e.g., the enslaved peoples from Africa or the underpaid Aboriginal workers), and cheap nature (i.e., these disposable common lands in the United States and Australia) as central characteristics of the age of capital (1450–1750). And although the benefits of the system of commons that preceded enclosure were not necessarily equally distributed among the rural-dwelling poor who cultivated the common land, it is telling how attitudes toward the poor influenced enclosure. Williamson notes that the commons attracted “squatters, gypsies, and other undesirable elements, and allowed the poor a measure of independence from labour discipline.” As such, the poor were a threat to the social order and were described as “vermin” by one seventeenth-century pamphleteer.[4]
Carl Griffin argues that values and approaches from colonialism were applied to enclosure through ideas of land use and the lens of private property. He describes how colonization relied on “settling and making [the land] productive” and how there wasn’t much of a conceptual leap between planting colonies and planting farmers on “wastes and commons.” This is a view that persists—I live on the colonized lands of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people in what is now called Victoria, Australia, and just thirty years ago, our courts ruled that Aboriginal land use did not constitute possession. Griffin observes that a part of this internal colonization is the discrediting and debasing of Indigenous peoples—and commoners—as savages or “brutes creation” who cannot be trusted to exercise Christian dominion over these so-called empty spaces and bring “Christian civility” to the inhabitants.[5]
Today, as we face climate change, many people continue to draw their logic from settler colonialism. We continue to see the transformation of landscapes and forced displacement of peoples, and such displacement severs the relationship between Indigenous peoples and soil, both economically and spiritually as natural wealth is transferred from the colonized to the colonizer.[6] Indeed, insofar as wealth continues to be hoarded in the hands of the few, be they royal families who have long benefited or the nouveaux riches of Silicon Valley, enclosure continues to occur, and we as Christians must have a response.
Sabbath and Jubilee
This may initially sound strange, but I suggest we turn to the priestly tradition we find in Leviticus, with its concerns for temple, sacrifice, and Sabbath. More particularly, in chapters 17–26, we read the Holiness Code, which commands our reverence of the temple and calls us to keep the Sabbath (see Lev. 19:30 and 26:2).[7] That word, Sabbath, comes from the Hebrew word Shabbat,meaning to cease or desist, and the command finds its etiology in Genesis 2:2–3, when God rests after creation. This holiness emphasis shows that the exercise of human dominion (Gen. 1:26–28) has its limits—indeed, humans bear the image of God not only in ruling or exercising dominion but also in holiness, also in resting and letting go.
However, Sabbath keeping was itself a form of exercising dominion. According to Jewish scholar Jon Levenson, it mimetically reenacted the bringing of order from chaos in creation. This is made clear by the very strong parallels between the priestly creation story and the Babylonian Enuma Elish.[8] To fail to keep Sabbath, to fail to enjoy holy rest, invites chaos.
This brings us to Jubilee. Jubilee years were the Sabbath of Sabbaths. Each seventh year was a Sabbath year of rest for the land (Lev. 25:4), a year in which agricultural activity ceased and the land enjoyed a rest, and after seven times seven years, the fiftieth year was a Jubilee Year, a super Sabbath. Once more the land was to rest, but not from producing food—it was to rest from human agricultural management (25:11–12). And in that fiftieth year, humans were to rest too; we were to rest from debt and bondage. Everyone was to return to their original property, for the land was both a person’s inheritance and their economic security. Anyone who fell into debt and had to sell a piece of their land could have it redeemed by a relative (v. 25).
Israelites who ended up as debtors and were pressed into service were not to be treated as slaves and could expect to live with their kin without interest or profit being made. Support for those who could not support themselves was considered a right and not a business exchange (25:35–37). In a Jubilee Year, they could expect freedom and return to their ancestral lands (25:41).
All of this points in one direction: those who fall upon financial difficulty may lower themselves to repay debt, but wealth was never permanently accumulated in one place so that others might be permanently disadvantaged. Intergenerational poverty and wealth were reset every fifty years. As Michael LeFebvre puts it, Jubilee “provides a theological overlay for the social, economic reforms typically required with every generation for the sake of proper land management.”[9] The concepts of rest and restitution embedded in Sabbath theology are as relevant now as they have ever been in the face of ecocidal economies and ecological collapse.
Decolonizing Leviticus
Some readers may protest that Leviticus is a work describing historical dispossession, that it is itself a colonizing text. It is important to understand that Israel’s conquest of other nations and peoples can’t be mapped onto the colonization of the “new world.”[10] Instead, what we find in the text of Leviticus is a more sobering view of our own tenancy on the earth and our need to apply the principle of Jubilee to others.
First, the Holiness author identifies social norms, principally sexual ones—some of which modern readers may no longer see as problematic—as defiling the land. This in turn leads to the nations being vomited out of the land (Lev. 18:24–25). Yet this is also applied to Israel, as Israelites were warned to keep the covenant lest they too be vomited out (18:26–28 and 20:22). This covenant keeping was inclusive of both citizen and resident alien, a hint of the broader attitude of the Holiness school.
Second, the land itself has a priority insofar as it belongs to God and not to the people. The principle of the Jubilee returning of land rested on the fact that “the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants” (Lev. 25:22 NRSVA). Israel was included with the other nations with regard to its residence in the land. Furthermore, God’s relationship with land was clearly a covenantal one. After describing how a land with the people in exile would finally get to enjoy its Sabbath rest, Leviticus 26:42 reads like so: “I remember my covenant with Jacob; I will remember also my covenant with Isaac and also my covenant with Abraham, and I will remember the land.” The land itself, then, is part of the covenant and enjoys Sabbath rest as part of that covenant.
Third, this broader social imaginary is grounded in the priestly creation story (Gen. 1:1–2:3). There, all things are invited to enjoy the sacred nature of the seventh day, and, moreover, the general Semitic name Elohim (translated as God) is used rather than the covenant name YHWH (usually translated as Lord). This points to a radical inclusion of all nations under the same God even if they know that God by different names. In terms of occupancy of the land, Israel and the nations are placed on the same footing, with similar responsibilities.[11]
How then might we take a broader, decolonized view of Leviticus and apply it to our modern concerns of wealth accumulation and the historical debt of colonization?
The first step is to reject slavery in all its forms. Debt slavery was moderated for the Israelite, and there was a Jubilee manumission (Lev. 25:40). Of course, we now understand that the practice of slavery is not to be tolerated at all. We go beyond the text and apply this to all people, such that we treat none as a slave (vv. 44–46). And although most modern readers would understand this, few of us understand crippling debt due to medical expenses, higher education, or an overinflated property market as symptoms of a system designed for the benefit of the wealthy. Debt forgiveness is an example of the Jubilee principle that could be applied domestically, as it could for international debt.[12]
The Levitical relativizing of Israel to resident aliens, together with the deconstruction of the colonizing conquest narrative, demands a Jubilee approach to the displaced and enslaved. This encompasses reparations for the descendants of slaves, the return of lands, the payment of rent for occupied lands, and the sharing of profits from the extraction of “natural resources” and other material goods.[13]
Finally, various forms of taxation are possible to keep wealth from accumulating in the hands of the few. For those who understand taxation as theft, two principles from Leviticus apply. We can read Leviticus as teaching that all wealth derives from the land, and the land in the “new world” was stolen by Europeans from the original inhabitants under false pretext. Moreover, all land belongs to God. Hence, if God commands that wealth be circulated, accumulation is sin. Jubilee recognizes that all people are to have a share to flourish. Jesus himself proclaimed the Jubilee in his Nazareth manifesto (Luke 4:16–30), yet this message, just like his warning to rich rulers (Luke 18:18–30), continues to fall on deaf ears.
[1] Rupert Neate, “All Billionaires under 30 Have Inherited Their Wealth, Research Finds,” Guardian, April 4, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/apr/03/all-billionaires-under-30-have-inherited-their-wealth-research-finds; and “Taylor Swift among 141 New Billionaires in ‘Amazing Year for Rich People,’” Guardian, April 3, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/apr/02/world-gains-141-new-billionaires-in-amazing-year-for-rich-people.
[2] Daniel Boffey, “King Charles Will Not Pay Tax on Inheritance from the Queen,” Guardian, September 13, 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/sep/13/king-charles-will-not-pay-tax-on-inheritance-from-the-queen; and Maeve McClenaghan, Rob Evans, and Henry Dyer, “Revealed: King Charles Secretly Profiting from the Assets of Dead Citizens,” Guardian, November 24, 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/nov/23/revealed-king-charles-secretly-profiting-from-the-assets-of-dead-citizens.
[3] See G. W. Bernard, “The Dissolution of the Monasteries,” History: The Journal of the Historical Association 96, no. 4 (2011): 390–409.
[4] Tom Williamson, “Understanding Enclosure,” Landscapes 1 (2000): 72; also, see 56–58, 69, and 75. For the rise of capitalism and the Atlantic slave trade, see Moore, “The Rise of Cheap Nature,” in Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, ed. Jason W. Moore (PM, 2016), 98–99. For stolen wages from Aboriginal workers, see, for example, Andrew Gunstone and Sadie Heckenberg, The Government Owes a Lot of Money to Our People: A History of Indigenous Stolen Wages in Victoria (Australian Scholarly, 2009). For the equitability of the system that preceded enclosure, see Daniel Curtis, “Did the Commons Make Medieval and Early Modern Rural Societies More Equitable? Survey of Evidence from across Western Europe, 1300–1800,” Journal of Agrarian Change 16, no. 4 (2016): 646–64.
[5] Griffin, “Enclosure as Internal Colonisation: The Subaltern Commoner, Terra Nullius and the Settling of England’s ‘Wastes,’” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 1 (2023): 101 and 103. Also, see Griffin, “Enclosure,” 97 and 106; and Mabo v. Queensland, no. 2, HCA 23, 175 CLR 1 (HCA June 3, 1992), https://www6.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/cases/cth/HCA/1992/23.html.
[6] On the severed relationship between people and soil, see Heather Davis and Zoe Todd, “On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene,” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 16 (2017): 761–80.
[7] See David P. Wright, “Holiness in Leviticus and Beyond: Different Perspectives,” Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology 53, no. 4 (1999): 351–64. Also, note that many of the points I share below are adapted from my book: Pope, From Creation to Canaan: Biblical Hermeneutics for the Anthropocene (Pickwick, 2024).
[8] See Jon Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil (Princeton University Press, 1988), 3–13; and Pope, From Creation, 35
[9] Michael LeFebvre, “Theology and Economics in the Biblical Year of Jubilee,” Bulletin of Ecclesial Theology 2, no. 1 (2015): 35.
[10] See, for example, Pope, “Sacrificing the Sioux: Oil Pipelines, Girard, and the New Colonialism,” The Other Journal 28 (2017), https://theotherjournal.com/2017/07/sacrificing-sioux-oil-pipelines-girard-new-colonialism/.
[11] See Mark Brett, Political Trauma and Healing: Biblical Ethics for a Postcolonial World (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2016), 100–101.
[12] For more on our understanding of debt slavery, see Pope, “Sacrificing the Sioux”; for medical debt, see Jessica Glenza, “Majority of Debtors to US Hospitals Now People with Health Insurance,” Guardian, January 12, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/11/hospital-debt-increase-people-with-insurance; for education examples, see Rhea Basarkar, Noah Berman, Jacqueline Jedrych, Anshu Siripurapu, Mia Speier, and Steven J. Markovich, “Is Rising Student Debt Harming the US Economy?” Council on Foreign Relations, April 16, 2024, https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/us-student-loan-debt-trends-economic-impact; and for the Jubilee 2000 campaign, see Ann Pettifor, “The Jubilee 2000 Campaign: A Brief Overview,” in Sovereign Debt at the Crossroads: Challenges and Proposals for Resolving the Third World Debt Crisis, ed. Chris Jochnick and Fraser A. Preston (Oxford University Press, 2006): 297–318.
[13] See, for example, Eric A. Posner and Adrian Vermeule, “Reparation for Slavery and Other Historical Injustices,” Columbia Law Review 103 (2003): 689–747.