The Concept of Redemption
One idea central to Judaism but difficult to explain in terms of Western thought is the close interlinking between law, ethics, and nature. For the ancient Greeks there was a conflict between nomos, law, and physis, nature. Law represented order, nature meant chaos, and there was a constant struggle between them. Apollo, god of order, found himself having to fight snakes, dragons, and sea monsters, symbols of the wild, untameable forces at work in the universe. As for ethics, these were hardly the interest of the gods at all. The word “ethics” comes from the Greek ethos, meaning the character of an individual or a community. It also meant custom, established practice. That is what ethics were: not divinely mandated edicts, but rather man-made customs that varied from place to place.
In Judaism, these concepts – law, ethics, and nature – are part of a single, coherent, integrated vision of the universe and our place within it. There is a direct connection between scientific law1This, of course, is an anachronistic way of putting it. The word “science” is a relatively recent coinage, and scientific method in the modern sense dates from the seventeenth century. The regularity of nature was, however, well known to the ancients and the Mesopotamians and Egyptians achieved astonishingly accurate predictions of, for example, the movements of the planets and the regularity of the seasons. and moral law. Both are part of the fabric of the universe, made by a loving Creator. The one difference is that the moral law, handed over to humans endowed with free will, can be broken. God creates natural order in the universe and asks us to create order in the social universe, and in the same way: through law.
There is also a deep connection in Judaism – equally strange to the Western mind insofar as it was influenced by Greece – between law and narrative.2See Robert Cover’s famous article, “Nomos and Narrative,” Harvard Law Review (1983).
In the West, there are narratives (mythic, historical, or fictional) and there are laws, legislated by parliaments and collected in codes. But the two literatures are utterly distinct. We know that constitutional monarchy emerged after the invention of printing and the spread of literacy, that democracy grew under the impact of the industrial revolution, and that the enfranchisement of women emerged as old social systems crumbled in the wake of the First World War. So there may be a connection between law and history, but they remain two different literatures with very little in common.
Not so in the case of Judaism. The Torah contains both and weaves them together in deep and subtle ways. Law generates history and history generates law. The history of Israel as seen through the eyes of Tanakh is the story of how Israel kept or broke the laws it received from God. And the laws themselves had their logic in the history of the people: “Do not oppress a stranger; you yourselves know how it feels to be a stranger, because you were strangers in Egypt” (Ex. 23:9). It was precisely because of their historical experience, regularly recalled and re-enacted, that the Israelites were expected to understand the law.
So the Torah weaves law, ethics, and narrative together using an extraordinary array of literary techniques. I want in this essay to show how it does so in the form of a single word, g-a-l, meaning “to redeem.”
The last three chapters of Leviticus, 25–27, the parashot of Behar and Beḥukkotai, form a single literary unit.3This is one reason why they are often read together.
They seem to be about completely different subjects. Chapter 25 is about the social structure to be implemented in the land of Israel. It deals with issues relating to land, slavery, and debt. Chapter 26 is about the blessings and curses that will be Israel’s fate in the land, depending on whether they are faithful or disobedient to the covenant they made with God at Mount Sinai. Chapter 27 reads like an appendix to the book as a whole, and deals with donations to the Sanctuary.
On the face of it there is no connection between them, but actually they are very tightly integrated. First, note how they are joined together. Chapters 25 and 27 are about law, while chapter 26 is about history. This is a literary device we find elsewhere. A central chapter is framed by being placed between two passages that seem to belong together. So the “holiness code” of Leviticus 19 is framed by chapters 18 and 20, which belong together because both are about sexual offences. The story of the Golden Calf (Ex. 32–34) is framed by being placed between two sections (Ex. 25–31 and Ex. 35–40) that belong to one another because they are both about the construction of the Sanctuary. The priestly imagination works through the device of chiasmus – a literary unit of the form ABCBA, in which the climax is in the centre. So it uses framing devices (AB and BA) to draw attention to the central term as the axis on which all else turns.
What unites Leviticus 25 and 27 is a shared keyword: the verb g-a-l, “to redeem,” which features in chapter 25 nineteen times and in chapter 27, twelve times. Significantly, though it does not appear at all in chapter 26, another word that sounds almost identical – g-‘-l (with the guttural ayin in place of the aleph) – does appear five times. This is fascinating because the two words, despite their similarity in sound, are almost opposite in meaning. The first means “to redeem, buy back, restore to its proper place,” while the second means “to despise, cast away, reject.” As I noted in an earlier essay,4“Between Destiny and Chance,” above. the beginning and end of Leviticus are linked by a similar play on two words that sound almost the same but have opposite meanings, k-r-a, meaning “a call,” and k-r-h, meaning “a chance event.”
Turning to the word g-a-l itself, the basic idea of redemption is that the law provides for the possibility of reclaiming land, property, or even liberty itself if one has the means to do so. Leviticus 25 discusses three cases in which an individual finds himself forced, through poverty, to sell something valuable. It may be land, or a house, or selling himself as a slave. In each case, provision is made for a relative of the seller, or the seller himself should he suddenly find himself with the means to do so, to buy it back by providing the buyer with appropriate compensation. If neither of these is possible then redemption will automatically take place in the Jubilee year (with the exception of a house in a walled city).
At stake in these laws are two deep ethical principles. First is that when it comes to certain goods essential to human dignity – land, a house, and freedom of employment – a distinction must be made between temporary poverty and permanent deprivation. The market economy functions on the basis of binding exchange. If I sell something to a purchaser at a price both of us accept as fair, I cannot change my mind tomorrow and say, “I have decided not to sell it after all. Give it back and I will return your money.” If the purchaser does not want to do so, I cannot force him. But there are certain things, says the Torah, that should not be left entirely to the vagaries of the market because they are too fundamental to self-respect and human flourishing. In such cases, while respecting the integrity of the market – the redeemer must pay the proper market value of what he redeems – a basic law of justice takes priority. No one should be permanently disadvantaged because of temporary misfortune.
The second, no less fundamental, is the role of the family within society. Leviticus 25 uses familial language (what the French revolutionaries called “fraternity”) throughout: “If your brother becomes poor.” But there is a difference between this metaphorical use of the term to describe society as an extended family, and the literal use to signal the duty of close relatives to come to the aid of an impoverished member of the family. Set out here for the first time is the idea later articulated by Edmund Burke: “We begin our public affections in our families.”5Edmund Burke, Reflections on the French Revolution, The Harvard Classics, vol. XXIV, part 3, paragraph 331 (New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1909–14), www.bartleby.com/24/3/.
By caring for those closest to us we learn to care for our fellow citizens as a whole. The family is “the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country, and to mankind.”6Ibid., IV, 50.
Evolutionary psychologists have recently reminded us that sacrifice for the sake of kin is a fundamental principle of human nature. The Torah embodies this idea in the laws of redemption. Tanakh later gives it moving narrative expression in the book of Ruth, in Boaz’s willingness to come to the aid of his impoverished relative Naomi and her widowed, childless daughter-in-law Ruth. Geula is a keyword of that narrative also, appearing more than twenty times in the course of the book.
But redemption is more than a legal idea. It is the way the Torah describes God’s intervention in history to liberate the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. God tells Moses, “I am the Lord, and I will bring you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians. I will free you from being slaves to them, and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with mighty acts of judgement. I will take you as My own people, and I will be your God” (Ex. 6:6–7). At the Red Sea the Israelites sang, “In Your unfailing love, You led the people You redeemed” (Ex. 15:13).
Only now, retrospectively, given the laws of Leviticus 25, do we understand the significance of the first words God commands Moses to say to Pharaoh: “This is what God says: Israel is My son, My firstborn” (Ex. 4:22). God is doing more than rescuing people from oppression or liberating slaves. He is engaged in an act of redemption, that is to say, exercising the right and responsibility of a close relative, in this case a father. The fusion here between law, ethics, and narrative, and between God’s interventions in history and our duties within society, is complete.7For an extended study of the connection between law, narrative, and theology in relation to the idea of redemption, see David Daube, Studies in Biblical Law (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1947), 39–62.
In the Exodus, God was engaged in more than miracles. He was teaching us how we too ought to behave when people close to us fall into destitution.
To be sure, the Torah does more than leave redemption to the willingness of family members to do their duty. The Jubilee provided equal redemption for all, even for those who did not have willing and wealthy relatives to come to their rescue before then. What I have tried to show here, though, is how law and theology are intrinsically linked in the Torah. One word, geula, redemption, figures in both, and in the same sense: restoring something, be it land, a house, or a person, to its proper place after it had been forfeited because of misfortune.
This becomes an essential element of a world of hope, not in the trivial sense of wishing or wanting things to be better, but in the grounded confidence that things will become better, because we are part of a society in which people know they have a duty to help out family members in distress, and part of a nation whose founding memory is of just such an act performed by God Himself.