Nevertheless, it can plausibly be claimed that there are some basic
attitudes towards wealth and poverty which underlie Scripture as a whole,
which condition its injunctions and practices in this regard and which the
religious person may claim should still inform contemporary social
behaviour and regulations. We must begin with the Old Testament view of
wealth, understood in its basic sense of welfare or prosperity, as a
fundamental Biblical ideal. It represents God's intention for man and is a
sign of the divine blessing, all of which is implied in the Biblical
doctrine of creation. In Genesis I:28. the particular blessing God gives
to human beings is to control the earth, so that it may supply their needs
in abundance, v.29. It is important to be sensitive to the almost
rapturous tone of the language here: man's dominion is described in the
language used of the dominion of kings, ii human destiny is
the equivalent of the wealth and splendour characteristic of the ancient
Near Eastern monarch, as is brought out in Psalm 8:5ff., which echoes the
Genesis passage. Much the same picture is presented by the story of Adam
in the garden of Eden in Genesis 2, where we have an ideal of the creation
'in which, from the moment of setting Adam in Eden, God destined man to
luxuriate'. iii
It is to be noted, however, that Adam is set in the garden not just to
enjoy it but also 'to till it and care for it' Genesis 2:15. Man's
appropriation and enjoyment of the good things of the world depends on the
work he himself puts into realizing their potentialities. Work is regarded
as an essential part of the human condition, without which human life
would be incomplete, throughout the whole of the Bible. It is not confined
to agricultural operations, as Genesis 2 might appear to suggest, but
includes any type of work which may be demanded by changes in society or
environment, such as the developments into specialized industrial or
commercial activities which the growth of civilization brings about that
are described in Genesis 4:17-22.
It is against this background that the particular role of the nation of
Israel is to be understood. According to the Pentateuch, Israel began as a
group of wandering, landless families. But this was not its ultimate
destiny in God's purpose, and so one of the central themes running through
the entire Pentateuch is the divine promise to the patriarchs that their
descendants would be given enduring possession of a land of their own,
e.g. Genesis 15:18-21, 17:8. The basis of the nation's existence was this
divine gift of the land of Canaan and hence Israel's calling was to leave
the desert and its nomadic existence and embrace that gift. Such is the
context of what can fairly be described as the creed or confession of
faith, whatever its precise date, of Deuteronomy 26:5-11 and, in Hosea,
Israel's punishment for her failure to realize that the riches of the land
were bestowed on her by her God is that she should become 'naked as the
day she was born, parched as the desert, left to die of thirst', 2:3.
What this meant was that the nation was to luxuriate, just as Adam in
Eden, in the abundance provided by the land promised and given to it by
God. One of the Hebrew terms for 'wealth' is osher, of which the basic
sense of the root is 'to abound' and it is the abundance of the land of
Canaan-'a land of milk and honey' -which is described and emphasized in a
number of Old Testament passages, most fully in Deuteronomy 8:7-10, with
its statement, 'It is a land where you will never live in poverty nor want
for anything'. And if riches were the sign of God's blessing for the
nation, so too were they for those individuals who traditionally
represented the ideal and apex of human existence, the patriarchs. Genesis
24:35--(Abraham), 26:12-14 (Isaac), 30:43 (Jacob) or a king like Solomon,
I Kings 10:14-27. But, further, it is not simply these great paradigmatic
figures who are to enjoy the blessing of wealth: it is the destiny of what
might be called the 'average' Israelite too. So, the sign of the ideal
state of Israel during the reign of Solomon is not just the abundance of
the national wealth but the fact that 'Judah and Israel lived in security,
everyone under his own vine and under his own fig tree', I Kings 4:25;
everyone was secure in the enjoyment of his own property, and it is
noteworthy that exactly the same expression is employed to describe the
future 'golden age' in later prophecies, Micah 4:4, Zechariah 3:10. Two
other Hebrew terms for 'wealth' are hìn and hayil, the roots of which mean
'faculty', 'ability' or 'power', that is, in the Old Testament view,
wealth is what gives a person the ability to live a proper life and power
over his own destiny, and the freedom wealth brings is the right of each
individual in the community.
From all this various consequences follow. In the first place, for the
reason just mentioned, the Bible takes the possession of private property
for granted and is at pains to protect it. It has sometimes been argued
that Israelite law was not concerned with the protection of property but
of persons. However, this is to make a false distinction, for in Israel
personal and property rights were bound up together: it was because such
groups as the poor, the widow and the orphan lacked property that they
also lacked status in the community and so needed protection, as will be
discussed later. In any case, not only is there the prohibition of theft
in the Decalogue, but what is probably Israel's earliest legal code, the
so-called 'Book of the Covenant', Exodus 21:1 - 23:19, contains a string
of provisions to safeguard the possessions of those with considerable
substance, fields and vineyards, flocks and herds, houses and money, e.g.
Exodus 22:1-15. Above all, it was having his own property which conferred
full citizenship on a man and gave him the position of 'elder', with the
right to take part and speak in the legal assembly that regulated the
concerns of the local community. iv It is the loss of this
status which accounts for the sharpness of the prophetic denunciation of
the powerful who, probably quite legally, as again will be argued later,
dispossessed the lesser citizens of their property, Isaiah 5:8-10, Micah
2:1-5.
Secondly, if the powerful ought not to take advantage of their position
to deprive others of their property and its concomitant rights, the same
applied to the state when that came to be established in Israel. In the
Bible, there is a marked resistance to any interference with private
property, not least by enforced taxation, which was regarded as unjust. As
Proverbs 29:4 remarks, 'By just government a king gives his country
stability, but by forced contributions he reduces it to ruin'. Opposition
to the monarchy, as found in texts probably dating not long after its
establishment, was in the first instance on social and economic, rather
than theological, grounds, and one of the main complaints was against the
king's imposition of taxation or its equivalent, forced labour, which
prevented the individual from working his own land, I Samuel 8:11-17, see
also I Kings 12:1-15: this perhaps also accounts for the condemnation of
the taking of a census, 2 Samuel 24, which may well have been intended for
taxation purposes.
Thirdly, as with Adam, the wealth that God destines for human beings is
the reward for their own efforts to achieve it-'that a man should eat and
drink and enjoy himself, in return for all his labour, is a gift of God',
Ecclesiastes 3:13. The Wisdom literature especially contains a number of
exhortations to work hard and warnings that failure to do so will result
in poverty, e.g. Proverbs 6:6-11, 10:4, 20:13, 28:19. However, it would
hardly be correct to describe this, as has sometimes been done, as a
straightforward work ethic: it is not so much work in itself which is the
ideal as the prosperity which it brings and which human beings may then
enjoy.
What has just been said must be balanced by various other
considerations. We may first consider some limitations which are found in
the Bible on the individual's freedom to acquire wealth and his freedom to
employ his possessions as he himself chose. One of these can be described
as theological and again it derives from the fact of Israel's possession
of the land of Canaan. As has been stated, this was God's free bounty and
so the land and the wealth it produced were ultimately His to dispose of
as He willed. This concept is given theological expression in the
institutions of the sabbath year and the jubilee in the book of Leviticus,
and fully expressed in God's words in Leviticus 25:23, 'the land is mine
and you are coming into it as aliens and settlers', that is, the land of
Canaan belongs only to God and the Israelites are there only as 'aliens',
permanent, but non-property owning, residents. During the sabbath year the
whole land was to be left fallow as an assertion of its divine ownership,
returning to its original state unexploited by man, and the provisions of
the jubilee, Leviticus 25:8-55, spring from the doctrine that ownership of
property was really vested in God, so that no individual could have an
absolute permanent claim on it. However successful a person might be in
acquiring wealth by his own endeavours and however much this might be
viewed as the ideal, he was never to think that what he owned was under
his absolute control: it was always to be understood as a divine gift and
the individual was always responsible to God for its proper use,
Deuteronomy 8:17-18.
Another kind of limitation can perhaps best be described as social. The
Old Testament view of wealth, like so much of its basic social ethics,
reflects an age-old and relatively simple society, a pastoral and
agricultural community in which each extended family exercised its own
autonomy, possessing house and land which provided economic livelihood.
Great discrepancy in wealth was not envisaged. Rather the ideal was that
everyone should enjoy the basic necessities of life, an ideal well
expressed in the prayer of Agur, son of Jakeh, in Proverbs 30:7ff., which
interestingly combines both the theological and social limitations on
wealth which we have mentioned:
The words of Agur lead to a consideration of the Old Testament attitude
more specifically to poverty. Quite simply, because God has set Israel in
so abundant an environment, it ought not to exist at all-'there shall be
no poor among you, for the Lord your God will bless you with great
prosperity in the land which he is giving you to occupy', Deuteronomy
15:4. But realistically it was recognized that in the actual world it did
and would continue to exist, and so, very shortly after the verse just
quoted, the book of Deuteronomy has to say, 15:11, 'the poor will always
be with you in the land.' Poverty did not just begin with the new social
conditions under the monarchy: all sorts of reasons could bring a man and
his family into poverty, even in the simplest and most closely-knit
society. But because this was so clearly contrary to the divine purpose,
there was a special duty to relieve it as far as possible, a duty laid on
any individual Israelite who had the ability to do so.
However, this was not a matter of legal enactment, as can be seen from
that earliest Israelite legal code already mentioned, which the other and
later Old Testament legal collections pre-suppose and build upon, the
so-called 'Book of the Covenant' in Exodus 21:1-23:19. This falls clearly
into two parts. The first, Exodus 21:l2-22, consists of a series of
definite enactments, described in Exodus 21:I by the legal term mishpatim,
'laws'. They seem to be addressed to those responsible for the actual
administration of justice, for they deal with civil and criminal matters
and provide specific penalties for their non-observance which could be
enforced in the courts. What is noteworthy here is the concern to
establish strict impartiality in the administration of justice. This
section witnesses to the centrality of law, an ideal which marks the whole
of the Old Testament. It was to operate in exactly the same way for rich
and poor alike, as is expressed in a key verse, Exodus 23:3, addressed to
those responsible for pronouncing judgment: 'you shall not be led into
wrongdoing by the majority, nor, when you give evidence in a lawsuit,
shall you side with the majority to pervert justice; nor shall you favour
a poor man in his suit.' This always remained a basic principle of
Israel's law, for what is said in Exodus 23:3 is repeated in much the same
terms in Deuteronomy I:17 and Leviticus 19:15. There was to be no
mitigation of strict justice, however harsh the consequences, simply
because the guilty person was poor: the thief 'shall repay in full; if he
has no means, he shall be sold'-i.e. into slavery-'to pay for the theft',
Exodus 22:3. At least as far as the law is concerned, the Old Testament
appears to know nothing of any inbuilt legalized 'bias to the poor'.
The second section of the Book of the Covenant, Exodus 22:21-23:19, is
very different. Here we find a mixture of humanitarian and cultic
injunctions-we shall only be concerned with the former-which envisage no
legal redress for their breach and provide no penalties for their
non-observance. Rather, they appeal to the moral and social conscience of
each person for obedience. In fact, they are a kind of sermon addressed to
the nation and this becomes the characteristic of the whole of the later
legal collections, such as Deuteronomy and the 'Code of Holiness',
Leviticus 17-26. Whereas the distinctive form of the first section of the
Book of the Covenant is by way of a statement of a case in the third
person singular, 'if a man does so and so, then so and so follows; here we
find a direct address, usually in the second person singular, sometimes
accompanied by motive clauses designed to persuade the hearers to do what
is being asked of them, e.g. Exodus 22:21-24. What these humanitarian
injunctions appear to seek to do is to go beyond the strict application of
the law to a different sphere of justice, to ensure that all in society
share in, and are sustained by, the wealth of the people as a whole, to
realize God's intention when He gave that wealth to Israel. What is
noteworthy is that it is only in this section that we find enjoined the
duty of care for the poor and the underprivileged, such as the widow and
orphan, and that here the problem of poverty is to be resolved by the
action of the individual or perhaps the individual man as head of the
family group. But he is free to act as he chooses, there is no formal law
which can compel him to behave in the ways the author of the section
wishes, for whom only an appeal to a person's conscience is available.
Even if, as some scholars hold, the injunctions in question in their
present form emanate from the royal court, yet they are not state law.
At this point, it is appropriate to say something of the role of the
Israelite king as an upholder of social justice. The monarch in the
ancient Near East was expected to show a particular concern to protect the
poor and underprivileged, and the Israelite king was no exception, as
several Old Testament passages show-one may instance the description of
the ideal king in Psalm 72 or Isaiah 11: 3-5. The king had this special
responsibility because of his uniquely close relationship with the deity:
as God was concerned with the plight of the poor, the widow and the
orphan, so, as His intimate servant, was the king. The king's
responsibility here was highlighted by the new social and economic
conditions which developed during Israel's monarchical period, when there
grew up a class of large landowners and rich merchants who were tempted to
increase their wealth by forcing poorer groups into actual or economic
slavery. The issue for the king was the exploitation of such persons by
those more powerful than themselves, and the king's role was twofold:
first, to rectify any actual flouting of the law when people exercised
their right of appeal to him in cases where they had a grievance, but
secondly to set an example of right behaviour for others. It is when the
rich use their economic power to destroy the freedom and independence
which was every Israelite's heritage that they are attacked in the Bible,
not just for being rich or even very rich. It is when the king, as the
wealthiest and most powerful figure in society, fails to carry out his
divinely given calling to foreward the proper social order for Israel that
he is condemned, not because of the position he occupies. This is clearly
seen in the prophet's contrast between king Josiah and his son Jehoiakim
in Jeremiah 22 : 13-19. The latter is condemned for his extravagance,
injustice and economic oppression while the former who, it is pointed out,
was equally a king and equally wealthy, is praised in that 'he dispensed
justice to the lowly and poor' and this was because he knew the Lord and
what He willed, in the way that his successor failed to do. Again, it is
to the monarch's own conscience, his own awareness of his duty, that
appeal is made.
It is against the background of the monarchical period that the
prophets speak and various things need to be noted. First, the prophets do
not differ from the basic Israelite view that wealth, at least in the
sense of a basic self-sufficiency, is good and poverty an evil which ought
to be mitigated as far as possible. And they were realistic enough to
realize that, in the society in which they found themselves, there was
bound to be disparity of wealth as between different groups in the nation.
Hence, when they inveigh against the rich, it is not because of their
wealth as such, but because of their enjoyment of it while ignoring, or
taking advantage of, others' needs. So their attacks on the rich are
always accompanied by statements that they are oppressing the poor and
indeed these statements always form the climax of the prophetic
indictment. For example, Amos rebukes the ladies of Samaria not so much
for their idle and luxurious life-style or their wealth, but because 'they
oppress the poor and crush the destitute', Amos 4 : 1. Similarly, the
prophets appear as advocates of the private ownership of property as the
right of all Israelites and hence they denounce those who deprive people
of their possessions and force them into poverty.
What the prophets base themselves on is not primarily the legal system,
as represented by the mishpatim of the Book of the Covenant, but rather
the general terms of the humanitarian injunctions of the second section of
that document. Certainly, they sometimes roundly condemn corruption and
sharp practice in the actual administration of the courts, occasions when
the high would have been favoured against the low, but such is not their
main concern. The problem was that those stipulations of the law which
demanded the same impartial treatment of rich and poor alike could be the
cause of much hardship, just because they required equal application of
the law to those who in fact were not equal. v To take the
law of theft in Exodus 22 : 1-2, which has already been mentioned: this
would cause no great difficulty for the man who could afford the fine but
disaster for the one who could not. Often, the prophets seem to speak not
of legal maladministration but of the harshness of the judgments handed
down, which the rigorous impartiality of the law necessitated. So what the
prophets were conscious of was a conflict between legality and justice, a
distinction that can perhaps best be expressed by the two Hebrew terms
mishpat, a law or legal ordinance, and zedekah, justice or righteousness.
What the prophets seem to have desired is that zedekah should function,
for the benefit of those who would otherwise suffer unduly, in the actual
application of the mishpatim. We may perhaps see a succinct statement of
the prophetic ideal in the words of Psalm 94 : 14, as rendered in the New
English Bible, where it is said of God 'for righteousness still informs
his judgment (mishpat) and all upright men follow it'. Righteousness or
equity informing law and legal decisions - that sums up the prophetic aim.
But how was one to know what was really just in any given situation?
What guidelines did Israel have for discerning where 'oppression' was
taking place, when the disadvantaged were in fact being unfairly treated?
At one time, it was thought that the prophets were appealing to the
Covenant and its law but it is curious that they hardly ever mention the
Covenant and scholars are now more inclined to believe that they challenge
those they condemn to act in accordance with what we might call 'natural
law' or 'natural morality', that is, with generally recognized standards
of humane and decent behaviour which the human conscience could recognize.
As one scholar, speaking of the outlook of Amos, has put it: 'Social
morality, understood both as impartiality in justice and care for the
rights of the helpless, is not a mere piece of arbitrary divine
legislation nor merely a human convention, but almost a part of the order
of nature, self-evident to any right-thinking man'. vi
If this is right, two consequences follow. First, the prophets assume
that people can change when they are confronted with the contrast between
what they do and what in conscience they know they ought to do. The
powerful could use their power in concern for the welfare and rights of
others. The prophets never speak as though some authority, such as the
king, should step in to force the rich to behave properly : no doubt they
held that on occasion he could and should, but in the first instance the
powerful have to realize their obligations and act on them. Secondly, the
fact that the rightness of social obligations ought to be so obvious means
that neglect of them would incur divine judgment, for God is the creator
and guarantor of universal justice. For the prophets, social injustice was
what would bring judgment on the nation because the people had no excuse
for not doing what was right and this insight was the root of what was a
novelty in the message of the great prophets, the proclamation of doom. To
quote again the scholar mentioned above: 'since the rightness of the
obligations laid on Israel ought to be as obvious as if they were agreed
on by all men, how much worse her guilt is when she also has the advantage
of a special personal contact with God to endorse them'. vii
It is this broad basis of natural law which should form the guiding
principle for Christian participation in secular politics, not that it is
exclusive to Christians, but because they can perhaps understand its
implications more clearly than some others.
So far, we have been considering wealth and poverty in the Old
Testament in almost purely economic terms but it is important to recognize
that in the Bible 'poor' often has a distinctively religious connotation.
The Psalms in particular frequently refer to a group of people described
by various Hebrew terms-'helpless, wretched, oppressed, small, weak,
poor'-but they all designate the same entity and 'poor' is an adequate
blanket term. Probably some of those thus designated were poor in a
material sense but that is not the primary connotation here : for example,
in Psalm 86, 1-2 the speaker describes himself as 'downtrodden and poor'
but also as 'constant and true' and as putting his trust in the Lord and
all the expressions are clearly synonymous nor is there anything in this,
and similar psalms, to suggest material poverty. What is meant is a group
which represented the faithful members of the religious community of
Israel, the centre of whose existence was a living relationship with God
and whose trust was not ultimately in political schemes or high position
or wealth. After the return from exile, it is this sense of the term
'poor' which becomes most significant, as denoting the central division in
Judaism, that between the 'poor' or 'righteous', who adhered to worship,
to the Law and to the regulations governing devout conduct, and the
'wicked' who no longer adhered to these things. viii Above
all, these 'poor' looked to God for redemption, for His intervention to
usher in a new age to be marked by perfect justice and righteousness in
contrast to the evils of the present world.
It would now be generally agreed that this situation, and the group of
the 'poor' in the sense described, constituted a vital element in the
emergence of Christianity. But before turning to the New Testament, it is
perhaps worth saying something briefly in answer to the objections which
might be raised today by many powerful voices against the description so
far attempted of the Old Testament view of wealth and poverty. The
'Liberation' theologians, and those influenced by them would say that the
Old Testament is far more revolutionary and radical than we have pictured
it and that its central message is a call to the poor to struggle for
their freedom from the oppression of the rich and powerful and that God is
seen to be on their side and the enemy of wealth and authority. In
particular, such thinkers give a central place to the experience of the
Exodus which, they would claim 'always carried powerful connotations of
liberation' and is 'used as a model for later events and experiences.
ix But, whatever truth there may be in this it ignores the
caveat uttered at the beginning of this paper in that it is one-sided and
fails to take into account so much of the Biblical evidence, in particular
the concept of a divine commonwealth and a holy community which is so
prominent there. The Exodus is not the only, or even the predominant,
strand in the Bible as we have it. x It is preceded by, and
set in the context of, the primaeval history of creation and the
patriarchal narratives with their ideal of land and family and the Exodus
itself is not God's supreme achievement for Israel, but rather, as we have
already noted, His settling of them in the abundance of Canaan. Though
there is a clear awareness of the danger of riches, there is no
glorification of the economically poor and, as one scholar has put it:
'There is little sense of the Old Testament as witnessing to the demands
of the poor for their rights within their own society. It is rather the
expression of the conscience of those who have sufficiency'.
xi Its message is to rich and poor alike and both have their
place.
This paper has concentrated on the Old Testament and that for two
reasons. First, the Old Testament is concerned with those who have a
direct responsibility for the society in which they are set and who can
influence what happens in it: by contrast, the early Christians were a
small and marginalized sect who could exercise virtually no control upon
public life. Thus we should not expect to find much guidance for those
occupied today with political, social and economic questions in the New
Testament as compared with the Old. Secondly, the first Christians did not
greatly concern themselves with the existing social order because they
expected a speedy end to the world age in which they were living and while
it may be going too far to describe their social understanding merely as
an Interimsethik-there are indications in some of the later New Testament
documents that the hope of an imminent parousia was beginning to fade-it
was inevitably limited. Thus the New Testament relevance to the subject
under discussion can be treated more briefly.
The radical and revolutionary understanding of the Old Testament was
mentioned above because similar claims have been made about the message of
Jesus, that Jesus taught that the economically poor are specially favoured
by God and that the rich are the enemies of the kingdom be came to
inaugurate. Attempts to portray Jesus as one among a number of political
revolutionaries in the troubled climate of first century Palestine have
not proved very convincing and the texts adduced to prove this 'bias to
the materially poor' will not bear that interpretation. It would seem that
when Jesus speaks of the 'poor' he is using the term in the religious
sense which, as we have seen, had become characteristic of the Judaism of
his day, the voluntary poor who were willing to be poor even though they
were still in possession of wealth. Significantly, it is in this sense
that the members of the Qumran community described themselves as 'poor', a
group contemporary with Jesus and with which his own movement had many
similarities. It is the poor with this meaning of whom the gospels speak:
in the Beatitudes, Matthew's 'poor in spirit' gives the correct
understanding of Luke's 'poor' and we should understand in the same way
the 'poor' in Jesus' quotation of Isaiah 61 : 1 at the beginning of his
ministry at Luke 4 : 18 which has often been taken simply to show his
identification with the economically deprived. The Isaiah passage also
shows clearly that his message for the poor is a sign of the breaking in
of the new age: the poor are those whose hope is only in God and His
kingdom, who do not put their trust in wealth and secular power, for those
who would embrace the kingdom wholeheartedly 'cannot serve God and
mammon', Matthew 6 : 24.
But this does not mean that, as long as they are in the world as it is,
Jesus' followers are not to enjoy its benefits or to neglect their social
obligations. One is often given the impression that the early Christian
communities consisted very largely of the economically poor and socially
deprived. However, recent thorough sociological studies have shown that in
fact most of their members were reasonably well to do, pursuing gainful
occupations, and who could fairly, in modern terms, be described as
'middle-class''. xii And Paul can say bluntly 'the man who
will not work shall not eat' and he rebukes the idle who will not 'work
quietly for their living', 2 Thessalonians 3 : 10-12, remarks which are
wholly in accord with the outlook of the Old Testament Wisdom literature.
Certainly, the New Testament teaches that wealth has very great dangers,
that greed is an ever-present temptation and 'even when a man has more
than enough, his wealth does not give him, life', Luke 12 : 15, while the
Letter of James fulminates, exactly as do the Old Testament prophets, at
those who use their riches to oppress and exploit the less fortunate,
James 5 : 1-6. But, again as with the prophets, it is reliance on wealth
and the lack of responsibility in its employment which is being condemned,
not possessions as such, and the remedy is a change of heart, to become
'poor in spirit' by putting one's whole trust in God and accepting that
our possessions are only His to be used, certainly for ourselves as a mark
of His gracious blessing, but also for the good of others. The Christian
must always be governed above all by this faith and trust in any
participation in the inevitable imperfections and limitations of secular
political, economic and social action.
WEALTH AND POVERTY IN THE
BIBLE
provide me only with the food I need.
If I have too much I shall deny thee
and say 'Who is the Lord?'.
If I am reduced to poverty I shall steal
and blacken the name of my God.
However, these words, reflecting later developments in Israelite society,
indicate the possibility of excessive wealth, of great discrepancies in
this respect between one person and another. The effect of these
developments on the ancient social order will be discussed later when we
come to look at the ethical teaching of the prophets.
ii Cf. C. Westermann, Creation, 1974, p.51ff.
iii
v Cf. Eryl W. Davies, Prophecy and Ethics, 1981, p.98ff.
vi John Barton, Amos's Oracles against the Nations, 1980,p.49.
vii Ibid, p.49f.
viii Cf. for these two groups, C. Westermann, The Living Psalms, 1989,
p.144f.
ix Richard Bauckham, The Bible in Politics, 1989, p.104
x
xi R.J. Coggins, 'The poor in the Old Testament', Expository Times,
vol.100, 1988.
xii
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