[This is an exerpt from a book I'm writing on social justice in the Old Testament.]
Compared to our modern economy of global corporations and labor markets, the economy of biblical times was relatively simple. The Law of Moses anticipated four economic classes of people among the Israelites once they settled in the Promised Land: estate owners and their families, servants who lacked freedom but were considered to be part of the family, hired workers who retained their freedom and lived on a wage, and finally foreigners who had made their home among the Israelites.[1] In Leviticus and Deuteronomy, the Mosaic Law prohibits employers from delaying the payment of wages due to hired workers. Lacking the property and equipment needed to operate their own enterprise, these poor but free men hired themselves out to estate owners who needed help working their land.
References in Job and Isaiah indicate that hired workers agreed to contracts as short as one day or as long as one year.[2] Genesis records that Jacob agreed to seven-year labor contracts with his rich uncle, Laban. However, the provisions in Leviticus and Deuteronomy aim at protecting the former class of hired workers—the day laborers who lived a hand-to-mouth existence and who counted on their daily wage for sustenance. These men, and perhaps women, lived on the fringes of society and, lacking the security of property or stored wealth, suffered the most in times of national duress, such as famine or war.
Though a New Testament example, the Prodigal Son described by Jesus in Luke 15:11-32 provides an excellent picture of this type of worker. Alone in a foreign land, his money exhausted, the son hires himself out to a local landowner as a swineherd. His position is so low and precarious that he envies the pigs for being able to fill their bellies. Another apt New Testament example is another of Jesus’ parables: the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard in Matthew 20:1-16. In that parable, the owner of a vineyard hires day laborers from the marketplace and agrees to pay them a denarius (a day’s wages) for their work at the end of the twelfth hour, or six o’clock in the evening.
Indeed, nearly every society since biblical times has included some people without the property, equipment, or trade skills needed to employ themselves. In economic terms, these people lack the capital required to start their own business. Serfs in mediaeval times or Irish peasants under the English aristocracy had no access to land of their own. Instead, they worked the land of other men in exchange for a share of the harvest. Currently in the developing world, large numbers of workers from rural areas continue to flock to cities where they manufacture or assemble goods for large overseas corporations. Depressed wages and weak or unenforced labor laws make the situation of these hired workers precarious, and they are compensated only a small fraction of the value of the goods they produce.
Even today in the United States, many people work to receive an hourly wage without any capital share in the company they work for. Labor-friendly laws and an economy that is driven by specialized skills and knowledge put most hired workers in the United States on equal footing with even the most powerful employers. To find people in the United States facing similar circumstances to the hired workers in Jesus’ parables, do not look for office-park cubicle farms. Instead, line up early in the morning at temporary employment agencies. Or, they wait in groups at the edge of the parking lots at home improvement stores. There, you’ll find desperate people hoping construction contractors or homeowners will hire them to work at low-skill tasks such as painting, fence repair, or landscaping. Or, look to the fields during harvest time, when entire families in agricultural areas will hire themselves out to farmers for long days of picking fruits or vegetables. Or, look in the homes of the wealthy where immigrant women work as nannies and maids. None of these people are slaves, but they are poor and desperately need work. The money they earn that day will mostly be spent within days on food, shelter, and clothing.
It is about these types of people that Leviticus 19:13 says, “Do not hold back the wages of a hired man overnight.” Moses expands on the same command in Deuteronomy 24:14-15:
Do not take advantage of a hired man who is poor and needy, whether he is a brother Israelite or an alien living in one of your towns. Pay him his wages each day before sunset, because he is poor and counting on it. Otherwise he may cry to the Lord against you, and you will be guilty of sin.
First, Moses clarifies that to hold back wages from a hired man is to take advantage of him. Without collective bargaining and all other things being equal, employers hold an advantage over employees, especially those who have little financial or social influence and who depend on their daily wages for basic necessities. Moses indicates these people have no other support or recourse except to cry out to God. They have no money saved up, no patrons in the community to champion their cause, and would be powerless to demand justice themselves. It is for the sake of these powerless and vulnerable people that God gives the command to the Israelites. Although there is no specifically prescribed penalty for an infraction of this law, God Himself will bring retributive justice against the unjust employer.
Jacob’s service to his uncle Laban reveals something about unequal relationships between employer and employee. Although Jacob enjoyed some advantages compared with the day laborers referred to in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, Laban had become a powerful landowner who considered everything Jacob earned as belonging to himself. Laban took advantage of his more powerful position to unscrupulously lessen his compensation ten times over twenty years. Finally, Jacob had had enough and decided to flee back to his father’s country and out of under his oppressive employment to Laban. When Laban pursues and overtakes him, Jacob finally pleads his case:
I have been with you for twenty years now. Your sheep and goats have not miscarried, nor have I eaten rams from your flocks. I did not bring you animals torn by wild beasts; I bore the loss myself. And you demanded payment from me for whatever was stolen by day or night. This was my situation: The heat consumed me in the daytime and the cold at night, and sleep fled from my eyes. It was like this for the twenty years I was in your household. I worked for you fourteen years for your two daughters and six years for your flocks, and you changed my wages ten times. If the God of my father, the God of Abraham and the Fear of Isaac, had not been with me, you would surely have sent me away empty-handed. But God has seen my hardship and the toil of my hands, and last night he rebuked you.[3]
God’s intervention and family ties kept Laban from taking from Jacob twenty years’ worth of labor. Many centuries later, God tells the Israelites that He will similarly intervene on behalf of oppressed workers. Where we are left to infer a moral standard in Genesis, here God makes it clear: He ardently desires just employment practices where employer and employee negotiate on equal terms.
Jesus’ Parable of the Great Banquet, told in Luke 14, emphasizes God’s special grace extended to those on the lowest rungs of the societal ladder. The master in that parable, his invitation having been rejected by those of means, commands his servant, “Go out to the roads and country lanes and compel them to come in, so that my house will be full.” As the commentator Matthew Henry notes, these people are “the vagrants, or those that are returning now in the evening from their work in the field, from hedging and ditching there.” In other words, Jesus implies that God’s grace is effectual for those who, because of their desperate situation, would welcome it as a day laborer would welcome a rich and free banquet at the end of the day. Jesus’ message reaffirmed that those who are powerful and rich in this world, as a result of their self-absorption and self-importance, will not receive God’s grace though it is equally extended to them. Those who have little in this world, as a result of their desperate need for salvation, will receive God’s help.
With this same idea in mind, James the brother of Jesus writes: “The brother in humble circumstances ought to take pride in his high position. But the one who is rich should take pride in his low position, because he will pass away like a wild flower.” But, James scathingly rebukes the rich landowners who have forgotten God’s defense of the needy. Recalling the provision for day laborers in Deuteronomy, he writes:
Look! The wages you failed to pay the workmen who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty.[4]
[This post is an excerpt of my work-in-progress book on social justice in the Old Testament. Feedback is welcome! More on Learning to Do Right.]
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