Joshua Berman on "The Bible, Home Ownership, and the Housing Crisis"

This is from the History News Network:

"In the wake of the mortgage crisis, a growing chorus of economists today questions the status of home ownership as the fulfillment of the American dream. An argument supporting home ownership is found – of all places – in the Hebrew Bible. Although usually read as part of a religious text, the Bible's economic prescriptions may be mined to recover the roadmaps by which past thinkers navigated, even if no longer fully applicable today."

"Economic commentators Paul Krugman and James Surowiecki argue that the American dream increasingly ends with a rude awakening. With the market value of houses falling, many Americans are now trapped in mortgages that exceed the value of their homes. And for many more, they argue, the hassles of buying and selling a home make it harder for underemployed home owners to move to where the jobs are."

"But consider the original context of a touchstone of American political culture, the biblical inscription on the Liberty Bell in Independence Hall in Philadelphia: "Proclaim Liberty throughout all the land to all the inhabitants thereof." Contrary to popular conception, the verse in question, Leviticus 25:10, addresses neither despotic rule nor slavery, but is an economic prescription. When read in the larger context of that biblical chapter it emerges as a call to ownership stability, part of an economic plan that was radical for its time."

"Elsewhere in the ancient Near East, land was held chiefly by the kings and by the temples. The Hebrew Bible, for the first time, sought to put the vast majority of landholdings into the hands of ordinary people. Land -- the means of production in an agrarian society -- was apportioned to extended kinship groups. The vision was that you never dwelt alone, but as part of a deeply intertwined social fabric of extended kin. If a landowner suffered crop failure, or illness, he could sell his land, but would then find himself alienated from his property with no means of getting back on his feet. The Bible's solution was that every fifty years property was restored to the original owners: "Proclaim Liberty throughout all the land to all the inhabitants thereof, for the Jubilee year it will be for you, and each man shall return to his property and each man unto his kin." The "Liberty" is from debt, and the prescription is for stability of property ownership in the company of one's kin."

"The Bible sought to empower citizens by granting them equity. The distribution of lands was similar in spirit to the Homestead Act of 1863. Opening the Great Plains to mass settlement, nearly any person 21 years of age could acquire at virtually no cost a tract of 160 acres that would become his after five years of residence and farming. For 2 million new arrivals and other landless Americans, the Homestead Act was an opportunity to acquire assets and to bring equality of economic standing in line with equality before the law."

full article.