Capital and Labor

The relation between the one who owns the land and tools and the one who works them is, in Scripture, both an ordinary economic fact and a recurring moral test. Owners hire and pay; workers labor and are paid; and the books from Exodus to the Gospels return again and again to the points at which the relation breaks down — wages withheld, slaves crushed, vineyards seized from their lord. Strife between the two parties is not handled abstractly but through narrative: a vineyard let out to tenants, a hired worker robbed of his pay, a Pharaoh whose officers stand over the people with whips.

Strife in the Vineyard

The Synoptic parable of the wicked husbandmen casts the conflict as one between a landowner and the workers to whom he has let his vineyard. Mark gives the longer setup: "A man planted a vineyard, and set a hedge about it, and dug a pit for the wine press, and built a tower, and let it out to husbandmen, and went into another country" (Mark 12:1). The capital is fully developed before the workers receive it — hedge, press, tower, all built — and then the absent owner sends a slave at harvest "that he might receive from the husbandmen of the fruits of the vineyard" (Mark 12:2). The husbandmen "took him, and beat him, and sent him away empty" (Mark 12:3); a second slave they wound in the head, a third they kill, and many others they beat or kill (Mark 12:4-5). When the owner's son comes, the husbandmen reason "This is the heir; come, let us kill him, and the inheritance will be ours" (Mark 12:7), kill him, and throw him out. The parable ends with a question and its answer: "What therefore will the lord of the vineyard do? He will come and destroy the husbandmen, and will give the vineyard to others" (Mark 12:9).

Luke shortens the catalogue of slaves but gives the same arc. "A certain man planted a vineyard, and let it out to husbandmen, and went into another country for a long time" (Luke 20:9). A first slave is beaten, a second is beaten and shamed, a third is wounded and thrown out (Luke 20:10-12). The owner sends his beloved son, hoping for reverence; the husbandmen instead say to one another, "This is the heir; let us kill him, that the inheritance may be ours" (Luke 20:14), throw him out of the vineyard, and kill him. The lord's response is identical: he "will come and destroy these husbandmen, and will give the vineyard to others" (Luke 20:16). The parable describes the worst case of the owner-tenant relation — a labor force that, having received the developed estate, refuses to render its produce and finally turns on the owner himself.

The Vineyard as Yahweh's Own

Behind the Gospel parable stands the older image of Israel as Yahweh's vineyard. Isaiah opens, "Let me sing for my wellbeloved a song of my beloved concerning his vineyard. My wellbeloved had a vineyard in a very fruitful hill" (Isaiah 5:1), and closes the song with the identification: "For the vineyard of Yahweh of hosts is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah his pleasant plant: and he looked for justice, but, look, oppression; for righteousness, but, look, a cry" (Isaiah 5:7). Jeremiah voices the same complaint of damage done to the owner's property: "Many shepherds have destroyed my vineyard, they have trodden my portion under foot, they have made my pleasant portion a desolate wilderness" (Jeremiah 12:10). When the Synoptic parable casts the conflict as a vineyard-tenant problem, it draws on a vocabulary in which the property is Yahweh's, the tenants are the leaders of his people, and the failure is a labor-failure measured against what the owner planted.

The Hired Worker

The biblical economy is also full of day-laborers, and Scripture's interest in them is mostly protective. Job uses the figure twice in passing: human life "Is there not a warfare to common man on earth? And are not his days like the days of a hired worker?" (Job 7:1), and the request for relief, "Look away from him, that he may rest, Until he will accomplish, as a hired worker, his day" (Job 14:6). Isaiah measures Moab's coming humiliation by the same clock: "Within three years, as the years of a hired worker, the glory of Moab will be brought into contempt, with all his great multitude" (Isaiah 16:14). The hired worker's day is the unit by which short, fixed terms are reckoned.

What the prophets and the wisdom books do most insistently with the figure is to defend the worker's wage. Malachi places the wage-cheater alongside sorcerers, adulterers, and perjurers: Yahweh's word is "a swift witness against the sorcerers, and against the adulterers, and against the false swearers, and against those who unjustly reduce the wages of a hired worker" (Malachi 3:5, abbreviated quotation from the row). Sirach makes the case still sharper: "He slays his neighbor who takes away his [means of] living, And a shedder of blood is he who deprives the hired worker of his wages" (Sirach 34:26-27). To withhold wages is, in this register, on the level of homicide. Sirach earlier folds the same protection into his domestic instruction: "Do not afflict a slave who serves faithfully; Or likewise a hired worker who gives his soul" (Sirach 7:20). Maccabean narrative, by contrast, simply registers the hired worker as a fact of warfare — Arabian troops "hired" to fight Judas (1 Maccabees 5:39), and "hired troops" arriving from other realms and from the islands of the sea (1 Maccabees 6:29).

The good shepherd discourse turns the figure to a different purpose. The hired worker is contrasted with the owner: "[he flees] because he is a hired worker, and does not care for the sheep" (John 10:13). The wage-relation in this case is what fails the flock; the labor done for pay alone is precisely the labor that breaks down at the moment of danger.

Slaves and Servants in the Workplace

Sirach treats the household slave as a working employee whose discipline is the master's responsibility but whose limits are also recognized: "Fodder, and a stick, and burdens, for a donkey; Bread, and discipline, and work, for a servant" (Sirach 33:24). The next verse balances the picture from the worker's side: "Set your servant to work, and he will seek rest, Leave his hands idle, and he will seek liberty" (Sirach 33:25). The wisdom is practical, not romantic — work and rest both have their pull on the laborer.

The Taskmaster

At the other end of the labor relation stands the figure of the taskmaster, and Scripture's first long account of the relation is an account of its abuse. Pharaoh's response to a foreign labor force in Egypt is to set "over them slave masters to afflict them with their burdens. And they built for Pharaoh store-cities, Pithom and Raamses" (Exodus 1:11). When Israel later asks for relief, Pharaoh tightens the screw: "And the same day Pharaoh commanded the taskmasters of the people, and their officers, saying" — the order that follows is to deny straw while keeping the brick-quota the same — "Thus says Pharaoh, I will not give you⁺ straw" (Exodus 5:6, 5:10). The taskmaster is the point at which the owner's will reaches the worker's body, and in the founding story of Israel that point is one of pure oppression. The whole exodus is, among other things, Yahweh's intervention into a broken capital-and-labor arrangement.