{Pascal was sniffing around a stack of books on “Christus Victor” theology when he found an unexpected, albeit unrelated, treasure. He shares his reaction to it here, at some length.}
“They do not know how to do right,” declares the LORD, “who store up in their fortresses what they have plundered and looted. Away with the noise of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps. But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!” (Book of Amos)
When it comes to theology and scriptural exegesis: Lord, I do love a crank, an eccentric, a lone voice crying in the wilderness. And while it may be impertinent of me to describe as a “crank” a man so credentialed and distinguished as Professor Morris Silver, allow me to present my evidence. 1
In 1983, Morris Silver published Prophets and Markets: The Political Economy of Ancient Israel. The book was neither a best-seller nor a critical favorite, though even reviewers who opposed Silver’s thesis acknowledged his indefatigable multi-discipline research into his subject. “Silver's book will be useful to many because of the wealth of material he has collected,” one reviewer grudgingly conceded; another praised Silver’s “meticulousness and logic,” calling the book “a vivid example of how powerful the tenets of economic behavior can be in ordering even limited evidence.” A study of ancient Israel’s political economy might stir mild academic interest and/or disagreement, but it does not seem to be the stuff of major controversy.
Until, that is, you look at Silver’s main thesis:
The writing prophets of the eighth-seventh centuries—Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Micah, Jeremiah, Zephaniah, and Ezekiel—succeeded in committing the rulers of Israel and Judah to welfarist reforms. With the support of the state’s armed might they unleashed a “prophetic revolution.” The ill-conceived policies severely damaged the economy and morale. Traditional historiography holds that Israel and Judah fell because the prophetic counsel was ignored. In fact, whatever its presumed moral virtue, the advice of the classical prophets was destructive from the standpoint of economic affluence and political strength. In the end, the prophets did not succeed in transforming the Israelite. Since they understood neither the man nor Israelite society, they succeeded only in making the former miserable while destroying the latter.
If you wonder why economics is sometimes called “the dismal science,” consider Morris Silver’s audacity in besmirching the reputation of the hallowed Old Testament prophets; consider how, as an economist, Profess Silver blithely dismissed the “presumed moral virtue” of the prophets’ declarations, as though calls to moral betterment were a mere distraction from the business of piling up treasure on earth.
Mustering economic and archaeological data I am not qualified to assess, Silver concluded that “By the beginning of the eighth century BCE, Israel and Judah [were experiencing] a glittering era of prosperity and power.” Why, then, did buzzkills like Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah choose that time to denounce the nation in the name of (and at the command of) its God? What is so wrong with prosperity and power, even if somewhat unequally distributed? According to an earlier book by Silver (Affluence, Altruism, and Atrophy: The Decline of Welfare States), “Altruism or the taste for helping others is one of the ‘higher needs’ described by the psychologist Abraham H. Maslow. [Research and behavioral evidence] suggest that affluence increases the demand for altruistic consumption, which often takes the form of state actions to improve the lot of the poor.” 2
By “altruistic consumption,” Silver meant “indulging in the senseless luxury of trying to help others”. In other words, the prophets were “social reformers,” over-educated and out-of-touch elites who, consumed by guilt over their own privileged lives and/or worried about potential social unrest (which they helped to stoke), demanded that the state implement policies to achieve “social justice”.
Is any of this beginning to sound familiar? Writing in the early Eighties, Silver was, for all intents and purposes, composing a revisionist gospel of Reaganomics. He accused ancient Israel’s elite of “talking to itself” through the medium of prophecy. “The struggle for social justice [in ancient Israel],” wrote Silver, was an effort by “the wealthy, both royal and non-royal, with the guidance of the prophets, to employ state power to nullify the laws of economics and society. These well-meaning but uncomprehending efforts backfired disastrously.” 3
As Jesus said, “The poor will always be with you, so why bother?” In Silver’s analysis, the prophets—reformers brimming with misplaced compassion and wielding well-intentioned blueprints for social reconstruction (“fundamental transformation,” as it were)—were the bane of Israel and the proximate cause of its downfall. 4 Barry Bandstra and John Lunn summarized Silver’s charge: “The governments of Israel and Judah responded to the calls of the prophets for land reform and other measures to aid the poor, and the reforms weakened the economies of the two nations, ultimately leading to Israel’s defeat by the Assyrians and Judah’s defeat by the Babylonians.”
“Silver’s hypothesis,” Bandstra and Lunn went on to say, “questions the use of the Old Testament prophets in evaluating modern societies. Following the ideas of Amos or Isaiah would harm rather than help the poor. Silver’s analysis upends the views of most Christians about the prophets,” they concluded. But maybe those views deserve to be upended, based as they are on flawed economic reasoning and on false assumptions about human nature? Incentives matter: give a man a fish, as Paul Ryan would tell you, and he’ll stay in his hammock all day long.
In the opinion of Morris Silver, to take at face value what the Old Testament prophets had to say about Israel’s economy and society would be “like writing a history of the US economy relying solely on the opinions of Ralph Nader.” Moreover, “From the perspective of the prophets (and of many modern social reformers), any economic transaction between a rich person and a poor person [qualified as] robbery, whether it was legal and uncoerced or not.” To hear the likes of Amos and Micah tell it, there is such a thing as systemic injustice, what we might call society’s “preferential option for the rich”. Professor Silver will have none of that. The Old Testament prophets, by preaching a God of social justice rather than cultic or national solidarity, actively sought to undermine both those latter elements; “the ordinary Israelite could not be converted to a new religion of social justice and social reform until he had been robbed of the peace of mind and the sense of belonging provided by the ancient religion.”
Silver did not hesitate to draw the obvious comparison: “The Israelite society portrayed by Amos and his successors suffers terribly from severe oppression of the poor, injustice, commercial dishonesty, and official corruption, all of which are linked to the lifestyle of a well-to-do middle class. The central image is one that is familiar to modern Americans, namely the blight of poverty amid affluence. There can be no doubt,” Silver wrote, “that the prophets were social reformers. For them, social injustice is neither private nor inevitable; it can and must be eliminated by a resolute act of social will. And the will—that is, the necessary force—is to be supplied by the state.”
In case the reader has not yet gotten the message, Professor Silver spells it out: “Modern liberalism is the closest contemporary analog to the program of the prophets. Motivated by idealism or personal ambition, [liberals] seek, with the support of the affluent, to commit the rulers to programs of social amelioration and regeneration.” He allows that “the prophets were authoritarians, not social democrats. For them, extremism in defense of social justice is the supreme virtue, while the passive acceptance of injustice is a vice. At times the prophets seem to play the role of revolutionaries and their oracles have the ring of sedition.” Nonetheless, the parallels with liberals today are clear.
Even apart from its contemporary political implications, Silver’s analysis did not persuade most reviewers. “Not being a biblical scholar,” wrote one, “Silver makes many mistakes, and his lack of training in biblical studies [inevitably results in] a lack of method.” Bandstra and Lunn accused Silver of “misusing the models he employs to draw unwarranted conclusions” and to “claim ‘facts’ that are not in evidence in either the Scriptures or the archaeological record.”
Morris Silver had anticipated criticisms, especially those which would dismiss his work as “a conservative polemic against liberal social reformers.” He lamented that “modern liberal-minded attitudes,” along with “presumptions of a Marxist-Leninist character,” had led to inaccurate (or meretricious) assessments of ancient Israel’s economic conditions. His research led Silver to insist that “there is no reason to believe that the [Israelite] poor became poorer”; rather, “there is abundant reason to conclude that an appreciable number of Israelite citizens became men of means during the eighth and seventh centuries BCE.” A rising tide lifts all arks!
Silver’s thesis, of course, hinged in part on the claim that the prophets had significant influence and that their social critiques were translated into government policy. Again, Bandstra and Lunn: “The evidence from Hebrew scriptures does not provide an answer to whether Israel or Judah engaged in land reform and other welfarist actions.” For that matter, they add, “Although the biblical evidence is not straightforward, Silver utilizes the most skeptical school of thought regarding the scriptures’ reliability.” Not to overstate the obvious: “Silver’s characterization of the prophets is not typical for biblical scholars.” Silver himself, in a 1995 publication, described his proposition as ‘startling,’ which did not mean he intended to retract it.
Reading through the work of both Silver and his critics, one is amazed at the amount of dogged research that goes into this level of scholarship. Interpreting ancient documents written in archaic languages, correlating them with other contemporaneous materials, sifting through archaeological finds, and trying to piece together fragments of a culture distant from us in so many ways: all that is an extraordinary undertaking. No wonder scholars disagree—there is so much to disagree about, and so many ways to disagree about it.
That said, and given my own modern liberal-minded bias, I would like simply to conclude that Morris Silver was wrong about ancient Israel and about the Old Testament prophets; but I have, if I am being honest, no grounds for doing so. Silver’s thesis goes against the grain and against everything I have ever read or heard about Amos, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Micah, and the other prophets; their words continue to inspire and to echo through the millennia, and I for one would rather not think of them as the mistaken proclamations of economically illiterate bleeding-heart reformers.
After all, man does not live by the “laws of economics” alone, but by the sharing of both bread and sorrow, of weal and of woe. Morris Silver’s market-based critique of prophetic calls for social justice may be economically defensible, but it will not get an “Amen” from me; as for me and my house, we will take our business elsewhere.
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Prophets and Markets: The Political Economy of Ancient Israel. By Morris Silver.
Prophets and Markets: The Political Economy of Ancient Israel | Morris Silver - Academia.edu
Markets and Prophets: An Examination of the Silver Hypothesis* | Barry Bandstra - Academia.edu
1 Morris Silver is Professor Emeritus of Economics at City College of New York. A member of the American Economics Association and a veteran of the U.S. military, Silver holds a Doctorate in Philosophy from Columbia University.
2 According to Doug Bandstra and John Lunn, Silver argues that “Political altruism tends to become perverse, weakening the economy and the society, in part because it is based on a taste for ‘doing good’ even when the results may not be good. Silver adds, ‘Altruism becomes dangerous because of the range of policy options available, the kinds of options selected, and above all the massive scale and persistence with which the attempt to improve society is carried through.’” As Silver explained the evidence, the prophets’ calls for economic justice were “perverse” and even harmful to the very people whose cause they claimed to champion.
3 Writing in 1983, Silver could have been providing a template for future works by the likes of Charles Murray (Losing Ground) and Marvin Olasky (The Tragedy of American Compassion). While the Invisible Hand of the Market is adept at turning self-interest into social gains, it seems to be all thumbs when it comes to spinning the straw of compassion into the gold of prosperity (see my forthcoming monograph, “The Rumpelstiltskin Economy”.) In fairness, the Invisible Hand is, after all, only a hand; maybe we need to give it an Invisible Heart?
4 This is entirely irrelevant, but the online dictionary (“Oxford Languages”), while defining “bane” as “a cause of great distress or annoyance,” employs the following example: “The bane of the decorator is the long, narrow hall.” I must admit that, of all the baneful things in the world, that one would never have occurred to me.
Thus says a voice in my head to which no one else is privy:
"Thou shalt not bite the hand that feeds thee, nor kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Neither is there such a thing as a free lunch. Those who do not work shall not eat."
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