Practicing The King's EconomySample

Gleaning

Old Testament gleaning laws required that Israelite landowners leave the edges of their fields unharvested so that the most vulnerable people in the land could provide for themselves by harvesting these leftovers.

Imagine what these gleaning laws required from Israelite landowners. After each small business owner had worked his field throughout the growing season, he wasn’t allowed to gather all the profits. Instead, God called him to create opportunities for work for the orphan, the widow, the immigrant, and the poor by leaving some of his own profits in the field. While the marginalized had to work in his field to gather these profits, their work didn’t contribute anything to the landowner’s business. The gleaning laws required every Israelite landowner to create access to work for others by accepting lower profits for themselves.

The gleaning laws provide the church with a paradigm that is vastly different from our own approaches to work and poverty alleviation. Using our usual economic logic, it would seem far more practical for God to let the business owners maximize profits, gather every last scrap of their harvest, and then redistribute a portion of it through taxation. But in the gleaning laws, God gives us something altogether different.

The gleaning laws provided work for, and required work from, the marginalized. They required Israelite business owners to create work by sacrificially leaving profits in the field. God cared more about every poor person in Israel being able to provide for themselves through work than he did about any particular Israelite landowner’s “right” to maximize the profits from their enterprise. The gleaning laws also made every “family business” the place where economic justice happened. The working poor and the landed Israelite found themselves laboring in the same field.

In today’s world, gleaning job creation gets messy—and is a greater topic than we can discuss here. But consider the idea that by practicing the King’s economy through gleaning job creation, your church, family, and workplace can create opportunities for the marginalized and, at the same time, invite God to transform you and your community. Looking deeper into gleaning job creation will help you discover what God has next for you in his kingdom economic journey.

How are the gleaning laws of the Old Testament the same or different from your perspective on work and profit?