Leviticus; The Law of Holiness and Grace
The Meaning of Vows
Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony
Subject: Pentateuch
Genre: Lessons with Q & A
Lesson: 78
Track: 78
Dictation Name: RR172AQ78
Date: Early 70s
Let us worship God. Serve the Lord with gladness. Come before His presence with thanksgiving. Enter into His gates with thanksgiving and into His courts with praise. Be thankful unto Him and bless His name, for the Lord is good, His mercy is everlasting and His truth endureth to all generations.
Let us pray.
Oh Lord our God, we give thanks unto Thee that even as men conspire together and seek to overthrow Thy kingdom and to stamp out Thy Word, Thou art on the throne. And Thou who dost sit in the circle of the Heavens doest hold them in derision. And in due time, they shall be confounded and destroyed. We thank Thee our Father that Thy kingdom is an eternal kingdom. Thy Word, the Word that abides, and Thy people have been called to victory. Make us ever joyful in the victory that is ours in Christ and confident in Thy service. In Christ’s name, amen.
Our scripture is Leviticus 27:14-25, our subject again, “The Meaning of Vows.” Leviticus 27:14-25, “The Meaning of Vows.”
“14 And when a man shall sanctify his house to be holy unto the Lord, then the priest shall estimate it, whether it be good or bad: as the priest shall estimate it, so shall it stand.
15 And if he that sanctified it will redeem his house, then he shall add the fifth part of the money of thy estimation unto it, and it shall be his.
16 And if a man shall sanctify unto the Lord some part of a field of his possession, then thy estimation shall be according to the seed thereof: an homer of barley seed shall be valued at fifty shekels of silver.
17 If he sanctify his field from the year of jubilee, according to thy estimation it shall stand.
18 But if he sanctify his field after the jubilee, then the priest shall reckon unto him the money according to the years that remain, even unto the year of the jubilee, and it shall be abated from thy estimation.
19 And if he that sanctifieth the field will in any wise redeem it, then he shall add the fifth part of the money of thy estimation unto it, and it shall be assured to him.
20 And if he will not redeem the field, or if he have sold the field to another man, it shall not be redeemed any more.
21 But the field, when it goeth out in the jubilee, shall be holy unto the Lord, as a field devoted; the possession thereof shall be the priest's.
22 And if a man sanctify unto the Lord a field which he hath bought, which is not of the fields of his possession;
23 Then the priest shall reckon unto him the worth of thy estimation, even unto the year of the jubilee: and he shall give thine estimation in that day, as a holy thing unto the Lord.
24 In the year of the jubilee the field shall return unto him of whom it was bought, even to him to whom the possession of the land did belong.
25 And all thy estimations shall be according to the shekel of the sanctuary: twenty gerahs shall be the shekel.”
In Numbers 30:1-16, we are told about vows, that they are often conditional upon our duty to others. We cannot view—vow to God as an excuse or as a means of evading any godly responsibility to someone else; so that we cannot vow any vow which would entail breaking an honorable vow to another.
Moreover, it cannot erode our responsibilities to others. We are told in Numbers 30:1-16, that a daughter’s vow can be disallowed by her father and therefore so too can be a son’s. It is conditional upon his approval. And the same is true of a wife’s vow. She cannot make a vow that would undermine or undercut her relationship to her husband. But this does not mean that the husband can make an unconditional vow. For example, we are given an instance by St. Paul in I Corinthians 7:3-5. “3 Let the husband render unto the wife due benevolence: and likewise also the wife unto the husband. 4The wife hath not power of her own body, but the husband: and likewise also the husband hath not power of his own body, but the wife. 5Defraud ye not one the other, except it be with consent for a time, that ye may give yourselves to fasting and prayer; and come together again, that Satan tempt you not for your incontinency.”
Now the occasion of this was a practice that was becoming very common in the Roman Empire. Asceticism had set in out of revulsion for the depravity of the era and it had set in even among the people of Israel. As a result, very often a man felt that he was being very holy by swearing that for a time, he was going to abstain from any sexual relations in order to give himself to prayer, or he might even vow to abandon his family and join an ascetic community. Paul says this is not lawful in the sight of God, that there are mutual obligations of a man and a woman—a married couple—which can never be set aside by any vow (supposedly) in the name of God.
An even more telling example is given by our Lord. Our duties to our parents cannot be dissolved by a vow to God. In Mark 7:9-13, we read,
“9 And he said unto them, Full well ye reject the commandment of God, that ye may keep your own tradition.
10 For Moses said, Honour thy father and thy mother; and, whoso curseth father or mother, let him die the death:
11 But ye say, If a man shall say to his father or mother, It is Corban, that is to say, a gift, by whatsoever thou mightest be profited by me; he shall be free.
12 And ye suffer him no more to do ought for his father or his mother;
13 making the word of God of none effect through your tradition, which ye have delivered: and many such like things do ye.”
Corban meant ‘that which is brought near,’ that is to the altar to be given to God. And our Lord says that God rejects gifts which represent an evasion of a duty commanded by His Law. Any vow pledging such a gift is disallowed as false. This means that a great deal of piety over the centuries has been false.
Now in these verses, Leviticus 27:14-25, there are two kinds of gifts pledged by vow to God:
1. Houses (verses 14 and 15)
2. Land (verses 16-24)
Now in this first group, the houses are probably townhouses which could be sold permanently. As with unclean animals, these could be bought back at the assessed value, plus 20%. If the house were not redeemed, it was sold with the proceeds going toward the sanctuary. The ancient meaning of ‘his house,’ of course, had two facets so that it could mean first the house pledged had to be his house, that is free and clear without encumbrances of any kind. And second, house could refer to the building or to its contents or some of them or everything, depending upon the specific nature of the vow. There is another factor here. We’re told when a man vowed his house, he sanctified it, that is dedicated it to God as a gift. Now this did not make the house itself entitled to any special status. But it meant that the value of the house now belonged to God. Its money value had to be dedicated to the holy coffers. Thus, according to the Old Testament practice, it belonged to God unless a man redeemed it or a son or a wife redeemed the property.
John Gill, centuries ago, pointed out that the Pharisees and others permitted Corban to function in violation of a man’s duties. For example, Gill cites, “His wife cannot demand her dowry out of that which is sanctified nor a creditor his debt. But if he will redeem, he may redeem on condition that he gives the dowry to the wife and the debt to the creditor.” This is an important point because it’s precisely this that the Bible prohibits. We cannot give away that which belongs to another member of the family or to heirs who are perhaps not yet born, because the godly seed can inherit. They have therefore a stake in something. And of course, a great deal of the problems that developed in the way of hostility to the Church in the Medieval Era came from such vows. Now it was not that people did not create very often important and valuable things—hospitals, charities and so on, but when they went beyond the legitimate sphere of the vow as God gave it they created hostilities against the work of the Lord.
The second kind of vow cited in these verses, concerns the redemption of land, or it could be of the harvest of the land. Because farmland depreciated as the Jubilee approached, the cost of redemption was assessed in terms of the number of years remaining until the Jubilee. Now if the land had been given to another man on a lease, on the Year of Jubilee it went to the sanctuary and the payment of the vow was simply deferred until the lease-holder’s tenure ended. The vow could not undermine a man’s obligation or his word to another person. If a lease-holder dedicated the land to God in a vow, the dedication was for the years remaining until the Jubilee. Now if a man refused to redeem the land before the Jubilee Year or if he sold it fraudulently to another, then he forfeited all right to redeem it and it became permanently the property of the sanctuary and the priests. This meant that the vowing of the land meant the vowing of the value of the land.
Samuel Clarke commented, and his comment helps us to understand verses 22 and 24. “If a man vowed the worth of his interest in the field which he had purchased, the transaction was a simple one. He had to pay down at once the calculated value to the next Jubilee. In this case, the field reverted at the Jubilee to the original owner, who, it is likely, had the same right of redeeming it from the priest during the interval as he had previously had of redeeming it from the man to whom he had sold it in accordance with chapter 25:23-28. The regulation for the payment of the exact sum to be made (in this case) in ready money, is supposed to furnish ground for inference that in redeeming an inherited field, the money was paid to the priest year by year and hence the fairness of the addition of one-fifth to the total sum as interest.”
Now the word used in verse 21, ‘devoted,’ means an irrevocable dedication. In terms of verse 20, this inability to redeem the land applied in two cases. First, if the land is a gift to God permanently and without any time limit, then it cannot be redeemed. Second, if after vowing the land, a man tried to evade the vow by leasing the land to someone else, he then lost permanently any right to the land at the time of the Jubilee. Thus, for dishonesty, he forfeited everything. The innocent buyer, of course, retained possession until the Jubilee.
These vows concerning, these laws concerning vows had an extensive influence in the Medieval Era. They did function very often to restrain people from unwise dedications as well as to govern dedications. There were abuses; but we do know that more than a few dedicated their lands or certain harvests or uses thereof to the Church and to monasteries for a given period.
In verse 25, we have an important qualification to protect everyone involved, the priests and the people. The redemptions and the monetary estimates thereof had to be in terms of a fixed and unchanging standard: the weight of gold or silver as established permanently by the sanctuary.
Thomas Aquinas gave an excellent short definition of a vow. It was simply this: a promise made to God. {?} wrote, a few generations back, concerning the vow, “The idea of a gift to God which the pious soul feels compelled to consecrate to God is of the very essence of Christianity; that this gift is nothing less than that of the whole person, will and life. This self-dedication to God takes place at baptism, together with a conception of divine grace and the entry upon a new life. The promise made then in that confirmation may fairly be called a vow in the usual meaning of the word but nothing is promised which is not already obligatory. It is justified as the formal expression of the internal impulse called forth by the appeal of redemption.” Now I cite this because there always has been some confusion about the meaning of vows. What {?} here described is the obligatory vow and the vow made at baptism by the parents or by the adult person is one of the obligatory vows.
But what Leviticus is dealing with is voluntary or non-obligatory vows. We don’t have to make them, but when we do, we are bound by them. The Early Church and the Medieval Era give us a long history of such non-obligatory but still binding vows. Their disappearance is one of the marks of a Humanistic Era. And even the obligatory vows are now casually regarded by most people. They have been replaced by obligatory duties to the modern State. And these obligatory duties to the modern State are constantly increasing in number.
At one time, all obligatory duties came from God’s Law-Word to govern our relationship to Him, to one another in Him and to Church and State in Him. Now our obligatory vows and the claims upon us come directly and essentially from the modern Humanistic State and are held to supersede all other duties. This has been a major revolution in the history of mankind. The modern State has indeed become a god walking on earth and we are the losers.
This is why consideration of the meaning of vows is so important, and sounds so remote. Because all our duties were once comprehended within the voluntary and the obligatory vows and these were directly to God. And even the obligations to the State as well as to the temple or church were conditional upon their obedience to God. And now, the State claims the right to make them directly.
Now in the Medieval Era, this was carried perhaps too far at times, because while they at times were not faithful to the concept of vows in overstressing the church, they were also often very faithful. For example, it was held that a ruler who had violated irredeemable his vow to be a ruler under God could be assassinated—legitimately—by any believer. That’s how seriously it was held that all things were under God. Now whether or not we agree with that legitimation of assassination, we must say that the basic point, that all vows are under God and conditional upon His word is valid. And for the State to believe now that not only those things it imposes upon us without our knowledge or regulations that are routinely passed by the bureaucracy of this new god are binding vows upon us is a fearful fact. It tells us how far we have come, and how deeply we have gone into slavery to a new god, without even realizing it.
This is why the study of vows is so important and why the fact that teaching about vows is absent in the modern church indicates the surrender of the Church itself to this new and false god, to the State. Which, like those worldly powers and nations whom David described in Psalm 2, take counsel together and conspire against the Lord and His anointed, saying we will break His bands asunder and cast away His rule forever, but He that sitteth in the circle of the Heavens shall laugh. The Lord shall have them in derision, and He shall break them with a rod of iron.
Let us pray.
Oh Lord our God, Thy Word is truth and Thy Word, because it is written in all creation, in every atom of our being, in the stars which in their courses fought against Cicera, the tyrant of old, shall destroy the false gods of our time. Oh Lord our God, we thank Thee and we praise Thy holy name. In Christ’s name, amen.
Are there any questions now, or comments our lesson?
Yes.
[Audience] A Lorcha, the Latin American poet, once wrote a poem, I remember one of the verses was the burglar said God, help me steal tonight.
[Rushdoony] Yes
[Audience] And it brings up the idea that people expect God to help them irrespective of everything else.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Recording suddenly ends]