The Levitical Widow Laws and Social Justice

This might a bit “technical” for some of my readers, but bear with me.

Widows in the ancient world (and many modern cultures, in fact), have little to no value. To understand why, you need to understand the clan based culture of these societies. When a woman was married, she was effectively being transferred from one clan, or extended family unit, to another. If her husband died, she was left in a “no man’s land.” Her husband’s clan had no further reason to claim her (unless there were economically productive children already in place). On the other hand, her father’s clan also had no further reason to claim her —hadn’t she transferred her loyalties through the marriage process?

It’s into this environment that God gave Israel the various widow laws: Leverite marriage and the gleaning laws. These laws were two sides of the same coin: respecting the worth of a widow as a person, outside the social structure of the clan. These sets of laws were designed to provide a connection from the widow into the clan, or into the social structure, so that she could continue to be treated as a person, rather than as a used up object of derision.

Thus says the LORD of hosts, Render true judgments, show kindness and mercy to one another, do not oppress the widow, the fatherless, the sojourner, or the poor, and let none of you devise evil against another in your heart. -Zechariah 7:9-10

These widow laws are often appealed to by modern purveyors of “social justice,” to prove God has commanded us to build government structures around caring for widows (and other poor people, of course). But this is fraught with problems.

Every command in relation to widows in the Mosaic Law was laid on individuals, rather than the government. Individual landowners were to leave the gleanings for the widow. Individual judges were to treat widows fairly in court. There is no mention here of creating a welfare agency targeted at widows. But the supreme irony is that the “social justice” crowd is actually returning us to the clan culture which God was trying to counter with the widow laws. How can this be? The answer is deceptively simple.

In a commune, your only worth as a person is in your relation to the community.

The modern concept of “social justice,” is that you gather people into “oppressed groups,” and then you get those groups to agitate for their “rights” (preferential treatment by the government). This means, ultimately, that a white man only has value so long as he is in a group of other white men. A black man only has value so long as he is within a group of black men. A woman only has value only so long as she is within a group of women. And widows only have value only so long as they are within a group of widows.

Through the widow laws, God wanted to remind Israel —and the world through Israel— that widows are people, too. As individual bearers of the image of God, each widow in the world has intrinsic value in and of themselves.

In social justice —in communism, in socialism, in postmodernism— we return to a world where someone who is somehow outside any group has no value because they have no community. If all morality is decided by the community, and all value is a moral judgment, then each person only has value within a community.

Social justice, in the end, turns the widow laws on their head.