Here’s a very interesting letter that our muchacho Harry wrote for someone whose correspondence with Gary North didn’t sit well with him:

I’m not a Hebrew scholar, but here’s my take on it, and I hope it helps. I would rephrase what you said to focus on the tribal aspect and not just the covenantal aspect. There was ethnic and tribal privilege in Israel, and it was not meant to be a place where anyone in the world was invited to come share in the inheritance if only he agreed to become a proselyte. North is changing the subject when he refers to "protection for the stranger." Of course there was to be protection for the stranger and one standard of justice for all, but this does not mean that non-Hebrews were allowed to take what belonged to Hebrews.

The word "stranger" has several forms and connotations in Hebrew. There is a tribal connotation in Numbers 3:10, an ethnic connotation in Exodus 23:9, a familial connotation in Deuteronomy 25:5, and a case could even be made that there is a solely religious connotation in Exodus 12:43. But one is hard-pressed to find a reference to a stranger that is not at least partly based on blood. The word "ger" indicates a sojourner, usually if not always a fellow Israelite, while "ezrah" indicates "one rising from the soil," or home-born. All blood-strangers ("toshabh," "nokri," “zar”) could be charged usury or enslaved permanently, by the law of God Himself.

John Calvin writes this very helpful commentary in his Harmony of the Law, Volume 3:

As touching the political law, no wonder that God should have permitted His people to receive interest, from the Gentiles, since otherwise a just reciprocity would not have been preserved, without which one party must needs be injured. God commands His people not to practice usury, and still lays the Jews alone, and not foreign nations, under the obligation of this law. In order, therefore, that equality (ratio analogica) might be preserved, He accords the same liberty to His people which the Gentiles would assume for themselves; for this is the only intercourse that can be endured, when the condition of both parties is similar and equal. For when Plato asserts that usurers are not to be tolerated in a well-ordered republic, he does not go further than to enjoin, that its citizens should abstain from that base and dishonest traffic between each other.

The question now is, whether usury is evil in itself; and surely that which heathens even have detested appears to be by no means lawful to the children of God. We know that the name of usurer has everywhere and always been infamous and detested. Thus Cato, desiring to commend agriculture, says that thieves were formerly condemned to a fine of double, and usurers quadruple; from which he infers, that the latter were deemed the worst. And when asked what he thought of usury, he replied, “What do I think of killing a man?” whereby he wished to show, that it was as improper to make money by usury as to commit murder. This was the swing of one private individual, yet it is derived from the opinions of almost all nations and persons. And assuredly from this cause great tumults often arose at Rome, and fatal contentions were awakened between the common people and the rich; since it can hardly be but that usurers suck men’s blood like leeches. But if we come to an accurate decision as to the thing itself, our determination must be derived from nowhere else than the universal rule of justice, and especially from the declaration of Christ, on which hang the law and the prophets, — Do not unto others what ye would not have done to thyself. (Matthew 7:12.)

Regardless of what you may think about usury itself (and Calvin’s views on the matter did not entirely square with those of other church fathers), there is no doubt that he recognized the legitimacy of preventing blood-strangers from gaining an unfair advantage over (or even equality with) the Hebrews. He also condemned our generation for adopting the Satanic business plan of the Jews. The end result was to keep Israel for the Israelites. No border fence was needed because no one outside the tribes could own land. What’s more, rural land (all land not within walled cities) remained with the families of the tribe to whom the territory belonged. If they went into debt and had to sell it, it went right back to them in the Jubilee, every fifty years. This was the whole point of Ahab coveting Naboth’s vineyard, knowing that he could not possess it, and Jezebel convincing him to take it because he was the king.

Now, North does some clever sleight-of-hand in his commentary on Deuteronomy. He knows that he can’t get around this matter of tribal apportionment prior to the Babylonian captivity, so he says the land could be bought up by strangers after the captives returned. Ezekiel 47 refers to foreigners settling within tribal territory in the future, and sharing in the inheritance. North seems to miss the fact that the post-exile congregation was a Hebrew congregation. Ezra and Nehemiah saw to it that blood-strangers and their mixed-race children were sent away. North seems to interpret the pre-exile era as being landed by tribe and the post-exile era as including any stranger who happened to come along and invest in property. His commentary on Deuteronomy is more like a commentary on "private ownership" in a "free market economy" as expounded by Ludwig von Mises. But there was no "private property" as we know it, in the sense of land being traded as a commodity, for reasons previously stated.

North even conjectures that pig farmers existed in the time of Christ as a result of land inheritance being relaxed, after the Babylonian exile, to include ownership by resident aliens. He writes: "The Jubilee law surely would have made the development of permanent herds of such beasts unlikely, for the resident alien could not have counted on access to rural land after the Jubilee. Only in the post-exilic era, when resident aliens at the time of Israel’s return gained lawful permanent access to the land (Ezek. 47:21-23), would such herds have become more likely." He passes this off as a problem with the Jubilee, but instead the problem is his open-border immigration policy and his faulty interpretation of Scripture.

His comparison to the welfare state is a non sequitur, because if we still operated under biblical laws of inheritance, there would be no land ownership by those who are not our kin, much less welfare payments to them.

It should be obvious why the law places such a premium on land. Farmers know that land is what binds us to family and to God. Land is the point at which tribal/familial and religious loyalties converge. This is why God places such strict designs on inheritance. It is a break with the ancient Greek idea of a deed’s boundaries being terminated by "sacred fire" and held only if the settler could defend it from those brave enough to overcome their superstitions. The fixing of tribal boundaries under biblical law is for the purpose of expanding God’s kingdom. We need look no further than polyglot America for a prime example of how not to expand God’s kingdom. Gary North defends the very system of usury that has allowed our dispossession, and which Christendom unanimously condemns.

I’ll just add a few things to this. I’m sure Harry would agree that it’s crucial for Ezekiel 47 to be interpreted as an eschatological, not an historical, prophecy. It is just like Zechariah 14:8, the last chapter of Joel, and the last chapter of Revelation. The stream of Ezekiel 47 is just like the rock-mountain of Daniel 2. These are prophecies of the reign of Christ after time has ended, but Scary Gary the Race-Mixer runs it through the wringer of his anarcho-libertarianism and Austrian economics and twists it into 500 BC real estate law. Compare Ezekiel’s vision of the New Jerusalem to John’s vision in Revelation. John’s is 230 times the size of Ezekiel’s. Ezekiel’s map of tribal territory, arranged north to south, is a small-scale representation of the entire earth, and it has the same proportion to the earth as Ezekiel’s city has to John’s city. Obviously, the difference between the two has everything to do with Ezekiel prophesying prior to the cross and John prophesying afterwards. John’s vision probably would not have been understood by the Christians of Ezekiel’s time. This means, of course, that Ezekiel’s vision is not of an earthly temple at all, nor of land parcels irrigated by the Jordan River, but of an eschatological temple and a worldwide kingdom of the living Christ. Gary North’s temporal application of Ezekiel’s prophecy is inconsistent and ahistorical.

The victory of Christ is over a world of all races, nations, tribes, and languages, brought together in one but retaining their distinctions, as God created them. That’s called true diversity; it’s a trinitarian concept that only Christians understand. God does not create one nation of the world, even in eternity. Be sure to see Isaiah 56:1-8 for something else that is very interesting: the "son of the foreigner who has joined himself to the Lord" is equated with "the outcasts of Israel." Think about that.