The Dowry of the Earth Is Pure Gift

Abstract

To understand and live again, here and now the great message of the Ten Words donated by YHWH-Elohim, we would need a culture of the covenant, a civilization of faithful promises, capable of pacts that recognize the value of the word ‘forever’. Instead, a big sign of our time is the transformation of all the pacts into contracts, a sign that resonates louder and louder until it covers all the other sounds of the concert of community life. We see this extremely vividly in the context of family relationships, but also in the labour market where work relations in the twentieth century were designed and described using the relational register of pacts but today they are increasingly being flattened to the shape of contracts only. As if money could compensate for dreams, plans, expectations, human flourishing, especially in young people. We are losing the basic principle of any civilization capable of a future: that young people should be given credit, confidence must be given to them when they do not deserve it yet because they cannot possibly earn it yet. If they receive this confidence-credit, they can and should, give it on to the new young generation in turn.

If a man contracted a debt and gave his wife, sons, daughters in exchange or handed them over to be slaves, for three years they will work in the house of their purchaser or to the person who keeps them in slavery; but in the fourth year they will recover their freedom.

(Code of Hammurabi).