'Much food is in the tillage of the poor.'--PROVERBS xiii. 23.
Palestine was a land of small peasant proprietors, and the institution
of the Jubilee was intended to prevent the acquisition of large
estates by any Israelite. The consequence, as intended, was a level of
modest prosperity. It was 'the tillage of the poor,' the careful,
diligent husbandry of the man who had only a little patch of land to
look after, that filled the storehouses of the Holy Land. Hence the
proverb of our text arose. It preserves the picture of the economical
conditions in which it originated, and it is capable of, and is
intended to have, an application to all forms and fields of work. In
all it is true that the bulk of the harvested results are due, not to
the large labours of the few, but to the minute, unnoticed toils of
the many. Small service is true service, and the aggregate of such
produces large crops. Spade husbandry gets most out of the ground. The
labourer's allotment of half an acre is generally more prolific than
the average of the squire's estate. Much may be made of slender gifts,
small resources, and limited opportunities if carefully cultivated, as
they should be, and as their very slenderness should stimulate their
being.
One of the psalms accuses 'the children of Ephraim' because, 'being
armed and carrying bows, they turned back in the day of battle.' That
saying deduces obligation from equipment, and preaches a stringent
code of duty to those who are in any direction largely gifted. Power
to its last particle is duty, and not small is the crime of those who,
with great capacities, have small desire to use them, and leave the
brunt of the battle to half-trained soldiers, badly armed.
But the imagery of the fight is not sufficient to include all aspects
of Christian effort. The peaceful toil of the 'husbandman that
labours' stands, in one of Paul's letters, side by side with the
heroism of the 'man that warreth.' Our text gives us the former image,
and so supplements that other.
It completes the lesson of the psalm in another respect, as insisting
on the importance, not of the well endowed, but of the slenderly
furnished, who are immensely in the majority. This text is a message
to ordinary, mediocre people, without much ability or influence.