One thing worth everything
Particularly was this the case in Palestine because Palestine was a place of war. It was a battleground. Its history is literally filled with the record of one battle after another, one war after another and there were inevitably conquering peoples and those who came in to steal and to loot and to plunder and so very often when a battle was on the horizon, the people would take the valuable things out of their home, take them out into the field and in a marked place where they could recover them again, they would bury them in the earth.
Josephus said, the historian in that time, “The gold and the silver and the rest of that most precious furniture which the Jews had and which the owners treasured up underground was done to withstand the fortunes of war.”
First of all, Jewish Rabbinic law said—“If a man finds scattered fruit or money, it belongs to the finder.” Now that is what the law said. If you find lost fruit or money, it belongs to the finder. So the man is within the permission of the Jewish Rabbinic law. So the Jews listening to Jesus would not have perceived this man as unethical.
Secondly, that which was hidden in the field did not belong to the man who owned the field. If it was his, he wouldn’t be selling his field without digging it up.
Now, thirdly, this man was very equitable, this man was very fair. If this man was not an honest man when he found the treasure what would he have done? I mean, he would have split. He would have packed up his treasure and been long gone, and put it in his own field. Why go to all the trouble of buying the entire field when you’ve got the treasure in your hand? You say—Well, maybe his conscience bothered him. Or maybe it was his father-in-law … or some relative. Well, I thought about that and then I thought … I thought of a good idea, this will show you how my mind works, you could take the treasure and go liquidate a portion of it and with the money you gained from the treasure, then buy the field … not bad, huh? He didn’t do that. He took that treasure that he had found; he knew it belonged to him by Jewish law. He knew he had more, or at least equal right to it with the man who owned the land, he put it right back in the ground, never even used any of it for the purchase … liquidated every single thing he had on the face of the earth in his possession and went and bought the entire field just so that he could do what was right to get that treasure. No lack of ethics here … no one was defrauded.