2 If thou buy an Hebrew servant, six years he shall serve: and in the seventh he shall go out free for nothing.

3 If he came in by himself, he shall go out by himself: if he were married, then his wife shall go out with him.

Today we begin the rules that applied to an Israelite slave. As I mentioned in my last post, this subject can be shocking to us today, but we must not take our current privileges and assume that they also existed in these ancient times. The historical context matters.

As we will read in upcoming verses, an Israelite man might end up a servant by selling himself, or by being sold by his father, into that service, presumably due to immense poverty. This was, therefore, a transaction with payment, and the serving participant elected to participate in it. The relationship being described here is not chattel slavery, but probably something between our modern concept of slavery and servanthood.

Today, we might wish that that the slave/servant could have been aided by some sort of welfare program instead, but what if there wasn’t sufficient stability and wealth in the economy to provide that welfare? We might wish that the rich master would simply pay for the man’s livelihood without receiving any service in return, as an act of charity, but what if the rich men of the time would themselves become destitute unless they made some gain after paying for the man’s livelihood?

Freedom is a great good that we should all aspire to, but history has taught us that it is a concept that requires a certain level of infrastructure and stability to exist. The Israelites simply may not have had that necessary infrastructure or stability, given that they were fresh out of Egypt and living in a brutal environment. At least, not enough infrastructure or stability to support it entirely.

Because, even while God’s law was allowing for a form of slavery in this moment, it is already showing the ending of slavery as well. Defined in God’s law was that no Hebrew slave should be forced to stay in such a state for perpetuity. Every seventh year he would have the opportunity to go free, at no cost, and be a free man again. If he found the world still too hard to abide on his own he could presumably sell himself back into servitude again, though after another seven years he would have still have that guaranteed chance for freedom once more.

And if it seems unfair that this option for freedom is only offered to Hebrew slaves, and presumably not the foreign ones, remember that God had already detailed how any foreigner could become a child of the covenant, and would presumably then have the same privilege of freedom.