Posted on by Abe Austin

Scriptural Analysis- Exodus 21:2-3

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.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Scriptural Analysis- Exodus 21:1

1 Now these are the judgments which thou shalt set before them.

After giving the ten commandments, God goes on to clarify other aspects of His law. The things that we are going to read now are going to look much less like the transcendent, eternal principles of the ten commandments, and more like the nitty-gritty terms of judicial law, meant to help the judges when ruling over a dispute.

And for this study, it is essential to remember that the people and time that the Lord is providing a law to is not the same as the people and time of today. In our next study’s verses we will examine the rules related to servants belonging to their masters. Some of these practices may sound shocking to us, but that is with the lens of today’s unprecedented upwards mobility. We did not live at this time, we did not have the same problems, we did not need the same solutions. It is too shallow, too simplistic, to just dismiss these parts of Jewish law out of hand, and call them unjustifiable in every time and place, and never admit that in actuality we just don’t really know. Most of us don’t even try to study the day-to-day life of these people, and even those who do have never had to face it firsthand. We just don’t know.

And so, if some of these rules feel out-of-place in today’s world then they probably are. That’s alright, because these aren’t eternal commandments that we’re reading about now. These are merely the legal rules and definitions that applied to the local scope that they belonged to.