2 “If you buy a Hebrew servant, he shall serve six years; and in the seventh he shall go out free and pay nothing. 3 If he comes in by himself, he shall go out by himself; if he comes in married, then his wife shall go out with him. 4 If his master has given him a wife, and she has borne him sons or daughters, the wife and her children shall be her master’s, and he shall go out by himself. 5 But if the servant plainly says, ‘I love my master, my wife, and my children; I will not go out free,’ 6 then his master shall bring him to the judges. He shall also bring him to the door, or to the doorpost, and his master shall pierce his ear with an awl; and he shall serve him forever.
7 “And if a man sells his daughter to be a female slave, she shall not go out as the male slaves do. 8 If she does not please her master, who has betrothed her to himself, then he shall let her be redeemed. He shall have no right to sell her to a foreign people, since he has dealt deceitfully with her. 9 And if he has betrothed her to his son, he shall deal with her according to the custom of daughters. 10 If he takes another wife, he shall not diminish her food, her clothing, and her marriage rights. 11 And if he does not do these three for her, then she shall go out free, without paying money.”
Comment:
At first glance, this commandment doesn’t seem to have much relevance for us today in Western society. We don’t have slaves, Hebrew or otherwise, and so we’re not sure what to do with these instructions on how to treat them properly. But equally, the commandment has not been retracted anywhere in scripture either and so we cannot give it a red status. Hence we have coded it amber.
Two things are immediately clear from this passage:
1) YHWH does not forbid the owning of slaves among His people. We may find this quite difficult to comprehend, as in our modern day it is accepted as a given that slavery is neither desireable nor justifiable. We struggle to understand an economy in which a man might sell either himself or his family into slavery to another. And we find it hard to imagine that slavery might be preferable to the alternatives in some circumstances.
2) Slaves should be treated in accordance with certain minimum standards. This is entirely in line with what we know of YHWH and His mercy and compassion. But still we struggle with our modern picture of slavery as always being a bad thing being perpetrated on the slave by the slave owner. Perhaps we need to meditate eg on the many passages in the Psalms where man gladly fulfils the role of a slave/servant of YHWH, and the advantages that this relationship brings.
Looking more broadly at the subject of slavery, we realise that it does still play a role in our society today. The consequences of the historical trade in slaves from Africa, for example, are still being felt in many places around the world, and in various ways. Statues are being removed from universities and names are being erased from buildings and institutions. But people with slave forebears are also still experiencing on a personal basis the long-term consequences of that trade in their daily lives.
Then we have modern slavery, in which people are enslaved and/or trafficked today in our own societies. Maybe we don’t need to travel very far in either time or space from where we are right now in order to find someone who is in a very real sense a slave. How do we react to that?
And of course there is also the question of the extent to which we are all either figuratively or literally enslaved to something in our own lives – debt, addiction etc are often considered perfectly normal in our society (eg a smoker with a mortgage) but the reality underneath the surface is a form of slavery.
All in all, there’s still plenty of reason for considering how the subject of slavery affects us today, and also for remembering that we are YHWH’s own, redeemed by Him for a price. We’ll keep thinking about this one…