https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=6IackdJwiUg
If thou buy a Hebrew servant, six years shall he serve, and in the seventh he shall go out free for nothing.” So that’s obviously a commentary on the limitation of something like indentured servitude. Perhaps we could call it slavery. And so there’s a freedom that’s extended to the slave who would have been indentured in one manner or another. I’m going to go through the laws here and anyone who wants to chime in and comment. It’s important because it’s related to the Sabbath. It’s like an implication of the Sabbath, which is that if you take a servant, if someone becomes your property for six years, they will work. And then the seventh year they are set free. And so it’s a structure that you find in the Sabbath. Also in the Jubilee, the different structures of how we kind of restore things so that we don’t have, we wouldn’t have generations of Hebrew slaves, you know, bound to one family forever. And so you would create this destructuring thing within the people. But it imitates the rhythm of creation. That’s right. That’s the point. Exactly. And it’s a magnificent contrast to the other nations who all have classes. That are permanent. No permanent slaves and no unequal permanent classes. Right. We should make a point here that the natural condition of human society is class distinction that are relatively permanent, as permanent as the upper classes can make them, we might say, and slave ownership. And so that any movement in the direction of the freeing of the slaves is a revolutionary movement. But having said that, how do you reconcile the fact that God is the spirit that leads people out of tyranny in the broader book of Exodus, but there’s still allowance made, for example, in this verse, for the existence of slavery per se? Well, the thing about slavery is that it’s very difficult for us to understand what ancient slavery was because we have safety nets, we have all these things which make it possible for people to exist. But in a world where you have someone who can become in such a dire situation, that they’re basically, you know, dying of hunger in the street, giving, you’d say, selling yourself or placing yourself under the authority of someone else was a way in which to continue to actually preserve the social fabric. And so it’s like, I can’t do it, I just can’t. So I propose myself to someone, I say, I want to enter into your service, you take care of me, I work for you, and then after six years, then hopefully I’m set on a path that I can now continue. It’s like a mortgage on yourself, and it’s a remedy. As you pointed out, it is indentured servitude. And I don’t know the statistic, I wish I did by heart, but more than half of the earliest settlers of America came as indentured servants. So that’s how common it is. It was a way actually of uplifting your life, as you both have pointed out. And the other thing worth noting is the word for slave in Hebrew, eved, is very complex because it doesn’t mean servant, doesn’t mean slave. For example, Moses is described as eved adonai. The eved of God. Is he God’s slave? Nobody thought so. Yet the Jews or the Hebrews Israelites in Egypt are avadim, plural of eved. So they were slaves. So the Torah, I guess, almost unfortunately, uses the same word for servant as for slave. Well, one of the things we need to understand about words in general is that as they move through time, they become more specific. So if you chase a word back in time, it has a broader and broader and broader and broader range of application. It contains more concepts that would be differentiated in modern society. So it’s harder for us to understand what the word might mean. But you remember with earlier in Exodus, you free them that they might serve the Lord. In other words, the principle is, you know, Bob Dylan, you’ve got to serve somebody. Right, right. So there’s, yeah. But this service, we have a prayer in the Anglican service book, Your service is perfect freedom. And that’s Moses, the servant of the Lord. Oh, I should point out too that we’re welcoming Douglas Headley to the table today. He hasn’t been here for the last two episodes, but he’s come today and should be sitting in for the rest of the seminar. So welcome, Douglas. We’re extremely happy to have you back with us. So, okay, I’d like to point out that we’ve got through one whole law so far. And so we’ll go to 21.3, which is an extension of the same proposition. So this is a limitation on indentured servitude. If he came in by himself, he shall go out by himself. If he were married, then his wife shall go out with him. If his master have given him a wife and she have borne him sons or daughters, the wife and her children shall be her masters, and he shall go out by himself. So that enables him to take with him what he has accrued to himself. I presume. And if the servant shall plainly say, I love my master, my wife and my children, I will not go out free, then his master shall bring him unto the judges. He shall also bring him to the door or unto the doorpost. Okay, forgive me. So this is critical. There is an obvious implication that not everybody will pick up on. If the slave says, I love my master, so people will think kind of kook as that. A slave who loves his master. But it’s not a master in the sense that we think of like the transatlantic slave trade or ill treatment in South America, etc. This is, again, what we said earlier, indentured servitude. And it is possible he loved his master. What if he treated him well? And he has his needs taken care of and he doesn’t want to leave his wife and children. So it implies, if nothing else, the possibility that there were good people or decent people in the role of quote unquote master. And this enables the person to continue that service even though in some manner he’s condemned to be free by the, essentially by the lifting of the indentured servitude requirement. But there is a subtlety here that if he comes in with his wife, he goes free with his wife in the seventh year. But if the master gives him his wife and he bears children, the wife and children stay. Right. So this is a, whatever we may think of that. Property differentiation. Yes, this is a way of his being able to freely stay with what he has been part of building. But it doesn’t simply go with him because of this distinction in the law between whether you were given it or whether you brought it with you. Right, it’s difficult when you’re explicating a text as ancient as this to understand exactly what parts you would require to be permanently applicable and what parts have to be differentiated so they were laws that were germane and relevant to a time and place. And so it’s very difficult for modern people to understand anything like the morality of this set of rules because all of the conditions under which these rules were generated are so different from our conditions. But it’s also hard, I guess, for people who are claiming something like the divinity of the biblical text to also say, well, this doesn’t apply because it only applied to that time and place. And so what the text, I mean, first of all, there’s a huge distinction that might be good to make now. God, this God is everybody’s God. First one to say so. And he gives a law in great detail. We’re going through it. It’s not everybody’s law. It’s the Jewish law, right? And Christians think that later God will say, my kingdom is not of this world. That means he doesn’t give us laws like this. And that’s an enormous change. And see, in Islam, God is a universal God and a lawgiver. And that means the one who interprets the law has got supreme authority. It’s hard to think what check there is on it. And but in both Judaism and Christianity, it isn’t like that. These laws are as strict and detailed as any in the ancient world, but they’re just for this people. And there’s a structure, by the way, of rule. This is a polity. We’re founding a polity here, right? And they can be analyzed against each other according to Aristotle’s categories for one. And this polity has a structure of authority that goes, it’s not absolute monarchy. It’s in the beginning, it’s hardly monarchy at all. And there’s priests and rulers and they offset each other. And this law is a law over them, too. And so it’s a very curious thing. And it gives fuel and credence to the Christian view that this is a preparation for God to rule all the earth. That’s right. We can see in the particularity of the laws, the sort of the seeds of a universal understanding of all humanity. Because what’s different from the codes that came before is that we don’t have not just it’s not just an abolition of distinctions among classes. It’s just there is it’s very clear that there is no longer any category of human being that is, as it were, enslaved. That the servitude is sort of part of what it is to be that category of human being. And so we should see it really, I think, in just in developmental terms. We’re seeing what we need to do is compare with what went before. And we need to understand the kind of trajectory of the moral universe of of Israel towards the universalism that we find later on. There is a phenomenon that that Egyptologists described as the democratization of Osiris and Horus. And so the Pharaoh in Egypt was conceptualized as the union of Osiris and Horus. So Osiris was the god of the state who could become willfully blind to the machinations of evil. Who was once great in his youth, but who developed this ossification across time. That’s the problem of tradition. And then Horus is the visionary revitalizer who journeys to the underworld and revitalizes the father. And the Egyptians conceptualized the Pharaoh, the sovereignty of the Pharaoh, as the union of Osiris and Osiris. So it’s the union of tradition and vision. And then to begin with, the only only the Pharaoh could use the symbolism that was associated with Osiris and Horus. But then the aristocracy began to pick it up. And they call that the democratization of Osiris. And you can think of what happened among the Jews as an extension of that. It’s a spreading down of the idea of sovereignty and intrinsic value itself down to the hoi polloi. That’s right. I think there’s a parallel to this. If I’m not mistaken, in Babylonian political theology, the phrase image of God or something very like it was confined to the king, the Babylonian king. It looks as if what may be happening in the early chapters of Genesis is that you’ve got a similar process of democratization as the image of God shifts from from king to all human beings. And that’s again that parallel is also the abstraction of the idea of sovereignty. So sovereignty is no longer what a king does. It’s in the nature of the king. And then once you understand to some degree that it’s in the nature of the king, then you can think, well, maybe that kingly nature is distributed more widely than you might have assumed to begin with. And then maybe eventually it’s part and parcel of everyone.