Slaves 2 - Exodus 21:3-6

21:3-6 - Apparently the rest of the world treated slaves as the lowest form of property throughout the ancient world and they were to be enslaved indefinitely. However, when God gave the law of Moses, the first issue he addressed was slavery and instead of owning a slave forever, in Israel, the “servant” was to be freed during the 7th year of his service. TB notes that there were different rules for Hebrew slaves vs foreign slaves, but we will see here shortly that a non-Hebrew slave was to be permitted to convert to become an Israelite and then they were to be granted the same rights as the Hebrew slaves.

If a slave is taken into a household alone, he will be freed alone, but if he came into slavery while married, then when he’s free, his wife is free too. If he comes in alone, but if given a wife by his master and they have children together, then on the 7th year only the man is free, his wife and kids are to remain enslaved. This really bothered me until I started thinking about it from the context of the next part.

If a slave is given a wife by the master and they have children, when he’s allowed to be freed at the 7th year, he can decide whether or not to abandon his family and try his hand at freedom alone or he can decide to stay in his current situation and remain in the master’s household with his family, swear allegiance to the master in front of God, do some weird thing with an awl in a doorframe with his ear, “and he shall serve him for ever.”

This is where my perspective shifted on the whole only letting the man go free thing. The cultural understanding was that if he did opt to stay then his social status was elevated from that of slave to more of a hired laborer, like we talked about yesterday. Giving the slave the option to stay begs the question, why would anyone do that? Why would anyone choose to stay in servitude if they could go free? Well let’s think about why they would stay.

Like we discussed yesterday, from my understanding, this type of slavery wasn’t like the American brand of slavery, in that it was much more humane, slaves were treated better than the American slaves were, societies were very tribal, and life was rough out there to survive just one person on your own with no family, friends, or means to support yourselves. We are still talking about Mesopotamia, desert, water issues, food scarcity, bands of marauders, etc. So someone might opt to stay because they were already engrained into their master’s society, they would still have their master’s protection from other tribes or groups, they would have food, water, shelter, and clothing. They would have a job that allowed for them to provide for themselves and their families. They might have even gained some status by their skills, kind of like how Joseph did in the household of Potiphar.

Is staying in a system where you aren’t the main guy in charge the best thing? Maybe, maybe not. In those systems, a household such as Abraham’s for example, the main guy is Abraham and favorite son Isaac, and every other man was just there with varying degrees of social status. The only way to get to be in that position would be to be born into it and if you’re a slave, then baby that ship has already sailed for you, or to conquer another person who already had that and take their over, and that is a tall order for someone who spent the last 6 years as a slave, or possibly come up with some way to make lots of money and get all that for yourself. Again, that is going to be a rough way to do it.

All that is to say that I know lots of men who would be like “YOLO, I’ll never stay a slave, I’ll leave the second I get a chance and try to make it on my own, I don’t care if I have to leave my family to do it.” But again, this was a different world, much more difficult to make it on your own, even more so than the American opportunities that were available to runaway slaves or even freemen who just went out west and ate food off the land, etc. It seems like the opportunities for men to just take off and make it work were more limited anciently, but that’s just what I think, I could be wrong.

And now how that changed my opinion on the family staying enslaved if the men left. Just like I know a lot of men who would leave their families so that they wouldn’t be slaves anymore, I have to think back to what my own father would do. He absolutely, 100%, would say “I’m never going to be a slave again,” and leave, but if there was the option to take my mom and all his kids with him, he would, not because he loves us and wants us to be free as well, but because he doesn’t want to give up with he considered his possessions. Additionally, if he was able to take my mom and us out of slavery to go “be free” with him, he would have sold the rest of us kids off into slavery so that he could have had money to spend on himself.

By requiring the women and children to stay enslaved, God was protecting them from being sold again to less scrupulous people. He was also allowing them to stay in the situation that they already knew. It’s not like women and children had any rights during that time anyway, it’s not like they were going to have all these opportunities to thrive outside of their master’s house anyway. Once they left that household, the almost certainly would have starved to death or been sold into worse slavery. So God was making sure that whatever idiot choice a man made, it didn’t mean certain death or suffering for his wife and children as well. Just the thoughts that I had while reading this, I could be wrong, but it’s just what occurred to me.