Leviticus 25:39

39. Be sold This is more correctly rendered reflexively, SELL HIMSELF. Ewald maintains that the reflexive and not the passive was the primary force of the niphal form of the Hebrew. See Gesen. Thes., p. 787. There is granted here no authority for the creditor to seize the debtor and sell him into slavery. He may enter into voluntary servitude under the pressure of poverty, but not of debt. The instances in 2 Kings 4:1 and Nehemiah 5:5 were outrages of the Mosaic law, and the case in Matthew 18:25 is a parable founded on Roman usages. Isaiah 50:1, applies to one already a slave. The only cases of the legal involuntary sale of a Hebrew are for theft, (Exodus 22:1; Exodus 22:3,) and of a daughter for the matrimonial estate. Exodus 21:7-11. According to Jewish writers, it was not lawful for a Hebrew to sell himself except in extreme poverty.

Says Maimonides: “A man might not sell himself to lay up the money which was given for him; nor to buy goods, nor to pay his debts, but merely that he might get bread to eat. Neither was it lawful for him to sell himself as long as he had so much as a garment left.”

Bondservant The Hebrew is, thou shalt not impose upon him the service of a servant. This language has no word to signify distinctively what we mean by slave, bondman, or bondservant. Many glaring misstatements have proceeded from the false assumption that all the servitude in the Old Testament was slavery, and that the word עבד , servant, wherever it occurs, means slave. It is to be regretted that our English translators did not use the term apprenticed servant of all work as distinctive from the servant, like a mechanic hired to do specific work by the day or year. The Israelites were oppressed servants in Egypt, but never bondmen or slaves, the property of the Egyptians. The Septuagint frequently and more accurately uses παις where the English Version uses bondman. The poor Hebrew who contracted to serve until the jubilee must be exempted from the rough work of the apprenticed non-Hebrew servant of all work. In Exodus 21:2; Deuteronomy 15:12, the Hebrew servant is to go out free after serving six years, while in Leviticus he is to serve till the year of jubilee. These apparent discrepancies harmonize in this way, “His servitude would cease at the end of the six years or at the end of the jubilee period, whichever was nearest. For example, a man sold under ordinary circumstances must serve six full years; but a man sold in the forty-sixth, would go out in the fiftieth year of the jubilee period, thus serving less than six years’ time.” Haley. This is the rabbinic view. We cannot agree with Ewald and others that we have here legal provisions of different dates; that after emancipation in the seventh year had fallen out of use through the avarice of the masters, the later legislation in the interest of the oppressor extended the service to the fiftieth year; “which would indeed,” says Oehler, “have been a very sorry surrogate, since numberless servants did not survive to the year of jubilee.” The first legislation in Exodus harmonizes with the last in Deuteronomy, both limiting the service to six years. Saalschutz, who thinks “this is getting over the difficulty in a superficial way,” harmonizes the discrepancy in these two classes of laws by “the pretty clear intimations contained in them that they treat of entirely different classes of persons.” 1.) Hebrew servants born in a state of servitude. 2.) Impoverished Israelites, free landholders, who are never called servants, but brethren. See Leviticus 25:39; Leviticus 25:47. These, having sold their lands till the jubilee, are allowed, as a favour to them, to borrow money on the pledge of a long term of service, extending to the jubilee. But in the case of the purchase of a servant already in bondage, on the contrary, his master set his price in view of the requirement to release him at the end of six years. See Bib. Sac., Jan., 1862.