furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the Lord thy God hath blessed thee, thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the Lord thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing to-day.”[1]
Moreover, the Hebrew who had been driven by poverty to sell himself to a stranger or a sojourner, might be redeemed at any time either by himself, or by his kinsman, on payment of the fair value of his service for the term yet remaining.[2]
A housebreaker, not punished in the fact, and unable to make full restitution, is to be sold for his theft; and it appears, into slavery for life.[3] But this being a case of penal bondage, does not bear upon the present question. It is the counterpart not of modern slavery, but of modern transportation.
Thus, so long as the law of Moses was kept, the bondage of a Hebrew would not be more severe, either in duration or in other respects, than a modern apprenticeship, nor so severe as the forced service of a soldier in a modern army: and he would receive what would be equivalent to wages in the shape of a gift at parting when his term expired. Such servitude was in fact not slavery at all, in the proper sense of the term.
The law of Moses was not always kept in this any more than in other respects; but it was not a dead letter. “This is the word that came unto Jeremiah
