Monday, July 8, 2019

Jewish Legalized Servitude.

Your next main argument is substantially this: — The Jewish nation held slaves, whose condition and treatment were regulated by laws given them by divine authority, and therefore American slave-holding is sanctioned by the Bible. In proof of the facts in the case you refer to a few passages, which we allow are sufficient to test the principle which you maintain, and we oppose. — We will first look at the passages themselves, and then examine the argument founded on them. “The Lord himself.” you say, “directed Moses and Aaron how slaves were to be treated with respect to the passover;” and you quote Exodus 12:43, 44. “And the Lord said unto Moses and Aaron, This is the ordinance of the passover: there shall no stranger eat thereof: but every man's servant that is bought for money, when thou hast circumcised him, then shall he eat thereof.” Slaves were allowed religious privileges which were not granted to strangers nor to hired servants; Exodus, 12:45. “A foreigner and a hired servant shall not eat thereof.” “It was no sin for a priest,” you continue, “to purchase a slave with his money, and the slave thus purchased was entitled to peculiar privileges.” Lev. 22: 10, 11. “There shall no stranger eat of the holy thing, a sojourner of the priest or a hired servant shall not eat of the holy thing. But if the priest buy any soul with his money he shall eat of it, and he that is born in his house, they shall eat of his meat.” You add, “The Bible warrants the purchase of slaves as an inheritance for children forever:” and, bring for proof, Lev. 25:46, “And ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them for a possession, they shall be your bond-men forever; but over your brethren the children of Israel, ye shall not rule one over another with rigor.”

Now against your continual substitution of the term slaves for servants we earnestly protest, on grounds which have been already stated. You seem to have forgotten that the original word has any other meaning. Was Paul a slave of Jesus Christ? Are all the people of God his slaves? What is it to be a slave in your sense of the expression? The law of South Carolina answers, “Slaves shall be deemed, held, taken, reputed, and adjudged in law, to be chattels personal, in the hands of their owners, and possessors and their executors, administrators and assignees, to ALL INTENTS, CONSTRUCTIONS, AND PURPOSES WHATSOEVER.” And Judge Stroud in his sketch of the laws relating to slavery, says, “The cardinal principle that the slave is not to be ranked among sentient beings, but among things, obtains as undoubted law in all these states.” —  Such is slavery among you. But that the Hebrew laws ever authorized any such slave-holding, we utterly deny. They do throughout recognize servants of every order as intelligent beings, who though in a state of servitude, had personal rights; and secured to them comfortable support, protection from personal abuse, and, on receiving circumcision, unqualified admission to all the religious privileges enjoyed by the Hebrew people, generally. This sort of servitude, we maintain, was radically and most evidently a very different thing from slavery in your sense of the term. Why then should you persist in calling it slavery without once intimating that the term, in this application, is to be taken in any limited sense? It will not be strange if you should, within a few years, amuse yourselves by giving to our northern apprentices and hired help the same appellation. You have indeed already intimated, that you deem the epithet not inappropriate

While the passages to which you refer, say nothing at all of slavery in your sense of the expression, and of course give it no countenance, they do, we freely admit, contemplate the fact, that not only the Jewish people, but priests would buy servants for money; and secure important religious privileges to those who should be thus purchased. — That what is said of the exclusion of hired servants from the Passover has respect to those of foreign extraction only, and is predicated on the supposition that such had not been circumcised is evident from the exegetical remark which follows in the same connection, “No uncircumcised person shall eat thereof; one law shall be to the home-born and to the stranger that sojourneth with you.” It is possible that the hired Hebrew servants, as well as the foreign servants, of the same condition, might have been excluded from eating of the holy things in the families of the priests, in as much as such eating was a family, not a national, privilege; and the mere circumstance of being hired for perhaps a few months or days, did not so incorporate them with the family as to give them a right with the children and permanent domestics to the peculiar privileges of members. The act that the bought servants, in regard to the partaking of the holy things, were to be put by the priests on a level with their own children, while all hired servants and even distinguished visitors in the family, were to be strictly prohibited, shows, in some measure, how exceedingly different the condition of such persons was, from that of the slaves among you.

The passage in Lev. 25: 46, shows that persons procured by purchase for permanent servitude must not be Hebrews, but be obtained from the surrounding nations, or families of Gentile extraction residing in Palestine. These nations and families should be to them a constant scource of supply. Stress has been laid on the terms bondmen and bondmaids as expressive of the lowest degree of servitude, or absolute slavery. But you will see, by looking into your Hebrew Bible, that the simple terms usually translated man servants and maid servants, without any qualifying adjunct corresponding with bond, are here employed. The fact that they were bought with money, determines not that their bodies and souls were by the purchase converted into things, and held as property; but only that they, by money paid down to themselves, to their parents, or others who claimed the right of disposing of them, had been procured to occupy the condition, and perform the services, and enjoy the privileges which were prescribed to persons thus situated by the Hebrew laws. It is remarkable that while servants of this order might be procured only from the Gentiles, Gentile families residing in Canaan were permitted by law, to buy, with their own consent, poor Hebrews, to be their servants, from the time of purchase to the year of jubilee; unless previously redeemed by themselves or friends. Lev. 25: 47–54. From this we may infer that the Hebrews had at least no power to compel the Gentiles resident among them to sell either themselves or their children. That it was on the part of the latter altogether a voluntary transaction.
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Continued from: Reverend Silas McKeen to Thomas C. Stuart, August 20, 1839

SOURCE: Cyrus P. Grosvenor, Slavery vs. The Bible: A Correspondence Between the General Conference of Maine, and the Presbytery of Tombecbee, Mississippi, p. 48-54

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