The Treatment of Non-Israelite Slaves: From Moses to Moses

In Exodus, its perpetual memory is sustained by observing the pre-Deuteronomic Festival of the Unleavened Bread, “for on this very day I brought you out of the land of Egypt” (12:17). In Deuteronomy, this is conflated with the Passover festival, “so that you may remember the day of your departure from the land of Egypt as long as you live” (Deut. 16:3). For an excellent analysis of the Deuteronomic transformation of both biblical festivals into one see ch. 3 of Bernard Levinson’s Deuteronomy and the Hermeneutics of Legal Innovation, (NY: Oxford University Press, 1997). See also Michael Satlow’s TABS essay, “Passover and the Festival of Matzot: Synthesizing Two Holidays.”

For another reflection on this problem, see Isaac Sassoon’s TABS essay, “Did Israel Celebrate Their Freedom While Owning Slaves?”

For more on the three sets of Hebrew slave laws the TABS essays by Marvin Sweeney,“The Bible’s Evolving Effort to Humanize Debt Slavery.” Zev Farber, “The Law of the Hebrew Slave: Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy,” and Aaron Koller, “The Law of the Hebrew Slave: Reading the Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy Law Collections as Complementary.”

See Reuven Yaron, “Biblical Law: Prolegomena,” in Jewish Law in Legal History, ed., Bernard Jackson (Leiden: Brill, 1990) p.36, and Hans Jochen Boecker, Law and the Administration of Justice in the Old Testament and Ancient East, (Augsburg Press, 1988) pp.162-163.

In her comprehensive survey of slavery in the rabbinic corpus, Catherine Heszer asserts the same distinction between rabbinic an Roman law as that made previously with respect to the distinct nature of biblical laws on slavery. Although rabbinic/biblical bears some analogy to Roman law in its recognition of a master’s right to punish a slave for misconduct, “unlike Roman Law, biblical and rabbinic law refrain from granting the master an unlimited power of life and death over his slave.” In Jewish Slavery in Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) p. 211.

As is his systematic wont, Maimonides dedicates a section in his Code to the laws governing slaves but ends, as is also his custom in a number of other sections, with his own creative, rhetorical, non-halakhic sentiments which finally collapse the distinction between Hebrew and non-Hebrew slaves.

כל עבד עברי אסור לעבוד בו בפרך, ואיזו היא עבודת פרך זו עבודה שאין לה קצבה ועבודה שאינו צריך לה אלא תהיה מחשבתו להעבידו בלבד שלא יבטל

The horror of this kind of labor reappears in the twentieth century in the Nazi concentration camps captured with mind numbing force by Primo Levi: “In the early Lagers, which were almost coeval with H’s coming to power work was purely persecutory, practically useless for productive ends: to send the undernourished to dig up turf or cut stone served only a terroristic purpose…for Nazi rhetoric…”work ennobles” and therefore the ignoble adversaries of the regime are not worthy of working in the commonly accepted meaning of the word. Their work must be afflictive; it must leave no room for professionalism, must be the work of beasts of burden- pull, push, carry weights, bend over the soil. This too is useless violence…” in The Drowned and the Saved (NY: Vintage Books, 1989), p.121.

See for example jKiddushin 1:2. To appreciate the theological offensiveness of slavery, it is instructive to note that the term “harsh labor (פרך;, pharekh),” which the Israelites are forbidden to subject their fellow Israelites to, is the same term used in the Torah regarding the Egyptians treatment of Israelites (Exod. 1:13-14).

The moral gravity of Job’s sentiment carries through into the modern age and concludes Isaac Mendelsohn’s pioneering scholarly work on Slavery in the Ancient Near East (NY: Oxford University Press, 1949) who also recognizes the unique biblical progressiveness in restricting the right to enslave in perpetuity, “a step which no other religion had taken before.” His parting comment is “The first man in the Ancient Near East who raised his voice in a sweeping condemnation of slavery as a cruel and inhuman institution, irrespective of nationality and race, was the philosopher Job.” He then quotes Job31:15 as the expression of this moral condemnation of slavery. (p.123)

Maimonides’ choice of Job’s declaration of equal human rights is also determined by Job’s situation of a shared humanity in birth. Maimonides, again in the Guide, points to the very process of the formation of the embryo in the womb as emblematic of divine mercy, a characteristic human beings attribute to God based on empirical observations of natural phenomena. “[T]he production of the embryos of living beings, the bringing of various faculties to existence in them and in those who rear them after birth-faculties that preserve them from destruction and annihilation and protect them against harm and are useful to them in all the doings that are necessary to them” Guide, I:54, p.125.

III:12, p.447.

Ibid.

Ibid, p.448.