Eighth Commandment

Stealing Freedom

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Restitution & Forgiveness

Lesson: Stealing Freedom

Genre: Speech

Track: 81

Dictation Name: RR130AS81

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960’s-1970’s

Our scripture is Exodus 21:16, and Deuteronomy 24:7. Stealing Freedom. First of all, Exodus 21:16: “And he that stealeth a man, and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death.”

Then, Deuteronomy 24:7. “If a man be found stealing any of his brethren of the children of Israel, and maketh merchandise of him, or selleth him; then that thief shall die; and thou shalt put evil away from among you.”

Thus far, in our treatment of the eighth commandment, Thou shalt not steal, we have dealt with property and restitution. Certain modern scholars in Germany who are by no means orthodox, have on the basis of their study of the text, an analysis of the law and in particular, the word steal, have concluded that steal here means primarily something other than property. These scholars, notably Martin Knot{?} and Gerhard Von Rod{?}, believe that the commandments are personal, that the second five commandments deal with people. Thou shalt not kill. That is, a man, basically. Thou shalt not commit adultery, with a person who is the spouse of another man, or to have relations with anyone other than your wife. Thou shalt not bear false witness, against a person. Thou shalt not covet, that which belongs to another man, and their point is that all these commandments, being personal, the basic meaning of the commandment Thou shalt not steal is again personal. In other words, it should read, expanded to give the full connotation of the word steal, Thou shalt not steal another man’s freedom. Thou shalt not steal another man’s freedom. The primary reference is to these commandments with respect to kidnapping, but the basic reference is to theft of a person’s freedom in any sense, whether it affects his person or his property. Thou shalt not steal a man’s freedom by infringing on his person, or his property.

Thus, the eighth commandment, properly understood and expanded, can read, Thou shalt not steal another man’s freedom by forcibly enslaving his person or his property. Let us analyze this meaning of the commandment then, in terms of man’s purpose. Man’s purpose, under God, is to exercise dominion over the earth under him. This duty involves the restoration of a broken order by means of restitution. To kidnap and enslave a man is to rob him of his freedom, and a man needs his freedom in order to fulfill his created purpose. We are told repeatedly in scripture that the believer is not to be a slave. This is stated very bluntly in 1 Corinthians 7:23 and Galatians 5:1. We are not to be a slave by becoming servants of men, compromising ourselves so that we are serving men rather than God. We are not to be servants by going into long-term debt, for the borrower, we are told by Solomon, is slave to the lender. We are to be free man in Jesus Christ.

Now scripture makes it clear that some men are slaves by nature. To them, the worst thing is fre3edom. They run away from freedom. They ask, they beg for slavery. They ask the government in one way or another, to take care of them. As a result, as we have previously seen, the Bible does permit voluntary slavery. That is, a man can attach himself to someone as his master, become his slave, serve him for his keep and whatever the master provides for him, but this has to be voluntary. There can, therefore, in terms of biblical law, be no slave market. The law forbids any runaway slave from being returned to his master, Deuteronomy 23:15-16.

Thus, the slave was really not a slave in our sense of the word. He was a man who did not feel that he could be a full-fledged free citizen. Therefore, he placed himself under some other man as his servant on a voluntary basis. We are well informed about the facts of Hebrew slavery, if we can use that word, from various non-biblical documents. Thus, the Book of Ecclesiasticus, not Ecclesiastes which is in the Bible, but Ecclesiasticus, the teachings of Jesus Ben Sirach, over and over again confirm this that the law permitted a tremendous liberty on the part of the slaves. It was a system whereby people got security in return for certain work. On the other hand, the law very strictly required just treatment on the part of their masters.

St. Paul echoes this when he says in Colossians 4:1, “Masters, give unto your servants that which is just and equal; knowing that ye also have a Master in heaven.” Now these points are important because they reveal the fact that the Bible even as it condones a kind of slavery, requires a tremendous freedom for those slaves. It is a voluntary situation. It is not comparable with slavery if{?} any other country, including our own, has ever had. The only other kind of enslavement permitted was when someone stole. He had to be a bond servant and work out restitution if he could not make restitution in cash or in kind immediately.

The scriptures we read make it clear that kidnapping is regarded as one of the capital offenses of scripture. The purpose of kidnapping is related to slavery. Its basic purpose in Antiquity was to seize men and to sell them in a foreign country where forcible slavery was the rule. Holding them for ransom was a minor and secondary kind of kidnapping, but either is punishable by death. The law calls the kidnapper, in both these scriptures we read, a thief.

Now, these two laws we read reveal certain things. IN the Exodus passage, Exodus 21:16, the law forbids the kidnapping of any man, Israelite or foreigner, whereas Deuteronomy 24:7 basically deals with the kidnapping of Israelites. Moreover, the selling of slaves is strictly forbidden, the compulsion to remain is forbidden, and the death penalty is mandatory for any infringement on a man’s liberty by kidnapping.

The passage in Deuteronomy also says, “If a man be found stealing any of his brethren of the children of Israel, and maketh merchandise of him, or selleth him; then that thief shall die; and thou shalt put evil away from among you.” The passage, “maketh merchandise of him,” does not mean too much to us today because the word “merchandise” has lost a lot of its original meaning that it had at the time of the King James Version. In modern language, it would mean “have tyrannized over him,” have treat him, in other words, as a non-person with cruelty, in a depersonalized manner. A man, in other words, must be treated as a man at all times.

It is interesting to compare these passages with the laws of Antiquity. Some liberal scholars will tells us casually, “These laws were like those of the Code of Hammurabi and of other ancient codes. The Code of Hammurabi is almost alone in having a law against kidnapping, but it is significant to compare the Code of Hammurabi, it is Code 14 if you want to look it up in the Code of Hammurabi, with the biblical law. The Code of Hammurabi only legislated against the kidnapping of a child. You could steal a man, you could enslave him, there was compulsory slavery, there was a slave market in Babylon, there was no comparison with the biblical situation. As a matter of fact, as Dr. Cyrus Gordon, a distinguished biblical scholar and archeologist has remarked, “The entire population is theoretically in slavery to the king in the Code of Hammurabi,” and this, of course, was basic to the law system of every civilization in Antiquity. The entire population was, in theory and usually in fact, a slave of the king or of the state, and of course, it is pre4cisely this theory of the state that revives wherever Christianity recedes.

Today, increasingly, theoretically, every citizen is in bondage to the state. He is no longer free. Consider, for example, the sixteenth Amendment, the income tax amendment. Recently, we had a measure in Congress which has not passed the House of Representatives, in fact they did not include the Amendment, to raise the exemption per person, from $600 I believe, to $800. The language there, of course, is significant. Theoretically, in terms of the Amendment, all your income and all your property, implicitly, belongs to the state. When they allow you $600 or $800, or anything else in the way of a deduction, it is an exemption. It is a grant from the state to you. The state has the legal right to all your income, so that we can say in terms of our law system now, the entire population is theoretically in slavery to the state. The commandment says Thou shalt not steal, and the meaning, as these scholars who have no particular belief in scripture and treat it very casually and with contempt basically, the meaning they recognize of the commandment Thou shalt not steal is Thou shalt not steal another man’s freedom. Thou shalt not steal another man’s freedom by forcibly enslaving his person or his property. A man’s freedom is robbed by false weights and false measures, by fraudulent money, by the destruction or impairment, or theft of his property. All these things diminish a man’s freedom. Property is basic to a man’s freedom. The tyrant state always strikes at a man’s freedom through his property, but according to this law, neither the state nor any individual has any right to steal man’s freedom in any way.

Today, there is an extensive awareness of the fact that man’s freedom is being stolen. The New Left is very angry about the establishment, and they’re very angry about what is going on in the universities, and they are rioting about it, and they have all kinds of slogans. “Do not fold, bend, staple, or spindle,” and they declare that people are so treated as though they were just something to be fed into a computer. In a sense, they are right, and conservatives, too, are very angry about the loss of freedom, and they produce reams of literature to document this loss of freedom, and they’re right, but is there any solution to the matter, apart from biblical faith and law? Every society, apart from this, rapidly goes into slavery.

Franklin, when the Constitution was adopted, made it clear that men would either obey God or they would end up obeying men, and of course, we are obeying men today increasingly, and we are seeing our freedoms stolen. The state is transgressing this law not only by acts of confiscation and manipulation of money and taxation, but also by every undercutting of biblical faith and education. A state controlled system of education is a theft, not only by its taxation, but by its destruction of public character. It destroys godly society.

Let us turn back the pages to just a hundred years ago, 1869, New York City. Now, at that time, most of the country was a very devout, God-fearing, law-abiding area. There were two areas where there was disorder, in some frontier towns, and New York, which was known by Sodom by the Sea, and New York was regarded as the epitome of everything that was horrible, and if in those days a farmer saw his son go to New York, of course, his daughter never went there unless she were in the company of her husband or her father, the family would send him off to New York City with prayer, and they would be in prayer for him the whole time he was in Sodom by the Sea, and yet, here is what Robert Sobel, in his book Panic on Wall Street, a History of America’s Financial Disasters, has to say about Wall Street in 1869. He speaks of the integrity of the day, which, “Might be illustrated by noting that by the late 1860’s, gold was transported openly, carried by messengers in heavy, canvass bags. From time to time, one of the bags would burst, and its content, usually $5,000 in gold coins, would scatter in the street. (this was Wall Street, in 1969). The custom on these occasions was for a crowd to form a circle around the area, not moving until the messenger had picked up and accounted for all the coins. Anyone who stepped up to take a gold piece would receive a boot in the rear.” Now, can you imagine anyone taking a bag of $5,000 in gold coins down Wall Street or any other street today without an armed guard? And can you imagine him every collecting that bag, if the contents of that bag did burst on any street of any city in the United States today? Something has happened, has it not? There has been a loss of public character. There has been erosion, serious erosion of the faith and character of the people and this has robbed every one of you.

You are robbed every time you go into a store today. Why? Because the thefts which are so high today are written into the price of the merchandise. You are robbed every time you pay cash. Why? Because those who use credit cards now are so often deadbeats that the collection costs by whether it’s a bank or a collection agency that handles the credit cards has been raised so that on every credit purchase, because it increases his volume of business, the business goes along with it, they are getting 5% less. The Wall Street Journal in the last week remarked that a lot of the bigger customers, are now demanding, if they see a sign “Bank America Card Honored,” or any other such sign, they will not do business unless they get a 5% cash discount, and so the credit card business is beginning to create a great deal of unhappiness in many areas.

The more lawlessness grows, the more you are robbed in that your peace and security, and the cost of items to you increase. It is interesting to note what archeologists have reported concerning Israel in the days when the law was kept. Israel, in those days was, incidentally, a different country from now, in that it has had twenty centuries of devastation and it is no longer the heavily wooded country it once was, but it was, in those days, a beautiful country well-wooded, with many streams flowing that are now dry, and a country rich in field stones, so construction was normally by stone. Go to the archeological excavations in the areas round about Ancient Israel, and you’ll find that not only are the stone walls still standing, heavy construction, sometimes a couple of feet thick and more, but the very doors of these homes were made of stone in order to protect themselves from thieves and marauders. Not of wood, because a thief could start a fire, a band of thieves, and burn down the door and then enter to murder and rob the inhabitants, but at the same time, what was the situation in Israel? Stone walls, fine houses, but a curtain for a door. A curtain for a door. Why? The climate was mild and warm the year round. The only purpose of the door was for privacy, and a curtain was sufficient, a drape, because there was no need since you had a law-abiding people, to have a stone door and a lock.

As early as the early 1950’s, I was told when I lived in Palo Alto, the inhabitants of Palo Alto never locked their doors. They’d go away and come back, and there was no need for a lock because thefts were unknown. It’s no longer true there. I was in an out-of-the-way place in the Dakotas not too long ago, and I had to catch a plane but had two or three hours to wait, and the minister told me, the man who was driving me to the airport, to go and wait at his home for a couple hours and then go to the airport. He had not been home for three days, but he said, “It isn’t locked. Just go and walk in. Nobody locks their doors around here.” It’s still an oasis of law. There is law there, not because they have a high percentage of police officers, they have hardly any, but because there is still character. It’s a community, incidentally, of 25,000 people.

Thou shalt not steal, but if we are going to live as the neighbors of Israel lived, behind stone walls and stone doors so that at night they could not burn us out from out home, if we lived in a state of siege, if it becomes unsafe for women to be out after dark as it increasingly is, anyone after dark in some of our cities in the East, have we not been robbed? Robbed of our freedom?

Thus, the same lawless, siege-living condition is again beginning to prevail. A man is free if his person and his possessions are under his control, and to the degree that his persons and his possessions are free, a man is free. Add as its original meaning, a property owner, a property owner, a man who could say, “My home is my castle, and this is my territory, and no one can step across there without my permission.” Today, the free man in the sense that a man had property in the Early American sense, that was beyond taxation, the state had no right to tax it, the state had no right to walk upon it, it was his castle. The free man, in that sense, is God. “Except that the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it.” Except that the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain. Let us pray.

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we give thanks unto thee that thy word is true, and we come to thee, our Father, as men who have been robbed, robbed of our freedoms, beseeching thee, our Father, to establish us again on thy law-word, that we may again be a free people under thee. Bless us to this purpose in Jesus name. Amen.

Are there any questions now, with respect to our lesson? Yes?

[Audience] Two questions on slavery. First, a man’s {?} slavery {?}

[Rushdoony] Unless he commits a crime.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Or, one other exception under limited circumstances, captives of war, but even they were under such strict laws that we could not call it slavery.

[Audience] {?} The other question is, can a man {?}

[Rushdoony] He cannot, and this is why the commandment is to believers, Be not ye the servants of man. In other words, the Bible recognizes that the man who is not a believer doesn’t’ have dominion over himself, and therefore, he is going to try to create a slave society, inescapably, and so, the attitude of scripture is, Yes, the man who cannot control himself is going to be controlled by someone. You cannot legislate slaves into free men, but a free man has an obligation to stand up in terms of his freedom. Another question?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, that is Psalm 127:1. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] No, the principle of the death penalty in the Bible is the principle of restitution. The punishment must fit the crime. Thus, as I pointed before, if you steal $100 in terms of biblical law, you restore the $100 plus another $100. You are penalized by the exact amount that you hope to profit by. If you steal one sheep, you restore five, because the sheep can multiply. It has use as wool, as meat, and so on. If you kill a man, you forfeit your life. If you kidnap a man, stealing his freedom is a way of killing a man, you forfeit your life. So restitution, you see, is a basic principle. This is why, and we’ll come to this at a later date again, there is no prison system in the Bible. It’s restitution or death.

[Audience] What if a man {?}

[Rushdoony] If you kidnapped a person?

[Audience] Yes.

[Rushdoony] It would be death.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] As long as you committed the act, the punishment would follow. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. The southern slavery was not biblical. On the other hand, the kidnapping was not done by any white man. The money of Africa was slaves, and the slaves were bought and sold by the Negros themselves to Arabs, and the Arabs sold them to the slavers, but those people had been slaves and were slaves for some time. In fact, there was nothing but slavery in Africa. Every chief owned his tribe. He could sell it right out from under him. In fact, they still do. Sometimes, to this day, there have been instances within the past few years of a Negro chief of a tribe becoming a Muslim and then selling all his tribe in order to have the money for a pilgrimage to Mecca, and to live high{?} there, too. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Well, not only was it a business there, they were selling slaves back and forth. As I say, it was the money of Africa, but they had breeding pens. This was a business. They were selling them into Asia. They were selling them into the Middle East, and the Arabs would have breeding pens, and they would themselves breed some of the Negresses to produce the foreman, because the average tribesman didn’t have the capacity to be, say, a foreman if they were shipped to India to work there, or to Ceylon, or to Arabia, and these half-Arab, half-Negro offspring would be the managers. It was a business, a systematic thing, an ugly thing from start to finish, but the ones who were shipped to America usually were the happiest ones in these breeding pens because they preferred it, to be shipped here, but they would be rounded up by their tribal leaders and this was a regular thing, and this was what they expected when they were children. They were going to be slaves either of a Negro, or an Arab, or Hindu, or somebody, and if they were shipped to America, you hit the jackpot.

In other words, they didn’t think of freedom. Now, this is a fearful fact, but there are people in the world to whom freedom is not an imagined concept, and this is by Liberia never worked out. The rounded up a lot of freed slaves, a lot of very benevolent people, and they shipped them to Liberia and they did everything to make a country out of it. Didn’t become a country until Firestone moved in and began to exploit it, and the whole thing there is a façade, and of course, all of the African countries are facades. There’s more colonialism today in Africa than when it was supposedly a colonial empire, and now, it’s divided up between the Soviet and the Western Bloch. That’s the only difference, and the puppet governments are far more brutal to their people than the formal colonialism where there was a lot of criticism from abroad if they got seriously out of line.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, there are quite a few myths on the whole subject, and the University of Timbuktu never existed. The only thing that existed in Timbuktu was a small mud hut the Arabs had where they taught a few of the half-breeds to memorize the Koran. They never even learned to read. But, the people who are trying to exalt the Negro past have gone into that sort of thing, and they’ve spoken of the school of Timbuktu, and then somebody quotes that and it becomes a university, and then it becomes quite a tremendous cultural center. This is ridiculous. This is a myth that has been manufactured wholesale. There is a very interesting book now on some of the very great Negro empires of Africa. Well, the trouble with the whole book is that what it is describing, in reality, is the slave empires that the Arabs created, and they did create some very, very powerful states, built huge stone cities and the like, but it was the Arabs running it, and the Arabs were utterly ruthless. These were not Negro states. If they want to portray a Negro past that’s good, let them portray the achievement of some of the free Negros in this country who have done remarkable things, but these are the very people they’re running down. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. The point made by St. Paul in his letter to the Corinthians is that every man is to stay in the condition in which he is, unless he can work himself out of it peaceably. In other words, it tells the slaves that their route to freedom is not rebellion and murder, and that sort of thing. Revolutionary, but they have an obligation to be free men in Christ, and to do this lawfully. Now, this could be done even under Roman law, and Greek law, because a slave had the opportunity to make money on the side. He could do things on his own. Now, this seems strange to us, but we forget that slavery basically was a status symbol in most of civilization, including the South. Only a minority of the slaves ever worked. Slaves were a statist symbol. Thus, a Roman household might have twenty-five slaves of whom two or three were working. To be a slave owner, you had to work hard to support the slaves.

For awhile, and there’s quite a bit written on slavery in the Roman Empire, one or two people tried to run some mines using slave labor, and it didn’t work out. The slaves weren’t used to working. They were white collar people. This is why the only way slavery could operate on the southern plantations, and there were southerners who wrote books about this they were so upset. They said the South is destroying itself through slavery. President Pierce told the abolitionists, “Give the South enough time and it’ll destroy itself and it’ll have to get rid of the slaves.” The only way they could operate profitably was to have fresh land, work it a few years, and then move out to another place. The old land, after it was mined by slave labor, was unfit. Why? You had to have a tremendous ratio of profit when you had slave labor, because you were supporting old slaves, and little kids, so you were a welfare state for a fair number of people. Then, you didn’t get the work out of them that you did out of free labor. This is why, for example, the southerners would hire free white men if there was any hard work to be done, or any dangerous work, because they didn’t want their slaves to get hurt, because after all, they paid good money for them, and besides, they wouldn’t do the hard work.

As a result, you had to have soil that was virgin soil, that would produce a high yield for a few years, or you didn’t make money off your crop. This is why a handful of slave owning people had to expand westward in state after state. Only one out of eighteen white southerners was a slave holder. Only a very small handful of those had more than one or two slaves, so it was a minority. The minority of those who owned slaves in the South, incidentally, included some Negro slave owners, who had been freed and had become wealthy plantation owners, and they were really hard on their slaves. They didn’t put up with nonsense. So, slavery was a ridiculous, non-economic fact everywhere.

And as a result, in Rome, to get back to the original point, this is what St. Paul was saying, “Alright, if you’re a slave and you become converted, don’t run off or start a revolution or anything. Work. Buy your freedom. Most of the time you have nothing to do. Go out and get a job. Your master will be glad to see you do it,” and this was regularly done. A slave would make money on the side and could buy his freedom, because there was nothing for him to do in the average household. What would you do with eighteen slaves in a house? Or twenty? Or ten? Even without modern conveniences, you’d have trouble finding, really any work to do. You’d assign more than three-fourths of them to taking care of each other. That was the reality, and we have all kinds of ancient documents to that effect, and all kinds of documents from the South. Slavery was an albatross that hung the South, that bled it. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Very good question. The Sagadahoc Colony of 1607 which was very abundantly and richly provided for by the Plymouth Corporation failed because the men had no faith and they fell apart. The 1620 Colony was sent there under orders that everything was to belong to the London Corporation. The land, everything. Therefore, they had no title to anything there. It was on orders from London, where the corporation director said, “Everything belongs to us so you’re going to operate this as our employees.” It was not that they wanted a communistic status, you see. They were employees of the corporation, but as they said, it is a kind of communism. So, after two years in which the thing went from bad to worse, the colonists gathered together and under their governor, they voted without waiting for London or asking them, to divide up the land. Every man to be a free enterprise person and they wrote to London and the corporation headquarters, and said, “We will contract with you to work off the cost of bringing us here and settling us, and so on, and any cost you want to assess us, but this is the way we are going,” so it was not their choice to establish that first kind of society. It was because the corporation was running the whole thing.

Now, this is an important fact which we’re not normally told about the Plymouth Colony.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] On the way over, they were told what the corporation expected of them. They weren’t happy about it. You see, they were picked up in the Netherlands. They were Englishmen who fled from religious persecution. Here was an opportunity to go to the New World and try to make a new beginning on their own. They were ready to go on any terms, so they left. They were stuck with whatever was told them. That was the reality. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Well, in Africa today, there is a rapid regression to everything before the coming of the White Man, including cannibalism, except in those areas where you have Christians, and of course, one of the areas Biafra is being systematically destroyed, and the Christians massacred, but they are different. Very different. Well, our time is up. One announcement. I now do have the copies of the Myth of Overpopulation, but I forgot to bring the list which states how many you have. So, if you remember how many copies of Myth of Overpopulation you have coming, please see me at the car and you’ll get them, and if you don’t, I will bring the list next week. I was a little scattered in my thinking this morning as well as late, for which I apologize. Thank you.

End of tape