Leviticus; The Law of Holiness and Grace

The Jubilee V

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Genre: Lessons with Q & A

Lesson: 71

Track: 71

Dictation Name: RR172AM71

Date: Early 70s

Let’s worship God. This is the confidence we have in Him that if we ask anything according to His Will, He heareth us. Having these promises, let us draw near to the Throne of Grace with true hearts in full assurance of faith. My voice shalt Thou hear in the morning, oh Lord, in the morning will I direct my prayer unto Thee and will look up.

Let us pray.

Oh Lord our God unto whom all glory belongeth, we come into Thy presence, rejoicing in Thy mercies, beseeching Thee oh Lord to revive Thy Church, to make strong Thy people, in order that the kingdoms of this world might become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ. Use us to this purpose, we pray our Father, for Britain, that Thou wouldst bless those who are Thine, and empower them to bring the whole nation again unto Thy dominion. We pray for the United States, for Canada and for all the nations who have not known Thee that they may know Thee and those who have known Thee and departed from Thee that they may turn again to Thee and be saved. Bless us now as we give ourselves to the study of Thy Word, and empower us by Thy Spirit that we may be more than conquerors in Christ our Lord. In His name we pray. Amen.

We continue our studies in the Jubilee this morning with Leviticus 25:39-46. Leviticus 29:35-46 [25:39-46] “The Jubilee,” the fifth of our lessons on The Jubilee.

“39 And if thy brother that dwelleth by thee be waxen poor, and be sold unto thee; thou shalt not compel him to serve as a bondservant:

40 But as an hired servant, and as a sojourner, he shall be with thee, and shall serve thee unto the year of jubilee:

41 And then shall he depart from thee, both he and his children with him, and shall return unto his own family, and unto the possession of his fathers shall he return.

42 For they are my servants, which I brought forth out of the land of Egypt: they shall not be sold as bondmen.

43 Thou shalt not rule over him with rigor; but shalt fear thy God.

44 Both thy bondmen, and thy bondmaids, which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids.

45 Moreover of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land: and they shall be your possession.

46 And ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them for a possession; they shall be your bondmen forever: but over your brethren the children of Israel, ye shall not rule one over another with rigor.”

God’s Law requires loans without interest to help the poor. It does not, however, allow the poor to exploit this fact. Bond service to repay debt or as a refuge from an inability to be provident was the law as God set it forth. We find more specific details of these laws in Exodus 21:1-6 and also in Deuteronomy 15:12-18.

What we have in God’s Law is a recognition that some people will prefer a state of dependency. They are not self-reliant. They are going to be subordinate and dependent. Now, the freedom of all such persons was possible on the Sabbath Years and in the Jubilee. In any case, such a people could not be treated as slaves. They simply had to be lesser members of the household. And so, the law is very clear, you are to treat him as a hired servant, as a sojourner, someone who is with you temporarily, even if he is there to pay off his debt.

Now, foreigners could be bought as bond servants, or we might say using modern terminology, as slaves, except that there was a difference. They were not slaves in any sense that we understand the term. The law in Deuteronomy 23:15, 16 forbids the return of a runaway bond servant to his master, whether he be an Israelite or a foreigner. Now if someone who were a bond servant were not treated properly, he knew he could walk away and he was free to do so. They had to be as God specifies, treated with justice, made members (subordinate members, but members) of the family.

In verse 38, we saw last time that God declares that He is the Lord, we must obey Him, because He requires it, not because we so choose. It is also worth noting that if an angry master struck at a servant, a bond servant, whether an Israelite or a foreigner, he had to free him at once, if he injured him. This is the statement of Exodus 21:26, 27. C.D. Ginsberg noted, “The authorities during the Second Temple enacted that the master’s right, even with regard to this kind of bondman; that is those that are bondmen for life (foreigners), is restricted to their labor, but that he has no right to barter with them, to misuse them, or to put them to shame.” Thus, the tasks assigned to a covenant member who is a bond servant cannot be degrading. Verse 39 and 40 make it clear that they must be comparable to work assigned to competent free laborers.

Now God declares in verse 42 that we are all His servants, in bond service all our lives to Him and therefore we can never treat another man as our property because we are all together God’s property. One commentator said, “You may hold them to service, but only to service, nothing more.” There was however much abuse of this law in Israel at various times, especially in the generations preceding the fall. Thus, in II Kings 4:1, we see that creditors sought to seize the two sons of a widow and she appealed to Elisha. This was a pagan pattern, as Nehemiah 5:4, 5 make clear.

Isaiah said that Israel had sold herself into slavery by her sins, in Isaiah 50:1. And the messiah’s task is the release of captives and of the exploited, according to Isaiah 58:7. For failure to obey the law of release of bondservants, Judah herself, Jeremiah declared in Jeremiah 34:8-11 would go into captivity. Because they refused to treat those under them with justice, they would feel the justice of God. Amos 2:6 and 8:6 give us a very telling account of Israel’s apostasy in the disregard for God’s Laws in these matters and the same was true in New Testament times as we see in Matthew 18:25.

Now, even if an Israelite chose to be a bond servant because he was unwilling to risk freedom and wanted security, he had to go free in the Jubilee Year. Freedom and responsibility were his inescapable duties. The unbeliever, being a slave to sin by nature, could walk away if conditions were unjust, or convert, becoming eligible for Sabbath Year release; which many did.

And this is why the Jews of Europe are not really Jewish in blood, because vast numbers, when Jewish merchants were the rule in early Europe in the days of the barbarians, converted when they were bought by these Jews to escape slavery. So the Jewish traders in the early Medieval Era took countless numbers in of European slaves in trade for goods. And most of them, finally all of them, adopted Judaism to gain their freedom. So they are an overwhelming proportion of those who call themselves Jews. There are no Jews with more than a trace of Jewish genes from antiquity.

In the United States in the early Colonial Era, these laws prevailed. And blacks at first could gain their freedom by converting. But some of the Southerners went to the legislatures and had laws past eliminating the biblical laws and thereby they established slavery in America.

A commentator of the early 1800s in the United States, George Bush, summarized very clearly the operation of this law in Israel. “Persons were sometimes sold among the Jews by judicial process when they were guilty of theft and were not able to make satisfaction according to Exodus 21:2. Some were sold by their parents, that is, they disposed of their right of service for a stipulated sum and for a given number of years. Others again, when reduced to extreme want, sold themselves. The Jewish writers inform us that this was not considered lawful except in extreme cases. 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.” Now, such practice, while it was not literally in terms of the law, had a logic to it, namely that as long as a man retained his freedom, he would be able to re-establish himself and redeem his children from bond service.

All through God’s Law, we see regulations governing the treatment of all kinds of servants. God’s Law requires man to be always mindful that all men are God’s creatures and His servants. And Samuel Clarke gives us a good summary of the Law in this regard. “Kidnapping was punished with death. The slave was encouraged to become a proselyte. He might be set free. Special rules were laid down for the security of his life and limbs. The Law would not suffer it to be forgotten that the slave was a man and presented him in every way that was possible at the time, against the injustice or cruelty of his master.”

Bamberger, another scholar, has called attention to an interesting aspect of this law, and later, Judaism. It became a requirement that the owner of a non-Jewish slave seek to convert him and have him circumcised. If after one year, the slave refused to become a Jew, he was to be sold.” The Union of American Hebrew congregations has called attention to this law in some of their recent writings, as a way of calling attention to the fact that the essence of Judaism became the freedom of peoples. This has led them to a great deal of liberalism, because as they separated this concept from the biblical law proper, it was easy to become sentimental.

Basic to this law is God’s statement in verse 42, “For they are my servants, which I brought forth out of the land of Egypt. They shall not be sold as bond men.” Calvin commented on this, “God here declares that His own right is invaded when those whom He claims as His property are taken into subjection by another, for He says that He acquired the people as His own when He redeemed them from Egypt.” And let me say parenthetically, Calvin says the same is true of us because God redeemed us also in Christ. But to continue, “Whence He infers that His right is violated if any should usurp per perpetual dominion over a Hebrew. If any object that this is of equal force, when they only served for a time, I reply that thou God might have justly asserted His sole ownership, yet He was satisfied with this symbol of it. And therefore, that He suffered by indulgence that they should be enslaved for a fixed period, provided some trace of His deliverance of them should remain. In a word, He simply chose to apply this preventative, lest slavery should altogether extinguish the recollection of His grace, although He allowed it to be smothered thus as it were. Lest, however, cruel masters should trust that their tyranny would be exercised with impunity, Moses reminds them that they had to do with God, who will at length appear as its avenger. Although the political laws of Moses are not now in operation, still the analogy is to be preserved. Thus, the condition of those who have been redeemed by Christ’s blood should be worse among us than that of old, of His ancient people, to whom Paul’s exhortation refers, ‘ye masters, forbear threatening your slaves, knowing that both you and their master is in Heaven.’ “Now, Calvin was right in seeing the application of this law today, though he was wrong in seeing the political laws of Moses not now in operation. This is especially strange because he insisted on the present validity of this law and it’s difficult to say what law Calvin set aside, because he regularly affirmed them.

However, the word in Greek which appears in Ephesians 6:5, 6 to which Calvin refers and quotes, is a ‘doulai’ or ‘doulos’ and it appears in verb form and the King James as ‘eye service’ and ‘service.’ It can mean slave. But it usually means servant and implies bondage; that is, some kind of subjection. So while Calvin at some points is not correct in referring to the word, he is right in this point. And abundantly right—that God’s property rights are invaded and usurped if we enslave men or in any way exercise ungodly powers over them. This was a basic thrust of Calvin’s passage. Man can never be treated merely as something that exists in this world. He is the creation of the Almighty with a particular destiny, with a particular calling from God and we must always view him in terms of God’s purposes and God’s judgment. We cannot be sentimental toward him in terms of our feelings, nor can we be unduly harsh toward him in terms again of our anger or sense of justice. It must be God’s justice which prevails and God’s attitude toward all men. And this is especially true, as Calvin says, of our fellow believers. The law denies us the right to have a purely individualistic relationship to God. We are, Calvin makes clear, members of a community, of humanity, and we have an obligation both to God and in Him to our neighbor. As our Lord declares, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment and the second is like unto it, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

Very briefly, what we are to understand is that all relationships in this world are mediated through God, that we never have a direct relationship to anyone. We cannot treat anyone who works for us or anyone who lives near us, or our children or husband or wife as though it were a direct and totally personal relationship. It is always mediated through God, because we are God’s creature and the other person is God’s creature and His Law governs our relationship.

I read in the papers a couple of days ago in one of the advice to the lovelorn-type columns, which are usually gems of Humanism, a statement telling somebody to butt out of something that was very stupid that a person wanted to do, because it was something between husband and wife and so the parents who were providing everything for the wedding had no business saying anything, it was a purely personal thing. That’s nonsense! Nothing in this world is purely personal. No relationship between any two people is outside of God. All relationships are mediated through Hm and governed by His Word. And it is Humanism to think that what we do with ourselves or with any other person is strictly personal. It cannot be. And that’s why we have this book. God is the maker of Heaven and earth and all things therein and of us, and everything has to be in Him in whom we live and move and have our being.

Let us pray.

Our Lord and our God, we give thanks unto Thee that every area of life is within Thy Word and Thy Spirit, that we can never separate ourselves from Thee, for then indeed we would be lost. Then indeed our folly would prevail. But Lord, let Thy Word and Spirit govern us, that Thy kingdom may come and Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven. Grant us this we beseech Thee, in Christ’s name. Amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson?

Yes

[Audience] Are you saying that slavery is legitimate as long as it’s, the relationship between the master and the slave is governed by the strictures of scripture?

[Rushdoony] Not quite. Slavery in the biblical sense.—in other words, it was really a form of bond service. It was not an ownership of the person.

Consider slavery as we know it in this country, as it existed. If it had been under God’s Laws (it was in the earliest days), the blacks who had been bought were free as soon as they paid for their passage, and paid any other expenses the master had occurred. And so, many of them went free. Or if they converted, they became free. Ten percent of the black in the South in 1860 were free. Or, if they were mistreated, they were free to walk away. That was biblical slavery. It meant that because you were in debt and you were working off your debts or you were someone who had grown weary of the struggle and wanted security, you became somebody’s bond servant, or if you were a foreigner and you had been purchased from somebody, you were free to walk away, which meant, as the Law stipulated, you had to be treated as God’s creature.

Now, that isn’t slavery as we can recognize it, is it? So there is a dramatic difference between the slavery we encounter in the Bible and the slavery of, say the early United States.

Yes.

[Audience] I think it’s remarkable that so little has been said about the forced labor of the Soviet Union which is slavery by definition. And the fact that so many people have sold themselves into slavery in the job market.

[Rushdoony] Yes, with regard to the Soviet Union, we need to recognize 10 million people are slaves there, and the turnover is great because so many are worked to death and replaced with more slaves—political prisoners. And this is just one country among the Socialist countries of the world that have slaves. A higher percentage of slaves are held today than ever before in human history.

You must remember when slavery was a matter of private ownership, to afford a slave, you had to be well-to-do. In the South, 1 in 18 white families had a slave—1 in 18. And most of those had only one, maybe two. So it was not a situation where many people could afford it. It was too expensive. And this has always been true of private ownership of slaves. Only a minority have been able to afford them. Slavery, until just a few years ago (within a decade, I believe), was legal in Saudi Arabia, and in other Arabian countries. But very few could afford them. Some, like a few of the very wealthy, would have a large number, but it was expensive. So no vast numbers of people have ever been slaves except in capital cities of antiquity where you had people who lived off the tax funds of the rest of the country, or of the outlying districts. So Rome could have a tremendous number of slaves. Athens had a very large number of slaves, to a great degree from its wars. But you would not find them if you went outside the city; they would be very rare, almost unknown. So that in Greece, in the period of Greece’s prosperity and success, a few cities would be centers of slaves and the rest of the country would have very few, almost none, unless it were some urban person who had a villa out in the country.

But today, you have the mass ownership of slaves by various socialist countries, so we need to re-think all our thinking about slavery. Even in antiquity, it was the State who enslaved them through war and then brought them home and sold them to people in the capital center, or parceled them out to leading personages. The private ownership has always been limited.

Today with State ownership, which is nowhere banned, not even by our Constitution. State ownership has reached an all-time high in history. And yet, we congratulate ourselves on being so much better than the people of the past.

Yes, Colonel, you had a question.

[Audience] A historical question. You made an interesting statement that, that most of the Jews in Europe are not actually genetically related to Israel, but rather converted to Judaism to be, to be able to become bond servants and then be released at some point. What about the, the Jews today from Israel? I mean, are they… in other words, we have a large Jewish community in the Unites States for instance, there are often physical characteristics, you know, somewhat in common, so I assumed therefore they all had a similar genetic background. Do, are most of the Jewish community around the world today from the European base, or relating back to Israel then?

[Rushdoony] Studies that have been made by scientists find that the German Jews are German. Polish Jews are Polish, and so on. Now, what we do recognize is some, because they have the commonly-ascribed Jewish characteristics, but we don’t observe those characteristics in millions of others. One of the problems in Israel is that you have such diverse peoples.

The Oriental Jews (and a Jewish friend told me), are regarded as the blacks were regarded here, 40 years and 50 years ago. In fact, he said that when he went over there to visit his relatives, there was a great deal of grief because one of the young men had married an Oriental Jew. And it was a family disgrace. They were keeping it a secret. They didn’t want anyone else to know that they had such a person in the family. So there are very real tensions, very real problems. They are different peoples.

Any other questions?

Yes.

[Audience] I have a, just a general question on the subject of The Jubilee. This past week I heard a preacher give a sermon on the righteousness and the beauty of the Jubilee Principle, but he observed that Jubilee Year was never observed in Israel, historically. Is that correct?

[Rushdoony] Yes, it was. We don’t know when they stopped observing The Jubilees. We know that sometime after the division, they apparently stopped observing the Sabbath Years because from the time of the captivity, seventy years of sabbath rests were going to be required of the land to make up for the Sabbath Years which would include the Jubilee Years, when the land had not been given its rest. So this would mean fifteen years every century. And divide fifteen into seventy and you know how many centuries back you have to go to the early days of the kings, but after Solomon. So the cessation of the observance of the sabbaths and The Jubilees came sometime after the kingdom divided.

Any other questions or comments? Well if not, let us conclude with prayer.

Our Lord and our God, we thank Thee for Thy Word which is truth, for the joy of knowing the way which Thou hast declared as the Way of Life. Give us grace to walk in faithfulness and in joy—joyful obedience, all the days of our life. And now, go in peace. God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost bless you and keep you, guide and protect you this day and always. Amen.