Deuteronomy

The Stealer of Life

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Lesson: 82-110

Genre: Talk

Track: 082

Dictation Name: RR187AS82

Location/Venue:

Year: 1993

Let us worship God. Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord or who shall stand in His holy place? He that hath clean hands and a pure heart, that hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity nor sworn deceitfully. He shall receive the blessing from the Lord and righteousness from the God of His salvation. Let us pray.

Almighty God our Heavenly Father we give thanks unto Thee again for the blessings of the week past. We thank Thee our Father that we live, move and have our being in Thee. That not for a second of time are we outside Thy omnipotent and all wise government. Grant our Father that we then know our limitations, know our sin, know our blindness and cease from troubling ourselves and cast our every care upon thee who carest for us. Grant us this we beseech Thee in Christ’s name, Amen.

Our scripture is Deuteronomy 24:7. Our subject: The Stealer of Life. The Stealer of Life, 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.”

This law is a restatement of Exodus 21:16 but with a difference. The Exodus law bans and requires a mandatory death sentence for anyone engaged in the slave trade. In Deuteronomy the law specifies the children of Israel, that is no covenant member could be enslaved. Both texts refer to forcible enslavement, both foreign and native enslavement are banned. There is an exception to this law that anyone unable to pay a debt was required if he could not repay it to work it off as a bondservant.

The length of such a servitude was brief. Since debts were limited to six years usually the man who acquired debt did it somewhere between the first and the sixth year so that any un-payable debt would be a fraction of the six years. In the Ten Commandments we are told very bluntly neither shalt thou steal. If the theft of property is very strictly forbidden by many texts in God’s law how much more is the theft of people banned. This applies to young and old, male and female, this is a very strong statement of the ban. The main purpose of kidnapping in antiquity was enslavement. In our time the purpose is to gain ransom and in many cases it is a political reprisal and at the same time a demand at times for money or for the release of criminal prisoners. But even more the major impedance to slavery which is more prolific, more widespread, than ever before in history is the sexual use of children, kidnapping, to be enslaved in various continents in out of the way places, to be worked in factories until they die, kidnapped in order to be cannibalized for their organs because there is a worldwide market now in human organs. So this law is important. More relevant now than ever before. In the Hebrew the kidnapper is called the stealer of life, this term explains why the death penalty is required. To steal a family member was to destroy the life of the person stolen and also to shatter his family. The kidnapper, the enslaver, is the stealer of life. Now we are told that this law was something that existed elsewhere because the Code of Hammurabi had a similar law which read: if a man has stolen the son of a freeman he must be put to death, or in the translation [unknown], if a [unknown] has stolen the son of another [unknown] he must be put to death. Now the difference is a very substantial one.

The Code of Hammurabi made such kidnapping and enslavement illegal only when a freeman or a [unknown] or a nobleman was involved, depending on who translates the law. In Hittite law for example free men had exemptions from various penalties because of their status. What would incur death in someone on the lowest levels of society such as incest or bestiality was not a crime for a nobleman. In such cultures criminal law restrained the lower classes and gave license to the upper classes. As against this, biblical law protects everyone. The freedom of Christendom cannot be explained apart from God’s law. From the alien law codes of antiquity we can see that the life of most people was unrelieved exploitation, therefore when scholars talk about the similarity here of God’s law and Hammurabi codes or some other code they falsify history. Kidnapping for enslavement was a common part of non-Christian cultures even until recently and is far from gone now. A man’s freedom means security from theft and from enslavement. Modern enslavement is often indirect, it can be by taxation, by the destruction of sound money and by various other means such as regulations and controls. P.C. Craigie called attention to an important facet of this law and I quote him:

“Stealing the life, the crime is social murder. For though the victim does not literally die by being sold into slavery is effectively cut off from the covenant family of God, hence the penalty for the crime is severe. To cut a man off from the covenant community was to cut him off from sharing in the blessing of God for His people in the Promised Land.” Unquote.

Of course the Exodus version applies to foreigners. The two versions of this law make clear that stealing the life of a man, covenant or non-covenant, is an offense against God. In Deuteronomy there are three laws, essentially two, that do not equally protect the foreigner and the Israelite. Apart from these all men are equally under the protection of God’s law. The first is in Deuteronomy 14:21 and has to do with diet. The non-covenant man is free to eat as he chooses because he is after all suicidal. The second and third law as Deuteronomy 15:3 and 23:20 deal with money lending. Long term loans to non-believers can be made, to believers only to six years. The non-believers have no Sabbath premise, no belief in resting in God and therefore long term debt is a way of life for them. This law declares that the kidnapper must die. Whether or not the victim was restored to his or her family the act of stealing and enslaving a person cut him or her off from the family, therefore the life of the kidnapper must also be cut off. Normally the targets of kidnappers would be the poor. In those days to steal someone from an important family would mean the possibility of immediately being pursued and captured so this law protects the poor. It protects families who had neither the means to pursue the slaver nor the importance to arouse the authorities to quick action. Today the slave trade is active in Africa and elsewhere.

By making enslavement a capital offense it made pursuit and capture more important to the civil authorities. It is a rather strange thing that the later rabbis limited the meaning of this law. They held and I quote:

“The victim must have been seen by witnesses in the hand of the kidnapper and also have been sold before the crime was punishable by death.”

Well, it’s strange that the victim’s testimony is not included; after all, he had something to testify to. A man could sell himself into voluntary servitude but no man could sell him. Men can and do enslave themselves but this does not entitle other men to coerce them into slavery. This text was used by the English clergy in fighting against and ending the English slave trade. As one great Christian leader of that era, very active era, Thomas Scott wrote and I quote:

“Christianity has annihilated that distinction of nations which for typical and political reasons was during a time established and in this respect every man is now our brother whatever be his nation, complexion or creed. How then can the merchandise of men and women be carried on without transgressing this commandment or betting those who do? An inhabitant of England be stay at home and steal a horse or sheep be condemned to death but if he take a voyage to Africa he may steal or purchase of those who do steal hundreds of men and women and not only escape with impunity but grow great like a prince. According to the law of God whoever stole cattle restored four or five fold, whoever stole one human being, though an infant or an idiot, must die. May we not call upon the British legislatures to rectify this flagrant abuse?”

And then Scott adds:

“Since this was written the author with tens of thousands more has to bless God that this expectation has been answered in the abolition of the slave trade by an act of the legislature. But further powerfully coercive measures are still needful fully to accomplish the benevolent design.” Unquote.

For many offenses God requires no punishment by human agencies but reserves that power to himself. In this instance the state must exact the death penalty. According to Calvin: for we know how God appoints punishments accordingly as He esteemeth of the greatness of the sin that is committed. The death penalty is required and we are told: for thou shalt put evil away from among you. God does not see it as sufficient for us to live morally by separating ourselves from the evils of our time. We must be a force for good to eliminate the evils of our time. Multiculturalism in our day rejects the legitimacy of Christianizing the world. This is seen as cultural aggression. Our enemies reserve, however, the right to wage war against God and us. The bible requires us to put evil away from among us. We are told that there are capital offenses and if we do not triumph over the evil ones they will triumph over us. The biblical phrase, the stealer of life, tells us that many analogous ways of stealing life exists. These do not entail the death penalty but they are still very important for us to forestall [??]. It’s an ironic fact that today we are not interested in anti-slavery. We see no great alarm over the fact that world wide a slave trade of staggering dimensions exist, that a very high proportion of humanity is enslaved.

We have become callous to that sort of thing. It was only a few years ago that tens of thousands of children were starving to death daily in [unknown]. Only one government did any real protesting, it was ours, we were a little better in those days a decade or so ago. And that’s forgotten. And forgotten are like things that have since taken place in Cambodia and elsewhere. Gordon Thomas wrote in conjunction with the now centuries old London anti-slavery society a book Enslaved on the Slave Trade Today. It got very little attention. For political reasons neither the great powers nor the U.N. have sought to move against the vast slave trade, including the traffic in body parts. But what arouses people today? Inequality. People can be run out of office for a fancied slight to someone of a minority group or of another race. The bible tells us there are inequalities among men; they must receive equal justice under the law. But there are inequalities all over the world and the only way they can be overcome are as people work to improve their lot. What have we done? We have shifted the whole of the agenda from that which we could do to deal with slavery, with the traffic in body parts, the slave labor camps and the like to something, inequality, which can never be solved but which gives the politicians a permanent ground for interference in human society. We have seen the creation of a false agenda which will accomplish one thing: increase the power of the modern state. Let us pray.

Our Father Thy word is truth, Thy word deals with the problems of sin and of our need of Thee. Turn the nations again to Thy word, give them the grace to read, to hear, to understand and to obey that we may become a godly people in whom dwells righteousness, a people of justice. Grant us this we beseech Thee in Christ’s name, Amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson? Yes?

[Question unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] That’s a very thoughtful question, the French Revolution enthroned liberty, fraternity and equality, and as more than one scholar, most notably Count Eric [unknown], have pointed out if you demand equality you will destroy liberty and fraternity. You will shatter human brotherhood in the name of equality and you will destroy freedom. And that’s exactly what is happening so that we have a warping of the whole human scene and the creation of a great deal of hatred in the name of equality. That’s a point that should be pursued; it’s a very important point. Yes?

[Question] I think it’s a case that a great many people in the United States and elsewhere are already slaves and whether having become enslaved by the greedy or already slaves themselves, the liberties and freedoms that they are allowed make them feel that they are free when in fact they aren’t and by classic definition would be slaves.

[Rushdoony] In terms of the historic definition of slavery we are indeed becoming a slave people. Because it has been recognized historically that you cannot enslave the soul of a man, that he may be chained and working but in his mind he can be free, and in antiquity we have the case of many a slave who became a notable philosopher. Well, the definition historically of slavery has been ownership or property rights in the labor of another man. Well now the federal government has, and the state and local governments, have ownership in roughly fifty percent of your labor. That certainly constitutes a form of slavery. And slavery has not always been cruel except in one fact, even at its best it’s a depravation of freedom. So you have been deprived of a considerable amount of your freedom because the state has title to fifty percent of your labor. Yes?

[Question unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes, we have a problem today because freedom is given an anti-God and a totally lawless meaning. There is a case now going to court in city after city especially on the West Coast. The homeless are being legislated against because what they are beginning to realize in city after city is that they have shelters for the homeless but these people won’t go there, they can’t make them go there. They are usually, and in most cases are, mentally disturbed people who have been discharged from institutions who don’t want to take further care of them. So around the city hall, the public parks and squares, they’re squatting, they are urinating, they are defecating and creating such a problem it is driving people out of those places. So these laws have been passed to get rid of the problem.

And what has happened? Well an advocacy group is taking these city governments into court. Declaring that anything that is public property the homeless have a right to do as they please in that public property. And as the opponents of these advocacy groups have said, the white house lawn is public property, Congress is public property, but that doesn’t give you the right to go and camp there, put up a tent or a cardboard shelter and use it as a public toilet. And yet the indications are not favorable to these cities that are passing this law. Why? Because the definition of liberty is increasingly anarchistic. It means freedom to abort, to kill, freedom increasingly now for euthanasia, freedom for homosexuality, so why not freedom to use public properties as they see fit? And if they triumph there why not on your property? So the definition of liberty has lost any biblical context. It has become anarchistic after the manner of the Marque De Sade. Yes?

[Question unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes that doesn’t surprise me at all. When this kind of thing has happened in the past it has been the death of that state. The only question now is will the reviving faith in this country be strong enough to overcome and overturn that. I’ve mentioned more than once and I think it is a fact we need to remember: taxation in Rome finally became so oppressive and collecting taxes became so difficult that torture to collect taxes became legalized. So that it finally reached the point that nobody would fight for Rome and the barbarians simply walked through the Empire looting and killing as they saw fit. Nobody in Rome felt the city and the empire were worth fighting for. And this I believe is a temper that is beginning to develop all over the world. A disgust of people with their countries, or I should say government, they love their country but they hate their government.

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

Our Lord and our God, we thank Thee that in all the crises of life we have the certainty that underneath are Thine everlasting arms. That Thou art He that dost make all things work together for good for them that love Thee, for those that are the called according to Thy purpose. Make us strong in faith, bold in action, confident in Thy victory so that we may be more than conquerors through Christ our Lord. 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.