of their masters and did not descend to their heirs:”  or that he was to serve him until the year of Jubilee, when all servants were set at liberty.  To protect servants from violence, it was ordained that if a master struck out the tooth or destroyed the eye of a servant, that servant immediately became free, for such an act of violence evidently showed he was unfit to possess the power of a master, and therefore that power was taken from him.  All servants enjoyed the rest of the Sabbath and partook of the privileges and festivities of the three great Jewish Feasts; and if a servant died under the infliction of chastisement, his master was surely to be punished.  As a tooth for a tooth and life for life was the Jewish law, of course he was punished with death.  I know that great stress has been laid upon the following verse:  “Notwithstanding, if he continue a day or two, he shall not be punished, for he is his money.”

Slaveholders, and the apologists of slavery, have eagerly seized upon this little passage of scripture, and held it up as the masters’ Magna Charta, by which they were licensed by God himself to commit the greatest outrages upon the defenceless victims of their oppression.  But, my friends, was it designed to be so?  If our Heavenly Father would protect by law the eye and the tooth of a Hebrew servant, can we for a moment believe that he would abandon that same servant to the brutal rape of a master who would destroy even life itself.  Do we not rather see in this, the only law which protected masters, and was it not right that in case of the death of a servant, one or two days after chastisement was inflicted, to which other circumstances might have contributed, that the master should be protected when, in all probability, he never intended to produce so fatal a result?  But the phrase “he is his money” has been adduced to show that Hebrew servants were regarded as mere things, “chattels personal;” if so, why were so many laws made to secure their rights as men, and to ensure their rising into equality and freedom?  If they were mere things, why were they regarded as responsible beings, and one law made for them as well as for their masters?  But I pass on now to the consideration of how the female Jewish servants were protected by law.

1.  If she please not her master, who hath betrothed her to himself, then shall he let her be redeemed:  to sell her unto another nation he shall have no power, seeing he hath dealt deceitfully with her.

2.  If he have betrothed her unto his son, he shall deal with her after the manner of daughters.

3.  If he take him another wife, her food, her raiment, and her duty of marriage, shall he not diminish.

4.  If he do not these three unto her, then shall she go out free without money.