“When you go among the heathen round about to get a man to work for you, I straightly charge you to go first to his neighbors, get their consent that you may have him, settle the terms with them, and pay to them a fair equivalent.  If it is not their choice to let him go, I charge you not to take him on your peril.  If they consent, and you pay them the full value of his labor, then you may go and catch the man and drag him home with you, and make him work for you, and I will bless you in the work of your hands and you shall eat of the fat of the land.  As to the man himself, his choice is nothing, and you need give him nothing for his work:  but take care and pay his neighbors well for him, and respect their free choice in taking him, for to deprive a heathen man by force and without pay of the use of himself is well pleasing in my sight, but to deprive his heathen neighbors of the use of him is that abominable thing which my soul hateth.”

3.  “FOREVER.”  This is quoted to prove that servants were to serve during their life time, and their posterity from generation to generation.[A] No such idea is contained in the passage.  The word “forever,” instead of defining the length of individual service, proclaims the permanence of the regulation laid down in the two verses preceding, namely, that their permanent domestics should be of the Strangers, and not of the Israelites; it declares the duration of that general provision.  As if God had said, “You shall always get your permanent laborers from the nations round about you; your servants shall always be of that class of persons.”  As it stands in the original, it is plain—­“Forever of them shall ye serve yourselves.”  This is the literal rendering.

[Footnote A:  One would think that the explicit testimony of our Lord should for ever forestall all cavil on this point. “The servant abideth not in the house FOR EVER, but the Son, abideth ever.”  John viii. 35.]

That “forever” refers to the permanent relations of a community, rather than to the services of individuals, is a fair inference from the form of the expression, “Both thy bondmen, &c., shall be of the heathen.  OF THEM shall ye buy.”  “They shall be your possession.”  “THEY shall be your bondmen forever.”  “But over your brethren the CHILDREN OF ISRAEL,” &c.  To say nothing of the uncertainty of these individuals surviving those after whom they are to live, the language used applies more naturally to a body of people, than to individual servants.  Besides perpetual service cannot be argued from the term forever.  The ninth and tenth verses of the same chapter limit it absolutely by the jubilee.  “Then thou shalt cause the trumpet of the jubilee to sound * * throughout ALL your land.”  “And ye shall proclaim liberty throughout all the land