V. We infer the voluntariness of the servants of the Patriarchs from the impossibility of their having been held against their wills.  Abraham’s servants are an illustration.  At one time he had three hundred and eighteen young men “born in his house,” and many more not born in his house.  His servants of all ages, were probably MANY THOUSANDS.  How Abraham and Sarah contrived to hold fast so many thousand servants against their wills, we are left quite in the dark.  The most natural supposition is that the Patriarch and his wife took turns in surrounding them!  The neighboring tribes, instead of constituting a picket guard to hem in his servants, would have been far more likely to sweep them and him into captivity, as they did Lot and his household.  Besides, there was neither “Constitution” nor “compact,” to send back Abraham’s fugitives, nor a truckling police to pounce upon them, nor gentleman-kidnappers, suing for his patronage, volunteering to howl on their track, boasting their blood-hound scent, and pledging their “honor” to hunt down and “deliver up,” provided they had a description of the “flesh-marks,” and were suitably stimulated by pieces of silver.  Abraham seems also to have been sadly deficient in all the auxiliaries of family government, such as stocks, hand-cuffs, foot-chains, yokes, gags, and thumb-screws.  His destitution of these patriarchal indispensables is the more afflicting, since he faithfully trained “his household to do justice and judgment,” though so deplorably destitute of the needful aids.

VI.  We infer that servants were voluntary, as there is no instance of an Israelitish master SELLING a servant.  Abraham had thousands of servants, but seems never to have sold one.  Isaac “grew until he became very great,” and had “great store of servants.”  Jacob’s youth was spent in the family of Laban, where he lived a servant twenty-one years.  Afterward he had a large number of servants.  Joseph sent for Jacob to come into Egypt, “thou and thy children, and thy children’s children, and thy flocks and thy herds, and ALL THAT THOU HAST.”  Jacob took his flocks and herds but no servants.  Gen xlv. 10; xlvii. 16.  They doubtless, served under their own contracts, and when Jacob went into Egypt, they chose to stay in their own country.  The government might sell thieves, if they had no property, until their services had made good the injury, and paid the legal fine.  Ex. xxii. 3.  But masters seem to have had no power to sell their servants.  To give the master a right to sell his servant, would annihilate the servant’s right of choice in his own disposal; but says the objector, “to give the master a right to buy a servant, equally annihilates the servant’s right of choice.”  Answer.  It is one thing to have a right to buy a man, and a different thing to have a right to buy him of another man[A].

[Footnote A:  There is no evidence that masters had the power to dispose even the services of their servants, as men hire out their laborers whom they employ by the year; but whether they had or not, affects not the argument.]