9.  If a man smite his servant or his maid with a rod, and he die under his hand, he shall be surely punished.  Notwithstanding, if he continue a day or two, he shall not be punished, for he is his money.  Ex. xxi, 20, 21.

From these laws we learn, that one class of Hebrew men servants were bound to serve their masters only six years, unless their attachment to their employers, their wives and children, should induce them to wish to remain in servitude, in which case, in order to prevent the possibility of deception on the part of the master, the servant was first taken before the magistrate, where he openly declared his intention of continuing in his master’s service, (probably a public register was kept of such,) he was then conducted to the door of the house, (in warm climates doors are thrown open.) and there his ear was publicly bored, and by submitting to this operation, he testified his willingness to serve him in subserviency to the law of God; for let it be remembered, that the door-post was covered with the precepts of that law.  Deut. vi, 9. xi, 20:  for ever, i.e., during his life, for Jewish Rabbins, who must have understood Jewish slavery (as it is called), “affirm that servants were set free at the death 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.  The other class, when they first sold themselves, agreed to remain until the year of Jubilee.  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 rage of a master who would destroy even life itself?  Let us then examine this passage with the help of the context.  In the 18th and 19th verses we have