still the equal lot of all. The seven daughters of Jethro, the priest of Midian, “came and drew water, and filled the troughs to water their father's flock.”[1] Moses keeps the sheep of his father-in-law. The wealthy Boaz mingles with his reapers in a way in which no great planter would mingle with his slave-gang, and he lies down himself on the threshing-floor to guard the corn at night. In this respect the feelings of men had not changed since that earlier age when Jacob was Laban’s shepherd.
In politics, too, we are far from those aristocratic liberties of republics which make slavery bitter indeed. In the time of Moses, the thought of political liberty has perhaps scarcely awakened in any breast. In the time of the Monarchy all are alike servants of the king.
Long after this the relation between master and servant might serve a sacred poet as the type of a relation which, though that of the most complete dependence, is the most beneficent as well as the holiest of all. “Behold, even as the eyes of servants look unto the hand of their masters, and as the eyes of a maiden unto the hand of her mistress: even so our eyes wait upon the Lord our God until He have mercy upon us.”[2]
In fact, the state of things among the Hebrews in the time of Moses very much resembles that which the poems of Homer disclose to us as existing in heroic Greece; where society is still in course of transition from the family to the nation; where slavery is domestic and on the whole mild, the lot of the slave under
