The Hebrew Lawgiver does not set aside the general constitution of the family, and the general prerogatives of its head. He could not have done so without tearing up the very foundations of society in that age. But he places the life and limb of the slave for the first time under the protection of the law. “And 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.”[1] “And if a man smite the eye of his servant, or the eye of his maid, that it perish; he shall let him go free for his eye’s sake. And if he smite out his manservant’s tooth, or his maidservant’s tooth; he shall let him go free for his tooth’s sake.”[2]
This, no doubt, is one of the things given to the Jews because of the hardness of their hearts; because they had not as yet attained, nor could they as yet have attained, the high social morality of modern and Christian times. The protection afforded by this law to the person of the slave is small in itself; but it is a great step in humanity compared with his totally unprotected condition among the Romans, far more advanced in general civilization as they were, and even with the protection afforded him among the Anglo-Saxons, not only in their heathen state, but after their conversion to Christianity. “In the earliest period,” says a writer on Anglo-Saxon institutions, “the master had the power of life and death over the slave, and with it all the inferior rights which flow from it.
