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and usages, proclaimed their liabilities; their locality made a specific term unnecessary. But if the Israelites had not only servants, but a multitude of slaves, a word meaning slave, would have been indispensable for every day convenience. Further, the laws of the Mosaic system were so many sentinels on the outposts to warn off foreign practices. The border ground of Canaan, was quarantine ground, enforcing the strictest non-intercourse in usages between the without and the within.
2."Forever." This is quoted to prove that servants were to serve during their life time, and their posterity from generation to generation. 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.
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," &c. "They shall be your possession." 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 unto all the inhabitants thereof." It may be objected that "inhabitants" here means Israelitish inhabitants alone. The command is, "Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof." Besides, in the sixth verse, there is an enumeration of the different classes of the inhabitants, in which servants and Strangers are included; and in all the regulations of the jubilee, and the sabbatical year, the Strangers are included in the precepts, prohibitions, and promises. Again: the year of jubilee was
