Page:Keil and Delitzsch,Biblical commentary the old testament the pentateuch, trad James Martin, volume 1, 1885.djvu/982

 recover his liberty. This limit is not mentioned here, because the chapter before us simply treats of the influence of the year of jubilee upon the bondage of the Israelites. On this point it is decided, that the year of jubilee was to bring freedom even to the Israelite who had been brought into slavery by his poverty, - of course only to the man who was still in slavery when it commenced and had not served seven full years, provided, that is to say, that he had not renounced his claim to be set free at the end of his seven years' service, according to Exo 21:5-6. We have no right to expect this exception to be expressly mentioned here, because it did not interfere with the idea of the year of jubilee. For whoever voluntarily renounced the claim to be set free, whether because the year of jubilee was still so far off that he did not expect to live to see it, or because he had found a better lot with his master than he could secure for himself in a state of freedom, had thereby made a voluntary renunciation of the liberty which the year of jubilee might have brought to him (see Oehler's art. in Herzog's Cycl., where the different views on this subject are given).

verses 42-43
Because the Israelites were servants of Jehovah, who had redeemed them out of Pharaoh's bondage and adopted them as His people (Exo 19:5; Exo 18:10, etc.), they were not to be sold “a selling of slaves,” i.e., not to be sold into actual slavery, and no one of them was to rule over another with severity (Lev 25:43, cf. Exo 1:13-14). “Through this principle slavery was completely abolished, so far as the people of the theocracy were concerned”' (Oehler).

verses 44-46
As the Israelites could only hold in slavery servants and maid-servants whom they had bought of foreign nations, or foreigners who had settled in the land, these they might leave as an inheritance to their children, and “through them they might work,” i.e., have slave-labour performed, but not through their brethren the children of Israel (Lev 25:46, cf. Lev 25:43).

verses 47-50
The servitude of an Israelite to a settler who had come to the possession of property, or a non-Israelite dwelling in the land, was to be redeemable at any time. If an Israelite had sold himself because of poverty to a foreign settler (תּושׁב גּר, to distinguish the non-Israelitish sojourner from the Israelitish, Lev 25:35), or to a stock of a foreigner, then one of his brethren, or his uncle, or his uncle's son or some one of his kindred, was to redeem him; or