slave – Sim Lev

There is a verse in the Torah so radical that one of my teachers did not believe me it was even in there.

I was working on a project as a rabbinical student and I brought a text that cited this verse.

“That can’t be in the Torah,” my teacher said. She was a serious scholar, with not only rabbinic ordination but also a PhD in rabbinics and a host of published articles.

“No ancient society would allow a law like that. The entire economy would collapse.”

I thought, perhaps I had misread it. It was a bold claim. So I went back to look.

But there it was, nestled among a litany of miscellaneous commandments in Deuteronomy. On one side of this law was the instruction to make sure soldiers did not have nocturnal emissions, and on the other side was the requirement not to bring money gained from prostitution as a Temple offering.

There it was, a law completely at odds with ancient society, which threatened to collapse an entire economy if enforced:

Do not hand over a slave to his master who is taking refuge with you from his master. He will dwell with you in your neighbourhood in the place he chooses, in one of your gates that is good for him. Do not oppress him.

– Deuteronomy 23:16-17

Let us start by acknowledging why this law is so radical. Ancient agrarian states were built on slavery. Prisoners of war, pillaged people, indentured servants and trafficked humans did back-breaking work to make the farms run. Their unpaid labour was what made the brutal machinations of early states even possible.

Here we have a rule: do not hand over any slave to their master. The Torah is biased, and it’s not on the side of the owners!

More than this, if you get a runaway, your duty is to look after them. You have to give them accommodation. You have to give it in a place where the refugee himself feels is good for him, within the gates of one of your towns.

This is bold.

But still, it may be I had misunderstood. We already know from many other Torah sources that Israelites cannot be held as slaves. They might be debt labourers and bondsmen, but if somebody is part of the Israelite family, they can never be subjected to lifelong slavery.

So, perhaps, this law is just talking about what to do if an Israelite runs away. In such a case, they might have been the slave of another Israelite, in which case they were being held against the law. Of course you would then give the slave refuge.

Or they might have been an Israelite running away from another country, like an Edomite who had captured them in war. Well, then, they have come back to their people and need to be cared for.

So, have I mistranslated? Is this actually about Israelite slaves?

I’d have to look at earlier translations to check what it means.

The earliest translation of the Torah is Targum Onkelos, a 2nd Century rendition of Scripture into the vernacular Aramaic.

This translation gives details that clarify things. In this case, it adds an adjective to the Torah’s word for slave. עממין – from the foreign nations. A non-Israelite. The translation is unambiguous: we are talking specifically about foreigners.

This is even more radical. It’s saying we insist on looking after complete outsiders. They have no connection to us.

They may even, then, be running away from Israelite masters. The Torah is saying that, if a slave runs away from their master, even though the slave is definitely not one of us, and the master might actually be one of us, we are on the side of the slaves.

About a century after this translation, the rabbis in the school of Rabbi Akiva wrote a commentary on the Book of Deuteronomy to expound its meaning. The book is called Sifre Devarim, and it takes all the legal verses from these books and adds oral traditions about how to interpret the laws.

Sifre’s explanation of this verse gives details on how you are supposed to treat a runaway slave when they come to you. Not only do you have to welcome them into your towns, say the rabbis, you also have to make it possible for them to make a living. They have to live with you, and not on the borders of the town.

It adds that the commandment not to oppress the runaway extends even towards words. Even the language you use must be kind. And it insists: you have to make them feel like the place they have come to is better than the one they left.

This is even bolder than where we began. It’s an official open borders policy to every runaway, with the requirement that they not only get refuge but actually get a livelihood and integration in the place where they move to.

It is not only uneconomical, it goes against all the foundations of the ancient economy.

You cannot even appeal to other economic reasons. There’s no organised mass of runaway slaves that the law-givers need to accommodate. There’s no suggestion that there was great pressure from the peasantry to be kind to foreigners.

It is a law entirely based on compassion.

What makes this law so radical is that it seems to be motivated entirely by altruism. That is why my teacher was so incredulous about the law being in the Torah at all.

And yet, isn’t that why we turn to the Torah to begin with? Not for cold economics, but to know the right way to live. We want a moral guide for how we should treat people.

Rabbi Julia Neuberger, who serves as a crossbencher in the House of Lords, has been a consistent voice for refugees, as each successive government has threatened hostility and sanctions.

As a lawmaker and a rabbi, she has to balance the high moral demands of our religion with the practicalities of government.

In all her addresses, she emphasises the need for compassion. She treats refugees as a litmus test for the compassion of a society, because their marginal status tells us how our country is likely to treat everyone else.

Baroness Neuberger advocates firmly for the rights of refugees.

Perhaps that is why the Torah introduces this seemingly radical rule. It wants to set a culture where the most vulnerable people get the best possible treatment, so that the whole of society will be based on kindness.

The foundation of Torah law is about caring for the poor, the orphan, and the widow. This most intense case – a complete outsider running away from slavery – is the Torah’s own test for its moral system.

It is a test every society faces. How people treat refugees shows what they think of human beings.

For the past few weeks, protesters have been gathering outside hotels, demanding refugees be sent back. The main political parties have entered into a race to the bottom for how unwelcome they would make refugees.

Their rhetoric and laws may turn out to be a threat to us all. They may undermine the very basis of a compassionate society.

Let us consider what would happen if Britain implemented Torah laws in its approach to refugees.

What would happen if this country made an active decision to welcome refugees and refuse to send them back? To deliberately integrate them and make sure they were firmly part of our towns? To set them up so that they could make a livelihood and refuse any insult to them?

Would this collapse our economy, or would it make this place better for everyone?

And, if we had to choose, why would we not choose to follow the Torah?

Shabbat shalom.

We are days away from Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks, when we celebrate having received the Torah. At this festival, we affirm we have received God’s word and that it is unfailing.

This is what we think we know: these words are not only God’s.

They have human origins, and they were written over many centuries. The Torah is not a single, unaltered revelation. It is a book with a history.

What happened at Mount Sinai matters immensely. It is the foundation of our faith. It is the basis not only of Judaism but of every monotheism that followed it.

The story has been told so many times. Hordes of Hebrews fled from Egypt, gathered around the foot of a desert peak, and heard the voice of the One True God.

What they experienced, they told to their children, and they to theirs, until – after generations – the vision was written down into a collection of stories and laws we call the Torah.

We have to know what really happened at Sinai; so much hinges on this indecipherable point of history.

We have to believe in the real world, where history is something made by human beings, who work, and struggle over resources, and build societies.

We have to believe in the God of Judaism, who is revealed through history.

We must synthesise the two. We cannot split the material and the spiritual. We need to know what the material reality was that lay underneath this spiritual truth. We need to know what happened at Sinai.

We cannot truly know, but we have to try and work it out. A group of human beings felt so inspired that they wrote down ten commandments and passed them on for thousands of generations. Why?

A group of human beings, who surely worked and slept and ate and drank and dreamed, proclaimed that they had seen God.

Something marvellous must have happened at that time. Something awe inspiring – to give us this treasury of ancient wisdom. Who committed these words to paper, what happened to them, and what made these commandments feel so important to them?

What really happened at Mount Sinai? The biblical historian pores over our texts, strips them back, digs out inconsistencies, looks for parallels in ancient cultures, and analyses the language in which the stories are told. The biblical historian discards impossibilities, looks for likelihoods, and reconstructs the best possible version of events.

We cannot know for certain, but we can do our best to do the same – to discard, seek and reconstruct. And, when we do, the truth of/ Mount Sinai that we are left with is far more radical than we might imagine.

For the historian, Mount Sinai may not have been Mount Sinai at all. It may be, as the Samaritans claim, Mount Gerizim, near Nablus, since that is also one of the mountains the Torah names as a site of revelation. It may have been Mount Pisgah or Mount Nebo, on the eastern side of the Jordan River, since our Torah names those locations too.

We do not know at which mountain the important revelation happened. But there was a mountain.

This is what we think we know: there was a mountain.

Some people went there. They may not have been Jews, since that word did not exist yet. They may not even have been Israelites, since the story teaches that they only became Israelites through the process of what happened at that mountain.

They were, says the Torah, a mixed multitude. They were drawn from all the nations of the Ancient Near East: from Ethiopia and Yemen; through Egypt and Sudan; to Lebanon and Syria.

They were, by their own self-description, border-crossing nomads. They had no land or title. There are no records to suggest they owned any weapons, let alone that they had military strength.

If we are to trust how they wrote about themselves, they were menial workers. Water drawers; grain carriers; tenant farmers; shepherds. They had been slaves. They were a ragtag of the ancient world’s lowest classes.

We do not know who these people were. But they were poor and transient.

This is what we think we know:
the poorest people of many ethnicities came together at a mountain.

We are not sure when it happened. It may have been any time from the 15th Century BCE. The latest it could have been is the 5th Century BCE, when the Torah was edited into its final form. That is a difference of nearly a thousand years.

We do not know what brought them to that mountain. We cannot prove that the exodus took place exactly as it was described in the Torah.

But we do know that, in the 12th Century BCE, there was a massive societal collapse in all the nations of the Mediterranean basin. In the broad period when our Torah tells us that our ancestors received the Ten Commandments, the Egyptian empire was crumbling.

We also know this. When Egypt was collapsing in the late Bronze Age, a Pharaoh wrote a stele, complaining of slave uprisings by a group of nomads on the fringes of his empire. He calls those people Habiru. The biblical historian notes the linguistic similarity between these people and the Hebrews.

This is what we think we know: the poorest people of many ethnicities rebelled together against a decaying empire some time around the late Bronze Age.
They met at a mountain.

The stories they tell of their experiences at that mountain are fantastical. Fire descended from heaven. Thunder crashed and lightning roared. Thick smoke descended over the peak. The earth trembled violently. The Creator of Heaven and Earth became manifest before them.

How can we know if any of this happened? Nobody else could have testified to what they saw. There are no contemporary meteorological records. There are only two possibilities: either the authors of our Torah really believed that was what they experienced, or they made it up.

If they made it up, so many others were convinced that they had been part of that experience at the mountain, that they faithfully transmitted the story for hundreds of years to their children and grandchildren. Which is more likely: that these people lied, or that they genuinely believed they had a transcendent experience?

This is what we think we know: the poorest people of many ethnicities rebelled together against a decaying empire some time around the late Bronze Age.
At a mountain, they had an experience so profound that they felt as if they saw God manifest, and it changed their lives and the lives of their descendants forever.

The God they thought they heard told them: “Although the whole earth is Mine, you will be for Me a dominion of priests and a holy nation.”

The poorest people in the world affirmed belief in a God who knew no borders and rejected all hierarchies. Every one of these ancient landless waifs would be holy.

According to our Torah, those people entered into a covenant.

Until this point in history, contracts of these kind were predominantly made between empires and vassal states. They took the form: “you will pay me tribute, and I will be your landlord.”

This was a covenant of a new kind. It said:
“you will do justly by one another, and I will be your God.”

They ratified this new agreement and remade what a covenant was. They swore an oath, committing themselves to an entirely new society. They bound themselves to a Law that knew no Sovereign save for a universal God.

They promised that their society would have no more killing; no more trafficking in human beings; no more greed. They declared fealty to each other, to their God; and to their sacred days of rest.

Take our texts. Strip them back. Dig out inconsistencies. Look for parallels in ancient cultures. Pay close attention to language. Discard impossibilities.

From what remains, you can reconstruct the best possible version of events.

This is where we have arrived.
This is what we think we know.

Thousands of years ago, poor people from many ethnicities got together in common rebellion against a decaying empire. They had an experience so profound that they felt as if they saw God manifest.
At a mountain, they made a covenant to create a society based on dignity.

Many hands have since re-written and interpreted that event – but, deep at its core, buried under years of transmission and analysis, was one moment.

This, is what we think we know:

Somewhere in history, there was a slave rebellion by a mountain.

And it was marvellous.

Originally published in Vashti.

Tag: slave

What happened at Mount Sinai?