Among the Hebrews, also, a man could voluntarily sell himself into slavery; thus the debtor paid his debts with his own body, or with that of his wife or child. This custom was almost universal in early antiquity, as well as among the Romans and the barbarous Germans. But the Mosaic law appointed a regular epoch for the emancipation of all slaves, and therefore of debtors among the rest; and the operation of this law it was which made hereditary slavery of such comparatively rare occurrence. Slaves, therefore, even when bought from the Gentiles, and therefore considered _unclean_ by the Hebrews, or when prisoners taken in war, were not cut off from the general law of protection. They enjoyed human rights, and some of the civil privileges of the Jewish born. No absolute distinctions of men can be traced in the Mosaic law without perverting its whole moral tendency. When a slave received any severe wound from his master, he was from thence declared free, and the Jewish law punishes with death the sale of a freeman into slavery--(a fact, by the way, in striking contrast with the great social movement of the militant pro-slavery party, whose policy it is to enslave both emancipated and free-born). A slave concubine could not be sold to strangers--still less her children by her master. But if he wished to be rid of her, the master was obliged to find her a husband or another master among his relatives or friends. In the old colonial times in America, the law inflicted a penalty on _white servants and bondsmen_ for mixing with black chattels--but what penalty threatened the _white masters_ for the same offence? The fact is, the slave-breeders of the slave regions continually invoke the Bible to justify their doings, and continually violate Scriptural regulations.