Slaveholders, and the apologists of slavery, have eagerly seized upon this little passage of Scripture, and held it up as the masters' Magna Charta, by which they were licensed by God himself to commit the greatest outrages upon the defenceless victims of their oppression. But, my friends, was it designed to be so? If our Heavenly Father would protect by law the _eye_ and the _tooth_ of a Hebrew servant, can we for a moment believe that he would abandon that same servant to the brutal rage of a master who would destroy even life itself? Let us then examine this passage with the help of the context. In the 18th and 19th verses we have a law which was made for _freemen_ who strove together. Here we find, that if one man smote another, so that he died not, but only kept his bed from being disabled, and he rose again and walked abroad upon his staff, then _he_ was to be paid for the loss of his time, and all the expenses of his sickness were to be borne by the man who smote him. The freeman's time was _his own_, and therefore he was to be remunerated for the loss of it. But _not_ so with the _servant_, whose time was, as it were, _the money of his master_, because he had already paid for it: If he continued a day or two after being struck, to keep his bed in consequence of any wound received, then his lost time was _not_ to be paid for, because it was _not his own_, but his master's, who had already paid him for it. The loss of his time was the _master's loss_, and _not_ the servant's. This explanation is confirmed by the fact, that the Hebrew word translated continue, means "to stand still;" _i.e._, to be unable to go out about his master's work. Here then we find this stronghold of slavery completely demolished. Instead of its being a license to inflict such chastisement upon a servant as to cause even death itself, it is in fact a law merely to provide that a man should not be required to pay his servant twice over for his time. It is altogether an unfounded assumption on the part of the slaveholder, that this servant _died_ after a day or two; the text does not say so, and I contend that he _got well_ after a day or two, just as the man mentioned in the 19th verse recovered from the effects of the blows he received. The cases are completely parallel, and the first law throws great light on the second. This explanation is far more consonant with the character of God, and were it not that our vision has been so completely darkened by the existence of slavery in our country, we never could so far have dishonored Him as to have supposed that He sanctioned the murder of a servant; although slaveholding legislators might legalize the killing of a slave in _four_ different ways.--(_Stroud's Sketch of Slave Laws_.) But I pass on now to the consideration of how the _female_ Jewish servants were protected by _law_.