The oppression of the Israelites in Egypt, and the wonders wrought for their deliverance, proclaim the reason for _such_ a law at _such_ a time--when the body politic became a theocracy, and reverently waited for the will of God. They had just been emancipated. The tragedies of their house of bondage were the realities of yesterday, and peopled their memories with thronging horrors. They had just witnessed God's testimony against oppression in the plagues of Egypt--the burning blains on man and beast--the dust quickened into loathsome life, and cleaving in swarms to every living thing--the streets, the palaces, the temples, and every house heaped up with the carcasses of things abhorred--even the kneading troughs and ovens, the secret chambers and the couches, reeking and dissolving with the putrid death--the pestilence walking in darkness at noonday, the devouring locusts and hail mingled with fire, the first-born death-struck, and the waters blood, and, last of all, that dread high hand and stretched out arm, that whelmed the monarch and his hosts, and strewed their corpses in the sea. All this their eyes had looked upon,--earth's proudest city, wasted and thunder-scarred, lying in desolation, and the doom of oppressors traced on her ruins in the hand writing of God, glaring in letters of fire mingled with blood--a blackened monument of wrath to the uttermost against the stealers of men. No wonder that God, in a code of laws prepared for such a people at such a time, should light up on its threshold a blazing beacon to flash terror on slaveholders. "_He that stealeth a man and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall be surely put to death_." Ex. xxii. 16. God's cherubim and flaming sword guarding the entrance to the Mosaic system! See also Deut. xxiv. 7[A]. [Footnote A: Jarchi, the most eminent of the Jewish writers, (if we except perhaps the Egyptian Maimonides,) who wrote seven hundred years ago, in his comment on this stealing and making merchandize of men, gives the meaning thus:--"Using a man against his will, as a servant lawfully purchased; yea though he should use his services ever so little, only to the value of a farthing, or use but his arm to lean on to support him, _if he be forced so to act as a servant_, the person compelling him but once to do so shall die as a thief, whether he has sold him or not."] The Hebrew word, _Gaunab_, here rendered _stealeth_, means the taking from another what _belongs_ to him, whether it be by violence or fraud; the same word is used in the eighth commandment, and prohibits both _robbery_ and theft.