# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1863_S37
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Foreword. 37

that his descendants should become the servants of servants among their brothers. Gen. 9:20–27.

In what follows we learn that almost all the well-to-do saints of the old covenant possessed such menservants and maidservants. According to Gen. 12:16, Abraham, the father of all believers, obtained such household servants already in Egypt, and later we hear that he alone had 318 servants born in his house who were able to bear arms, Gen. 14:14; and in the account of the institution of circumcision such servants are also mentioned, who were "bought of any stranger's son that is not of your seed," Gen. 17:12. In what follows we further read that Isaac also (Gen. 26:12–14, 25), Jacob (Gen. 32:6), Job (chap. 1:3; 31:53), Solomon (Eccles. 2:7), and others had menservants and maidservants, and in part in great number.

We read further that in the holy Ten Commandments themselves mention is made of menservants and maidservants, as members of the family over whose labor the head of the household has to command as over that of his own children — namely in the Third Commandment, where it says: "In it thou shalt do no work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, nor thy manservant, nor thy maidservant," etc.; indeed, that in the Tenth Commandment menservants and maidservants are expressly, solemnly confirmed by God Himself as the property of their masters, with a blessing going before and following upon all who keep this commandment too, and with a curse upon all who despise and transgress it, where it says: "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, manservant, maidservant, ox, or anything that is his" — or, as the words of Exod. 20:17 read: "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor's." —

We read further that Moses, by God's inspiration, made not only the civil arrangement that convicted thieves who could not make restitution for what they had stolen were to be sold into slavery as punishment for it, Exod. 22:3, but that it was also permitted to the Israelite generally to buy menservants and maidservants for himself — yet with one distinction. An Israelite sold, say, on account of inability to pay a debt, had (since the Jewish people, in its outward civil constitution too, was meant to represent outwardly the free people of God, and, for the sake of the promise of the Messiah, was not to lose its division into tribes and families until the Promised One appeared) to be set free again in the seventh year of his servitude, so that he might "return again to his family

*) Luther therefore says, in the Large Catechism received into our Book of Concord, on the Ninth and Tenth Commandments: "God has added these two, that one should also hold it for sin and a forbidden thing to covet a neighbor's wife or goods, and in any wise to scheme after them — and especially for this reason, that under the Jewish government menservants and maidservants were not free, as they are now, to serve for wages as long as they wished, but were their master's own, with body and whatsoever they had."