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THE FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW Thou shalt not deliver unto his master the servant which is escaped from his master unto thee: He shall dwell with thee, even among you, in that place which he shall choose in one of thy gates, where it liketh him best: thou shalt not oppress him (Deut. 23:15-16).
The theocentric principle that undergirded this law is the principle of God's sanctuary. A sanctuary is a place formally marked by boundaries for the worship of God. This does not mean that everyone who enters a sanctuary is there to worship God. It does mean that everyone inside its boundaries has unique access to God.
This law seems to be contrary to the Mosaic law's defense of private property in slaves. Foreign slaves in Israel were the permanent possession of their Israelite owners, generation after generation (Lev. 25:44-46). Furthermore, Israelite bondservants were not free to come and go as they pleased. A debtor who had forfeited payment on a zero-interest charitable loan had to serve his creditor until the next year of release -- up to six years (Ex. 21:2). If an Israelite had been sold into bondage to another Israelite in order to repay a non-charitable loan, he had to serve until the next jubilee -- up to 49 years (Lev. 25:39-40). If an Israelite sold himself into bondservice to a resident alien, he had to serve until the next jubilee or until one of his relatives bought him out of servitude (Lev. 25:47-52). In short, the Mosaic law upheld the right of a foreigner to retain ownership of an Israelite. This was a strong defense of private property. Contrary to Rushdoony, there was nothing even remotely voluntary about remaining in temporary bondservice, let alone permanent slavery.(1) This is why it took an act of extreme violence by a master to authorize a civil court to award a slave his freedom, e.g., poking out an eye or knocking out a tooth (Ex. 21:26-27).
This was not a land law. If the jubilee land law authorizing foreign servitude could not be invoked by a foreign slave owner to get back his slave, surely a foreigner cannot invoke it today, after Christ has annulled the jubilee law (Luke 4:17-21), including the law authorizing inter-generational slavery (Lev. 25:44-46).
Slaves from Abroad The key words that unlock the meaning of this passage are among and gates. The escaped slave described in this passage had come to dwell among them. The words "with thee" were added by the translators. The Hebrew word for among immediately follows dwell. The Hebrew word could also be translated within, meaning within a jurisdiction. The escaped slave also had the right to choose where he would live. He could choose one gate from many gates, meaning any city.
To understand this law better, we must first consider the fact that Mosaic civil law did not compel anyone to offer positive sanctions.(2) Rather, it imposed negative sanctions for evil acts. It should be the ideal for every system of civil law to remove all positive sanctions by the State and impose only those negative sanctions authorized by biblical law. The State is to impose negative sanctions only: punishing public evil. It is not a wealth-creator; it is a wealth-redistributer. It is not safe to entrust to the State the power of making one man rich at the expense of another. It is also not moral.
Second, we should recognize that slaves do not "dwell among" an individual. The language indicates that this law was addressed to a corporate group, the nation. It was a civil law. It did not compel any Israelite to grant a positive sanction to the escaped slave. What it did was to prohibit Israel's civil authorities from imposing a specific negative sanction on him, namely, returning him to his owner or forbidding him the right to take up residence in a city. The locus of jurisdiction was the nation, from which the slave could choose any city as his place of residence. This indicates that he had not previously been a resident of Israel. He was an escapee from servitude in a foreign household in a foreign nation.
The key covenantal issue here is hierarchy. This former slave had been in bondage to a foreign master, who in turn was in bondage to a foreign god. The slave had sought deliverance from his former master. He had decided to come to Israel because it was the nation in which former slaves could be free men. Men were free in Israel because they were not in bondage to idols. This is the heart of the Bible's message: deliverance from evil. This deliverance begins with deliverance from idolatry. In the Old Covenant, idolatry was almost universal outside of Israel.(3) There was little likelihood that this slave would bring along an idol from the household of his former master. Such an idol would have been the mark of his former servitude. In any case, household or civic idols in the ancient Near East were exclusively local gods. The fugitive slave's presence inside the boundaries of Israel testified to their limited jurisdiction.
My interpretation of this law as applying to foreign slaves has ancient precedents. The Talmud declares this fugitive to be a non-Jewish slave of a Jewish master living outside the land (Gittin 45a). There is no exegetical evidence for identifying the owner as a Hebrew, but the rabbis did identify the fugitive as having immigrated into Israel. Nachmanides argued that this slave had been in bondage to a foreigner. The key issue was idolatry, he said. "The reason for this commandment is that with us he will worship G-d and it is not proper that we return him to his master to worship idols."(4) This statement is incorrect with respect to worshipping God, for worship was not required of any foreigner residing in Israel. He was required only to obey God's civil laws, which did not include formal worship. But it is true that the slave had been delivered from the idolatrous rituals of his former household, in which a slave would probably have been compelled to participate.
Nachmanides also argued that the slave probably had fled into the camp of the Israelites during an offensive miliary campaign by Israel against a foreign city.(5) The previous section of Deuteronomy sets forth laws governing foreign campaigns (vv. 9-14). This is a plausible argument. A foreign slave would have had a much greater opportunity to flee from a foreign master during a defensive war against Israel. But this law stands on its own, irrespective of war. Any slave who could get to Israel -- the Promised Land -- could escape bondage. This fact would have become well known among slaves in the ancient Near East, as word of this sanctuary spread from slave to slave. Israel would have attracted other men's slaves.
Israel honored private property. Property is an extension of the kingdom of God in history. Private property is an owner's legal immunity from fraud and violence, both private and pubic, which is granted by God and is supposed to be enforced by the State. God's authority to grant such a legal immunity is based on His original ownership of the creation and His delegation of stewardship tasks to individuals. Every individual is responsible to God for the management of whatever it is that God has put under his authority, as Jesus' parable of the three stewards indicates (Matt. 25:14-30) -- the parable that immediately precedes His description of the final judgment: sheep and goats. In short, private property is legally grounded in the doctrine of God's absolute sovereignty.
The foreign slave master did not acknowledge God's authority. Therefore, his rights of property were inferior to the fugitive slave's right to asylum in Israel. The Promised Land was to be a place of refuge, a sanctuary -- a set-apart place, i.e., a holy place. Immigrant fugitive slaves were not compelled to worship God, but they did have to obey God's civil laws. They had to honor God to this extent. Foreign gods could no longer claim jurisdiction over these ex-slaves. The power of foreign gods was broken to this extent.
The former slave master was disinherited by this law. His living inheritance had fled to a sanctuary. The legal defense of his inheritance under the authority of an idol was sacrificed to the principle of defending Israel's boundaries and its sanctuary status. The biblical covenantal principles of God's sovereignty, His hierarchical authority, and Israel's boundaries were superior to pagan covenantal principles: local god or gods, an alternative hierarchy, and local jurisdiction.
In effect, the Mosaic law acknowledged the right of a foreign master to proclaim his local god's local authority. If he chose to live under such tyranny, he was entitled to do so. But this idolatrous tyranny would not extend its authority across Israel's borders. This case law mandated that Israel's civil government not return immigrant slaves to their foreign masters. It announced to foreign masters: "You want to worship a local god? Very well, have your own way. Your god's jurisdiction does not extend across Israel's boundaries. Your property rights in people's lives do not extend across these boundaries."
This means that a foreign slave who had been purchased by an Israelite in a foreign nation would henceforth live inside a sanctuary established by God: a covenant-keeping household in a covenant-keeping nation. He could hear God's word there. He would be circumcised (Gen. 17:2). He would attend Passover with the family. Through lawful purchase, he had been separated from the idolatry of his nation. Legally, the head of his new household had become his kinsman redeemer.(6) Whether his new household was located in a foreign nation or in Israel, he was the property of his owner. Prior to the annulment of the law of permanent slavery by Jesus Christ's fulfillment of the jubilee law (Luke 4:18-20),(7) the principle of the covenant-keeping household as a foreign slave's sanctuary superseded the principle of the Israelite city as the foreign slave's sanctuary.(8)
Oppression The Mosaic law repeatedly mentions three classes of people who deserved special consideration as deserving of justice: widows, orphans, and strangers. The immigrant fugitive slave was in a vulnerable position -- indeed, the most vulnerable position in Israel. He could not return home without becoming enslaved again. Worse; he was a man who had run away. He would be subject to harsh penalties. Masters would have made him an example to other would-be fugitive slaves. The fugitive slave in Israel had no local family, no access to landed inheritance, no citizenship, and no place to return. He had been at the bottom of the social ladder in his home country. Except for the foreign slave permanently owned by an Israelite family, he was at the bottom of the social scale in Israel. But, economically speaking, he was potentially in worse shape than the permanent slave, who was part of an Israelite household. He had no economic safety net.
What did it mean to oppress a person? Oppression as defined by the Bible is a judicial act. It involves using civil law to steal from or otherwise restrict an honest person. Oppression is a misuse of the civil law. There is no economic definition available to civil judges to identify oppression. There is only a judicial standard.(9) The biblical principle of civil justice is expressed in Exodus 12:49: "One law shall be to him that is homeborn, and unto the stranger that sojourneth among you." The rule of law is at the heart of civil justice. To use the civil law to shape the outcome of another person's efforts is a form of oppression. When the State structures economic results by applying the law to one group in a way not applied to all men, someone is being oppressed.
The judicial defenselessness of the immigrant ex-slave was not supposed to become an opportunity for oppression. He was not to be targeted as a likely candidate for theft through judicial manipulation. His property rights were to be upheld in Israel, unlike his former master's property rights. His former master had gained authority over him by means of another god's laws. The God of Israel had become his liberator. Liberation in Israel was a symbol of liberation by God. It meant liberation from corrupt civil laws. The rule of God's law gave him his liberty. It also warned him regarding the final judgment: all men are under the same law and sanctions. All men need the mercy of God as the judicial basis of their liberation from sin and its eternal consequences: negative sanctions.
Conclusion Economics is subordinate to biblically revealed religion. So is everything else. Private property is not an absolute principle. Neither is anything else. No arrangement or institution is absolute in history. Only the written word of God possesses unchangeable, comprehensive authority in history.(10) No institution can legitimately claim total allegiance. Any institution that does so will fail. The more secular it is, the sooner it will fail. This is why the Communist Party failed, despite its extraordinary international expansion under Lenin and Stalin. It claimed total allegiance.(11) It could not enforce this. One by one, the most eloquent of Communism's disaffected former disciples recognized it as the god that had failed, decades before it visibly failed.(12)
Is this case law still in force? Yes. Christian societies should be sanctuary societies, where liberty is available to all residents: liberty under biblical law. The sanctuary is bounded; these boundaries must be defended by the sword. This means that Christian societies must be defended by confessionally Christian civil governments. In short, biblical sanctuary means Trinitarian theocracy. There can be no permanent sanctuary State in history apart from Christian theocracy,(13) just as there is no sanctuary in eternity apart from subordination to the King of kings.
No magistrate in a Christian nation should ever send an immigrant fugitive slave back to his master. His master may be the State. Modern nations do not admit to being slave societies, even when they are. The reality of slavery, whatever it is called, should be acknowledged by the civil authorities in free societies. Immigration laws should offer sanctuary to all those who are suffering from the judicial equivalent of slavery.
The covenantal problem here is that open borders into a confessionally pluralistic nation offer ripe fruit to dedicated disciples of non-pluralistic foreign religions. They bring their gods with them. These gods are not local gods; they make universal claims, just as the God of the Bible does. Their disciples want to extend the authority of their non-pluralistic religions. Islam is the obvious example in the late twentieth century. When citizenship is not grounded in a public confession of faith in the God of the Bible, immigrants can work to change the pluralistic confession of the nation after they become naturalized citizens. The religion of pluralism offers most of these immigrants equal access to the public square, once they become citizens. The result is the weakening of Christian faith in the public square and the undermining of the remnants of Christian civilization. In secular democratic nations, the war for the national confession will be fought in the nation's bedrooms. Apart from a massive revival, comparative birth rates will determine the future national confession. In Germany and France, Islam is winning this demographic war.
This is not to deny the legitimacy of open borders. Open borders were basic to Mosaic Israel. If fugitive slaves were welcomed in Israel, how much more were free men welcomed! If people who were lowest on the social scale outside the land had legal access to residency inside the land, how much more did capital-owning immigrants have access! This case law offers additional evidence that Israel had an open doors immigration policy. People who were willing to submit to the civil laws of Israel's God were offered freedom inside the holy nation's boundaries. Israel was a true sanctuary.(14)
The deciding civil issue was confession of faith. Citizenship was open only to circumcised men and their wives who confessed faith in the God of Israel and who participated in Passover. Israel was not pluralistic. Long-term residence did not mean the right to vote. It meant only the right to participate without discrimination in Israel's economy. It meant justice; it did not mean judgeship.
Footnotes:
1. He writes: "Thus, the only kind of slavery permitted is voluntary slavery, as Deuteronomy 23:15, 16 makes very clear." R. J. Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law (Nutley, New Jersey: Craig Press, 1973), p. 286.
2. Restitution payments by the convicted criminal are the restoration of what is owed to the victim. The State coercively redistributes wealth back to the lawful owner. The legal owner was the victim of a crime. Under biblical law, no one has a legal claim on another person's wealth merely because the other person is richer.
3. The one major exception was Greek rationalism, a millennium after this law was declared. But Greek rationalism was the religion of very few classical Greeks, as Socrates' execution indicates.
4. Nachmanides, Commentary on the Torah, 5 vols. (New York: Shiloh, [1267?] 1976), V, p. 288.
5. Idem.
6. This pointed forward to Jesus Christ's purchase of the gentiles through His death on Calvary. Covenanted gentiles now live in His household, not merely as servants but as adopted sons. Christ has become their kinsman redeemer.
7. Gary North, Tools of Dominion: The Case Laws of Exodus (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), pp. 144-47; North, Leviticus: An Economic Commentary (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), ch. 31.
8. In the New Covenant, the principle of the covenanted Trinitarian nation as a sanctuary for oppressed foreign slaves is still in effect. This includes the escaped slaves of messianic States.
9. North, Tools of Dominion, pp. 679-80, 785.
10. "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away" (Matt. 24:35).
11. Benjamin Gitlow, The Whole of Their Lives (New York: Scribner's, 1948).
12. Richard Crossman (ed.), The God That Failed (New York: Bantam, [1950] 1959).
13. The United States was the most open sanctuary society in history. It was also socially Protestant throughout most of its history. California began to erect immigration barriers against the Chinese toward the end of the nineteenth century, when the Darwinian Progressive movement was beginning to gain political strength. The 1924 national immigration law was passed in the middle of the humanistic Roaring Twenties.
14. In 1850, the government of the United States passed a fugitive slave law. This law mandated that officers of the United States government extradite fleeing slaves to southern states. These officers were empowered to appoint local commissioners to assist them. These commissioners in turn were empowered to compel private citizens to join a posse comitatus to chase down fugitive slaves. No jury trials on the alleged slave's judicial status were allowed in North; none was authorized in the South, either. The accused was not allowed to present testimony in the North regarding his free status. A fine of $1,000 -- a huge sum in 1850 -- was imposed on anyone who aided a slave in escaping. "The Compromise of 1850," in The Annals of America, 18 vols. (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1968), VIII, pp. 55-57. In short, the government of the United States compelled residents in the North to cooperate with slave owners in the South who had purchased kidnapped Africans from slave traders (mainly Northerners). The fugitive slave law of 1850 forced Northern moralists to break the law and help those who broke it. The enforcement of this law over the next decade steadily separated the United States into two nations: a sanctuary nation and a slave nation. The politicians found no way to reconcile these two nations. This law created the mentality of "two nations in one," which in turn led to the Civil War (1861-65).
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