Your assignment for this week was to
look at Exodus 21:20-21, and then 26-27 in the same chapter, so that we can
finish off the subject of battery. Then
look at Leviticus 25:42-46.
I said that Mishnah had defined 5 types
of damages a batterer had to pay and I only described 4. The fifth one is loss of value. That means two things one of which I will discuss
later.
As of right now, it means that somebody
who suffers an injury out of the group listed in Exodus 21:24-25, might not be
able to work as well as before the injury.
That means his value as a bondsman drops. First he gets poor because he can’t earn as
much as before the injury. Then he has
to take out a bond on himself because he can’t support his family – but he
can’t get as much money on the bond as he could have before he sustained the
injury. Finally, he can’t work as well
as he used to, so there’s a chance that when the bondholder has to release him,
the bond won’t be fully paid up.
So when the judges in a case of battery
assess damages, they take into account this drop in value as a bondsman and
they add that to the other damages assessed.
The bondholder is liable for battery
for all five classes of damages. The bondsman
is allowed to pay off the bond with the money award. What’s more, even if the award wasn’t enough
to pay off the whole bond, the bondholder who puts his bondsman in the hospital
doesn’t get to hang onto him when the time on the bond expires. That’s what it means by “it’s his
money.” The bondholder loses money if he
puts the bondsman in the hospital so he can’t work, and if the bond expires
without being paid off, the bondholder can’t hold onto it just because the
bondsman was in the hospital due to battery.
And the bondholder can be tried for
murder if the bondsman dies.
Now look at the conflict in verses 26
and 27 compared with verses 24 and 25:
If you beat your bondsman or bondswoman and put out the eye or tooth,
for the eye the person goes out free and for the tooth, you pay
compensation. That seems to be a
conflict and we have to find a verse to resolve it.
The resolution is Leviticus
25:42-46. These verses describe a set of
bondsmen for whom the situation is different.
They have to be freed, not just paid damages, if the bondholder puts out
an eye; and the bondholder owes damages for other injuries, like striking out a
tooth.
You remember from the story of Noach
that his youngest son Cham was the father of Canaan, and Gd condemned Canaan to
be slaves. At least, that’s the urban
legend.
Jewish law says that these people could
take out bonds on themselves that did not have to be cancelled at a given date,
but they had to be treated right. They
might be assigned menial labor, and they might be bequeathed to the purchaser’s
descendants, but he didn’t have rights of life and death over them. The money for striking out a tooth absolutely
belonged to the Canaanite slave, and he could pay it back toward the bond. So a Canaanite slave could buy his freedom if
the bondholder committed battery in an extreme degree or more than once.
Now we have destroyed the urban legend
that the Bible justifies the slavery imposed on Africans kidnapped and brought
to the U.S. as labor.
Next week we’re going to continue with
the bonding situation and unload another urban legend about Jewish law. Read Exodus 21:7-11.
© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved
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