Women at Work in the Deuteronomistic History - International Voices ...

FEMALE SLAVES AND DEPENDENTS | 137
law in 21:2–6, in which conditions for release of indentured male slaves after six
years of service are set. Verse 7 states that the procedure for male indentured
servants at the term of their service will not apply to the המא. She does not
leave unless her owner is unable to meet particular conditions. 54 Since they
present some difficulties, several explanations have been offered on the meaning
of these verses. The major difficulty lies in the meaning of המא both for regular
female slave and for “(slave)-wife” or “concubine.” Because of this ambiguity,
some scholars think that v. 7–11 applied only to certain females, taken as slavewives,
while the general law (v. 1–6) applied to, at least, certain women
unattached to a male. 55
A second difficulty is that the law has “packed” three different situations
into a few verses. It is not easy to disentangle them. And, to add to the difficulty,
one of the three rights the המא is to keep (v. 10) is a hapax legomenon.
That the law understands the woman as unfree may be gathered from its
attachment to the previous law in v. 2–6) and by her description and restraint in
v. 7. Scholars split in two main groups: those who believe she is a wife and the
law “pertains to the sale of a young girl by her father to a purchaser who must
ensure her with a marital status” 56 and those who believe she is a slave bought to
become a concubine. We review briefly most arguments in favor of each
position.
Approach (JSOTSup 174; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1994); David Daube, Biblical Law (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1947), 47–53; Nahum Sarna, “Zedekiah’s Emancipation of Slaves and
the Sabbatical Year,” in Orient and Occident: Essays Presented to Cyrus H. Gordon on the
Occasion of His Sixty-fifth Birthday (ed. H. Hoffner, Jr. AOAT 22; Butzin & Bercker:
Kevelaer/Neukirchener Verlag: Neukirchener-Vluyn, 1973), 145–6 for a list of similar elements in
Jer 34 and Deuteronomy; Yairah Amit, “The Jubilee Law—An Attempt at Instituting Social
Justice,” in Justice and Righteousness (ed. H. Reventlow and Y. Hoffman. JSOTSup 137. Sheffield:
Sheffield Academic Press, 1992), 55; Westbrook, Property, 51–7.
54 Thus Pressler, “Wives and Daughters,” 160; Shalom M. Paul, Studies in the Book of the Covenant
in the Light of Near Eastern Law (VTSup 18. Leiden: Brill, 1970), 56–61. Slightly different,
Sprinkle, 53–54 comments: “I take הראשׁ, normally translated ‘flesh’, as not just ‘food’—any slave
would be fed—but butcher meat (cf. Ps. 78.20, 27; Mic. 3.3 for this sense of ראשׁ, which for the
ancient diet was a delicacy, a ‘choice food’. If ראשׁ is metonymy for ‘choice food’, it followed that
תוסכ (‘covering’) should imply more than mere clothes (which would be provided any slave), but
rather ‘fineries,’ clothes as befits a master’s wife. The third item, the hapax legomenon התנע, is
uncertain in meaning, but ‘cosmetics,’ is an attractive guess.” Sprinkle’s proposal presupposes the
המא as a concubine of a higher rank than a slave who would be provided clothes, food, and oil.
55 Pressler, “Wives and Daughters,” 167, posits the case of widows, divorced women, and other
unprotected women, who would not be the wives mentioned in v. 3 and even less in v. 7. She makes
a strong case based on the fact that all legislations include both male and female bound people on
equal terms.
56 Paul, Studies, 53.