Among the laws pertinent to injury, death, and slavery in Exodus 21 is a five verse passage on an instance where a bovine has attacked someone and killed them. The full text in question is below, detailing Yahweh's moral requirements for how to handle the situation depending on whether the animal has ever attacked previously. If it had killed someone, it was not even to have been left alive to do so again. Of emphasis in this post, though, is the issue of whether the punishment if the owner has not taken the right precautions (by having the animal killed if it has killed or penned if it has only attacked) is different depending on if the dead person is free or a slave. To some people, it might like seem like the punishment is indeed lesser all around. This would only be an assumed concept foreign to both the literal wording of Exodus 21 and what is logically entailed by the concepts behind the words.
Exodus 21:28-32—"'If a bull gores a man or woman to death, the bull is to be stoned to death, and its meat must not be eaten. But the owner of the bull will not be held responsible. If, however, the bull has had the habit of goring and the owner has been warned but has not kept it penned up and it kills a man or woman, the bull is to be stoned to death, and its owner also is to be put to death. However, if payment is demanded, the owner may redeem his life by the payment of whatever is demanded. This law also applies if the bull gores a son or daughter. If the bull gores a male or female slave, the owner must pay thirty shekels of silver to the master of the slave, and the bull is to be stoned to death.'"
With murder, Exodus 21:12-14 and 22-23 make it clear that the penalty is death, in accordance with Genesis 9:6, and so Exodus 21:20-21 not specifying the exact punishment for killing a male or female slave with a rod would not mean that execution is not the penalty. This idea would not follow logically from a lack of specification in verses 20-21 as it is, but since multiple other verses in the same chapter clarify that death is the deserved penalty for murder, and an abusive master or mistress who kills their slave with a rod has committed murder, it simply does not have to say it yet again here. Other parts of the text already do. Why would it be any different for negligently allowing an animal to kill a free person or a slave? Then the matter would hinge on if anything is said directly prescribing a different penalty for the death of a slave through refusal to pen up a dangerous animal, as with how Exodus 21:26-27 does give a different penalty for the injury of a slave by their master/mistress from that of injury to a free person in Exodus 21:23-25 (and one more advantageous to the slave).
First of all, aside from the issue of consistency with Exodus 21:12-14, 20-21, and 22-23 in not prescribing different punishments for the murder of a free man or woman and of a slave, Exodus 21:28-29 speaks of a bull goring a man or a woman, with verse 31 including boys and girls as well. An adult slave is a man or a woman, short of rare cases of intersex status (which does not alter their human rights at all), a person regardless. Verse 28 teaches that if a bull gores someone to death, it must be killed. Verse 29 mentions a bull that has already gored someone—but not killed them, or else it should die—and how it should be penned up. It is only if the bull has gored someone before, whether or not it resulted in human death, and not been respectively killed or penned up by the owner who saw or heard of this so that it kills someone else that the owner is also to be killed. They are permitted, though, to pay a potentially enormous amount of monetary value to escape this capital punishment. When Exodus 21:32 prescribes paying the owner of a male or female slave 30 shekels of silver if a bull gores them to death, this is perfectly consistent with the killing of a servant by a bull that has never previously been aggressive. Whoever the victim is in Exodus 21:28, slave or free, the owner is not to die in this scenario anyway.
Now, nothing about verse 32 requires that the owner of the animal never be killed as long as the victim is a "mere" slave, even if the owner was negligent. In the case of an unconfined domestic/agricultural animal that kills a male or female slave after attacking people in the past (the animal belonging to someone other than the master of the slave), the 30 shekels could be given to the master or mistress as part of the monetary payment to redeem the animal owner's life (Exodus 21:30). Nothing about this conflicts with the literal prescriptions in the preceding verses. It does not matter if the first or second scenario of Exodus 21:28-29 involved the death of a slave instead of a free man or woman. The comment about paying the slave's owner does not have to refer to an exception from what to do if a free person is killed with or without the animal having a violent history.
At worst, Exodus 21:32 clearly still treats the death of a male or female slave due to an attack from a farm animal as the loss of a person, not of a subhuman entity. The animal must be killed no matter what. But differing penalties based upon whether a slave or a free person is killed by someone's animal is not inherent to what the text conveys other than that a monetary payment is always involved in the former instance, to make restitution for the loss of service to another party; no one is said to never deserve capital punishment if the victim of the animal is a slave. Nowhere does the passage present penalties that conflict with the concept of egalitarian equality of human lives concerning livestock and murder by negligence. Slaves, too, are humans with all the rights thereof, including the right to not be treated as a disposable resource by having dangerous conditions dismissed. The payment of 30 shekels of silver to the master of the dead slave is entirely consistent with the exact instructions if a bull spontaneously kills someone or does so after showing previous aggression because it was never confined.
No comments:
Post a Comment