By GARY ALLEY
April 2024
Since the Hamas invasion of Israel on October 7th, 2023, the eyes of the world have become even more focused on this conflict-ridden region. Now, half a year later, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) continue on in a very complicated war of multiple fronts which also includes the battle for global perception. Initially, 1,400 innocent people were estimated to have been murdered that day, but now, after extensive forensic work of the butchered and burnt bodies, the current official count stands at 1,139 dead—including 695 Israeli civilians, 373 Israeli security forces and 71 foreigners. Besides the thousands that suffered physical and emotional injuries, there were numerous reports of rape, torture, and sexual assault on October 7th.
Hamas forces also kidnapped 253 people from Israel on October 7th, including children, women, and the elderly. From those, 112 have been returned alive to Israel, with the vast majority of them being exchanged at the end of November 2023. Notably, 80 Israeli captives were exchanged then for 240 Palestinian prisoners at a three to one ratio.[1]
Today, it is feared that less than 100 hostages remain alive in Gaza. Negotiations to release those remaining captives have been hindered by Hamas’ excessive demands.
Eighteen years ago, Israel brokered a shocking deal with Hamas to free Gilad Shalit, a lone Israeli soldier who had been kidnapped from Israel in 2006. Shalit was held captive in Gaza for over 5 years before being exchanged for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners in 2011. Of those released, 315 Palestinians had been sentenced as terrorists to life in prison for the murder of 569 Israelis. One of these convicted criminals freed in that Gilad Shalit exchange was Yahya Sinwar—the now infamous Gazan leader of Hamas currently hiding among the Israeli hostages deep under the Gazan ground.
This Israeli practice of not leaving a fellow citizen behind—even at such an exorbitant price like the Gilad Shalit deal of a 1000 to 1—is a long-respected Jewish tradition. The famous medieval rabbi Maimonides summed this up over a 800 years ago when he wrote:
“There is no mitzvah (biblical commandment) so great as redeeming captives…
“Redeeming captives takes precedence over feeding the poor and clothing them, since the captive is included among the hungry, thirsty, and naked, in danger of losing their lives. And one who turns his eyes away from redeeming [the captives] transgresses [the commandments] ‘do not harden your heart or shut your hand’, and ‘do not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor’,... and it nullifies the commandment:…’You shall love your neighbor as yourself’…””
Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Matanot Aniyim 8:10
Sign reads: “Freeing the Captives: A Great Commandment”
Family members of Israeli hostages marching in Jerusalem during Purim.
In the ancient world of the Bible, we find Ancient Near Eastern written records attesting to prisoners of war as the first slaves.[2] The world’s earliest known texts come from Sumer, a 6,000 year-old civilization located in today’s Iraq, where the idiom for slave was “male of a foreign country,” and “female of a foreign country.”[3] And so the Ancient Near Eastern slave industry was first populated with foreign people captured in war.
For example, Abram’s nephew Lot and his family were taken as prisoners of war during the “War of Nine Kings” in Genesis 14 when their home city, Sodom, was sacked. In that story, Abram and his army pursued Lot’s captors, ultimately defeating them and freeing Abram’s family, otherwise they most likely would have become slaves.
Like Abram’s story, David also had to chase and defeat an army that had captured and enslaved his family.[4] There are many accounts in the Bible which record[5] and even regulate[6] prisoners of war taken as slaves.
Ransoming or redeeming captives with money was a common practice where rates were set based on a prisoner’s value and status. In an ancient war where the city state of Carchemish had defeated the city of Ugarit, many Ugaritic prisoners were taken. The king of Ugarit wrote to the king of Carchemish requesting the release of one of the Ugaritic captives by offering one hundred shekels as a ransom. But since this Ugaritic captive was of high rank, the king of Carchemish countered by demanding more money for his release.[7]
So too, ransoming a captive by money or exchange became an enduring biblical metaphor for God’s redemption of Israel from their Egyptian slavery.[8]
…it was because the Lord loved you
and kept the oath he swore to your ancestors
that he brought you out with a mighty hand
and ransomed you from the land of slavery,
from the power of Pharaoh king of Egypt. Deut 7:8
Later, the prophets continued this redemption metaphor by portraying the citizens of Jerusalem as joyful hostages having been freed from their Babylonian captivity.[9]
But only the redeemed will walk there,
and those the Lord has ransomed will return.
They will enter Zion with singing;
everlasting joy will crown their heads.
Gladness and joy will overtake them,
and sorrow and sighing will flee away. Isa 35:9-10
It is believed that after the regional slave market was started with these foreign prisoners of war, the demand for slave labor grew which then led to enslaving local citizens. In fact, over time, most slaves in the Ancient Near Eastern society came to be native-born and not foreign prisoners of war.
The first group of native-born slaves would have been children sold by their parents. These children would have come from poor families who were likely starving during times of famine, and without food, their children would have died.
And if the parents did not improve their own subsistence, they, too, would have then sold themselves into slavery in order to guarantee their own survival. The prophet Amos condemned Israel for this cheapening of human life.
This is what the Lord says:
“For three sins of Israel,
even for four, I will not relent.
They sell the innocent for silver,
and the needy for a pair of sandals.
They trample on the heads of the poor
as on the dust of the ground
and deny justice to the oppressed.
Father and son use the same girl
and so profane my holy name. Amos 2:6-7
Later on, after the descendants of Jewish prisoners of war had returned to Jerusalem from Babylonian exile, this practice of Jews selling their children as slaves to other Jews continued. During the time of Nehemiah
…the men and their wives raised a great outcry against their fellow Jews. Some were saying, “We and our sons and daughters are numerous; in order for us to eat and stay alive, we must get grain…”
Although we are of the same flesh and blood as our fellow Jews and though our children are as good as theirs, yet we have to subject our sons and daughters to slavery. Some of our daughters have already been enslaved, but we are powerless, because our fields and our vineyards belong to others.”
When I heard their outcry and these charges, I was very angry. Neh 5:1-2, 5-6
As mentioned earlier, slave trade among the ancient Israelites was a regulated practice with specific rules for Israelite slaves. In Ex 21:2 it was commanded,
If you buy a Hebrew slave, he is to serve you for six years.
But in the seventh year, he shall go free, without paying anything.
In other words, an Israelite who had become financially indebted to another Israelite and had became a slave to pay off his debts was to be released after they had served for six years.[10] So too, the well-known biblical “Jubilee year” was a time for releasing Israelites from their financial slavery.[11]
Ultimately, it was the financial debts of these poor Israelites that had enslaved them to their own people. And even though we read these biblical passages that specifically proclaimed freedom for Israelite slaves after six years, we find no evidence that it was actually practiced.
The only example we find in the Bible where Israelite slaves were temporarily released was during the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem when King Zedekiah of Jerusalem commanded the people,
…proclaim freedom for the slaves. Everyone was to free their Hebrew slaves, both male and female; no one was to hold a fellow Hebrew in bondage…10…They agreed, and set them free. But afterward they changed their minds and took back the slaves they had freed and enslaved them again.
Then the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah: “This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: I made a covenant with your ancestors when I brought them out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. I said, ‘Every seventh year each of you must free any fellow Hebrews who have sold themselves to you. After they have served you six years, you must let them go free.’ Your ancestors, however, did not listen to me or pay attention to me. Jer 34:8-14
Like Nehemiah, perhaps, this is what the prophet Isaiah was so upset about—Israelite slave owners not freeing their fellow Israelites but holding onto them in perpetuity and abusing them for profit. Isaiah proclaimed
“… on the day of your fasting, you do as you please and exploit all your workers.
Your fasting ends in quarreling and strife, and in striking each other with wicked fists.
“Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:
to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke,
to set the oppressed free and break every yoke?
Is it not to share your food with the hungry
and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—when you see the naked, to clothe them,
and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood? Isa 58:3-4,6-7
When Jesus read from the scroll of Isaiah in the Nazareth synagogue, he also introduced his messianic calling as freeing slaves or prisoners from their oppression.
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Luke 4:18-19
Jesus’ messianic calling is to “set captives free.”[12] Following the biblical commandment to release Israelite slaves from their financial debts, Jesus proclaims the Kingdom of God as a fully-realized year of Jubilee. This is a time where debts are completely forgiven and freedom has been restored to those who had been imprisoned. But what are the captives being freed from?
When Jesus taught his disciples how to pray in Matt 6:9-13, he alludes to and expands upon this biblical commandment of freeing debtors—
“forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.”
His word choice reminds us of intertribal slavery, where the vast majority of slaves were descended from financial debts that were owed by themselves or their family. Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer understands these debts in a spiritual sense—
“and forgive us our sins, for we also forgive everyone who is indebted to us.” Luke 11:4
So here, the debts that we have inherited from our parents, those debts which forced our parents to sell us into slavery, debts that are passed down, these are now sins that have enslaved us and continue to enslave us; we are captives imprisoned by our own sins. This elucidates Jesus’ messianic calling further—he comes to set the captives free from their sins.[13]
After Jesus finishes the Lord’s prayer, he adds,
For if you forgive other people when they sin against you,
your heavenly Father will also forgive you.
But if you do not forgive others their sins,
your Father will not forgive your sins. Matt 6:14-15
Jesus has illuminated “forgiveness of sins” within a spiritual ecosystem. God’s forgiveness of us is interrelated with our forgiveness of others. Jesus expanded on this concept when he was asked, “how many times should we forgive our brother or sister who sins against us (Matt 18:21)?”
Jesus answered with a parable about a servant who owed his king an unfathomable amount of money.[14] The king ordered that the servant and his family be sold as slaves to pay off his debt, but the servant begged the king for more time to pay off what he owed. The king had great mercy on the servant, not by giving him more time to repay his debt but by completely forgiving the millions that he could never have repaid.
This redeemed and forgiven servant, now with no debt, then went to another person who owed him a small amount of money and demanded that he repay him immediately. This man also asked for more time to repay his debt, but the forgiven servant refused to have mercy on the man who owed him little and had him thrown into prison.
When the king found out, he told the forgiven servant
…‘You wicked servant,’
‘I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to.
Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?’ Matt 18:32-33
The king sent the servant off to jail to be tortured until he could pay back all he owed. Jesus ended by saying,
“This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you
unless you forgive your brother or sister from your heart.” Matt 18:35
And so, Jesus has called his followers to walk in his steps by setting the captives free when we forgive those who have sinned against us. We take others hostage when we refuse to forgive them. But just like God ransomed us from our debtor prison, we also are called to release our prisoners. The more we unchain and release others’ wrongs from our anxieties, the more we enlarge and experience the Lord’s liberty in our lives.
[1] Twenty-five foreign hostages were also released through the intervention of other governments.
[2] Mendelsohn, I. “Slavery in the Ancient Near East.” The Biblical Archaeologist, vol. 9, no. 4, 1946, pp. 74–88. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3209170. Accessed 8 Feb. 2024
[3] Mendelsohn, 74.
[4] 1 Samuel 30
[5] Gen 31:26; 34:29; Num 21:1,29; 31:9; Judg 5:12; 1 Kgs 8:46-50=Jer 13:17; Jer 50:33
[6] Deut 21:10-14
[7] Albright, "Two Letters from Ugarit," BASOR 82 (1941), 43.
[8] Deut 9:26; 15:15; 24:18; 2 Sam 7:23; Mic 6:4; 1 Chr 17:21
[9] Isa 51:11; Jer 15:21; 31:11
[10] Deut 15:1-18
[11] Lev 25:8-10, 39-43
[12] When Jesus reads from the scroll of Isaiah in Luke 4:18-19, he reads Isa 61:1-2a’s Jubilee year allusion woven together with Isa 58:6’s “set the oppressed free.”
[13] The Greek word afesis (ἄφεσις) is used for both “release, set free” captives and “forgiveness of sins.” See Lk 1:77; 4:18; 24:47. Also, Jesus’ name is interpreted as rescue from sins—“She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins (Matt 2:21).” Even more, this spiritual redemption is a divine act—“[The Lord] himself will redeem Israel from all their sins (Ps 130:8).”
[14] The servant owed 10,000 talents which in today’s value would be millions of dollars. “One silver talent was a huge sum of money, equal to 6,000 days wages. One gold talent was worth at least thirty times that amount.” 6.82—Louw, Johannes P., and Eugene Nida, eds. Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains. New York, NY: United Bible Societies, 1988.