This page was originally produced 20 June 2017. To navigate back up to the passage index, see index-passages.
In the Bible, a you could keep a slave for only six years, and in the seventh the slave had to be set free. This legislation applied to both genders of slaves.
Here’s how Deuteronomy 15:12 expresses that idea:
If your brother, a Hebrew man — or a Hebrew woman — is sold to you and serves you six years, then in the seventh year you must set him free.
I’m not sure exactly how you’d write that sentence today, but it would probably be something like this, if we were writing in an informal register. And if we still had slavery and we had laws written specifically for governing the institution of slavery along ethnic lines.
If a Hebrew person is sold to you and serves you for six years, then in the seventh year you must set them free.
Then again, the Hebrew in Deuteronomy doesn’t really strike me as “in an informal register,” so perhaps a closer equivalent would avoid the “singular they.”
If your fellow Hebrew, of either gender, is sold to you and serves you six years, then in the seventh year you must set him or her free.
This is less chatty, and comes off as a little stilted, but that’s how laws are. In fact, if we really wanted to translate the legal material in Deuteronomy in the manner of modern legal material, we’d have to do away with the “you” as well. Laws nowadays don’t address the reader as “you,” like they’re talking to him directly. No, the law speaks in a special jargon, comprehensible only to those with legal training or unusually strong reading abilities.
If any male or female person of Hebrew ancestry, hereinafter referred to as “the slave,” is bought for the purpose of involuntary servitude by another Hebrew person, hereinafter referred to as “the master,” the slave shall not be compelled to serve the master for a period of time exceeding six years, after which point any attempt to coerce the slave to continue in servitude will constitute kidnapping.
To be honest, putting the verse into modern legalese would probably take up considerably more room. Here’s just one sentence from the Ohio Revised Code, picked more or less at random.
In all actions brought to recover from an employer for personal injuries suffered by his employee or for death resulting to such employee from such personal injuries, while in the employ of such employer, arising from the negligence of such employer or any of such employer’s officers, agents, or employees, it shall be held in addition to any other liability existing by law that any person in the employ of such employer, in any way having power or authority in directing or controlling any other employee of such employer, is not the fellow servant, but superior to such other employee; any person in the employ of such employer in any way having charge or control of employees in any separate branch or department shall be held to be the superior and not the fellow servant of all employees in any other branch or department in which they are employed; any person in the employ of such employer whose duty it is to repair or inspect the ways, works, boats, wharves, plant, machinery, appliances, or tools, in any way connected with or in any way used in the business of the employer, or to receive, give, or transmit any signal, instruction, or warning to or for such employees, shall be held to be the superior and not the fellow servant of such other employees of such employer.
Of course, translating like that would be mistranslation too, because it would make Deuteronomy look like a work of modern administrative law, which it isn’t. It’s all mistranslation. The best a translator can do is try to mitigate the damage and mislead the reader as little as possible.
For the record, I endorse the very first rendering of the verse, found at the very top of the post, because I have a tendency towards literalism. Maybe not as much literalism as you’d see in the ESV all the time, but I like the idea of working to try and let the little features and sentence structures of the source text shine through when they can without distorting the meaning too badly.
Interestingly, while a literalish translation of Deuteronomy 15:12 sounds oddly archaic to our modern feminist ears, just two chapter later comes a verse which expresses gender (though not religious policy or penal law) in an oddly modern way (17:5).
. . . then you are to bring out that man or that woman who have done this wicked thing, to your gates, the man or the woman, and stone them to death with stones.
Stone “them” to death with stones: a singular them.