Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“When someone steals an ox or a sheep, and slaughters it or sells it, the thief shall pay five oxen for an ox, and four sheep for a sheep. The thief shall make restitution, but if unable to do so, shall be sold for the theft.”
NL Daily Devotion for Thursday, June 30, 2022
by R. M. Fergus, Clergy Stuff
This seems far more humane than the past couple days’ quick rush to execution. If you steal someone’s sheep and kill it or sell it, you have to pay back the sheep with interest. Of course, the interest is unrealistically extreme. If you had a to steal a sheep to put food on your table, where are you going to get four sheep to give back to the owner? Again, if it’s supposed to be a deterrent to sheep-stealing in the first place, it’s doomed to fail. The average person doesn’t steal because they feel like it even though they have plenty (the wealthy in society do, and with impunity). They steal because they are in need. And here the system is set up so that if they can’t pay back the sheep (which we know they can’t) then they can be sold into slavery.
It smacks of the Convict Leasing system that proliferated in the south after the Civil War, in which a series of laws were passed that only applied to Black people, for violations of which they were arrested, convicted, and then “leased” as free labor—in other words, enslaved—as punishment. There is absolutely nothing okay about this. Not one thing.
So how can we look at this law of Moses with anything other than dismay? If nothing else, maybe we can see it as what’s wrong with our criminal justice system as a whole, and let God guide us to actual justice.
Did I ever learn about the Convict Leasing system in school? How can I learn more about how our system does not do justice to BIPOC individuals?