But if a priest buys a slave with money, or if slaves are born in his household, they may eat his food. – Leviticus 22:11

Today's Scripture Reading (November 19, 2021): Leviticus 22

In the parable of the prodigal son, after the boy had squandered the portion of his father's wealth that he had inherited, the son makes this proclamation.

'How many of my father's hired servants have food to spare, and here I am starving to death! I will set out and go back to my father and say to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me like one of your hired servants.' So he got up and went to his father (Luke 15:17-20).

The son does not decide that he should go and get his father to take him on as a slave and spend the rest of his life owned by his family. And there is a good reason for that, and it is not the one that we might think. In our thoughts, a hired worker is a significantly higher position in the business hierarchy than an indentured slave because a hired slave maintained at least part of his freedom. But that was not the way that the ranking was designed in the ancient world. In the ancient world, a hired servant was the lowest rung of the employee ladder, a rung that existed below that of the slave. The thought was that in bad times, a hired employee could be let go, but a slave was part of the family and could never be released. The prodigal son thought that he could be a hired servant, but he would never presume that his father would allow him to be a slave because a slave would be too close to the son requesting that his father consent to the resumption of his role as son, something that he now felt that he was disqualified to be.

And all of this was actually set out in the Mosaic Law. The principle is described in this passage. If a priest hired a laborer, that worker would not be allowed to share the food reserved for the priest's family. Workers could be hired and paid, but they could not eat the food that was provided for the priest and his family. But a slave was welcome at the table of the priest; the slave was family. Nineteenth-Century Methodist theologian, Adam Clarke, sums up the belief like this;

"We see that it was lawful, under the Mosaic economy, to have slaves under certain restrictions; but these were taken from among the heathen, and instructed in the true religion; hence we find, as in the above case, that they were reckoned as a part of the priest's own family, and treated as such. They certainly have privileges which did not extend either to sojourners or to hired servants" (Adam Clarke).

In Jesus's parable, the prodigal son possessed no illusion that he was worthy of rejoining the family he had spurned, even as a slave. The most he could hope for was to occupy the lowest rung of the family ladder and become a hired servant. He would have a job in good times and then be discarded when things turned tough. And, in his mind, even that was more than he deserved. 

Tomorrow's Scripture Reading: Leviticus 23