Abstract
Abstract
In the Hebrew Bible, the exodus from Egypt is a founding myth of freedom. In the exodus story, there is no king to enforce a decree of liberation and justice. Instead, the God of Israel takes on the role of king and liberator when he redeems his people collectively from forced labour in Egypt. With the help of the exodus motif, the idea of liberation is granted more stability in the sense of reliable predictability in law and ethical justification of morals, thereby also taking steps from negative to positive freedom. Connected to the exodus story is the differentiation of law as a field of its own with rules of its own, independent from other social spheres. The principle of impartiality is installed to abstract from socio-economic, political, cultural, or religious statuses that might lead to preferential treatment. Liberation was installed regularly by law, independent from sporadic manumissions, providing for legal certainty. The law raised the sporadic act of manumission to the legal concept of liberation, transforming events of liberation into the idea of liberty. When a slave is manumitted by consecration to a god, it implies freedom from any slavish dependency and from any human being who might try to exercise power over the freedman. Ancient Near Eastern and Greek sources that speak of slave manumission through new slave sale to a god aim at the freedom of the slave and not at a new enslavement to a god. Some creation texts even envision a free status for all human beings.