15:11
“There will always be poor people in the land.” Because of man’s sinfulness there will always be poor people. God’s command is for His people to be generous towards them. If everyone followed God’s ways there would be no poor (15:4), but no one does follow God’s laws all the time, and some hardly ever. So there will always be the poor.
15:12
Part of the result of there being the poor is that sometimes people would sell themselves as slaves. If this happened, then a Hebrew slave was to be freed in the seventh year. So we see here a pragmatic approach to the problem of poverty. We do have a tendency to go for unattainable perfect solutions, and end up achieving little, or even making the problem worse. It should also be noted that the slavery talked of here was not “slave trade” slavery. So slavery, or being a servant, was accepted as a pragmatic solution, but was not allowed to go on for longer than seven years.
15:13,14
Critics sometimes argue that the Bible supports slavery. This is evidence of shallow thinking. As I have already said, it was not “slave trade” slavery, and we have just seen one crucial difference, the releasing of slaves after seven years. Here we get perhaps an even starker difference. They were not just to release the slave, but to send them away with gifts, with livestock and other gifts. The one who employed them as a slave was to bless the slave as they freed them. They were to release them gladly.
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