The church is the bride of Christ. He has redeemed her. He has purchased her. The bride-price Jesus paid was the most expensive price ever paid for a bride. With that price He assumed covenantal responsibility for her provision, nurture, and protection.

Thank you, Gary North. One of the benefits reaped by the impact of the theonomist movement is a renewal of the serious study of the Old Testament law.

As a consequence of the pervasive spirit of antinomianism that has infected contemporary evangelicalism, the law of God has been treated with woeful neglect. In their zeal to recover the importance of divine law, the theonomists have produced significant scholarly expositions of the Old Testament law. In his huge volume Tools of Dominion, Gary North provides a masterful exposition of many of the laws of the Old Testament that appear arcane to the modern reader. I found his treatment of the case laws of the Holiness Code of Exodus 21–23 particularly helpful. Exodus 21:2–4 presents a conundrum of severe difficulty for the contemporary reader:

If you buy a Hebrew servant, he is to serve you for six years. But in the seventh year, he shall go free, without paying anything. If he comes alone, he is to go free alone; but if he has a wife when he comes, she is to go with him. If his master gives him a wife and she bears him sons or daughters, the woman and her children shall belong to her master, and only the man shall go free.

On the surface this text appears to justify a practice that is blatantly cruel, harsh, and severe. Not only do we face the problem of the Old Testament sanction of slavery, but we see the treatment of slaves by which upon their liberation in the sabbatical year they may face separation from their wives and children. This all seems primitive and savage in its conception.

North explains the text in terms of the practice of indentured servanthood and the Jewish practice of exacting a “bride price” from a groom. If a man wanted to take a wife in Israel, he was required to pay a bride price to the girl’s father. The bride price was proof of economic productivity and stability, evidence that the groom was capable of supporting his wife and their subsequent offspring.

(Even in modern times, when a young man asks a girl’s father for her “hand in marriage,” the father usually inquires about the suitor’s ability to provide for his daughter.)

In Exodus 21:3, it is clear that if the servant was already married when he entered into his indentured servitude (to repay debt he was unable to pay), the Law provided that at the time of his liberation, his wife and children would go free with him. In the case of Exodus 21:4, the provision of the Law deals with a servant who marries after he enters indentured servitude.

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