Can an IOU serve as money?
Let's say two people own a slave, and one lets him go. So now he is 1/2 slave and 1/2 free. According to Beit Hillel [Tractate Bava Batra page 13] he works for himself one day, and for his master on every other day.
Beit Shamai said but then he can not get married. That is, a gentile slave can not marry a Israelite woman. And a freed slave can. So as a slave he could have his slave wife and not an Israelite. As a freed slave he can only marry a Israelite. So he would be stuck. So Beit Shamai says the owner must let him go and the slave writes a document (an IOU) for the money that is owed.
But we know a slave only goes freed in one of three ways; (1) A document letting him go, (2) money or (3) injury [24 types].
So here there is no document letting the slave go. Just an IOU. So that must be considered as worth money שווה כסף
[I am being short here as this comes up in Rav Shach's Avi Ezri in the beginning of Laws of Selling. In other contexts clearly an IOU is not money. In Tractate Kidushin [see pages 5 and 8 and 47], the Rashba and Ramban that marrying a women by an IOU does not work.]
[Just as a side issue, it does look to me that Abraham Lincoln, really could not free the slaves by means of a proclamation. Certainty he did not expect that the slaves would then turn around and become the masters of the whites. -forcing whites to work for them by the welfare state. And now becoming the ipso facto masters of white people. It is unlikely that Lincoln would have agreed to this.] [The 14 Amendment signed by the southern states under force can not be thought to be valid.]
Let's say two people own a slave, and one lets him go. So now he is 1/2 slave and 1/2 free. According to Beit Hillel [Tractate Bava Batra page 13] he works for himself one day, and for his master on every other day.
Beit Shamai said but then he can not get married. That is, a gentile slave can not marry a Israelite woman. And a freed slave can. So as a slave he could have his slave wife and not an Israelite. As a freed slave he can only marry a Israelite. So he would be stuck. So Beit Shamai says the owner must let him go and the slave writes a document (an IOU) for the money that is owed.
But we know a slave only goes freed in one of three ways; (1) A document letting him go, (2) money or (3) injury [24 types].
So here there is no document letting the slave go. Just an IOU. So that must be considered as worth money שווה כסף
[I am being short here as this comes up in Rav Shach's Avi Ezri in the beginning of Laws of Selling. In other contexts clearly an IOU is not money. In Tractate Kidushin [see pages 5 and 8 and 47], the Rashba and Ramban that marrying a women by an IOU does not work.]
[Just as a side issue, it does look to me that Abraham Lincoln, really could not free the slaves by means of a proclamation. Certainty he did not expect that the slaves would then turn around and become the masters of the whites. -forcing whites to work for them by the welfare state. And now becoming the ipso facto masters of white people. It is unlikely that Lincoln would have agreed to this.] [The 14 Amendment signed by the southern states under force can not be thought to be valid.]
