Yet man is born unto labour, as the sparks fly upward * : prolegomena for a legal study of work in the bible (vocabulary, concepts and structures).

According to the opinion accepted by most, labour law was born in the late nineteenth century in connection with the production processes delivered by the Industrial Revolution. Its genesis follows the paradigm for which is the main feature of this new production model to generate both socioeconomic and legal subordination. So, keeping this basic assumption, a research that wanted to investigate the origins of the employment, back-links from this period, it seems to stand outside of the legal framework that constitute generally its reference system. For the same reason, also the new post-industrial work organisation in the era of globalisation, although for different reasons and yet paradoxical, it tends to stand outside the natural riverbed of labor law and it tends to breaking free from it. This is the reason why there is the current tendency to talk about the labor market law, jobs law, job protections, rather than labour law and employment law. You can not escape that in every age, however, the concern of the law has been, and it always is, to assign the protection to who, by himself, that protection can not give it to himself. Well, this situation is an essential common need of the labour law both pre-industrial and industrial and post-industrial. Thus, the basic concerns of labour law in the era of globalisation are not different from those of previous eras. Let's change the superstructure of utilisation / exploitation of the labor of others - and correspondingly the legal structures that govern them - but it do not change the structures on which those forms are inserted; - in fact, at the root of it all there is the person, in one of its many most qualifying natural phenomena: that of work. Now, the Bible (both the Hebrew and Christian, in its different denominations) is - of course - a common humus to the whole so called the West and - in part - even to the Islam. As you know, the inextricable intertwining of theological requirements with social requirements, that are typical of theocratic societies, on the one side whether it does not make it easy to distinguish the one from the other (even supposing that such hermeneutic approach it can be useful and accessible); on the other side it might help to identify protection structures that, as referring to man in his relationship with creation - ( in the secular sense for non-believers ) and the creator - could likely to be erected to universal rules, without space or time, rules good to delineate the outer limits of regulation of employment at any time and any where. The purpose of this research is to catalogue the biblical texts - notably in a first phase those which are in the first (or old) testament of the Christian Bible - which contain both prescriptive structures and pathways, designed to protect the position of social weakness and minority of the worker, understood in its broadest sense and in its various and diverse facets: of worker, of salaried, of servant, even of slave, and so on. The starting point and most immediate objective of this work is therefore to find the biblical sources - and to get ready one first critical apparatus - which they refer to, directly or indirectly, to work in broad sense, that is a personal relationship in which one of the two subjects of it, is in a position of weakness, comparable to that which the Bible considers typical for orphans , widows, the poor and in some respects for foreigners: a one word the Weaks.