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 inconnection with the production processes delivered by the Industrial Revolution. Its genesis followsthe paradigm for which is the main feature of this new production model to generate both socioeconomicand 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 constitutegenerally its reference system. For the same reason, also the new post-industrial work organisationin the era of globalisation, although for different reasons and yet paradoxical, it tends to stand outsidethe natural riverbed of labor law and it tends to breaking free from it. This is the reason whythere is the current tendency to talk about the labor market law, jobs law, job protections, rather thanlabour law and employment law.You can not escape that in every age, however, the concern of the law has been, and it always is, toassign the protection to who, by himself, that protection can not give it to himself. Well, this situationis 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 ofprevious eras. Let's change the superstructure of utilisation / exploitation of the labor of others - andcorrespondingly the legal structures that govern them - but it do not change the structures on whichthose forms are inserted; - in fact, at the root of it all there is the person, in one of its many mostqualifying natural phenomena: that of work.Now, the Bible (both the Hebrew and Christian, in its different denominations) is - of course - acommon 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 distinguishthe one from the other (even supposing that such hermeneutic approach it can be useful andaccessible); on the other side it might help to identify protection structures that, as referring to manin his relationship with creation - ( in the secular sense for non-believers ) and the creator - couldlikely to be erected to universal rules, without space or time, rules good to delineate the outer limitsof 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 whichare in the first (or old) testament of the Christian Bible - which contain both prescriptive structuresand pathways, designed to protect the position of social weakness and minority of the worker, understoodin 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 inbroad sense, that is a personal relationship in which one of the two subjects of it, is in a position ofweakness, comparable to that which the Bible considers typical for orphans , widows, the poor andin some respects for foreigners: a one word the Weaks.