A HIRED MAN — a day-labourer or contract worker, free but landless, working for a wage. He is a real social class in the law rather than a figure of speech, and he is the yardstick Deuteronomy 15:18 measures a slave against: releasing him should not seem hard, for double the wage of a hired man he has served you six years. ⭐ That three-word phrase splits the shelf three ways — most versions say the slave gave you DOUBLE (ASV, Geneva, NIV, NWT), three say he cost you HALF (TLB, RV60, NVI), and the Douay drops the multiplier altogether. Double the labour received and half the price paid are the same fact from two ends of a ledger. ⚠ A popular argument that a sakhir’s standard hire ran three years, so that six is literally double the term, rests on Isaiah 16:14 — and does not survive checking, because the identical idiom ‘as the years of a hired man’ is used of ONE year at Isaiah 21:16. The phrase marks a term counted exactly, not a fixed length. ⭐ Leviticus 25:40 uses him as the standard in the other direction: an impoverished Israelite is to be treated as a hired man and as a settler and not as a slave at all. ⭐ Deuteronomy 24:14–15 (now on these pages) is his own law: not to be oppressed, whether a brother or a stranger; paid on his day, before the sun goes in, for he is poor and to it he lifts up his life; and if he cries out to Jehovah, it be sin in you. Leviticus 19:13 had set the deadline at morning; Deuteronomy moves it back to sunset. Malachi 3:5 (not yet on these pages) lists those who oppress the hired man in his wages with sorcerers and adulterers, and James 5:4 has the kept-back wage itself cry out. → first discussed at Deut 15:18