a hired worker: a free person paid wages for a set term of labor, rather than owned as a slave or belonging to the household by birth.
At its core this word names someone hired for pay. He is free, unlike a slave, but usually landless and poor, and so he lives on his wages, which fell due the same day he earned them. The Torah pictures a man whose very life is "set upon" that daily pay, which is why it commands that his wage never be held back overnight.
The word gets much of its force from the two figures it stands between. He is not a slave (עֶבֶד), who is owned and tied to a master, and he is not a resident outsider (תּוֹשָׁב), who is defined by where he settles. The hired worker is defined instead by his contract: free enough to strike a bargain, poor enough to depend on being paid on time. That in-between standing is exactly what makes him a test case for justice, and it is the standing the Jubilee law reaches for when it insists that an impoverished Israelite be treated "as a hired worker," not as a slave.
From that social base the word reaches in three further directions. Job turns it into a picture of human life itself, a hard shift of labor that only longs for the day to end. Isaiah uses the hired worker's exactly counted contract as an image of a fixed span of time, no day added or taken away. And once, of Egypt's paid soldiers, it carries the sharper edge of a hireling with no real stake in what he defends.
Nuances
Whether Leviticus 25:40's directive to treat the impoverished, sold Israelite "as a hired worker" was a real abolition of Israelite slavery or only a softer name for a bondage that in practice lasted until the Jubilee.
- contestedA genuine reform: the Holiness legislation abolishes owning a fellow Israelite as a slave and converts debt-bondage into paid labor, on the rationale that Israelites already belong to God (Lev 25:42) and so cannot be owned by anyone else.; Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 23-27, Anchor Bible 3B (2001), 2212-2224; Baruch A. Levine, Leviticus, JPS Torah Commentary (1989), 175-178; Moshe Weinfeld, Social Justice in Ancient Israel and in the Ancient Near East (1995)
- contestedA legal fiction: the "hired worker" label softens the language, but Leviticus 25:39-43 lets the sold Israelite be held until the Jubilee with no earlier release, a status hard to distinguish from slavery.; Gregory C. Chirichigno, Debt-Slavery in Israel and the Ancient Near East, JSOTSup 141 (1993), 328-353; Jeffrey Stackert, Rewriting the Torah, FAT 52 (2007)