Did God condone chattel slavery in the OT?

[Luke_K]

Exodus 21:20-21 :
“When a man strikes his male or female slave with a rod so hard that the slave dies under his hand, he shall be punished. If, however, the slave survives for a day or two, he is not to be punished, since the slave is his own property.”

This is one of the laws regarding slaves that God told Moses to lay before the people (according to the text, literally). God is saying that there should be no punishment for beating a slave, because a slave is his master’s property. (In some translations it says “since the slave is his money.”) How can this be explained within Christian theology? I assume one may try to explain it away by saying “God allowed it because of the hardness of their hearts.” But were the Israelites really incapable of not beating their slaves, and not justifying the beatings by the slave’s property status?

 

[patrick457]

Exodus 21:20-21 :
“When a man strikes his male or female slave with a rod so hard that the slave dies under his hand, he shall be punished. If, however, the slave survives for a day or two, he is not to be punished, since the slave is his own property.”

This is one of the laws regarding slaves that God told Moses to lay before the people (according to the text, literally). God is saying that there should be no punishment for beating a slave, because a slave is his master’s property. (In some translations it says “since the slave is his money.”) How can this be explained within Christian theology? I assume one may try to explain it away by saying “God allowed it because of the hardness of their hearts.” But were the Israelites really incapable of not beating their slaves, and not justifying the beatings by the slave’s property status?

Before we jump to how the text could be squared in Christian theology, I’ll look at it first from a cultural POV.

I like to remind folks that the number one rule in reading the Bible is, never to assume that it would read like a modern text with a 21st-century audience in mind. It may be the word of God, but that doesn’t (and wouldn’t) change the fact that it is an ancient text, written by people in a time and culture that was never yours. And no one really reads the Epic of Gilgamesh or the Canterbury Tales with a modern lens, do they? Here, one must apply what scholars call critical distance: being able to detach from the situation at hand and view things with a critical mind. In other words, you’re not taking things for granted, but rather are aware that differences exist (in this case, between the times and cultures) and are open to thinking about them.

With that over with, let’s look at the topic of slavery. Slavery seems to be a rather nasty concept in this age: the word evokes images of people being abducted and kidnapped, hauled into boats and shipped into the New World, where they would be sold to buyers willing to pay cash.

But here’s the news: there are very few ‘true’ slave societies in the ancient world (in fact, Greece and Rome are two of the major societies). In fact, scholars on Ancient Near Eastern cultures - Israelite culture is one of these - have often abandoned the use of the general term ‘slavery’ in descriptions of the many diverse forms of master-servant relationship, as frankly, the term is too broad and ambiguous (and it could send up the wrong signals to people today!)

In fact, New World slavery - perhaps the one that you, and possibly others are thinking of when the word appears - is historically a unique case (from Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology by David Levinson and Melvin Ember (1996)):

Scholars do not agree on a definition of “slavery.” The term has been used at various times for a wide range of institutions, including plantation slavery, forced labor, the drudgery of factories and sweatshops, child labor, semivoluntary prostitution, bride-price marriage, child adoption for payment, and paid-for surrogate motherhood. Somewhere within this range, the literal meaning of “slavery” shifts into metaphorical meaning, but it is not entirely clear at what point. A similar problem arises when we look at other cultures. The reason is that the term “Slavery” is evocative rather than analytical, calling to mind a loose bundle of diagnostic features. These features are mainly derived from the most recent direct Western experience with slavery, that of the southern United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America. The present Western image of slavery has been haphazardly constructed out of the representations of that experience in nineteenth-century abolitionist literature, and later novels, textbooks, and films … From a global cross-cultural and historical perspective, however, New World slavery was a unique conjunction of features … In brief, most varieties of slavery did not exhibit the three elements that were dominant in the New World: slaves as property and commodities; their use exclusively as labor; and their lack of freedom …

‘Slavery’ is a very relative word in our time period. And the word has some very fuzzy boundaries in the Ancient Near East as well. Freedom in the ANE was a relative, not an absolute state: any subordinate in the social ladder can be called a ‘slave’, even if they were actually ‘free’. For a king, his subjects are his ‘slaves’; a vassal would be the ‘slave’ of his suzerain; all men are ‘slaves’ of the gods. A social inferior, when addressing a superior, referred to himself out of politeness as ‘your slave’.

 

[The_Old_Medic]

The ancient Jews did indeed keep slaves. But, they did NOT have slavery as we would envision it.

First of all, the children of slaves were NOT slaves. They belonged to their parents, not to the “master”.

Second, all slaves were released after 7 years of servitude. Just as the fields were required to lie fallow periodically, so slaves were freed.

Third, slaves had very definite rights under the law, including the right to marry, to own property of their own (believe it or not, some slaves owned their own slaves).

The Hebrews concept of slavery was very, very different than ours. You see, they had experienced slavery in the usual sense, and they believed that this was wrong, and that God ordained that it be done very differently. Most of their slaves were either captured in battle, or were somewhat like what later was called, “Indentured Servants”.

 

[patrick457]

Here we would contrast slavery in the New World and ANE slavery in general:

Entry: In Islamic and Transatlantic slave trades, slavery was overwhelmingly involuntary: people were captured by force and sold - or at times (such as in the case of the Atlantic trade), people - often fellow Africans - would sell their captives or prisoners of war to European buyers.

In the ANE, the opposite was the case: slavery was a voluntary act. The impoverished would either sell themselves, or their relatives, in return for economic security and protection. And many of the documents that survive today actually emphasize that the transaction is voluntary, which applies not only to self-sale but also to those who are the object of sale (though admittedly the consent was sometimes fictional).

War was not a major source of ‘real’ slaves, despite the large number of war captives in every battle. The great majority were not turned into slaves (only a small percentage), but rather were settled on the land as palace and temple serfs. The question would naturally arise: why is this the case? Slavery was the optimal form of dependence, and very often there was no shortage of prisoners captured in war. Besides, there were no legal or ethical norms preventing these prisoners from being turned into slaves. But this happened in a negligible percentage of cases, while the overwhelming majority were settled in places specially set aside for them, paid royal taxes, and carried out obligations, including military service.

The same holds true for the Israelite case: even in wars on foreign soil (Deuteronomy 20:10-11), if a city surrendered, it became a vassal state to Israel, with the population becoming serfs (mas) who had to perform corvée labor, not slaves ('ebed, 'amah).

Motive: In the New World, slavery was motivated by the economic advantage of the elite. The plantation economies of the New World were in fact built on slave labor. Seventy percent of the enslaved people brought to the new world were used to produce sugar, the most labor-intensive crop. The rest were employed harvesting coffee, cotton, and tobacco, and in some cases in mining.

In the ANE, the dominant (statistically) motivation was economic relief of poverty - ‘slavery’ was initiated by the slave, not by the owner - and the primary uses were purely domestic (except in cases of State slavery, where individuals were used for building projects). The two-volume work [A History of Ancient Near Eastern Law](A History of Ancient Near Eastern Law) (2003) surveys every legal document from the ANE (by period) and includes sections on slavery:

Most slaves owned by Assyrians in Assur and in Anatolia seem to have been (originally) debt slaves - free persons sold into slavery by a parent, a husband, an elder sister, or by themselves. (1.449)

Sales of wives, children, relatives, or oneself, due to financial duress, are a recurrent feature of the Nuzi socio-economic scene…A somewhat different case is that of male and female foreigners, called hapiru (immigrants) who gave themselves in slavery to private individuals or the palace administration. Poverty was the cause of these agreements… (1.585)

Most of the recorded cases of entry of free persons into slavery [in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emar”]Emar] are by reason of debt or famine or both…A common practice was for a financier to pay off the various creditors in return for the debtor becoming his slave. (1.664f)

On the other hand, mention is made of free people who are sold into slavery as a result of the famine conditions and the critical economic situation of the populations [Canaan]. Sons and daughters are sold for provisions… (1.741)

The most frequently mentioned method of enslavement [Neo-Sumerian, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur_III”]UR III] was sale of children by their parents. Most are women, evidently widows, selling a daughter; in one instance a mother and grandmother sell a boy … There are also examples of self sale. All these case clearly arose from poverty; it is not stated, however, whether debt was specifically at issue. (1.199)

 

[patrick457]

Treatment: Much has been said about the worse, often inhumane conditions of slaves in the New World, especially in the American South. Slaves for instance were punished for a variety of reasons, most of the time it was for working too slow, breaking a law such as running away, leaving the plantation without permission, or not following orders given to them.

ANE slavery, on the other hand was much less severe, due largely to the differences in the attitudes of the ‘master’ to the ‘slave’, and because slavery was more of an in-house, in-family type of thing, with closer emotional attachment. Now there were still some rather cruel punishments in the ANE, but the Israelite attitude - as expressed in the Torah - are in ways surprisingly more milder and ‘humane’ than even their neighbors. But generally, ANE slaves were protected from over-abuse (under normal conditions, runaways were a problem) and enjoyed fairly humane treatment, more like domestic servants.

Let’s branch off for a sec and look at the problematic passage here (Exodus 21:18-22):

And when men quarrel and a man strikes his neighbor with a stone or with a fist, and he does not die but falls to bed; if he gets up and goes about outside on his crutch, then the striker will go unpunished; he will only give his ceasing and see that he is fully healed.
And when a man strikes his manservant or his maidservant with a rod, and he dies under his hand, he will be avenged; but if he survives a day, or two days, he will not be avenged, for he is his silver (ḵasəp, usually loosely paraphrased as “money” or “property”).
And when men struggle and strike a pregnant woman and her children come out, yet no injury comes, he will surely be fined as the husband of the woman may set upon him, and he will give as the judges determine.

The law allowed disciplinary rod-beating for a servant apparently under the same conditions as that for free men here (note the context). For the record, free men could likewise be punished by rod-beating under law (Deuteronomy 25:1-3; Proverbs 10:13; 26:3), as could rebellious older sons (Prov 13:24; 22:15; 23:13), so it was not a slave-specific punishment.

Note that the verses are in parallel to what is ordered in verses 18-19. If two people fight and it leads to the injury of one party (but not to death), the aggressor is punished by having to ‘retributively’ pay the victim’s “ceasing:” his lost (economic) time and medical expenses. If it is a person’s slave and this occurs, there is no (additional) economic payment - the lost productivity and medical expenses of the wounded servant are (punitive economic) loss alone. There was no other punishment for the actual damage done to the free-person in 18-19, and the slave seems to be treated in the same fashion.

 

[Crumpy]

There’s a recent thread on this subject. Please see my comments there.

forums.catholic-questions.org/showthread.php?t=244087

When God makes the covenant with Abraham, He tells Abraham that as a condition of this covenant, that Abraham’s descendents would be PUT into slavery.

So, to ask the question “How could God allow slavery in the Old Testament” is blasphemous, strictly, in questioning why God can do ANYTHING. We accept God as revealed to be an infinite and sovereign God, etc. in the first place.

Second, we see that God put Abraham’s descendents INTO slavery for hundreds of years just to show His love and power and desire to redeem them from slavery. And, it was well-suited as an experience to crystalize their hope and trust in God.

That was real, physical, back-breaking, brick-making slavery.

And, THAT redemption was not only a real liberation, but it was a escatological redemption, prophetic redemption of the spiritual redemption that would come through Jesus Christ.

If God had any other purpose in “allowing” slavery in the Old Testament, it would seem logical that it had to be connected to this primary purpose.

 

[buffalo]

Slavery and Christianity

 

[Luke_K]

Note that the verses are in parallel to what is ordered in verses 18-19. If two people fight and it leads to the injury of one party (but not to death), the aggressor is punished by having to ‘retributively’ pay the victim’s “ceasing:” his lost (economic) time and medical expenses. If it is a person’s slave and this occurs, there is no (additional) economic payment - the lost productivity and medical expenses of the wounded servant are (punitive economic) loss alone. There was no other punishment for the actual damage done to the free-person in 18-19, and the slave seems to be treated in the same fashion.

That’s explains it, then. There was actually no punishment for non-mortally striking another man, other than monetary for lost production. For a slave-owner, there was no monetary punishment because the slave’s production is for the master anyways (“for he is is property/money/silver”).

Thanks for clearing that up! (and the lengthy reply!)