Leviticus 25:44-46

[Atreyu]

Leviticus 25:44-46 states:
44 " 'Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. 45 You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property. 46 You can will them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life, but you must not rule over your fellow Israelites ruthlessly.
I’m having a hard time understanding how this fits into Mosaic Law. It seems to me that this is actually condoning slavery.

The Catechism says on slavery:
2414 The seventh commandment forbids acts or enterprises that for any reason - selfish or ideological, commercial, or totalitarian - lead to the enslavement of human beings, to their being bought, sold and exchanged like merchandise, in disregard for their personal dignity. It is a sin against the dignity of persons and their fundamental rights to reduce them by violence to their productive value or to a source of profit. St. Paul directed a Christian master to treat his Christian slave "no longer as a slave but more than a slave, as a beloved brother, . . . both in the flesh and in the Lord."194
Isn’t it an offense against the dignity of the person to buy them and sell them like they are a mere commodity? I understand that it is not an offense to buy someone’s labour - even if it is a lifetime’s worth of labour. But that doesn’t seem to be what the above passage is saying.

When it says that you can “own them for life” and “will them” to your children and so forth, is this specifically their labour - is that the answer?

 

[Pete_1]

This is what came into my head:

Possibly it was a comprimise like this one Jesus mentioned for example “moses allowed you to divorce because you were hard of heart”

**Matthew 19:8 (New International Version)
**

8Jesus replied, "Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning.

Also it says later or earlier on that Hebrew servants (same thing as slaves?) must be freed every seventh year.

Exodus 21:2 (New International Version)

2 "If you buy a Hebrew servant, he is to serve you for six years. But in the seventh year, he shall go free, without paying anything.

Deuteronomy 15:12 (New International Version)

** Freeing Servants **

12 If a fellow Hebrew, a man or a woman, sells himself to you and serves you six years, in the seventh year you must let him go free.

This is only my opinion though i could be worng

 

[Atreyu]

The same thing occurred to me. I believe the same Hebrew word is used to describe the Hebrew slaves as is used to describe the gentile slaves. Yet the Hebrew slaves would not actually be “slaves” under the contemporary use of the word; they would be more like indentured servants; for which there was no Hebrew word.

I think maybe my issue is that I don’t properly understand how Mosaic Law works with respect to Biblical inerrancy. How could Mosaic Law condone something that is explicitly immoral - which the slavery of gentiles described in this passage seems to be?

For that matter, how could Mosaic Law condone divorce - something else that is explicitly immoral?

 

[Pete_1]

**Matthew 19:8 (New International Version) **
Jesus replied, "Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning.

Possibly the jews would not have accepted those laws, such as no slavery and no divorce