Slavery in the Bible

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This is the hardest thing for me to defend and is a major sticking point for me when I debate people. I just wanted your guys opinion on the matter. How can this be explained? Particularly this passage- “When a man strikes his slave, male or female, with a rod and the slave dies under his hand, he shall be avenged. But if the slave survives a day or two, he is not to be avenged, for the slave is his money.” Exodus 21
 
Thanks Della. That was a good read and I appreciate it.

The New Testament is easier for me to defend. But it’s the mentions of slavery in the Old Testament which I find the most difficult to explain.
 
Slavery was a reality of the era they lived in, and in most cases considered far superior to death. One thing to keep in mind is the distinction between the modern understanding of slavery, and the OT understanding.

Under OT law, slave owners were required to provide for and care for their slaves on a much higher level than the modern understanding. Further, it was often more akin to indentured servitude tahn slavery, and many slaves were freed after a given period.

Jimmy Akin does has a great article over this topic, and other things from teh OT that modern people have trouble reconciling with their world views.

Jimmy Akin: The Dark Passages of Scripture
 
Addiction, abortion, inequality in the workplace, certain types of jobs, and lifestyles are forms of slavery. To NOT mention them in any of our contemporary stories would be to ignore certain realities, sad or not. The OT is a compilation of stories and slavery was a part of those stories, in various ways, through various viewpoints.
 
St_Redemption said:
This is the hardest thing for me to defend and is a major sticking point for me when I debate people. I just wanted your guys opinion on the matter. How can this be explained? Particularly this passage- “When a man strikes his slave, male or female, with a rod and the slave dies under his hand, he shall be avenged. But if the slave survives a day or two, he is not to be avenged, for the slave is his money.” Exodus 21
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Jesus taught that we are to obey the law.

Slavery is now illegal in most places.

That said: the Bible is talking about what people are worth. The Catholic church teaches that all people are priceless in the eyes of God.

One last thing: I’m not up on the Bible. This is a passage from Exodus: is this passage talking about the mistreatment the Jews faced under the Egyptians?
 
St_Redemption said:
This is the hardest thing for me to defend and is a major sticking point for me when I debate people. I just wanted your guys opinion on the matter. How can this be explained? Particularly this passage- “When a man strikes his slave, male or female, with a rod and the slave dies under his hand, he shall be avenged. But if the slave survives a day or two, he is not to be avenged, for the slave is his money.” Exodus 21
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You need to read the whole chapter to understand the position of slavery within Israel, not just one verse taken out of context.

This verse simply means that a slave is not to be badly treated. Hitting a slave with a rod as a disciplinary measure is one thing, but to kill him with the rod is another matter. The first is allowed the second is not. It was meant to keep masters from killing their slaves, which was not their right. Disciplining them was their right.

Haydock’s Catholic Bible Commentary says:

Ver. 21. Money, which purchased the slave. Hence, as he will be punished in some degree, and it is not absolutely certain that the slave died of his wounds, his master shall not be put to death. “They are slaves, (says Seneca, ep. 47,) but they are our fellow-slaves.” We have one common origin, and one master over us all, Job xxxi. 13. (Haydock) — Many nations tolerated the murder of slaves by their masters. But this was contrary to reason and humanity, (Calmet) and condemned by many of the Roman laws. (Christen.)

Let’s compare it to today’s employer/employee. A employer has certain rights and so does the employee. Employees are money to an employer because without them he could not have his company/put out his product/do business. If the worker doesn’t do his job his employer has certain rights. He can demote him, fire him, or reduce his pay, but he can’t kill him. Does that help?
 
Della said:
You need to read the whole chapter to understand the position of slavery within Israel, not just one verse taken out of context.

This verse simply means that a slave is not to be badly treated. Hitting a slave with a rod as a disciplinary measure is one thing, but to kill him with the rod is another matter. The first is allowed the second is not. It was meant to keep masters from killing their slaves, which was not their right. Disciplining them was their right.

Haydock’s Catholic Bible Commentary says:

Ver. 21. Money, which purchased the slave. Hence, as he will be punished in some degree, and it is not absolutely certain that the slave died of his wounds, his master shall not be put to death. “They are slaves, (says Seneca, ep. 47,) but they are our fellow-slaves.” We have one common origin, and one master over us all, Job xxxi. 13. (Haydock) — Many nations tolerated the murder of slaves by their masters. But this was contrary to reason and humanity, (Calmet) and condemned by many of the Roman laws. (Christen.)

Let’s compare it to today’s employer/employee. A employer has certain rights and so does the employee. Employees are money to an employer because without them he could not have his company/put out his product/do business. If the worker doesn’t do his job his employer has certain rights. He can demote him, fire him, or reduce his pay, but he can’t kill him. Does that help?
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Yes it helps a bit. Thank you for the response.

It does need to be put into context as it was a very different time and writing style. It is really unfortunate however that people have used passages like these to justify there enslaving and mistreatment of entire races. I mean, who am I to say what the Bible should be like, but I have to be honest when I say that I wish those passages were not in it.
 
St_Redemption said:
Yes it helps a bit. Thank you for the response.

It does need to be put into context as it was a very different time and writing style. It is really unfortunate however that people have used passages like these to justify there enslaving and mistreatment of entire races. I mean, who am I to say what the Bible should be like, but I have to be honest when I say that I wish those passages were not in it.
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People have justified many things based on their private interpretation of a work they have no business interpreting for themselves. 😉

The Bible is a compilation of many writings, some of which dealt, like this one, with day to day realities of the times. Slavery was not then as we think of it now–at least not in Israel. There were limits on slavery that most other nations did not have. If this had been hidden from the biblical text and later came to light through the work of historians and archeologists it would be much worse, IMHO. Better to have it all out in the open–right there in the text–where it can be examined in its proper context, both cultural and of the time period in question. We have to remember that after Christ came slavery was, little by little abolished. It took time to bring cultures around to seeing that we are all equal in God’s eyes. There are still people in Western culture who seem to think they are above everyone else, that’s a moral failing, but the slavery of the Bible was not that. It was simply how people viewed others outside their own peoples who were captured in war, etc.

Take the story of the soldier (whose named escapes me at the moment) cured of his leprosy when he dipped 7 times in the River Jordan. How did he come to hear of the Prophet Elias? Through an Israeli slave girl who served his wife. His slaves called him “father,” for that’s how masters were thought of in those times–as the head of the household composed of family, servants, and slaves who all looked to him to provide for them. It was something like being in a family business. We don’t think like that now about slavery, but we often do think like that when we are employed in a family business.
 
St_Redemption said:
This is the hardest thing for me to defend and is a major sticking point for me when I debate people. I just wanted your guys opinion on the matter. How can this be explained? Particularly this passage- “When a man strikes his slave, male or female, with a rod and the slave dies under his hand, he shall be avenged. But if the slave survives a day or two, he is not to be avenged, for the slave is his money.” Exodus 21
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What's hard for us to distinguish from the distance of three millennia is how Hebrew society was regulated in contrast to the polytheistic societies surrounding them. In this case, that law was in advance of the laws in slave-holding states in the US, in which the slave-owner held absolute power of life and death. The passage here would have elaborate Talmudic commentary which would give all sorts of modifications and amplifications; it's absolutely vital to recall that the bare text of the Pentateuch is only the bare principle from which rulings were decided. That's the biggest problem with applying the idea that the Bible speaks clearly: no one living under the law of Sinai ever governed on the basis of the written text alone.
 
You may want to check this thread from last month. It goes over the same points from both sides of the argument and from a few different angles. It’s somewhat long and gets heated and points but it is thorough.
 
Thanks Mike, I just read through it.

When I was an agnostic I had a lot of arguments against the faith which I now find ridiculous. But this is one of the few that remain a difficult point for me. It hasn’t shaken my faith, my faith is quite strong as the reasons that I believe in Christ are far too many for this to shake it. But I do, and will always find it troublesome and I will probably forever lack a complete and satisfactory explanation.
 
St_Redemption said:
Thanks Mike, I just read through it.

When I was an agnostic I had a lot of arguments against the faith which I now find ridiculous. But this is one of the few that remain a difficult point for me. It hasn’t shaken my faith, my faith is quite strong as the reasons that I believe in Christ are far too many for this to shake it. But I do, and will always find it troublesome and I will probably forever lack a complete and satisfactory explanation.
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To understand slavery you have to understand 1) how debtor’s prisons worked and, 2) the nature of God’s law about how slaves were to be treated.

If you could not pay your debt you could be dragged off to the judge at the city gate and thrown into debtor’s prison. Debtor’s prisons were a fact of life in ancient times. Even if you came into money while in prison you could not pay your own debt. To add to the embarrassment of defaulting on a debt, someone else had to come to the prison and “redeem” you - purchase the right to take you out of prison.

If a poor family could not redeem a loved one, they could make a deal with a rich man or accept an offer from a rich man for redemption. The debtor in prison could agree to serve as a servant or slave in return for being redeemed. That is how many - not all - but many slaves were purchased, through redemption from debtor’s prison.

The law was crystal clear for a redeemed Hebrew…

When you buy a Hebrew slave, he shall serve six years, and in the seventh he shall go out free, for nothing. (Exodus 21:2)

There is no discussion about this - it was God’s law. This is one of the major reasons why Israel failed so often - over and over they refused to release their slaves.

There were other laws about slaves as pointed out in the original post, but these were controls on slavery. Man had fallen a long way from Adam and Eve in the garden. There was child prostitution, child sacrifice, cannibalism, incest… Life was bad back then. Man was bad. God was slowly establishing laws, bringing man back to where they were before sin entered the world, and preparing them for the Messiah who would accomplish that.

The slavery laws were the first guardrails. They don’t condone slavery, but are God’s first work at controlling it, and eventually eliminating it as we are finally starting to do today.

Blessed John Paul II said that to use someone was the opposite of loving them. This is the fullness of God’s laws about slavery at the time of Moses. The laws at the time of Moses should be seen in a positive light - they were the first controls on an out of control situation.

-Tim-
 
Yes, the law cited from Leviticus is as you cited TimothyH a guardrail not an approbation.

It’s like the law: “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” It didn’t mean that an eye must be given for an eye lost, but rather that no one could kill another person if that person caused them to lose an eye. It put a limit on punishment for crimes so people would not take revenge against one another and kill each other.

Again, it’s like divorce from wives that Moses allowed. God doesn’t condone divorce any more than he condones slavery, but in the hardness of men’s hearts, they’d have killed an unwanted wife if they couldn’t have put her aside through divorce. Jesus referred to this when he was asked about divorce. He was clear that marriage is a sacred bond, but that it was allowed to keep an even worse consequence from happening.

We must keep firmly in mind that the OT was before the age of grace which Christ brought about through his redemptive life, death and resurrection. Men did not have the access to God’s grace as we do now, which is why it is so hard for us to understand how men could be so barbaric and can still be without redemptive grace acting in their lives. This doesn’t mean, of course, that non-Christian societies and people are automatically worse than Christian societies (or in our case post-Christian). The grace of God is at work among all people. Rather, it denotes why you feel so upset about slavery–it’s because for you, raised in an atmosphere in which such times are anathema, it should have been allowed at all in ancient Israel. But you have to understand that that was a time before the grace of God had been poured out on all men. It’s why we must not revert to doing what goes against the dignity that God has given to all men but convert our world to see that God wishes us to see/practice what God has always wanted for us–holiness of life and love for one another.
 
That’s right. Divorce was allowed because men were killing their wives to get out of marriage.

Divorce was a first control placed on what was an out of control situation, for the time being, until Jesus came and re-ordered creation back to the way it was “in the beginning.”

Same deal with slavery laws. They were controls on an out of control situation, temporary, until Jesus came.

-Tim-
 
St_Redemption said:
Thanks guys
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You’re welcome.:tiphat: Of course, all the things that Christ through his Church teaches are sins ought to repel us. Divorce ought to be as repugnant as slavery or killing for revenge. Unfortunately, people enter into marriages for the wrong reasons, so the Church may rule that such unions were invalid, but we should strive to make marriage what God intended it to be. As we should see each other as equals in God’s eyes or restrain our desire for revenge. This is the call to holiness and love.
 
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