Your reply is not exactly born out by the evidence.
2 Peter 1:21 “…but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Spirit.”
My goodness. So you believe that this somehow justifies these horrific approvals of slavery? Does the Holy Spirts still have these attitudes towards slavery?
This short article pretty much sums up the way I understand the issue.
“a kidnapper, whether he sells his victim (Hebrew or not) or still has him when caught, shall be put to death”. (Ex. 21:16)
So you agree that Moses contradicts himself.
This article doesn’t even adress the verses I quoted. Moses directly advocates men selling their daughters for pleasure, humans being sold as property and pssed down as inheritance and the permisabilty of beating slaves ith rods. I understnad you wish to side step the issue (as would I) but your article does nothing to address these concerns. At best, you’ve demostrated that the bible contradicts itself.
Not really - it’s not like a slave who was beaten to death would have any use for their freedom, and the slaveowner loses their valuable property that they spent money to purchase by the slave’s death, so in that sense they’re already punished for their sins.
So a moderate financial loss is punishment enough for killing a slave?
Listen, I’m not suggesting that Moses invented the concept of slavery or the concept of sex slavery, or the concept of beating a slave. Nor am I saying that he is the first to explicitly approve of selling one’s daughter for cash or barter. What I am say is that Moses more than anyone should have known that slavery was evil and why it was evil. Moses, were he honestly a prophet of God would have condemned slavery in the strongest terms rather that authoring laws approving of it. That’s what I’m saying. Thus, Moses was a hypocrite.As for ‘selling a female as a slave’ - that’s actually not all that different to the arranged or business-like marriages all women had, in that society and ours up until about 250 years ago when the cult of romantic love first really reared its head.
And our expression ‘rule of thumb’ comes from the rule of law (until surprisingly recent times) that a man was allowed to beat his wife as long as the rod he used wasn’t thicker than his thumb.
Note firstly that the slaveowner keeps her only if she pleases him. A slave who hates his guts is incredibly unlikely to do so, at least not for very long at all. Most men are not really sadists or rapists at heart. So such a one would almost certainly fall out of favour and could be bought back by her family, and usually sooner rather than later.
And note also that if she is mistreated in other ways (if the owner marries her but then neglects her in any way, especially in favour of a second wife) then again she is entitled to recourse.
I’m not saying that Moses was not a product of his times and region…he was. I’m saying that’s all he was, nothing more. So yes, a person of that day and age might have found slavery perfectly acceptable; but what about a person who was a prophet of God; should he be held to no higher standard than the Pharaohs of Egypt?
Firstly, more than moderate - not only do you lose what you paid for that slave, you also lose the profit that their future labour would bring, you lose whatever you have to pay for a new slave to replace them, you lose the difference in profit that an untrained and unfamiliar slave would give as opposed to an experienced and well-trained one …
Why Moses more than anyone? Contrary to the sometimes unbiblical movie depictions of the Exodus, he was certainly never a slave, he was raised as a prince of Egypt, remember?
The notion that murdering your slave is punishment enough seems kind of silly to me. That’s all.
He did rule an entire race of people who had just been released from slavery. I would have assumed that would have had some sort of impact upon his conscience.
Just wondering if people thought Moses was a hypocrite or not. Your answer appears to be: no since there’s nothing wrong with owning humans. I just find it hard to believe that God does not oppose the buying and selling of humans and particularly the sale of ones own daughter to people seeking pleasure. Am I wrong on this? Are Moses’ views on the matter God’s views?
You mean the fact that someone loses tons of money by killing their slave just might be punishment enough …
He ruled nothing - it’s not like he was their king. They frequently disagreed with him on all sorts of issues. For all you know this might have been one of those issues, like divorce. Remember Jesus said Moses (and by extension God) only permitted divorce in the OT ‘for the hardness of men’s hearts’? This might be another thing that was only permitted ‘for the hardness of men’s hearts’.
I never said there’s nothing wrong with slavery. I’m just pointing out that humanity maybe wasn’t ready to hear about the issue at the time, and that God (Christ) wisely didn’t beat His head against a stone wall about it, nor require His prophets to do so.
How do you avoid doing so given Moses’ status as a prophet and his stance on slavery? In regards to the bararity of the people in those days, I’ll agree; however my point is that a true man of God would have stood against these practices rather than stand up for them. Maybe you could argue that he could have remained silent on the practice of slavery, but to specifically endorse it eliminates any credibility he could claim to have had.
We need a time machine.