Were the Jews actually slaves in Egypt?

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DictatorCzar

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So I’ve been researching Egyptian history and watching Egyptian history related videos. So they said they weren’t slaves at all, but laborers. The people who built the pyramids and everything were just paid to do so, and they were buried. They had luxuries after their work was done. But I’m not sure about the Jews though, they said the Jews were also laborers. It’s just Judeo Christian traditions that made it up. Because the Bible says the Jews were slaves, but apparently, they said the Egyptian texts doesn’t say so.
 
Would also make sense that Egyptian texts would say that despite what bible says just saying
 
DictatorCzar said:
They had luxuries after their work was done.
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Not really. We know the pyriamid builders weren’t slaves, but they certainly didn’t have “luxuries”. The most they got was a payment of beer and some cucumbers.
 
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The pyramids were built long, long before the Hebrews were in Egypt.
 
I don’t mean that. I’m talking about what those historians are saying. I believe in the Bible. I didn’t mean it to put it that way.
 
The Hebrews were forced to labor, and were maltreated. At one point the Pharoh ordered their boy babies to be killed.
Does it really matter what word the Egyptians used to describe what was done to them?
 
Can you say agenda? This sounds exactly like every other national and cultural denial of inhumanity and genocide.
 
@DictatorCzar there are historians who doubt the historical account of the Exodus. They say there is no evidence that thousands of Hebrews lived and left Egypt crossing the Sinai Peninsula into Canaan.

However, there is no doubt that Egypt did have at various points an influx of Semitic people. There is also no doubt that Egypt had classes of people we would consider slaves. Slavery was widespread in the ancient world, but it was not the same as plantation slavery in the Southern United States.
 
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The Hebrews may have been forced into labor, or have taken on the “jobs” that no one else wanted to do (sort of like Germany’s ‘Gastarbeitern’ - “guest workers”), but it’s also important to remember that Egypt didn’t really need a slave workforce; it had it’s own native workforce every year during the season of Inundation. Roughly a four-month long season.

When the Nile would flood, farmlands were covered with water. Thousands of able-bodied people were essentially out of a job for 1/3 of the year. Instant work force. They were even paid (apparently, in leeks and beer, if one goes by the ‘reports of the time’ found in texts).

I’m sure Egypt had Hebrew slaves, but I’m not overly convinced that their lives were quite as bad and oppressive as some historians seem to portray it. From many accounts, slaves were not necessarily mistreated because of their status.
 
In Biblical Hebrew, one word means both slave and servant.
Unless a person knows and understands Biblical Hebrew, the translation of this word is bound to cause a lot of confusion.
 
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I think it’s also important to remember that ancient slavery was not exactly the same as the slavery of the American South.

Yes, they were often treated as property and not treated as human, but it was much easier for a slave to win/earn their freedom and depending on their roles, they sometimes had a lot of freedom.

And as the previous poster mentions, in ancient Hebrew they use one word for servant and slave, therefore there are MANY levels of “slavery” in the Old Testament
 
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A leather scroll dating to the time of Ramesses II (1303 BCE-1213 BCE) describes a close account of brick-making apparently by enslaved prisoners of the wars in Canaan and Syria, which sounds very much like the biblical account. The scroll describes 40 taskmasters, each with a daily target of 2,000 bricks.
The Merenptah stele, bears the first mention of an entity called Israel in Canaan. It is robustly dated at 1210 BCE.
 
The inscriptions on ancient artefacts, and the artwork, tell us a lot about the ancient world. There is one Egyptian frieze showing the circumcision of Jewish adults. Sometime after this, circumcision was changed to the custom of circumcising 8 day old babies.

@edwest211, it would be prudent to differentiate between blog type web pages and valid historical pages. It would also be prudent to differentiate between what we know historically and what we cannot verify historically.

The issue of Exodus is separate to the issue of Jewish and other nationalities being slaves in Ancient Egypt.
Not a great idea to conflate the two. This thread is not about Exodus. It is about slavery.
 
ltwin said:
Slavery was widespread in the ancient world, but it was not the same as plantation slavery in the Southern United States.
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This.
Most of think of the American chattel slavery when we hear the word “slavery”, but in fact, slavery looked different and had different rules and regulations depending on where and when you were.
In some parts of the world, slaves got paid, but weren’t allowed to leave.
Or they didn’t get paid, but could opt for freedom at various time points during their slavery .
Or a person could sell themselves into slavery for an economic boost (sometimes poor but educated Greeks sold themselves as tutors to wealthy Roman families)
 
0Scarlett_nidiyilii said:
slavery looked different and had different rules and regulations depending on where and when you were.
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The same is true of African slavery in North and South America in the modern period. In Brazil, for example, manumission was an established practice, and it was not uncommon for freed slaves, particularly women, to become slave owners in their turn. In the eighteenth century, there were places in Brazil where more than half of all slave owners were themselves classified as “black or mixed race”.
 
The Hebrews were not building the pyramids. They were building stuff in the cities of Pi-Rameses and Pi-Atum.

The interesting thing for Egyptologists is that we are talking about a period when land was going from being owned mostly by individual farmers, tradesmen, etc., to being owned mostly by Pharaoh, the temples, and the nomarchs. Any group that had managed to hold onto fertile lands was under a lot of pressure. The stories of how Joseph got people to turn over land and become Pharaoh’s tenants in exchange for getting fed, and the story of how Pharaoh tried to kill all the potential male Hebrew heirs of the farms of Goshen, fit into this milieu.

There were forced labor projects, and at other times than the inundations. Bad pharaohs did that, and they did it to those they saw as enemies.
 
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ltwin said:
Slavery was widespread in the ancient world, but it was not the same as plantation slavery in the Southern United States.
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Slavery was never fun: but customs varied widely. In some times and places being a slave meant they worked you to death over a few years. In others a slave could own slaves of his own.
GiftofMercy said:
In Biblical Hebrew, one word means both slave and servant.
Unless a person knows and understands Biblical Hebrew, the translation of this word is bound to cause a lot of confusion.
Click to expand...
This also.
 
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