I agree. But I don’t think that saying slavery wasn’t so bad back then gets the Bible off the hook in lots of people’s minds for some of its slavery passages. I think the knee-jerk defense of inerrancy has led to a lot of tone deafness in the Evangelical community when it comes to how we talk about the Bible with non-believers.
In Deuteronomy 21:10-14 we basically have God regulating the use of female war captives for sex. Even with the idea that God was just accommodating their awful tribal practices and trying to inject a new level of humanity into their barbaric customs, I completely understand why people don’t get excited about the fact that this was a better situation for the women than the customary getting raped and then sold into slavery. Are all the feminists supposed to rejoice that the girl was granted the honor of marriage to the person who took part in the slaughter of her loved ones, and that she got the privilege of grieving the loss of her old life before she was forced into a marriage that ended as soon as the man got tired of her? I think for many people, when they point out those passages and ask how it fits with God’s word being perfect and inerrant, and when we “defend” God’s word as perfect and inerrant and authoritatively communicating timeless absolute truth (by coming up with some kind of contextualizing that makes it not as bad as you might think), what they hear is us justifying, minimizing, and rationalizing a situation that was clearly wrong on many levels. What amounts to the trafficking of female prisoners of war clearly has no place in the Kingdom, and should be denounced in the strongest terms, but many Christians seem to think that God would be more honored if we make sure everyone knows his word is perfect than if we make sure everyone knows God hates all situations that hurt and debase women, whom he loves with indescribable love.