At what point does a trafficked human cease to be trafficked?
When he is free from the trafficker’s claim of ownership or control.
So the answer is not: “when he is sold,” or “when he has children,” or “when time passes.” A trafficked human remains trafficked as long as the system still treats him as property, captive labor, or transferable human possession.
Applied to slavery: descendants born into slavery were not “untrafficked.” They inherited the condition created by trafficking. The crime was not erased; it was reproduced.
So Exodus 21:16 is not dodged by saying, “Most were born into slavery.” The child born in the kidnapper’s house is still being held under the kidnapper’s regime.
Total misrepresentation: slavery was already “assembled”; it was part of the culture; there was never any chance of preventing it since it was already established. Taken together the prescriptions in Torah declared that slaves were people, potential family.
Then there’s the fact that there were really no other options for enemies captured in battle; it was make them work for you or kill them.
What the Torah does is already steps towards “dismantl[ing] something piece by piece over centuries”.
That’s another misrepresentation. The rule isn’t permission to beat slaves, it’s a recognition that some people will do so and draws a line. The surrounding culture had prohibitions about beating anyone else’s slaves, but masters were generally free to punish slaves as they pleased (an exception being if the slave had family who were free); the Torah is making the significant step of applying the same restrictions to masters. It also went a step farther, requiring that if a master inflicted permanent injury the slave had to be set free.
Some went willingly; some went resignedly; some went unwillingly.
But that wasn’t the issue re that verse from Exodus, which was about whether or not they were kidnapped. Mostly they weren’t.
No it doesn’t. Kidnapping requires abduction. Neither p.o.w.s nor sold tribesmen are abducted.
Sometimes, but not always, and it doesn’t matter for those who were sold by their own chiefs.
It means that Exodus 21:16 does not apply. It didn’t apply to slaves purchased by the Hebrews or born in Israel, or to Israel’s war captives, so it also doesn’t apply to slaves purchased by Transatlantic traders (whether war captives or not), or to slaves born in the US.
Slavery did not always exist, so it must have been established at some point.
(Unless the world was created with slavery already in it, which would be worse for your cause)
Anyway, isn’t this God we’re talking about? Are you seriously saying that God could not have diverted ANE society so that slavery never took place? As apparently happened in some societies?
What “universal, divine moral code”? There is no such thing in scripture except “Love your neighbor as yourself”.
You’re setting up a straw man. Try dealing with the reality.
I would think it was 'way better than being a slave in one of the neighboring nations.
You mean if God started over again with a single man, built up a nation, and acted to move that nation towards thinking in terms of compassion and mercy? Slavery would be forbidden because today’s culture already rejects it, and instead there would likely be rules about paying a living wage, denying health care to employees, etc.
No, we didn’t – slavery was initially recognized as being essentially a form of blasphemy, up until power politics took over.
Your statement was an attempt to imply that Israel invented slavery.
There have never been any technologically developing societies that didn’t have slavery.
How was God to have prevented it? By being a puppet master? That’s what things always seem to come down to, the demand that God just coerce and manipulate people or magically alter them.
The God you seem to want is one that already has a name: the Devil.
The entire Torah shows the sort of God any reasonable person would want, one that takes people where they are and tells them they can be better.
To throw in my $0.02. I think @St.Roymond’s points about the sensus plenior of scripture are spot on. The canon as a whole absolutely rules out slavery in the modern sense.
The Catholic Church is firmly opposed to it:
>Feser (All one in Christ, a Catholic Critique of Racism and Critical Race Theory) writes: “Defenders of racism commonly posit racial differences of a cognitive, affective, or behavioral sortthat they claim are grounded in genetics or other biological factors. Their critics respond that the scientific evidence for such claims is weak. But from the point of view of Catholic theology, to address the issue at this level alone would be superficial. The Church’s condemnation of racism is grounded in considerations about human nature that go deeper than anything that could be either discovered or undermined by biological science. . . . For the Church, the source of our common dignity is primarily to be found, not in the body as understood by science, but in the soul—which, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches “refers to the innermost aspect of man, that which is of greatest value in him, that by which he is most especially in God’s image: ‘soul’ signifies the spiritual principle in man” (363)? Being spiritual, this principle cannot be detected at the genetic or any other biological level of description, and indeed it is not the product of biological processes.”
This goes to show that even if some genetic or cognitive difference was ever found, it is irrelevant. The full nature of man goes well beyond biological reductionism.
This is an important point. What is moral cannot change if morality is objective and built into the nature of things. God also cannot do evil that good may come. If God could regulate and condone indentured servitude in ancient societies, he can do so today. So those wanting to defend these passages and the type of slavery they envision them supporting, we need to come to terms with this.
I’ll give you an analogy: Imagine it was worldwide practice to sacrifice your first two children to the gods in antiquity. Imagine our Holy text accommodates this but God says we must only sacrifice one child, or the deaths must be painless or maybe only that we shouldn’t kill the children but beat them and let them heal and live. Sure, all of these seem like improvements, as terrible as they are, on sacrificing two children but my point is they are all objectively immortal and God does not will such things.
Sp on this basis, I think it is important to distinguish between forms of indentured-servitude or just-title servitude and chattel slavery. The scholastic tradition points out the legitimacy of the former. Thomas Aquinas accepted it but to put his idea of slavery in perspective, a man had the right to marry and have children whether his master permitted it or not. I think he saw slavery as a tragic consequence of original sin and not the ideal or a part of natural law (contra Aristotle) . All men are free by nature but like clothes, just-title servitude has social benefits.
So while I think God can add safeguards or restrictions to cultural evils, what he does will in this instance is just by definition. So if God allowed just-title servitude in the past in the case of wars, it’s hard for me to see how this would be axiomatically evil today if given the same social situations.
I also think slavery comes in many forms and though I would never compare this to the harshness of chattel slavery, economic slavery is very much alive and well.
But those social condition presupposed a nation being shaped by God to be better than its neighbors, a situation which almost by definition won’t repeat.
And the shaping of that nation was also for the purpose of achieving the right parameters for the arrival of Messiah, which has already happened. One might wonder how much of Torah was cast the way it was primarily to set things up just right for Jesus’ ministry.
That sounds quite tortured. Some commentaries state that the steal or have another in your possession is so offensive because it treats a person made in God’s imagine as property. Hard to see how that is not what chattel slavery in the Americas and the Atlantic trade is anything different. Of course, the laws in the Old Testament were often not followed to their ultimate conclusions, but it does show God’s view of the seriousness of the offense, even in ANE times
Yes, there is definitely some accommodation and working from within occurring. I see it in terms of regulating or safeguarding a social evil in a fallen world. As a practical example, it is similar to divorce. Husbands needing to provide a certificate was a safeguard for women. But God in no sense is a fan of divorce or is saying “get divorced.” Genesis 2:4 established marriage as a life-long covenant.
I think if the slavery in the Bible was chattel slavery where the slaves were stripped of their humanity, these passages would be irredeemable. They come off more as indentured servitude or as penal servitude as punishment for a just war. Though OT slaves are described as property, they have rights (even women are listed along side the possessions of men in one of the commandments). Ones stuff does’t have any rights such as: “26 “An owner who hits a male or female slave in the eye and destroys it must let the slave go free to compensate for the eye. **27 **And an owner who knocks out the tooth of a male or female slave must let the slave go free to compensate for the tooth” We also know women had rights despite the patriarchal environment.
I am not sure every passage on slavery in the OT is salvageable but when we distinguish it from what most moderns see as slavery, it becomes easier to digest. I also never have felt the need to understand every law or rule in the OT as is God was ordering it as some timeless truth up on high.
Slavery is just the tip of the iceberg. There is promiscuity, Bigamy (and hareems), trickery, deception, downright lies and self interest as far back as the Patriarchs. At what point are we goin to claim Scripture as a blueprint of God’s way of living? The truth is what God says and what people do , are rarely the same. Now if you want to blame that on Adam, then: Good luck. The truth is that God has never controlled us or forced His will despite the Biblical Narrative commentaries.
We can argue the humanitarian, or cruelty of slavery until the cows come home, but it happened whether God instigated it or not. Perhaps people are trying too hard to follow Scriptural examples and missing the teaching underneath?
Yep! The only approach to scriptures that suffers (and rightly so) under this criticism is the fundamentalist lens that tries to force the whole thing into a mere decodable, flat, and timeless rulebook for life.
We can note that slavery persisted in Christendom and among Jews up through the mid 1800s. There were Jewish slave owners in the US South and others in the slave trade, and this enjoyed support among many rabbis (typically also of the southern US). They deployed similar justifications as presented by those citing the Torah. If we accept the notion that abolition of slavery was the divine goal from early Hebrew times, then it sure was a heck of a ridiculously slow process to come to fruition. Or, perhaps we could suspect that maybe the opinions captured by humans in the text incorrectly attributed the cultural norm of the time as what God expressly wanted. Or, one could say, “I don’t know why something clearly at odds with my understanding of morality today was codified in the text”. I understand why one would feel a need to justify the text but perhaps the explanations offered don’t really jibe with what we understand today.
Yes, but the question here is how do the regulations and customs around slavery in the Old Testament compare to the regulations and customs around slavery in the Ancient Near East as a whole at the time? As I understand it, they were at least some improvement, so it would represent a moving of the dial towards the more compassionate and egalitarian norms of today.
“Assisting in its assembly” would imply that the norms and regulations in the Bible were worse than those of the nations around them. I’d be very surprised if that were actually the case.
It is interesting to think that Jesus was concerned, not with changing laws or rules, but rather changing people‘s heart. I wonder if the rules set down in Exodus while guidelines for the theocratic state that existed in that culture, are more geared towards looking changing people’s hearts as well.
It seems hard to get away from looking at the Bible as being a rule book to follow.
I guess the problem here is to identify what are God’s rules and what are human ones.
If people are going to treat all Scripture as being somehow God authenticated, that becomes almost impossible.
I cannot agree more. One thing I’ve noticed from apologetics prior was that there always seemed to be some clever explanation to explain away whatever little quip existed from these older texts, be it God allowing Job to face pain or for God to allow the deaths of the firstborn in Egypt.
However, none of these explanations were really satisfying to me because they weren’t an overarching analysis but rather a point-by-point argument. In other words, I didn’t want (and I’m not at all trying to compare these arguments above to it but I don’t have a better way to word it) the flat-Earth treatment where every inconsistency had its own explanation that couldn’t apply to others in a neat manner, but rather a single, coherent scientific theory on how to look at the whole situation (changing daylight hours, seasons, atmosphere, etc) that fits neatly with what we know (which in this case is the sphere theory). I’m not saying that this one-by-one treatment exists for all apologetics, but I think for the most part an unfortunate number of people I’ve tried to read resources from will try to use this technique rather than informed ones.
What I would like to ask for is if we have such a theory for this situation: we know that the Old Testament had mentions of slavery. We shouldn’t need to make excuses as to why this slavery was better than that slavery. Rather, we should explain why this was included in the same text that describes a God dying for the sins of all people, be it slaves or slave masters. Personally, I like the explanation that (the Israelites being the pains in God’s rear they were) the Israelites decided to justify their actions as though God had commanded them, similar to perhaps what we could expect from other ANE societies (I have a limited knowledge of ANE societies but from what I do know from a basic humanities class, many human sacrifices and other unethical activities were done in the name of gods).
Despite what the Israelites thought of God, we know that Jesus was different from many of these. From what I understand, Israel thought that the Messiah would come to overthrow their enemies and reunite the Kingdom of Israel. However, it appears that their idea of a militaristic God was in direct contradiction to the moral-teaching and self-sacrificing God that Christians now believe in.