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Biblical slavery: does regulation mean approval?

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Here’s an interesting angle on the debate about biblical slavery. Just because God regulated a practice in the Old Testament, this argument states, that doesn’t mean that God approved.

I’m responding to a recent article, Did God Condone Slavery? by Amy Hall of the Stand to Reason ministry. She notes that Jesus sometimes updates the Old Testament with new moral rules because Israelite society back in the Old Testament was immature. Here is Matthew 19:3–6.

Some Pharisees came to [Jesus] to test him. They asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?”

“Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? … Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”

Biblical marriage

Be careful—biblical marriage is polygamy. Abraham had two wives, Jacob had four, and Solomon had 700. God said to David, “I gave your master’s house to you, and your master’s wives into your arms. I gave you all Israel and Judah. And if all this had been too little, I would have given you even more” (2 Samuel 12:8). There are a few caveats, but in general God is fine with polygamy.

This appeal to a maturing society is just a transparent attempt to paper over the Bible’s embarrassing contradictions.

Paul is surprisingly unsupportive of what evangelicals call “natural marriage”:

It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman…. To the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I do (1 Corinthians 7:1, 8).

If you want to excuse the Bible because it’s a reflection of the culture of the time, I can understand that. But then don’t insist that the Old Testament’s bluster about homosexuality or human rights or chastity are binding today.

Jesus rationalizes his new divorce rule

Hall continues the passage from Matthew:

“Why then,” [the Pharisees] asked, “did Moses command that a man give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away?” [a reference to Deuteronomy 24:1]

Jesus replied, “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning.” 

So God gave Moses a permissive rule about divorce and Jesus overrode that with a stricter rule (only the wife’s adultery permits divorce—see Matt. 19:9). Now show me the parallel with slavery. God legislated slavery for life (Leviticus 25:44–6) and gave the rules for beating slaves (Exodus 21:20–21), but where does Jesus override that with new rules? Your argument is that the Bible can change its rules, but you haven’t shown that it did in the case of slavery.

The Bible is contradictory

And consider the consequence of your argument. It shows that the Bible is contradictory. I agree, but do you really want to go there? Christianity from its birth in Judaism to the present continues to evolve. God gives the rules for divorce in Deuteronomy, and more than 500 years later in Matthew, Jesus gives different rules. This is how manmade religions work. It’s not surprising that a series of books documenting changing ideas over centuries don’t harmonize.

If God gave different rules for slavery back then, Jesus tells us, that was because the people were hard hearted. Does the new rule for divorce mean that the Jews have matured? But why would God need to wait for the Israelites to become mature enough to accept this new message? If they could handle the Moses version of divorce, they could handle the Jesus version. To take another example, God didn’t dribble out the Ten Commandments because they were too difficult for the Israelites to handle. They went live on one day, and the death penalty was the punishment for breaking most of them. There was no need for a centuries-long grace period.

Society must mature?

This appeal to a maturing society is just a transparent attempt to paper over the Bible’s embarrassing contradictions. Teleport an Israelite baby from 3000 years ago to the present, in a Western society, and it would adapt to Western morality like a modern baby in that society. Or imagine the reverse: God takes Western morality and imposes those rules on the Israelites of 3000 years ago like he did with the Ten Commandments. God never said that society needed to mature—he imposed rules, and the Israelites had to deal with them. Those rules could be Iron Age morality or, just as easily, modern Western morality.

Related: Contradictions in the Bible? No, It’s Progressive Revelation!

Consider the structure of this argument. Divorce is defined in an embarrassing way in the Old Testament, but luckily it’s redefined in the New. Slavery is also embarrassing in the Old Testament. That’s not corrected in the New, but the divorce precedent provides an opening to slip in some modern morality as a correction.

The first problem is that this opens the door for anyone to reinterpret the Bible to suit their fancy. The Bible becomes a mirror, and today’s 45,000 denominations of Christianity show the consequence of that.

Second, if you’re going to impose modern society’s view of slavery onto the Bible, why stop there? Why not apply modern society’s acceptance of same-sex marriage or abortion on the Bible, too?

Continued in part 2.

The holocaust happened and
presented an incontrovertible proof
that Yahweh is dead.
Even if he had existed once,
he too perished in the gas chambers.
— Vitaly Malkin

Biblical Slavery, Part 2

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Slavery and the Bible--doesn't make God look very good(See Part 1 of this discussion.)
Let’s continue this critique of a podcast titled “Sex, Lies & Leviticus” from apologetics.com that responded to Dan Savage’s criticism of the Bible. Italicized arguments are my paraphrases from the podcast.
“Slavery” in the Bible is simply not the same thing as slavery in the United States. For example, consider Ex. 21:16:

Anyone who kidnaps someone is to be put to death, whether the victim has been sold or is still in the kidnapper’s possession.

See? A rejection of slavery, right there in the Bible.
Nope. This refers just to Jews kidnapping Jews—see the NET Bible comment on this verse. The Bible makes a clear distinction between (1) Jews as slaves and (2) members of other tribes as slaves.
(Why is the atheist educating the Christians about their own book? Don’t they know about these two aspects of biblical slavery?)
“We have a very different view here of what slavery was [comparing American slavery with biblical slavery] and you can see that it’s heavily regulated.”
Yes, slavery was regulated, just like commerce. And, like commerce, slavery was kosher from God’s standpoint.
And yes, Africans enslaved in America was different than Jews enslaved by Jews (but we’ll get to that).
On the podcast, Brooks read the rules for treating Jewish slaves from Exodus 21:2–8. A Jewish slave must be freed after six years; any wife or children that came with him would be free to go, but if the master buys him a wife, she remains behind; if the slave can’t bear to part with his wife, he can remain if he promises to be a slave for life; there are special rules for how to sell your daughter into slavery; and so on.
This is rather like indentured servitude used in the American colonies, the contract by which someone would be transported to the New World in return for five or so years of work. These were European servants working for European masters.
But, incredibly, the discussion didn’t address the elephant in the room: the biblical rules for non-Jewish slavery. This conversation went on for an hour, so it’s not like they didn’t have time. Are they really unaware of this? Or was this a deliberate deception on their part, a wager on the ignorance of their audience?
Well, if they won’t discuss it, I’ll be happy to. Let’s wallow in the Bible’s radically pro-slavery message.

Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property. You can bequeath them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life, but you must not rule over your fellow Israelites [harshly]. (Lev. 25:44–46)

This doesn’t look like indentured servitude, Toto. Indeed, this looks very much like the slavery for life (chattel slavery) in America that the speakers were so frantic to distance themselves from. The Jews treated the folks from their own tribe better than “those people” from other tribes. Sound familiar?
Much is made in the Old Testament of how God rescued the Jews from slavery in Egypt, but slavery was a terrible burden only when applied to us. When it’s applied to them, that’s a very different story. In fact, the Jews enslaved the tribe of the Gibeonites as soon as they returned to Canaan after the exodus from Egypt (Joshua 9:23).
More biblical advice on slavery:

When you march up to attack a city, make its people an offer of peace. If they accept and open their gates, all the people in it shall be subject to forced labor and shall work for you. (Deut. 20:10–11)

You could argue that slavery is better than being killed, which the following verses make clear is the alternative. Indeed, the hosts make points like this—slavery is better than dying, slavery is the merciful alternative, Old Testament rules were kinder than those in some neighboring countries, and so on.
But I gotta wonder—is this is the best that can be said about the greatest moral document in history, that it wasn’t as bad as the morality in surrounding countries? This is the best an omniscient, omni-benevolent God can do?
Speaking of forced labor, this is how King Solomon worked his famous mines (1 Kings 9:20–22).
Then there’s the category of sex slaves (or sex workers or concubines or whatever):

Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man. (Num. 31:17–18; see also Deut. 21:11)

And no slave manual would be complete without a rule for how to beat slaves correctly:

If a man beats his male or female slave with a rod and the slave dies as a direct result, he must be punished, but he is not to be punished if the slave gets up after a day or two, since the slave is his property. (Ex. 21:20–21)

Again, this sounds very much like slavery in America. These biblical laws sound similar to the laws governing the practice of slavery in America. Some of these also protected slaves. For example, the 1739 South Carolina code fined someone who killed a slave £700 and limited the number of hours that slaves could be made to work. The 1833 Alabama law code dictated, “Any person who shall maliciously dismember or deprive a slave of life, shall suffer such punishment as would be inflicted in case the like offence had been committed on a free white person.”
Despite the hosts’ protestations to the contrary, American slavery and biblical slavery were quite similar institutions.
Continue reading: Part 3

He that will not reason is a bigot;
he that cannot reason is a fool;
he that dares not reason is a slave.
— William Drummond

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