Giving the moon the finger

It seems whenever the question of slavery and the Bible comes up, everybody starts to get their fundie on. Even people usually far-removed from the fundamentalist and evangelical subcultures start using some of its more dubious tools -- like the vivisection-by-concordance approach to Bible study. Yes, concordances are helpful, and this can be a fruitful approach, but only if studying the index is not seen as the equivalent of, or a substitute for, reading the book.

In this case, actually, you'd be better served by reading the Table of Contents than by reading the index: "Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Num ..."

Wait, what was that second one?

Right, Exodus. The title of that book is the first and last biblical word on the subject of slavery.

Exodus definitively establishes the motif and the trajectory. Liberation starts here. But it does not end here.

The Exodus story provides refrains that echo all through scripture: "You were once slaves in Egypt," "the Lord brought you out of slavery in Egypt." This refrain is the basis for much that follows in the law and the prophets. You were once slaves in Egypt, so we're going to practice liberation every Sabbath year and every Jubilee. You were once slaves in Egypt, so breaking every yoke is what religion is all about. And further along this trajectory, You were once slaves in Egypt but I brought you out, so you're going to love your neighbor and even love your enemies.

The Exodus is, to borrow an image from Buddhism, a finger pointing at the moon. Measuring the length and the limits of that finger misses the, well, point. Woolman and Wilberforce understood this. Martin Luther King Jr. understood this. Bob Marley understood this.

So if you've an interest in this subject -- what the Bible says about slavery -- you need to do more than study the finger. You need to look where it's pointing.

Comments

[David Newgreen]

Not to sound needlessly contrary, but Exodus also contains a decent sized chunk of rules regarding the divinely mandated rules regarding slavery, and those rules don't add up to anything resembling an abolitionist position.

Now I'm sure there's a perfectly reasonably explanation for this, but it seems to me you can't read Exodus as pointing at an anti-slavery position when the first thing God mentions after the Ten Commandments is how hard you're allowed to beat your slaves (answer? Not so hard that it kills them that day. Lingering deaths are fine!)

[ako]

Yes, concordances are helpful, and this can be a fruitful approach, but only if studying the index is not seen as the equivalent of, or a substitute for, reading the book.

Right, Exodus. The title of that book is the first and last biblical word on the subject of slavery.

So studying the table of context is a substitute for reading the book? Because reading the whole of Exodus, including Exodus 21, doesn't exactly suggest that God condemns slavery, and the rest is just detail. Frankly, the Bible does present rather an ambiguous picture about slavery, following a liberation story with rules about how to sell your daughter. Or asking to set the oppressed free in one spot, and telling slaves to obey their masters in another. It's not being unfair, or a fundie, or an illiteralist to notice all the words, and expect that they all mean something.

[Joshua]

Yeah, I thought those guys in the last L.B. comment thread were way off base. Even if some people justify all kinds of heinous things with their "literal" reading... well, nobody's more critical of "literal" readings than you, so I don't see what they thought they were proving.

[Ian]

Fred's right that possibly the most important theme in the entire Old Testament is that "the Lord brought you out of slavery in Egypt" and that this perspective should make you see others differently. Ako is right to point out that there are passages which suggest that God was OK with Israelites keeping people in slavery.

That tension in the book of Exodus starts to fade, I think, in the context of the Bible as a whole. One key point we get to later in the Bible is the idea that God is going to start treating all people the way he had treated the chosen people. (In Isaiah, "My house shall be a house of prayer for all people," etc.) God's making the Israelites free (or at least the male Israelites) gave them obligations to each other; it's perverse to oppress someone who is as free in the eyes of God as you are. As we approach the idea that God wants to liberate all people from sin, it gets increasingly hard to justify any claim of superiority over anyone else.

No, this doesn't solve all problems of interpretation, but this arc seems to me to be the heart of the Bible's ethical message.

[damnedyankee]

Slaveholders didn't ban "Go Down Moses" because they didn't like the tune.

[Ebonmuse]

On the other hand, let's not forget that Jubilee was only for Israelite slaves only. Foreign slaves were explicitly exempted from being freed during Jubilee (Leviticus 25:39-46), and the Bible informs its readers that "they shall be your bondmen forever".

The thing is, the message of Exodus is indeed as Fred would have it - freedom in service to God, joyous liberation from a cruel world, and so on. But the text is clear that that message was only for Israel. They were, after all, the chosen people, the ones for whom God showed special favor and whom he loved better than every other nation on earth. The idea of applying the Bible's decrees to humanity as a whole, and not just specifically to the chosen people for whom it was intended, is something that didn't come about until much later and frankly is not supported by scripture.

[Wally Hartshorn]

The Bible condemns slavery OF the Jews, but not slavery BY the Jews. At one point, Paul instructs a slave who ran away to return to his master, and Paul includes a letter to the master urging him to treat the slave well. That doesn't sound like a condemnation of slavery to me.

One key point we get to later in the Bible is the idea that God is going to start treating all people the way he had treated the chosen people. (In Isaiah, "My house shall be a house of prayer for all people," etc.) God's making the Israelites free (or at least the male Israelites) gave them obligations to each other; it's perverse to oppress someone who is as free in the eyes of God as you are. As we approach the idea that God wants to liberate all people from sin, it gets increasingly hard to justify any claim of superiority over anyone else.

Interesting interpretation. That does raise rather a large question, though. Namely, considering that God's fairly willing, for the most part, to give commands that a lot of people won't and don't obey (and even punish them for not obeying it) why the gradualist approach to slavery? You don't see God going "Thou shall not worship the Gods of the Cannanites" and later adding on passages indicating that he doesn't really want people worshiping other gods at all. Why is slavery the special case?

I saw the argument that early Christians couldn't demand the abolition of slavery without declaring themselves in open revolt against Rome, but why not send a revelation to Paul or someone that it's un-Christian to hold slaves? If every Christian felt it was their obligation (not just an act of charity) to free all slaves they held, and not take new ones, the history of slavery would be a lot different. For that matter, why not tell Moses? Or Abraham? Proclaim that it is disobedient to God to take people as slaves?

Thanks for getting my point, though. It seems as shallow to point to Isaiah 58 without reading Exodus 21 as it does to do the reverse.

[ako]

That was me, sorry.

[Ian]

Ebonmuse: The text of Exodus is indeed quite clear in saying that it is Israel being saved -- salvation for them and destruction for their neighbors. As the Bible goes on, though, applying the Bible's decrees to humanity as a whole becomes a persistent theme.

Isaiah 56:6-7 "also the sons of the foreigner who join themselves to the Lord...even them I will bring to my holy mountain...for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations"
Isaiah 49:22 "behold I will lift up my hand in an oath to the nations, and set up a standard for the peoples..."
Luke 2:10 "behold I bring you good tidings of great joy which will be to all people"
Galatians 3:28 "there is neither Jew nor Greek...for you are all one in Christ Jesus."
Revelations 7:9 "I looked and behold a great multitude which no one could number, of all nations, tribes, peoples, and tongues, standing before the throne..."

Most straightforwardly,
Romans 4:29 "or is he the God of the Jews only? is he not also the God of the Gentiles?"

I don't think I've fallen into the RTB habit of prooftexting. I hope that this is a representative sample of passages on this topic, taken in context. I don't want to deny that the xenophobia of the Pentateuch lingers on into the New Testament, but Paul in particular is crystal clear that God has something to say to all people.

For once, yay Paul!

[Ian]

ako: You're quite right that Christians can't just wish away parts of the Bible we don't like, so yes, Exodus 21 isn't something I can just wallpaper over with my favorite bits of Isaiah.

The Bible seems to me to take a gradualist approach to a lot of things. I think you're right to say that gradualism can't be explained as God going easy on the old-timers seeing as there's nothing easy about what he did demand of them.

I think the RTC idea of the Bible's being inspired in the sense that God himself wrote every word is the problem here. To get out of the problem you've posed, I'd need to tell a story about how God reveals herself through history, with each Biblical writer drawing inspiration at least partly from the teaching and example of those who came before.

Why God would correct justifications of slavery by slow consciousness raising rather than immediate revolutionary change is the real mystery. It doesn't seem right. As Isaiah said, "oh that you would rend the heavens and come down."

[the opoponax]

@ ako:

well then the question there is whether the Bible and the Christian establishment has always been perceptive to messages from God they may not have wanted to hear. how can we know what God has done or not done, what her intentions are or are not, what messengers she has or has not sent?

i mean, what if God really did that, except it turned out that none of the establishment really much cared, and thus the message was never heard? i think it's important to remember that the books of the bible were chosen by committee, and that there are plenty of other cases of the people who came to power in the church didn't always take spiritual matters to heart. what we have now wasn't just handed down on high, as some would put it. and there are lots of places even in the bible where you can point to a certain idea and watch it get shot right down by the early church, or Paul, or whoever.

of course that begs the question of the omnipotence of God -- if God is omnipotent, then she's not going to be at the mercy of sending a messenger that nobody heeds.

[nieciedo]

While it is true that the laws of the Sabbatical year and the Jubilee applied only to Israelites (eved ivri) reduced to temporary indentured servitude because of debt, there are many laws that applied to the eved kena'ani, the non-Israelite slave.

Exodus 21:20-21:
When a man strikes his slave, male or female, with a rod, and he dies there and then, he must be avenged. But if he survives a day or two, he is not to be avenged, since he is the other's property.

While people are permitted to own slaves, the slaves are nonetheless human beings. They are not chattel. No one has the right to kill a slave simply because he owns him. The Torah allows an owner to discipline slaves and if such corporal punishment leads indirectly to fatal complications, the master is not liable. However, if the master directly kills his slave, he is just as guilty of murder as if he had killed a free-born Israelite citizen.

Exodus 21:26-27
When a man strikes the eye of his slave, male or female, and destroys it, he shall let him go free on account of his eye. If he knocks out the tooth of his slave, male or female, he shall let him go free on account of his tooth.

Not only may an owner not kill his slave, he cannot even inflict any permanent mutilation or disfigurement.

This may not seem like much from our perspective, but if you consider the time and place where these texts were written it becomes revolutionary. Slaves were not treated as human being in ancient society. Slaves in the antebellum south were treated far better than slaves in Egypt, Babylonia, Greece, or Rome. Ancient slave owners could do whatever they wanted with their slaves: torture them, rape them, kill them for sport. The Romans elevated this to an art form.

Yet the Torah commands Israelites to treat their slaves as human beings. All oppressive regimes in history have been founded on the dehumanization of the enemy, the Other. Slave-owning societies justify their economic exploitation of unfree labor on the inferiority and subhuman quality of their slaves. The Torah rejects that, and forces the slave owner to remember that even his slave is created in the image of God and must be treated with a minimum of respect.

You cannot make something out of nothing. Utopian reformers often find that it is rather difficult to jump instantly from reality into the perfect society of their dreams. The real world must be taken into account and what current exists and the prevailing tendencies within it must be harnessed and shaped toward the desired goal. Trying to force human society into an ideal structure will lead to chaos, anarchy, and often enough tyranny.

Slavery was normal in the ancient world. It was part of the expected order of society. To ban it outright would have been unworkable: no one would follow such a rule and everyone would be the worse off. Instead, the Torah issues laws that humanize slavery and undermine its justification, which gives later generations the motivation to further reform the institution until it no longer exists.

[the opoponax]

"Slaves in the antebellum south were treated far better than slaves in Egypt, Babylonia, Greece, or Rome. Ancient slave owners could do whatever they wanted with their slaves: torture them, rape them, kill them for sport."

not to head off on too much of a tangent, but do you have a cite on this? i'd always heard that slavery in the US south was far more barbaric than slavery had been in ancient times, and that ancient world slaves were not treated like chattel. especially in that most slaves were themselves prisoners of war and that any children they had would be born free -- you didn't have this "breeding for the market" that came about later, and you didn't have whole societies in a certain part of the world routinely kidnapped and enslaved for mere profit. not to mention that without a racial divide, it would have been easier for a freed slave to assimilate back into free society.

and of course, American slaveholders had every right to torture, rape, or kill their slaves for sport.

though i have to say i don't have the facts on this, i'm just repeating back things i've heard. i'd be curious to find out what conditions were like under slavery in different times and places.

[Tehanu]

I seem to remember reading somewhere that slavery was actually an improvement over what came before -- namely, just slaughtering everybody in the enemy's village. And it was the economic basis of pretty much every ancient civilization. Nobody hates slavery more than I do, but I don't want to fall into the trap of saying that people 2000 years ago should have had the same moral standards I do.

[rob]

"Slaves in the antebellum south were treated far better than slaves in Egypt, Babylonia, Greece, or Rome."

Yeah, definitely not buying it. Slaves in the U.S. were regularly mutilated for attempting to run away or other perceived "crimes." That slaves were the sexual property of their masters was perfectly accepted. Whole shiploads of slaves, chained to each other, were dumped overboard so that slave traders could avoid fines. Any progress made in these areas was due to the gradual recognition that slavery as it existed at the time was untenable in the face of the coming industrial revolution, for reasons pointed out by McJulie in the last LB thread. There probably have been slave cultures that were more or less humane, as humane as slaveholding can be, but I doubt the United States would be at or near the cream of the crop.

[the opoponax]

not to mention, of course, that in the greek and roman world, slaves could own (a certain degree of) property and conduct private business, and slaves were generally considered humans with something close to bodily autonomy. some slaves even escaped actual work for the master by running their own businesses and paying the master a tax. there were legal codes that regulated the treatment of slaves. in the later Roman empire, a slave could even take his master to court.

contrast this with the US south, where slaves were not even considered entirely human.

[hf]

Fred's position would make sense for someone who didn't believe in a personal God (one who could "force" humans all s/he wanted). Not so much for a theist.

[David Newgreen]

My issue is that even taking Exodus 21 as more humane than normal as far as slavery goes - it comes directly after the Ten Commandments. God doesn't say "Thou shalt not kill in a particularly painful way" or "Thou shalt not steal really valuable things"; so why the half measures with slavery?
Slavery is an interesting issue because it was so totally accepted by humans for thousands of years until about two hundred years ago when, in the space of a generation or two, it became a total abomination in the western world. I don't normally condemn ancient sources for acceptance of slavery, because it was such an omnipresent fact of live in those societies. But I would hope that a god could be held to higher standards. If ninteenth century abolitionists could stand up to a slave holding society and say "This is wrong, this is unacceptable no matter the details", why doesn't God do the same? Surely a group of rebelious slaves would be at least willing to consider a ban on slavery.

[Ben Martin]

As for the gradualism theory... It would be internally consistent for something to be tolerated in the Mosaic covenant, but either condemned outright or frowned on later.

Some examples:

(1) Divorce. Check out Jesus' comment on that in Matthew 19. The Pharisees want to know why, if divorce is so bad, it was permitted. His response is that "Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it has not been so."

(2) Another example is polygamy. This is a particularly interesting example for all of those of you looking for where the Bible explicitly condemns slavery. The Bible never explicitly says, "Don't marry more than one person" either, and yet I don't think too many people today think that the New Testament suggests that one should do that (although I could be wrong about that, I suppose). Part of the reason is because there's a lot of implicit criticism of the practice - see again the Matthew 19 passage. Again, something permitted in the Mosaic covenant but not permitted later.

(3) And of course there's examples of things that are never explicitly condemned under the Law that are denounced in the New Testament, such as the infamous example of lust.

(Some things from the Mosaic covenant are loosened up or dropped in the New Testament, like all the cultural rules, and some things are made more strict, like the above examples.)

Now, I suppose you could complain about God's methodology or about the logical coherence of Scriptures or some such, but you can't argue that a changing position on slavery would be a priori internally inconsistent, I think, as those examples show.

[Ben Martin]

And incidentally, there definitely seems to be a tension in the Bible between theory and practice, as some of you are saying. I'm inclined to say though that this sort of thing seems to be a deliberate choice. Again, I point to Matthew 19 where Jesus explicitly calls out a point where that is so. You also have Paul's writings. Paul is pretty clear that "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus" - that passage is just one example of that sort of thing. He implicitly suggests problems with slavery in several places, such as I Corinthians 7 and Philemon (I know some of you don't share that particular reading of Philemon, but nonetheless). There's a similar issue with gender and family in Paul's writings. Paul lays out the theory one way, but then is careful to not create some sort of radical revolution in the process. It certainly doesn't fit modern sensibilities - it certainly doesn't fit MY sensibilities, at least - but it seems to be deliberate. The only way to get around it I see is to either outright assume bad faith on Paul's part or to assume Paul is a all-talk windbag. I suppose those are possible, but I think there are also more interesting things there if you don't just automatically assume one of those explanations. And, anyway, that might get around the problem of Paul, but you still have Jesus' take (at least as represented by the evangelist) on the same sort of tension in the Old Testament. Again, I don't think it's easy to explain why there is a deliberate choice to allow that sort of tension, but I think there's good reason to to think it is a deliberate choice.

[Stu]

Can we just take a moment and say that, whatever the hell the Bible says, slavery is wrong, and that whatever the Bible says, we're not going to accept it going forward?

Rather than trying to justify it or criticize the Bible for not condemning it or whatever it is is being done here?

[Ian]

Agreed, slavery is wrong. Agreed, slavery would be wrong even if the Bible unequivocally said that slavery was OK.

I think that talking about the Bible's position(s) on slavery is important because it tells us something about whether or not the Bible is worth reading.

[David Newgreen]

There is also the fact that if you claims to be a Christian, and that your's morality is influenced by one's Christianity, then if you take a position that X is morally wrong, regardless of what the Bible says... well then, I'm rather interested to know what use you consider the Bible to be.
It seems to me that the only options are either a, slavery is a moral wrong, but not as morally wrong as various things outright condemned in Exodus, or b, the moral and legal code laid out in the Bible is a moral and legal code only suited to an ancient and now lost society, and should not be considered appropriate or applicable today. Either alternative has problems. In the first case, one must consider, say, graven images a greater moral wrong than slave holding. In the second case, if one is a Christian, the Bible goes from being a moral handbook inspired or influenced by the divine to being another ancient artefact to be filed alongside the Code of Hammurabi or the Iliad - the difference being that no-one claims to consider Achilles a moral example or seeks to make trial by water part of the legal system... at least, no-one I'd care to associate with.

[the opoponax]

"In the second case, if one is a Christian, the Bible goes from being a moral handbook inspired or influenced by the divine to being another ancient artefact to be filed alongside the Code of Hammurabi or the Iliad"

It's not so simple. The short answer is that Christians believe that some parts of the Bible are more binding than other parts, in a moral sense. For instance, most of what's stipulated as law in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy quite specifically does not apply to Christians at all whatsoever. This is what makes it possible to be uncircumsized, eat pork, and have sex during your (or your partner's) period, as a Christian. The Ten Commandments are perhaps the lone exception to this, but honestly I don't know about that.

Additionally, and this is the part where I could be totally wrong, things that Jesus said are supposed to be more morally binding than, say, some random verse of Acts. Jesus said point blank the chief commandment of all possible human laws is "Love thy neighbor as thyself." (and most certainly meant EVERYONE as your neighbor, not just your fellow Jews or Christians or people in your town or members of your political party) Therefore, "Love thy neighbor as thyself" is more important than something Paul might have implied in some obscure epistle somewhere. It's pretty easy to use this metric in order to evaluate how relevant something in the Bible is to Christians, right now, today.

And I say all this as someone who left Christianity because I thought it the good in this faith didn't outweigh the bad, and there was no baby in the bath water to worry about. The one slight hitch, the one thing that made me consider that I might be wrong, is "Love thy neighbor as thyself."

[David Newgreen]

But this isn't "something Paul might have implied in some obscure epistle somewhere", or buried somewhere in between genealogies and lists of forbidden animals. Exodus 21 comes directly after Exodus 20, the Ten Commandments; it’s still God talking directly to Moses atop Mt. Sinai. It’s part of Covenant between God and the Jews. I can understand Christians don’t follow it – they don’t keep kosher either, but it seems rather odd to just ignore it entirely.
But I’m not religious, and don’t really understand the subtleties. So I’m asking any Christians here what their interpretation is: Is slavery always equally immoral, or was it acceptable for the ancient Jews to keep slaves, even if such behaviour would be monstrous today?
Also, on that subject, how does modern Judaism deal with this issue?

[the opoponax]

"it seems rather odd to just ignore it entirely."

Why? That's the whole point of the "This Part Doesn't Apply To You" aspect of Jewish Law. Christians also seem to be just fine ignoring the fact that if you die and leave behind a childless widow, she by law has to marry your brother for the purposes of reproduction (even if he is already married), and your brother has to support any resulting children, even though legally they would not be considered his children, but yours. The Old Testament is full of stuff Christians are perfectly justified in ignoring.

Someone else has already mentioned polygyny. During biblical times, it was apparently sort of acceptable in certain situations. Nowadays, it is NEVER acceptable. Nobody feels any particular conflict about this. Very few people feel the need to abandon Christianity because clearly polygyny used to be OK, but now even the LDS church is against it, and OMG this is totally inconsistent... We simply say, "OK, times change, cultural mores change, let's just agree to move on." I don't really see why slavery isn't comparable.

[David Newgreen]

Sure, but this is God laying down his laws, and it seems to me that the nature of those laws, even if intended only for certain people in a certain era, should say something about the nature of that God.

As I asked before, is slavery always a moral evil? If you're thrown back in time and find yourself in second millennium BC Palestine, are you morally obligated to do something about slavery, or do you just accept it as part of that culture? If you accept it then, why not in first century Rome or nineteenth century America? I'd consider slavery an unforgivable crime in any society, and so I'd imagine would most people, but here we've got a God who considers slavery - at least sometimes - justifiable. Now you can argue that this is just ancient Jewish law, and not actually the direct word of God, but then are you willing to dismiss the ten commandments as well? And if so, why not the word of God incarnated as Jesus Christ? And if you're doing that, what's the Bible but a rather large and oddly organised piece of literature?

And if not, why is God defending the indefensible?

[Jesurgislac]

the opoponax is, as usual, right.

Slavery and war were taken for granted as a de facto part of life until relatively recently, as far back as we have recorded human history. The only ethical questions with regard to slavery were how humanely slaves were treated: it was taken for granted that there would be slaves.

It appears that whenever slavery was associated with race, slavery appears to have been much more brutal than when slavery was accepted as a state into which anyone might chance to fall - through defeat in battle, or economic necessity. The American South was one of those places.

[Rosina]

Paul is pretty clear that "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus"

I don't know my Bible as well as most of you, but it seems to me that this is not saying that slavery is wrong, or that slaves should be freed - just that Jesus will welcome you all equally. If you read that Paul is saying that the slave shall become a free man, the pattern of the sentence should similarly mean that the Jew will become Greek, the male female. But all these will stay as they are in the outside world, with whatever rules apply to them. Only in Jesus are the slaves equal to free men (or women). Elsewhere the slave should obey his master, and the Christian master should 'love' his slave as his neighbour.

And treatment of slaves in the Roman world was not uniform. There were household slaves, many very well educated. A non-citizen who was a skilled artist could sell himself into slavery to a Roman, knowing that in a few years he would be able to buy his freedom, which would come equipped with Roman citizenship. Any slave who had enough money could buy his freedom (the rules about slaves not being allowed to own anything seem to have been overlooked in this instance, although I'm sure there were slave-owners who 'confiscated' the money saved and sold the slave). Slaves and ex-slaves ran the Empire, particularly under Claudius, and less influential ones became immensely rich.

On the other hand, field slaves, slaves who worked in mines and other industrial situations were very badly treated, as they were easy to replace. Nonetheless, there were still rules governing the way slaves could be treated, and it was illegal to throw them out when they became old and sick.

The children of Roman slave women were slaves, even if they had been taken in warfare, and even if their father was the master or other citizen. Gladiators and those killed in the arena were slaves, although generally (originally?) volunteers who had sold themselves (fame and fortune awaited the survivor), or condemned criminals (but you could be condemned on some pretty shaky grounds), or foreigners (the Other).

It may be that in some areas slaves in the US were better treated than in Roman times - fewer chances of ending up in the arena. It is even possible that as the other nations got together to stop slave ships, the slaves already in the US became a much more valuable commodity, and overall the owner would not wish to harm them while they were able to work.

It also strikes me that the argument over whether the Bible (NT particularly) condemns slavery implies that if it does, we would of course have stopped doing it. This doesn't apply to any other activity, does it? I mean, all parts of the Bible are pretty clear that adultery is wrong, but for two thousand years millions of Christians have continued to commit it. Far more, I'm sure, than have ever owned slaves.

[David Newgreen]

I suspect that if Christianity was outspoken against slavery and continued to have the level of influence over Roman and later societies that it did historically, slavery would still have existed in some form – but not as the foundation of society. Commandments against adultery may not have stopped adultery, but certainly played a role in ensuring it was only practiced either in secret, or by individuals with immense personal power and/or contempt of the authorities.
I can easily imagine an alternate Christianity in which Christian nations use increased serfdom in the place of outright slavery, and where the African slave trade it replaced by a more widespread and stringent use of indentured servants. But slave plantations, slave ships and succession in the name of slavery in a world where the eleventh commandment is “Thou shalt not own slaves”? I don’t think so.
Of course, I’m not blaming Christianity for slavery; Christians were vital to the abolitionist movement, and one can argue it was the influence of Christianity that led Europe to largely abandon slavery in favour of serfdom following the collapse of Rome, only reviving the institution on a large scale in the American colonies. I’m certainly not arguing that Christianity or the bible actively supports slavery!
But what I am saying is that I think Fred Clark’s reading of Exodus as an anti-slavery narrative is a difficult interpretation to support. I hope he makes a new post following up on that interpretation, because to me the issue of Exodus 21 makes reading a universal abolitionist message into it impossible. To me, it’s no more anti-slavery than Athenians opposing Persian invasion makes classical Athens anti-slavery. Opposition to oneself being enslaved is not equivalent to the universal message Fred is claiming. If Exodus is the first and last word on the subject of slavery, then the last word is “Don’t beat your slaves TOO hard”. I somehow doubt that’s what Fred – or God -intended to say.

[Jesurgislac]

David, you seem to be a little confused: serfs were slaves. They were slaves with a given set of rights who were usually not bought and sold except when the land they worked on was bought or sold. But they were human property: a subset of slavery, not an alternate to it.

[Jesurgislac]

But slave plantations, slave ships and succession in the name of slavery in a world where the eleventh commandment is “Thou shalt not own slaves”? I don’t think so.

Given that Christians came up with Bible-based rationales for owning slaves, ranging from the assertion that the "sons of Ham" were meant to be slaves, to the idea that slavery was good for Africans because it enabled them to be brought to a "Christian country", I think you're very likely wrong. There is an explicit commandment against graven images, and Christians have been breaking that on a regular basis since the Church moved away from Judaism.

But in any case: the notion that the early legal beagles who wrote down the laws in Exodus and Deuteronomy could have jumped to the idea that slavery shouldn't exist is pure fantasy: it's not worth discussing as a serious historical idea. Slaves were a given: it was only a question of how humanely slaves would be treated. The legal status of Jewish slaves was clearly better than the legal status of non-Jewish slaves, and the laws required that even non-Jewish slaves ought not to be killed out of hand, even if it was legal to beat them until they eventually died.

[Rosina]

Jesurgislac: serfs were slaves. They were slaves with a given set of rights who were usually not bought and sold except when the land they worked on was bought or sold. But they were human property: a subset of slavery, not an alternate to it.

This thought casts an interesting light on the middle ages - if slavery (by that name) was outlawed in feudal England after 1066, changing from (free but possibly slave-owning) Saxons to feudal Norman, it shows the replacement of one system of slavery with another. In Southern Europe, where feudalism wasn't the same force, slaves were still bought and sold in the the fourteenth century, being shipped from Tartary (and often bringing plague with them).

I don't think that serfs had the right to buy themselves out of serfdom, and would be unlikely to get the opportunity to amass any wealth. In fact, I seem to remember that if someone serf-born is 'employed' in a permanent non-serfish capacity (as a bowman, builder etc) they cease to be a serf - it is very much a land-tied form of slavery. If you ran away and could survive for a year and a day in a 'free town' you couldn't be taken back.

This ties in with the Introduction to my book of Renaissance Verse ;-). Feudum, the humanists discovered, was not an original Latin word, but Germanic, a system of landholding quite separate from that of classical antiquity. Clearly the status as well as the name of slaves were also quite separate.

[Mabus]

I'm as sure as sure can be that there is a passage in one of the Mosaic law codes that requires that a runaway slave not be returned, but must be allowed to go free. That by itself sounds as if it would be seriously problematic for slaveholders--certainly the American South did just the opposite, for obvious reasons. Unfortunately I can't seem to find it at the moment. Anyone recognize it?

[burritoboy]

"serfs were slaves. They were slaves with a given set of rights who were usually not bought and sold except when the land they worked on was bought or sold. But they were human property: a subset of slavery, not an alternate to it."

Serfs in feudal Western Europe were not slaves. They were party to a fairly explicit contract - a specified amount of work, fees, rents, etc in return for specified land rights. The major difference between a serf (villein) in feudal Western Europe and a freeman was that the serf's contract descended upon his children. Other than the contract, a villein was legally the same as a freeman (though of course there was always conflict between the lord and serf). Villeins could, and did, sue their lords, freemen or other villeins for all sorts of matters. Lords could not command (at least, theoretically) serfs outside of the specified labor time the serfs owed to the lord. Lords had little control over the serfs' private affairs (including the serf's numerous other economic contracts and activity), marriage choices and children, or internal political matters.

Serfs in early modern Eastern Europe were much closer to slaves. But this was hundreds of years, in completely different political environments and geographically distant from the heyday of western European serfdom.

"In the second case, if one is a Christian, the Bible goes from being a moral handbook inspired or influenced by the divine to being another ancient artefact to be filed alongside the Code of Hammurabi or the Iliad"

A good revelation. If you have your own, solid moral code, it becomes easier to see the Bible as what it actually is. A pity it hasn't been filed away already.

[burritoboy]

"I don't think that serfs had the right to buy themselves out of serfdom, and would be unlikely to get the opportunity to amass any wealth."

While most serfs didn't have much wealth, serfs made all sorts of economic arrangements outside of their manorial duties. It wasn't solely their serfdom that made them poor, but also the small amounts of land available to them and the low yields of their agricultural techniques. It varied, but serfs could sometimes buy their freedom.

[David Newgreen]

Jesurgislac: "...the notion that the early legal beagles who wrote down the laws in Exodus and Deuteronomy could have jumped to the idea that slavery shouldn't exist is pure fantasy."

Sure, I agree completely. Slavery was an essential part of ancient societies, and completely unquestioned. The laws of Exodus are completely in line with ancient legal codes, and completely unremarkable. At worst, one can only condemn the ancient Jews for being no better than their neighbours. That’s fine, and if we’re to condemn ancient civilizations, Jewish slavery wouldn’t make the top ten of things to castigate the people of the past for.
But Christianity doesn’t say “Exodus is an interesting insight into the legal codes and social assumptions of ancient near-east society.” It says that Exodus is, to a greater or lesser degree, an accurate record of the intervention of the creator of the universe on behalf of his creation. And I don’t mean to be rude, but it seems slightly suspicious that the creator’s vision of society three thousand years ago is very similar to that of every other culture in the region at that time, yet now his vision of moral society is astonishingly similar to that of a modern, egalitarian, educated person from the first world. I’m not seeing anything in Exodus that sets the Jews or their divinely ordained legal code apart from the divinely ordained legal codes of other civilizations. I’m certainly not seeing a message of ‘breaking every yoke’.
It’s certainly nice that mainstream Christianity considers abolitionism a fundamental aspect of their faith today. I’m certainly not arguing they should change that! But it seems to me to be forcing modern values onto an ancient text. Now granted, as I said before, I’m not religious, and I don’t get a lot of it. But if Exodus isn’t relevant any more, if it espouses a legal code unacceptable in the modern society… why is it still in the Bible? Why hasn’t it been deemed of historical interest only, like the Book of the Maccabees? It seems needlessly confusing to have a holy book that contains God ordaining laws that are then meant to be ignored.

[Maegis42]

It seems needlessly confusing to have a holy book that contains God ordaining laws that are then meant to be ignored.

The bible shalt not be changed! It is the divine word of God, and no part can be ignored. Unless...and this is VERRRY important...unless thou shalt find it convenient to do so.

[nieciedo]

Sigh. I should have known that people would obsess over insignificant details. I was not clear about the statement about how well certain slaves were treated at various points in history, so I retract the statement: it was not material to my point. I was thinking about how I never heard of American slaves being ordered to kill each other as a spectator sport. Don't confuse time frames: gladiatorial combat under the Empire was very different from it's origins at the time the Bible was written (as a sacrifice to appease the blood-thirst of the ancestors). But everyone has show him/her/itself more intelligent and more knowledgeable than everyone else in order to win the prize, so I defer. Ugh.

Anyhow:
if slavery (by that name) was outlawed in feudal England after 1066, changing from (free but possibly slave-owning) Saxons to feudal Norman, it shows the replacement of one system of slavery with another.

Um, isn't that obvious? Slavery was nothing more than set of relationships by which a surplus was extracted by those with wealth, military power, and legal authority from those without them. The position of the slave and the feudal serf is in a very real sense no different from that of the modern wage worker. "The history of all hither-to existing society has been the history of class struggle..." etc.

Slavery has never gone away. Real actual slavery still exists, even in the US. But slavery in general has just changed its name and window dressing as the social relationships to the ownership of wealth have fluctuated.

Modern capitalism is just a very efficient form of slavery. At least the slave or the serf rarely had to deal with unemployment and the whim of the Invisible Hand.

[hf]

Mabus:
Deuteronomy 23:15-16. Like I said, the Bible has some good bits if you assume humans wrote it with no divine intervention.

[nieciedo]

@Malbus:
I'm as sure as sure can be that there is a passage in one of the Mosaic law codes that requires that a runaway slave not be returned, but must be allowed to go free. That by itself sounds as if it would be seriously problematic for slaveholders--certainly the American South did just the opposite, for obvious reasons. Unfortunately I can't seem to find it at the moment. Anyone recognize it?

Deuteronomy 23:16-17
You shall not turn over to his master a slave who seeks refuge with you from his master. He shall live with you in any place he may choose among the settlements in your midst, wherever he pleases; you must not ill-treat him.

@David Newgreen
And I don’t mean to be rude, but it seems slightly suspicious that the creator’s vision of society three thousand years ago is very similar to that of every other culture in the region at that time, yet now his vision of moral society is astonishingly similar to that of a modern, egalitarian, educated person from the first world. I’m not seeing anything in Exodus that sets the Jews or their divinely ordained legal code apart from the divinely ordained legal codes of other civilizations.

The laws regarding the treatment of slaves are one significant part that sets the law code of ancient Israel apart from its other civilizations of its time. Another is the advancement in the rights of women it conferred. A third is the economic system supported by the Sabbatical Years and the Jubilees.

I do not believe that the Torah is "the creator's of society." Rather, it is my ancient ancestors vision of how their society could and should be improved. Further, something that most people seem to neglect is that the Written Torah -- regardless of whether you're Orthodox or Reform -- was never meant to be the final word. Just as the US Constitution isn't much help in telling you whether you have to move your car to the other side of the street after 6:00 PM, the Torah is only the foundation, the general principles, the first couple of steps planned out for you. Traditional Jews believe that there was an Oral Torah taught to Moses on Sinai that explained how to interpret and use the Written Torah to apply to situations not envisioned in the text; liberal Jews like me see the "Oral Torah" as the creativity and ingenuity of the Jewish people over the centuries attempting to remain faithful to the general principles of our "constitution" while confront situations that constitution could not have conceived of.

Simply reading the text of the Torah is no help in determining how to live today except in the most general ways. That is why the Torah must be studied in conjunction with the Mishna, the Gemara, and the commentaries over the past 2000 years.

Exodus 21 was written in the 8th century BCE. Deuteronomy was written sometime around the late 7th-early 6th centuries BCE. These laws of slavery, for example, were revolutionary for their time. A modern egalitarian educated first-world person can find in them the first steps toward our modern opinion on slavery, particularly when you combine the other demands of social justice found in the Torah and especially the Prophets. For much of history, Jews were in no political position to do much about slavery, but those truly committed to the values of the Torah (even if they did not have traditional religious belief) opposed it, just as Jews were central to socialist, communist, and anarchist movements at the turn of the century and in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.

[rob]

"I should have known that people would obsess over insignificant details. I was not clear about the statement about how well certain slaves were treated at various points in history, so I retract the statement: it was not material to my point."

Ah, but it was material to your point, as you were claiming that, as a result of God's commandments to the Jews, slaves of people of the book had a much better life than slaves of pagans. If that's not true, then your claim that being beaten to within an inch of your life versus being killed outright constitutes a huge improvement on the lot of the slave is severely called into question. Also I suspect the Romans felt that dying in the arena was a much more honorable, and probably less painful, death than any number of ways a master could kill his slaves. Slaves who fought for sport were not the same as slaves who harvested wheat or cooked your food. Just because there was an additional class of slaves that we today consider extra barbaric does not mean that the lot of all slaves was much worse, nor that the slaves of Christians were automatically kept in a better manner, even if those Christians did follow the laws that the good books lays down concerning slaves.

If God intended slavery to be abandoned gradually, which does seem like a possibility, I would think he would have something more to say about it than what he said 2000 years ago. At some point, he came right out and said that divorce was wrong, but he has sent no new revelation that slavery is outright wrong. His final word on the subject seems to be that it's just fine.

[nieciedo]

hf
Deuteronomy 23:15-16. Like I said, the Bible has some good bits if you assume humans wrote it with no divine intervention.

Of if you assume that human activity and divine intervention are one and the same.

[nieciedo]

Rob
Ah, but it was material to your point, as you were claiming that, as a result of God's commandments to the Jews, slaves of people of the book had a much better life than slaves of pagans. If that's not true, then your claim that being beaten to within an inch of your life versus being killed outright constitutes a huge improvement on the lot of the slave is severely called into question.

Wrong. The question was whether US slaves were treated better or worse than slaves in antiquity. My point is that the laws governing the treatment of slaves in ancient Israel were more humane than those of other nations. That is demonstrably true. Whether they were enforced is another question beyond our scope here.

If God intended slavery to be abandoned gradually, which does seem like a possibility, I would think he would have something more to say about it than what he said 2000 years ago. At some point, he came right out and said that divorce was wrong, but he has sent no new revelation that slavery is outright wrong. His final word on the subject seems to be that it's just fine.

Well, I do not believe you can talk about "God" "intending" anything except in an abstract, metaphorical way. And then there is varying traditions. Christians got it into their head somehow that God thinks divorce is wrong, yet divorce has been a perfectly OK part of the Jewish traditional all along. As I said in an another post, the authors of the Torah did not intend their document to be the final word but rather the starting point. Torah is a process, not a finished act as the Prophets and the rabbinic tradition show.

[the opoponax]

note: the main reason US slaves were rarely if ever required to kill themselves or each other for sport was because slaves were, in general, far too valuable and useful to the southern economy for that to ever be practical. it would be like buying a brand new powerbook and throwing it out the window, for sport. nobody sane would ever do that.

it has NOTHING to do with whether US slave society was generally more "humane" than other slave societies.

also, i'm pretty sure that almost any religion that was around during ancient times involves a god that, at one point at least, tacitly allowed slavery. i don't think this is a very good reason to be atheist.

[ako]

also, i'm pretty sure that almost any religion that was around during ancient times involves a god that, at one point at least, tacitly allowed slavery. i don't think this is a very good reason to be atheist.

True. How just and moral a god is has no bearing on whether they actually exist (although it does raise questions about religions that claim their god is supremely just and moral.) But I don't think I've seen anyone argue, "You can't believe in God, because he allows slavery!" (In deciding whether to worship gods or not, their attitude towards slaver is worth considering.)

For me, the big point is what the Bible's statements on slavery indicates about the Bible, and the writer(s) of the Bible. And the Biblical attitude towards slavery does look very much like a product of its time, and the cultural attitudes people in those places would take towards slavery and morality (correct me if I'm wrong, but weren't most of the Old Testament passages about breaking yokes and ending oppression written when the Jews were themselves oppressed?) Which doesn't disprove the possibility of a god, but does suggest all passages in the Bible should be read with the caution, judgment, and yes, skepticism one would apply to a book that suggests beating a slave to a lingering death is allowed, but not to a fast one.

It is, to my mind, very much like Hammurabi's code. An interesting way to trace developments in morality, and containing some admirable precepts about why to create laws (so the strong will not harm the weak). But I don't believe in Marduk, and if someone was using Hammurabi's Code as evidence of the goodness of Marduk, I'd have some hard questions about why Marduk would choose to have the laws created by a man who thought throwing people in a river was a good test of guilt.

[nieciedo]

The value of a text is always subjective. No text, no thing except life itself has any absolute value. If one believes in the Bible, then it is very important and no one can prove otherwise. If one does not believe in it, it is not important and no one can prove otherwise.

The only thing that can be proven is that some people find it valuable. It would be nice if things didn't have to be absolute, if one side would stop trying to convince everyone that the Bible is God's Word and if the other side would stop trashing it completely as worthless and outdated and should be thrown away.

It is my opinion that unless you are a Jew, the Hebrew Bible (the "Old Testament") should be to you the same as Hamurabbi's Code or the Eddas or the Qur'an or the Analects or the Vedas or what-have-you are to your average Christian. I have never understood why Christians bother with the "Old Testament" at all, since pretty much none of it was written for them or applies to them. Especially Jesus is supposed to have "fulfilled" the "old" covenant, anyway.

[ako]

I have never understood why Christians bother with the "Old Testament" at all, since pretty much none of it was written for them or applies to them. Especially Jesus is supposed to have "fulfilled" the "old" covenant, anyway.

I don't know either. I'm not Christian (or religious at all).

I do agree that it's not necessary to insist that the Bible be either the Word of God or utterly without value, but I think a lot of it is the kind of value people generally associate with the Bible. If everyone's used to thinking that the Bible's important because it's the Word of God conveying absolute Truth, then it's fairly easy (although not entirely reasonable) to conclude that this book which lacks the value you expected to find is valueless. And a lot of Christians don't draw a distinction between not having read the Bible, and not believing it, placing both acts under the heathen/bad/wrong category.