Idol worship is very much in line with witchcraft. In fact it is the very essence of witchcraft.
Okay, but you can have idol worship without having witchcraft, but you can't have witchcraft without idol worship. That's what I was saying, and I think we can agree on that. I mean you could say that the way we treat celebrities in America is idol worship, but it certainly isn't witchcraft. Witchcraft is the extra bad version of idol worship, and assuming that they were practicing it is a big assumption.
So I wouldn't say it wasn't a concern to God.
I didn't say idol worship wasn't a concern to God, I pointed out that he was letting these people live, and the having them kill other people. The ones that they were told to kill were killed because of the concern of idol worship. If the others are allowed to live, then idol worship wasn't practiced there.
But once again, these people had no place to flee to.
They could flee to their neighbor if they thought things would be nicer there. What if some slaves just liked their neighbor better? Then all of a sudden the original owner loses his property for no good reason.
I'm not aware at all that they had plundered the Egyptians.
And the Lord had given the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians, so that they let them have what they asked. Thus they plundered the Egyptians. Exodus 12:36
Now some folk had really rich masters, and some folk had modestly rich masters. So the gift God gave them in controlling the Egyptians, was not evenly distributed from the start. You already had income disparity the minute they set out from Egypt. So when you talk about the poor who were in debt and the poor who resorted to thievery, they had generational poverty just like we do today. If everyone started out with the same chances in life, then we could call people lazy or stupid if they run out of money, but that is not the case and never has been.
Do you think we are free?... can you really do anything you want to in the world. Some countries might allow you to visit only as a tourist but not hold land. Other silly countries like mine let foreigners buy all our land so we can't afford it ourselves. If I went to certain countries I would be forced to submit to males and cover my face.
I can't do anything I want in the world because some things are bad and people shouldn't be allowed to do them. There is no objective morality that everyone in the world agrees on and thus we need laws based on the best morality that we have developed. At the same time, some countries have laws that aren't based on morality but are more based on oppression. But you can be more free in some places than others, and more freedom is generally better than less freedom (to an extent). And some freedom is always better than no freedom.
These days if you are not allowed to buy property in a foreign country you would have to rent to live there. In our time you pay money for use of the property. There was no money back then so all you could do was barter, and in that case, barter your services for food and shelter. It makes sense for the conditions of that time.
But see, they did use currency. Did they also barter? Sure, but that is probably just another way to keep poor folk poor in my opinion.
The rich shall not give more, and the poor shall not give less, than the half shekel, when you give the Lord's offering to make atonement for your lives. Exodus 30:15
They used weights of silver and gold to have currency. Currency is the oldest form of written language that can be found in the world. Money has always been and always will be till the Earth is no more. I didn't bother explaining the absolute best route that the Israelites could have taken instead of slavery, because it just isn't necessary. Anything is better than slavery. Communism would have been a relatively simple matter to explain to the primitive people, as opposed to a more complex system involving taxes, social security, education, etc.
So whilst it is clearly alluding to forced labour there is another kind which is the kind I think you are thinking of.
I'm alluding to the fact that there were all sorts of slavery back then that the Israelites practiced because they hadn't developed the notion that owning a human being is bad and leads to exploitation. You pointed out that it ended up being that indentured servants were released and then found right back in service of their old master. When it got really bad someone did something, but doesn't this show you that the rich were not generally trying to be good people? I mean, the Bible is full of stories of terrible things that some Jews did. I don't pay them much notice because I have no reason to judge the veracity of God based on the actions of humans acting of their own accord, but thinking that they were generally good folk that followed the "spirit of the law", as it were, is kind of naive isn't it?
They were bad folk and that's why Moses had to come down with the 10 commandments. You have to keep people under control because without laws, not everyone has a conscience, and people will do bad things. And isn't that the general theme of the Bible? People are all bad and they need God to change them? The Jews didn't have God working in them in their daily lives like Christians do. It was all law and order for them. There's no reason to think that people after the flood were going to choose to be any better than the people before the flood until God came and told them what to do. People don't have this inherent view of what is right and wrong, they have to learn it. There isn't a crime that you can think of that someone hasn't done and then didn't feel guilty about it because they justified it and rationalized it in some way. I can say that we can have objective morals by proving it and arguing for it that some people can have incorrect morals, but you can't say that we all see morals on our own because God gave them to all of us. He gave them to his believers, and some of us developed them on our own. It doesn't mean that God doesn't exist, it just means that that one proof, that says that we all observe objective morals, isn't a proof at all.
h4522
