- Oct 28, 2006
- 21,222
- 9,981
- Country
- United States
- Faith
- Christian
- Marital Status
- Married
- Politics
- US-Others
...alright. That's sounds fair enough.So if you would not mind, let's start simple....
Ok. That sounds like a good place to start, but before I get into a direct discussion with you about how we should “define slavery as it pertains to the Bible,” I'm going to lay out some preliminary considerations, just so you better understand where I'm coming from. Think of it as a prologue....So let's start with the definition of 'slavery', as it pertains to the Bible. What is it, and why am I not interpreting it in the correct way? How is 'biblical slavery' different than other slavery?
*****************************************
So, here it goes-
Personally, I wouldn't just jump into the Bible without first forming some understanding of 'slavery' as a historical, multiform phenomenon, one that has been present in the world since time immemorial and exists even today in various parts of the world. (I mean,yeah...it's not gone yet, which I can agree really sucks!)
I'll admit that when I first became a Christian 30+ years ago and began reading the Bible for the first time as a teenager, I probably did come to the whole issue of 'biblical slavery' in a more or less simple and direct fashion. If my memory serves me right, I had never heard of the word “hermeneutics,” and I remember coming across the passages describing how slavery was imposed by the Israelites and being quite baffled by it all. My first emotional responses, I think, were, “But I thought God was good and purposeful and that He was supposed to make people nicer to each other? I don't get it. Isn't slavery supposed to be really wrong? Didn't God just get done freeing the Israelites from slavery from under Pharaoh?”
Of course, back then, I hadn't studied nearly anything that I have studied since that time. Back then, I had been an art student for the most part, and what little real ethical realization I had in my mind as to why slavery was 'immoral' came as the remnants of having been acculturated and "educated" in scant fashion in small town America. By the time I became a new Christian, I had only had a few fleeting lessons about slavery and about civil rights in junior high and high school history classes, and I had picked up a few notions about slavery by having seen the old t.v. mini-series, "Roots," and "Harriet Tubman," the constantly replayed Charlton Heston movie, "The Ten Commandments." So, when I newly encountered the Old Testament, I had no idea about how to analyze, differentiate, contrast, contextualize, or really how to more fully and equitably understand the whole social matrix I found in the pages that I was reading. Instead, like many people, and based on what little I knew about the phenomenon of slavery in the world, I just saw “beat your slave...” and thought “Dang! That's awful!”
Now, I would approach this whole thing in a completely different way, mainly because I recognize a plethora of factors that play into our understanding of what we are reading. This expansion of understanding doesn't take away my feeling of cringe worthiness when I read about biblical slavery—no, it's still a sad state of affairs to read about—but at least I have insight into how biblical slavery is constituted, how it was enforced AND how it differs from both the slavery already extant in the Ancient Near East as well as with how it differs with the oh so obviously and utterly inhumane way that the Atlantic Slave Trade was operated.
Of course, being the social science advocate that I am , there are....shall I say...some associated and derivative insights I've gained about why we see the world the way we do today, especially as to why and how we assume the cogency of certain modern articulations regarding human rights, civil rights and ethics that then feed into and shape the way we appraise the ethical contents of the Old Testament.
Feel free to offer comments on this, and then we can begin to dig into 'slavery and the bible.'
Last edited:
Upvote
0