Discussions over time naturally tend to get more and more open issues, resulting in a
Tower of Babel effect.
We obviously don't want that outcome.
(We all know a politician who makes a barrage of many claims every day. It works for a while...
But -- We learn over time to totally distrust that politician.)
We should pick fewer questions -- 1 or 2 questions -- and investigate those more.
So, picking a good one to begin with --
...[to say] that God actually didn't want people to enslave others, buy them, sell them....[is]...ignoring the fact that He told people to do this.
This seems 2 things which seem different:
A) buying, and B) some commanded action. -- So let's look more closely at some instances.
Buying --
Leviticus 25:44-46
"As for your male and female slaves whom you may have: you
may buy male and female slaves from among the nations that are around you. You
may also buy from among the strangers who sojourn with you and their clans that are with you, who have been born in your land, and they may be your property."
Of course here "may buy" isn't a command.
But we know that
taking by force isn't a general option:
Exodus 21:16 Whoever kidnaps another man must be put to death, whether he sells him or the man is found in his possession.
So...trying to guess what you mean by "told to" [commanded?], from recently reading through many of the books, I wonder if you mean:
Generally
the main source of slaves for Israel we know most famously is from the same time period and also the aftermath of the commanded destruction/erasure of the
cities that sacrificed children to B'aal, Moloch, etc.
The peoples that had been sacrificing children in fire as their permanent ongoing culture (something so awful we can hardly even comprehend it) --
29 “When the LORD your God cuts off
[destroys] before you the
nations whom you go in to dispossess, and you dispossess them and dwell in their land,
30 take care that you be not ensnared to follow them, after they have been destroyed before you, and that you do not inquire about their gods, saying, ‘How did these nations serve their gods?—that I also may do the same.’
31 You shall not worship the LORD your God in that way,
for every abominable thing that the LORD hates they have done for their gods, for they even burn their sons and their daughters in the fire to their gods."
And for
those cities, with their varying degrees of evil, He commanded at times either of 2 broad outcomes:
A) Total Destruction/Erasure of the city and all traces of its culture --
(Sending everyone to be sorted in the afterlife Day of Judgement all will face -- judged by their deeds (Psl 62:12, Rom 2:6), the innocent and forgiven going to eternal Life, the rest to eternal death. )
OR
B) Allowing Some Survivors to remain alive, so that many are given a place as
slaves instead of being left to starve -- these having time to possibly and many to gain the good outcome on the Day of Judgement. For many: life here and now, and then even for many we'd think also
Life eternal, (as we know foreigners were allowed to convert and become part of Israel and its covenant.)
Are these destroyed cities in those wars the instances of taking slaves from the survivors you are thinking of as being a commanding the taking of slaves?
Or was it the more general regulation of being allowed to buy slaves later from the remnants and peoples around after the destruction of the child-sacrificing cities?
Tell us what verses where, and we can better track down the overall situation.
And where does the O.T. command the Israelites to actually go out into the world and make slaves in a proactive, even aggressive fashion as the white Southern slave traders and owners of yesteryear in America did?
Frankly, I'm not seeing any, BUT I do see a host of commands where the Israelites are told by Moses (and by God) to be caring, even loving, of well-intended FOREIGNERS/STRANGERS/SOJOURNERS, the very "class" of people who would supposedly end up becoming slaves to the Israelites for life with ZERO possibility of manumission, according to you and
@cvanwey.
But of course, as you and
@cvanwey read in that article I previously posted, it seems unlikely that history utterly bears out that there was any consistent tradition among the Israelites or the later Jews wherein even foreign slaves were not manumitted. Sometimes they were kept for life;...............sometimes they were let go. And even if they were 'kept' for life, the Israelites were commanded to treat their slaves with compassion.
Of course, as we all keep bouncing along on this same old road which you and
@cvanwey refuse to pave any further with hermenetical suffieciency, making it difficult for anyone else here to actually study the broader social implications inherent within the Torah, I guess we'll just keep ignoring with you the ways in which
Ancient Israelite Jurisprudence more than likely handled the issues pertaining to foreign slaves in ancient Israel. Somehow, I get the feeling that you and
@cvanwey think all of that should be my job ... but in my hermeneutical view, it's 'everyone's' job to do; i.e. everyone who dares to pick up ANY book that exists in the world. And if you guys don't like that principle, well then....TOUGH! Don't claim you've actually read and understood the Bible when you haven't. (If anything, you and
@cvanwey are just showing that you both don't have any more hermeneutical insight than did white American southern slavers, and that really is too bad.)
If you guys can't up your 'game' on the hermeneutical frontier, I'll just have to decidely bow out of this discussion since I won't be able to take you all seriously ... and yes, that's how it's going to work, despite how you think 1 Peter 3:15 is supposed to bear out or not bear out.
Yes, that I already know. And I'm sure you all are sincere in thinking you're doing the world a favor, which all in all, seems to me to be a social propensity that fits well with what I find in Scripture and, ironically, has likely been instigated by God Himself as a part of the whole process of judgement upon the world, as strange as that may seem to sound.