Is God Unfair? Part 3 - Does God Condone Slavery?

  

I realize it has been several months since I posted part 2 of this series, but unfortunately I have been so busy with school that I have not had the time to devote to trying to research this next question.  I had a difficult time with this one, it is indeed a very tough question to answer.  After discussing it with my father and my professor (who is also a pastor) among other people, I finally feel ready to tackle it.  So..here we go.

Does God Condone Slavery?
Exodus 21:20-21 says this 'Anyone who beats their male or female slave with a rod must be punished if the slave dies as a direct result, but they are not to be punished if the slave recovers after a day or two, since the slave is their property.' This seems, at first, to be a puzzling case law to find in the bible.  If God does not condone slavery, why would he put forth a law about it?  But let's back up a bit....two very important question needs to be addressed before we decide whether or not God truly condones slavery.

What Is Slavery?
When we think of slavery, we often think of the vile practice of kidnapping people and selling them to others. However, this kind of slavery, otherwise known as 'man-stealing' is expressly forbade only four verses before. Exodus 21:16 says '  He who kidnaps a man and sells him, or if he is found in his hand, shall surely be put to death.'  So then, whatever biblical slavery means, it does NOT mean the kidnapping of another person and forcibly selling them.

What Was The Cultural Context?
In the culture in which Exodus was written, it is important to remember that it was a time in which it was actually quite normal for a man without money to sell himself into slavery to someone he owed. Exodus 21:2 says ' If you buy a Hebrew servant...'  It is interesting, is it not, that the section dealing with the treatment of slaves begins by saying 'If you buy a Hebrew servant'?  This seems to refer more to the cultural practice of slavery to pay debts, rather than to a kidnapping and selling of people from other places as slaves.  Another question that may come up in the slavery issue may be Exodus 21:7-11, in which it talks about a father selling his daughter as a slave.  A friend of mine recently asked my opinion on this passage, and I must say, I was very grateful to him for bringing it up, since it is a very important aspect of the issue, and maybe a difficult one to understand as well.  I will tell you basically the same thing that I told him. Again, you MUST understand the cultural context of the time. Men and women were thought of very differently then than they are now. Men were leaders, while women were always owned, and thought of as possessions. A father had protection of his sons until they came of age, but he owned his daughters forever, and he therefore had the right to choose her fate.  In the Old Testament times, if a man married a woman he had to pay her father for her, whether that was by labor or by material possessions.  Given this idea of ownership, in a culture where a man would sell himself into slavery in order to pay a debt, it makes a great deal of sense that a father would sell his child into a form of slavery instead of himself, thereby enabling the father to continue supporting the remainder of his family.  Also, Exodus 21:7-11 does not imply at all that this slavery is to be a brutal one. On the contrary, verse 10 states that 'If he marries another woman, he must not deprive the first one'.  This would imply that this 'selling into slavery' was really more along the lines of a marriage agreement, rather than a slave. There is one more question that may come to your mind when reading the passage. Why does the passage seem to allow for the beating of the slaves? That can't be right, can it?  Again, think of the cultural context...a man owned his children and any servants that were in his household, and he was completely within his rights to discipline them in any way he saw fit. This did indeed include beatings, as harsh as that may seem in today's anti-disciplinarian society.

 In Conclusion:
So, does God condone slavery?  Yes, in fact, I believe he does. I also believe that 'slavery' as we think of it today does not in any way equate with the slavery of the bible.  In today's society, it is not unthinkable for a man to 'work off' a debt with labor, and I believe this is exactly what is happening in Exodus, but in a culture where the agreement was not temporary, but permanent.

><>RileyRose<><