10 Doesn't the Bible Condone Slavery?

Index post : Rebecca McLaughlin Wrote a Book

Most moderns would condone some form of slavery. What do you think prison is? It is a kind of slavery, but one earned by some ill deed, usually.

Many condone very much less well deserved forms of slavery than prison. Mental hospitals. Child protective services. Enforced desintoxication visits. Pushing homeless into centres where they are isolated among themselves and "off the streets" but not in independent living accomodations.

People who condone such types of slave hunt are hypocrites if they criticise the Bible for "condoning slavery" ...

But this does not dispense from explaining the Bible.

I would say, there are some kind of motives that rationally motivate servitude or at least can do so among non-Christians:

• crime — at least those deserving death penalty, and some do, would be considered as worthy of slavery, of perpetual servitude, too, as a kind of clemency;
• this would involve some war crimes and some crimes leading to wars (Joshua's wars were God's punitive action);
• those born in slavery when treated well do not always and everywhere look for freedom instead — if many a Black man of the Antebellum South was in for running away, it was because of harsh treatment (against the Bible) and also because of a comparison with Europeans elsewhere who neither were nor had slaves (due to Christianity);
• some cultures have held it just to keep debtors in slavery as payment for their debts (common ground to both Rome and Greece before Christian times, and to Jews too, but in that case only for seven years — because the Bible told them so).

Above all, what the New Testament had to say about slavery was indeed not a blank condemnation (as some would have wanted, when all they think of in the context of Biblical slavery is the Black Antebellum), but held such qualifications, involving the equality of men, irrespective of class, irrespective of free or bond, that slavery became an irksome thing, and even less likely to be abused.

Think of it as the reverse of racism. In the Antebellum South, slavery was becoming worse in attitudes from the owners and their abettors, and in humiliations suffered by Blacks, because racism was spreading.

The NT words about slavery are the reverse of that. In the Christian empire, slavery was becoming better in attitudes from owners, and less hard, involving fewer humiliations, because Christianity was spreading. In place after place, in the Latin West, slavery was even abolished totally.

Even in the Old Testament, slavery was more lenient than among other people. Moses and Caesar Augustus forbade the killing of a slave. Yes, I know there is a passage in Leviticus which states when it does not count as killing, but the fact that an earlier death than that would involve penalties was a deterrent. In Rome, people could throw slaves to murenas (a fish pretty like pirayas) just for fun with no punishment, until Caesar Augustus, c. 1500 years later (around the time when Christ was born) put an end to that disregard for the life of a slave./HGL

PS - confer slaveries of new types, like school compulsion, marriage delay, child welfare, psychiatry, which seem to be getting more power the more a society is secularised.