[Vision2020] Wrong About the Bible: Slavery

[Andreas Schou]

On 2/3/07, Ralph Nielsen <nielsen at uidaho.edu> wrote:
> You're the one who is dodging, Tony. Just go back and read what I
> said. I have never claimed the Bible was consistent from cover to
> cover. That is what dishonest preachers claim. That is why Xians like
> to pick out particular verses or stories to prove their pet
> prejudices. That is why Doug Wilson and his friends want to have
> homosexuals killed by the government. That is why the majority of
> Idahoans don't want same-sex couples to have the same rights as other
> married people. That is why millions of Americans want to have
> creationism and so-called intelligent design taught in public
> schools. And so on...
>
> But the Bible is consistent on at least one subject: nowhere does it
> condemn slavery. That is precisely why Andreas jumped on me.
>
> As for translations into English, they are usually made from Hebrew
> and Greek texts, not from previous translations thereof. But entire
> books have been written on this subject.

Ralph --

There have been very few times at which the morality of slavery was a
matter of debate in the Christian world; consequently, modern
scholarship on the issue of slavery is sparse, as modern theologians
(with very few exceptions) consider the matter closed for debate.
This, of course, elides the fact that the Bible is not ambiguous, but,
rather, contradictory on the subject. However, as I mentioned before,
abolitionism was, at its root, a Christian movement, and found its
roots in the same Bible from which slaveholders derived their
authority.

I mentioned, in an earlier post, the pardes rules of scriptural
interpretation. You seem content to use only the plain reading of the
text, the p'shat. This is, of course, appropriate if you believe the
Bible is cover-to-cover nonsense. However, you've got a bad habit of
applying a plain reading of the text to only parts of the text which
you find repugnant, which is dishonest.

The Bible contains several types of texts: straightforward narrative,
epistles, prophetic texts, gospels, and administrative priestly texts.
Each have different attitudes toward slavery.

As Genesis and Exodus, the Torah's main narrative texts, depict a
people in slavery, it's unsurprising that depictions of slavery are
ambiguous. Of the slaveowners depicted in the Bible, only Abraham (who
is given extrordinary license elsewhere in the Bible to violate God's
commandments, even going so far as to serve God Himself milk and meat
in the same meal) is depicted as wholly good. Elsewhere, slaveowners
and slavetraders (who are largely, themselves, owners and traders of
Jews) are depicted as lazy, venal, cruel, and in violation of God's
commandments, and slavery as being a profoundly negative condition.

Once you reach Leviticus, you find slavery both condoned and
regulated, and regulated in a way that is fairly morally repugnant.
This moral repugnance is fairly characteristic of Leviticus, which
regulates things as one might expect of what is (effectively) the
Constitution of a tiny, despotic Near Eastern kingdom. One might note,
however, that as Israel became less of a tiny, despotic Near Eastern
kingdom, Jewish theologians did their best to mitigate the stupidest
laws of Leviticus.

The first thing that they noticed, of course, is that while Leviticus
regulates slaveholding, it appears to establish no legal method for
obtaining slaves, other than Exodus 21's offhand comment that one can
sell one's own daughter into slavery. Exodus 21 (as befits a text
about the Jews' own experience with slavery) condemns manstealers to
death, and, notably, does not restrict the crime of manstealing to
Jews. Any Jew or foreigner found with any kidnapped Jew or gentile is
punished with death. As this text specifically mentions that the
penalty applies even if the victim is sold, it can't be argued that
this was not intended to apply to slavery.

Jesus, not being particularly concerned with issuing particular moral
pronouncements on particular activities. The New Testament contains
sin punishable in the afterlife and forgivable by repentance, rather
than laws punishable in the corporeal realm. Jesus did not
particularly consider that his teachings would ever be used in an
attempt to administer a state. For that reason, if you are looking for
a law in the Gospels that stands in direct contradiction to
Levicticus, you simply won't find one: the New Testament contains no
such administrative principles.

Contrary to the apostles, Paul returns much more clearly to the Old
Testament. As a Jew who sought to maintain Christianity's roots in
Judaism and who was actively combatting gentile converts who saw
Christianity as a religious movement entirely distinct from Judaism,
he returned to the Old Testament when giving advice to Philemon --
advice that is  both facially inconsistent with the radical
egalitarianism of Jesus'  command that 'there is neither slave nor
freeman. Even granting that inconsistency, Jesus' removal of the
distinction 'between Jew and Greek', Christian abolitionists argued,
caused the crime of manstealing (which previously was interpreted to
only apply between Jews) to apply to all people, and, while it did not
free slaves in Paul's day, (a) made new enslavements punishable as
manstealing and (b) applied the tradition of the Jubilee year to
gentile slaves to which the rule was previously inapplicable.

This is a fairly straightforward remez interpretation of two clearly
stated principles, and one that does not rely on the theological
wishy-washiness of using Christ's 'do unto others'  proclamation as a
sort-of overarching Constitutional principle for the entire BIble

I can anticipate, of course, that you interpret Paul's interpretation
of Christ as the correct one. This is, however, inconsistent with the
intepretive strategies you use elsewhere -- strategies that accept
that the Bible contains clearly contradictory principles. Why you
believe that an interpretive principle you use elsewhere (to, for
instance, argue against the existence of an afterlife in the Torah)
somehow does not apply when it can be used to paint the Bible in a bad
light is beyond me.

If you're interested, which I doubt you are, you can find any one of a
number of Christian abolitionists' arguments against slavery in
historical collections online. They are not entirely without merit.

-- ACS