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NASB | Leviticus 25:44 'As for your male and female slaves whom you may have--you may acquire male and female slaves from the pagan nations that are around you. |
AMPLIFIED 2015 | Leviticus 25:44 'As for your male and female slaves whom you may have--you may acquire male and female slaves from the pagan nations that are around you. |
Bible Question: Does God approve of slavery? |
Bible Answer: Dear Jenny, It has occured to me that perhaps instead of discussing slavery with those who have attempted to answer you, perhaps I should give you my own thoughts on God's view of slavery. I pray you excuse the length, but a simple answer probably wouldn't ease your mind even if it was accurate. First, you ask does God "approve" slavery. Now that is quite a hard phrasing to answer. You might perhaps mean does he think it is a good thing. I'm not sure how I would answer that. However, let's begin with that when we look to scripture, God "permits" slavery in Old Testament Israel. He gives multiple guidelines concerning it, but at the end of the day we must acknowledge that he does permit it. Now if I understand EdB correctly (I may not) the thrust of his arguement is that we must not take God's permitting slavery and import all the horrible ideas of slavery which we have seen outside the biblical picture of it. If that is his thrust then he is quite right. That is exactly how we must approach this. We admit that God permitted slavery and then we must make sure we understand the exact nature of the slavery which God permitted. If we do not carefully do that we will end up saying that God permitted horrible things such as murder, rape, maiming, and other attrocities that have gone hand in hand with wicked instances of slavery in history. However, as we begin to seperate these wicked things from the biblical picture of slavery we must be careful that we don't rule out some of the things which biblical slavery does permit. For example. I do think in scripture that there is a clear notion of owndership over the slave. I do think that Exodus 21:20 is getting at the idea of the slave being property. There is owndership that does actually seem to alter some of the slaves rights. What I mean is, a normal Israelite would have to be brought before a judge, an elder, a king, or something in order to be beaten. Why? Because no offended man had the right to simply assert himself as the judge, jury, and executioner of the one who offended him. It would be sin to simply say to another Israelite, "You have offended me and now I will punish you for it." With slaves we see a different picture. In Exodus 21:20,21 we see that there is no grounds to punish a master who has beaten his slave. I believe what we are seeing here is that there is a clear recognition that the master DOES have the right to be the judge, jury, and executioner over the slave. And it seems to me that verse 21 says that the grounds for his right to do so is that he is the authority over his slave based upon the fact that he owns the slave. Now, before anybody accuses me of something I don't affirm. We must acknowledge that scripture sets very specific limits on this. Should he even cause the slave to loose a tooth in disciplining him then the slave becomes a free man on account of it. This is in the same passage! Exodus 21:27. Other similiar statements are made. So we see it is simply permission to have his slave punished in a similiar way the elders would punish another Israelite. Not license for whatever cruel torture he desires. I would articulate it like this. "While biblical slavery acknowledges the ownership of the slave and affirms him as the property of the master, it constantly remembers that what is owned is a human being with a certain God-given dignity." As we protect the scriptural notion of slavery from wicked practices that has accompanied worldly slavery, we must still be carefull not to misrepresent it as something better than it actually was. I will address this further in a second post. In Christ, Beja |