The Bible, Slavery, and Israel. 1. Christianity did NOT invent slavery. Nearly every society has had slavery. This has been a universal problem throughout mankind. It’s simply false to sit there and assume that all the other nations were looking to Israel to morally justify slavery. 2. The two biggest causes of slavery in the ancient world were war and poverty, not skin color. The contemporary ancient Near Eastern empires slave markets were glutted with captives of war and displaced people. These slaves were put to degrading and dehumanizing labour. And, of course, Israelite slavery was even more different from the ghastly commercialized and massive-scale slave trade that Arabs, Europeans, and Americans perpetrated upon Africa. 3. We need to remember that Israel was NOT Gods ideal society. All of humanity is created in Gods image. However, when sin entered the world and perverted the good world God created, that ideal was violated and the ancient world was from then on perpetually plagued by poverty, war, and dominance. Therefore, Israel was already corrupt and broken like the rest of the people of that world when God began His redemptive work in and through them. The people of Israel were called to be progressively different than the surrounding nations. Many times we see that they did not want to be His people and rebelled. 4. God did NOT show any favoritism towards Israel/Judah/Jews. Yes, the God of the Old Testament is repeatedly portrayed as acting in judgment on a wicked and degraded society and culture. Truthfully, we forget that many times that wicked society and culture was Israel itself being judged. In the biblical narrative, the actions of the Israelites are never placed in the category of oppression but of divine punishment operating through human agency, as it did even against Israel (when God, at times, allowed them to be defeated by their enemies). It was within the volatile kill-or-be-killed world of the ancient Near East that God began the process of restoration and redemption through the people of Israel, who, by the way, would have been just like everyone else in that culture were it not for God’s grace and revelation. Needless to say, there was no United Nations or diplomacy over high tea in this violent culture. Rebellion, depravity, and the violation of Shalom had become so rampant among all the nations of the earth that God decided to work his plan of redemption through one nation. Israel was established by God to help set the religious, cultural, and historical context for the saving work of Jesus the Messiah later in history. The ultimate goal was nothing less than God’s salvation being brought to all the nations and seeing his righteous rule finally established. Because of this role, God providentially protected the nation of Israel, from whom the Messiah would eventually come. . 5. Jesus was not silent on slavery. He only chose to identify where the root issues were, which resides in the human heart. Jesus’ mission was to set spiritual captives free, and this freedom would come to have righteous real-world effects. 6. The Bible accounts for Human Rights and Dignity. The Bible teaches universal human dignity and equality because all are made in the image of God. No matter how its manipulated, racism is completely at odds with this foundational truth. What is often forgotten is that atheism rose to prominence only after centuries of Judeo-Christian ethic and thought had shaped modern civilization. Atheism did not lay the groundwork for inherent human dignity and equality; it borrows that from a Judeo-Christian worldview. If you remove the God of the Bible from the equation, you also remove inherent human dignity and equality. 7. Christians tolerated slavery until it could be abolished. I am by no means trying to justify slavery, give any Christians a pass for their participation in it, or mitigate the dehumanization that occurred in the African slave trade. The main point here is merely that slavery in ancient Israel and the laws pertaining to it recorded in the Old Testament need to be understood within an ancient Near Eastern context because they were very different.
Posted on: Thu, 11 Dec 2014 19:51:33 +0000
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