Religious Slavery

[cwes99_03]

Originally Posted by Southtown

Well I could argue for a better translation of the Hebrew, but you have a point. They treated foreigners differently. Those slaves were undoubtedly the result of warfare or slavetrades. What to do with those guys? Well purchasing people from slavetraders would be the humane thing to do, actually. In the case of warfare, slavery is of course preferable to death.[/speculation] Read the book of Ruth.

But keep in mind, Yahweh did attempt to police their behavior, even he did it rather leniently. In my mind, the difference between owning Israelites and owning foreigners prohpetically symbolized the dynamic relationship between the righteous (free) and the self-righteous (slaves to law), i.e. the whole Sabbatical Year/Jubilee debt-forgiveness thing.

Of course they treated foreigners differently. God had set up a covenant with the decendents of Abraham not of any other man, and certainly not with the decendents of Sodom and Gomorrah and other like city-states.

When Josephs brothers sold him into slavery they likewise thought that they were doing something better than killing him, but they still knew what they were doing was wrong. Likewise Joseph said that what his brothers had done was wrong, but that God had turned the bad thing into a good thing, using his slave status to the advantage of Isreal and his sons when the drought came about.
Again a scriptural example that went to show that the Bible did not condone all aspects of slavery, particularly those of the European trade of African slaves, who were likewise kidnapped in some cases and sold into slavery by their own tribes and families. Some have argued that these people thought they were selling their family members into indentured servitude, not the Americanized (if you would call it that) form of slavery for life and death.