Using the Bible as an excuse for bigotry

[jeremyp]

Verses in the Bible are evidence of what's in the Bible and not much else. 

This is not completely true. The Bible is certainly evidence for what its authors thought about the World and parts of it are evidence for various historical events and personages. The difficulty is in winnowing out the real history from the make believe. For example the historical narratives of the time between the end of the Davidic empire and the Exile are almost certainly based on truth, although other sources tell us they are heavily spun.

[SteveH]

Do you keep slaves as you must agree with your God that slavery is fine?

The Bible allows the keeping of slaves, but gives slaves certain rights. It doesn't command the keeping of slaves.

[Roses]

All types of slavery is wrong, it should have been one of the 'Thou Shalt Nots'.

[Spud]

The Bible allows the keeping of slaves, but gives slaves certain rights. It doesn't command the keeping of slaves.

Just found this regarding divorce law in Dt 24:1-5, and wonder if it applies to Leviticus 25:44-6, since keeping slaves may too have been a social and cultural reality?

This is case law. Case laws begin with social and cultural realities (a man marries a woman and masters her) and function to correct practices {43} or spell out restraints or limit excesses (if. . . . then he may not remarry her. . . .); they are not expressions of the ideal.

https://directionjournal.org/24/1/interpreting-silences-deut-24-1-4.html

[SteveH]

Just found this regarding divorce law in Dt 24:1-5, and wonder if it applies to Leviticus 25:44-6, since keeping slaves may too have been a social and cultural reality?https://directionjournal.org/24/1/interpreting-silences-deut-24-1-4.html

Yes, that occurred to me. Slavery was pretty much universal in the ancient world, in every society. At least the ancient Hebrews gave slaves rights, and slave-owners duties, which was an advance.

[Robbie]

Not exactly on topic but thought you might find this interesting Oli. My mother who was a Quaker and very knowledgeable on Quaker history, told me about Benjamin Lay when I was young & wanted to know all about the Friends, warts and all.
http://www.quakersintheworld.org/quakers-in-action/61

[SteveH]

Not exactly on topic but thought you might find this interesting Oli. My mother who was a Quaker and very knowledgeable on Quaker history, told me about Benjamin Lay when I was young & wanted to know all about the Friends, warts and all.
http://www.quakersintheworld.org/quakers-in-action/61

Interesting. I've heard of him before. I must say that I prefer the quieter campaigning of John Woolman. I've got a copy of Woolman's Journal, published in 1896. It is bibliographically interesting, being a paperback - it must be one of the earliest.

[Robbie]

I have the Journal of John Woolman which I thought was published not long after he died. It is very interesting to read aboutQuakers and what they achieved.

[SteveH]

I have the Journal of John Woolman which I thought was published not long after he died.

It probably was, originally.

[jeremyp]

Yes, that occurred to me. Slavery was pretty much universal in the ancient world, in every society. At least the ancient Hebrews gave slaves rights, and slave-owners duties, which was an advance.

What rights did the Hebrews give slaves that weren’t given by other cultures?

[SteveH]

What rights did the Hebrews give slaves that weren’t given by other cultures?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_views_on_slavery

[jeremyp]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_views_on_slavery

And how does that link answer my question?

[SteveH]

Some specific legal rights of Hebrew slaves:

Working conditions
The Ethical Decalogue makes clear that honouring the Shabbat was expected of slaves, not just their masters.[65] The later[27][28][29] Deuteronomic code, having repeated the Shabbat requirement, also instructs that slaves should be allowed to celebrate the Sukkot festival.[66]

Although the Holiness Code instructs that during the Sabbatical Year, slaves and their masters should eat food which the land yields, without being farmed, it does not explicitly forbid the slaves from the farming itself, despite restricting their masters from doing so, and neither does it grant slaves any other additional rest from work during these years.[67]

Indeed, unlike the other law codes, the Holiness Code does not mention explicit occasions of respite from toil, instead simply giving the vague instruction that Israelite slaves should not to be compelled to work with rigour;[68][69] Maimonides argues that this was to be interpreted as forbidding open-ended work (such as keep doing that until I come back), and that disciplinary action was not to include instructing the slave to perform otherwise pointless work.[27][70]

A special case is that of the debtor who sells himself as a slave to his creditor; the Holiness Code instructs that in this situation, the debtor must not be made to do the work of slaves, but must instead be treated the same as a hired servant.[71] In Jewish tradition, this was taken to mean that the debtor should not be instructed to do humiliating work - which only slaves would do - and that the debtor should be asked to perform the craft(s) which they usually did before they had been enslaved, if it is realistic to do so.[27][70]

Injury and compensation
The earlier[27][28][29] Covenant Code provides a potentially more valuable and direct form of relief, namely a degree of protection for the slave's person (their body and its health) itself. This codification extends the basic lex talionis (....eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth...),[72] to compel that when slaves are significantly injured by their masters, manumission is to be the compensation given; the canonical examples mentioned are the knocking out of an eye or a tooth.[73] This resembles the earlier Code of Hammurabi, which instructs that when an injury is done to a social inferior, monetary compensation should be made, instead of carrying out the basic lex talionis; Josephus indicates that by his time it was acceptable for a fine to be paid to the slave, instead of manumitting them, if the slave agreed.[74] Nachmanides argued that it was a biblically commanded duty to liberate a slave who had been harmed in this way[27]

The Hittite laws and the Code of Hammurabi both insist that if a slave is harmed by a third party, the third party must financially compensate the owner.[75] In the Covenant Code, if an ox gores a slave, the ox owner must pay the servant's master a 30 shekel fine.[76]

The murder of slaves by owners was prohibited in the Law covenant. The Covenant Code clearly institutes the death penalty for beating a free man to death;[77] in contrast, beating a slave to death was to be avenged only if the slave does not survive for one or two days after the beating.[78] Abraham ben Nathan of Lunel, a 12th-century Provençal scholar, Targum, and Maimonides argue that avenged implies the death penalty,[27][70] but more recent scholars view it as probably describing a lesser punishment.[79] A number of modern Protestant Bible versions (such as the New Living Translation, New International Version and New Century Version) translate the survival for one or two days as referring to a full and speedy recovery, rather than to a lingering death, as favoured by other recent versions (such as the New Revised Standard Version, and New American Bible).

Fugitive slaves
The Deuteronomic Code forbids the people of Israel from handing over fugitive slaves to their masters or oppressing them, and instructs that these fugitives should be allowed to reside where they wish.[80] Although a literal reading would indicate that this applies to slaves of all nationalities and locations, the Mishnah and many commentators consider the rule to have the much narrower application, to just those slaves who flee from outside Israelite territory into it

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bible_and_slavery

[Christine]

This is not completely true. The Bible is certainly evidence for what its authors thought about the World and parts of it are evidence for various historical events and personages. The difficulty is in winnowing out the real history from the make believe. For example the historical narratives of the time between the end of the Davidic empire and the Exile are almost certainly based on truth, although other sources tell us they are heavily spun.

Real places, people and events appear in all kinds of fiction, it doesn't make it any less fictional.  I don't know how accurate anything in the Bible is.  Do reputable historians use it as evidence of anything other than the development of some religious myths?

I think I'm on safe ground saying that there is no evidence that God wrote the 10 commandments, from the Bible or anywhere else.  I stand by to be proved wrong when Spud expands on his claim of physical evidence.

[Christine]

Are we supposed to be impressed by rules for a slave-owning society that may or may not have been less brutal than other slave-owning societies?  Imagine, if that all-powerful and good deity had just said no slaves, and treat everybody (including women, foreigners and people who have different beliefs from you) with kindness and respect and no mealy-mouthed excuses.  Imagine! 

Is there any moral (I mean actually moral, not along the lines of "don't beat your slave to death") guidance in the Bible that can't be found better framed and expressed somewhere else?

By the way, the quotation provided by Oliphant Chuckerbutty shows instructions in the Bible are open to different interpretations - another faux pas by the Almighty there.  Clear instructions comprehensible to every human shouldn't be too hard to arrange for the being that created the Universe.

[Spud]

Are we supposed to be impressed by rules for a slave-owning society that may or may not have been less brutal than other slave-owning societies?  Imagine, if that all-powerful and good deity had just said no slaves, and treat everybody (including women, foreigners and people who have different beliefs from you) with kindness and respect and no mealy-mouthed excuses.  Imagine! 

Is there any moral (I mean actually moral, not along the lines of "don't beat your slave to death") guidance in the Bible that can't be found better framed and expressed somewhere else?

By the way, the quotation provided by Oliphant Chuckerbutty shows instructions in the Bible are open to different interpretations - another faux pas by the Almighty there.  Clear instructions comprehensible to every human shouldn't be too hard to arrange for the being that created the Universe.

Leviticus 19:34
You must treat the foreigner living among you as native-born and love him as yourself, for you were foreigners in the land of Egypt. I am the LORD your God.

Deuteronomy 10:19
So you also must love the foreigner, since you yourselves were foreigners in the land of Egypt.

[Spud]

The slave Onesimus and his Christian master Philemon became brothers when Onesimus became a believer. Since foreign slaves in Israel were able to worship God with the Israelites, the relationship between masters and slaves who converted was the same as described in Philemon v.16:

Perhaps the reason he was separated from you for a little while was that you might have him back forever— 16no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a dear brother.

[Dicky Underpants]

Real places, people and events appear in all kinds of fiction, it doesn't make it any less fictional.  I don't know how accurate anything in the Bible is.  Do reputable historians use it as evidence of anything other than the development of some religious myths?

Reputable historians do use it as evidence when there is other evidence from contemporary hostile sources (i.e. engraved stelae, prisms, and tablets) when the events related in both sources appear to concur on certain key points. One of the most significant archaelogical items in this regard is the prism of Sennacherib, which tells of the Siege of Jerusalem by the Assyrians in the reign of King Hezekiah. The story is also told in the Bible e.g. 2Chronicles 32. The accounts are naturally biased in favour of the nations writing their own stories - but both accounts agree that a) there was a siege of Jerusalem, and b) the siege was lifted, and the Jews and Jerusalem survived. Jeremy's comments about the reliability of the Bible accounts are pretty much accepted by objective historians (but of course not by believing fundamentalists). We can be pretty certain that we can trust nothing in the earlier part of the Bible as having any historical truth, up to perhaps the 1st Book of Kings, which might contain a few trustworthy grains. Our learned believer here Anchorman is the chap to approach for all the corroborative archaelogical evidence about supposed events in the Bible.

[Anchorman]

Reputable historians do use it as evidence when there is other evidence from contemporary hostile sources (i.e. engraved stelae, prisms, and tablets) when the events related in both sources appear to concur on certain key points. One of the most significant archaelogical items in this regard is the prism of Sennacherib, which tells of the Siege of Jerusalem by the Assyrians in the reign of King Hezekiah. The story is also told in the Bible e.g. 2Chronicles 32. The accounts are naturally biased in favour of the nations writing their own stories - but both accounts agree that a) there was a siege of Jerusalem, and b) the siege was lifted, and the Jews and Jerusalem survived. Jeremy's comments about the reliability of the Bible accounts are pretty much accepted by objective historians (but of course not by believing fundamentalists). We can be pretty certain that we can trust nothing in the earlier part of the Bible as having any historical truth, up to perhaps the 1st Book of Kings, which might contain a few trustworthy grains. Our learned believer here Anchorman is the chap to approach for all the corroborative archaelogical evidence about supposed events in the Bible.

   




Dunno about 'learned', but there ARE anchor points (no pun intended) which ground the OT in history.
Those points become increasingly frequent as time goes on toward the conquest of the area under the Greeks.
On another thread, I argue that the Pentateuch was edited around the sixth-fifth centuries, and cannot be relied on for either accurate history or culture before c1000 BC.
The first 'anchor' which definitely ties the Bible into the recorded events of the first millennium BC is the invasion of Judea and Israel by a resurgent Egypt under Hedjkheperre Setepenre Sheshonq around 930 BC.
The Bible records this as having taken place during the reign of Rehoboham son of Solomon, during his fifth year as king.
(See 1 Kings chapters 11-14)
Sheshonq I - Biblical 'Shishak' - recorded his invasion in typical Egyptian bombastic style on the walls of the temples of Karnak and Luxor.
For example
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubastite_Portal?sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj6zdz1r4HnAhWaFcAKHe-mAlgQ0gIwAHoECAMQAw#Description

In many ways, Sheshonq , though of Lybian stock, is counted as the last 'great' Egyptian king.

[Christine]

Reputable historians do use it as evidence when there is other evidence from contemporary hostile sources (i.e. engraved stelae, prisms, and tablets) when the events related in both sources appear to concur on certain key points. One of the most significant archaelogical items in this regard is the prism of Sennacherib, which tells of the Siege of Jerusalem by the Assyrians in the reign of King Hezekiah. The story is also told in the Bible e.g. 2Chronicles 32. The accounts are naturally biased in favour of the nations writing their own stories - but both accounts agree that a) there was a siege of Jerusalem, and b) the siege was lifted, and the Jews and Jerusalem survived. Jeremy's comments about the reliability of the Bible accounts are pretty much accepted by objective historians (but of course not by believing fundamentalists). We can be pretty certain that we can trust nothing in the earlier part of the Bible as having any historical truth, up to perhaps the 1st Book of Kings, which might contain a few trustworthy grains. Our learned believer here Anchorman is the chap to approach for all the corroborative archaelogical evidence about supposed events in the Bible.

Thank you for the information, I appreciate it.  I'll try to use more precise wording in future. 

[Christine]

Leviticus 19:34
You must treat the foreigner living among you as native-born and love him as yourself, for you were foreigners in the land of Egypt. I am the LORD your God.

Deuteronomy 10:19
So you also must love the foreigner, since you yourselves were foreigners in the land of Egypt.

Well done God! Shame about the qualification though.  Does that mean people who've never been abroad are OK to be horrible to foreigners? Shall I quote some verses about smashing babies' heads against rocks? Raping women? Killing children using bears? Burning witches?

Can you not conceive of a better method of communicating moral imperatives than the obscure, repetitive and contradictory Bible?  Read The Age of Reason and explain to me where Thomas Paine's analysis goes wrong.  It's a short book and easy reading, unlike yours.

 

The slave Onesimus and his Christian master Philemon became brothers when Onesimus became a believer. Since foreign slaves in Israel were able to worship God with the Israelites, the relationship between masters and slaves who converted was the same as described in Philemon v.16:

Believe (or pretend to) in my irrational and cruel deity and I'll release you from bondage, meanwhile, your friends and relatives will continue slaving for me.  You'll be able to boss them about too!

I think you need to think about what "good" means. 

 

[Outrider]

Leviticus 19:34  You must treat the foreigner living among you as native-born and love him as yourself, for you were foreigners in the land of Egypt. I am the LORD your God.

Deuteronomy 10:19  So you also must love the foreigner, since you yourselves were foreigners in the land of Egypt.

Isn't this rather undermined by the evidence that the years of Jewish slavery in Egypt are a myth - or, rather, by the continued lack of any evidence supporting the claim despite more than a century of looking.

O.

[Anchorman]

Isn't this rather undermined by the evidence that the years of Jewish slavery in Egypt are a myth - or, rather, by the continued lack of any evidence supporting the claim despite more than a century of looking.

O.

   

I DID try......
http://www.religionethics.co.uk/index.php?topic=13261.msg773640#msg773640

[Spud]

The first 'anchor' which definitely ties the Bible into the recorded events of the first millennium BC is the invasion of Judea and Israel by a resurgent Egypt under Hedjkheperre Setepenre Sheshonq around 930 BC.
The Bible records this as having taken place during the reign of Rehoboham son of Solomon, during his fifth year as king.
(See 1 Kings chapters 11-14)
Sheshonq I - Biblical 'Shishak' - recorded his invasion in typical Egyptian bombastic style on the walls of the temples of Karnak and Luxor.
For example
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubastite_Portal?sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj6zdz1r4HnAhWaFcAKHe-mAlgQ0gIwAHoECAMQAw#Description

In many ways, Sheshonq , though of Lybian stock, is counted as the last 'great' Egyptian king.

I've just read 1 Kings 11-14, and there's no mention of Shishak attacking anywhere but Jerusalem. All it says is that there was continual war between Rehoboam and Jeroboam (14:30). If Shishak had attacked the north as well, surely Jeroboam would have been a bit busy defending against the Egyptians to be fighting Rehoboam? Yet Shoshenq invaded Judah and Israel. Does the wrong Shishak need to sit down?

[Anchorman]

I've just read 1 Kings 11-14, and there's no mention of Shishak attacking anywhere but Jerusalem. All it says is that there was continual war between Rehoboam and Jeroboam (14:30). If Shishak had attacked the north as well, surely Jeroboam would have been a bit busy defending against the Egyptians to be fighting Rehoboam? Yet Shoshenq invaded Judah and Israel. Does the wrong Shishak need to sit down?

   


How do you think he managed to get an army to Jerusalem?
The 'Bubastis gate' records several areas in which he tried to reimpose Egyptian authority.
Remember that the whole region had been virtual Egyptian property since around 1800 BC, and stelets had only recently made a grab for freedom when the Egyptian state threw an internal wobbly around 1000 BC.
In effect, Sheshonq was simply emphasising Egyptian control.
Archaeology from what is now Syria, Palestine and Israel gives ample evidence of his presence from seals, inscriptions, dtelae fragments, scarabs and a particularly fine statuette of the king as the Memphite war deity Ptah, found outside Jerusalem in 1976, now in Tel Aviv university museum.
The inscription reads

    "...Hedjkheperrure Setepenre, victorious, given life in the mansion of Ptah before the miserable taken places, finding that which is his in eternity..."
Typical Egyptian bombast saying "Hey, I'm the boss, standing here, taking back what's mine already...."