Tuesday, September 16, 2014
deuteronomy - holy wars
Chapter 20 of Deuteronomy, addresses waging holy wars. It says one should enter a town and it and attempt to offer peace. If those terms are rejected and the town surrenders, then "the the people in it shall serve you at forced labor" (Deuteronomy 20:11). Granted, God never lays out a specific commandment that states "you should not enslave others". The closest commandment there is to this would be "you shall not steal" (Exodous 20:15), as in stealing freedom from another (but this is an incredible stretch). Despite this, I would think that there isn't much honor in promoting the enslavement of others, especially given the fact that they were slaves in Egypt and understand the suffering. It's likely that I'm skeptical because I wasn't brought up religiously, but I still don't see the sense in forcing others to suffer in such a way that one would understand the pain of.
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I think the idea of slavery is deeply embedded in these ancient cultures. Because of this, we never see the Old Testament explicitly condemn slavery as inherently immoral. In the case of Hebrew enslavement under the Egyptians, for example, it is not so much the act of slavery which is evil, but the fact that God's chosen people are being mistreated and oppressed. Basically, it's a bigger deal when bad things happen to the Israelites because, in the Hebrew Bible, they are culturally superior to all the other ancient peoples. Your argument that the Jews should empathize with enslaved people is interesting, but I think they were too convinced by their divine privilege to really care about outsiders. We especially see this in Deuteronomy, where God instructs his Hebrew children to deal harshly with polytheistic tribes, who were viewed as inferiors by the Abrahamic monotheists.
ReplyDeleteSlavery is mentioned many times in the Old Testament, most specifically Deuteronomy 15. God provides laws for the Israelites regarding the treatment of slaves. Not only does this mean that the Israelites came into contact with slaves or took slaves, but that it was enough of a cultural norm that God needed to provide laws concerning their treatment. What i find interesting is that in their escape from Egypt and their subsequent wandering in the desert, slaves were still enough of a everyday part of life to warrant attention. I wonder if slaves were more of a cultural norm where people inside the culture were traded for debts and labor or if it was more of establishing dominance over another culture, more like what we think of slavery as today?
ReplyDeleteIt seems that at this point in time it was culturally accepted to have slaves. In most accounts that we have read, people in the stories often have slaves or servants. In a few instances people have traded their labor services to pay off debts, such as when Jacob agreed to work for Rachel's hand in marriage in the book of Genesis. However, the slavery at this time seems different from the idea of slavery that we generally think of now. When God says that the people in the town that surrender must serve the people that took over, it seems that he is having the people who surrenders pay debts for not accepting the initial terms of peace. Having slaves wasn't out of the ordinary back then, and it doesn't seem that they were being treated particularly poorly, more like they were being used for labor. It doesn't seem like slavery at the time was meant to degrade others, more to show their superiority and higher class than their slaves.
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