The Problem with Christians

[Huggy Bear]

Not to get off topic, but Hebrew law explicitly forbade anyone to force a person into servitude without their consent.


http://www.gotquestions.org/bondservant.html

Yes, except it wasn't written in Roman times. You're over 1000 years off. You're also completely ignoring, by jumping into the semantics and "connotations" of the words, that it explicitly says that you can own their children and will them to your children, that you own them for life.

First of all, I included the Roman example to show how it contrasted against the Hebrew example, the law of Moses still applied in roman times after all.

Secondly, in those days women and children required a male protector or guardian. this tradition is still simulated in modern marriage ceremonies where the Father gives away his daughter to the groom, relinquishing guardianship.

If you were a bond servant, you were in no position to provide for a family, that's why you sold yourself into servitude in the first place. If by some miracle you were able to afford to pay for your wife and children's freedom, then you were free to do so.

The verses you cite in "defense" of this practice are part of the Indentured Servitude practice (which was also practiced, in the Biblical form of six-years-of-voluntary-slavery-then-out, here in the USA, and is how many white people got over here from Europe, while Native Americans and African Americans were subjected to the other sort of slavery, chattel slavery, per Biblical instructions... it's appalling to me that you pretend not to notice the difference), as you can see if you read all the verses in context:

1 `And these [are] the judgments which thou dost set before them:
2 `When thou buyest a Hebrew servant -- six years he doth serve, and in the seventh he goeth out as a freeman for nought; 3 if by himself he cometh in, by himself he goeth out; if he [is] owner of a wife, then his wife hath gone out with him;
4 if his lord give to him a wife, and she hath borne to him sons or daughters -- the wife and her children are her lord's, and he goeth out by himself.
5 `And if the servant really say: I have loved my lord, my wife, and my sons -- I do not go out free; 6 then hath his lord brought him nigh unto God, and hath brought him nigh unto the door, or unto the side-post, and his lord hath bored his ear with an awl, and he hath served him -- to the age.

(Exodus 21, KJV)

The "And he who stealeth a man, and hath sold him, and he hath been found in his hand, is certainly put to death." verse, a few lines later, is obviously a prohibition about kidnapping, even though it's for the purpose of turning the person into a slave. The Exodus 21 list is about things Israelites can/can't do to one another, and has nothing to do with our discussion about foreign slaves. You really REALLY need to watch Rob's video, because you sound just like the god depicted in that video right now.

And by the way, the article you cited starts with these lines:

A bondservant is a slave. In some Bibles the word bondservant is the translation of the Greek word doulos, which means “one who is subservient to, and entirely at the disposal of, his master; a slave.” Other translations use the word slave or servant.

In Roman times, the term bondservant or slave could refer to someone who voluntarily served others. But it usually referred to one who was held in a permanent position of servitude.

Emphasis, of course, my own.

What you guys don't get is that this system existed well before the Hebrews, and well before any law of Moses. If you remember Jacob agreed to 14 years of servitude to marry the daughters of Laban because he couldn't afford a dowry.

What is amazing to me is how you guys judge a society that existed purely on a trade based system, in which LABOR is a tradable commodity, by modern day standards, and really if you look closely you'll find that nothing has changed all that much.

If you want to buy a house, your obligated to work and pay off that mortgage for 30 years before YOU "own" it, how is that any different from Jacob volunteering to serve 14 years to pay off dowries? Nothing, except in the case of the bible, you provided labor in exchange for a house, food, protection and got a wife that you didn't pay a dowry for, and in your mind this is an atrocity?

If I owned a ranch and went and got homeless people to work on it voluntarily for room and board; would you consider that to be evil?