(June 29, 2016 at 5:41 am)Veritas_Vincit Wrote:(June 28, 2016 at 10:41 pm)SteveII Wrote: So your solution was to be the pacifist nation among all constantly warring people of the middle east? The Israelites were not particularly war-like. Mostly wars were defensive in nature. They stayed put after the initial conquest for over a 1000 years--with some breaks when they were carted away as slaves.
What about the poor? The people who needed the safety net that selling yourself or family member provided over misery and possible death? You do realize that these practices were done thousands of years before and 2000 years after Exodus 21.
He's GOD! Why didn't he just appear to ALL of the people?! Why didn't he just say "Don't own people as property"?! Do you seriously think your God is incapable of finding a better solution to these problems? It's just not good enough.
Would God know of a better solution: yes, certainly.
Could a nation of loosely grouped tribes create a centralized government that was capable of providing a safety net for the poor and refugee camps (with a long-term resettlement plan) for the displaced after a military campaign? Highly unlikely.
To make your point, you can't simply say "God could have...". It is not that easy--you would have to give a plausible scenario. You also did not make the case that God condones slavery. Since the penalty of kidnapping and selling someone into slavery was death, the goal of the system was obviously not for slavery itself. The best thing for the greatest number of people seems to have been to regulate a practice that had been going on for literally thousands of years.
