Why Do We Think Slavery is Evil?

[Tonus]

I don't know the answers to some of the questions you raise. My point is mainly that in those times, people weren't saving up for retirement. They weren't golfing on the weekends. And they were definitely not checking out the latest hot restaurant. However you put it, they needed food, shelter and clothing. Maybe there could have been a better system.

We have the ability to apply empathy, sympathy, and imagination to the situation.  If we're talking about an agricultural society using the technology of the times, I think it could function quite well without the concept of owning people.  Either via wages or barter, people could still provide for one another.  Slavery really doesn't seem necessary in a society where an able-bodied person can't really sponge off of the rest, where it seems clear that everyone benefits when he pitches in (including that person).  Where is the benefit in keeping your own tribesmen as property?

But regardless, gods purpose was to not make this system a perfect world but rather to go back to his original plan of having a peaceful world in paradise. So it wouldn't make logical sense for him to employ a system that was perfect because he knew it would require perfect humans to carry it out.

There are two problems with this idea.  For one, if the world with a god works no differently than the world without a god, then god is either nonexistent or superfluous.  If god's guidance were to make a people in a backwards time seem very forward-thinking, that might be a very convincing bit of evidence.

Second, this is a god who took a very direct and active role in human society at the time.  He had thrashed the Egyptians with plagues, then wiped out their army by dumping an entire sea on them.  He led his chosen people through the desert by making it rain food, and making the rocks gush water.  He eventually led them on a miracle-laden conquering of several other tribes, doing such things as making city walls crumble.  In later times he would send an angel to massacre 180,000 Assyrian soldiers in a single night, and make the sun stand still in the sky to allow for another victory in war.  He even cared about the little things, striking dead a man who tried to steady the ark of the covenant when it appeared as if it might fall.

Yet when it came to slavery and rape, he seems to have been constrained by their stubbornness?  Or their cultural mores?  He wrote a law that made it a sin to covet your neighbor's stuff, but owning other people and taking the virgin girls of conquered people as wives (or alternatively, kidnapping them) was a line he couldn't cross?  That doesn't make sense.  It's so inconsistent on his part as to be almost random.  And a god with the kind of power and temperament of the OT Yahweh is bad enough, but if we also make him unpredictable he's the most terrifying villain we can possibly imagine.