What is with refusing to admit slavery is wrong?

[Redbeard The Pink]

I think "if he is found in his hand" indicates otherwise, and a sincere person would not make the verse of no effect just because an intermediary trader was involved.

Like I said before, Leviticus provides ample permissions for buying slaves from other nations, and there is no command or admonition to make sure those foreign slaves are not kidnapped from somewhere by whoever was selling them. The command against kidnapping, therefore, is most likely against kidnapping Hebrew citizens specifically, as foreign slaves did not need to be kidnapped--they could simply be bought per Leviticus 25.

Do you agree with the first statement on that page: The Hebrew term for slave, eved, is a direct derivation from the Hebrew verb la'avöd ("to work"), thus, the slave in Jewish law is really only a worker or servant.

I mean yeah...it's just like having a butler that you're allowed to beat to within an inch of his life and then watch him suffer to death for days...wait...no, this is pretty much slavery. Just because they used the same word for different kinds of servants, doesn't mean all those servants were treated the same, nor that any of them were treated particularly well. Hebrew slaves tended to be more like indentured servants and had to be treated better and freed eventually, but foreign slaves were afforded no such luxury. They served in perpetuity and in bondage, much like the African slaves kept by America later on.

This is speculation. So far we don't know how many foreign slaves were typically in Israel, or how many of those were prisoners of war as opposed to purchased.

It's also epistemically likely based on the circumstances, which elevates it slightly above mere uninformed speculation. While we don't know how many foreign vs. domestic slaves they had, the bible's restrictions on the amount of time Hebrew slaves could be kept and the restrictions on the kind of work they could do would have made it far more convenient and permanent to obtain foreign slaves, who could simply be bought rather than obtained under special legal circumstances (which was pretty much the only way to get a Hebrew servant). Furthermore, even people with Hebrew slaves probably would have kept some foreign ones to handle the work that Hebrew slaves couldn't legally be ordered to do (like washing feet, for instance).