The Sean McDowell Show - The BIBLE and SLAVERY Explained! (Dr. Carmen Imes)

Episode Date: January 5, 2025

Does the Bible Endorse Slavery? Does the Bible allow beating slaves? Dr. Carmen Imes is an Old Testament professor, writer, and biblical scholar at Talbot School of Theology at Biola University. She is currently writing a commentary on Exodus, and thus spending a ton of time thinking about these issues. Today, she's here to address these tough challenges and more. READ: Bearing God's Name: Why Sinai Still Matters (https://a.co/d/bjAZRjP) WATCH: Genocide. Slavery. Polygamy: Dennis Prager on Tough OT Questions (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8RIdPwyqNs) *Get a MASTERS IN APOLOGETICS or SCIENCE AND RELIGION at BIOLA (https://bit.ly/3LdNqKf) *USE Discount Code [SMDCERTDISC] for 25% off the BIOLA APOLOGETICS CERTIFICATE program (https://bit.ly/3AzfPFM) *See our fully online UNDERGRAD DEGREE in Bible, Theology, and Apologetics: (https://bit.ly/448STKK) FOLLOW ME ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Twitter: https://twitter.com/Sean_McDowell TikTok: @sean_mcdowell Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmcdowell/ Website: https://seanmcdowell.org

Perhaps the toughest objection to Christianity is the issue of slavery in the Bible. Many people are looking with fresh eyes at the Bible and raising troubling questions such as, does the Bible allow the beating of a slave? And why didn't Jesus condemn slavery? Our guest today, my colleague at Talbot School of Theology, Biola University, Dr. Carmen Imes, is ready to help us navigate these questions. Carmen, thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me, Sean. I'm glad to talk about this. Yeah, I've been looking forward to this for a while. I've touched on it in short videos, but never gone into depth. And people have been asking me for a long time. Given that my office is literally just one floor above yours,

and we've been working together for a while, I thought it'd be perfect to bring you on, especially because you're working on a commentary on Exodus, the key passage we're going to probe into. But maybe let's just start off with a few general questions before we jump into some of the particulars. What interest and expertise do you bring to the question of the Bible endorsing slavery? Well, just as a follower of Jesus, it is important for me to handle the question, to address the question of, is the Bible good for human flourishing? Is this book going to be one that leads us to better relationships with each other, or does it endorse oppression? So that's just a question that I bring to the Bible along with lots of other readers. But as a scholar, I'm an Old Testament scholar, as you said, I'm writing a commentary on Exodus. So I've been doing a deep dive into the whole book,

and Exodus is the book, right? That where God brings his people out of slavery in Egypt, and then it seems a little contradictory that he seems to allow slavery going forward and so there's a kind of disconnect that people run into wait a minute so it's okay for uh for the Israelites to own slaves but they don't have to be slaves like what what is this how do we reconcile this or is it just a hopelessly irreconcilable difference? You're absolutely right. We're going to get into that, this apparent tension between God choosing people who are slaves and freeing them and then allowing this institution to continue. What's going on? We're going to get into that. But I'm curious, since you teach specifically on Exodus, how big of a question

this is with some of your students at Talbot and beyond. And in particular, I was just interviewing the apologists, Cliff and Stuart Koneckley, who go on to college campuses and engage people. And Stuart, the younger one in his 30s, he said he thought this was, until he really studied it, the toughest objection he's faced to the faith. It's not the top one or two I get asked, but it's a frequent question both Christians and skeptics have. What's your experience with your students in this question coming up? Yeah, I definitely have heard students voice this question and wrestle with it. I think especially it's a poignant question for students of color who are wondering, is the Bible behind the slavery that maybe my ancestors experienced in the antebellum South? This is not something I feel

comfortable with. And I taught a grad class this past semester on Exodus, and we definitely addressed it head on there. And you could just see everyone in the room like, yes, let's talk about this. I don't know how to answer people's objections or questions. That's really helpful. It's not only academic, but in particular for minority students, it can be very, very personal. And so I appreciate that. That's a helpful perspective. So let's jump into, again, a few questions before we look at particular passages, but maybe some principles you bring to bear would help us. So I'm curious, like, how should we judge Old Testament commandments that are written 3,000 some years ago? Should it be by modern sentiments? Through what lens should

we look at them and judge them? Yes, I think there's such a tendency for us to, as readers, look at the Bible and dislike anything that feels like it wouldn't fit in our context. But reading the Bible is a cross-cultural experience. We're going way back in time. We're going to another cultural context in which there are different values at play. And I think to read the Bible well we need to understand that context and understand what is this doing in its environment sometimes I talk to students about a time when I flipped on the television this is back before you could just choose what you wanted to watch and I and I flipped on I was flipping through the channels and all this that I landed on some kind of it was like a C-span uh channel and it was showing a meeting of the british parliament

and it was vicious i mean they were yelling at each other they were stomping and you know and it seemed very barbaric to me and i just thought what have i just stumbled upon like this is unglued or unhinged and and I realized then and I've realized since that when you're not accustomed to a particular the conventions of a particular context that when you walk in as an outsider it can seem really wrong but if you can somehow put yourself in their shoes and understand all of the history behind it, the context, like what's normal? You know, maybe someone who's in normal parliamentary meetings would say this was a

particularly mild meeting, like I don't know. But if you have nothing to compare it to, it can just seem like, ah, that would not go well in my context. But we're not supposed to be judging it by our context. We should be judging it by our context. We should be judging it against its ancient context. This is where my doctoral work has come in handy because I wrote my dissertation on the Ten Commandments. So I was in Exodus looking at biblical law, doing comparative work, and trying to see like what's normal, what's unique about these laws, and that can really help.

I've heard you in another video when you were talking about this discuss, and that can really help. I've heard you in another video when you were talking about this discuss, and this particular point would maybe take us aside, but it talks about a God revealing himself 3,000, 4,000 years ago. And in that culture, what spoke to people that a God was real really was power and military might. And so we might not like that. That might not be the way that we think God should speak today. But God spoke in that culture. Now it's for us, but wasn't uniquely to us. Right. Are there any other just principles like that in the background? Because when you describe modern day, you know, UK, I've been there. I've seen this. I've watched that. I'm like, wow, this is very different.

In some ways, I wish we had it instead of date. Sometimes it feels like it's just a show we're trying to do and have soundbites like their substantive debate. But that's another English speaking country that we descended from in modern times. We're talking about three to four thousand years ago. So are there any other background issues that might help us approach this to realize some of the gulf that's between us and them? Or is that point that I made just sufficient to draw the contrast? I think there's a couple of other things that might help. One is to understand the way law functioned in the ancient world because we have particular assumptions about laws

and how they work in our context. But in their context, a king would sponsor the development of a law code as a way of demonstrating his fitness to be the ruler. And those laws did not necessarily function legislatively. That is, they weren't applied in court in a sort of fixed or rigid way with particular penalties if you broke each one. It was more about,

I want to say in the surrounding nations, the law functioned more as wisdom or as sort of hypothetical situation rather than a fixed application. So when we come to the book of Exodus and we see Yahweh declaring these laws to Moses and he's going to pass them along to the people, we should understand that Yahweh is claiming to be king, that he is expressing what a just nation would look like, but that these laws were not actually, we have little evidence that they were applied in a legislative sense until much later in history.

Around the Hellenistic period, starting in 300 BC, that's where you start to see the legislative application of law. Before then, it's not that the law was optional or just for decoration. It just, it played into decision making in different ways than how it does now. So there would be more discussion involved about particular cases. And when there's a penalty listed, it doesn't mean this has to be the penalty. It's expressing this would be the maximum penalty within which you can then figure out what are the particulars of this situation that might push it one way or the other. So I think that's helpful to just reframe, recognize we're not looking at a law code the same as the law codes of the United States. The other thing I would say is in addition

to the historical context, we really need to pay attention to the literary context. We have a habit of clipping out a particular verse or paragraph and saying, what is this? But if we read it in its wider context, that wider context puts all sorts of nuance and guard rails around the application of that verse or that paragraph. And when we ignore that context, it does seem very challenging or even egregious.

But I think the context can really help us in this case. That's helpful. It can be the context of the chapter, the context of the book, the context of the torah all of this weighs in in different ways it does so in some ways this conversation is like like a funnel let's narrow down a little bit more and maybe maybe one or two questions in terms of the context we talked about related to slavery before we get to the particular passages in exodus 21. sure but maybe talk about how slavery in the Bible compares and contrasts with other surrounding nations of the time, such as Egypt.

Now, I realize we could do an entire program or two on this, but give us a few principles, maybe the way they're similar, but also maybe ways that they're different. Yeah, and this is an important question because I think what often happens is we see the word slave in the Bible and we have already downloaded in that word

a particular way of thinking about slavery. And if we have grown up in the United States, we're thinking of the terrible abuses of slavery in the antebellum South. And we think of that, you know, maybe we watched Roots or something, and we've seen how bad slavery can be. And we import all of that into every occurrence of the word. But it's important that we see what is slavery like in the ancient world? What kind of a situation are we even thinking about? So I would say one mistake that Christian apologists sometimes make

is to try to overplay the differences between slavery in Israel and slavery in other nations. Across the ancient world, slavery was an institution that people participated in. It was regulated in every context with comparable boundaries to curtail potential abuses to that institution. So one difference that we can see, we could look at particular differences in laws, but I think it's good to note that other law codes tended to protect the rights of the owner of the slave, whereas the biblical law tends to focus on restraining the owner so that he cannot abuse

the vulnerable. And so although there is some restraint of the owner in these other law collections as well, I think that the emphasis in the Bible is on restraining the owner. I think it's also really important to notice that when we're looking at slavery laws in the Bible, they're not what we call apodictic law, which is thou shalt, you know, it's like a sort of timeless prohibition or encouragement to do something. But we're looking at casuistic law, which is an if-then. If this is the situation, then here are the particular boundaries of that situation. Casuistic law, which is also called case law, is never presenting the ideal. It's not presenting an ideal society that we should all aspire to have slaves. No, it's speaking into a situation

in which slavery is already an institution. And I'm saying slavery in the ancient near Eastern sense, not in the modern sense, right? So like, I don't like using the word because of all the connotations that come with it. In the ancient world, sometimes people abused slaves. They did not follow these laws, but the case law was intended to restrain the power of the owner so that there was a

there was potential and so that there was human flourishing for all those involved. So there were already talking about we begin at the beginning with non-ideal situations. Never in the Bible does God say, here's my grand vision for human society, and it includes slaves. That's not what we're looking at here. I've been reading Dennis Prager's commentaries on the Old Testament, which I really enjoy, and he says it doesn't command slavery. It recognizes that this is an institution and then tries to regulate it that's which i thought is a really interesting point now this could somewhat take us aside but it seems to make your point about not just holding you know slave owners like that their property was damaged so to

speak but that the slave him or herself has rights it seems behind that is that in the biblical idea is that all human beings are made in the image of god yes like that seems to background this you know the other one is through the old testament it gives these commands but it talks about fearing god so even if you can get away with the law there still is a god who watches your treatment of slaves and then finally in levit it's it's in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy, repeatedly is referring to the Israelites as you were once slaves. Remember this. So even apart from these particular laws we can look at

that compare and contrast with neighboring nations, there's this undergirding God who is watching your former slaves, from these particular laws we can look at that compare and contrast with neighboring nations there's this undergirding god who is watching your former slaves they're made in god's image now let's regulate this fallen institution yeah would you agree with the way i framed that would you add or take anything away yeah maybe i'll just grab an example of a place where we can see that god is very concerned that that Israel not forget their own experience as slaves, and that's supposed to shape them as a society going forward. So this is the strongest example that I have been able to find in biblical law. You want to see God get really

angry. This is what makes him really angry. So we're in Exodus 22, beginning in verse 21, do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner. For you were foreigners in Egypt. I mean, that alone is going to eliminate all the most egregious forms of slavery. And people will bring up Leviticus 25 as an example of a passage that seems to condone or allow the acquisition of foreign slaves, and they seem to be treated worse than Israelite slaves. Well, we have to read Leviticus 25 in light of Exodus 22, verse 21, do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner. So whatever's going on with these foreigners in Leviticus 25, it's not mistreatment and it's not oppression. Then he goes on to say, do not take advantage of the widow or the fatherless. These are two of the most vulnerable

classes of people in ancient Israel. If you do, and they cry out to me I will certainly hear their cry my anger will be aroused and I will kill you with the sword your wives will become widows and your children fatherless so this is it I mean if you mistreat the vulnerable your own family will become will will join that category of vulnerable people like this is the the and this is not because god delights in in going around and ruining people's lives this is supposed to be a deterrent right this is supposed to deter the abuse and mistreatment of others who are in vulnerable situations and who is more likely to be brought into an enslaved situation than a widow or an orphan, right? Someone without a male protector, they're the ones who are most at risk to being enslaved. And God says, if they cry out to me, I'm listening. And it's the same language that

is used earlier in the book of Exodus when the Hebrews cry out to Yahweh in Egypt and he hears their cry and rescues them. So he's like, don't think that I'm only all about you. I'm all about listening to anyone who's crying out to me because they're being oppressed. So that is a really important framing for the entire conversation. That's a great example, Carmen. Super helpful.

Look at theological backdrop, God's view of foreigners, God's view of slaves, etc. Let's move into now the book you've been studying for a long time. And by the way, when do you expect maybe the commentary to be out, the end of 2025, which would mean it'd be out in 2026 or maybe early 2027. It's a long project. It'll be like 750 pages. I can only imagine. Good for you. I was just curious, not putting any pressure on you. And ironically, I'm right in chapter 21 right now, like working on this passage. So the timing of our conversation is just perfect. Well, that's perfect then, because that was my next question. I was going to say, is there any relevant background information kind of of the placement of 21 or the theology in Exodus 21 before we look at the claims of like buying a slave, being a slave, et cetera? Yeah. Yeah. I think one of the mistakes that Christian readers of the Old Testament often make is we assume that the laws are there because that was the means by which the Israelites earned their salvation.

That these are the things they must do, and then God will like them and save them. And it's just really important to notice we're already in chapter 21 of Exodus when we get to these laws. The first 20 chapters of the book are God rescuing his people from slavery in Egypt, bringing them across the wilderness, encountering them at Mount Sinai, revealing himself to them. And so they have already been saved. They've already been rescued. This is not a prerequisite. This is now part of their mission as his people to represent him among the nations. And so he wants them to have a well-ordered society in which everyone's being looked out for and nobody's abusing other people. That's the context for the law. It's not how to get saved. It's how to be God's people

in the world. And if we look at the chapters of law from 20 to 23, we begin with at the end of chapter 20. So this is just after the Decalogue or Ten Commandments. We begin with chunks or sections of law. I am convinced by William Morrow's idea that the covenant code is in a chiasm. So there's an overall structure like a literary sandwich in which the laws that people think are about slavery in chapter 21 verses 2 through 11 correspond to chapter 23 verses 10 through 12, which are about the Sabbath.

So we have two sections that are Sabbath oriented. And how is this Sabbath oriented? It's oriented toward the release of slaves, not the acquisition of slaves. So when we look at chapter 21, it's not all about, okay, here's how you get people to work for you. It's, no, here's when you have to let them go. And so it's the whole posture of chapter 21 is aiming towards release of those who work for you. And that I think is an important part of, again, restra towards the release. There's a different kind of trajectory or movement that's going on there. It allows it, but it's not encouraging and moving towards that. That's a helpful backdrop. So this passage in 21, I actually had a debate 14 years ago with an atheist on God and morality,

the local junior college. And afterwards, an atheist professor came up to me, and I was exhausted from the debate. And he goes, he basically said to me, he goes, how can you be a Christian? He was a former Christian, and be okay with people buying and selling and beating slaves. It was Exodus 21. So I said, because I was wiped, I said, let's grab coffee and talk about this. But I asked you that because I've been asked this question a lot and I'm really curious how you can help make sense of it. So you can read more from this passage if it's helpful, but let's start with verse two in

21 when it says you buy a Hebrew slave. Now I have two questions from this, but the word buy obviously jumps out, makes it feel like slaves are just property and they're a product you buy and sell. It's transactional. So how should we think about the idea of buying and selling people? Yes. So I actually don't think this is a case of buying and selling people. I think this is about contract labor to pay back a debt that is owed. And I think probably the majority of Old Testament scholars would say, yeah, what we're looking at here is

indentured servitude. So this is the case of a man who is unable to pay a debt that he owes. Maybe his crop failed. We don't know the situation. Maybe he fell ill or his family members fell ill and they weren't able to bring the crop in. We don't know why he's in debt, but he's unable to repay it. And so he's selling his labor to the one he owes money to, to pay off that debt. So I would prefer to translate it just because I think it conveys that idea more readily with, if you hire a Hebrew evved and I'm leaving the word evved untranslated because as I mentioned slave has all sorts of connotations to it maybe ultimately it's the right word to use but we just have so much baggage we bring with us into it so I'm gonna leave it untranslated if you hire a

Hebrew evved six years he shall serve, but in the seventh, he may leave freely at no cost. So in other words, there is from the get-go a limit on the repayment of debt via labor. And I would describe this as the landowner who's benefiting from the work of this Hebrew Eved is he does not own the person, but he has rights to his labor. And that's an important difference. We see later in the chapter that there are laws regulating the treatment of slaves. And you mentioned beating. There is corporal punishment that's part of the institution of slavery, but it's limited. If you permanently injure your eid, he gets to go free at no cost. In other words, his debt is automatically wiped out and he gets to go back home because you have proven yourself

to have been an owner who cannot be trusted, a landowner who can't be trusted to treat his employees with dignity. And so this as compensation for the physical injury, the eved is allowed to go free. If a landowner beats an eved and he dies, there is actually a death penalty that still is in effect for the landowner. So I find this very interesting that the life of the slave is counted as equal with the life of a regular citizen. If you murder him, then you are subject to the death penalty

just like you would be if you murdered a free man. So this I think is good news for anybody who's coming into an unpleasant situation of being unable to repay their debt. There are certain protections afforded to them. The servants or the eved's body does not belong to the master, only his labor does, and it's temporary. So I would see this as a voluntary hired worker. He's voluntarily offering himself into this situation. It's a limited term of service. We find out he's free to leave and to marry. If he's able to repay his debt, he can go early. He's allowed to marry someone while he is serving his master. And if he decides he wants to become a permanent servant, and this then would qualify it more as chattel slavery in the sense that there's actually a permanent ownership, that's entirely voluntary. It's the servant saying, I want to sign up for this. So that would i i assume would be a very uh severe situation in which the servant has realized

okay i've got it pretty good working for this master because i've got a roof over my head i get food every day and if i go back to my ancestral homeland that i left i am not going to be able to farm it and be this prosperous like maybe Like maybe he inherited a plot of ground that just doesn't produce well, or maybe there's some other factors that make it just not in his best interest to go back to his homeland. He can decide, I want to stay working for you. This is a good situation. And then that can be made permanent.

But the landowner never gets to decide, okay, we're making this permanent. It's always temporary unless the servant right so they would want to stay and other service might want to certainly doesn't prevent all abuse but seems like it's a way of building in proper treatment of slaves would you would you agree with this I've heard this illustration used where some people say okay modern example insofar as it goes you have an owner of an nba team yes you have a contract where a player is bought and owned by this and traded they can trade the player to another team right that's a good example yes we use the language of of physical of financial transactions in relation to sports players. And we all understand that that person does not belong to the owner of the team, but that this is conventional language used for their

sports ability as what's being traded or contracted or whatever. I think it's a great illustration. That's helpful. Now, certainly an NBA player could just say, I'm not playing anymore, I'm done. And the contract is over. So there's some differences, but it's enough to show that being owned a lot of abuse of other people in the ancient world and in ancient Israel. This is what the prophets are railing against, right? They're saying, look, you know, Amos is pointing out over and over examples of the mistreatment of other people. So we have to separate and distinguish between description and prescription. Just because there's a story about someone mistreating a slave does not mean God is okay if we mistreat slaves, or we. God is okay if ancient Israelites mistreat slaves. Let me also hasten to say I am an abolitionist. I do not believe that modern day slavery is a good idea. And I think sometimes people's objection

to Christian apologetics is it sounds like you're trying to make a case for slavery being a good thing. And I do not think that slavery is ever the ideal. And it's probably never a good thing. It can be a lesser of two evils in certain situations if it's voluntary, you know, if it has these kind of boundaries, if it's voluntary, a limited term of service, they're free to leave, their body doesn't belong to the master, a form of debt repayment, maybe, but not slavery like we saw with the transatlantic slave trade.

Now we're going to come back to some of the even graver differences between the slavery you described and the slavery that's at least permitted in the Bible. Yeah. But let me, let me shift to a passage in Leviticus chapter 19 that seems to have the same idea of buying and selling slaves. And maybe your response is the same, but I want to, I want to read it because this is a common passage that comes up. It's Leviticus 19, 44 through 46. And it says, as for your male and female slaves, whom you may have, you may buy male and female slaves from among the nations that are around you. So clearly this isn't referring to Israelites within Israel, but with nations around, we can buy from the Moabites or the, you know, whatever group it was, Ammonites. You may also buy from among the strangers who sojourn with you and their clans that are with you. So now people move into Israel, but they're not native to Israel or Israeli ethnics, ethnically, so to speak.

Yep. Who may have been born in your land and they may be your property you may bequeath them to your sons after you inherit as a possession forever so now they seem to be passed on generationally don't have a chance of freedom you may make slaves of them but over your brothers the people of israel you shall not rule one over another ruthlessly so essentially is their difference what is it between slaves again not the perfect term within israel and those outside of israel how they're treated okay yeah this is a tricky passage this is this seems really uh egregious on first read. And so I think it's again important to recognize that the word by could also be translated higher. I don't think money is being

given to a third party in order to acquire foreign slaves. I would take this to be, and I'm reading this in the most charitable way possible, because I believe scripture is the word of God, and I believe God is good. And so I'm inclined to read it, say, is there a most charitable way of reading this? And so I would say you're hiring foreigners to work for you. They don't have the same conditions of release after six years because, and it doesn't say this explicitly, but this would have been understood by every ancient Israelite, land ownership in ancient Israel is by tribal affiliation. You inherit land from your father, and there's 12 tribes, and each tribe has its own plot of land, and it's divided amongst the descendants. A foreigner has no hope of ever owning land in ancient Israel. And so there's no way for a foreigner, for a Moabite

to come in and start farming. And farming is how you feed your family. So there's no Walmart down the road that they can go and get their groceries at. Like you have to have land if you're going to survive. So if a foreigner is sojourning among the Israelites Israelites they need to become attached to an Israelite family in order to have access to food and so the the law in their case is different they're not supposed to be released because that would be essentially creating a class of homeless people who are just going to be drifting around trying to find a way to eke out a living. The permanence of the relationship with foreigners is because the only way to live inside the land, again, in ancient Israel, I'm not talking about

today, the only way in ancient Israel to live in the land is to be attached to an Israelite family. So Ruth marries in, right? Ruth is a Moabite, she marries in, and so she has access to land through her father-in-law, Elimelech, and then through her husband, Boaz. So she's able to provide for her mother-in-law in that way. This is why, again, property language is being used, and the bequeathing to the next generation, that sounds icky, but if we think of it again in this kind of sports realm where players are being traded or whatever, if you get a new manager for a team or a new owner for a team, does that mean everybody suddenly loses their job? Like, no, the contracts are passed on to the next owner of whatever sports team we're talking about. So in a similar way, a foreign family that has attached itself to an Israelite family to labor on their land and enjoy its fruit is not suddenly homeless as soon as the landowner dies.

They are able to stay as part of the family with the future generations. That's how I read this or how I understand this. That's helpful. I appreciate that. And what's interesting, the example of Ruth, who is a Moabite, is that Boaz sure seemed to treat her very, very well. He did. He followed all of the laws about treating a foreigner well.

And I think that's so, such a beautiful example of how it was supposed to work. Ruth is able to glean in his fields because he's following the laws about not reaping to the edges of his fields, but leaving it for the foreigner and for the widow and for the fatherless. So already built in, and this is part of what I was talking about earlier with we need to read the whole context, built into the Israelite civil system is a law that tries to prevent someone from sliding into abject poverty. If they're unable to farm their own land,

there's a way to get food by gleaning the edges of other people's fields. And Boaz not only allows this, but he makes sure that none of the men working in his field will harm her. He provides lunch for her. He says, hey, leave some extra grain for her to pick up. He still gives her the dignity of a day's work, but he makes it so that it's not dangerous for her to do so. And he's held up as a model in the Old Testament as the way you're supposed to do this. So certainly some people failed it, but the ideal in a sense is somebody who treats a slave,

for lack of a better term, in this way. So sometimes the ideals teach the heart of God and what the principles are for, even though people could have abused him and did so in other circumstances so that's yes so if everything's working properly we don't we're not in a situation where exodus 21 verse 2 needs to happen where someone needs to hire themselves out for six years to pay off a debt because they've been able to survive through a lean year

you know their maybe their harvest failed one year but they can get by by gleaning until the next year um an interesting thing to notice is that there's a rule about setting free your servants in the seventh year but there's also a rule about letting your land be fallow in the seventh year and letting other people live off of it, off of whatever grows naturally. And so there's an interesting coinciding of these two rules so that if someone is working for you and it's their labor that's keeping your farm going,

the year that you let them go is also the year that you require less labor because you're not allowed to farm your land. And it's the year that the person who you just let go, this man who's just left to go farm his own land, he doesn't have a harvest yet, but he can still come back to your land and benefit from whatever grows naturally there. So there's this really interesting safety net for those who are even being released. I think a lot of the discussions about this really rest upon

assumptions if we have a certain view of god a certain view of the scriptures are we read passes charitably not really charitably do we at least have reasonable possibilities for how these passages can be taken given the vast cultural and linguistic differences between now and the old testament i think that's at play now this next one to me is one of the most jarring ones because i'm a dad my daughter's a high school senior going to biola next year excited about that and she you know it says when a man sells his daughter as a slave exodus 21 7. now if i not mistaken, I think that's the ESV that I copied this from. So use the term sell, describes his daughter as a slave. Like that seems to me like I would rather die before I would sell my daughter away as a slave. And if I did, I feel like a failed dad.

Clearly something else is going on here. Unpack it. Yeah. so this follows right on the heels of the instruction to release a man who works for you as an evid after six years so this is introducing an exception to that this the same law does not apply to everyone female servants are treated differently again this doesn't look good at first blush but i think there are lots of clues in here that actually this passage is meant to protect vulnerable women. So the first thing we need to know is that every marriage in the ancient world was arranged by the father, and there was always a transfer of wealth between the father and the husband's family. And so the fact that there's money changing hands here does not make this an instance of human

trafficking. This is in fact what would normally happen if someone was getting married. So I think what's different here is that again, we're in case law. So this is a non-ideal situation. A man has a daughter who's of marriageable age, but he cannot provide a dowry for her. And so he can't arrange a good marriage, like among social equals, where there's a kind of equal transfer of wealth. Instead, the money is only going one direction. So he is offering his daughter as an ama, which is a kind of servant. And the new, the homeowner or landowner that he's offering his

daughter to is giving money to the man. So money is only going one direction instead of both directions. Now, what's interesting is that we have clues here that she is not just doing laundry for this new landowner she is married to him or to his son there's there's clues it says if she is troublesome in the eyes of her master who has claimed her for himself that sounds like a marriage then he must let her be ransomed he's not allowed to sell her to foreign people because he broke the agreement with her. The agreement is she's his, which means she's entering into a marriage with him. It is a marriage of unequal social statuses, but she is supposed to be treated just like a wife would be treated. If he has claimed her for his son rather than for himself, like if this was part of him

arranging a marriage for his son, he must treat her in his son rather for than for himself like if this was part of him arranging a marriage for his son he must treat her in accordance with daughter's rights in other words she is not sexually available to him he needs to treat her like she's a daughter and if he takes another wife for himself now there's debate about what this what mean, but I'm presuming the man is married to her, and for some reason he decides to bring another woman into his household. Again, this is not God's ideal. This is not like regulating non-ideal situations. The rule is he can't reduce her food, clothing, or marital rights.

So she still has access to all of the things that she needs to survive in that world, including access to the marriage bed in order to bear children who can care for her in her old age. And if he doesn't give her these three things, she may leave without paying any money. She can just walk away and go back home. She doesn't need to like present her dowry to pay for it or something like because there is no dowry if she's mistreated she just gets to go free so i think the reason why there's a difference between the woman and the the the female ama and the male evid is there's no sexual relationship between the evid and the household the the sexual relationship is with the woman and so it needs to

be treated like a like permanently because it's a marriage it's not just a it's not just a hired worker who's doing the laundry i mean in all honesty as i'm looking at this passage i'm i'm thinking god why didn't you just say don't marry another wife like it'd be easy right right now of course genesis lays out very clearly god's design and of course i think polygamy is condemned in other ways at least through the narrative the life of jacob the life of david so it's not well it never ends well yeah the old testament teaches many times narratively not in the way like a greek way of thinking that systematically lays it out. And so that might just be my expectation rather than God meeting the people where they were at,

not saying he should get another wife, saying it's okay, but saying, look, if you choose to do this and I've laid out what my design is for marriage, you still have to protect this woman you brought in and care for her yes is that how you see it yes there is one situation in which i think it could be appropriate for a man to bring in another wife this is debatable but there's the practice of leveret marriage where if a woman if a if a man dies and his wife has not born any children for him now there's the inheritance is in jeopardy and so she's supposed to be uh brought into a relationship with her brother-in-law with the man's brother and and that man is supposed to bear children on behalf of his dead brothers so that there's uh stability to the inheritance of land that's supposed to belong in

the family. So that would be the one situation where I think polygamy could result, but it's not out of lust or greed. It's out of compassion for the brother who died and whose inheritance is in jeopardy. And so that would be the one situation where I'd say, well, maybe there, maybe this could happen. Like the Bible doesn't tell us whether Boaz was already married when Ruth came to be part of his household. that he has all these servants working for him and he's a landowner. He has clout in the city gate that he's not a married man. Like it would have been seen as socially irresponsible for him not to be married and to be providing for a woman. So there's a possibility that there was already a woman in the picture, but that Bo his selflessness then results in david because you know that that's david's family line and we have our favorite king of of israel that raises a million questions for me but i will just let it settle for now that's there i

appreciate the honesty that you're bringing this in and some of the difficult passages in the old testament if we don't pretend they're there we haven't read it right let's try to make sense of it now i do want to move on to leviticus 19 but you might have already answered this the question that comes up a lot is 20 verse 21 we're still in exodus 21. says when a man strikes his slave male or female with a rod and the slave dies under his hand he shall be avenged but if the slave survives a day or two he is not to be avenged for the slave is his money this atheist professor became a friend of mine distinctly said how can God allow the beating of the slave yes okay so um one thing to say off the bat is I don't like how the ESV translates this. I don't like how the NIV translates this. There is metaphor in biblical

law and we don't always appreciate that metaphor. And sometimes there's ambiguity enough that it doesn't land right in English. So I would say if a man strikes his evad or his ama with a rod and he dies under his hand, he shall surely be avenged, which that's the normal language for referring to the death penalty. If you kill someone who's working for you, you're subject to the death penalty. However, if after a day or two days, he stands up, that is the injured person stands up, he shall not be avenged. There's no death penalty now for the owner who beat his servant or struck his servant. So this is allowing for the possibility of corporal punishment as part of household management. but it's being strictly limited to something that does not cause death and does not cause personal, sorry, permanent injury. And then the very last phrase

of this lot of this sentence is it. So after, if after a day or two days, he stands up, he shall not be avenged for it is his silver. Now in English, it's the slave is his property. And I'm like, Ooh, I don't like this. So I spent some time with the Hebrew and it literally says it or he is his silver. And what we're looking at here is a metaphor because we've already had laws preceding this about financial compensation for loss of labor. If you strike anyone and injure them so that they have to convalesce for several days and they've now lost labor, they've lost income, you are responsible to pay the wages they would have earned in the days that they were in bed. If you injure someone whose labor already belongs to you

like they're working off their debt to you that's why they work for you then then whatever days they spent in bed you're eating that because it was your you would have to repay yourself for lost labor right they're not being paid it's their debt that's being reduced. So it's recognizing that the labor of these people belong to the homeowner or landowner. And so there's no fine because who would they pay the fine to? In other words, you just shot yourself in the foot, buddy. Like they would have been working your land and you just hurt them so that they couldn't do the job. So they don't have to eat that. You have to eat that.

That's how I read this. Okay. That's interesting. And again, this, maybe this doesn't apply, but I played basketball at Biola. No one was going to pay me to play past Biola, but I've often thought when somebody does a cheap shot and hurts another player and they're out for two weeks, the person who did it should be out for the length of the injury they caused the other person. That's just to discourage cheap shots i hurt your slave again not the perfect word and like hurting a team or an owner and cost you wins and what you're trying to build here yeah you have to

compensate me for this now a player is they lose maybe wins and they lose the productivity but that doesn't mean the player can be reduced just down to the productivity there's more to it than that so the slave in a sense lose the ability to work and the silver or the money but that's not implying the slave is just the silver or just the money no that seems to be the key point that you're drawing out here right yeah this is this is precisely trying to regulate um fines and consequences for injury it's not it's not making a global statement about the worth of a person where they're i mean we've got lots of other passages in the bible that do that this is regulating that again non-ideal situation in which corporal punishment was taken too far and someone sustained injuries that

kept them in bed for several days. And this is the owner's own loss. The owner cannot then find the slave for not working for those days. Like, I'm going to add this to your bill. And this is often what happens in modern day slavery contexts where there's indentured servitude. You know, I'm thinking of like brick factories in India where where somebody's in debt they can't pay their debt someone comes along and says hey i'll i'll take on your debt if you come work for me but then they they make it so that every day you're incurring more debt than you're paying off so your debt is just growing and growing and growing as you work for them. It's an exploitative form of labor management that has no place in God's economy. Now, I have a few more questions for

you. I started realizing in some ways we could spend hours on this and anybody watching this is going to say, what about this passage? What about that passage? Maybe we'll come back and we'll do kind of a follow-up and dive into some of those. But just one more passage, especially as a woman, I want your perspective on this. Back to Leviticus chapter 19, verses 20 through 22. It's kind of the question, can men have sexual relations with their slaves or their servants? And one reading of this seems to imply that a man just has to give a ram for a guilt offering if he has sex with a slave and then moves on now especially if this person is rich and has the kind of means we're talking about i could see guys easily going oh it just cost me ram it's worth it

in fact i could have ram a week i mean some guys are going to start thinking that way. Is this allowing, or at least not sufficiently trying to restrict the use of female slaves sexually? Yeah, I think this is another case where we need to take into consideration all the laws, and there are other laws that regulate sexual activity outside of the bonds of marriage. What happens when a couple commits adultery? It merits the death penalty if they commit adultery. Well, if it could be shown that it happened in a place, you know, out in the field where the woman couldn't cry for, like if she cried for help, maybe no one heard her, then only the male's put to death and the woman is given the benefit of the doubt that this

might've been rape, not adultery. So the man has to die, but the woman does not. So there's already boundaries set up around sexual activity that are also in play here. The reason this law comes up is because it's adding, there's a particularly ambiguous case here. The ambiguity is that this woman is not a free woman. She is connected to somebody else. She belongs, in a way, to someone else.

And she's promised to another man, but it hasn't happened yet. So there's debate among the commentators whether this constitutes an actual betrothal or if it's just shy of a betrothal and that's what makes it ambiguous. Because in the case of a betrothal, if a man has sex with a woman who is betrothed to someone else, he has now violated the future husband of that woman. Like a betrothal is taken

as seriously as marriage. It's treated like adultery. And there's something ambiguous about this case. It's like in the fuzzy zone between being promised and having actually put it into effect. And she's not free herself. So how do they deal with it? I really like how J. Sklar talks about this in his commentary on Leviticus. This is the exegetical commentary on the Old Testament. He says perhaps the simplest explanation is that she is not yet officially betrothed. This would explain why the verse doesn't use the normal word for betrothal and why the death penalty is not mentioned. So in this case, she's been assigned or designated or promised, so she's going to marry

another man, but it's again not official yet, which makes this not quite adultery, according to that specific kind of case. Adultery is the violation of a marriage, and that hasn't happened here exactly. But what happens is the man does not get off scot-free. So there's not a death penalty because it isn't adultery, but it is a serious matter, and he has to provide a ram. And many commentators think that this also would then imply that he marries her so this is not like the kind of thing where you could just give a ram a week and keep you know

working your way around the community right like you'd be collecting a wife every week in that case so the the giving of a ram as an offering is to it is a kind of repentance saying, I'm not going to do this again. And it is releasing the woman to marry. So whether she's being released to marry the one she was promised to before, or whether in this case, the man who slept with her would be expected to marry her, which is where J. Sklar lands.

The man must bring the offering because he's also violated God's laws. And so it's not okay for him to just do this. It's being treated as a sin issue. And it seems like a ram offering is going to be a public kind of offering, which other people are going to know, and that's going to affect your reputation in an honor shame culture so it's not like just pay 50 bucks online with your smartphone and move on yeah a public uh act in which other people are going to see who you are and it's going to affect you in that community that makes sense let me ask you one more just tough passage and again i know each of these really require a lot of of backdrop but this in his war against the midianites i think this is in numbers 31 moses commands the people to kill

every male and non-virgin female the esv says again i know you don't love the way at least some of the earlier translations happen but it says but all the young girls who have not known a man by lying with him keep alive for yourselves so it's like kill all the men kill the women who've already had sex but keep the virgins alive for yourself later in the chapter describes 32,000 virgin women as part of the spoils of war. Like, again, I realize there's so much we could talk about to unpack this, but maybe just give us some principles that can begin to make sense of this because on its surface, take it alone. It seems problematic. It is problematic.

Yes. Yes. So one thing that I think is helpful to start with is just noticing what, what led to this, like, what was, what's the backstory? This is not just like, here's the policy. Whenever we go to war, we're going to do this. It's, uh, there's been a specific, uh, attack on the Israelites via the Midianites and their, of attack, because Balaam was unsuccessful in cursing Israel, he incited the Midianites to seduce the men of Israel to come worship false gods and have sex with their women. So the women who are not virgins are being killed because these are the women who were seducing Israelite men and leading them to worship false gods. Their husbands were, or the men of the community were in on this. This was their

military strategy, if you will, to infiltrate Israel and get the better of them. And so anyone who had been sexually active was potentially part of that ruse and needed to be eliminated. So that's the logic behind it. There's also a sense in which from an ancient Israelite perspective, any woman who has been with a man potentially is pregnant with the offspring of the man she's been with. And so if the idea is to stamp out the Midianites because they've committed this egregious sin and they've shown themselves to be trying to infiltrate the Israelites and lead them astray spiritually, then we need to eliminate the next generation of Midianites and to do that any woman who's been with a man needs to go because she might be pregnant with a

future generation of Midianites and any man because he is representing the Midianites then you you would exempt from that any woman who's not been with a man because she could potentially be absorbed into the Israelite community and become Israelite the way Ruth becomes Israelite or Rahab becomes Israelite. So I mean, we could talk about the numbers here. The numbers seem very, very large to me. And it's possible that this is a case where, where, uh, the word LF should not have been translated thousand, but maybe group or clan. Like there's, are there 32 clans or 32 clans worth of virgins rather than 32,000 virgins? Like, I don't know. That word is flexible in its interpretation in the Old Testament.

One more thing to say, I think often in the modern West, we think of children as innocent. We have this idea that children are innocent. But this is not the perspective that ancient Israelites had. They didn't think of children as innocent. They thought of children as little Canaanites or little Midianites or little Babylonians in training. And so there's a passage in Isaiah, I don't remember the exact reference, where they talk about the whole family, maybe it's Jeremiah, the whole family being in on the worship of the queen of heaven. So the fathers start the fire and the children collect the firewood and the mothers bake the cakes for the queen of heaven. And so this is the religious worship of other gods is not

just limited to the adult males in the community, but it's like a whole family affair. And so when Israel is engaging with other peoples, there a there's a sense in which we need a reset button because even from childhood these children are learning to worship false gods and that has to be stopped because it's not tenable now you raise the issue about the women who are pregnant with Midianites and responses given the nature of Israel for Israel to to stay pure, so to speak, they need to go. Now, I know people listening are going, wait a minute, how is that just? That's a separate conversation that we could come back to. That's the topic of genocide, et cetera. That is a whole massive

conversation. What I would say is a lot of the passages we've looked at here on the surface are jarring and problematic. But oftentimes when the backstory is explained, it's at of a broader question but you've referenced a couple times chattel slavery is there any biblical teaching that would directly outlaw the kind of chattel slavery as practiced in the u.s and britain and i think behind a lot of this is you're right that we used confused term slavery when i was reading that the x is 21 passage about selling your daughter in slavery that still comes to my mind even though I know the point that you're making so are there any positive teaches that if the Bible and specifically maybe the Torah had been taken seriously would have outlawed that I think I think one thing we do have in the Torah is so many other limits on what can be done that the kind of chattels, like that what comes to our mind when we hear

the term chattel slavery is untenable in ancient Israel. It's prohibited. So in other words, Yahweh brought them out of servitude in Egypt. So they're not supposed to treat, they're not supposed to mistreat or oppress foreigners. Their servants and any foreigners among them get a Sabbath rest just like they do. So there's limits even on the labor they're allowed to extract from others. Kidnapping is strictly prohibited in chapter 21 verse 16. So they can't, like that already makes the transatlantic slave trade not possible because kidnapping is not allowed death penalty for killing a servant that we talked about a release for permanently injured servants that we talked about um if there's an accidental death of the

servant that's taken seriously also in chapter 21 of exodus um the passage that we began with in chapter 22, verse 22, where God says, under no circumstances are you to take advantage of the vulnerable. You're not allowed to charge interest on loans to the needy. You're not allowed to deny justice to the poor. And your unplowed fields support the poor. So there's all of these other things that make slavery less likely to happen and less likely to be exploitative if you're following the laws. William Morrow puts it this way in his introduction to biblical law. He says, the biblical slavery laws were calculated to make readers uneasy about the ethics of slave owning. These laws represent an early strategy for raising readers' conscience about the ethics of slave owning. These laws represent an early strategy

for raising readers' conscience about the institution of slavery and implicitly calling it into question. Overall, their tactics reflect an ethic of concern for the vulnerable. So there's not an explicit condemnation of chattel slavery, but there are all sorts of things in place to make sure that Israel does not mimic what the Egyptians did to them. They're not allowed to do that to other people.

Not to mention the eighth commandment, thou shalt not steal. Right, yes. When you're stealing a person and their right to the fruits of their labor. If I'm not mistaken, isn't it within Exodus 21, it might be verse 16 that says, do not kidnap. Isn't that right within Exodus 21 itself? The very passage we're looking at gives the kind of principle that was at the root of chattel slavery would have stopped it right at its roots and its beginning. And this is why I'm concluding that chapter 21 verses 2 through 11

that describes this indentured servitude, that this is my reason for saying this has to be voluntary, that a man is hiring himself out, hiring out his labor, because kidnapping is not allowed, so it can't be that. Well said. Is there any other teaching that I missed or questions I should have asked you that's important to just bring out when we talk about the Bible endorsing slavery, big or small? You know, we haven't talked about the New Testament at all. And although I'm an Old Testament scholar, I do read the New Testament too now and then. And I think sometimes people really struggle with Paul's letters, like his letter to the Ephesians where he says, slaves obey your masters. And that seems again to be endorsing slavery. And I really appreciate what Lynn Kohik

has said about that passage in her commentary on Ephesians. She talks about how this is turning the ancient institution of slavery on its head by giving agency to slaves. It's treating them as moral agents who can choose to do their work as unto the Lord. Right. So it's addressing the owners and saying you can't be exploitative, but it's also addressing the slaves themselves as having agency. And here, as in the Old Testament, there's never an encouragement to obtain slaves, but rather addresses those who are already in that predicament, who already have slaves as part of their household. The slaves are being addressed. So I think that we can see all the way through the canon, God's character, his concern for the vulnerable, and in the way that God regulates human institutions. And it's probably just important to end with a reiteration. What we're seeing in Exodus 21 and these other passages we've talked about are not a template for modern day slavery. These are speaking to a cultural context in which this sometimes was the case and God is regulating

it. So that does not mean we should reinstitute this. We're not trying to mimic Old Testament culture. So I believe these laws still matter because they teach us about how to care for others and how to set up guardrails to protect the vulnerable but that doesn't mean they're a template for us to try to imitate exactly the same things in our in our day great answer that's really helpful do you think there's a redemptive movement not only regulating slavery but moving towards its abolition over time like that is what god's ideal is that doesn't really come to fruition until like Paul and, and Anesimus and then after the time of Christ. So not only regulating,

do you believe in that redemptive ethic as well? Yeah. Esau McCulley says the Old Testament and later the New Testament create an imaginative world. And by imaginative, he means they cast a vision for a world in which slavery becomes more and more untenable. It does seem like it's moving in that direction. And yeah, I think God, the roots of that vision are embedded in the very beginning of the Old Testament when it says all human beings are the image of God. There's no parameters there around, well, only humans with certain characteristics or certain qualities qualify to be God's image. So I think that if we really take seriously

that everyone is the image of God, eventually no more slavery. And of course, you've written a book on that that we talked about on our Biola podcast called Being God's Image. That's fantastic. And I hope folks will check it out it's called being god's image by our guest today dr carmen imes you can come take a class from her at talbot school of theology we would love to have you come set of the old testament full class on the book of exodus i wish i had time to take that

carmen that sounds good so interesting I I love it for so many levels thanks do you have any last like what book if somebody goes okay I want to dive into this is there a book that stands out to you or is it really just a bunch of articles that you've brought together I mean I think if somebody wants to understand kind of a bigger picture view of what is Old Testament law for and how does it relate to us as Christians, I would recommend they start with my first book, Bearing God's Name, Why Sinai Still Matters. I'm making a case for Sinai Matters. We should pay attention to it, but we're not implementing it wholesale. So I try to help readers navigate that. And so that might be a good starting point for

somebody. That's great. So it's not specifically on slavery, but how to even approach the laws themselves and what their application might be. Great recommendation. All right, folks, there you have it. But before you click away, make sure you hit subscribe. We've got a lot of other topics coming up that you will not want to miss in apologetics and worldview and culture. And if you thought about studying apologetics, would love to have you in our program here at Biola, fully distance program. In fact, right now I'm teaching a class on the resurrection and a weekend class on apologetics and communication. There's information below. If you're not ready for a master's program, we have a certificate program in which we'll just send you some helpful lectures, some basic assignments

to just kind of walk you through, keep you accountable. There's a big discount below as well. Carmen, excellent job. Thanks for all your research in this area. Really, really well done. Let's do it again soon. All right. Thanks for having me.