This seems to be a well written article from the Christian perspective that explains some of the rationale. I'm not familiar with the history of the area during biblical times to say whether this is accurate nor do I necessarily agree with everything, but at least it has some interesting biblical points to debate that seem contradictory.
http://www.apologeticspress.org/apcontent.aspx?category=11&article=1587
The word "apologetic" sets off my alarm bells. Let's look at that text.
Through the millennia, some of the worst atrocities perpetrated on humans have been linked to the institution of slavery. Historically, slavery has not designated one particular ethnic group as its singular victim. The Hebrews were slaves to the Egyptians during the days of Moses.
Didn't happen.
Alexander the Great forced almost the entire inhabited world to cower and serve him.
Equivocation. Alexander didn't enslave the people he conquered. They had the same relation to their monarch as before under the Persian kings.
Truth be told, practically every nationality of people that exists today could point to a time in its past history when it fell victim to slavery.
As the second sentence, this is as clear as mud. Slavery is the status of an
individual. Undoubtedly, of every nationality at least one individual has at a point in history been enslaved. However, the wording suggests that all nations have wholesale been enslaved, and that is definitely not true, that is a very rare occurrence.
He spends a lot of time on the Greek word doulos and cites from the reputed BAGD lexicon, which is exclusively geared to the NT and other early Christian writing. I don't have this lexicon and am not willing to shell out $160 for it. The way he quotes from it:
Arndt and Gingrich documented that the Greek word doulos meant “slave,” but that it also was used “in a wider sense” to denote “any kind of dependence.”
with only sentence fragments raises my eyebrows though. All other lexicons I've consulted -
Thayer's and
Liddell-Scott-Jones and my highschool dictionary - simply translate it as slave. The examples he offers of a "wider meaning" are all examples of
metaphorical use, e.g., Paul calling himself the servant of Christ. The concrete passage he offers up as example (Romans 1:1) is exactly such a passage. Thus, his claim that doulos in its non-metaphorical sense would mean anything other than slave (or bondsman or bondservant, which are kinds of slavery) is entirely unconvincing.
His comparison of imprisonment with slavery is outright ludicrous:
However, those who take such a position fail to consider that certain types of slavery are not morally wrong. For instance, when a man is convicted of murder, he often is sentenced to life in prison. During his life sentence, he is forced by the State to do (or not do) certain things. He is justly confined to a small living space, and his freedoms are revoked. Sometimes, he is compelled by the State to work long hours, for which he does not receive even minimum wage. Would it be justifiable to label such a loss of freedom as a type of slavery? Yes, it would.
No, this fundamentally misses the mark. A slave is bound by another human being for no other reason than being born a slave. A prisoner is bound by the State, i.e., by society, because he transgressed the rules of that society. Those are two fundamentally different things. Moreover, his description of prison willfully includes aspects like long work hours which are forbidden by the UDHR and other documents defining human rights: those are
not the norms we uphold or strive to in our modern society.
In the same line, a comment like
As appalling as it is to the sensitivities of most United States citizens, many countries still employ some type of beating or bodily harm to deter crime
serves nothing but to bring the message "those biblical slaves didn't have it so bad after all", but is besides the issue. Those are not our human rights norms and so you can't use it for comparison.
On the other hand, he does his best to play down slavery in biblical times. About slavery during OT times he says
Many of the injunctions found in the Old Testament pertaining to slavery fall into the category of regulating something that was “less than ideal.”
and the section discussing slavery in NT times has the heading "A Mutually Beneficial Relationship". The latter completely sidesteps the issue that a freeman also often had a client-patron relation with a (wealthy) patron which was mutually beneficial and did not have the bondage aspect of slavery.
All in all, the article is a dishonest piece and only serves to try to justify slavery, and I'm not even sure if I should add "slavery in biblical times". It's another data point validating my hypothesis that "apologetic" is merely a euphemism for "professional liar".
