I’m Wrong AGAIN?!? ![rw-book-cover](https://img.youtube.com/vi/8ffIkl3ayXo/maxresdefault.jpg) Hey everybody, I wanted to take a few minutes and respond to a comment that was recently posted on a video of mine that points out that there's not a single syllable of the Bible that in any way whatsoever questions, condemns, or prohibits the practice itself of buying, selling, and owning other human beings. Slavery. And here is the comment and it reads, "Wrong again, bud. Here is a verse that condemns slavery. Whoever steals a man and sells him, and anyone found in possession of him shall be put to death. Exodus 21:16. And there are a number of problems with this comment. To begin, the translation is a mistransation. This comes from the ESV, which as far as translations go is a joke. But the mistransation is in rendering uh whoever steals a man and sells him and anyone found in possession of him cuz that would make it a capital offense to unknowingly purchase an enslaved person who had been kidnapped and that's just not how these laws worked in the ancient world. Uh an appropriate translation would say whoever steals a man and sells him or is found with him in his possession. In other words, the idea is it is a capital offense whether you have already sold him or you have not yet sold him. So the translation is a problem. But the translation does get one thing right because it says steals a man. And that's a literal rendering of the Hebrew is and we're in the covenant code. And the covenant code is very very careful to very specifically designate the perpetrators or the victims of the crimes that are being laid out here because the punishments differ depending on the social status of the perpetrator or the victim. And so when it wants to talk about an adult male Israelite, it uses the word ish. And if it wants to include an adult female Israelite in that particular law, it will say ish o isa man or woman. If it wants to talk about the victim as an enslaved person, it will say e o am which means male enslaved person or female enslaved person. when it wants to impose a separate punishment if the victim is a child it will say ben o bot son or daughter so whether it's uh an adult male Israelite or adult female Israelite or a child who is either a male or a female or it is enslaved person whether male or female whatever the social status of the perpetrator or victim the covenant code specifies eyes. And here it just talks about kidnapping an ish. It doesn't even say, "Oh, Isa," or woman, just a man, which the majority of scholars agree indicates that this law is addressing what happens if an adult male Israelite is kidnapped. In other words, this law is only about the kidnapping of an adult male Israelite. And we can actually look at the parallel law in Deuteronomy 24:7 for confirmation of that. Here's Deuteronomy 24:7. If someone is caught kidnapping another Israelite, enslaving or selling the Israelite, then that kidnapper shall die. So you shall purge the evil from your midst. Both the identity of the victim and the punishment are identical. Only Deuteronomy 24:7 is a lot more explicit. And here's the Hebrew of that passage. And in the red box, I've put the identification of the victim mibel from his brothers from the sons of Israel. Quite explicitly, in fact, repeating the fact that this is referring to what happens if you kidnap an adult male Israelite. So, right off the bat, it's not talking about kidnapping a foreigner. uh it's not talking about any old person. It's just talking about adult male Israelites. And the notion that this condemns slavery is problematic for that reason and for other reasons because all societies, civilizations that had complex systems of enslavement and slave trades had laws prohibiting the kidnapping of certain members of society for sale into slavery. You can go into the uh pre-Ivil War American South. It was not legal to kidnap a white male adult to sell into slavery. So just because you have a law that prohibits kidnapping an adult male Israelite for sale into slavery doesn't mean that the law in any way, shape, or form whatsoever questions, condemns, or prohibits slavery. But there's more. For this to be a law that questions, condemns, or prohibits slavery, kidnapping would have to be the only or at least a major means of sourcing enslaved people. But when we look throughout the Hebrew Bible and when we look at what we can recover regarding the nature of enslavement in ancient West Asia and specifically in the central and northern hill countries and the southern negv, we don't see any indication that kidnapping was any kind of primary means of sourcing enslaved folks. And so the notion that this in any way limits or inhibits the ability of the slave trade to function or in any way whatsoever limits or inhibits uh the practice of buying, selling and owning other human beings. That's just nonsense. And we can look in Leviticus 25:44-46 for the quite explicit endorsement of cattle slavery through the purchasing of non-Israelite enslaved folks from their families or from other Israelites in the land of Israel or uh from other nations around you or through conquest. Uh those are the main means of sourcing enslaved folks in ancient Israel at least according to the texts and according to our reconstruction of how the practice of enslavement worked in ancient Israel. So this passage in absolutely no way, shape or form whatsoever condemns slavery. Contrary to the comment that was posted on my video, this passage is embedded within a set of law codes that actually explicitly talks about slavery and approves of it and talks about how it's going to function. Chapter 21 of Exodus begins by talking about what happens if somebody sells themselves into slavery or what happens when a man sells his daughter into slavery. And the law regarding the man selling his daughter into slavery is that she doesn't go free. She's a debt slave, but she doesn't go free after 6 years like a male debt slave does. She's perpetually enslaved basically because she's a sex slave. She's a concubine, which means she's now damaged goods and isn't really eligible for proper Israelite marriage anymore. And so there's no reason for her to go free. things are going to be worse off for her if she goes free than if she stays a concubine or a sex slave. So slavery is heartily endorsed in Exodus 21. Verse 16 is not in any way, shape or form whatsoever undermining that practice of enslavement. Verse 16 is just prohibiting the kidnapping of an adult male Israelite for sale into slavery. And that doesn't question, condemn, or prohibit the practice itself of buying, selling, and owning other human beings because there is no syllable of the Bible that does that. Now, 1,500 years after the completion of the New Testament, when we started to reach a critical mass of folks who decided, you know what, this is wrong. We're not going to endorse this anymore. There were renegotiations and reinterpretations. And this is one of the passages that was misunderstood in that otherwise well-meaning attempt to overrule the morality of the Bible. But the notion that that morality that was developed independent of the Bible can be found in the Bible is nonsense. It can be read into the Bible. But there's nothing remotely approximating a plausible case to make that there is any syllable of the Bible that was written with the intention of or with the thought of questioning, condemning, or prohibiting the practice itself of enslavement. That's just not in the Bible. That can only be imposed upon the Bible from the outside, which is what happened first in the 19th century. And we're far enough removed from it now that interpreters don't realize that what they imagine to be the actual meaning of the Bible is really just the renegotiation that we all agreed to accept. And the fit for this video, it's been the 16-bit Avengers., I’m Wrong AGAIN?!?, YouTube, 01kg84ff8er35w449fzt4xst18.