Unshackling our Interpretive Practices: Rereading Rabbinic Slavery

This scholarly exploration scrutinizes the endorsement of slavery within biblical texts, juxtaposing these ancient endorsements with modern scientific and ethical standards that vehemently oppose such institutions. By delving into the socio-cultural and economic contexts of biblical times, this analysis reveals how slavery, deeply entrenched within ancient societies, was legitimized and perpetuated through religious doctrine. The examination extends to the profound societal, psychological, and geopolitical repercussions of these endorsements, highlighting the enduring legacy of inequality and trauma engendered by the biblical sanctioning of slavery. Moreover, this discourse critically evaluates the authors of the biblical texts, attributing their acceptance of slavery to significant ethical and psychological deficits, thus challenging the notion of divine inspiration and questioning the moral integrity of the biblical endorsement of slavery. Contemporary scientific perspectives, including psychology and sociology, offer a robust counterargument to the biblical narratives, advocating for human rights, equality, and the intrinsic dignity of all individuals, thereby urging an expungement of the ethical foundations of religious teachings concerning slavery.

Due to the infamy of New World slavery, particularly the plantation slavery practiced in North America between the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, the terms 'slave' and 'slavery' invariably invoke images of precisely that form of servitude. Readers both Christian and non-Christian alike recoil from any passage of the Bible in which these words appear, assuming that any reference to 'slaves' or 'slavery' in the Bible necessarily refers to the New World 'chattel slavery' of the plantations. This article demonstrates that servitude as sanctioned by the Bible has little in common with actual slavery.

2012

A Theo-Ethical Reflection on the Emancipatory Motifs of Exodus and Exile in the Hagar slave saga: Challenging the concept of power Doreen Delores Wynter The Historical context of a text was the predominant approach in Biblical interpretation. In recent times, this emphasis has been criticised by some exegetes. However, as this writer believes that history is important, this is the methodology: the emphasis on context which has been adopted for this study. For it is history then, the context of the biblical text, which has influenced current contexts which sees the legitimisation of the subordination of women to men and their exclusion from the religious rituals: word and sacrament. But whereas the historical critical approach focussed on the context of the author and the period of the time; it is the context of the text as a finished product and the context/social location of the interpreter which become key factors in this re-reading of the Hagar saga. These convergences of text, c...

Evangelical Review of Theology, 2018

The term slave in Bible translations is given to misunderstanding, because it is all too easy to mistakenly read the cruel slavery of the Greeks, Romans, Muslims, Europeans and Americans into the Old and New Testaments. For this reason, to describe what was allowed in the Bible, one should rather speak of ‘bonded labour’ (albeit only for real debts), ‘labour service’, or with Georg Huntemann ‘servanthood work’.

2021

Slavery is not a natural state. It arises when people or classes in a society assume the right to treat others as their property. And yet the status of slaves has rarely been defined by law, even when slavery was an accepted social fact. This publication examines the laws that did deal with slavery, from the earliest written rules in Mesopotamia, India, China, Rome, and the Islamic world, to medieval Europe and Tibet. It is evident that, rather than offering comprehensive definitions, the lawmakers were dealing with the complications that arose from the instability of the state, including issues of manumission, legal capacity, and the status of children. People could become slaves without the need for legal intervention, as a result of warfare or debt, but many slaves acquired freedoms, presenting complications that the lawmakers tried to address. They also, in many cases, hint at moral discomfort, suggesting that the act of lawmaking forced slave-owners to face up to the fact that ...

Translations of chapters on the virtues of manumission and the proper treatment of slaves by the noted Khurasani scholar al-Halimi (d. 1012 CE)

A Companion to Luis de Molina, 2013

This publication has been typeset in the multilingual "Brill" typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface.

Priscilla Papers, 2015

Author: Francine L. Allen Publisher: CBE International For enslaved members of the African diaspora in America, the biblical story of Exodus provided a way of understanding and framing discussions about slavery. Enslaved people would eventually use the Exodus story to shape their arguments for the abolition of slavery. If enslaved people found comparisons between their situation and that of the children of Israel, might not contemporary literary scholarship turn to the Moses narrative to understand and frame discussions, especially theological ones, about the enslaved experience as recounted in slave narratives, whether narratives of the African diaspora in America, of modern-day sex trafficking, or other instances of slavery?

Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, 2018

The recent renaissance of Augustinian ethics remains mostly silent about the central place of slavery in Augustine's thought. Although Augustinians appear confident his insights can be excised from his legitimation of the institution of slavery, two facts challenge this assumption: First, slavery constitutes not simply one moral issue among others for Augustine, but an organizing, conceptual metaphor; and second, the contemporary scene to which Augustinians apply his thought is itself the afterlife of a slave society. Thus, to bear faithful witness in a racialized world, Augustinians must grapple with slavery as Augustine's key conceptual metaphor, one that animates his thought and subtly reproduces the moral vantage of the master.

Religions, 2021

Racial ideas which developed in the modern west were forged with reference to a Christian worldview and informed by the Bible, particularly the Old Testament. Up until Darwin’s scientific reframing of the origins debate, European and American race scientists were fundamentally Christian in their orientation. This paper outlines how interpretations of the Hebrew Bible within this Christian Weltanschauung facilitated the development and articulation of racial theories which burgeoned in western intellectual discourse up to and during the 19th century. The book of Genesis was a particular seedbed for identity politics as the origin stories of the Hebrew Bible were plundered in service of articulating a racial hierarchy which justified both the place of Europeans at the pinnacle of divine creation and the denigration, bestialization, and enslavement of Africans as the worst of human filiation. That the racial ethos of the period dictated both the questions exegetes posed and the conclus...

Case Study, 2024

This case study explores the creation and use of a selectively edited version of the Bible during the transatlantic slave trade. This Bible, produced by British missionaries and colonial authorities, was designed to control and subjugate enslaved Africans by emphasizing passages that promoted obedience and removing those that advocated for freedom, justice, and liberation. By examining the theological, psychological, and cultural impacts of the Slave Bible, this case study argues that it was a powerful tool used to maintain colonial power structures. The paper highlights the ways in which religion was manipulated to justify slavery and prevent resistance, offering a critical analysis of how the Bible was used as a means of ideological control. Through an examination of the historical context, the selective editing process, and the dissemination of the Slave Bible, this study sheds light on the insidious role of religion in the systemic oppression of enslaved African populations in the Americas.

The Bible already expresses ambivalence about Hebrew slavery, the rabbis expand upon it and Maimonides takes the next step, applying the negative evaluation of slavery even to non-Israelites.

2015

Excerpt Used with Permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers' The Bible has the unfortunate legacy of being associated with gross human rights violations as evident in the scriptural justification of apartheid in South Africa as well as slavery in the American South. What is more, the Hebrew Bible also contains numerous instances in which the worth or dignity of the female characters are threatened, violated or potentially violated, creating a situation of dehumanization in which women are viewed as less than fully human. And yet the Bible continues to serve as a source of inspiration for readers committed to justice and liberation for all. But in order for the Bible to speak a liberative word, what is necessary is to cultivate liberating Bible reading practices rooted in justice and compassion. Restorative Readings seeks to do exactly this when the authors in their respective readings seek to cultivate Bible reading practices that are committed to restoring the dignity of those whose dignity has been violated by means of racial, gender, and sexual discrimination, by the atrocities of apartheid, by the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and by the dehumanizing reality of unemployment and poverty.

Bridge, Edward J., ‘The Metaphoric Use of Slave Terms in the Hebrew Bible’, Bulletin for Biblical Research 23 (2013) 13-28.

An analysis of metaphoric uses of slavery terms in the Hebrew Bible reveals a culture of hierarchical relationships based on power and status. Associations from slavery that are evoked in such uses are “possession” (with the derived association, “control”), “inferior status,” “work,” “debt/poverty,” “oppression,” and “propensity to run away”. Of six major categories of metaphoric use (subjects and officials to the king, vassalship, personal servants, people in relation to God, deference), “inferior status” is the association that is evoked in all contexts.