Jason Lisle #fundie

Jason Lisle #fundie jasonlisle.com

The biblical model of slavery is another very misunderstood principle. Perhaps some of the confusion comes from the history of slavery as it occurred in the United States; that type of slavery was not biblical. The Bible never condones racial or brutal slavery—the kind that was experienced in our nation. However, the Bible does indeed endorse a type of “slavery.” And when we read the relevant Scriptures in context, we see that it is quite different from what many people think. Biblical slavery was designed to help a financially irresponsible Israelite get out of debt and become a responsible worker. Here is how it was designed to work:

Those people who were very financially irresponsible, and had accumulated so much debt that they could not possibly pay it off, could request to become the slave of a wealthy individual (Leviticus 25:39; Genesis 47:19). If the wealthy individual agreed, he would pay off all the person’s debts and provide for him, and then the servant would work for the individual for some period of time apparently proportional to the amount of debt (Leviticus 25:50) but not to exceed seven years (Exodus 21:2; Deuteronomy 15:12). When the period of time had expired, the servant was set free, and the wealthy person was required to give him enough start up supplies so that he could begin his own business (Deuteronomy 15:13-14). The Israelite slave was to be treated respectfully (Leviticus 25:43) and was immediately granted freedom if mistreated (Exodus 21:26–27).

It’s really a very generous system. Help a financially irresponsible person to become responsible by (1) paying off his debts and providing for him, (2) training him by having him work for a period of time, (3) giving him sufficient startup capital to start his own business. It’s not quite what most people think, is it? I would suggest that the biblical system is far superior to our modern welfare system.

63 comments

old comment by Really?

Slavery in antiquity is generally misunderstood. Roman and Greek slaves had substantially more rights than hebrew slaves did, and slaves in the roman republic were by law allowed to purchase their freedom at a rate set by the state.

However, whenever people try and argue that slavery in antiquity was different than colonialist slavery what they are forgetting is that it was still slavery, and it was still horrible. So horrible, that most cultures world wide that developed feudalism exchanged large scale slavery for serfdome or peasantry.

Anybody who thinks slavery is better than the welfare state needs a lesson in Rawlsian Justice and the viel of ignorance. Certiantly, Dr. Lesle only thinks that slavery is preferable because he presupposed that he will never need welfare.

old comment by John

What you're talking about is "indentured servitude". They've had that in the Americas, too. Many used it in order to obtain passage to the New World - a kind of "loan" of the cost of passage against future wages. There may have been some of that in the Bible, too. But the Bible talks about selling one's daughter and using slave women as sex toys - not features of indentured servitude.

Our modern welfare system doesn't deal with people who got themselves into unpayable debts. That's what the bankruptcy laws are for. It deals with people who can't get jobs. If jobs were available - as they must be for the "biblical system" you describe to work - we wouldn't need welfare.

old comment by UHM

Not everybody in debt was financially irresponsible. My father is a great example of that.

Around, I think 20 years ago, my father - a medically licensed massage therapist - opened a licensed massage therapy practice (massage therapy is real medicine, for all you skeptics that think squishing muscles won't actually relax them). It was located in a retirement home (around 50% of all massage therapy business is with the elderly), and business was good. Then there was a reform of security standards (in case of a fire for example - most of which made absolute sense) and the practice had to be renovated, as business was good, the patient base loyal and the people he rented the place from were happy about the arrangement - there was no reason not to invest 50,000DM (or 25,000) into the business. Well, shit happend. Half a year after the renovation was finished, the retirement home was sold to a new owner - that owner wanted to have my fathers business for himself. The rent contract was cancelled. The worst part of it all is that the new owner refused to buy up the old furniture and supplies - making us store them in our very home. So there was my father, with 25,000 debt, furniture nobody else needed and massage oil to last a practice a month.
So were would any of this have been his fault? He did nothing wrong - in fact, if anything, he did to many things right. But still he paid that debt off for 15 years and I still have blanket from that time that I use during the winter.

Now, think about it, that was my father's business risk, a risk all business people understand and willingly take, but I can't imagine how it feels to have 60,000$ of debt because the cancer treatments cost something, and the insurrance won't pay or you simply couldn't afford one because you were working at Walmart. And then not to forget when you try to get the government and other people (you know, like the Walmart owners) to pay their fair share you get called a "moocher".

Oh yeah, not to forget, slavery is still wrong. Now matter how cozy you describe it, owning another human being, will always be wrong, destructive and inhumane.

old comment by

Fundie sociopaths's (read: Republican's) definition of financially irresponsible =

1.Nearly half the country, since nearly half the US is now living at or below the poverty level.

2.Anyone who gets sick, since some 50 million now are uninsured, and even most of those who have insurance can't meet the astronomical co-pays and deductibles when they get seriously ill, thus ending up in debt to their eyeballs. Of course, the Republicans took care of this irresponsible class of people, who account for the majority of bankruptcies in the US, by passing a law that says medical expenses can not be discharged by bankruptcy.

3.Anyone who's paid non-union, non-living wages, with sky-high rent and other costs, who can not obtain basic necessities of life without going into debt.

old comment by Hasan Prishtina

As usual, we are dealing with a fundie who doesn't know his Bible. While the system for Israelite slaves was better than that for non-Israelite slaves, slavery was still a feature of ancient Judaism and of Christianity into the 19th century. Around 2,000 years ago, it was the Talmud that effectively abolished slavery by making the conditions of holding any kind of slave so onerous that it was impossible to hold them.

Later systems of slavery outside those practised in the Christian West were easier until we get to the Ottoman system, where it was possible for a slave to be richer and more powerful than the great majority of free men.

old comment by Angua

If Jason Lisle actually bothered to read his Bible, he'd notice that the seven-years-of-indentured-servitude model of slavery only applied to Hebrew slaves. As others have already pointed out, foreigners could be made slaves for life, and their children would inherit their status as slaves.

I suppose that Lisle is technically correct when he says that the Bible doesn't set up a system of slavery based on race. No, it sets up a system of slavery based on ethnicity and nationality instead. And race-based slavery is clearly worse than ethnicity or nationality-based slavery because . . . because one's in the Bible and the other isn't, I guess. In principle, they don't really seem all that different to me.

Funny how apologists only ever acknowledge the Bible's model of slavery for Hebrew slaves, but ignore its model of slavery for foreign slaves. It seems that when you look at what the Bible says about slavery in context, we see that what it says is quite different from what many apologists would have you think.

old comment by Adrian

And let's don't forget that even for an Hebrew slave, the master could give him a wife, and when the slave's seven years of slavery were up, he had to choose between abandonning his wife (and the children that may have resulted) or begging the master to allow him to remain his slave forever...

@sandchigger: reminds me of the song Sixteen Tons, which was about that kind of engineered debt slavery in company towns working under the truck system.

You load sixteen tons, what do you get
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store

Oh, and a nice little piece of Fridge Horror: according to Wikipedia, "scrip as a de facto form of currency within the setting of the mining or logging industry was discontinued around 1952", which means that barely more than half a century ago some US workers in those industries may still have found themselves in the same kind of debt slavery as a 19th century miner or factory worker.

old comment by JeanP

Thus, instead of giving welfare to down-trotten families-because there are not only irresponsible among the poors but also people who didn't have luck (diseases, accidents)-, you want to enslave them, setting up peonage and submitting them to forced labor.

Yeah,a " very generous system".

Moreover, the three adventages for this pratice could be refuced as following:
(1) If the debts are really high -and we will exclude cases where the peon live under truck system-, there is no possibility to reimburse them, and this is why there were Jubilees every fifty years, enabling the freeing of peons, and that we have today bankrupcy laws

(2) Apart some civilizations (ancient Greece, Roma) where slaves could be tasked with highly qualified trades such as teacher, physicians, banker and the like, slaves were historicaly used for low-qualified and repetitive work such as mining and farming;

(3) Startup capital? Don't make me laugh.
And this system applied only, as you and some commenters remarked, to Israelite slaves; foreign slaves were just wieved as chattel and treated accordingly.