This is Week Sixteen of Giford's Bible Study Programme.

If a man smite his servant or his maid, with a rod, and he die under his hand, he shall be surely punished; notwithstanding, if he continue a day or two, he shall not be punished, for he is his money.

Exodus 21:20-21

Thy bond-men and thy bond-maids which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you: of them shall ye buy bond-men and bond-maids. Moreover, of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land. And they shall be your possession. And ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them for a possession, they shall be your bond-man forever.

Leviticus 25:44-46

Length: 3/5

Controversy: 1/5

Slavery is morally permissible. Beating a slave is permissible, provided he survives. Mutilation, presumably, is just fine. I personally am quite prepared to believe that the 'three day rule' from Exodus quoted above was introduced with the best of intentions - it was probably intended to differentiate between slaves who died of their injuries and slaves who died for some other reason, to allow for punishment of excessively brutal masters. However, if that's correct, it's rather cack-handed; far better methods could have been suggested.

Christian Responses

Some of the responses by Christian fundamentalists are almost as alarming as the Biblical commandments here. At the more acceptable end of the scale is the simple claim that the Old Testament is no longer valid, or that this was just 'the way of the world' at the time and God didn't want to rock the boat or say anything too controversial. The former claims that slavery was morally acceptable in the past, even though it is not now; the latter claims that on this one occasion God decided not to challenge a human law He disagreed with, which flies in the face of almost everything else in the Old Testament.

Towards the more disturbing end of the spectrum, we have claims that since this was often debt slavery, it was acceptable, or that because there are some limitations to slavery - for instance (male Hebrew) slaves were released after seven years¹ and runaway slaves are to be freed² that somehow justifies the whole thing. It appears that such people see nothing inherently wrong in one human owning another.

Foreign slaves have no hope of release because, you see, God is slightly racist that way.