Slavery

Joseph sustains his family from the official Egyptian storehouses, unlike the Egyptian population, whose produce and livestock were taxed by a fifth, and who were forced into corvée labor to keep from starving. Then a new king arose who did not honor that agreement.

A unique law in its ancient Near Eastern context, commentators such as ibn Ezra, Maimonides, and Calvin, living in a world of normative slavery, debated its reason, and whether it was theological or ethical.

What really motivated the editors of Select Parts of the Holy Bible: For the Use of the Negro Slaves in the British West-India Islands (1807), better known as “The Slave Bible”?

In 1861, Rabbi Morris Raphall of New York attempted to save the Union by declaring from his pulpit that slavery was the will of God, as per the Torah’s story of the curse of Ham. Some rabbis and Jewish scholars approved of the message, but others, such as Michael Heilprin and David Einhorn, pushed back with biting criticism.

If an Israelite wishes to marry a woman taken captive in war, she becomes part of the Israelite community and is protected from future re-enslavement. Uncomfortable with the Torah’s permission of this marriage, the rabbis declare it to be a concession to man’s “evil impulse,” an idea reminiscent of Jesus’ assertion that the Torah allows divorce as a concession to humanity’s “hard heart.”

Like many traditions with a long historical pedigree, Judaism has inherited its share of texts with racial bias. Failure to acknowledge this is one reason for prevalent conscious and subconscious racist views that can be found in the American Orthodox Jewish community—the community of which I am a part—which sometimes reveal themselves in overt statements and actions.

Leviticus 25 legislates a multi-tiered system of rights and requirements that act as a corrective to a market in which even human beings can be sold. This system preserves the dignified status of Israelite brothers as free persons with their own ancestral agricultural land, ensuring that no Israelites become a permanent lower class.

The designation ivri in the legal corpora of the Pentateuch is found only in the laws of slavery. So who is this ivri slave and why was he sold?

Can all social change be antedated back to Sinai?

A classic example of source criticism applied to Torah legislation.

19th century Anglo-Jewish translators defended the Israelites’ behavior against the King James translation’s perceived accusation that the Jews “borrowed” the Egyptians belongings and never returned them.

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.

Doing history one better

And the challenges of putting it into practice.

Egyptian sources shed light on the nature of the work described in the Torah.