That Wacky Old Testament (17)

Worldwide, 50 million people live in slavery. Yes, in 2024.

India has 11 million slaves, China almost six million. In fact, 86% of the world’s 195 countries still have some form of modern slavery, including the US. 22 million of our world’s slaves are in forced marriages, 40% of these being children (defined as below the age of eighteen).

It gets worse.

A Social Problem That Won’t Go Away

In 2021, documented sex trafficking in the US involved almost 17,000 individuals, meaning the real number is considerably higher. The worldwide porn industry employs approximately 100,000 men and women, with 89% of the actors being women. Some of these enter the industry by choice; drug addicts and illegal immigrants generally do not.

Finally, notwithstanding several high-profile prosecutions, approximately 19,000 girls are sexually groomed and exploited for financial gain annually … in England. This is an appalling commentary on the third-world societies from which the groomers migrate and an even more appalling commentary on the pathetic English virtue signalers who would rather be perceived as racially open-minded than muster the courage to eliminate a massive evil in their midst. (It also highlights the failure of the multi-generational welfare state, in which broken homes, addiction and parental inertia expose teenage girls to predators in astounding numbers.)

So then, slavery with sex as a component is not just an ancient problem. It thrives today despite all visible public efforts to end it and all decent people everywhere decrying it. That said, in the ancient world, slavery was ubiquitous; every nation without exception engaged in it in some form or other. Powerful men kept huge harems, and sexual usage of enslaved women was a matter of course around the world. Where no social safety net exists, it may be argued that certain forms of slavery may be preferable to the alternative, when the alternative is starvation or life on the street.

The Controversial Portion

Keep that in mind when you read the first ten verses of Exodus 21. The Law of Moses did not inaugurate the concept of slavery, nor does it explicitly approve it. It simply puts unique limitations on an institution that existed everywhere in the world, limitations that improved the working and living conditions of the slave, and ensured his or her future prospects.

So then, here’s the “controversial” portion of the text:

“When a man sells his daughter as a slave, she shall not go out as the male slaves do. If she does not please her master, who has designated her for himself, then he shall let her be redeemed. He shall have no right to sell her to a foreign people, since he has broken faith with her. If he designates her for his son, he shall deal with her as with a daughter. If he takes another wife to himself, he shall not diminish her food, her clothing, or her marital rights. And if he does not do these three things for her, she shall go out for nothing, without payment of money.”

Firstly, why would a father sell his daughter as a slave? Almost invariably, the reason was poverty, a situation described in Leviticus 25, in which a man might become so indebted or unable to support his family that he sold himself into slavery in order to pay off his debts. For an Israelite man, this servitude was temporary, and his treatment by his Israelite master under law was fair and reasonable. Unless redeemed earlier by a relative, a male slave would serve until the year of jubilee, so the worst-case scenario for an Israelite man was a six-year term of service. For an Israelite, there was no lifetime slavery except by choice.

Alternatively, a poor father with a large number of mouths to feed might be better off selling a daughter into slavery than selling himself and leaving his family without male protection. A daughter’s bride price could be the financial salvation of her family, while offering her the prospect of improving her own situation in a more affluent household.

Examining the Cultural Context

Unlike the servitude of a son, the servitude of a daughter did not end with the year of jubilee. To modern readers, this sounds like unfair treatment, but it was actually a protection for the woman. We can see from the text that the slavery of a woman presumed an ongoing sexual relationship, either with the purchaser, one of his sons, or sometimes with a well-regarded male slave. On the woman’s part at least, the relationship was monogamous, which certainly made it preferable to prostitution. She belonged to a single man in the household, and could not be used indiscriminately as would occur in a brothel. Her position came with both privileges and responsibilities.

In the culture of the day, a man turned loose in the seventh year of service could go and work anywhere he might choose. A woman could not. Terminating her service to a master effectively ended her income and security. Thus, the “freedom” to which a man might look forward enthusiastically after six years held no promise for a woman no longer a virgin, whose relative value in the sexual marketplace was diminished by her history. It would leave her with fewer good prospects and possibly without means of support. Few women, especially as they aged, would choose the option of freedom unless her circumstances in her existing home had become intolerable.

Getting Out of a Bad Situation

The law took these unfortunate realities and inequalities into account, limiting the options of a master who had lost interest in a slave-wife. It barred him from reselling her to foreigners or giving her place in the household to another. If he could afford to add to his harem, he might opt to do so, but he could not do so at her expense. She was to continue receiving food, clothing and “marital rights” (which appear to include both sexual access, and therefore the ability to bear children, and her place in the home) at the same level she always had, regardless of the number of other women introduced into the household. This provision of the law would obviously tend to set upper limits on the polygamous tendencies in the husband, who could only marry the number of women he could afford to maintain at a particular level, providing a natural financial incentive to monogamous behavior.

In the alternative, a slave-wife could be redeemed if members of her family or extended family were in a position to do so, meaning that some portion of the bride-price paid for her would be returned to her husband in exchange for her freedom. The redeemer would thus be taking on the responsibility of providing for her for the rest of her life. What could not happen was for the “husband” to grow tired of her, replace her with a younger or more attractive model, and reduce her position to that of handmaid or drudge for the new queen of his household. If he in any way curtailed her privileges as a wife, he was obligated to release her without receiving any repayment of her dowry, losing the value of his investment in her.

Ideals and Realities

Was this a perfect system? Absolutely not. Polygamy was not God’s ideal. The sale and ownership of persons was not God’s ideal. Divorce was not God’s ideal, and a woman bouncing around from household to household was definitely not God’s ideal. None of this was in the case “in the beginning” when God instituted marriage and the concept of slavery had never entered the human mind. Nevertheless, as in the laws concerning divorce, God was dealing with a hard-hearted people whose cultural and moral progress could only be achieved incrementally. Israel relentlessly patterned itself after the nations around it, and could only be moved a certain moral distance from generation to generation.

Whether our current social arrangements are a net improvement over these is a matter for debate. But in its day, the Law of Moses set Israel apart by limiting sexual profligacy, divorce and spousal abuse, and maximizing rights, commitment, provision and security for women when compared to other societies of the time, and to the greatest extent the cultural context would allow.