Almost every morning I drive to a nearby Starbucks to get my morning venti dark roast. Each Wednesday morning I run into a group of four or five men who meet at the Starbucks for Bible study. Their discussions are generally serious ones, as each pores over his own copy of the Bible. I am most curious about what passages they are studying, and I confess to eavesdropping sometimes while I am doctoring my coffee. I have sometimes thought I should ask to join their group and explain, in a respectful way, my secular views on the Bible and on religion in general. My guess is that they would not be particularly interested, and I wouldn’t want them to feel that I was hijacking their discussion.
I do not know if the men in this group believe that the entire Bible is the inerrant “word of God.” But I do know that others of my Christian friends believe that it is. Some of those friends have told me that they have read the entire Bible through, in some cases several times. Others have told me that all the stories in the Bible—the creation, the flood, the exodus, Jonah, Job—are factually true. And that certainly is what I was taught growing up in the Seventh-day Adventist church.
Having said that, there are many passages in the Bible that these fundamentalist Christians appear to ignore—completely. I mention this because I recently ran across a passage that, in my view, is impossible to reconcile with contemporary Christian theology. Exodus 20 lays out the Ten Commandments that Christians are familiar with. In the following chapters God spells out “ordinances” that the Israelites were to be governed by. In a sense, these can be considered more specific rules that flesh out the main commandments. Here is a passage that contains one of those ordinances. Keep in mind, according to the surrounding text, this is not just Moses improvising on his own. Rather, it is God speaking directly through Moses:
When a slaveowner strikes a male or female slave with a rod and the slave dies immediately, the owner shall be punished. But if the slave survives a day or two, there is no punishment; for the slave is the owner’s property.
Exodus 21:20-21 (NRSV)
The problems with this passage should be obvious to anyone.
First, the passage explicitly condones slavery, a barbaric, immoral practice that is condemned by virtually every civilized culture. I suppose one could claim that the reference to slaves is a mistranslation. The less specific King James Version refers to servants and maids, but the New Revised Standard Version I have quoted is considered to be the most accurate. Moreover, the passage refers to the slave as the owner’s property. Really, how else is one to interpret that? Again, the KJV refers to the servant being the master’s “money.” What could that mean if it didn’t mean that the “servant” was the property of the master?
I have had friends tell me that slavery was an accepted cultural practice during biblical times and that such ordinances were intended strictly for that point in history, not for all time. My response to that is, if slavery is truly immoral, then it should be prohibited, regardless of the prevailing cultural norms. Wouldn’t such a prohibition have made a much better commandment than some of the so-called “big ten”? If God really wanted to lay out general moral precepts, why not do it then? If abolishing slavery would have put the Israelites at an economic disadvantage, could not an omnipotent god have protected the economic interests of his chosen people?
Second, while the passage declares that if a master should kill a slave, he should be punished (without specifying the nature of the punishment), amazingly, if the slave should languish for a day or two before dying, then there should be no punishment because the slave was the owner’s property. This is a recognition that slaves are to be treated not as humans but as chattel. In truth, it represents a brutal, shameful disregard for the fundamental equality of all humanity. And it’s coming directly from God.
This all leads me to ask the following questions:
1. For those who are Bible literalists, how do you interpret or justify the quoted passage? Were you even aware of it? If not, does learning of the passage change your thinking as to the inerrancy of scripture? What if there are other similarly puzzling passages (which there are)?
2. For those who look to specific passages in the Bible for study and for guidance, how do you decide which passages to study? Do you ever study such passages as the quoted one? Are some passages more worthy of study than others?
3. For those who have read the Bible through, what did you think of the passage when you read it? Or did you simply gloss over it without thinking about it, because it was just part of what you had to read to get through the entire Bible?
© 2017 John M. Phillips
Excellent post, John. It is a pleasure in this age of indifference to facts to see you write with such logic and precision and focus. Reading your post caused me to reflect on another question that arose for me as I read. Most Biblical scholars agree that the Pentateuch (first five books of the Old Testament) was not and could not have been written by Moses, but was written some three hundred years after the events it describes by an anonymous author or authors. My question to the Bible study group and to believers in general is: Does it make any difference to you that Genesis, Exodus, and the next three books were written long after the events they describe by an anonymous author or authors? How does that impact your conviction that the words attributed to Moses came from God?
ReplyDeleteAgain, an excellent post, John.