You're not going to have a better discussion if you're going to play tit for tat
over which slave system was good or not so bad or this, you know,
like you're gonna go through Hammurabi's laws and,
"okay, this one goes into Hammurabi column and this one goes in the Torah column."
That's ridiculous.
Let's talk a little bit about the readings.
I just wanted to go through that to help you think or to help...
not really help you think. I hope it'll do that a little bit,
but help you explain kind of how I approach the situation.
I'm not going to argue with people in such a way
that I have to defend the Torah slave system.
Cuz I'm just not going to do that. Why would I bother?
It's not where the story is supposed to end.
How do I know that? Because it ain't where it began.
I don't need to defend it.
I don't need to defend something that's going to be obsolete.
I don't need to defend any world system of this.
Because Genesis 1, the Edenic ideal teaches me that all people are images of God.
I'm exhausted now.
You know, that was just an onerous thought process; one verse, okay.
I mean, just one idea. That is the orienting idea.
That is the idea.
So, this is how approach these things, I'm always asking, and I just think
you can have a better discussion with people,
a lot of the stuff we've done this semester is really about
how do you have a better discussion with somebody.
You're not going to have the better discussion if you're going to play tit for tat
over which slave system was good or not so bad or this, you know,
like, you're gonna go through Hammurabi's laws, and,
"okay, this one goes into Hammurabi column and this one goes in the Torah column."
That's ridiculous.
No one today would want to live, you know, own, even if it was for 6 years,
or whatever the Jubilee is. I mean, you don't want to be a debt slave.
That's not a good thing.
Okay, even in Israel. Yes, it had an expiration date, which was nice.
But you wouldn't want to be there.
There was no bankruptcy court.
Okay, this is what you're looking at; stay out of the situation.
So, nobody wants to live under some of these conditions,
regardless of how they might have cultural benefits, especially for women,
because, you know, otherwise, you're gonna be
a servant in my household, or you have fun being a prostitute.
You know, I mean, these are terrible choices.
So, you can spend your time talking about that and trying to defend
something that isn't the ideal, or
you can have a conversation about, "well, yeah, that's the way it was.
And it wasn't really ideal. It wasn't really what God wanted.
It was a place to park for a while, and then, you know, if Israel takes hold,
and they honor God, God's gonna bless them.
And then we're gonna move from this to that, and so on and so forth.
There's this thing called Salvation History, there's a thought trajectory in the Bible.
It doesn't end with the Levitical or Torah slave laws.
It transcends them, it moves beyond them.
Again, some of these big picture theological concepts that get applied,
here's the point; that get applied to everyone in the New Testament.
Everyone. And this is by design.
If you believe that the Gentiles were supposed to be grafted in.
The outsider was supposed to become the insider.
Okay, then this topic, the whole slavery thing comes right along with that.
Rides the coattails right on there, you know.
So again, it's about trying to have just a better conversation.
Now, I hope you found some of this interesting.