law – Good Question

What about the law in the Bible about masters beating their slaves?

Q. An atheist has challenged me about a problem in the Bible that I have been trying to resolve. In Exodus 21:21 it says about a slave who is beaten by his master, “Notwithstanding, if the slave survives for a day or two, the master shall not be punished: for the slave is his money.” How is this consistent with a compassionate God who wants to protect the weak? Can you help me with this?

Thanks for your question. This law in Exodus is one that compassionate people of faith really struggle with, as it seems to suggest on first reading that once masters have paid for slaves, they can do anything with them that they want. But I believe that the proper way to understand this law is by recognizing that it was originally intended to protect slaves from severe beatings.

Someone asked me about that same law on this blog earlier this year, as one of a number of questions about slavery and the Bible. Here’s what I said in response:

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The law in Exodus about beating a slave should not be understood in any way as giving permission to masters to beat their slaves severely, so long as they don’t quite kill them. For one thing, this law specifies that if a slave dies immediately from a beating, the master must suffer the death penalty, just as in the case of a free person being murdered. The Hebrew says literally, “vengeance shall surely be taken.” The NIV says that the master “must be punished,” but this is not specific enough; the ESV says that the slave “shall be avenged,” and this is clearer. The first part of this law provides the same protection for slaves as for free persons, an unusual and perhaps unique piece of legislation among ancient cultures.

The second part of this law says that if the slave does not die immediately, but after a day or two, “he is not to be avenged,” that is, the master does not suffer the death penalty. The reasoning behind this stipulation is that the slave’s survival for a time suggests that the killing was not intentional. The law of Moses carefully distinguishes between the penalties for murder and manslaughter (that is, for intentional and unintentional killings). The explanation “for the slave is his money” does not mean that the master has bought and paid for the slave and so can do anything with him that he wants. Rather, the meaning is that the loss of the price of the slave, a significant sum in the ancient world, punishes the master sufficiently for manslaughter. The master has, in effect, punished himself.

Even though understanding more about the background and intent of this law can help us recognize that it is designed to protect slaves, not the masters who beat them, it is still a very difficult law for compassionate followers of Jesus to read today in the Bible.

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I hope this helps answer your question. If you have more concerns, please comment on this post and I’ll try to respond to them.

Couldn’t “turning the other cheek” get someone seriously hurt?

Q. Jesus said we should “turn the other cheek” if someone hits us. But couldn’t we be seriously hurt if we don’t defend ourselves against an attacker?

Jesus’ teaching about “turning the other cheek” comes at a point in the Sermon on the Mount where he’s contrasting later interpretations of the law of Moses with the true spirit of that law.

In this case, he’s talking about a law that specified that the community should mete out proportionate justice for offenses: “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” This law was designed to prevent individuals from taking vengeance, and also to prevent disproportionate punishments (whether too lenient or too severe).

However, by the time of Jesus, people were taking the idea of “an eye for an eye” to mean that they should “keep score” personally. Whatever someone does to you, you do back to them. In other words, they were appealing to Scripture to justify grudges and feuds!

So Jesus basically tells them, “Don’t keep score.” Let the other person get “one up on you,” without trying to even the score, in the interests of pursuing reconciliation and peace.

Jesus gives several examples of how not to keep score. Lend or give money without expecting repayment. If someone sues you, settle with them generously. If one of the occupying Roman soldiers exercises his right to force you to carry his load for a mile, carry it an extra mile. (As it has been observed, you go the first mile as a conscripted laborer, but you go the second mile as a potential friend.)

As for “turning the other cheek,” it’s important to recognize that Jesus says specifically to do this if someone slaps you, not if they punch or strike you. (See this thread for a discussion of the translation.) In the time of Jesus, slapping was intended as an insult, not to cause injury. So the idea is that you don’t return insult for insult; instead, you say with your actions, “Insult me again if you want, but I’m still interested in reconciliation and friendship with you.”

Jesus’ early followers “got it” and they present the same idea in their writings. Peter says, “Do not repay evil for evil or insult with insult. On the contrary, repay evil with blessing.” Paul says similarly, “Do not repay anyone evil for evil . . . as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.”

It must be emphasized that Jesus is not saying here that we should allow ourselves to be beaten up and injured without trying to defend ourselves or escape. There’s no imperative for followers of Jesus to suffer bullying, domestic violence, and the like without protest or resistance. If we really want to live out the spirit of this teaching and pursue what’s best for the other person, we need to take the necessary measures to stop them from being violent and help them understand how to relate to others in a proper and healthy way.

Does the Bible condone slavery? (Part 1)

Q. It took the United States almost 90 years after it was founded, supposedly on Christian principles, to end slavery. Finally people understood it was wrong to own another person. Even after that, African Americans have been kept down and discriminated against.
In Leviticus 25 it gives instructions on how to purchase foreigners, even their children, and treat them like property. But they were told that the people of Israel must not be treated that way.
In Exodus 21 it talks about how to buy a Hebrew slave—that they must set him free in the seventh year, and if he got married while he was in slavery, he can’t take his wife with him when he’s freed. If he wants to keep his wife he has to say he’s happy with his master and have an awl pushed through his ear lobe, and agree to slavery for life.
Also in Exodus 21 it tells you it’s all right to beat your slave to the point of death, as long as he doesn’t die right away.
Jesus didn’t seem to condemn slavery either, and the apostle Paul even says that slaves should obey their earthly masters with respect and fear, as sincerely as they would serve Christ (Ephesians 6:5).
Why would God permit the Israelites, and later the Christians, to treat people like this?

Statements like these that the Bible makes about slavery are very troubling to thoughtful and compassionate followers of Jesus. It’s important to emphasize that we get a very different picture of the Bible’s view towards slavery when we consider the big picture rather than individual verses. So let me speak about the big picture first in this post, and then in my next post discuss the statements you have cited.

The central redemptive metaphor of the Old Testament, echoed throughout that part of the Bible, is God’s deliverance of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. To me this sends a clear message that God did not create slavery and does not approve of it; God wants people to be free. Slavery is instead like divorce, which, as Jesus explained to the Pharisees, is something that’s regulated in the law of Moses to protect people when it happens, not something that God commands.

While Jesus didn’t speak directly against slavery, he did use the image of being set free from slavery as a metaphor for the salvation that he brought. He could only do this if slavery wasn’t something that God instituted and upheld. For his part, the apostle Paul said that in Christ there was neither slave nor free, and he told slaves to gain their freedom if they could. He lived out this big vision in a practical situation when he appealed personally to Philemon to set Onesimus free.

It was Christians inspired by this big-picture teaching of the Bible who fought successfully to end government-sanctioned slavery in Britain, the United States, and other parts of the world. Contemporary Christians are equally motivated by their biblical convictions to fight modern-day slavery through organizations such as the International Justice Mission.

“Am I not a man and a brother?” Influential cameo created by Josiah Wedgwood, founder of the British pottery company and committed abolitionist.

By contrast, people who wanted to maintain slavery appealed to individual verses. In response, people who wanted to end slavery argued that slavery in ancient times—the situation the Bible actually speaks to—was very different from slavery in the American experience. They challenged slaveholders who appealed to the Bible at least to practice a much more moderate, “biblical” form of slavery (the slaveholders declined to do even this):
• Ancient slavery was not racially based and did not presume that some races were inferior to others and so could justifiably be enslaved.
• In biblical times masters owned their slaves’ labor but not their bodies or persons; that’s why masters were required to set their slaves free if they caused them permanent bodily injury. They were also required to set free concubines (female slaves they had married) if they did not honor them as full wives.
• Freedom could be purchased for slaves by their relatives; slaves could even buy their own freedom. In Roman times some slaves were adopted into their masters’ families and even became heirs; many interpreters believe this cultural practice lies behind the metaphor of “adoption to sonship” that Paul uses in Romans to describe salvation. In a more ancient example, Abraham’s household servant Eliezer would have been his heir if he hadn’t had a son.
So when we see the Bible regulate slavery rather than abolish it outright, we need to recognize that it’s regulating a very different institution than the one known from the American experience, which violated at every turn the biblical laws designed to protect slaves.

(In my next post I will address the individual passages you cited.)

Is it all right for Christians to get tattoos?

Q. In your guide to Paul’s Journey Letters, when you get to the end of Romans you ask about outward ways of identifying as a follower of Jesus. When we discussed this question in our group, the subject of tattoos came up. Most of the group members didn’t have a problem with them. But I thought Christians weren’t supposed to get tattoos. Doesn’t the Bible say, “Do not put tattoo marks on yourselves”?

I personally don’t think this one verse can be used as a proof-text against tattoos. The particular commandment you’re describing is found in Leviticus. It says in full, “Do not cut your bodies for the dead or put tattoo marks on yourselves.” The concern is with cutting or marking oneself as a pagan worship practice designed to appease or cultivate the spirits of the dead. (A similar commandment is found in Deuteronomy, “Do not cut yourselves or shave the front of your heads for the dead.”) So this is not necessarily a prohibition of using these practices for other purposes, including identifying oneself as a follower of the true God.

However, we need to be careful here. There are other things that are mentioned in the Bible only in the context of pagan worship, such as human sacrifice, that we shouldn’t conclude are acceptable in other contexts. We really need some indication that a practice can be used positively to honor God before we decide that any prohibition against it is really aimed only at pagan worship practices.

In the case of marking the body, in one of his visions Ezekiel sees a man with a “writing kit” whom God tells, “Go throughout the city of Jerusalem and put a mark on the foreheads of those who grieve and lament over all the detestable things that are done in it.” This image is echoed in Revelation when God “seals” the 144,000; later in that book we learn that they had the Lamb’s name and his father’s name “written on their foreheads.” Jesus also says in Revelation, in his letter to the church of Philadelphia, about anyone who remains faithful, “I will write on them the name of my God and the name of the city of my God . . . and I will also write on them my new name.” So Ezekiel and Revelation use the symbol of God marking or writing on his servants as a positive sign of protection and identification.

However, these passages really can’t be used as proof-texts in favor of tattooing, any more than the one in Leviticus can be used as a proof-text against it. This isn’t just because Ezekiel and Revelation are highly symbolic books and it’s often difficult to know how literally to take their imagery. Rather, it’s because those two books, like Leviticus, are recording the warnings and encouragement that God gave his faithful people over the centuries as examples and instruction for us today. We’re not supposed to turn any of this into rules, but rather use it to become familiar with the ways of God so that we can discern how to follow those ways in our own place and time.

On questions such as whether followers of Jesus can get tattoos, we do well to be guided by the counsel in the very part of the Scriptures that prompted your group’s discussion—the end of Romans. Paul writes there, “I am convinced . . . that nothing is unclean in itself. . . . Let us . . . make every effort to do what leads to peace and to mutual edification. . . . Whatever you believe about these things keep between yourself and God.”

In other words, a tattoo is really just ink on the skin, not something spiritually dangerous in itself. But a person who’s deciding whether to get a tattoo should ask how this would build up other believers and how it would make for peace within the community of Jesus’ followers. And whatever a person decides on a question like this, they should have a well-considered position that they keep mainly as a private conviction between themselves and God, and grant others freedom to follow their own convictions.