Sheep and Goats

Category: Slavery

  • David and the Deceased 70K

    David makes a dumb move at 70,000 die. Israel of old clears out the Promised Land and many more die. And then—what about slavery?

    Probably, the way it works is that once humans, in the persons of Adam and Eve, have sailed past God’s will and entered the doomed experiment of independent self-rule, to be concluded several thousands of years later, God works with the products of that rebellion to achieve his purpose. 

    This means, if warfare and yielding to the whims of the gods has become a fixture in life, it is used in furtherance of that purpose. People of that time may not like it, but they will take it right in stride as the sort of thing that happens in their times—whereas people 4000 years later won’t be able to get their heads around it at all. We, from the present day, imagine a world court of some sort that will make a stab at punishing war crimes. Not so then. The time-tested way to clear people out, especially those whose “error” has had 400 years to come to fruition, the way Genesis 15:16 says, is through warfare. 

    It is rather the same thing with slavery. Modern woke people expect Jesus, or any character of godly standing, to suspend all activity upon encountering it so as to deliver lectures as to how unjust it is. Instead, they say: “well, humans chose injustice (albeit unknowingly) from the earliest days of the first couple,” so they work with it, rather than rail against it. “Were you called when a slave? Do not let it concern you; but if you can become free, then seize the opportunity,” Paul writes at 1 Corinthians 7:21.

    In short, humans chose injustice. So God incorporates all the products of that choice into his developing purpose. In the case of David and the 70 deceased K, this is likely a realized manifestation of God’s warning not to choose a king. The system of judges was working just fine. Don’t mess it up:

    “However, the people refused to listen to the voice of Samuel and said: “No, but a king is what will come to be over us. And we must become, we also, like all the nations, and our king must judge us and go out before us and fight our battles.” (1 Samuel 8:19-20)

    Oh yeah! Cool! Do it the way “all the nations” do. Maybe we can even have our own flag!

    Sometimes the king loses those battles. When he does, since you’ve put yourself under his authority, you bear a part of the defeat. Even in lands of participatory government, when you succeed in putting your guy into office, then he commits mayhem abroad, don’t you share some bloodguilt for putting him in that position? Can you really claim to be an innocent civilian?

    That God uses the products of early human rebellion against him, in this case the nations they congeal themselves into, as instruments in his purpose, is no more evident than it is in the Book of Isaiah. He uses the nation of Assyria, even calling it the rod of his anger, to discipline his own people:

    “Ah, Assyria, the rod of my anger; the staff in their hands is my fury! Against a godless nation I send him, and against the people of my wrath I command him, to take spoil and seize plunder, and to tread them down like the mire of the streets.”  (Isaiah 10:5-6) Later, Babylon will be the instrument, as demonstrated most notable in chapters 39 and 47. 

    They are fickle and imprecise instruments, as would be expected of products of human rebellion—hard to control, even for God, but such are the tools he has to work with. When the hangman gets too ghoulish, even the State may restrain him. So it is that the mayhem-inducing nations go too far, and God must pull them back. “Should the axe exult itself over the One who chops with it?” Jehovah rebukes Assyria. (10:15) It is the same way with Babylon: “I was angry with my people and profaned my heritage; I gave them into your hand, you showed them no mercy…” (47:6) The oppression is limited. Once the discipline of his people is complete, His anger turns away.

    Though disguised, the beef of many is not with the 70K, nor clearing the Promised Land, nor the mean Assyrians or Babylonians, nor the myriad other criticisms they bring up, but with God’s overall plan to let thousands of years elapse to demonstrate that human self-rule independent of him doesn’t work. Rather than the present world “passing away,” they appear to want it repaired, and imagine that lectures on the evils of warfare and slavery will do the trick. If there is one thing history has taught us, it is that humans at the highest levels of accountability are perfectly capable of arguing away whatever is recorded in scripture in favor of what they would rather do. The way the Bible has it laid out is that after the experiment of self-rule has ended, Jehovah will forcefully uphold his sovereignty through the rulership of his son, amidst much loss of life from those who yet oppose. And I suspect they won’t like that either.

    ”They love this current system so they want to just ‘repair’ the aspects they dont want not realizing its broken and the only solution is to destroy it and have something better”

    Sometimes I phrase this that these don’t really want an end to injustice as much as to the symptoms of injustice, mostly the ones that affect them personally. Or, to be more charitable, to the ones that they know of personally. A central Bible theme is that human self-rule is itself the source of injustice, and that injustice manifests itself in so many ways at so many levels that nobody can possible tally it all up—so they just focus on fixing ones those they know, often at the expense of ones they do not know. Human self-rule itself has to go if injustice is to be solved.

    These are the ones who put unlimited faith in humankind—or maybe it is disdain for God—so that they continue to insist humans are salvageable, that all that lacks is more education, more communication, more ‘coming together.’ At root, it is those who suppose that man is basically good, rather than fatally flawed. Witnesses take the ‘fatally flawed’ viewpoint, and that the only remedy is salvation through Christ.

    It really is true that “the word of God is alive and exerts power and is sharper than any two-edged sword and pierces even to the dividing of soul and spirit, and of joints from the marrow, and is able to discern thoughts and intentions of the heart.” (Hebrews 4:12)

    Meanwhile, the most learned theologians, stymied by tools that prevent looking into the divine, attribute all such scriptures to after-the-fact damage control, as though putting lipstick on a pig. The 70K died, the original inhabitants west of the Jordan wiped out, Israel and Judah itself desecrated at the hands of foreign powers, and narrative must be concocted to cover these unpleasantries from a human point of view.

    ******  The bookstore

  • Does the Bible Condone Slavery? Part 2–Frederick Douglass

    (For best results, see Part 1 first)

    The poster tells it all at the Harpers Ferry National Historical Park as to John Brown’s motivation. But does it tell it accurately? You would think so—it is the National Historical Park Service, after all. So one is inclined to take at face value the interpretive text on one display:

    “Although slavery is often condoned in the Bible, [John] Brown believed that the ‘Golden Rule’ Do unto others as you would have them do unto you implicitly condemned slavery.”

    Is it? We hear it all the time that the Bible condones slavery, but does it? Or is it merely the pop atheist philosophy of today that drives research, that holds that if you’re not nagging about something 24/7, that means you condone it? After all, the ‘Golden Rule’ is also in the Bible. That doesn’t condone slavery, does it?

    Of course, the topic of slavery does come up in the Bible. If you’re doing any overview of history, as the Bible does, it is going to come up a lot. It was a universal human degradation, present from the earliest reaches of history, and ‘natural law’ holds it as an advancement in societal evolution; making captives of war slaves was surely an advance over killing them, wasn’t it?

    With regard to slaves among the Hebrews, their Law turns an historical degradation into something not degrading at all. A Jew might sell himself to his wealthy neighbor as a last resort should his debts overwhelm him. Harsh treatment of such slaves was not allowed and—wait for it—at the end of a seven-year Jubilee period, that slave was freed. And freed with a gift, so as to start life anew. Thus, the economic system universal to the ancient world, and not much less so today, that of the ‘rich getting richer while the poor get poorer’ was not allowed to take root in ancient Israel.

    Now, any scholar worth his diploma knows this. But secular atheist scholars may not know it because they have majored in topics divorced from what has historically driven humankind. ‘Science’ is the Great Father. ‘Religion’ is the enemy. They don’t look as deeply into the enemy camp as they do into their own.

    If anyone should be quoted in that Harpers Ferry display on what the Bible does or does not ‘condone,’ it should be Frederick Douglass—the escaped slave who became their voice until his death in 1895. He did not once say it in his first autobiography, written in 1845. (He wrote three autobiographies, each an update, incorporating his doings as history unfolded. It did not unfold his way. Post Civil War reconstruction fizzled within a decade or two. Notwithstanding that with the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments freed slaves, guaranteed them citizenship and the right to vote, an intransigent South found ways to defang them all. Douglass would come to feel that the Civil War had been fought for nothing. Grant, the victorious general who became President, would say the same.

    He didn’t say—not once—that the Bible condones slavery. And please don’t suggest that maybe he didn’t know the Bible well. His allusions to it are constant. He particularly was drawn to passages from the Old Testament on ‘setting the captives free.’ When in his old age he visited Jerusalem, he was especially interested in tracing the doings of Paul, his favorite apostle, the one who said ,‘And he [God] made out of one man every nation of men to dwell on the entire surface of the earth.”

    At the end of his first autobiography he inserts an appendix? Why? In view of certain harsh things he has said, he fears some may conclude he is “an opponent of all religion.” So he will correct the impression forthwith. Does he mutter that ‘the Bible condones slavery?’ No. But, Wowwhee! Does he ever let loose on the religionists of his day (and our day?)!

    No, he didn’t mean the Christianity of Christ. He meant “the slaveholding religion of this land and with no possible reference to Christianity proper.” He “recognize[d] the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good pure and holy is of necessity to reject the other as bad corrupt and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other.”

    He “love[s] the pure peaceable and impartial Christianity of Christ. I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.”

    Then he goes on to quote almost the entirety of Matthew 23, Jesus’ denunciations of the religionist of his day, applying it to his own time.

    “They bind up heavy loads and put them on the shoulders of men, but they themselves are not willing to budge them with their finger. All the works they do, they do to be seen by men, for they broaden the scripture-containing cases that they wear as safeguards and lengthen the fringes of their garments. They like the most prominent place at evening meals and the front seats in the synagogues and the greetings in the marketplaces and to be called Rabbi by men.” …. and so forth.

    He’s already, at this point in his autobiography, related his experiences with both religious and non-religious owners. By far, he says, religious owners were the worst. He finishes up with his own ‘Christian’ slaveholder poem, set to the cadence of a popular hymn of the time: 

    Come, saints and sinners, hear me tell
    How pious priests whip Jack and Nell,
    And women buy and children sell,
    And preach all sinners down to hell,
    And sing of heavenly union. . . 

    It runs thirteen stanzas.

    Nowhere does he indict the Bible, much less take up the modern shallow cry of its enemies that it ‘condone’s slavery.’ He’s wise enough—I mean, it was more or less a no-brainer at one time—to see the problem is not the with the Bible but with the hypocrites who don’t follow it. Atheistic scholars come along in modern times—the National Historical Park Service apparently got stuck with some of them—to tell the Harpers Ferry exhibit that the Bible condones slavery. And yet the fault is not primarily theirs. The fault is with those claiming Christianity who so blatantly forsake its principles that the non-participant, who isn’t paying all that close attention, figures the problem must be the book itself.

    He should read Paul’s caution to Titus of the ones in his time who “publicly declare that they know God, but they disown him by their works, because they are detestable and disobedient and not approved for good work of any sort.” (1 Titus 3:16) Depend upon it. When those professing Christ behave outrageously, “the way of the truth will be spoken of abusively.” (1 Peter 2:2) It’s not the enemies of God that are the problem. It’s his ‘friends.’

    Southern slavery ended long ago but the Jim Crow system of laws (strict segregation) kept the prejudices that fueled it alive and well for 100 years. Two blacks in the movie Sounder (setting: 1933) pass the packed-out white church. One recalls how he had naively entered once and was quickly thrown out. So he “took it up with the good Lord,” he tells his friend. “And what did the good Lord say to you?” the friend wants to know. “The good Lord said to me, ‘Why, Willie, what are you fretting about? You are doing better than me. I’ve been trying to get in there for two hundred years!”

    And in 1975, I visited North Carolina and spent time in the house-to-house ministry. I worked a lot with a certain black brother, completely at ease in the rurals. But for some reason I forget, we drove into the big city 60 miles away. There I found myself lost. Roll down the window, I said to my Black companion (also named Thomas), ask that strolling white woman for directions. He wouldn’t do it. I repeated my request, to no avail. I wondered why he had gone deaf. But after we drove on he told me that I didn’t really understand how it worked in the place I was visiting.

     

    ******  The bookstore

  • Does the Bible Condone Slavery? Excerpts from Civil War Research

    No scholar worth his salt says the Bible condones slavery. Any scholar who does say the Bible condones slavery is plainly not worth his salt. Rather, he or she is driven by a pop scholarship, usually atheistic, that opines jauntily on a topic it neither comprehends nor respects—if it gets something wrong, who cares? It’s only the bible to them.

    An example of such is found at the National Historical Park poster at Harper’s Ferry.

    “Although slavery is often condoned in the Bible, [John] Brown believed that the ‘Golden Rule’ Do unto others as you would have them do unto you implicitly condemned slavery.” Why is that statement weird?

    It’s because the words in themselves are directly contrary to the intended conclusion! That blanket statement, that the Bible condones slavery, is supported by nothing therein. If they are scriptures to the effect that it does, the reader is not made aware of them. On the other hand, there is a scripture embedded in the poster that indicates the contrary is true, that the Bible does not condone slavery—that of the Golden Rule.

    To be sure, the Golden Rule is unaccredited—whereas if you quoted the words of the Park system’s own resident scholars without accredation, their screams of protest would shake down the halls of academia enough to make Samson’s knocking down the temple of the Philistines look like a mere application of sandpaper.

    “All things, therefore, that you want men to do to you, you also must do to them. This, in fact, is what the Law and the Prophets mean.”

    It’s the Bible. Unaccredited. Matthew 7:12. Furthermore, it’s a key passage—it’s ‘what the Law and the Prophets mean.’ Do the National Historical Park scholars care if modern readers conclude some ancient practitioner of mindfulness—probably some Buddha-like figure—originated the saying, and not Jesus? It doesn’t seem to bother them. The same sloppiness that would never be tolerated in any topic they cared deeply about is left unmolested in a topic they do not.

    They do good work, the National Historical Park system does. They bring history to life. They restore old venues. They recreate old dramas. They make their rangers wear hats when outdoors. I’ve many times referred to them in the course of Historical Park visits in Go Where Tom Goes. But they are not immune to pop scholarship; that is the point of the preceding—a conclusion also demonstrated in that they got wrong the religion of Eisenhower’s upbringing.

    Moreover, were they to encounter the scholars that dig deep and do their research without regard for what’s trendy, they would never make such a shallow statement. Here I have read through Grant by Ron Chernow, and Team of Rivals [biography of Abraham Lincoln], by Doris Kearns Goodwin, as well as Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, by David Blight, and nowhere in any of these works is there a single mention that “the Bible condones slavery!”

    It’s a little early to tell with the Douglass book, I admit, because I started with Part 2, commencing with Civil War days till the end of Douglass’s life, but there is not one mention in what I have read. Instead, there are abundant references in all of these works of how abolitionists drew their very inspiration from the Bible—and not one mention that “the Bible condoned slavery.” Frederick Douglass took as his mission statement the Acts 10:34-35 passage of how the apostle Peter “began to speak, and he said: ‘Now I truly understand that God is not partial, but in every nation the man who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.’”

    When visiting the Seward house in Auburn N.Y, [Willian Seward, Lincoln’s Secretary of State] with its preserved, well-stocked library, we learned that Doris Goodwin spend countless hours there researching the tomes. Did she issue any new-age blather that “the Bible condones slavery?” No. She researched with respect, as modern atheistic scholars are not inclined to do, how Christian faith firmly molded the notable players of that age, certainly that of the abolitionists. Lincoln, though not an overtly religious man, was as familiar and respectful of the Bible as anyone of the age—and more representative of its basic theme of ‘proclaiming liberty to the captives’ than all but the tiniest handful of them.


    (Above: William Seward home – Auburn NY)

    And just how far do you think you would get were John Brown, the reason for that Harpers Ferry National Historical Park’ existence, were to stumble across that Bible-dishonoring poster. Oh yeah—try to explain it to that hothead how “the Bible condones slavery!” As is made abundantly clear in Good Lord Bird, [James McBride’s literary and TV adaptation of Brown’s life] nobody was as obsessed the the Lord back then as was Brown, and never did the Lord have to sit through so many interminable prayers as he did from that fellow:

    (https://www.amazon.com/John-Brown-Thundering-Jehovah)

    Now, there are mentions of slavery in the Bible. They were misrepresented by Southern slaveholders to reinforce their hand with divine power. But they are so thoroughly lacking in historical context that any thorough and/or balanced researcher sees it promptly and knows enough not to extract from it biblical support of antebellum Southern slavery.

    The slavery in the Bible was a volunteer slavery—an impoverished Israelite as a last resort might sell himself into slavery. It was a humane slavery—slaves by law were not to be beaten. It was a temporary slavery—temporary unless that slave wished to make it permanent. And he was not to be put into such straits that he had no choice but to remain enslaved. At the end of the ‘temporary’ period—the seven year jubilee cycle, that slave was to be released with a gift from the owner he willingly subjected himself to—so that he could hit the ground with his feet running upon release from his time of slavery.

    It’s so far from the slavery of modern times that all but the willfully blind ideological historians will realize you can’t extract from it support for Civil War era slavery. True, not all slaves were Hebrew slaves. It is possible a rich Jew might come to own non-Hebrew slaves, as spoils of war, as was universal practice at that time. There are few details in the Bible about this. But since the Mosaic law mandated kind treatment for animals, one can hardly imagine it condoned harsh treatment for humans—certainly not enough to prattle on about how “the Bible condones slavery” when the premiere historians of that age knew it did not.

    (To be continued here)

     

    ******  The bookstore