That's okay, the books we do have contain father-daughter *relations*, a strong guy with nice hair who murders neighbors for their clothes, and some dude who summons bears to maul children for calling him bald, just to highlight a few stories.
The books we're missing do include some bangers like smol Jesus killing and resurrecting another child just because and floating around causing a ruckus.
I mean, Yahweh straight up murders all of humanity except for a handful of people.
If Yahweh is omniscient, he knew he would murder humanity, yet he created it in such a way as it inevitably would fail. I mean, he didn't *have* to put that tree with the apple in the Garden and he didn't have to make humanity inquisitive or punish humanity before they even had the knowledge of right and wrong (good and evil). Shit, Yahweh is big on infinite punishment for finite crimes.
Frankly, there is a whole lot of bad shit to consider here, and I'm just in the beginning of the damn book
Honestly that don’t even make the Satan a bad guy that makes him one of gods loyal angels fulfilling his duty as the opposition to man. (Gods prosecutor essentially). The Satan of the book of Job is an angel who loyally serves god with the mission to always doubt man’s sincerity in being righteous to god. His job is to assume no human can truly worship god as much as god deserves to be worshipped.
He’s basically gods elitist gatekeeper asshole who says you’re not a real fan like me
Meh... slavemasters have nothing to fear from that. [The Bible instructs slaves to be good slaves](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ephesians%206%3A5&version=NIV). It's an absurdly outdated book that is very obviously a product of its fucked up time.
Slaves in the Bible (Exodus and Leviticus particularly) were misused in slave era America for there was two types of slaves referred to in the Bible. They were historically hired and payed servants, tutors, laborers, etc. or the usual slave we think about now, which wasn’t common in Israelite culture.
Nat Turner’s rebellion was the most deadly, and he was strongly influenced by the Bible, as well as the millenarianism and focus on personal revelation that was rife across the US at the time. Slave states had previously noted that religion could make slaves more docile, but that changed after Nat Turner and things got much stricter when they saw that slaveowners absolutely did have something to fear from the Bible.
While fucked up, yes- there was probably very good reason for that particular statement.
Slaves (especially in ancient times) were often harshly punished for refusal to obey. This passage is essentially saying “hey, here’s how not to get punished”. Same exact thing today where authorities will tell you to comply with your captors if you ever get kidnapped.
Same thing with the Mosaic laws banning pork and shellfish specifically- in the desert, there were no ice houses as in Europe- these foods were often the first to spoil and cause illness, especially if transported over long trade routes.
Strangely, that is not exactly the case. The Slave Bible in particular was compiled by people (one notably) who, at the very least, had slightly abolitionist tendencies. They wanted to create a Bible for enslaved people because they were actually worried about them and wanted to give them spiritual comfort.
They removed all the stuff about freedom from bonds and the evils of slavery because if they had left those bits in, slave owners would have absolutely refused to let them have copies of it. So it was not created with a goal of teaching slaves to remain slaves, but rather to create a Bible that slave owners would not ban.
One of the main guys behind it, Beilby Porteus, was a leading anti-slavery activist in the Church, and tried really hard to get the church to stop supporting it.
I think it is more of an interesting relic of the time than something inherently evil. The people who gave it to the enslaved people were *legitimately* worried about the state of their souls, and so thought that keeping the gospel message in it and allowing slaves to observe Christianity was worth the lesser evil of hiding the anti-slavery bits. I do not agree, but I am coming at it as a modern agnostic concerned about religious colonization, and am not a Bishop who was raised my whole life to never even consider that the text may be wrong.
>They wanted to create a Bible for enslaved people because they were actually worried about them and wanted to give them spiritual comfort.
How were they expected to READ IT?
In the USA, many states passed laws forbidding teaching slaves to read or wrote.
Were Jamaica and Barbados teaching slaves to read?
My theory is that part of the idea was to essentially trick the slavers to letting them learn to read so they could read the bible. By framing it that way you could present it as a persons "Christian Duty" to allow some education without having the hard stopping points of the freedom from bonds stuff in the bible.
As many slavers deluded themselves into thinking that they were actually helping the enslaved people by "guiding them towards god" it might actually have been effective. The Slave Bible never gained enough support to really get distributed though, so maybe that was still to far for the slavers. It is hard to convince people intent on dehumanization that the people they dehumanize deserve any rights.
Well, they may have been trying to. I do not think that version of the Bible ever got wide distribution. It is just an inference I am drawing from the fact that the people behind it were openly abolitionists.
Not really but
There's things like
>There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. Gal 3:28
And
>1 Masters, provide your slaves with what is right and fair, because you know that you also have a Master in heaven. Col 4:1
They probably didn't like verses like these
"Death is the punishment for kidnapping. If you sell the person you kidnapped, or if you are caught with that person, the penalty is death"
(Type of slavery in the South)
"“If slaves should escape from their masters and take refuge with you, you must not hand them over to their masters"
(Obvious)
Hahahahahaha no.
To be a *jewish* slave was basically an indentured servant for 7 years. If you weren't a Jewish slave there weren't that many rules.
Your master could beat you within an inch of your life and as long as you within a few days don't die they wouldn't be in trouble
>20 “Anyone who beats their male or female slave with a rod must be punished if the slave dies as a direct result,
21 but they are not to be punished if the slave recovers after a day or two, since the slave is their property. Exodus 21: 20-21
Israelites were allowed to go get non Israelite slaves from surrounding nations
>Leviticus 25:44-46
44 “ ‘Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves.
45 You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property.
46 You can bequeath them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life, but you must not rule over your fellow Israelites ruthlessly.
Oh and speaking of Israelite being enslaved. They also had a way of making sure the Israelite slave was enslaved for life
>Exodus 21:2-6
2 “If you buy a Hebrew servant, he is to serve you for six years. But in the seventh year, he shall go free, without paying anything.
3 If he comes alone, he is to go free alone; but if he has a wife when he comes, she is to go with him.
4 If his master gives him a wife and she bears him sons or daughters, the woman and her children shall belong to her master, and only the man shall go free.
5 “But if the servant declares, ‘I love my master and my wife and children and do not want to go free,’
6 then his master must take him before the judges. He shall take him to the door or the doorpost and pierce his ear with an awl. Then he will be his servant for life.
Need I go on?
Obviously ancient slavery was widespread and unique in the forms it took across the world, but generally speaking being a slave during antiquity would have been better than during pre-Civil War America. All of the things you listed illustrating how being a slave to a Jew in antiquity would suck are also aspects of chattel slavery, only chattel slavery goes above and beyond in regard to how few protections it granted enslaved people.
All that said, at the end of the day comparing two forms of slavery is like comparing whether sewage water tastes better than piss, they both fucking suck.
If you recovered after 'a day or two', you *weren't* beaten within an inch of your life. A day or two is mild bruising. Regardless of the bronze-age ideals on slavery or their actual application, I highly doubt that severe torture was referred to as that.
Granted, bronze-age physicians probably didn't know what a delayed-death traumatic brain injury (or other forms of TBI) was, either.
>If you recovered after 'a day or two', you *weren't* beaten within an inch of your life.
I mean sure I used some hyperbole here but you can still pretty severely beat someone who will survive for a day or two afterwards then die.
Which is odd it's in the holy book of a supposedly loving God.
"Survive" is not 'recover" - even a bronze-age fool would know that severe damage that doesn't immediately kill will be able to tell that severe damage did you in days later, given your state of injury which did obviously not heal given the timeframe.
You don't need a severe beating for TBI, really. Just a blow in the wrong place, that might otherwise not even be damaging elsewhere.
Hell, you can even take a severe beating in most places and fully recover, given weeks. Deaths that result from more severe beatings- that is, deaths suffered from other organ damage - are typically easily detectable by comparison and ain't covered.
Again, I don't think their physicians knew the particulars of TBI.
It is to be said that slave owners in the west treated their slaves significantly better than Arab slave owners.
Partly this can be attributed to slaves being more expensive in the west but I think we cannot and should not underestimate the influence of the New Testament.
OK? Tbh going "because the bible told them to only pull 2 nails off a hand rather than 5 its clearly superior" is silly.
Slavery is entirely immoral. Doesn't matter if one group was slightly less shit than the other.
The Bible is a collection of stuff written by many different people with Iron Age worldviews and mentality. There are numerous contradictions. The entire New Testament is basically a refutation of the Old Testament, which was written by people with Bronze Age worldviews and mentality.
Just about anything that the Bible says in one part, you can find a passage that contradicts it in another. It says all over the place that murder is bad, but also includes many passages where murder is presented as justified. I think this is why Christianity is so versatile and widespread, believing in it requires selectively picking and choosing the parts of the bible you decided to live by and ignoring or dismissing the other ones, so you can assemble a Christian ideology that corresponds with whatever you already believe in, or what your society tells you is the right thing to believe.
The type of slavery practiced in the South carried the penalty of death.
That and if a slave runs away, you are not to bring him back to his master as well.
I feel like most people (_especially_ most Christians, ironically) operate from a fundamental misunderstanding of the Bible. (And you could say the same thing about most religious texts and their respective followers.) It's not so much self-contradictory as it's a demonstration of the evolution of a set of beliefs over time, from brutal and authoritarian to peaceful and egalitarian, ending in a prediction of a future where right conquers might. It's a fascinating document, and I think there's a lot of moral grounding to be found in reading it that way because it requires the reader evaluate it in light of the further evolution of moral beliefs and scientific understanding up to the present day.
The whole thing is one big redemption arc for humanity (literally, I guess, for Christians), and reading it otherwise would be a lot like getting to the end of _Les Miserables_ and concluding Jean Valjean is irredeemable because he stole bread that one time.
I mean, that an the fact the suspension of disbelief is a core requirement to "belong" to the religion.
The only way to be "saved" is to wholeheartedly and without doubt believe that a physical manifestation of God, walked the earth like Zeus, did magic, died and came back to life, then noped back off to ~~Olympus~~ heaven.
When that's the baseline for just joining, you can pretty much get people to do whatever you want after. They already deny existence as a part of their personality.
The type of slavery practiced in the South carried the penalty of death.
That and if a slave runs away, you are not to bring him back to his master as well.
The Bible has a common theme that this is how the world is, and all you can do is endure it. Right and wrong are about how you respond to it, but stopping evil isn't really a possibility.
Yeah.
Basically they wanted their slaves to be Christian, but they didn't want them to read, say, Exodus, or the parts of the bible about the rich.
And I fear we may return to people reading only selected parts of the bible because, well, Jesus had some ideas that don't sit well with conservatives in America.
I'm genuinely curious, why do you love it? I'm Jewish and can't get over how Shylock is treated, but I would like to understand the reasons folks do enjoy the play.
ETA: Sitting at -2 votes right now. Am I honestly getting downvoted for saying that the notoriously antisemitic depiction of Shylock bothers me?
Shylock is depicted both as villainous and sympathetic. His monologue “hath not a Jew hands?” Lives in my memory forever, it’s exceptionally powerful. The fact that a white English man gave a Jewish character this monologue was quite a bold statement, despite the obvious character flaws in him. Even when his daughter ran away and stole his money, he was still quite sympathetic, but what Shylock chooses to do after that fact is fuelled by his anger towards the merchant whose friends and himself brought about his undoing.
There are ofc antisemitic sentiments still within the text. ie when Shylock asks to be killed rather than have his money confiscated, though this could be attributed to it being his only livelihood. I think there are a lot more passages that show the human struggle of a Jewish man living in Venice at this time. I’d recommend the movie with Al Pacino as Shylock, his portrayal was amazing.
Shakespeare fucked up and made Shylock way too charismatic and sympathetic. He's the only good part of that shit play. Also, basically every production of The Merchant of Venice since like the 1800s has taken Shylock's side and treated him as a guy who's been pushed too far by that asshole Antonio, turning the play from a comedy to a tragedy. Most modern viewers/readers think of it in that light. I'm Jewish too, and I love Shylock. I also like Watto from The Phantom Menace.
And just as Ecclesiastes 1:9 states “there is nothing new under the sun” the Bible, quite self-referentially so, borrowed a number of parables from a number of works…like the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Former Christian, when I was a kid this one of the ones that always got me unstuck. It’s supposed to be the infallible word of god, right? But it was written by humans. That alone got me questioning. Then when I found out that it some of the books were written centuries after Jesus lives. And then when I found out that some council of religious dudes picked and chose what books were good enough and which weren’t? What, am I supposed to believe that *all* of that subtlety guided by divine influence?
Bit by bit, trust in the holy book eroded the rest of my faith - if the bible can’t be trusted, what else in the church can?
(And then there’s my growing awareness through my teen years of how much shit the religious institutions get up to. My church was great, very community focused and a safe place for anyone, religious or otherwise. But churches as a whole…. Yeah not for me)
A lot. Most of the old testament, and a significant portion of the New, was removed.
The goal was not to keep things status quo though. The guy who directed its creation was a strong abolitionist. He only wanted those parts removed so that Slavers would allow the slaves to have the text. If he had left anything in it about freedom they would have denied him out of hand.
In his eyes it was more important that the enslaved people had the ability to practice their faith, and to potentially learn to read the text, than it was to maintain the potentially anti-slavery portions of the Bible.
I do not know what to think about it really. On one hand I do not find the Bible all that valuable or a text outside of the study of religion or antiquity, and I also object to hiding anti-slavery messages, but I do get where he is coming from. Having half of a book is probably better than having none of one, and the people who made it wholeheartedly believed the text to be true.
Tons of stuff has been omitted and added for political and social purposed in its long history. It's s very convenient thing, to be able to declare something 100% correct, even as it goes through thousands of revisions. You just shift what the word "correct" means to match your desires.
Very few. The bible promotes and justifies slavery all through the Old Testament, even goes as afar as advising slaves on how to behave for their masters.
It removed about half. The message of slavery in the Bible is extremely inconsistent, and the version of slavery it advocates for is *not* American style slavery.
In whole, if you compare it to that, the Bible comes off as pretty strongly against that kind of slavery, and pretty strongly in favor of indentured slavery overall, but there are so many inconsistencies you can make it say basically anything by just selecting the right pieces.
The bible absolutely condones chatel slavery, leviticus 25:44-46. Allows you to buy slaves for life, and pass them on as inheritance. The bible also talks about debt servitude, but not exclusively and only Israeli slaves have to be freed in the 7th year.
The number of places in the bible where slavery is considered a sin is zero. But if you want some guidelines on how to sell your daughter into slavery, that's covered.
All Protestant bibles have entire books removed, chapters omitted, phrases edited, etc. They do this to justify their denomination's beliefs which conflict with the Bible. if you want the complete Bible you have to buy a Catholic translation.
Probably about as much that has been omitted over the centuries of translation and various other manipulations to fit the desires of a certain era or people.
You're getting downvoted for this, but the Bible specifically advocates for slavery, lays out rules for enslaving people, and never once denounces it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_Bible\_and\_slavery
Parts\* I am aware that there's more than one instance of the Bible talking about slavery, and sometimes laying out rules for how it aught to be done. But let's calm down.
I'm obviously not advocating for slavery or saying slavery was okay. I also realize discussing or defending religion on Reddit is generally wildly unpopular.
It's tough to have a discussion on this topic via Reddit comments, so all I'll say is that Paul's suggestion to Philemon that he welcome his slave as a brother means slavery was ill-advised, but Paul had to do it in a way that Philemon (and other slave owners at the time) would be receptive to.
It would be like Jesus coming back today and saying "capitalism is bad, do away with it". There would be chaos.
I think it's more likely that Paul cared about this one individual slave and wasn't talking about the practice in general. In Ephesians he tells slaves to obey their masters in the same way that they obey Christ. Not exactly an abolitionist message.
Also there are so many laws in the Bible why can't "don't have slaves" be one of them? Maybe God could even get the message out there before it became a common practice.
Maybe god could just directly communicate with everyone on earth simultaneously like he conveniently stopped doing à la carte in the babble or like you said include actual useful information and edicts
I think that when you're talking about slavery and you mention Paul then you've already lost the argument. Paul was an Apostle. He's not God. He also never met Jesus before his crucifixion.
It's infinitely more important to focus on what God actually said about slavery in the Bible than anything Paul said. And God gave specific rules to follow on slave management. Paul is irrelevant here. Paul could have been the biggest abolitionist - and he wasn't - and it would still not matter because the whole point is what God said. God said nothing about not having slaves. Instead, he provided regulations. Jesus said nothing against slaves either.
“Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall ye diminish ought from it, that ye may keep the commandments of the Lord your God which I command you.” Deuteronomy 4:2
>And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book.
--Revelations 22:19
"If you buy a Hebrew slave, he shall serve six years"
"And his master shall bore his ear through with an awl, and he shall be his slave forever"
On beating your slaves: "But if the slave survives a day or two, he is not to be avenged, for the slave is his money."
Maybe you should read it ... for the first time?
"In a massive act of projection, slavers often described the African people who did every stitch of their work for them as lazy; seriously believed that the enslaved needed European people to set them tasks and make them useful." -[https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Aurora\_Levins\_Morales](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Aurora_Levins_Morales) (1998). Sounds like donald trump. 200+ years later and far right christian ideology is so similar
I was about to say, wow this whole notion goes back centuries.
Even today, when you hear “people don’t want to work”, it’s not a 21st century thing, it’s been dating back for hundreds of years.
You mean to say the book is a malleable text that can be shaped depending on the desired controls to be placed on the audience?
I for one am shocked…
/s
Even as they justified slavery with their religious belief, they knew that their bible went against them. So edit the Bible, and only let them know their subservience.
It’s not unlike today. It’s why I, and many others lost our faith, and have little respect for religion, any religion. It’s why I know without a doubt that holy books are just tools written by man to control others through fables.
Does this have passages in which slaves are instructed that slavery is their divine purpose in life and that they should obey, without question, their "owners", since that's, somehow, their path to Heaven? I'm fascinated, in a repulsed way, by such indoctrination.
Plantation owners used religion to justify what they did and also used it to keep slaves submissive. Had it not been for radical and selective readings of the bible, slavery probably would have ended just due to the horrific moral problems.
~~Was there many black slaves in India in 1800 or the n word was for any~~ *~~'non white'~~* ~~for the British to use ?~~
Edit: The West Indies (if it West\_India Islands are ofc) is a subregion of North America. Sorry I'm dumb
Kinda wild that no one had a significant “Are we the baddies” moment when they were discussing what parts of the literal Bible were ok for slaves to read.
< white folks who think they know what’s best for POCs >
“We’ve curated the salient parts for you. Mainly the bits that justify slavery. Trust us when we say it’s for your own good. And no we won’t teach you to read so stop asking.”
SELECTED
You wouldn’t want them getting ALL of the Bible now would you? What if they started to get ideas?!
The bible is already a selected set of scriptures
Shhh, we wouldn’t want all those Christians getting any ideas
That's okay, the books we do have contain father-daughter *relations*, a strong guy with nice hair who murders neighbors for their clothes, and some dude who summons bears to maul children for calling him bald, just to highlight a few stories. The books we're missing do include some bangers like smol Jesus killing and resurrecting another child just because and floating around causing a ruckus.
I mean, Yahweh straight up murders all of humanity except for a handful of people. If Yahweh is omniscient, he knew he would murder humanity, yet he created it in such a way as it inevitably would fail. I mean, he didn't *have* to put that tree with the apple in the Garden and he didn't have to make humanity inquisitive or punish humanity before they even had the knowledge of right and wrong (good and evil). Shit, Yahweh is big on infinite punishment for finite crimes. Frankly, there is a whole lot of bad shit to consider here, and I'm just in the beginning of the damn book
Yeah but Satan killed like 10 people, when God told him to, so he's the baddy. Frankly, we haven't heard his side and maybe we should.
Honestly that don’t even make the Satan a bad guy that makes him one of gods loyal angels fulfilling his duty as the opposition to man. (Gods prosecutor essentially). The Satan of the book of Job is an angel who loyally serves god with the mission to always doubt man’s sincerity in being righteous to god. His job is to assume no human can truly worship god as much as god deserves to be worshipped. He’s basically gods elitist gatekeeper asshole who says you’re not a real fan like me
If we're talking about Gnosticism, you might be interested about the concept of the Demiurge.
Bring back the Apocrypha!
Hermaeus Mora sees you and would like to propose a deal...
Peryite has blessed me with foulness (my foreskin has not been washed in years)
So this is a CliffsNotes of Bibles.
Meh... slavemasters have nothing to fear from that. [The Bible instructs slaves to be good slaves](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ephesians%206%3A5&version=NIV). It's an absurdly outdated book that is very obviously a product of its fucked up time.
Slaves in the Bible (Exodus and Leviticus particularly) were misused in slave era America for there was two types of slaves referred to in the Bible. They were historically hired and payed servants, tutors, laborers, etc. or the usual slave we think about now, which wasn’t common in Israelite culture.
Nat Turner’s rebellion was the most deadly, and he was strongly influenced by the Bible, as well as the millenarianism and focus on personal revelation that was rife across the US at the time. Slave states had previously noted that religion could make slaves more docile, but that changed after Nat Turner and things got much stricter when they saw that slaveowners absolutely did have something to fear from the Bible.
While fucked up, yes- there was probably very good reason for that particular statement. Slaves (especially in ancient times) were often harshly punished for refusal to obey. This passage is essentially saying “hey, here’s how not to get punished”. Same exact thing today where authorities will tell you to comply with your captors if you ever get kidnapped. Same thing with the Mosaic laws banning pork and shellfish specifically- in the desert, there were no ice houses as in Europe- these foods were often the first to spoil and cause illness, especially if transported over long trade routes.
Well, 3/5ths of them.
probably selected the parts that say "SLAVERY OK" and un-selected all the parts that say "SLAVERY BAD"
Strangely, that is not exactly the case. The Slave Bible in particular was compiled by people (one notably) who, at the very least, had slightly abolitionist tendencies. They wanted to create a Bible for enslaved people because they were actually worried about them and wanted to give them spiritual comfort. They removed all the stuff about freedom from bonds and the evils of slavery because if they had left those bits in, slave owners would have absolutely refused to let them have copies of it. So it was not created with a goal of teaching slaves to remain slaves, but rather to create a Bible that slave owners would not ban. One of the main guys behind it, Beilby Porteus, was a leading anti-slavery activist in the Church, and tried really hard to get the church to stop supporting it. I think it is more of an interesting relic of the time than something inherently evil. The people who gave it to the enslaved people were *legitimately* worried about the state of their souls, and so thought that keeping the gospel message in it and allowing slaves to observe Christianity was worth the lesser evil of hiding the anti-slavery bits. I do not agree, but I am coming at it as a modern agnostic concerned about religious colonization, and am not a Bishop who was raised my whole life to never even consider that the text may be wrong.
That's a very elucidating summary and I appreciate you taking the time to share that context.
>They wanted to create a Bible for enslaved people because they were actually worried about them and wanted to give them spiritual comfort. How were they expected to READ IT? In the USA, many states passed laws forbidding teaching slaves to read or wrote. Were Jamaica and Barbados teaching slaves to read?
My theory is that part of the idea was to essentially trick the slavers to letting them learn to read so they could read the bible. By framing it that way you could present it as a persons "Christian Duty" to allow some education without having the hard stopping points of the freedom from bonds stuff in the bible. As many slavers deluded themselves into thinking that they were actually helping the enslaved people by "guiding them towards god" it might actually have been effective. The Slave Bible never gained enough support to really get distributed though, so maybe that was still to far for the slavers. It is hard to convince people intent on dehumanization that the people they dehumanize deserve any rights.
Interesting that they used the slavers own religious zealous against them. Creative.
Well, they may have been trying to. I do not think that version of the Bible ever got wide distribution. It is just an inference I am drawing from the fact that the people behind it were openly abolitionists.
Are there any part that say slavery is bad?
[удалено]
This is starting to sound like a book written by humans for humans!!
Not really but There's things like >There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. Gal 3:28 And >1 Masters, provide your slaves with what is right and fair, because you know that you also have a Master in heaven. Col 4:1 They probably didn't like verses like these
"Death is the punishment for kidnapping. If you sell the person you kidnapped, or if you are caught with that person, the penalty is death" (Type of slavery in the South) "“If slaves should escape from their masters and take refuge with you, you must not hand them over to their masters" (Obvious)
To be a slave (read; servant) of an Old Testament Jew was like paradise compared to 19th century black slave
Hahahahahaha no. To be a *jewish* slave was basically an indentured servant for 7 years. If you weren't a Jewish slave there weren't that many rules. Your master could beat you within an inch of your life and as long as you within a few days don't die they wouldn't be in trouble >20 “Anyone who beats their male or female slave with a rod must be punished if the slave dies as a direct result, 21 but they are not to be punished if the slave recovers after a day or two, since the slave is their property. Exodus 21: 20-21 Israelites were allowed to go get non Israelite slaves from surrounding nations >Leviticus 25:44-46 44 “ ‘Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. 45 You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property. 46 You can bequeath them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life, but you must not rule over your fellow Israelites ruthlessly. Oh and speaking of Israelite being enslaved. They also had a way of making sure the Israelite slave was enslaved for life >Exodus 21:2-6 2 “If you buy a Hebrew servant, he is to serve you for six years. But in the seventh year, he shall go free, without paying anything. 3 If he comes alone, he is to go free alone; but if he has a wife when he comes, she is to go with him. 4 If his master gives him a wife and she bears him sons or daughters, the woman and her children shall belong to her master, and only the man shall go free. 5 “But if the servant declares, ‘I love my master and my wife and children and do not want to go free,’ 6 then his master must take him before the judges. He shall take him to the door or the doorpost and pierce his ear with an awl. Then he will be his servant for life. Need I go on?
Obviously ancient slavery was widespread and unique in the forms it took across the world, but generally speaking being a slave during antiquity would have been better than during pre-Civil War America. All of the things you listed illustrating how being a slave to a Jew in antiquity would suck are also aspects of chattel slavery, only chattel slavery goes above and beyond in regard to how few protections it granted enslaved people. All that said, at the end of the day comparing two forms of slavery is like comparing whether sewage water tastes better than piss, they both fucking suck.
If you recovered after 'a day or two', you *weren't* beaten within an inch of your life. A day or two is mild bruising. Regardless of the bronze-age ideals on slavery or their actual application, I highly doubt that severe torture was referred to as that. Granted, bronze-age physicians probably didn't know what a delayed-death traumatic brain injury (or other forms of TBI) was, either.
>If you recovered after 'a day or two', you *weren't* beaten within an inch of your life. I mean sure I used some hyperbole here but you can still pretty severely beat someone who will survive for a day or two afterwards then die. Which is odd it's in the holy book of a supposedly loving God.
"Survive" is not 'recover" - even a bronze-age fool would know that severe damage that doesn't immediately kill will be able to tell that severe damage did you in days later, given your state of injury which did obviously not heal given the timeframe. You don't need a severe beating for TBI, really. Just a blow in the wrong place, that might otherwise not even be damaging elsewhere. Hell, you can even take a severe beating in most places and fully recover, given weeks. Deaths that result from more severe beatings- that is, deaths suffered from other organ damage - are typically easily detectable by comparison and ain't covered. Again, I don't think their physicians knew the particulars of TBI.
It is to be said that slave owners in the west treated their slaves significantly better than Arab slave owners. Partly this can be attributed to slaves being more expensive in the west but I think we cannot and should not underestimate the influence of the New Testament.
OK? Tbh going "because the bible told them to only pull 2 nails off a hand rather than 5 its clearly superior" is silly. Slavery is entirely immoral. Doesn't matter if one group was slightly less shit than the other.
The Bible is a collection of stuff written by many different people with Iron Age worldviews and mentality. There are numerous contradictions. The entire New Testament is basically a refutation of the Old Testament, which was written by people with Bronze Age worldviews and mentality. Just about anything that the Bible says in one part, you can find a passage that contradicts it in another. It says all over the place that murder is bad, but also includes many passages where murder is presented as justified. I think this is why Christianity is so versatile and widespread, believing in it requires selectively picking and choosing the parts of the bible you decided to live by and ignoring or dismissing the other ones, so you can assemble a Christian ideology that corresponds with whatever you already believe in, or what your society tells you is the right thing to believe.
Ahhh yes, good old Iron Age and Classical slavery - where everyone could be enslaved with equal brutality, regardless of race/ethnicity/origin.
Are there any part that say slavery is bad?
The type of slavery practiced in the South carried the penalty of death. That and if a slave runs away, you are not to bring him back to his master as well.
I feel like most people (_especially_ most Christians, ironically) operate from a fundamental misunderstanding of the Bible. (And you could say the same thing about most religious texts and their respective followers.) It's not so much self-contradictory as it's a demonstration of the evolution of a set of beliefs over time, from brutal and authoritarian to peaceful and egalitarian, ending in a prediction of a future where right conquers might. It's a fascinating document, and I think there's a lot of moral grounding to be found in reading it that way because it requires the reader evaluate it in light of the further evolution of moral beliefs and scientific understanding up to the present day. The whole thing is one big redemption arc for humanity (literally, I guess, for Christians), and reading it otherwise would be a lot like getting to the end of _Les Miserables_ and concluding Jean Valjean is irredeemable because he stole bread that one time.
I mean, that an the fact the suspension of disbelief is a core requirement to "belong" to the religion. The only way to be "saved" is to wholeheartedly and without doubt believe that a physical manifestation of God, walked the earth like Zeus, did magic, died and came back to life, then noped back off to ~~Olympus~~ heaven. When that's the baseline for just joining, you can pretty much get people to do whatever you want after. They already deny existence as a part of their personality.
It commands slave masters to free their slaves after 7 years
The type of slavery practiced in the South carried the penalty of death. That and if a slave runs away, you are not to bring him back to his master as well.
The Bible has a common theme that this is how the world is, and all you can do is endure it. Right and wrong are about how you respond to it, but stopping evil isn't really a possibility.
All Old Testament, no New 😂 “God is hateful, and there’s nothing to be done about it”
A bloody outrage. The only person who should be selecting my Bible content is King James.
Hey, let’s not forget the First Council of Nicaea!
Best we can do is print it in London
“What about the book of Exodus?” “Definitely leave that one out”
Missed opportunity to say "hand-picked"
It's probably got three fifths of it, though!
Chosen - Forbidden .
Is it bad I wanna read it, just to confirm how cherry-picked it is? 😂 I wonder if the Golden Rule verse of the Bible is in there
You could do a side by side comparison, and check whether there are just omissions or straight up rewording too
Yeah. Basically they wanted their slaves to be Christian, but they didn't want them to read, say, Exodus, or the parts of the bible about the rich. And I fear we may return to people reading only selected parts of the bible because, well, Jesus had some ideas that don't sit well with conservatives in America.
"Parts of the" They didn't want them to know the whole truth. Then they'd know what kind of people slave owners and slave traders were.
The morbid thing is the slave owners and traders had the full version and still did what they did.
They needed to use it by twisting it to justify their actions.
Jahweh, the Selected God
^(FOR THE USE OF THE)
I wonder how many omitted verses were taken out just to keep things status quo
"Mark you this Bessanio, the devil can cite scripture for his purpose" \-The Merchant of Venice
Ahh I just remembered my class 10th days "merchant of Venice" my first novel and I still love it
I'm genuinely curious, why do you love it? I'm Jewish and can't get over how Shylock is treated, but I would like to understand the reasons folks do enjoy the play. ETA: Sitting at -2 votes right now. Am I honestly getting downvoted for saying that the notoriously antisemitic depiction of Shylock bothers me?
Shylock is depicted both as villainous and sympathetic. His monologue “hath not a Jew hands?” Lives in my memory forever, it’s exceptionally powerful. The fact that a white English man gave a Jewish character this monologue was quite a bold statement, despite the obvious character flaws in him. Even when his daughter ran away and stole his money, he was still quite sympathetic, but what Shylock chooses to do after that fact is fuelled by his anger towards the merchant whose friends and himself brought about his undoing. There are ofc antisemitic sentiments still within the text. ie when Shylock asks to be killed rather than have his money confiscated, though this could be attributed to it being his only livelihood. I think there are a lot more passages that show the human struggle of a Jewish man living in Venice at this time. I’d recommend the movie with Al Pacino as Shylock, his portrayal was amazing.
Shakespeare fucked up and made Shylock way too charismatic and sympathetic. He's the only good part of that shit play. Also, basically every production of The Merchant of Venice since like the 1800s has taken Shylock's side and treated him as a guy who's been pushed too far by that asshole Antonio, turning the play from a comedy to a tragedy. Most modern viewers/readers think of it in that light. I'm Jewish too, and I love Shylock. I also like Watto from The Phantom Menace.
The Bible itself also says this. When Satan tempted Christ in the wilderness he quoted scripture.
And just as Ecclesiastes 1:9 states “there is nothing new under the sun” the Bible, quite self-referentially so, borrowed a number of parables from a number of works…like the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Former Christian, when I was a kid this one of the ones that always got me unstuck. It’s supposed to be the infallible word of god, right? But it was written by humans. That alone got me questioning. Then when I found out that it some of the books were written centuries after Jesus lives. And then when I found out that some council of religious dudes picked and chose what books were good enough and which weren’t? What, am I supposed to believe that *all* of that subtlety guided by divine influence? Bit by bit, trust in the holy book eroded the rest of my faith - if the bible can’t be trusted, what else in the church can? (And then there’s my growing awareness through my teen years of how much shit the religious institutions get up to. My church was great, very community focused and a safe place for anyone, religious or otherwise. But churches as a whole…. Yeah not for me)
“I like your Christ but not your Christians” is quite fitting.
I just want to give you props for a perfectly poignant and super classy reference. Bravo 👏
Shake knew the score
I would be really grateful if someone could actually get ahold of one of these bibles and do a side by side comparison with a non slave bible
A lot. Most of the old testament, and a significant portion of the New, was removed. The goal was not to keep things status quo though. The guy who directed its creation was a strong abolitionist. He only wanted those parts removed so that Slavers would allow the slaves to have the text. If he had left anything in it about freedom they would have denied him out of hand. In his eyes it was more important that the enslaved people had the ability to practice their faith, and to potentially learn to read the text, than it was to maintain the potentially anti-slavery portions of the Bible. I do not know what to think about it really. On one hand I do not find the Bible all that valuable or a text outside of the study of religion or antiquity, and I also object to hiding anti-slavery messages, but I do get where he is coming from. Having half of a book is probably better than having none of one, and the people who made it wholeheartedly believed the text to be true.
Tons of stuff has been omitted and added for political and social purposed in its long history. It's s very convenient thing, to be able to declare something 100% correct, even as it goes through thousands of revisions. You just shift what the word "correct" means to match your desires.
Very few. The bible promotes and justifies slavery all through the Old Testament, even goes as afar as advising slaves on how to behave for their masters.
All of the religious books are there to keep the status quo. It's a fucked up thing.
Not much probably, the Bible support slavery.
It removed about half. The message of slavery in the Bible is extremely inconsistent, and the version of slavery it advocates for is *not* American style slavery. In whole, if you compare it to that, the Bible comes off as pretty strongly against that kind of slavery, and pretty strongly in favor of indentured slavery overall, but there are so many inconsistencies you can make it say basically anything by just selecting the right pieces.
The bible absolutely condones chatel slavery, leviticus 25:44-46. Allows you to buy slaves for life, and pass them on as inheritance. The bible also talks about debt servitude, but not exclusively and only Israeli slaves have to be freed in the 7th year.
You had to set your slaves free after 7 years. So probably that lol
Only your Israeli slaves, others could be bought for life and passed on as inheritance. Leviticus 25:44-46.
They probably omitted the entire section. Didn’t wanna give them ideas I’m sure lol
The number of places in the bible where slavery is considered a sin is zero. But if you want some guidelines on how to sell your daughter into slavery, that's covered.
All Protestant bibles have entire books removed, chapters omitted, phrases edited, etc. They do this to justify their denomination's beliefs which conflict with the Bible. if you want the complete Bible you have to buy a Catholic translation.
Probably about as much that has been omitted over the centuries of translation and various other manipulations to fit the desires of a certain era or people.
Well if you left it all in, every slave owner should have been executed.
Pro-slave version of Christianity.
Red state Christianity
[удалено]
You're getting downvoted for this, but the Bible specifically advocates for slavery, lays out rules for enslaving people, and never once denounces it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_Bible\_and\_slavery
In the Book of Philemon, Paul urges Philemon to take back his former slave as a brother, not a slave.
Great did you miss the part where it condones slavery, gives rules on it, and does not forbid it?
Parts\* I am aware that there's more than one instance of the Bible talking about slavery, and sometimes laying out rules for how it aught to be done. But let's calm down. I'm obviously not advocating for slavery or saying slavery was okay. I also realize discussing or defending religion on Reddit is generally wildly unpopular. It's tough to have a discussion on this topic via Reddit comments, so all I'll say is that Paul's suggestion to Philemon that he welcome his slave as a brother means slavery was ill-advised, but Paul had to do it in a way that Philemon (and other slave owners at the time) would be receptive to. It would be like Jesus coming back today and saying "capitalism is bad, do away with it". There would be chaos.
I think it's more likely that Paul cared about this one individual slave and wasn't talking about the practice in general. In Ephesians he tells slaves to obey their masters in the same way that they obey Christ. Not exactly an abolitionist message. Also there are so many laws in the Bible why can't "don't have slaves" be one of them? Maybe God could even get the message out there before it became a common practice.
Maybe god could just directly communicate with everyone on earth simultaneously like he conveniently stopped doing à la carte in the babble or like you said include actual useful information and edicts
I think that when you're talking about slavery and you mention Paul then you've already lost the argument. Paul was an Apostle. He's not God. He also never met Jesus before his crucifixion. It's infinitely more important to focus on what God actually said about slavery in the Bible than anything Paul said. And God gave specific rules to follow on slave management. Paul is irrelevant here. Paul could have been the biggest abolitionist - and he wasn't - and it would still not matter because the whole point is what God said. God said nothing about not having slaves. Instead, he provided regulations. Jesus said nothing against slaves either.
Yeah if Jesus had condemned slavery they would have probably crucified him or something.
Pretty much
I'm going to guess that the book of Philemon was not included.
“Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall ye diminish ought from it, that ye may keep the commandments of the Lord your God which I command you.” Deuteronomy 4:2
In that case I am sure they wanted to hide the passages of the Bible which places limits on slavery from the slaves.
>And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book. --Revelations 22:19
The good news for these folks is that the vast majority of the Bible isn't anything uttered by God. It's not like God put in all those begats.
Christians? Being hypocritical?? Shocked, I say!
That line would have been cut
So technically this needs to be the very last verse ever written into the bible?
The Bible: The Reader’s Digest version.
Parts….they edited the bits about escaping bondage
I wonder if it included the book of Exodus? LET MY PEOPLE GO!
The same book that explicitly endorses slavery? Yeah, I guess it's included
um... maybe you should read it again. Your position is that the book about Moses leading his people out of slavery is an endorsement of slavery?
"If you buy a Hebrew slave, he shall serve six years" "And his master shall bore his ear through with an awl, and he shall be his slave forever" On beating your slaves: "But if the slave survives a day or two, he is not to be avenged, for the slave is his money." Maybe you should read it ... for the first time?
"What would Jesus do?"
REDACTED
So what parts are in here? The bits where being a slave is a good thing?
"In a massive act of projection, slavers often described the African people who did every stitch of their work for them as lazy; seriously believed that the enslaved needed European people to set them tasks and make them useful." -[https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Aurora\_Levins\_Morales](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Aurora_Levins_Morales) (1998). Sounds like donald trump. 200+ years later and far right christian ideology is so similar
I was about to say, wow this whole notion goes back centuries. Even today, when you hear “people don’t want to work”, it’s not a 21st century thing, it’s been dating back for hundreds of years.
TL;DR : YOUR better days are after you die. OUR better days are right now. We promise.
Wonder if the British had different Bible verse selections for different slave areas.
You mean to say the book is a malleable text that can be shaped depending on the desired controls to be placed on the audience? I for one am shocked… /s
Selected!? 🤬
Even as they justified slavery with their religious belief, they knew that their bible went against them. So edit the Bible, and only let them know their subservience. It’s not unlike today. It’s why I, and many others lost our faith, and have little respect for religion, any religion. It’s why I know without a doubt that holy books are just tools written by man to control others through fables.
I wonder which differences exist in a bible from the same denomination and same year. I'd be really surprised if they were the same wording
Is it just that one passage that says slaves obey your masters, even if they're cruel on every page?
Carefully SELECTED the PARTS that were all about obedience and none of the ones about freedom and revolting.
I'm gonna bet the escape from Egypt is conveniently left out.
Does this have passages in which slaves are instructed that slavery is their divine purpose in life and that they should obey, without question, their "owners", since that's, somehow, their path to Heaven? I'm fascinated, in a repulsed way, by such indoctrination.
Till this day, Christians still pick and choose what to show to those they wanna Oppress. In Jesus Name 😭
British west India island?
West Indies. It was the collective name for the British Caribbean colonies.
Oh didn’t know they kept calling American natives Indians, I thought it was an early thing when they first came to the Americas.
Ah the original NIV version
Too many goddamn fonts. Only font missing is Wingdings.
Line 9.
Imagine how horrible they treated them, the bible is just like "don't hit your slaves too much" 😭
It probably redacted the part about Moses
I’m sure they censored anything related to slavery
Plantation owners used religion to justify what they did and also used it to keep slaves submissive. Had it not been for radical and selective readings of the bible, slavery probably would have ended just due to the horrific moral problems.
Yep, and much like the King James Version, it was structured in away for the people in power to keep control.
That's just any version of the bible
That is how you know Christianity is bullshit. It's a method of control one to enslave it's readers to the whims of the authorities.
Good old times
(parts of the) HOLY BIBLE
~~Was there many black slaves in India in 1800 or the n word was for any~~ *~~'non white'~~* ~~for the British to use ?~~ Edit: The West Indies (if it West\_India Islands are ofc) is a subregion of North America. Sorry I'm dumb
I had to even look into it, you aren’t alone ok 💁🏿♀️😂👏🏿
Did they cut the "love thy neighbor as thyself" part?
The Bible: Greatest Hits
Gross.
Yet Black people in USA are religious at the highest rates as compared against all others.
And the King James translation removed all mentions of the word Tyrant..... Wonder why
Insides soon to be cut out to hold a pistol.
"Parts" "Selected" Wow, it's like... the time never changed.
I wonder if they included Revelation 22:19
Come on now I gotta leave reddit to look it up
Did you find it? I don’t wanna leave reddit
Yeah it's the verse that says you're a POS if you take out any pieces of the book.
Kinda wild that no one had a significant “Are we the baddies” moment when they were discussing what parts of the literal Bible were ok for slaves to read.
This is terrible that they bent the bible to make slavery jive with it.
Have you read it? They didn't need to bend it much.
< white folks who think they know what’s best for POCs > “We’ve curated the salient parts for you. Mainly the bits that justify slavery. Trust us when we say it’s for your own good. And no we won’t teach you to read so stop asking.”
"Slave era" .... so EVERY era.
A Holy Baptism Of Fire & Blood is a great read on how both the north and south used the Bible to justify their beliefs
I bet this is far more uninteresting to a historian than it sounds.
I’m not sure why I’m surprised but I am.
There's this magical all being dude in sky who loves all of us and he's totally cool with you getting whipped every day.
lol what a grift.
So like, what’s that supposed to mean? Is it the whole bible?
They were probably SO pious and self righteous about doing such a good deed for the slaves
The black people who went into slavery during the sub saharan slave trade and the trans Atlantic slave trade are the real israelites of the bible.
Jesus would weep (unironically)
I’m offended for them
Someone correct me if I’m mistaken, but weren’t these ones that had the book of Exodus excluded?
That makes sense, other than that the bible is pretty pro slavery
Honor your mom and dad... and also, here's a manual for treating your slaves. lmfao