konceptual99:
If you will be patient with me (and I will try to be as concise as possible), I will explain how we are actually both on the exact same page.
You keep debating with me and saying the same things over and over, even though I’ve repeatedly said that Jews view slavery, even the slavery spoken of in Scripture, as evil. Though I totally agree with you and have explained that Jews do too, you still keep arguing as if I haven’t said those words or that my claim about how we view slavery isn’t true.
But then you added this following point, and I suddenly realize what the problem is:
It was wrong when it happened to the Israelites and it was wrong when it happened to people captured by the Israelites.
It seems that you believe that the Biblical accounts of the Hebrews conquering nations and taking their people as slaves are historical fact (and that we Jews do too). They are not fact, and we know and teach this.
The five books of Moses, the Torah, the Pentateuch, whatever you want to call it, is not an historical record. We never conquered the peoples living in the Fertile Crescent, destroying their cities, killing their people, and enslaving those who survived the invasion. We, the Jews, are those very people.
The New Union Haggadah sums it up best:
The Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem in 586 BCE. The rule of the world order up until that time--and for most cultures, ever since--was quite simple: if you were conquered and exiled, left without a monarch and bereft of religious shrines, your people would be integrated into the conquering host culture and quickly disappear. The Torah writers...remind us repeatedly of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadomites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites--people who were once nations like all other nations but whose destiny went the way of the conquered and oppressed…The Torah’s allegory, therefore, was devised to reform the Judaism of its day from an altogether land-based culture (prior to 586 BCE) into a religion that could survive without a central shrine, without an oligarchic priesthood, and most impressively, without a king--both on ancestral lands and in the Diaspora.
Did you notice how the Torah is referred to as “allegory”? What historically happened is not what you are repeatedly accusing me, the Jews, and the Hebrew Scriptures of. “When Torah was written, Egypt was no longer the player it once has been on the historical stage of nations. The shores of the Nile provided a place with few political ramifications during the author’s day...The Torah tells us of servitude and redemption in a valorized time and mythic place, but the servitude is to be abhorred in every era, and redemption is to be sought for captives in each generation.”--The New Union Haggadah, “The Biblical Exodus,” Rabbi David H. Aaron, PhD, Professor of Hebrew Bible and the History of Interpretation, Hebrew Union College--Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati, Ohio.
As you might know, a Haggadah is the book we Jews read from during the Passover Seder (which will be in about 12 days). What you just read above is from the one I use in my home with my family, and those statements pretty much sum up much about what you can expect from the rest of the Bible and its stories about the Jews.
This isn’t to say there isn’t any history behind the mythos. There is, but it is just under the veil of an illustrative narrative. The Israelites “12 tribes” are likely a combination of “the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadomites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.” Biblical stories of Israelites conquering and plundering these nations and enslaving survivors is not what really happened.
The Bible Through the Ages, (1996, Pleasantville, NY) states:
During the period of [the] Hyksos rule [of Egypt], and for a long while afterwards--or until about 1300 B.C.--there were great migrations of people in and out of Egypt owing to drought and famine and the slave trade.
It was likely during the Hyksos rule that the primary or central family of Hebrews entered Egypt. The Hyksos dynasty lasted 108 years, but saw its end when the Theban revolt spread northward under Kamose, with his successor, Ahmose, becoming king. The migrant peoples were enslaved under this new dynasty, but eventually it lost power over its slaves. A series of revolts and at least three series of exodus movements followed, with the enslaved people leaving.
It is theorized that the last exodus movement was the one that contained the people who would become the nation of Israel, but by this time they included more than just the nucleus of Hebrews. The mixed company that came with them crossed over into the Fertile Crescent and apparently merged with the peoples who lived there, with “the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadomites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.”
Our legends say we conquered them, but in reality they merged with us and we all became the nation of Israel.
Stories of them being conquered by “God’s army” are mythological ways of saying their cultural ways eventually dissolved to become one with ours. Under the Davidic dynasty, worship of YHWH became the state religion, and the stories that would be carried into Babylon and eventually become the Bible took shape.
But the conquests, our taking slaves, etc., these things didn’t happen as the legends say. The laws in Torah are meant to sound just like you describe them, as if to say “we treat our slaves better.” But this was only because we were a nation made up of slaves, not warrior conquerors of nations. Such a warrior state would have never fallen to the Babylonians if we were as great as the Torah stories say we were.
What you are talking about is based on a view we all got when we were Jehovah’s Witnesses, that these stories were factual. They aren’t. Slavery is evil. Always has been, always will be.
This doesn’t mean that the Jews didn’t own slaves at times. We did, probably from very early in our history. We were like everyone else when we were an ancient nation and thought that slavery was a normal aspect of life. We might have had laws that were made to regulate it that seemed humane, but we were not always faithful to our own laws.
Jews participated in the Atlantic slave trade. It appears I myself may have had ancestors who, while living in New Spain to avoid the Spanish Inquisition, purchased slaves during the time the Sephardic Jews founded what is now known as Monterrey, Mexico.
But just like practically all of us have ancestors who engaged in the horrible practice of slavery (I am sure you can find slave owners in your family tree too), we also likewise both have ancestors who were part of the Abolition Movement. (See “Antislavery Movement” from the Jewish Encyclopedia for more information).
You might get what I’m saying, and I hope you do. Or you might keep repeating the same thing over and over again as if I haven’t said from the beginning that I and the rest of Jewry agree with you. If just keep saying that, you are arguing something that isn't about Israelite or Jewish history. I can’t help or keep arguing with someone who won't learn the fact and be logical based on the real historical data.
Whatever other feelings or views you may have, however, are not based on a factual view of the Jewish people or their history. They seem to be left over of views left by the cult that left us both with scars. You may also be unaware that the Jews are not a religion, but a people and culture. Judaism is not a religion of belief but a practice. Some members and practitioners of Judaism are theists, others are atheists. It’s an ever-evolving way of preserving a people through time, and we are not innocents or more enlightened than others.
And it's a tapestry. Pull at one string you don't like, the whole thing and the people and culture within gets the impression you are against it.
