Is God a Moral Monster?: Making Sense of the Old Testament God by Paul Copan

Is God a Moral Monster?: Making Sense of the Old Testament God by Paul Copan

Author:Paul Copan [Copan, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: Philosophy, History, Non-Fiction, Spirituality, Religion
ISBN: 9780801072758
Publisher: Baker Books
Published: 2010-12-01T00:00:00+00:00


Nuzi was located near Kirkuk, Iraq, close to the Tigris River.6 Thousands of tablets—the Akkadian Nuzi texts—from the second millennium BC were found there. They mention legislation similar to this: if a slave entered a master’s home single, he left single. If he entered with a spouse, then he left on his marry way! Now, if a wife had been given to him by his master, then she (and any children from this union) belonged to the master.

According to this Exodus passage, if a man was given a wife by his master/ employer and they had children, then he had a choice: he could either leave by himself when the seventh year of debt release came, or he could continue as a permanent servant to be with his wife and children. It’s a less-than-ideal setting to be sure, but let’s probe the text more deeply.

At first glance, this text seems to treat females (and children) unfairly. The (apparently) favored male can come into a service arrangement and then go out of it. Yet the wife he married while serving his employer and any children who came while he served were (so it seems) “stuck” in the master’s home and couldn’t leave. That’s not only male favoring; it strikes us as criminal! Wasn’t this an earlier version of slave families during the antebellum South (like Frederick Douglass’s) who were broken up and scattered by insensitive slaveowners?

Our first point in response is this: we’re not told specifically that this scenario could also apply to a woman, but we have good reason to think this situation wasn’t gender specific. (We’ll see shortly that Deuteronomy 15 makes explicit that this scenario applied to a woman as well.) This is another example of case law: “if such and such a scenario arises, then this is how to proceed.” Case law typically wasn’t gender specific. Furthermore, Israelite judges were quite capable of applying the law to male and female alike. An impoverished woman, who wasn’t given by her father as a prospective wife to a (widowed or divorced) man or his son (Exod. 21:7–11), could perform standard household tasks. And she could go free by this same law, just as a male servant could.7 Various scholars suggest that the Scripture text could be applied to females quite readily: “If you buy a Hebrew servant, she is to serve you for six years. But in the seventh year, she will go out free. . . . If her master gives her a husband, and they have sons or daughters, the husband and the children will belong to her master, and she will go out by herself.” The law makes perfect sense in light of this shift; its spirit isn’t violated by doing so.

Some critics, though, would rather fight than shift. Rather than applying these case-law scenarios to both men and women, they’d rather put up resistance in order to make this law look its very worst. But we have no compelling reason to do so. Again, Israel’s judges would have looked to this general passage for guidance regarding female servants.



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