Answering Logician_bones on slavery in Deuteronomy

See update below...apparantly Mr. Holding decided to give his two-cents worth after i posted this article:

Some follower of Holding using the pseudonym "Chesterton clives" criticized Mr. Holding's attempted defense against OT "slavery".  A more fanatical follower of Holding named logician_bones apparently found it necessary to use YouTube's chat boxes to post several pages' worth of reply.   See here.

I comment to show that nothing asserted by anybody here places skeptics under any degree of intellectual obligation to give up their general belief that YHWH approved of physically abusive and oppressive "slavery".  Contrary to Paul Copan and Matthew Flannagan, slavery in the days of Moses was very close to the slavery of Antebellum South.  If the Hebrews in the days of Proverbs could seriously believe that the lacertations from a whipping were "cleansing evil" from the body (20:30), its perfecftly reasonable to assume continuity of thought as inerrantists must, and allow that Moses and his Hebrew slave masters also believed that violently being a person would cleanse evil from them.

Really Dumb Questions from Fundy Atheists #2: The Eunuch Fantasy

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Published on Nov 7, 2019
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Lucas M1 week ago (edited)Man, I just love the "God should have known I would be dumb, so the Bible shouldn't have been written that way" argument.

And is the teacher ever at fault if she 'expects' her students to learn something while he knowingly fails to employ the teaching method she knows will successfully impart the lesson?

Or is this a stupid question given that you couldn't show the relevance of Deuteronomy to today's skeptics if your life depended on it?  Skeptics who make Deuteronomy an issue invite critique, of course, but skeptics who just laugh at the OT remain reasonable.

Zachary Cawley1 week ago (edited)Of course! How else are they going to rationalize their abject laziness in the research they have to do in order to have a more productive discussion? I mean, geez! It's not like you can't download academic files or use Bitorrent over at archive.org to obtain copies of antiquated Christian works to see what the actual arguments are!

Not all bible skeptics/atheists are lazy. You might care to check my blog.  I routinely meet Christian apologetics arguments on the merits.  Furthermore, I do so at some length, as opposed to the lazy cocksucker James Patrick Holding, who seems to think 2 minute cartoon videos constitute the end of the debate on whatever controversy he wishes to address.

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annoyingdude761 week agoah, it's videos like this that make me a fan JP

This tells us what your maturity level likely is.

Chesterton clives1 day ago (edited)I found a commenter's opinion on the Leviticus 25:44-46 passage that I think needs addressing: In your videos you argue that the slavery in Leviticus 25 verses 44 to 46 don't describe chattel slavery because: 1) property in this passage doesn’t mean property in the modern sense and instead meant the master owned their labor and not their bodies 2) slaves had rights and the slave owner couldn't abuse them 3) foreigners should not be oppressed or mistreated and foreigners should be treated fairly and with love 4) slaves were not commanded to stay for life 5) they could become rich 6) it was voluntary 7) foreigners were not kidnapped against their will 1) is false as there is no textual justification for this assertion. Every verse that talks about masters owning their servants labor as opposed to their bodies makes it clear they refer to Hebrew servants and not non-Hebrew servants. Leviticus 25 verses 44 to 46 says non-Hebrew slaves could be bequeathed as inherited property to your children. This shows that property was just like what we understand property to mean 2) and 3) relate to how slaves were treated, which as I argued above, are irrelevant to the question of whether they were chattel slaves or not. Besides, American slaves could not be abused at will by their slavemasters since there were laws which protected slaves from being abused (and in some cases they gave better protection than the Hebrew laws did e.g. some limited the amount of hours a slave could be worked). The verses you quoted in support of 3) refer to free-foreigners who were in Israel and not foreign (non-Hebrew) slaves. Also Deuteronomy twenty three verses fifteen and sixteen do NOT mean a slave could just leave his master if he was abused. This verse says: “You shall not give up to his master a slave who has escaped from his master to you. He shall dwell with you, in your midst, in the place that he shall choose within one of your towns, wherever it suits him. You shall not wrong him." The law is telling Hebrews to allow slaves who have escaped their foreign masters in foreign lands to settle in one of their (Hebrew) towns. Big difference!!! Even if it did apply to all slaves, it just meant that Hebrew masters had to keep their slaves locked up or under guard if they thought that they might escape. It doesn't mean that slaves were free to leave when they chose 4) is false. Slavemasters could release a slave, but there was no obligation for him to do so. Furthermore, the slave had no say in the matter. If his master wanted to keep him for life, that was his fate. Your statement that non-Hebrew slaves were released in the Year of Jubilee is false. And even if they could be released, it doesnt mean he wasn't a chattel slave. There are circumstances under which American slaves could be and were released by their masters - does this mean they weren't chattel slaves? 5) specifically refers to rich foreigners who purchased Hebrew indentured servants. How can this refer to a foreign slave? As I argued above, even if slaves were paid it doesn't mean they weren't chattel slaves. Besides, there were examples of African American slaves gaining their freedom, and then becoming rich themselves too. 6) and 7) are both irrelevant because the means by which a person become a chattel slave is completely irrelevant to the question of whether he is a chattel slave. What textual justification do you have for 6)? I have seen none. Every verse that refers to people voluntarily selling themselves into servant-hood, also states that those involved were Hebrews, not foreigners 7) is false because Deuteronomy 20 verses 10 to 18 says if the Hebrews attacked an enemy city who didn't immediately surrender, they could kidnap the women and children and enslave them. This was the main way in which chattel slaves were obtained in ancient times, and I would guess this was also true of the Hebrews. And finally, Exodus twenty one verse sixteen does NOT ban slavery. It says "Anyone who kidnaps someone is to be put to death, whether the victim has been sold or is still in the kidnapper's possession." This verse is about kidnapping and says nothing about slave traders or slave holders in general. The main ways that Hebrews were legally allowed to acquire slaves were through purchase or inheritance (Leviticus twenty-five verses forty-four to fourt-six) or warfare (Deuteronomy twenty verses ten to eighteen). Slaves could also be obtained if a female slave gave birth since her children automatically became slaves as well. If anyone could help me with this verse and these objections, I would really appreciate it, as this passage is causing me to doubt a little.




Logician_Bones20 hours agoLet me address your final statement first: "If anyone could help me with this verse and these objections, I would really appreciate it, as this passage is causing me to really doubt the God of the Bible. (I don't want to lose my faith, my Christianity means everything to me, I just can't get around these passages.)" Actually the entire skeptical approach of arguing from allegations of moral problems in passages to the conclusion of the Bible being false doesn't work because 1) it's so difficult to prove they have understood the text correctly

That's your first problem, exegesis of ancient theological texts cannot be deemed "correct" or "incorrect", as if the intention of the author was capable of being discerned with the same degree of certainty that we have in answering "do trees exist?" or "is it correct that Japan is at the North Pole?".  The better approach merely asks whether the interpretation at issue is "reasonable" (i.e., consistent with word-meanings found in standard lexicons, consistent with the immediate context and consistent with the evidence of the genre of the book, where such can be reasonably determined).

Of course, you won't like the "reasonable" approach because it would then create room for skeptical interpretations to be "reasonable", whereas your "correct or incorrect" approach allows you to keep saying skeptics are "incorrect".  But the "reasonable" approach is premised on degrees of probability, as it should be anyway since the issue is one of historiography...which is an art, not a science.  In this and all posts, when I present the bible as teaching X, I mean that it is reasonable for me to interpret the biblical statements the way I do.

(even besides the problem that we can usually prove they haven't or at least strongly evidence that)

I agree there are a lot of overzealous bible skeptics whose rebuttals to biblical matters are shallow.  Not mine.

and 2) we already have proof the Bible is true,

There you go again, characterizing the claims in the bible in terms of accurate/inaccurate, when in fact the ancient and ambiguous character of the evidence, as disagreed on by Christians for 2000 years and despite advances in hermeneutics and science, makes it more reasonable to ask whether one's interpretation of a biblical author's statement is "reasonable", as opposed to "true".

God is real,

No, "god" is an incoherent concept, which, due to its alleged infinite complexity, fails Ocaam's Razor more quickly than any naturalistic hypothesis.  The Razor is not an infallible test, but it doesn't need to be, in order to helpfully reveal which beliefs are less likely true.  Saying god created the universe is like saying cherubim are responsible for putting that book on the table.

and especially that God is perfect (I've gone into this much before; it's beyond the scope of this comment).

If God was perfect, he would have been perfectly content existing all alone from all eternity, and as such, would never have felt any motive to create creatures.   Sure, you can make sense of God creating by saying he got lonely, but that would mean he stopped being perfectly content, meaning he lacked one perfection.  This is to say nothing of the other problem we have in that the bible doesn't present god as living outside of time, but YOU pretend as if God lives outside of time.

So we already know from an independent route that no such moral argument can work.

Correct, there is no logical connection between sadism and non-existence.  God's being a sadistic lunatic (Deut. 28:15-63) doesn't argue that he doesn't exist.  It merely explains why even most spiritually alive people focus more on John and Romans than they do on the yucky stuff.

Unfortunately, the god of Moses really is logically contradictory to the god preached by most Christians.  They say "God loves you", and they never qualify, leaving the impression that God's love for sinners is very similar to a father's love for his own kids.  The unbeliever is then left with the reasonable impression from the Christian that the biblical god's love for them is so similar to that of an earthly father's, that they rightly refer to god as a "heavenly" father.  THAT Christian god is without a doubt in diametric contradiction to the God of Deut. 28:15-62, Psalm 5:5, 11:5, etc.  But I suppose James Patrick Holding will argue that spiritually dead people are under some type of obligation to notice when spiritually alive people have misinterpreted their own book.

And these direct routes of investigation of the factuality and perfection of the God of the Bible should be everybody's TOP priority to investigate.

Nope.  I've found the arguments of Licona, Habermas and Craig on the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus to be horrifically weak and unpersuasive, on the merits.  Therefore, I am reasonable to believe Christ has not risen, and to conclude that the unhappy hypothetical drawn by apostle Paul (1st Cor. 5:14, 17) is actually true.

If Jesus did not rise from the dead, then god's existence becomes just as much of a threat to Christians as to atheists, as this would mean Jesus was a false prophet, so that his followers are guilty of a capital offense (Deut. 13 and Deut. 18).  That's where we end up if Christians pretend the OT YHWH remains proven even if Christianity's exclusive truth-claims are not as persuasive as they think.  How much time do Christians spend worrying about offending YHWH?  About as often as atheists worry about offending the Christian god.  ZERO.

So these moral arguments should never be the starting place anyway, and thus are worthless for skeptics.

Not at all, it is reasonable to avoid following a sadistic lunatic, even if he is powerful.  Especially if he can read my mind and recognize that I find him to be abhorrent, since to pretend otherwise would be hypocrisy.  If I really feel the biblical god is just a brutal fiction, I should live consistently with that belief.  I do.  I regularly warn fundy Christians of the dangers of taking ancient theological fiction seriously..

That they focus on them actually unwittingly admits that they know they're weak against the direct support and must desperately try to distract from it.

No, when we call your god a pedophile and rapist, we are appealing to your own sense of morality (i.e., that rape and pedophilia are absolutely immoral).  So you are forced to either deny the charges, or admit your god is unworthy of being followed.  Your belief that rape and pedophilia are immoral in an absolute sense is precisely why you don't have the third option of saying god's causing rape and pedophilia are exceptional.  Your absolute morality allows NO exceptions, period.  If you cannot avoid concluding God is a pedophile, you will more than likely give up your faith, you won't merely hide behind "is ways are mysterious".

And since even getting saved and becoming an "apologist" would not do anything to hamper viewing god as a pedophile (Steve Hays is a Calvinist apologist and thinks god infallibly predestined all pedophiles to do exactly what they do), I have to seriously wonder why any unbeliever should view "getting saved" and becoming informed about such issues is going to do jack shit toward hindering their view that the bible-god thinks pedophilia is morally good.

Our approach to these issues, when done rightly, should always therefore be either to put them off as open questions for after we've already done the groundwork investigation, or, after we have done that and know it's true and that no such argument can work, to satisfy curiosity (and obey the command to grow in knowledge) of precisely HOW the bad skeptical arguments fall apart (which can also be helpful for apologetics purposes). So, in short, such passages should never cause you to doubt the God of the Bible. If that's where you are, then to be frank, you have a larger problem of needing better familiarity with that groundwork. Which should be good news; it means you don't have to be left at the mercy of the attacks of selfishly motivated and often deceptive skeptics who want to use bad arguments about supposed moral problems to lure you away (ironically their motive is to get you to endorse immorality anyway, making it rather hypocritical).

No, we don't want you to worship a pedophile.  That's all.  What you "should" do in life after you get rid of the obviously non-existent biblical god, is another debate.  If there are skeptics who want Christians to start committing adultery after apostasy, count me out.

Two contradictory truths can't both be true, an admission skeptics themselves make when they try to argue for supposed contradictions in the Bible; even if you aren't yet familiar enough with this proof that the God of the Bible is real and morally perfect, you at least know you can investigate that directly rather than arguing backwards from supposedly apparent immorality to dubious assumptions that he must not be perfect or real. (For example, Holding's impossible faith argument alone is sufficient to prove Christianity,

No.  In Mark 6:4 and John 7:5, not even Jesus' relatives or brothers found his 'miracles' sufficiently stunning as to prompt belief on their part.  One little saying from Jesus that the context indicates was meant figuratively, was sufficient to cause "many" of his followers to apostatize (John 6:66).  Paul's miracles didn't slow down thousands of former followers from apostatizing from him (Galatians 1:8-9, 2nd Timothy 1:15, 4:10, 16, Acts 15:38-39).  Then we have the risen Christ allegedly charging the original disciples to take the gospel to the Gentiles (Matthew 28:19), only to find later that they felt content to hand this off to Paul and stick solely to Jews (Gal. 2:9).  Let's just say there's sufficient apostasy and apathy among the original Christians to justify the position that its foundation was something less then empirically demonstrable miracles.

Skeptics aren't going to be unreasonable in this merely because James Patrick Holding comes up with some clever trifle that justifies his followers to keep having faith in this impossible faith argument.  You don't prove the reasonableness of a position merely by showing the contrary position to be reasonable.  Reasonableness doesn't work like accuracy, otherwise, you'd have to accuse as unreasonable all jurors who falsely convicted an innocent person despite their best efforts to guard against doing so.  Two opposing positions can be equally reasonable.  It happens all the time among juries.  A group of equally highly educated intelligent members of the community cannot agree on whether to credit certain evidence, or whether to believe a certain witness.

and even if all we prove is the NT's reliability, in it Jesus affirms the OT as well.

Yup.  In a context that implies some of the saved people weren't even Christians, it is good works that are the only basis upon which people are let into heaven (Matthew 25:32 ff.).  This explains why fundy Christians are loathe to use the synoptic statements of Jesus to answer questions about salvation.  They will cite Acts 16:31 and Ephesians 2:8-9 before they ever cite Matthew 25:34-40. Their savior is not Jesus but Paul.

I've also done analysis proving, independantly of the Bible (so no "Bible sezzit so true" strawman can be used against this) that God has to exist and has to be perfect, and that the Bible resoundingly satisfies the criteria this analysis suggested for how this being would verify a message is his.)

Irrelevant, as I argued earlier: the historicity of Jesus' resurrection is so poorly attested that it justifies taking a skeptical view toward it...which then intellectually justifies the view that Christians have been pissing off the OT YHWH for the last 2,000 years.  Atheists being wrong about YHWH's existence is about as serious as mechanics being wrong about how to spell "7Up"

The skeptical focus on these things is probably because they know it puts an impossible workload on you; how can you settle EVERY possible moral question?

Not me, I go about my critiques one point at a time, trouble is, very few "apologists" are willing to debate me.  I take it as a compliment.

It makes no sense to argue that we must settle every single one of them directly in order to prove God,

Then it makes no sense to argue that we must settle every concern theists might raise in order to disprove god.

yet that is what they're implicitly demanding by focusing on these supposed issues as arguments. Their approach is foolish, and they hope you don't notice.

Mere rhetoric.  Some skeptics, like me have no illusions that our beliefs are false, we honestly believe they are well founded.

Don't buy that snake oil. ;-) It also lets them focus on emotions to sway people contrary to logic, a reprehensible approach.

Decisions based solely on emotion can be reasonable, though.  The father who kills the babysitter after catching her molesting his child is running on pure emotion (especially if the molestation did not cause any physical damage or pain).  And the only way you'd call it unreasonable is to pretend that you actually give two shits whether pedophiles endure death.  You don't.  Or you can look forward to difficult questions if you pretend in public that child molesters deserve second chances. If you can hear on the news about kids getting bombed to death in Syria and yet you somehow "get over it" enough to laugh at the boss's unrelated joke later that morning, I'm not going to believe you when you assert that you weep over the murder of pedophiles.

They should have the guts to directly take on the sound support itself and show how it supposedly isn't sound, and then if they can do that, the rest of this becomes a moot point anyway.

Read my blog.  Let's just say I'm anything but "frightened" of Christian apologetics.  Of course, my focus on Mr. Holding might lead one to believe that I only attack idiot Christians who offer nothing particularly compelling to skeptics.

(But when they do rarely actually try they fail miserably; mostly they rely on their own ignorance and pretend they've never heard of any sound support, which perhaps some haven't since they don't want to find it.)

Maybe they are too busy earning a paycheck and raising kids to worry about what some safely anonymous nobody on YouTube is boasting that they are missing.  How hard would it be to show it is more reasonable to raise kids than it is to obey Jesus and thereby throw away everything including the kids and just go broke in the name of stupidity (Matthew 19:29)?

Also the entire approach relies on the assumption that if God is moral he should spell out all the reasons every decision was right.

How much sin could have been avoided if he simply declared the minimum age a girl must reach before she can be married?  How much sin could have been avoided if he simply declared which parts of the bible apply to modern-day Christians?  What do you think of Christian apologist Steve Hays and his belief that God secretly wills that people disobey his revealed will (see here)?  Do you think that might qualify as one of those moral debates that God should have given a bit more clear guidance on?  Or do you accuse Hays of stupidity?  Or will you say becoming a Christian is a waste of time because it still leaves you in the dark about morality?

The problems with that are many; for example if God is omniscient then not only does he factor everything in THIS universe design for why it was the right call, everything is always in the context, in God's mind, of his full knowledge of ALL POSSIBLE alternate hypotheticals, even down to the level of detail of every possible placement of every atom and "unit" of energy.

Then God's refusal to prevent a man from raping a child is a morally good omission.  But then again theories about the extent of knowledge possessed by an obviously non-existent being, don't do much good, beyond showing that the bible contains inconsistencies.  It isn't like debating god's knowledge is as likely to result in tangible benefit as would be discussing city planning or how to find a job.

How in the world could all of that ever be packed into a single book we could ever have time to read this side of heaven?

Ezra 1:1, god can cause you believe and do whatever he wants to you believe and do, and he has less respect for human freewill resistance than most Christians allow (Daniel 4:33).  Books are not needed.  perhaps you should make a second attempt to give god an excuse for failing to do something.

Therefore, any such arguments must argue instead about some unclear line being drawn in a gray area of how much needs explained and how much doesn't.

If God doesn't want you to take that job, might help if he told you, as opposed to just saying nothing and letting you go your way and try to divine his will after the fact by interpreting any future conicidences in a highly subjective way.

But either way, no, read Ezra 1:1.  You forget that your god has telepathic powers, clairvoyance, esp and everything else.  God "needs" to provide a "book" for us to know his will about as much as a adult "needs" baby slobber to resolve political differences.

And if the audience already knows, as they're supposed to, why God is proven and proven perfect, then God already knows that they don't need him to justify himself on specific cases of decisions! In fact, the fact that he rarely explains most reasons is actually a crucial baseline evidence that this IS the word of a perfect God;

When in fact problems often come into existence because a leader didn't make his will clearly known to his subordinates.  Are you sure that "he isn't there" might not be a better explanation for the hiddenness of god?

a mere manmade text before people imagined he was omniscient (which is a common skeptic claim) would not write in this way. (This by itself doesn't prove anything in our favor, but it does provide initial evidence and it would have been easy for an actual made-up text to rule itself out by falling for this easy mistake.) So don't let them win by cheating like that. Be more skeptical of them -- as skeptics they need to appreciate that, or else be faced with charges of hypocrisy, right? They want to get you worrying and feeling helpless and at their mercy.

What else does James Patrick Holding do, except tell himself that skeptics are all "worrying and feeling helpless" at his mercy?  LOL.  Maybe that's why he banned my ISP from accessing his website.

Don't let that trick work. From having tested every skeptic argument I could get my hands on that I've had time to check (and spending way more time on it than most), I know we're more than justified to instead see them as spoiled little brats unimpressively trying the next scam and it's just a matter of an amusing diversion to look into why they're wrong about the latest one (though watch out for the occasional real wolf that the boy who cries wolf actually saw, but so far they've all been bad arguments some wrongly use on our side but that the Bible doesn't teach or require).

I would be such wolf.  I'm really there, and I'm really fucking you up.  Or at least that's a reasonable deduction from the fact that Holding and his pussy followers never dare to challenge me directly, despite proof at my blog that I handle all such challenges the way any scholar would.

Helps to study logic too to know how not to fall for their errors in reasoning.

Another addition from outside the bible turning the Holy Spirit into a gratuitous afterthought.  Either YOU STUDY, or YOU DON"T KNOW.  There is no telepathy from the Holy Spirit, even though Jesus promised it (Matthew 10:19), and the fact that you call Jesus Lord means you possess this exact same holy Spirit (1st Cor. 12:3).

If you do they're not hard to spot even if you haven't had time to do research to test their claims beyond the argumentation itself. Usually their arguments is self-refuting on its own if you just spot the logical flaw, and this one was no exception., though it makes plenty of errors of failure of research as well (not that I'm an expert on that but I have focused on this subject enough to know enough for this one) Above was written after most of the below; I was replying as I read. Now to the specific points: 1) "1) is false [that it's property in the sense of owning the labor] as there is no textual justification for this assertion." This is argument from silence fallacy,

Not all arguments from silence are fallacious, they are used all the time by Christian scholars.

and also black swan and bald assertion. To maintain that the arguer must do a FULL survey of ALL alleged scriptural support by apologists or any analyst who disagrees.

then skeptics don't need to do a FULL survey of alleged miracle claims, to be reasonably justified in denying the existence of the miraculous.

This also ignores that in a high context society, we shouldn't EXPECT direct clarification in the text.

If god wants you to preach Christianity in modern America, then he needs to add the "Low context" book to the NT.  The very fact that the ANE peoples were high context is one reason to suppose the authors of the OT books never intended their writings to be used by people coming from a completely different culture...which might argue that whatever "god" allegedly guided them to write also didn't want to write in a way that would be understandable to people in very different times/cultures.  The survival of the bible through history proves exactly nothing except the determination of Christians to support their religion.   You are never going to show that "god" is behind the popularity of the bible throughout history.

However, in my own reading of the whole law recently I found no support for this skeptical denial. Even if we accept that the apologetic claim isn't proven, it still must be DISproven in order to have an argument.

No, the skeptic only need be "reasonable", and they can often achieve this even if all they do is "ignore" any "argument".

The exact same bad argument could be made about the modern description of employees like myself as "human resources." A very simple text from our company found using this term would not likely clarify it (though to be fair a full contract would, but this is akin to taking a company flyer that happens to mention the term, where the full context isn't expected, and using its silence on it to assume the worst). [Continued; 1/5]
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Logician_Bones20 hours agoAnd in fact, Deuteronomy actually does justify this assertion in affirming the right of slaves to leave at any time, and demanding the rest of society "harbor" them and support their freedom.

But since most scholars, including many Christian scholars, have little faith in the unity of Deuteronomy, there is no intellectual obligation upon a skeptic to reconcile their view of one verse in that book with any other verse in that book.

There is a virtual consensus among contemporary adherents of source-critical and traditio-critical approaches to the Old Testament literature that Deuteronomy as a literary composition cannot antedate the seventh century and, in fact, probably is later in its present form.

Merrill, E. H. (2001, c1994). Vol. 4: Deuteronomy (electronic ed.). Logos Library System; The New American Commentary (Page 32). Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers.

Regardless, conservative inerrantist scholar John Walton disagrees with every anti-Canaanite premise that today's Christian apologists think they are finding in Deuteronomy.  See his The Lost World of the Israelite Conquest.  This makes it reasonable for a skeptic to declare Deuteronomy fatally ambiguous.  Not even when you are spiritually alive and get your ph.d in a biblically related field and teach at a Christian fundamentalist bible college for 20 years, will this necessarily increase your ability to detect biblical truth.  "fatally ambiguous" is the true phrase of the day.

Imagine the stupidity of pretending that all authors who contributed to a single person's "declaration" or "affidavit" surely agreed on everything (!?).  How about a personal diary of a girl, which contains entries from unknown authors in addition to the girl, over a period of centuries?  You would never assume these secondary authors agreed with everything the original author did.

That's hardly what property does. Skeptics have even been forced to admit that that passage refers to foreign slaves! [Update after draft: Even THIS skeptic admits this later on!] So the usual copout of "itsh furrenners who had it bad" will not work here. 1.1) It won't, in fact, work anywhere: "Every verse that talks about masters owning their servants [sic] labor as opposed to their bodies makes it clear they refer to Hebrew servants and not non-Hebrew servants." That's not the case in the Deuteronomy "leave at will" passage, which is context applying to all the rest.

No, the "leave at will" passages sound like later additions trying to soften the brutality of the earlier text.  Perhaps you didn't notice, but to many scholars, there's a lot of brutality in Deuteronomy, so we are reasonable to be skeptical of those passage that appear to be less cruel.  Furthermore, Moses refused to see his divine counsel as static, he required his men to kill ALL Midianites, but when they return with living Midianite captives, he is angry as if they disobeyed his orders, but then makes a concession and allows the POWs to live (Numbers 31:14 ff).

So there's a possibility that the nore loving sounding texts like Deut. 23:15 were either never intended to be static (i.e., one should return slaves to masters when circumstances permit), or that this is a more civilized addition to what was originally a more brutal ancient form of Deuteronomy, in which the editors did an imperfect job of cleaning up the yucky stuff.

(Normal in a high-context society to be saved for such a "closing speech" type of document; this context would have been understood already by all previously but as Moses is at the end of his life now and writing also the document of the speech for future generations, while speaking the speech to a mostly illiterate society so that they can already begin the process of passing on what they heard to future generations, it's time for him to make some things even clearer that didn't need clarified before.)

no, God didn't need any written law, see Ezra 1:1 and Daniel 4:33.  If God chooses to fuck around with imperfect people and an imperfect written Law, that's his own self-imposed limitation and problem.  I don't work for retarded bosses.  Its just a personal scruple.

And in my previous comments reporting on what I found from a whole-Law (after the leaving of Egypt) readthrough, I found MANY passages saying over and over that (as one put it) you shall have one law for Hebrews and foreigners alike, and in many different wordings and with logical defenses reiterating equality. I also found one passage even stating that they were ALREADY treating foreigners well and needed now to do better in treating fellow Hebrews well too!

One can only wonder why the earlier Hebrews didn't treat their slaves as well as they allegedly did later.  Perhaps Moses made clear in the earlier times that gentile slaves could be mistreated?  Read Leviticus 21:9, then talk to me about how stupid skeptics are for thinking Moses and his god were sadistic lunatics.  If the girl is caught in her father's house committing sexual sin, she is likely still living at home, which means she is likely 12 years old or less.  Since burning children to death is horrific and psychotic regardless of what the motive is, your god is just as morally bankrupt as the Canaanites (though Frank Turek and other apologists are wrong in saying Canaanites used fire to kill kids).

Such braggy claims of what the text doesn't say about this are nothing but revealing the skeptic's own ignorance -- or intentionally deceptive tactics if in fact they did study to know better. 1.2) "Leviticus 25 verses 44 to 46 says non-Hebrew slaves could be bequeathed as inherited property to your children. This shows that property was just like what we understand property to mean" It shows no such thing; modern assumptions must be read into the text to get that meaning, and as shown above, other places in the text actually clearly deny those assumptions.

Once again, you are treating Deuteronomy as a singular unity, as if we are "required" to reconcile all of it's statements with each other, when in fact Deuteronomy is more likely composite, and as such, we don't need to worry whether an interpretation of a verse consistent with its own immediate context, does or doesn't harmonize with something that book says elsewhere.  Would you automatically assume that a diary of multiple authorship contained only factually consistent statements?  Obviously not.

This is in context of the awl rite by which slaves could opt to serve permanently. The chances that this never overlapped times of "masters" dying are nill, so it would be a given this would be true of Hebrews, thus the question that would be raised naturally is, could this also apply to foreigners. This passage is affirming it can. That's nothing like modern slavery. This skeptical claim is "quote mining" at its worst.

not at all, we learn from Leviticus 19:20-22  that because the betrothed woman the slave-master raped was of lower social status, the man was exempted from the adultery death penalty, he was the only person required to do anything to atone, and he was required to simply give up a ram.  From this we learn that Moses did indeed view people of lesser social standing as having lesser intrinsic value (i.e., adultery with a slave-girl is not as serious as adultery with a free woman).  You are also overlooking the 10th commandment, which puts the man's wife in the list of animals and other things he "owns".

2-3) The claim that being chattel is irrelevant to treatment is one valid view, but as it happens NOT the view of "slavers" of our recent history as in American slaves. The next phrase seems to be trying to support this by the fact that there were restrictions, but it's a non-sequitur that therefore it's irrelevant. But it's a moot point since they clearly aren't chattel, and in fact, the condition given as the example for leaving was bad treatment!

No, inerrantist Christian commentator E.H. Merrill, says of v. 15 "How appropriate that slaves of enemy nations be allowed free access to and refuge among the Lord’s covenant people."

Merrill, E. H. (2001, c1994). Vol. 4: Deuteronomy (electronic ed.). Logos Library System; The New American Commentary (Page 312). Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers.

The purpose of allowing the escaped slave to avoid repatriation was apparently the Hebrew belief that the slave would be closer to the true god if allowed to live among them.  So the issue of how much physical abuse god would allow Hebrews to inflict on their own slaves is not answered here.

I'm also not seeing why you think it important to trifle the way you do. Proverbs allows parents to beat their children with rods (23:15), and whips were used on criminals in the belief that the lacerated skin would cleanse the body of evil (20:30).  Moses admits killing "children" Deut. 2:30, Numbers 31:17), so in light of all this belief that violence is the answer, it's reasonable to infer that Hebrews in the days of Moses treated their slaves the same way, believing that the only whippings that fixed an unruly slave's diobedience were those that produced lacerations of the skin.  And apparently, the more lacerations there were, the more effectively they would rid the body of evil.  The tendency to mistreat slaves is likely what prompted the law in Exodus 21:21, that verse that says the slave is the master's "money".

snip 3.4) "Also Deuteronomy twenty three verses fifteen and sixteen do NOT mean a slave could just leave his master if he was abused." In fact they mean, in didactic law, that the slave could leave for ANY reason, if they felt it was justified. If hypothetically they felt that their allowance (this was done, though not the same thing as a wage) was insufficient, or rules on the work weren't reasonable, etc. -- if in that situation it could be justified they could leave.

Unfortunately, in that society, the master was the slave's only means of sustenance, so if the slave ran away, it would have been due to very severe abuses making the slave think it was better to risk suicide by escape, than continue being abused.  I'm sure Moses was not quite as barbaric as one could possibly imagine.

And there's no reason to think the slaves would be told about such laws, especially given the language differences and how he average Hebrew slave owner likely knew only Hebrew.

And no argument against this can be made by this particular skeptic once he uses argument from silence; after all, the text says nothing about those harboring the slave after he left demanding an accounting of why he left, nor judges being allowed to be involved at all (though it's certainly possible the "masters" could involve them).

Sounds like a deficiency of the wording of the law.

All of this kind of argumentation is a moot point anyway as the modern assumption of anti-foreigner attitudes is being imported on the text since that's still common today and people confuse that for a necessary/normal attitude of all humans, but the text already debunked this assumption.

No, see Leviticus 19:20-22.  Hebrews would devalue a person for reasons that we today find immoral and unfair.

The goal of these arguments is to insinuate that this assumption stands unless the text goes out of its way to deny it.

No, I maintain that abusive slavery is a reasonable interpretation of the OT texts.

But this is circular reasoning; if in fact the Hebrew perspective at the time was admiration of foreigners in general (which is seen over and over again even to an unhealthy extent as they fell away constantly to mirroring pagan idolatry to imitate foreigners) and more of an anti (or "lord it over" sense) perspective on fellows who fall on hard times and the like, then the text should look precisely how it looks; it shouldn't even be imaginable to any author of that time that they would need clarifications like the skeptic is demanding.

All the more reason for today's Gentile skeptics to remain apathetic toward the Pentateuch.  That, and Jesus' never having expressed or implied that such persons need to "study" scriptures.  Must not have been very important.

Though in fact, the text already has sufficient to make it clear which way their perspective went, and even cautions in plenty of places, alluded to above, for the sake of future generations and no doubt some exceptions that they must treat foreigners fairly.

Wow, sounds like the authors thought the mosaic theocracy would last forever.  Is this where you suddenly remember that God can intend a text to mean something its human author never intended?  Yeah, like that excuse places an intellectual obligation on a skeptic!

3.5) "The law is telling Hebrews to allow slaves who have escaped their foreign masters in foreign lands to settle in one of their (Hebrew) towns."

Where the only realistic way such a runaway could sustain himself is to become a slave to a Hebrew.

That this is a fatal admission to his argumentation is lost on this skeptic. That goalpost is now VERY restricted. This is clearly to the point of demanding the Bible be written directly to this particular modern to clear up ANY possible misconception he personally (or she?) could have. Sorry, no, it was written to the Hebrews of that time.

Which makes it reasonable to assume it wasn't written for modern people, thus, modern people are reasonable to completely ignore it if the so choose, there's nothing about the Pentateuch that requires those who are apathetic toward it are on the level of those who deny the existence of cars.

3.6) "Big difference!!! Even if it did apply to all slaves, it just meant that Hebrew masters had to keep their slaves locked up or under guard if they thought that they might escape. It doesn't mean that slaves were free to leave when they chose" Oh come on. If it had a law that said you couldn't keep them locked up, Mr. Squeaky-wheeled moving goalposts, you'd say that just goes to show they would have to keep them in a deep underground dungeon and not tell anybody they existed!

No, too hard in that society to keep the slaves from being noticed by others as they go about their work above-ground.

In didactic law in a collectivist society this could hardly work if the principle was that they should leave at will. This is as much an admission that the law is evidence against your position as it is special pleading as usual. [Continued; 2/5]
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Logician_Bones20 hours ago3.7) "It doesn't mean that slaves were free to leave when they chose" Yes it does.

No it doesn't.  Moses tells his men who just killed the parents of many little girls, to take those little girls "for yourselves (Numbers 31:18).  Unless you stupidly think these traumatized little girls would willingly live with the men who so recently killed their parents, the problem of slave-escape was real.  And it's disgusting to think of what measures the men would employ to prevent these little girls from escaping.

Bald assertion works easily both ways! (And my claim actually has evidence; this skeptic's is based purely, so far as he or anybody else has yet been able to show, on evidence-free assurances by those who have bias to want the conclusions that would follow from them. I'm open to any conclusion, but I would like real sound support rather than blindly trusting a skeptic who has obvious motive to make such assumptions.) 4) This (that slaves weren't commanded to stay for life) is NOT false, and "Slavemasters could release a slave, but there was no obligation for him to do so" again rests on the assumption that the Deut freedom passage doesn't teach a general principle but instead (contrary to the nature of all law at the time, and with zero evidence of this exception) it's just a very super-special case that magically doesn't apply when the skeptic doesn't want it to.

No, the composite nature of Deuteronomy makes it reasonably clear that the civilized passages were likely added later, sort of like how Matthew smoothed out the stuff he didn't like in Mark.

If that passage means what all evidence says it means (not to reify but in the full context this is crystal clear to anybody informed), then it denies your claim. In any event, it's a non sequitur anyway from your claim to the denial of the original apologetic claim here. That original claim would be talking about a command to the slave about his own willing behavior. (As this is worded, anyway; perhaps it's worded poorly.)

Again, no reason to suppose the slaves would either know the laws or know most of the laws, though for obvious reasons the masters would want them to know "obey your masters".

I've decided to skip the rest of this trifling bullshit because as a skeptic, I don't argue in the precise manner that Logician_bones admits he is trying to refute.  There's plenty of evidence in the Pentateuch for shocking disregard for basic human dignity.  These trifles about how Hebrew slavery was loving and considerate is mostly irrelevant to the seriously problematic passages, some of which I've raised herein.

UPDATE November 19 2019

After I posted the above, Mr. Holding responded a bit more to posts at his youtube channel, so I reply here as follows:

tektontv1 day agoI stopped reading after 1). 

Then you cannot blame skeptics who imitate your logic, and stop reading an apologetics article soon after they have determined the argument to be meritless. 

My conclusion re property comes from credentialed social science scholars.

That would be the "context group", who has repeatedly said you give Christianity a bad name, and that you "obviously pervert" their scholarship.  See here.  You've replied in the past that you can legitimately draw conclusions from their work even if they themselves don't draw the same conclusions, but it is reasonable to suppose that when you draw conclusions from a scholar's work which the scholar himself doesn't draw, it is more likely YOU are the one that has misinterpreted something unless you provide a comprehensive argument for why the quoted scholar drew the wrong conclusions, and Holding never does this with respect to the Context Group scholars who object to his using their work to morally justify his insulting jackass defamatory libelous demeanor. 

Some ignorant numbskull who thinks we need "textual justification" for that fact is just being appallingly stupid and resorting to fundamentalist reading tactics.

He must have learned those tactics from John, who apparently also believes that nothing more than the reading of his words is necessary to give a person all they need to know to get saved (John 20:31), when 2,000 years of in-house church bickering and charges of "heresy" later, we find that neither salvation itself, nor interpreting John's intent, is anything so simple.

The facts interpret the text, not vice versa.

Then you are raising your understanding of social science "facts" above the authority of scripture, since it is the social science which determines how scripture is to be understood (or conversely, it is your opinion of the social science "facts" that can also smother or distort the meaning of the text).  And given the Context Group's vilification of you multiple times in the past, you aren't exactly a beacon of social science "facts".

Either way, Holding's distinction between Hebrew masters owning the "slave" and owning the slave's "labor" is pointless, as we can presume that the only way to gain their "labor" was to restrict their "person" or "body".    We see this from the sad case of Numbers 31:18.  Even assuming it doesn't authorize marital pedophilia, those little girls recently endured watching or knowing that their Hebrew male captors murdered their parents and male relatives, yet the asshole Moses automatically required that they be put to work as domestic servants by the very men who recently murdered their families and kidnapped them.

Those girls would not be in any mood to cooperate, therefore, the only sensible way to account for this scene is to assume that those girls would have to live in forced domestic servitude, likely including being tied up like an animal at night to preempt escape.  Holding is not going to get rid of the reasonableness of this interpretation by pretending that the honor/shame culture would have caused those girls to be less traumatized by the death of their entire families than we think today.  He may as well say that because of the honor/shame ethic of those people, those little girls would have been less traumatized by sexual molestation than girls are today, which if true, would mean the rest of the culture would not have viewed pedophilia as equally as horrible as we view it today.  You sure you wanna open that door?  I didn't think so.  Go fuck yourself and your amateur use of "honor/shame" context.

What was passed on was the rights to their labor, not the person as property. Period.

Except that in the vast majority of translations, Exodus 21:21 describes the slave as the master's "property" (NAU, NIV, NRS, NKJ), and in fact uses that secondary expendable status to justify insulating the master from liability for what we now call negligent homicide.  Why didn't God want Hebrew masters to be held accountable for negligent homicide, Holding?  Will you pretend that another two minute cartoon video constitutes the end of the debate?  Gee, its really hard to tell what sort of dumbass audience you are pandering to, eh?
.
The master having rights to the "person" is clear also from the same chapter:

 7 "If a man sells his daughter as a female slave, she is not to go free as the male slaves do. 8 "If she is displeasing in the eyes of her master who designated her for himself, then he shall let her be redeemed. He does not have authority to sell her to a foreign people because of his unfairness to her.
 9 "If he designates her for his son, he shall deal with her according to the custom of daughters.
 10 "If he takes to himself another woman, he may not reduce her food, her clothing, or her conjugal rights.
 11 "If he will not do these three things for her, then she shall go out for nothing, without payment of money.   (Exod. 21:7-11 NAU)

Freedom is denied to the "she" which means "person".  That's ownership of the slave, not merely their labor.  Otherwise, if the Hebrew master would never mistreat his slaves, then there would be no rationale for refusing to let he go free (i.e, go back to her family, go become the wife of a freeman, or otherwise enjoy the same level of absolute freedom allegedly granted to the ex-wife of Deuteronomy 21:14).

The master is able to designate a female slave for himself, which in context obviously refers to marriage and sexual rights.  ONly a fool would say the masters right to have sex with her is only a right over her labor and not a right over her person.  Let's take another look at Leviticus 25:

 45 'Then, too, it is out of the sons of the sojourners who live as aliens among you that you may gain acquisition, and out of their families who are with you, whom they will have produced in your land; they also may become your possession.
 46 'You may even bequeath them to your sons after you, to receive as a possession; you can use them as permanent slaves. But in respect to your countrymen, the sons of Israel, you shall not rule with severity over one another. (Lev. 25:45-46 NAU)

If Holding thinks the Hebrews living under Moses would have simply allowed one of their slaves to just up and walk away not too different from the modern day American who quits his job, Holding is only manifesting the deep-seated stupidity he has always been known for. 

There is no universal rule of interpretation that says we are required to interpret statements by one author in one document, in the light of statements authored by somebody else in another document, especially when we have no fucking clue exactly who authored the texts, how much the author actually contributed, how liberally the author allowed his amanuenses to restate his demands,  or how much redactionable activity those writings underwent before reaching us today.  Holding might say somethign to make his babies feel better about their faith, but he won't be saying anything that comprises an intellectual obligation on any non-Christian or critical OT scholar.

And it sure is funny that despite this Leviticus passage clearly speaking about foreign slaves (25:45), the author is very careful to limit the harsh-treatment provision solely to the master of Hebrew slaves (v. 46).  This reservation of the prohibition solely to Hebrew slaves contradicts anything else in the Law that gives the appearance that all slaves are to be treated with equal dignity and compassion regardless of race.

We can also be sure that the Hebrew master would never allow his foreign slaves to practice their "pagan" religions, so that's another example of how oppressive the Hebrew slave system was.  Holding will likely appeal to modern American sentiment and acuse the foreign slaves of bestiality and using fire to kill children, activities no employer would allow.  Unfortunately, not only does Leviticus 21:9 make the Hebrews just as vile as anybody who wants to use fire to kill children, but I've already answered the attempts of Turek and others to "prove" that the Canaanites had sex with animals and burned their children alive.   See here.

Therefore, the Hebrew slave master would likely have forbidden any and all pagan religion among his foreign slaves, solely because of conspiracy-laden crap like Deuteronomy 20:18.  The only way he could forbid is if he exercised control over their bodies and not merely their labor.  What the fuck does Holding think:  the slaves got off work at 5 p.m. and rode the lightrail home each day?  Obviously Hebrew slavery was oppressive sufficently to justify being disgusted with it, even if it wasn't quite as abusive as that found among the Assyrians or others.  The forcing of traumatized little girls into Hebrew servitude immediately after they witnessed the massacre of their families (Numbers 31:18) is a thorn in the apologist's side that does nothing more except wedge itself deeper every day.  Holding would have to argue that most Christians of today have too much compassion on little girls, before he could convinvingly argue that the Hebrew slave system wasn't "that" bad.

That is what comes from the social science facts.

Then the social science facts are more important than the text, just like any tool of interpretation you use is going to dictate the  meaning of, and therefore be superior to, the text you are trying to interpret.  That's exactly why Christian "cults" can continue falsely pretending to believe in the "scripture", when in fact they miss the scriptural message because their chosen method or tool or interpretation is precisely what disables them from seeing the true meaning.  John 1:1 cannot be saying Jesus was god, because the bible cannot contradict itself, and elsewhere the bible says Jesus is the SON of God.  The issue is not the viability of the hermeneutic or whether the reader properly employs it, but that that I am correct to accuse Holding or prioritize the hermemeuetic above the scriptural text itself.  .

May I ask what blithering idiot presented you with these abject lunacies?

If you weren't being sued for libel right now, in a way that is causing you financial catastrophe, you might have been nicer in how you phrased that.  But I could be wrong:  I recently offered to settle with you for FREE, and you rejected that offer, so perhaps its not money issues that have turned you into a stupid sneering cocksucker.

tektontv1 day ago (edited)LB, I appreciate you being here as I lost patience a while back with a lot of this sort of ignorance someone threw at clives.

You chose to go to YouTube and fight with the mostly idiot skeptics there, so what happened, did you forget your own goals?

Chesterton clives1 day ago (edited)tektontv An atheist under the name of Xian’d Sleena. He commented this stuff on digital Hammurabi’s second response to Whaddo you meme. It’s near the bottom. Frankly I was there to see a different side on the slavery issue, and Dr. Josh seemed to be a nice level headed guy. I read the comments tho, and I think my lack of knowledge on the subject compared to his and this commenter here sadly intimidated me. I’m just going to get away from all that.
Chesterton clives1 day agotektontv I can still see an atheist saying that the text clearly says that Hebrews may not make fellow Hebrews slaves, yet they can clearly make chattel slaves of foreigners. How would you respond?
tektontv20 hours ago@Chesterton clives That doesn't change the fact that ideas of property were not the same. Beyond that, I showed that such people were either outcasts or prisoners of war.

So apparently those poor little prepubescent girls of Numbers 31:18 were forced to begin slaving around the house for the men who recently massacred those girls' relatives.  If you personally endured the same type of abuse, you probably wouldn't trifle as long as you currently do, about how your captors' god was "good".  But when you merely read about this crap in an ancient book, its far easier to detach and thus fail to see the world through the eyes of those girls.  But you said you were an "emotional glacier" in those private emails I forced you to disclose during the 2015 lawsuit.  So perhaps your inability to sympathize with others outside your comfort zone is something you'll always be opposed to.

tektontv20 hours ago@Chesterton clives So basically a YouTube nobody. :P

Yes, just like you and all of your safely anonymous followers, who studiously avoid daring to challenge me on anything, stupdily thinking your preskool 2 minute videos constitute the end of all debate on the topic.

Chesterton clives20 hours agotektontv Basically, though to be fair, he does rely more on actual arguments rather than just atheist gobbedlygook like sky daddy or Bronze Age goat herders. He’s better than most, but this is like saying a rotten egg is better than a rotten... well you get the analogy. What made it look more sound to me was the fact that DIgital Hammurabi gave it a heart, and said that these were “great points!”
Logician_Bones11 hours ago@Chesterton clives Digital Hammurabi may be cool and collected, but is argumentation is so atrocious I would hardly call him level-headed. :P More like blockheaded, hence the nickname he's earned, blockhead. Which is actually generous considering his WYM responses dodged through three whole videos WYM's central point about the equality passages; Blockhead seems to be intentionally deceptive, not just stupid. (He also used insane reasoning in places; I listed many examples in past comments, and he even let a guest get a pass with the "Israelites couldn't take 40 years to reach Canaan" error, which is about the dumbest fundy atheist argument yet.) For the record. :)

Leviticus 21:9 requires using fire to kill any girl who had pre-marital sex in her fathers house.

Since the scenario involves her father's house, she is likely not of marriagable age yet, otherwise, the sex would likely have occurred at her husband's house.

I think Leviticus 21:9 tells us all we need to know about the Hebrews who lived under Moses.  Just like if you found out your neighbor kidnapped a teen prostitute and used fire to kill her in his basement, you wouldn't exactly trifle with anybody about whether he also possessed any good traits.  FUCK YOU, the skeptical view of biblical slavery is reasonable.