The Bible and Slavery

It’s an uncomfortable truth. Until Abraham Lincoln proclaimed that slavery was abolished in the United States in 1863, every rich (and probably) white land owner was an owner of (mostly) black slaves to labour in their fields and homes. It was considered legal and just to do so, since slavery was in the Bible.

My question today is: where did the Israelites get this notion that slavery was perfectly acceptable?

One could say that it was the norm in the past, since the Israelites were taken into slavery by the Egyptians in Moses’ time. And the Greeks and Romans had been doing the same during their empires. But does that make it right and proper? Or did they think it was a God-given right?

Speculation exists that the whole Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden thing was a fable to explain how an alien race enlisted the help of a ‘new’ species to mine gold for the ‘gods’ (people from the sky).

In other words, mankind was ‘created’ as slaves. When they partook of the forbidden fruit (gained sexual knowledge), the ‘gods’ threw them out of the enclosed prison (Eden) and gave them their freedom to do what they wanted. Well, of course, the newly freed slaves were going to emulate their former ‘owners’, weren’t they? Slavery became the norm, right from the get-go.