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| Moses, from the movie "The Ten Commandments." Image source. |
[content note: slavery, rape]
So I've been reading the book Womanist Midrash [affiliate link], and I got to the part where Gafney talks about Exodus 21:7, "When a man sells his daughter as a slave, she shall not go out as the men go out." (This is Gafney's translation; the NIV translates it as "servant.")
Gafney points out that this section, the rules for how it works when you have slaves, is in the book of Exodus. The book of Exodus, you guys. You know, Exodus, which starts out with the epic story of God bringing Their people out of slavery in Egypt. The ten plagues, parting the Red Sea, Passover, all that. The book of Exodus. After God brings Their people out of Egypt, God gives laws to Moses (like the Ten Commandments) and some of those laws are about how to treat your slaves.
The juxtaposition of this is WILD, and is something I never noticed before. Gafney asks readers to imagine the young Israelite women who were enslaved in Egypt, and then God freed them, and then they were again sold into slavery by their fathers, and there was no one to come and free them then.
Reading this, I'm extremely aware that I'm a white Christian, and Gafney is black, and that's why I never really thought slavery in the bible was a big deal. Gafney, on the other hand, says this:
For me as a black feminist and womanist descended from enslaved Africans in the Americas, biblical slavery is a particularly pernicious and personal issue. Slavery in the Bible represents more than the ubiquity of slavery in the ancient world; it represents the theological bulwark on which the Atlantic slave trade rested.
Well, yeah. And the fact that white American Christians try to just ignore all the slavery in the bible is A SIN.
In my experience growing up in the white evangelical church, first of all we didn't talk about the slavery in the bible. A lot of times the bible translations use the word "servant" instead of "slave." But to the extent that we did talk about slavery in the bible, it was in the context of apologetics. Some atheist comes and says to you that the bible is bad because it condones slavery, and you have to give an argument to defend the bible. The arguments we gave were along these lines:
- Slavery in the bible was totally different than American-style race-based chattel slavery. So even though slavery is bad, it wasn't, like, that bad. (And if anyone defends US slavery using the bible, well they're wrong, so just ignore them.)
- In ancient times, slavery was seen as normal. So even though God doesn't agree with it, he allowed it back then, because it would have been such a huge societal change to abolish slavery. But in the long run God didn't want people to enslave each other.
It was only about giving excuses so that atheists would stop pointing out the slavery in the bible. It was never about me, a Christian, being disturbed by biblical slavery, and asking why my God would allow that. It was never about recognizing the horror of how the bible has been used to support atrocities like slavery. It was never about caring about the enslaved characters in the bible stories.
For black American Christians, though, it can't just be an exercise in apologetics. The biblical passages condoning slavery have done real damage.
So Gafney points out this passage in the book of Exodus, the commands that God gave Moses regarding how slavery works. Right after God dramatically freed Their people from slavery in Egypt. Why is one of these things a well-known bible story, that Cecil B. DeMille made a 3-hour epic movie about, and one of them is "oh just ignore that, that's just how their society was back then"? We should be talking about these two things in connection with each other. God and Moses freed the Israelites from Egyptian slavery, and then turned around and said "so anyway, if you want to sell your daughter as a slave, here's how." Doesn't the story of the Exodus hit different, once you realize that?
If you read the story of the Exodus in the bible, you may notice that Moses did not say to Pharaoh, "Let my people go, because slavery is wrong." Instead it was more like, "Let my people go, because my god can beat up your god." Turns out it was never about "slavery is wrong." The bible *does* record God saying, "I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering." But did They really mean that? Did They later hear the cry of Israelites who were sold into slavery by other Israelites?
And in this section of "Womanist Midrash," Gafney emphasizes that when the bible talks about "selling your daughter into slavery," this is sex slavery we're talking about. And any time the bible talks about female slaves, this is sex slavery. (The book says it was common for male slaves to be sexually abused too.) Gafney says that the slaves may have done many other non-sexual tasks, but she uses the term "sex slavery" to make it clear that this was a class of people seen as sexually available to their masters.
I did not know that. Probably the reason is... slavery is so much worse than you imagine. American slavery was so much worse than you imagine. (Honestly, American slavery was also sex slavery.) And biblical slavery was so much worse than you imagine.
The picture I get, from reading "Womanist Midrash," is that back then, in the culture where the bible was written, they believed there was a class of people that it was okay to rape. The way they viewed sex was not in terms of "guarding your heart" like I was taught in purity culture.
I was taught that it's a bad idea to have sex outside of a monogamous marriage because then you'll be heartbroken, you'll be heartbroken about it for your entire life because sex necessarily creates a permanent emotional connection, and later when you're in a relationship with someone else, you'll still be hung up on your ex and unable to fully love your current partner. And these rules were created by God for our own good, God gave us sex as a good gift and this is how he wants us to enjoy it. And the rules are the same for both men and women (even though in practice for some reason people judge women much more harshly for breaking the rules). They said this is the "biblical" view of sex.
But this stuff about sex slavery in the bible... no, it's not that at all. It's like, men are in charge, and it's okay for men to rape women who are slaves. If someone rapes a married woman, well that would be bad because she belongs to her husband. It's about possessiveness, about who has power over whom. Nobody really cares about consent. That's the biblical view of sex.
(Suddenly it makes a lot more sense, in a horrifying way, why the bible specifies a punishment for a woman who is not a virgin when she gets married, but there's no equivalent punishment for a man. I always thought "well of course they had the same rules for men and women, but they just didn't happen to mention the part about men" but NOPE.)
I remember as a kid, reading the bible, there were some passages where I wasn't sure if it was talking about slavery or marriage. Take a look at Exodus 21:7-11:
“If a man sells his daughter as a servant, she is not to go free as male servants do. If she does not please the master who has selected her for himself, he must let her be redeemed. He has no right to sell her to foreigners, because he has broken faith with her. If he selects her for his son, he must grant her the rights of a daughter. If he marries another woman, he must not deprive the first one of her food, clothing and marital rights. If he does not provide her with these three things, she is to go free, without any payment of money.
I remember reading things like this in the bible, starting out with the assumption that it's about someone who works as a servant, ya know, doing farming or whatever, and then partway through the passage being so confused and deciding it's actually about if you marry your servant, apparently? Uh. It's about sex slavery. Also isn't it a little ****ed-up to have a passage in the bible where you can't tell if it's about marriage or slavery?
And another thing: Can we talk about Numbers 31?
In Numbers 31, Moses sends the Israelite army to fight the Midianites. The Israelites win, and bring back a lot of livestock and prisoners. Moses then says, and I quote,
“Have you allowed all the women to live?” he asked them. “They were the ones who followed Balaam’s advice and enticed the Israelites to be unfaithful to the Lord in the Peor incident, so that a plague struck the Lord’s people. Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.
I remember reading this, as a kid, and I was like, "what?"
And I've read apologetics books that explain it away like this: "Well, they had to kill the boys, because they would have grown up to become soldiers who would want vengeance. And they had to kill the non-virgin women, because [I don't even remember, some apologetics bullshit]." (The point of apologetics is to sear your conscience with a goddamn hot iron. Become the kind of person who says "here's why genocide is okay sometimes.")
And oh it gets worse:
The Lord said to Moses, “You and Eleazar the priest and the family heads of the community are to count all the people and animals that were captured. Divide the spoils equally between the soldiers who took part in the battle and the rest of the community. From the soldiers who fought in the battle, set apart as tribute for the Lord one out of every five hundred, whether people, cattle, donkeys or sheep. Take this tribute from their half share and give it to Eleazar the priest as the Lord’s part. From the Israelites’ half, select one out of every fifty, whether people, cattle, donkeys, sheep or other animals. Give them to the Levites, who are responsible for the care of the Lord’s tabernacle.” So Moses and Eleazar the priest did as the Lord commanded Moses.
The plunder remaining from the spoils that the soldiers took was 675,000 sheep, 72,000 cattle, 61,000 donkeys and 32,000 women who had never slept with a man.
So *God* is in on this. God wants the Israelites to treat virgin women like livestock to divide up among all the soldiers. WTF.
When I was in college, I remember having a conversation with one of my non-Christian friends (let's call him Bob) about this bible story. Bob was saying that Moses was telling the soldiers they could take these women prisoners and rape them, and I was like, no way. That would be so outlandish, no one would do that! How can you think that about Moses?! I did feel that it was creepy the way the bible kept specifying that these women had never slept with a man, but I assumed it must just be a translation thing, surely the biblical writer didn't mean it to sound that creepy. These were little girls and they were being adopted into Israelite families, right? That would actually make sense, right? That would be a reasonable thing to do for a child who just lost her family in a war, right? Not rape her, what on earth, who would do that?
Yeah turns out Moses did mean they could rape them. Moses. "Let my people go" Moses. That Moses.
"My god can beat up your god" Moses.
And one more thing from "Womanist Midrash" I want to talk about:
In 2 Chronicles 28:8ff, the prophet Oded demands that the Judeans free the Israelite women and men that they have taken captive as spoils of war as shiphchah-slaves and 'avadiym, "male-slaves." The people do so, and the text notes that they clothe those among the slaves who were naked (v. 15) as they heed the prophet. The public nudity of the slaves in that context calls up images of slave markets and the public stripping of slaves intended for sex-work, so that their potential buyers may more easily assess their value.
This is also really surprising to me. I've read this passage before, and when it said they clothed the slaves who were naked, I thought, "well these are prisoners of war, obviously they're all having a really bad day, maybe they lost their clothes somewhere along the way too" and also not thinking it meant literally naked, but just not really having the right clothes that one would want to have in that situation. I never thought of it as a sexual thing.
But, yes, it's good that someone came along and asked, "Wait, why are some of the slaves naked?" Apparently that was how it worked. Apparently it was understood back then that slaves were sex slaves.
White American Christians need to talk about this stuff. The bible condones slavery, and that's bad- we need to be able to admit that the bible is sometimes bad. And our ancestors used the bible as a justification for enslaving black people. We can't just say "well they obviously interpreted the bible wrong" and act like it doesn't matter, because they are like us. We need to learn from that history so that we don't commit the same sins. We need to listen to black theologians and learn about the bible from them.
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Posts about the book "Womanist Midrash" by Wilda C. Gafney:
Womanist Midrash
The Slavery We Ignore in the Book of Exodus
The Second-Worst Bible Story
Michal wasn't here for David's worship, and now neither am I
Why did I think David was the good guy in the story of Abigail?
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Related:
I Wish I Was This Angry About Slavery in the Bible
"Slaves, Women & Homosexuals" (What is this book actually about?)
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