Exodus 21 20-21: 20 “Anyone who beats their male or female slave with a rod must be punished if the slave dies as a direct result, 21 but they are not to be punished if the slave recovers after a day or two, since the slave is their property.”
Sounds like property you can beat as long as they don’t die within a day or two, nobody should treat anyone that way that’s horrific.
Substitutionary atonement is the whole gospel story. Jesus sacrifices his life to atone for Adam’s original sin of eating the apple from the tree of knowledge of good and evil that somehow infected the rest of humanity. Even if you believed it were true you shouldn’t place the punishment for crimes of ancestors or parents on their children, that’s fucked up.
The problem here is that the words you see in english translations of scripture are frequently connotatively incorrect… often on purpose (see: the word “hell”, a word and concept that does not exist whatsoever anywhere in scripture).
In this case, the word property is problematic, because it carries certain connotations for us, as modern, english-speaking readers. The root word is keseph, which literally means “money” or “monetary value”. So a more accurate translation to english is “…because the slave is valuable.” But even that is somewhat misleading because there is an overt implication of a household relationship, and this same rule would hold true for a head-of-household’s own children.
Again, I am not trying to diminish the many horrific acts portrayed in scripture, but in many (if not most) cases, the context is radically different than what our universally horrible english translations infer. Now, WHY they are all so bad a whole ‘nother can of worms.
Nobody should treat a household member or child the way the bible describes slaves should be kept, whether they use the actual word slave in the original translation they are describing how to own people you can beat as long as they don’t die within a couple days. They are talking about the allowed treatment for when you keep non-hebrew slaves, you don’t have to excuse it saying they were treated well because this is describing how they should be and were treated.
Edit: Of course I’m looking through it with a lens of modern ethics, but one of the selling points of religion is a dogma that never has to change because they know absolute morality from prophetic futures and can tell what is going to happen except apparently when it doesn’t
