Hello Bob,

Thanks for taking the time to respond.

Every single person comes to the Bible with presuppositions. There isn't a person on earth who can just "read it plainly."

The key to reading the Bible accurately is to identify your presuppositions and compare them to the original text, the original culture, the surrounding context in the Scriptures, and so on.

One of our current cultural presuppositions is that "slave" means something like the American south a few centuries ago, and so wherever you see "slave" in the Bible, it must mean that.

It doesn't.

The word most often translated "slave" is ebed, but ebed usually does not mean "slave." Usually it means "servant," or what we would today call an "employee" -- someone with rights who can choose to leave the job if they want. Often it means soldier, assistant, advisor, or helper.

But the Bible was translated into English when slavery was legal. The original translators ignored that nuance, and wrote "slave" in passages that are about employees, servants, and soldiers.

If we want to read the Bible accurately, we need to identify these incorrect translations and presuppositions and correct them. That's what I'm endeavoring to do.