Hello Sheng-Ta, thanks for responding.

You said:

"Lev. 25 uses vocabs such as "purchase", "property" and "inherited property". It is explicitly stated that the Israelites "can make them slaves for life". Do you not see that?"

I see a great deal.

I've studied this passage in depth. I've studied each word, looking at how it is used throughout the Scriptures. I've studied the context in every aspect.

That's why I don't buy your simplistic interpretation.

The words are indeed key, as you say. Unfortunately, this passage was first translated into English when slavery was still legal. Translators carried that bias into their work, whether consciously or not. Succeeding generations have been slow to correct it.

So let's examine these words.

The word for “slaves” in Hebrew, it is ebed. As any Hebrew dictionary will tell you, this word can mean “servant,” “slave,” “minister,” “adviser,” "soldier," or “official." Abraham calls himself the ebed of his guests, and the Messiah Himself is the Suffering Servant -- the suffering ebed.

Clearly, the word has a wide range of meaning. How do you know which of these it means at any given point? You examine the context.

Based on the Exodus and Deuteronomy passages we've discussed, we can safely say that this word does not mean “slave” in Leviticus 25. It cannot, or else it breaks those two commands. Further, we don't see slaves anywhere in the biblical narrative. We see servants, maids, and hired hands, but we do not see slave masters running slave plantations anywhere.

The better translation, therefore, is “servant,” or in modern-day lingo, “worker” or “employee.”

Many translations are picking up on this. The newer Berean Standard Bible translates the verse: "Your menservants and maidservants shall come from the nations around you." They've recognized that this passage is not describing slavery.

Next, examine the word for “buy.” Exodus 21:16 forbids possessing and selling people, so how can Leviticus 25 allow buying people?

Again, let’s look at what the word means. In Hebrew, this word is qanah, meaning “buy,” or “acquire,” or even “create.”

Eve uses qanah to describe giving birth. Genesis uses it to describe God creating.

Again, it has a far wider range of meaning than "purchase." It can signify any means of acquisition whatsoever, from giving birth to creating ex nihilo to exchanging money.

In modern lingo, how do you talk about acquiring someone to work for you? "Hiring."

That word fits the context of the Law far better.

Exodus 21:16 forbids selling people. So who is receiving the money in Leviticus 25:44?

There’s only one possibility: the worker themselves.

There is no slave trader or slave market at work. There is only the landowner and the worker present in the passage.

These two clarifications make it immediately clear: Leviticus 25:44 describes a hiring process, paying someone from a foreign nation to work for you.

Finally, the phrase "make them slaves for life" butchers the Hebrew. The word is olam, signifying a perpetual statute.

Do you know what else is a perpetual statute?

Every modern-day employment contract.

You are hired perpetually -- without a set limit to your work. You can be fired or you can quit, but you are hired to work long-term, without a set end-date.

If you do set an end date, as more of a contract employee, you'd be more akin to the Hebrew workers, who are released every seventh year.

But foreigners aren't part of the seven-year cycle, because they have no home land to return to in Israel. They have no inheritance to reclaim.

Thus, there is no end-date to their employment. They work until they're fired or they quit.

And again, Deuteronomy 23:15-16 gives them every right to quit and leave whenever they please, and the Law guarantees their freedom.

You said:

"The literary context (v. 25 ff.) is about purchasing and selling of stuff. V. 39-40 makes it clear that Israelites should not be enslaved, but should be treated as hired workers. That should tell you the word "slave" here means something different from "hired worker".

The problem is your assumption that Israel would default to treating foreigners worse than countrymen.

It's the opposite.

It was assumed that you treat foreigners well, so much so that Leviticus 25:35 uses the high standard for foreigners as a guide for how to treat your countrymen:

"Now if your countryman becomes destitute and cannot support himself among you, then you are to help him as you would a foreigner or stranger, so that he can continue to live among you."

You said:

"So when the passage goes on to talk about purchasing foreigners, i.e. non-Israelites, as slaves, you have no basis to claim that the word "slave" in v. 44-46 means just hired worker. If both terms mean the same thing, why would the author make explicit distinctions?"

Again, the author is raising the treatment of countrymen up to the level of the foreigner, not the other way around.

The author makes the explicit distinction in 35 to elevate a countrymen to the level of how you treat a foreigner, so that your countrymen can continue to live among you as the foreigners do.

You said:

"What more context or description do you need? If the author wanted to state that the slaves were treated as property, that's exactly the word you'd expect him to write. You are just in denial."

If slaves were property, you'd expect to see it somewhere in the biblical narratives.

Yet you never do.

Instead, you find passages like Exodus 21:16 and Deuteronomy 23:15-16 and a host of others, all making it impossible to treat people as property.

You said:

"You said context is key. Yet you used other passages that talk about completely different things and try to transfer that meaning to the passage in Lev. 25. You are the one who has no respect for the context."

Any verse in the Law that discusses slavery or servanthood is relevant to discussing slaves and servants.

You said:

"You keep repeating the observation that we read no slave markets in the Old Testament, but you should know that argument from silence is a weak form of evidence. It's like suggesting that the Gospels do not portray Jesus going to the bathroom; therefore, Jesus didn't need to go to the bathroom."

Bad analogies are not arguments, because you can always shape them to say whatever you want them to say.

The problem with your interpretation is this: if the Law was allowing/mandating slavery, then it should be everywhere, like it was in every other ancient culture.

But it isn't.

This isn't a polite excusal, like the avoidance of discussing going to the bathroom.

This is the backbone of all ancient economy and labor.

And yet it's completely missing from the Bible.

There's a reason: it was outlawed.

You said:

"Given your propensity to mental gymnastics, I can only imagine that even if the OT talks about slave markets, you are just going to say that they weren't following the OT laws, similar to idol worship."

If studying what the words mean and studying the context is gymnastics, then every scholar is a gymnast.

You said:

"Appealing to other verses is also very weak. It's not unusual that there are seemingly contradictory laws in the OT. For example, the regulations on the place of sacrifice offering are different depending on which book you read. But you can't pick and choose and say that the ones you like supersede that ones you don't like. If you confess that Lev. 25 is in the Bible and is the word of God, deal with it directly. Don't just dismiss it using other verses."

I don't dismiss it.

I put it in context.

I look at what the words mean.

I see that the interpretation of forcing it to mean chattel slavery violates every kind of context and takes the most reductionistic possible meaning of the words, when a while swath of better-fitting meanings are available.