The laws contained in the Torah are not the eternal law. They are not perfect. They are not universalizable. They are dim reflections of the true law and they often make concessions to the sinful state of mankind - so when we find a critic of the Bible complaining about the imperfect nature of the Mosaic law, it may be a legitimate move to just agree with them, admitting the imperfection.
How can I say such a thing? I’m speaking about the Bible, after all! But this is exactly the manner in which Jesus spoke about the Mosaic law, specifically in regard to divorce: For “it was not this way from the beginning,” and the concessions made in the Mosaic law were due to the “hardness of heart.” But we can broaden the case beyond divorce. We can see that, once this interpretative principle is admitted, that it can lead to a whole new view of how we should read and understand the Mosaic law. Jesus was quite the radical.
So mention of slavery, polygamy, divorce, conquest, odd civil code, and so on in the Torah may very well be concessatory. I think it’s important that we think of these concessions as regulations of already ongoing sinful practices. The effect of such regulations isn’t so much as to approve of these practices as it is to reduce and regulate an already ongoing practice. Take laws that aim to regulate abortion, either by forbidding the practice after the second trimester or enforcing stricter medical rules. The effect of these laws isn’t an approval of abortion, but a reduction and regulation of it. A similar thing can be said in regards to the OT’s regulation of sinful behavior like divorce, polygamy, and slavery.
We may ask why God would make concessions to sinful man–why not just proclaim the eternal and perfect law from the get-go? But this is a matter of probing the divine intention and may be beyond our capabilities. Still, Jesus does gesture towards one answer: “Because of your hardness of heart.” Perhaps worse realities would have resulted if these concessions were not made. Perhaps God wished to slowly meld society into the Kingdom of God. Perhaps God wanted the moral reformers of society to sprout organically, so that he could integrate these men and women as strongly motivated instruments for his Kingdom. I’m only guessing, but it seems like many options are on the table.
With this in mind, let’s take a look at a difficult passage, Exodus 21:20-21
If a man strikes his male servant or his female servant with a staff so that he or she dies as a result of the blow, he will surely be punished. However, if the injured servant survives one or two days, the owner will not be punished, for he has suffered the loss.
As the ANE scholar Harry Hoffner has argued, this law was in place to probe whether the master had homicidal intent. If the slave died immediately, that was enough to prove homicidal intent and warrant immediate punishment on the charge of intentional murder. If the slave survived for a few days before dying, the death would instead classify as something like an accidental death, as presumably the master took the effort and restraint to not intentionally kill the slave - but the punishment due the master for accidental death would have been paid in the expenses and time it would have required to care for the slave in that period, as well as the loss of one his workers, for the master had ‘suffered the loss,’ and that would count as their punishment. Intentional homicide and accidental death warranted different levels of punishment to the master.
And, secondly, presumably the slave would have been a member of the Canaanite peoples, known for their avid human sacrifice. The enslavement of these peoples could thus be construed as punishment for prior crime and the Israelites would then be construed as wardens rather than slavers.
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