The fourth of the ten commandments is quoted after this and commented on by me. The quote is from The New American Bible: “Remember to keep holy the sabbath day. Six days you may labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the sabbath day of the Lord, your God. No work may be done then either by you, or your son or daughter, or your male or female slave, or by your beast, or by the alien that lives with you. In six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them; but on the seventh day he rested. That is why the Lord has blessed the sabbath day and made it holy.”
My response: It is crystal clear that God or the good deities do not want us working on the sabbath day of our people, religion, or time in history. We need a day of rest from labor (If it is harvest time, and rain is coming, and the farmer needs to combine on Sunday to save his harvest, that likely is a legitimate exception. Or if a person owns a resort or inn or works as a shift nurse in a nursing home, these are legitimate exceptions.).
God also wants us to keep holy the sabbath day by attending religious service, or praying, or meditating or reading the Bible.
This 4th commandment is quoted from the Holy Bible (KJV): “Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work. But the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates:
For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.”
My response: The Holy Bible refers to the believer’s manservant or maidservant, but The New American Bible translates manservant as slaves.
It may be that a manservant was not always a male slave and a maidservant was not always a female slave, but they likely were more than not, but it certainly reveals a class structure, or social hierarchy as universal in the ancient world, both in pagan and Judeo-Christian societies.
It seems that Yahweh and Jesus did not condemn slavery outright. I just watched a 6-minute video narrated by a Pastor Nelson and he pointed out that the ancient Hebrews gave slaves some modest civil rights, and that in the New Testament it was taught that slave owners and slaves both had the same master in heave, Jesus, so this implicitly or explicitly asserts that God or Jesus regards people as equals in the next world, if not always in this world.
Pastor Nelson also pointed out that Christianity was not a political movement, so ending slavery was not its primary interest. He also pointed out that God wants worldly change to unfold slowly and gradually until Christians in the 19th century outlawed slavery.
A critic could ask the tough question that if injustice, inequality, and slavery are evils, why did not Yahweh and Jesus speak up for abolishing this cruel practice? I cannot answer that easily, but would offer that we cannot judge ancient value choices by today’s standards; we have to take them within the context of that long gone generation.
It also seemed to me that Yahweh and Jesus realized that they could only slowly, gently upgrade the ethics of these ancient peoples without damaging them irreversibly in some way. If I am correct with this interpretation, it seems that good divinities raise human ethical consciousness slowly but steadily over the centuries because humans are such a primitive, rigidly conservative creature, that drastic moral reform backfires, doing more harm than good.
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