Thread by @ThabitiAnyabwil

While some mount defenses of slavery and slaveholding, the seminal event of the Old Testament that helps define God’s relationship w/ His people is His literal freeing them from slavery in Egypt. The exodus shapes their entire life and worldview, woven thru their celebrations.

You can only miss this if you’re identifying with Pharaoh and enslavers. That identification with the powerful and villainous blinds you to the wretchedness of forced bondage, makes you sympathetic to abstract justifications, and hard-hearted to those suffering the injustice.

But to read Israel’s sacred texts (i.e., the Bible), you read the history of their groaning in slavery which God heard, the celebration of deliverance in their poetry, and the ritual re-enactments of freedom on their highest holy days—but not one sympathetic word for Pharaoh.

It would not be too much to say that the from-slavery-to-liberation theme is a vital hermeneutic key to understanding the Bible. God’s redemptive work ever moves toward freedom, whether freedom from physical slavery or from spiritual slavery to sin and idolatry.

You can’t use one to erase the other without commuting a “docetic” error. To argue that the new covenant concerns itself primarily/spiritual liberation and merely regulates physical slavery is a step toward arguing only the spiritual matters and not the physical.

It’s an argument pro-slavery voices have often made in the history of the US. To repeat the 2nd tweet, you can only do that when you’re identifying w/ Pharaoh rather than with God and Israel. It’s a hermeneutical idolatry and a spiritually misplaced loyalty to power over freedom.

Imagine yourself to be an ordinary Israelite during 400 years of slavery, or during the plagues and that first Passover, or during the chase Pharaoh gave to the Red Sea, or during the centuries of Passover seders told and retold by your elders...

And arguing “slavery wasn’t bad”

You couldn’t, could you?

And imagine doing that *using the scriptures which record and repeatedly remind you of your liberation from slavery*... it would require a serious psychological break from reason and revelation! It would be a betrayal of God and His crowning saving act.

The discussions about slavery are not instances of Bible ping pong or prooftext bingo. They are illustrations of how losing the central plot line of the holy word can lead to unholy positions that contradict every fiber of the word. Pro-slavery views are a hermeneutical glaucoma.

All that to say... read the Bible like an Egyptian slave or an African-American slave. The Bible is slave testimony. It testifies to God’s liberation and against Pharaoh’s enslaving and demonic sin. Read the Bible like a slave and you’ll never end up on the wrong side of slavery.

*committing