konceptual99,
I am slightly confused however since my original comment which sparked this too-ing and fro-ing was in response to a post you made which appears to be attempting to contextualise the accounts of slavery in the OT/Torah (and I apologise for the simplistic crossover but time is limited) and mitigate them by reference to laws that provide a measure of protection from very harsh treatment.
If I have understood the overall point of your original post then why attempt to defend or explain OT slavery rather than simply say that Jews don't believe any of it happened in that way and all these accounts are false?
Part of it is my fault. And part of it has to do with what we have both just come to understood about one another.
When I said you "understood the overall point," I was referring to the view of slavery we both share in common. We have been on the same page on this issue since the start.
What I was not referring to is was your assumptions about what Torah is to Jews. I thought you must have known the view of Jews from the start. Why argue about what the Jews' laws are about if you aren't actually studied in Torah and Halacha? Right?
Again that was my fault. I forget that you are not writing from my point of view, i.e.: "We're talking philosophical ethics that the Jews couldn't apply at the time they wrote these laws about having slaves. They themselves were slaves in Babylon, not owners of them. They were writing about how they hope slaves would be treated in the future if they ever got back to their land."
But you weren't arguing from that point of view, were you? You just learned at the end that this was my view because I just learned at the end where you were arguing from. We could have saved time and effort if we had realized this, but we can't read each other's minds, and so it took time to get the wires uncrossed.
In the end, I think we understand one another now. But any other confusion I have caused, forgive me as my time on here for the next few weeks is up. As I wrote, we are a little around 10 days before Passover, and we have a whole list of things we do to prepare that actually begins today for me, in just an hour or so.
But despite that it was a debate, it was very pleasurable discussing matters with you.
