re: #355 Bob Levin

Bob, I enjoy your postings because you tell a story here, an anecdote there, or offer an interesting explanation. BUT. This is all going around the main issue. I will skip over the fact that you did not really address the reliability of translations issue or the Talmud/Torah chronology issue except by pointing to what the tradition says (rather than what history says).

The main issue is that the contextual Torah verses really leave no doubt as to what kind of “servants” these ebedim were, Hebrew or non-Hebrew. They could have become such for many reasons - poverty, debt, theft, being a captive, being sold by parents etc. (to say that it was simply someone owing money is plain incorrect). There’s still no way around the fact that the Torah permitted and thus sanctified slavery and some of its abuses. This could be argued to still have been a step forward in those circumstances compared to other nations , whatever. But it happened. And history suggests that in practice (rather than in theoretical laws) the slaves in Jewish society in antiquity were very literal slaves. E.g. see a recent Oxford U book Jewish Slavery in Antiquity, intro in PDF here:
Thus Claudia’s comment is incorrect.