Exodus 21: The Bible Condones WHAT?!

One of the primary avenues of attack against the Bible by its detractors has to do with the specifics of some of the Old Testament Law.  In our day and age, it can be hard to understand what the Bible commands concerning such things as slavery, marriage, and punishment.

"How can you defend slavery?" we might be asked with hostility.  "Or the idea of applying the death penalty to someone who curses their parents?" (vs. 17)  "And what about 'eye for an eye' and 'tooth for a tooth'?" (vs. 24)

Part of the problem comes with trying to impose twenty-first century principles of justice and equality upon a culture that was still fairly primitive.  For instance, today we imprison for most serious crimes.  How could a people, themselves at the mercy of scarce economic resources, be expected to house, clothe, feed and guard criminals?  Other penalty systems had to be developed.  Today we have a robust economic system of capital and empowered workers.  How could that be expected to function in an ancient agrarian society?  Just as much as the enlightened decry cultural imperialism when we judge other societies in comparison to our own, so also should we be aware that it is unfair to hold up ancient people to modern standards.

Even some of the passages that sound barbaric to our ears are really not so upon further examination.  "Eye for eye?"  In its original intent, that principle was meant to LIMIT retribution.  If someone knocked out your eye, you weren't permitted to kill them and their family.  Punishment had to be proportionate to the crime.  And even then, a financial standard was applied to the loss so that literal body parts weren't being lopped off - aggressors had to make a monetary reimbursement.

Rather than condemning those parts of the Bible that strike us as foreign or antiquated, I believe we should be thankful that these early cultures in the Bible were doing the best they could with what they had.  For their day and age, they were an advanced society.  And they set the world on a progressive path of growing rights and freedoms so that, in time, slavery could be abolished, equality between the genders could be embraced, and systems of justice could be developed.

Don't mistake the nascent ideas of the first society of chosen people for the ultimate destination that God has in mind for this world.  In Exodus, God was working to direct history toward His purposes and plan.  He still is.