What are the significant differences? People were taken against their will and owned as property. They were subject to forced labor and physical violence.
The position requires not just that Biblical slavery was different in some way from traditional slavery, but that it was SO different that you wouldn't even view it as a moral wrong.
This gets to another Catch 22 that happens when discussing the Old Testament.
This part is talking about social conditions that existed 3000 years ago. Our knowledge of the ancient world is very imperfect. There is quite a lot of doubt surrounding things.
I think we need to take these writings liberally the same way we take Herodotus. I mean, we consider Herodotus historically accurate on many things, but some things not. Also we know that his view of things is probably imperfect in some ways, and we don't claim to know exactly how social conditions were in Ancient Greece. We just have some idea.
It's being argued here that we know, pretty much exactly, how slavery worked in Ancient Israel. And this is supported almost entirely from Biblical texts. How much extra Biblical evidence do we really have recording Ancient Israel in extensive detail? Not a whole lot.
The Catch 22 is that other things supported almost entirely from Biblical texts (say the Exodus) are simultaneously considered to be completely mythical.
My view is that we don't know any of this in very exact detail. It is too long ago, and even the texts that we are using were written hundreds of years after the purported events. There is plenty of room for variation here. From the Bible, it seems like King David was a pretty big time king. Some modern interpretations find him rather insignificant in the region.
I take all these texts with a grain of truth and a grain of salt. I think the very general outline was probably accurate in some degree, but to which degree is an open question for me.
So it is pretty easy for me to imagine that Ancient Israelite slavery, something that we really have pretty big gaps in the historical knowledge of (like most of the ancient world), could in fact have been something pretty different than what we think of as more modern American slavery.
It's even easier for me to imagine this in light of the NT, and in light of some of the contradictory passages even in the OT.
Yes, it takes some imagination. But pretty much everything in ancient history does. Herodotus said there were giant gold digging ants in Persia. Modern research actually suggests he was half right. There is a marmot animal that does dig up gold. And the Persian words for marmot and ant were very similar. Odds are Herodotus was not lying to us on this one. He just screwed up through his translator.
