1) The author makes precisely 3 statements regarding Halacha (Judaic law), each of which is demonstrably incorrect.
Well, no. He makes those statements about the Old Testament, not actual Jewish law. It seems blatantly obvious that the rulings and commentary you cite are indeed “apologetic glosses on a defective primary text.” The fact that they were written when scientific knowledge was still rudimentary is immaterial—clearly, they patched the locust thing when they finally got around to counting its legs.
2) The author asserts that the Tanakh (Old Testament) “doesn’t talk about a sense of wonder at the complexity of the universe.”
Again, in trying to refute this you cite texts that were written much later. If the Old Testament actually contained references to a sense of wonder at the complexity of the universe you’d be able to quote it. I think the closest it comes is a sense of despair and humility at the incomprehensibility of the universe.
3) The author asserts that historical Judaism defends the authenticity of the Torah without accounting for Bayes’ Theorem.
I think you’ve simply misunderstood, here: this is close to the opposite of what the author is saying.
4) The author asserts that contemporary religionists justify false opinions by claiming that their religion is a separate magisterium which can be neither proven nor disproven.
You don’t really dispute this, you just sort of argue that it’s okay. It’s not. If something like “the nature of good and evil” does not describe some aspect of human experience, then it’s vacuous. If it does, then it is subject to scientific analysis.
Given all of this, the popular contention that the Torah endorses slave-ownership is difficult to defend.
The Torah condemns nonmarital sex. Repeatedly, explicitly, and harshly. It does not condemn slavery. Nonmarital sex is an inevitable constant across all cultures, times, and places. It is so much more inevitable than slavery. This seems to suggest a somewhat different attitude toward slavery than toward nonmarital sex.
The passages you quote, brutal as they are, concern only Jewish slaves. The Torah explicitly permits Jews to buy non-Jewish slaves and never free them (Leviticus 25:45-46), but pass them and their children on to your children, forever. It instructs the Jewish people to, when conquering a culturally powerful enemy city, kill the men, women, and male children, but allow the soldiers to keep the virginal girls as slaves. Such a genocide is depicted in Numbers 31, for example. How do you think that kind of slavery went? Imagine you’re a young Midianite woman. Your father dies defending your city, and then it falls to the invaders a day later. Jewish soldiers come to your house. Your old, weak grandfather grabs a sword and bars the door, but you plead with him to surrender, and the soldiers watch as you tug the sword out of his hands and lead him inside to a chair. One of them laughs, walks inside, and runs him through. Your mother wails and he turns to her, sighs dutifully, squares off, and cuts her head off cleanly in a single stroke. You’ve barely had time to register what just happened, when he pulls your baby brother out of his crib. Some part of you manages to mobilize yourself and you find yourself charging towards him, screaming. By the time you reach him, he’s already bashed your brother’s brains out and dropped the body. You get in one wild punch before he backhands you to the ground. He could kill you in an instant but instead he stares at you appraisingly.
Would such a woman ever so much as weave a basket for her captor voluntarily? She’d have to be chained up at night, I bet, or else she’d slit his throat. She’d have to be beaten half to death before she even considered accepting this man as a master—the man who killed her family in front of her. Would the soldier sell her to another Jew? It might not make much of a difference: these would still be the men who destroyed her entire civilization. Would she be sold to outsiders? Sold, as a young, virgin slave, to outsiders who aren’t bound by all those ethical Biblical rules? Yeah, that’s going to end well for her. What do you suppose she would say, if she saw you praying today? Chanting some of the same prayers, thanking the same God in the same language, as the man who slaughtered her family thanked God for delivering her into his hands. Attending synagogue and saying “amen” as they read aloud the story, recorded for all eternity, of her torment and her people’s genocide.
At this point you are already preparing your response, where you explain that the genocide was pragmatically necessary. “They had to kill those people, or the next generation would have killed them. God commanded it because He knew it had to be done. Enslaving the girls was the most merciful practical option.” I beg you not to say this. This is the worst modern consequence of the Talmudic tradition: an intellectual, explaining how mass killings and brutal slavery are sometimes justified. Every time you defend genocide, you hasten the day when it will happen again. I ask again: What could you possibly say to any of those sixteen thousand Midianite women and girls, if they asked you why you were commemorating the atrocities committed against them, and adopting the perpetrator’s heritage as your own?
The next time you kiss a Torah, I expect you to picture that Midianite slave. She’s watching you kiss it. She knows what’s written there. She sees you as reaffirming, in that moment, your allegiance to the worst parts of human civilization. What do you need to do to get right with her?
Thank you for continuing to engage.
Genocide is the correct term for what the Jewish people do in Numbers 31. After the war is over, Moses discovers that the military commanders have spared the women and children, and is wroth. Or, from the New International Version:
This is meant as a destruction of their ethnicity to prevent them from tainting the Israelites, following commandments such as that in Deuteronomy 7:
There are plenty of other passages where the Israelites are described as killing “all the men, women, and children.” Numbers 31 is notable to me because it makes it clear that this was not commonly accepted practice—it was something Moses had to specifically instruct. But really this is also demonstrated by the way that these sort of genocidal injunctions feel the need to spell out that mercy is not to be shown to the women and children.
If you’d rather not use the word genocide, we can of course substitute “killing a girl’s entire family in front of her, then enslaving her,” and multiply it by, in this case, sixteen thousand.