The law of Moses permits things that the rest of Scripture treats as wrong, and it does so on purpose. Dr. Peter Williams argues that this is how law works in a world full of sin: a law can fence in a harm without approving of it. The objection that God must therefore approve of slavery or easy divorce rests on an assumption almost nobody says out loud, that whatever a law regulates, the lawgiver must think is good. Test that assumption and much of the objection’s force goes with it, though some real questions remain.
What exactly is the objection claiming?
It helps to state the objection at full strength before answering it. Someone reading Exodus or Deuteronomy for the first time finds rules for how long a Hebrew servant may be held, rules for what happens when a master injures a servant, and a procedure that lets a man send his wife away with a written certificate. The reader then reasons like this:
- God gave these laws.
- A good lawgiver only gives laws that reflect what he approves.
- So God approved of servitude and of divorce on these terms.
- A good God would not approve of these things.
- So either God is not good, or these laws did not come from him.
Each step looks reasonable on its own. The argument is valid, which means that if every premise is true, the conclusion follows. So the question is which premise is doing more work than it can bear. Williams does not deny the first premise. He says plainly that the laws in the Old Testament are presented as coming from God, and that in that sense they are good. His challenge lands on the second premise.
Does a law that regulates something approve of it?
Williams tests the second premise with an ordinary case. Some American states regulate gambling. He points out that “the fact that you have laws regulating gambling doesn’t mean the people who wrote the laws think that gambling’s at all good. They might think it’s terrible.” A licensing rule, an age limit or a payout cap tells you that lawmakers decided to manage a practice. It does not tell you that they admire it. Often it tells you the reverse: they think the practice causes damage and they want less of it.
This counterexample shows the second premise is false as a general rule. If it were true, every regulation of a harm would amount to an endorsement of that harm. Speed limits would endorse dangerous driving up to the posted number. Rules for how a landlord may evict a tenant would endorse eviction as an ideal. Nobody reads ordinary law that way. The objection only works if the Old Testament is held to a reading of law that we apply nowhere else.
Williams describes the result in his own terms: “God allowed things that if people weren’t sinful, he wouldn’t be allowing.” He adds that “sometimes what I see in the law is a compromise,” and that “you’ve also gotta see it as sometimes temporary measures.” The word compromise can sound alarming when applied to God. Here it has a specific meaning. The compromise sits between the ideal God intends and what a particular people, at a particular time, could actually live under. God’s character stays whole on both sides of it.
Where does the analogy break?
A careful skeptic will spot the weak point in the gambling example. A state legislature regulates gambling because it cannot simply abolish the desire to gamble. Its power is limited. God’s power is not. So why would an all-powerful God settle for regulation?
Williams locates the limit in the people receiving the law. He says that when God decides what law to give, “one of the things he is taking into account is people’s sinfulness and what law is possible in that situation.” A law is addressed to human beings who must obey it. A rule that a whole society will not keep leaves the harm in place and drives it underground, where nothing protects the weakest people caught in it.
Williams also places the law inside a larger story about how God deals with sin. He lists the responses in sequence: expulsion from the garden, the flood, the confusion of languages, the choosing of Abraham and then Israel, the giving of the law, the judges, the kings, the prophets, the exile. His verdict is blunt: “None of those things actually deal with sin.” The law could restrain behavior. It could not change the heart producing the behavior. On his reading, the Old Testament shows that problem again and again until the prophets point toward God himself coming to deal with it, which Christians understand as the coming of Christ.
That answer does not make the objection disappear, but it changes what the objection must prove. The skeptic now has to show that a better law was workable for that society, and that a stricter rule would have reduced harm rather than hidden it. That is a historical and practical claim, and it cannot be deduced from God’s goodness alone.
How can a reader tell a concession from an ideal?
Here a fair critic raises a sharper worry. If any uncomfortable law can be relabeled a compromise, the explanation proves too much. It would protect the Bible from every possible criticism, and an explanation that can never be wrong explains nothing.
Williams supplies a test, and he takes it from Jesus. In Matthew 19 the Pharisees ask why Moses gave a certificate of divorce. Jesus answers: “Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so” (Matthew 19:8). The text makes a careful distinction. The Pharisees speak of what Moses commanded. Jesus speaks of what Moses suffered, an older English word meaning permitted or put up with. Then he measures the permission against creation, where God made them male and female and joined them (Matthew 19:4-6). The passage is about divorce, and it would overreach to say it settles every other law. What it does show is the method: Jesus himself treats part of the Mosaic law as a concession and names the standard it falls short of.
Williams draws the principle out: “ideally a different law would’ve been written.” He then applies the same test beyond divorce. When he reads laws that seem to allow people to have slaves, he says, “one of the things I’ve gotta understand is that in the beginning, it wasn’t like that.” Elsewhere he states the creation pattern directly: in the beginning, no human owns another human.
This test gives the explanation limits, which is exactly what the critic asked for. A law that departs from the pattern God set before sin entered, as the divorce certificate does, is a permission. A law that matches that pattern still binds. Williams makes the point with deliberate dryness: the Old Testament forbids marrying your mother, and he thinks that law still applies today. He also names a third group. Some laws served Israel’s role at a particular time, such as rules about distinctive clothing meant to set Israel apart from other peoples. Those, he says, have done their job; Christians can learn principles from them without applying them directly. The reader has a way to sort the laws that is grounded in the text rather than in personal comfort.
Does the servitude in the law describe American slavery?
The objection carries special weight for readers who know that the Bible was quoted to defend the enslavement of Africans in America. That history deserves to be named. It also makes the hidden premise more tempting, because the same English word now covers both systems. Williams warns that “we mustn’t read any of that later stuff back into the text,” and concludes that “what we have in the Old Testament is not the same as chain gangs in the cotton fields.” He describes much of the arrangement as what we might call debt slavery: in a subsistence economy with little surplus, a person facing starvation might sell years of future work in exchange for being kept alive.
The regulations themselves bear this out, and they show what kind of law this is. The law limits a Hebrew servant’s term to six years (Exodus 21:2). It requires that a servant whose master knocks out an eye or a tooth be set free (Exodus 21:26-27). And it makes kidnapping a person and selling him a capital crime (Exodus 21:16), which condemns the very act the Atlantic trade was built on. These are limits placed on a practice, the same shape as the gambling law.
Williams does not argue that all compelled labor is wrong. He accepts forced labor as a sentence for rape or murder, and conscription to defend a nation. His line is justice: “it’s gotta be just compulsory labor, not just to suit the whims of some rich guy.” That distinction answers the hidden premise a second time. A law permitting some compelled labor under strict limits does not approve every system that has ever used the word slave. Williams adds a judgment that he admits rests on limited study of North America: in his view, the more closely people followed Scripture, the more they opposed slavery.
What the argument settles, and what it leaves hard
The step from “God regulated this” to “God approved this” fails as a general principle, and Jesus himself read part of the Mosaic law as a concession to hard hearts. Those two results carry most of the weight. They do not settle every verse. Exodus 21:20-21, for example, sets a penalty when a master’s beating kills a servant at once, yet sets none when the servant survives a day or two, and it gives as its reason that the servant is the master’s money. A reader is right to feel the weight of that. The regulation argument explains how such a law could exist without being God’s ideal. It does not make the law comfortable, and it should not be used to hurry past it.
Williams is candid that some texts still puzzle him, mostly in how one passage fits with another. He compares it to a puzzle you have been working at for an hour: “just ’cause you can’t do it doesn’t mean it can’t be done.” That is a modest claim. An unsolved difficulty, by itself, does not prove the puzzle is broken, especially when the larger pattern of the text keeps pointing one way. His practical advice follows from it: keep reading, pray about the problems, ask friends, and read Scripture together rather than giving up.
Underneath all of this sits a claim Williams makes about law itself: “The law is an expression of his character.” That sounds as if it cuts against the concession argument, but it supports it. A good character shows itself in how it meets people where they actually are. A law shaped by God’s goodness and by human stubbornness at the same time will look exactly like what the reader found: limits on harm, protections for the vulnerable, and a quiet admission, voiced later by Jesus, that from the beginning it was not so. The objection reads that admission as a confession of moral failure. Read with the right assumption about what law is for, it is evidence that the lawgiver knew the difference between the world as it was and the world as he made it.