Stolen bodies working stolen land

“You’re not entitled to benefit from your own murderous act.” 1^st Kings 21:19

Who in their right mind supports reparations for slavery? Who believes decisions made 400 years ago should require us to pay reparations? What kind of fuzzy-headed liberal thinks like that?

That would be God. Awkward, huh?

God said, "I have seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt, and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters; I know their sufferings…behold, the cry of the people of Israel has come to me, and I have seen the oppression with which the Egyptians oppress them.”
God drafted Moses to go to Pharaoh and demand their freedom. Long story short, Pharaoh reluctantly agreed, but not before forcing God’s hand.

By ordering the deaths of the first-born children of Egypt, God knew the people would finally demand their leader free the slaves. That cataclysmic Biblical event resonates with the American Civil War, which took the lives of so many of the first born (and second and third born) of both sides before the South let go of its grip on slaves.

After informing Moses of the God-awful plan, God says it will cause Pharaoh to “drive you out from here.” In the third chapter of Exodus, God told Moses the slaves would “not go away empty handed.” God ordered the slaves to “ask” the Egyptian people for their “ornaments of silver and gold.” Thus, they stripped the Egyptians.

After 400 years of enslavement, these slaves were free. And as God decreed, they did not leave empty handed. Where do you think they got the gold they used to craft the Golden Calf? The gold and silver weren’t gifts, but what Matthew Henry’s Biblical Commentary called “back wages.” Others call it plunder. In his book “God: A Biography,” Jack Miles writes, “The Israelites are not to be blamed for engaging in this plunder. It was God’s idea.”
It was reparations.

Reparations were God’s way of restoring justice. The first chapter of Exodus tells us of the injustices that demanded balancing. “The Egyptians put the Israelites to work at crushing labor, and they made their lives bitter with hard work with mortar and bricks and every work in the field, all their crushing work that they performed. Egyptians were ruthless in all the tasks that they imposed on them.”

God not only heard the cries from the slaves, God also witnessed how the Egyptian people, their country, and their economy benefited from the suffering they visited on the slaves. A nation can afford to build magnificent cities when it doesn’t have to pay wages to the builders. The Hebrew Bible says that is exactly what the slaves did for the Egyptians. 

Slaves did the same for the United States. 

One historian described the economic benefits. “Slavery was so profitable, it sprouted more millionaires per capita in the Mississippi River valley than anywhere in the nation. With cash crops of tobacco, cotton and sugarcane, America’s southern states became the economic engine of the burgeoning nation. 

“If the Confederacy had been a separate nation, it would have ranked as the fourth richest in the world at the start of the Civil War.” https://www.history.com/news/slavery-profitable-southern-economy

The “must-read” New York Times study, “The 1619 Project,” documents “the vast material wealth” created by slaves, which “helped turn a poor, fledgling nation into a financial colossus.”

Add the land stolen from Native Peoples. “Stolen bodies working stolen land,” is Colson Whitehead’s description in “The Underground Railroad.” America was built on slave labor, stolen land, and the destruction of African and Native cultures. We took their past, present and future, using them to create the wealth that continues to benefit all of us more than 150 years after slavery ended.

How do we atone? God’s plan for Egypt’s atonement for enslaving the Hebrews? Plunder Egypt. Today’s debate over reparations doesn’t ask as much. It asks only for an honest inquiry into what justice would look like if white Americans paid their fair debt.