However, God authorizes a different kind of slave society-a reformed institution, perhaps, but a slaveholding community nonetheless, in which genealogical difference determines the line between alien and citizen, the distinction that encodes the legal status of people who may be enslaved without end. Israel shall not take on the nature of Egypt, God declares. 2 In business dealings, aliens should be treated as citizens because they are bound up in the same beloved society, established and governed by the God who liberated Israel from the cruelty of the Egyptian form of slavery. Jacob Milgrom explains that the oppression prohibited in 19:33 has to do with cheating and with deceptive economic practices. Instead, the Israelite citizen should exercise empathetic slavery, compassionate mastery-to administer their ownership as benevolent slaveholders instead of with Egyptian brutality.
They should not treat their slaves as they themselves were treated while enslaved in the Egyptian empire. The law allows Israelites to own foreigners as slaves, yet their use of slaves should not be cruel. His sovereignty involves converting people into numbers for the political economy’s ledger. Solomon conscripted seventy thousand laborers and eighty thousand stonecutters in the hill country, with three thousand six hundred to oversee them” (2 Chron. “Solomon decided to build a temple for the name of the Lord, and a royal palace for himself. The second chapter of 2 Chronicles begins with the king’s penchant for forced labor. Solomon relocates them throughout his kingdom as needed, assigning overseers from among the enslaved population to administer Israel’s public work projects. “Seventy thousand of them he assigned as laborers, eighty thousand as stonecutters in the hill country, and three thousand six hundred as overseers to make the people work” (2 Chron. In the Chronicler’s narrative, King Solomon numbers the foreigners in his territory in order to monitor their existence, to track their sojourn in his land, and to allocate their bodies in his system of labor exploitation. “Then Solomon took a census of all the aliens who were residing in the land of Israel, after the census that his father David had taken” (2 Chron. In this paper the detention center becomes a site from which to understand the carceral power that creates the world-a political landscape echoing with biblical theologies. A liberative theology begins with a political commitment of solidarity. The Scriptures are not salvific on their own terms. The United States is a project in social engineering, in population control, invested in registering and monitoring and relocating human life-all of which resonate with political trajectories outlined in biblical texts. This paper tracks with Scriptural theologies that inform mechanisms of enslavement, the shadow side of citizenship. Detention centers extend the carceral imagination that subtends the modern state, which has claimed ownership of a particular land and has established a legal framework to criminalize and punish peoples who are categorized as threats to its vision for society. The apparatus of citizenship establishes the criteria to determine who should be counted as undocumentable and therefore alien to lawful existence in this geographical territory.