As a rationalist, I am fully aware that I cannot know if Yahweh is the real uncaused cause, if there is such a thing as good and evil, and so on. I, like anyone else who makes no assumptions and aligns with reason, can still know that if good and evil exist, certain things are excluded from one category or the other because of logical impossibility. Eternal torture cannot be good if there is such a thing, because it is inherently disproportionate to any deed punished. Opposing eternal torture therefore cannot be evil. Similarly, if an act like kidnapping can be committed against people of one's own country or foreigners, as is the case, there would be no moral difference between such targets if kidnapping is immoral. The act is the same; everyone is a person despite their nationality and ancestry. In Exodus 21:16, the Torah says to execute kidnappers. In Deuteronomy 24:7, the Torah says to kill Israelites who kidnap fellow Israelites. Nothing about these two moral prescriptions excludes the other or contradicts the baseline human equality taught by Genesis 1:26-27.
Exodus 21:16—"'Anyone who kidnaps someone is to be put to death, whether the victim has been sold or is still in the kidnapper's possession.'"
Deuteronomy 24:7—"If someone is caught kidnapping a fellow Israelite and treating or selling them as a slave, the kidnapper must die. You must purge the evil from among you."
If kidnapping any person is an evil deserving execution, then an Israelite kidnapping another Israelite has to fall into the same category. It would be Exodus 21:16 that clarifies Deuteronomy 24:7, if anything, and not the other way around as I have seen some pretend. All the same, even the Deuteronomic prohibition of kidnapping does not itself contain any sort of differentiation between the treatment of Israelites and foreigners abroad (as with Deuteronomy 15:3, 23:19-20; contrast particular instances like these with Leviticus 19:33-34, and it is clear that foreigners not residing in Israel are in view). Deuteronomy 24:7 does not say that foreigners may be permissibly kidnapped by Israelites or foreigners. It does not discriminate against foreigners. Neither does Leviticus 25:44-46, for that matter—this Leviticus excerpt speaks of buying, not kidnapping, foreign slaves and making them slaves for life, which is exactly what Deuteronomy 15:12-18 permits between Israelite men and women, with the vital fact that lifelong servitude is strictly voluntary after the sixth year (and does not override human rights like those of Exodus 21:26-27).
It is logically possible (consistent with logical axioms and other necessary truths) that a deity would prescribe the punishment for kidnapping more than once, especially if the second case was in the aftermath of a kidnapping of one Israelite by another after the revelation at Sinai (Exodus 19-23). The context of Deuteronomy is already that of summarizing a host of laws ascribed to divine revelation, some of which are repeated or expanded from Exodus (compare Exodus 23:4-5 and Deuteronomy 22:1-4) and Leviticus (compare Leviticus 19:13 and Deuteronomy 24:14-15). Moses is reminding people of what has already been affirmed after the giving of the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20, though in Deuteronomy, unlike certain portions of Leviticus and Numbers, there is no listed series of events that might have prompted the Israelites to seek God and receive individual laws. For instance, in Leviticus 24, when someone curses God, Moses asks what the deserved penalty is, and then God reveals it. In Deuteronomy 12-26, Moses only recites laws from Yahweh in largely miscellaneous order without any details about such situations that might have naturally brought certain issues to his mind.
On every level, there is no contradiction. Exodus 21:16 and Deuteronomy 24:7 are not independently inconsistent with logical axioms. If the concepts articulated in each verse are true, they are still dependent on one thing logically following or not following from another, on truth existing, on contradictions being impossible, and so on, which are true regardless. For each of these axioms to be false, they would still have to be true. This is why logical axioms cannot be false: to focus on one of them, the nonexistence of truth means it is true that there is no truth, which obviously entails that truth cannot be nonexistent. Consistency with logic's inherent veracity is necessary for mere possibility, which the idea of objective morality and kidnapping deserving death do not violate (this does not mean they are true, only that they are not impossible!). The kidnapping laws of Exodus 21:16 and Deuteronomy 24:7 likewise do not conflict with each other, the only other way there could be a contradiction.
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