The Bible condones slavery

The word “slavery” brings to mind the Atlantic slave trade: people kidnapped from Africa, owned for life because of their race, and treated as property with no rights. Much of what the Hebrew Bible regulates looks different.

In the ancient Near East there was no bankruptcy protection and no welfare. A family that could not pay its debts might sell a member, or the debtor might sell himself, into service. Israel’s law put limits on that. A Hebrew servant “is to serve you for six years. But in the seventh year, he shall go free without paying anything” (Exodus 21:2). When he left, “do not send him away empty-handed” (Deuteronomy 15:13). An Israelite who sold himself was to be treated “as a hired worker,” and “You are not to rule over them harshly” (Leviticus 25:40, 43).

These protections applied to Israelites. Foreigners were treated differently, and the next sections come to that. Still, the main form of servitude in these laws was debt service with an end date, not lifelong ownership based on race.

The Atlantic slave trade began with capture. The law of Exodus treats that as one of the gravest crimes there is: “Whoever kidnaps another man must be put to death, whether he sells him or the man is found in his possession” (Exodus 21:16). The New Testament carries this forward. A letter attributed to Paul lists “slave traders” among the lawless, alongside murderers (1 Timothy 1:9-10).

Other laws protected the person, not only the owner’s interest:

• Runaways. “Do not return a slave to his master if he has taken refuge with you. Let him live among you wherever he chooses” (Deuteronomy 23:15-16). The Code of Hammurabi, from Babylon around 1750 BC, made sheltering a runaway slave a capital offense, and the United States Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 required escaped slaves to be returned.
• Injury. A slave whose master blinded an eye or knocked out a tooth was to go free (Exodus 21:26-27).
• Killing. A master who beat a slave to death “shall surely be punished” (Exodus 21:20).

The Christian writer Jonathan Noyes, of Stand to Reason, puts the conclusion this way: “The Mosaic Law was not written to justify slavery.” You may think that overstates it, and these laws do not abolish slavery. A law written to serve slave owners would not shelter runaways or free the maimed.

Two passages carry most of the weight of your objection.

Leviticus 25:44-46 lets Israelites buy foreigners and keep them for life, and leave them to their children. That is permanent servitude, and Israelites could not be held this way. Exodus 21:20-21 punishes a master who kills a slave, but not one whose slave survives a beating, “since the servant is his property.” The Hebrew says, more literally, that the slave is “his money”: the loss of the slave’s work falls on the master. However you translate it, the law treats the slave partly as property, and it is painful to read.

Christians do not say these laws describe God’s ideal. Jesus, asked about the law that permitted divorce, said, “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because of your hardness of heart. But it was not this way from the beginning” (Matthew 19:8). Christians read some of Israel’s civil laws the same way: as rules for a particular ancient society that restrained its practices without approving of them.

You may find that answer insufficient. A law that permits lifelong servitude still permits it. It does show that Christians do not treat these verses as a moral standard for today, and that Jesus himself taught that some laws given to Israel fell short of God’s intention.

The first Christians were a small and often persecuted minority in an empire where slavery was everywhere. They had no power to change Roman law. The New Testament works inside the institution while denying its premise.

Paul tells Christian slaves, “if you can gain your freedom, take the opportunity,” and tells all his readers, “do not become slaves of men” (1 Corinthians 7:21, 23). He tells masters, “Give up your use of threats,” because they have the same Master in heaven, “and there is no favoritism with Him” (Ephesians 6:9). He sends the runaway Onesimus back to his master Philemon, but asks Philemon to receive him “no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a beloved brother” (Philemon 16). And he writes of Christians, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free” (Galatians 3:28).

Behind all of this is the claim in Genesis that every human being is made “in the image of God” (Genesis 1:27). Job, centuries before Paul, asks of his own servants, “Did not He who made me in the womb also make them?” (Job 31:15). If your slave is your equal before God and your brother, owning him becomes hard to justify. It took Christians far too long to act on that.

In the American South, ministers preached that slavery was sanctioned by Scripture, and they quoted the passages above. Their opponents read the same Bible differently. In the fourth century, the bishop Gregory of Nyssa preached against owning slaves at all, asking how anyone could put a price on a being made in God’s image. In Britain, William Wilberforce and the Quakers built their campaign against the slave trade on Christian conviction. Frederick Douglass, who escaped slavery in Maryland, distinguished sharply between the Christianity of the slaveholders and the Christianity of Christ, and condemned the first in the name of the second.

The two readings did not treat the text equally. Defenders of American slavery had to set aside Exodus 21:16, because the trade they depended on was built on kidnapping. Abolitionists appealed to that law, to the image of God, and to Paul’s “beloved brother.”

This does not clear the Bible of every charge. It shows that “the Bible condones slavery” is too simple: the Bible permitted a form of servitude in an ancient society, and it also supplied the principles that were used to bring slavery down.