Slavery in the Bible



The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals. In contemporary times, almost everyone reviles slavery; while human trafficking and similar practices are still far too common, people generally no longer argue that human beings should be owned like property. However, through most of human history, well into the 19th century, slavery (notwithstanding the opinions of the enslaved) was broadly accepted as an economic and social necessity.

Slavery was an important facet of life in biblical times. Both the Old and the New Testaments have instructions regarding slaves which contemporary Jews and Christians generally disregard and which Christian apologists frequently attempt to play down or deny.

Some fringe-Christian Biblical literalists, notably those who believe in Dominionism, argue that biblical instructions regarding slavery and its institutions remain relevant today.

Overview
The folk-legends of the Old Testament emphasise the slave-past of the Israelites: the brothers of one Israelite ancestor-figure, Joseph, sold him into slavery ; he ended up in Egypt, where the whole Hebrew population eventually re-settled  and became enslaved.

In its function as a legal text, the Bible identifies different categories of slaves, including: female Hebrew slaves, male Hebrew slaves, non-Hebrew and hereditary slaves. These were subject to different regulations.

Female Hebrews could be sold by their fathers and enslaved for life, but there were some limits to this.

Male Hebrews could sell themselves into slavery for a six-year period to eliminate their debts, after which they might go free. However, if the male slave had been given a wife and had had children with her, they would remain his master's property. They could only stay with their family by becoming permanent slaves. Evangelical Christians, especially those who subscribe to Biblical inerrancy, will commonly emphasize this debt bondage and try to minimize the other forms of race-based chattel slavery when attempting to excuse the Bible for endorsing slavery.

Non-Hebrews, on the other hand, could (according to ) be subjected to slavery in exactly the way that it is usually understood by slavery advocates. The slaves could be bought, sold and (when their owner died) inherited. This, by any standard, is race- or ethnicity-based, and explicitly allows slaves to be bought from foreign nations or foreigners living in Israel. It does say that simply kidnapping Hebrews to enslave them is a crime punishable by death, but no such prohibition exists regarding foreigners. War captives could be made slaves, assuming they had refused to make peace (this applied to women and children &mdash; men were simply killed), along with the seizure of all their property.

Hereditary slaves were born into slavery and there is no apparent way by which they could obtain their freedom.

So the Bible endorses various types of slavery, see below &mdash; though Biblical literalists only want to talk about one version and claim that it wasn't really so bad.

Types of slavery
As previously stated, the Old Testament endorses different types or grades of slavery.

Female Hebrew slaves
There are ambiguous passages concerning whether female Hebrew slaves were to be treated differently from males. Parents could sell their daughters into slavery. ( NASB)

, however, applies the same standards to female and male slaves, with verse 18 stating:

Male Hebrew slaves
(NASB):

It is interesting to note that if a slave wishes to remain with his wife and family he must submit to his master for life.

On the other hand Hebrew slaves &mdash; and only those Hebrew slaves who entered slavery "voluntarily" &mdash; got some severance package as described in (NASB):

Non-Hebrew slaves
(NASB) suggests how Israelites can utilize the full human resources of slaves:

There is clearly no way out for these slaves: they were truly slaves for life. And not just for the life of their owner. They were "property" and would be inherited along with the rest of their deceased owner's possessions.

Hereditary Slaves
The children of slaves were born into slavery. d (NASB):

Beating slaves
Beating slaves was perfectly allowable regulated under the following rules:

(NASB):

(NASB):

Abduction and the slave trade
Hebrews were not allowed to abduct fellow Hebrews and sell them.

(NASB):

Given that the Hebrews were instructed in to obtain their slaves from the people around them, it is evident that this injunction to not abduct people referred to Hebrews and not non-Hebrews. Obtaining and selling non-Hebrews was evidently not a problem. specifies that only the abduction of Hebrews to enslave them is a crime.

(Though at times apologists bring up this same quote in attempts to make Biblical slavery look better.)

Escaped slaves
An escaped slave from a foreign country could not be handed over to his master, and would gain full citizenship among Israelites:

(NASB):

However, as the BibleTrack commentary puts it regarding :

Slavery in the New Testament
The New Testament makes no condemnation of slavery and does no more than admonish slaves to be obedient and admonish their masters to treat them fairly. Paul (or whoever wrote the epistles), at no time suggested there was anything wrong with slavery. One could speculate that this might have been because he wanted to avoid upsetting the many slave-owners in the early Christian congregations or to keep on good political terms with the Roman government, but that seems inconsistent with claims that the Bible teaches an absolute morality. More probably, he simply thought slavery was an acceptable fact of life — as did practically everyone else at the time.

(NASB):

Christian slaves were told to obey their masters "for the sake of the cause" and be especially obedient to Christian masters:

(NASB):

There are instructions for Christian slave owners to treat their slaves well.

(NASB):

(NASB):

One passage often cited by apologists as supposed evidence for New Testament condemnation of slavery is. However, as the King James Version accurately translates, this condemnation is of "men stealers" (Greek: andrapodistais), i.e. slave raiders who kidnapped and sold people as slaves, not slave traders or slave holders in general. So Paul only singled out slave raiders to be considered "lawless and rebellious", and to be categorized with murderers, homosexuals, liars and oath-breakers.

The rather bland admonishment to slave masters by Paul is more than balanced by the demands for absolute obedience made of slaves. It is also rather telling that the slave owners are likened to God and Jesus, while they are simply told that they have a higher lord. So much for Jesus as the embodiment of the underdog &mdash; Paul could have pointed to Jesus' imprisonment and death as a cautionary tale to slave-masters that even humble(d) characters can be important.

Before the apologist plays the "but Jesus didn't condone slavery"-card, following all these Pauline examples, try reading, where Jesus uses slaves in a parable and has no qualms about recommending that not only a slave but also his wife and family be sold, while in other parables Jesus recommends that disobedient slaves should be beaten or even killed.

Moral relativism
Biblically-endorsed slavery is probably one of the clearest examples of religious moral relativism.

Most modern Christians prefer to avoid, or are unaware of, these sections of the Bible. If forced to explain Biblical justification for slavery, they may come up with something, but fortunately Christians as a group think it would be wrong to reintroduce slavery. Christian attempts to justify what is in the Bible can lead to them sanctioning things that most moral humanists, and even most Christians, would say are wrong, as can be seen from the quote below.

Here is a recent Christian attempt to justify slavery:

Attempts to justify the Bible's slavery passages
Argument 1: "Slavery in the Bible was more enlightened than that of 17th-19th century America and other ancient Near East cultures."


 * Even granting this (somewhat improbable) conjecture for the sake of argument, this fails to answer the simple question: is owning another human ever moral, or not? The relative kindness of a slave owner, though important to the slave, does not enter into the basic moral question of owning other humans as property.

Argument 2: "They could be let go after 6 years" or "It was a mechanism for protecting those who could not pay their debts." (A.k.a. "Debt bondage")


 * Hebrew slaves were to be freed in the 7th year (, Deuteronomy 15:12-18). Slaves from surrounding countries could be kept as property forever . A further exception pertains to women whose fathers sold them into slavery, and for whom there was no release after six years . Of course most slaves were never required to be freed, so this argument fails to address the real question.

Argument 3: The Bible restricted slave owners' actions.


 * does mandate punishment for a master who kills a slave with a rod, but the very next verse says "But if the slave survives a day or two, there is no punishment; for the slave is the owner’s property" (NRSV). The NIV, by contrast, translates this verse as "if the slave recovers after a day or two", which changes its meaning. Either way, the emphasis is that the slave is first and foremost property, and therefore the greatest loss is to the owner, whose slave was "as good as money". It's worth noting that the first citation here clears Simon Legree of wrongdoing in having beaten Uncle Tom to death, since he survived two days after his fatal beating. Nice one, Harriet Beecher Stowe!

Argument 4: "Slavery was allowed by God because of the time period, but was not the ideal will of God."


 * There are many ways a creative, all-knowing, and  all-powerful deity could make it clear that slavery is immoral while, for instance, giving the Israelite economy a grace period to let slavery "wind down", should that be necessary. The passages concerning slavery from the Pentateuch (e.g., ), by contrast, provide guidelines that allow for slavery to continue indefinitely. New Testament writers, too, who had an opportunity to overturn or clarify the Pentateuch's instructions, did not do so.


 * Also it seems improbable that a God who was capable of assassinating Israelites by the thousand if they did not follow his instructions to the letter would feel that he lacked the authority to tell them to give up slaves.

Argument 5: "The term 'slave' is a poor translation. It should be 'servant'."


 * This may be plausible in some contexts, but that's all a part of the colorful euphemisms the KJV uses for words it prefers not to use outright. For instance that interpretation wouldn't work at all for, which specifically allows that slaves are property who may be inherited by the owner's children and kept for life. This passage makes no sense unless they are discussing slavery &mdash; permanent ownership of one human by another &mdash; as we know it today.


 * Jesus'  makes no sense if said "servant" is not a slave, since the master has the power to sell both the "servant", his wife and his children.
 * It also makes little sense in the case of in which these "servants" may be not only beaten by their master (as in ), but that the master "shall cut him asunder" in the words of the King James translation.