Does the Bible support slavery?

Question 60092.

Slavery in Scripture is raised more often as an accusation than as a question, and I understand why. The charge is that the Bible not only tolerates slavery but endorses it, and that the transatlantic trade was therefore consistent with Christian teaching. If that were true it would be a very serious matter indeed.

It is not true, and the reasons are worth setting out at length rather than in a sentence. What follows is not an attempt to make the Bible sound modern. It is an attempt to say accurately what these texts actually did in the world they were written into, and what they went on to do afterwards.

What Slavery in Scripture Actually Was

The first move in this conversation has to be a definition, because the English word slavery covers institutions that had almost nothing in common. What the modern reader pictures is Atlantic chattel slavery: people seized by force on the basis of race, owned as property in perpetuity, their children born into the same condition, with no legal personhood and no exit.

Slavery in Scripture is a different institution in almost every respect. In the Old Testament the dominant form is debt servitude: an Israelite who fell into destitution sold his labour for a fixed term to work off what he owed. It functioned as a bankruptcy system in an economy with no welfare, no insurance and no banks.

There was also foreign servitude, taken from prisoners of war and resident foreigners, and I am not going to pretend the two were treated identically. But the fundamental point stands. Slavery in Scripture is not the thing the objection assumes, and using one word for both is the source of most of the confusion.

What the Law Actually Required

Look at what the Mosaic legislation does, and compare it with the surrounding cultures. Exodus 21:16 prescribes death for anyone who kidnaps a person and sells him. That single verse makes the entire Atlantic trade a capital crime, since the trade began with abduction at every stage.

Deuteronomy 23:15-16 forbids returning an escaped slave to his master, and requires that he be allowed to settle wherever he chooses without oppression. Every other legal code in the ancient Near East, including Hammurabi, imposed death for harbouring a fugitive slave. This is the opposite provision, and it is extraordinary.

Beyond that, a servant killed by his master was to be avenged, and a servant permanently injured, even by the loss of a tooth, went free immediately. Hebrew servitude ended in the seventh year, and the master was required to send the man out generously supplied rather than empty handed. The Jubilee returned ancestral land so that families could not be trapped in permanent landlessness.

Regulation Is Not Endorsement

A common objection at this point is that regulating slavery in Scripture amounts to approving it. That does not follow, and Jesus Himself refused the inference. Asked about divorce, He said Moses permitted it because of hardness of heart, but from the beginning it was not so. The law accommodated a fallen situation without ever calling it good.

The same distinction runs through the treatment of slavery in Scripture. The law meets an existing economic reality in a subsistence society and constrains it, protects the vulnerable within it, and builds in exits. What it never does is describe the institution as part of the creation order or as something God delights in.

You can see the difference by comparing how the texts speak. Marriage is grounded in creation and celebrated. Servitude is regulated and repeatedly framed by the reminder that Israel themselves were slaves in Egypt and were brought out. The memory of Egypt sits behind every one of these laws like a warning.

The Exodus Is the Bible’s Verdict

That last point deserves its own paragraph, because it is the most important thing in the discussion and it is almost always missed. The founding narrative of the Old Testament is God hearing the groaning of slaves and acting to set them free. Israel’s national identity begins with an emancipation.

Every festival in the calendar rehearses it. Every reference to slavery in Scripture within the law is anchored to it: you shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt. A book whose central act of divine intervention is the liberation of an enslaved people is not a book that endorses slavery.

The abolitionists understood this perfectly. The spirituals sung in American cotton fields were not about Aristotle or Locke. They were about Moses, Pharaoh and the Red Sea, and the enslaved read the Bible as a book about their freedom because that is what it manifestly is.

The New Testament’s Transformative Pressure

The New Testament is often thought to be weaker on slavery in Scripture, and I would argue it is doing something more subtle and more effective. The Greek word is doulos, and in the Roman world it covered perhaps a third of the population, including physicians, tutors and estate managers.

Paul lists enslavers among the lawless in 1 Timothy 1:9-10, using a term for those who kidnap and traffic people. He tells slaves in 1 Corinthians 7 that if they can gain their freedom they should do so. And he plants a principle in Galatians 3 that there is neither slave nor free, for all are one in Christ Jesus, which is a bomb with a long fuse.

Then there is Philemon, a whole letter about a runaway slave. Paul sends Onesimus back not as a slave but as a beloved brother, tells Philemon to receive him as he would receive Paul himself, and offers to pay any debt personally. He stops just short of commanding manumission, and every reader for two thousand years has understood exactly what he is asking for.

Why Not a Flat Prohibition?

People reasonably ask why the New Testament did not simply outlaw the practice. Part of the answer is that the church was a persecuted minority with no legislative power whatsoever, and a slave revolt led by Christians would have been crushed within a month along with the gospel’s reputation.

But I think the deeper reason is that Paul was undermining the foundations rather than attacking the walls. An institution cannot survive once the people inside it are told they are brothers, seated at the same table, sharing the same cup, with the master answerable to a Master in heaven who shows no partiality.

That is a slower method and it is a more thorough one. Legislation can be repealed. A conviction that every human being bears the image of God and is equally purchased by the blood of Jesus cannot be repealed, and it eventually dissolved the thing it was placed inside.

What Christians Actually Did with It

The historical record of what Christians did with slavery in Scripture supports this. Gregory of Nyssa preached explicitly against slave owning in the fourth century, arguing that no price could be set on a being made in God’s image. Medieval European serfdom, itself an improvement, was dismantled under substantially Christian pressure, and slavery had largely disappeared from northern Europe before the Atlantic trade began.

When the trade did begin, the opposition to it was overwhelmingly and explicitly Christian. The Quakers led. William Wilberforce spent forty six years on it and died three days after the Slavery Abolition Act passed. Granville Sharp, Thomas Clarkson, Hannah More and John Newton, the former slave ship captain who wrote Amazing Grace, all argued from Scripture.

On the other side, defenders of slavery quoted the Bible too, which is the uncomfortable half of this story and I will not hide it. Christians owned slaves. Churches split over it. But the argument was won by the side reading the Bible more carefully, and the abolitionist case rested on Genesis 1, Exodus and Galatians 3, not on Enlightenment philosophy.

The Image of God Is the Root

Everything turns on Genesis 1:27. If every human being is made in the image of God, then no human being can be property, because property is by definition a thing and an image bearer is by definition not a thing. Slavery in Scripture is regulated within a book that contains the principle guaranteeing its eventual destruction.

That principle has no secure foundation outside a doctrine of creation, which is worth saying to anyone who assumes human equality is simply obvious. Aristotle thought some people were slaves by nature. It took the biblical doctrine of the image to make the modern conviction of universal human dignity thinkable at all.

I have written more on the image at image and likeness in Genesis 1:26 and on the related ethical questions at reading the Canaanite conquest honestly.

Answering the Charge Fairly

So how do I answer when someone says that slavery in Scripture is endorsed rather than regulated? I would say: define your terms, because the Bible prescribes death for the slave trade you are describing. I would point to the fugitive slave law, which is the reverse of every ancient parallel. I would point to the Exodus as the founding story. I would point to Philemon and Galatians 3. And I would point to who actually ended it.

I would also concede what needs conceding. Slavery in Scripture is regulated rather than immediately abolished, foreign servitude was harsher than Hebrew servitude, and Christians defended the indefensible for centuries. Refusing to admit that costs you the hearing you need.

Honest concession is not weakness in this conversation. It is the thing that makes the rest of the argument credible, and the rest of the argument is strong.

The Ancient Economy Behind the Laws

To read these laws fairly you have to picture the economy they were written for. There were no banks, no insurance, no limited liability and no state welfare. A bad harvest, a family illness or a raid could reduce a household to destitution within a season, with no mechanism of recovery at all.

Debt servitude was the mechanism. A man in that position sold the only asset he had left, his labour, for a fixed term, and in exchange he and his family were fed and housed while the debt was worked off. In the seventh year he went free, and under the law he did not go empty handed but was supplied liberally from the flock, the threshing floor and the winepress.

That is closer to indentured employment with a statutory release date than to anything the word slavery now conveys. Slavery in Scripture, in its dominant Israelite form, was a poverty relief system in an agrarian subsistence economy, and it came with a jubilee that reset land ownership every fifty years so that families could not be permanently dispossessed. See Deuteronomy 15:12-15.

The Curse of Ham and Its Misuse

No discussion of slavery in Scripture can avoid the passage that was quoted more than any other by defenders of the Atlantic trade. In Genesis 9, after the incident in Noah’s tent, Noah pronounces a curse. For centuries this was used to justify the enslavement of Africans as divinely ordained.

Read the text and the misuse is obvious. The curse falls on Canaan, not on Ham, and Canaan’s descendants settled in the land of Canaan, which is the Levant rather than Africa. Ham’s other sons, Cush, Mizraim and Put, are not mentioned in the curse at all. It is also Noah speaking, not God, and the passage records the words of a man who has just woken from a drunken stupor.

That such a slender thread could bear the weight placed on it for three hundred years should teach us something about how badly people can read when they want a text to say something. It is a warning to every one of us about reading Scripture in the service of our interests rather than under its authority.

Reading the Household Codes Fairly

The passages that trouble modern readers most are the household instructions in Ephesians, Colossians and 1 Peter, where slaves are told to obey their masters. Taken out of their setting they read like an endorsement, so it is worth seeing what they actually do.

Every one of these codes is startlingly two directional. Greek and Roman household literature addressed the head of the house about how to manage his dependants. The New Testament addresses the dependants as moral agents in their own right, and then turns and addresses the master. Masters are told to stop threatening, to grant what is just and fair, and to remember that they have a Master in heaven who shows no partiality.

A slave owner who genuinely believed that his slave was his brother, seated beside him at the Lord’s table, and that both of them would answer to the same Judge, was holding an institution that had already lost its foundations. Slavery in Scripture is addressed as a present reality inside a theology that cannot sustain it. See Ephesians 6:9.

Reading Scripture Against Our Own Interests

The history of this subject leaves one lesson that outlasts the argument. Slavery in Scripture was defended for three centuries by people who owned Bibles, attended church and could quote chapter and verse, and they were wrong.

They were not wrong because they lacked information. They were wrong because they read with their interests engaged, and interests are very good at finding texts. That is a warning for every one of us, because none of us reads from nowhere and the doctrine we find least persuasive is often the one that would cost us most.

The discipline that guards against it is not cleverness. It is a willingness to be contradicted by the text, particularly where the text is inconvenient, and the company of Christians who are not shaped by the same interests we are.

So, now what?

If this objection has troubled you, do the reading yourself. Exodus 21, Leviticus 25, Deuteronomy 15 and 23, and then Philemon in one sitting. Compare them with the Code of Hammurabi, which is freely available. The difference is not subtle, and seeing it for yourself is worth more than taking my word for it.

And then look up. There are more people in slavery today than at any point in human history, most of them in debt bondage and trafficking, and the biblical principle that made abolition thinkable has not expired. Wilberforce read his Bible and it cost him his career and his health. What has yours cost you lately?

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

Genesis 1:27 (ESV)

For Further Study

For the ancient Near Eastern comparison, Christopher J. H. Wright’s Old Testament Ethics for the People of God is careful and readable, and Walter Kaiser’s Toward Old Testament Ethics handles the legal material well. On the New Testament, Millard J. Erickson’s Christian Theology addresses the ethical trajectory question, and Charles C. Ryrie’s Basic Theology gives a concise account of the image of God on which the whole argument rests. For the abolition history, Eric Metaxas’s Amazing Grace tells the Wilberforce story, and the primary documents of the Clapham Sect repay direct reading.