Does the Bible promote slavery?

Few evils are more heinous to our historical senses than the chains of chattel slavery. Consider the innumerable multitude of African lives that were kidnapped from their homes by warlords, sold to slave-traders, and trafficked across the oceans, only to have their families ripped apart and their humanity stripped. Imagine living out your days in servitude to ruthless sugar barons or plantation owners, with no rights or recourse in the courts of men, and no hope of freedom. The trans-Atlantic slave trade was a terrible evil.

So when casual readers of the Bible discover that the Old Testament has laws regulating slavery, that Jesus never condemned the practice in the gospels, and that the Apostles in their letters told slaves to submit to their earthly masters, naturally, we recoil in disgust. How can anyone believe that the Christian story is good news, or a source for moral illumination, when it seemingly promotes one of history’s greatest horrors? And doesn’t such a glaring shortcoming in the Bible’s ethic raise red flags about a supposedly good and loving God?

So what does does the Christian story say about this trade in human misery?

Does the Bible promote slavery?

As much as I wish I could unequivocally say no, the truth is more complex. There is no eleventh Commandment—thou shalt not keep slaves. And the reason why European slaveowners historically appealed to the Bible for some justification is because the master-slave paradigm is in the text, adopted seemingly without criticism as something practiced widely across most cultures throughout history.

So the Bible doesn’t explicitly condemn slavery.

But why? I mean surely the book that gave us the golden rule—do unto others as you would have them do unto you (Mt 7:12), and sublime teachings like love your neighbour (Mt 22:39) and even love your enemies (Mt 5:44)—would consider colonial slavery in the same terms as the Christian abolitionists; nothing short of an abomination. So let me share a few things that in wrestling with this fraught question has helped me to make sense of the dissonance.

First, slavery is anathema to God’s good design. When Christians speak of the earth God created, the cultures He intended, or the future world He will bring about at Jesus’ return; these are places devoid of evil’s fallout. When you read in the first few pages of the Bible that all humanity bear God’s image, establishing our innate equality and dignity, or of the harmony of Eden’s garden where humanity served together as the gardeners and governors of creation; slavery seems as unthinkable at the beginning of the story as it does at the end.

What we encounter throughout the rest of the Christian story, though, between these bookends, is not God’s good design, but rather a world damaged by evil. God’s perfect will is not being done on earth as in heaven, and with the desires of our heart now corrupted, God has to work within the limitations of fallen cultures. Which means that so often what we see in the Bible is not God’s ideal, but a concession, like divorce, where God permits something He hates only because sometimes it might be necessary as the lesser of two evils.

So because all people, regardless of creed and colour, are created equal in God’s image in the beginning, and since God’s future world is one where people of every tribe and tongue serve each other in love as an expression of the new creation, it makes no sense to say that the Bible promotes slavery as a good, even if it might permit such an ugly practice in certain contexts.

Which leads to a second observation: Slavery in the Torah is a world away from colonial slavery, which is expressly condemned in the Christian story. Although the Atlantic slave trade colours how we viscerally recoil at the very word slave, the Jewish instructions were radically different, both in the motivation for the practice and in the treatment of slaves.

For starters, whereas colonial slavery was all about Europeans desiring free and perpetual labour for their own unjust gain, the bulk of Jewish slavery was designed to lift people out of poverty. As a Hebrew or a foreigner, if you had debts you couldn’t repay, or if your family didn’t have the means to survive, you could sell yourself into slavery—a kind of indentured servitude—where you could work down your debt while the master supplied your daily needs. Exodus 21 and Leviticus 25 spell out that this practice was entirely voluntary and that it has a deadline after 6 years, for the 7th year, God’s Jubilee, marked a celebration; one where all debts were cancelled and where slaves were set free. Here’s the kicker: the masters were even expected to send them off with gifts.

Now this may not be ideal, but as a last resort after other attempts at welfare had failed, it was a far cry from the forced kidnapping of the African slave trade. In fact the heinous practice of man-stealing is explicitly condemned with such seriousness that in the Torah it was punishable by death (Ex 21:16).

Another key distinction is that slaves in Israel never lost their equal status as God’s image bearers, and so were afforded the treatment and dignity of being fully human. Whereas some cultures have considered slaves to be only 3/5 a person, the Hebrews were governed by a different story, recounting their own dehumanising treatment in Egypt, God’s profound sympathy for their plight, and the extradorinaiy lengths God went through to liberate them: a story that no doubt animated them to have a unique posture towards slaves.

For instance, Hebrew slavery was never racially motivated, so the colour of a person’s skin, or their ethnic identity, told you nothing of a person’s social status. Slaves had rights under the Torah: they were full members of the covenant community (Gen 17:2), were given the Sabbath and holiday feasts to rest (Ex 23:12), and could even redeem their own property (Lev 25:41). Torah sought to keep slave families together (Ex 21:3), retaining their unique identity and loving bonds, and many slaves even opted to become fully fledged members of their master’s household (Deut 15:16-17). And where Israel’s masters forgot who they were, where they forgot to love thy neighbour, they were held accountable for their violent impulses, with stipulations in the Torah of how the master is to be held accountable for harming the slave (Ex 21:20-21), often by granting the slaves freedom (Ex 21:26-27).

Now there are more confronting types of slavery in the Old Testament, such as the complex scenario in the ancient world with prisoners of war. Here, and in some other cases, the Torah does open the door to lifelong slavery, though with all the other expectations of humane treatment still applying.

But why? Why open this door? Why sanction the owning of another human being? And the truth is, I don’t know. Perhaps this was to prevent enemies from mounting a future rebellion, as though a lesser of two evils in a tribal age of violence. Or perhaps this situation too was voluntary, as any slaves who ran away were protected and granted freedom in Israel, and many servants chose to become permanent members of the master’s household out of love for the family. But honestly, I don’t know. These laws are foreign to my moral matrix, in some cases even disturbing. But what I do know is that these commands are often underdetermined, leaving room for the moral wisdom of God’s people to know what to do in walking out these cases.

Which leads me to one final observation, adapted from Dr King’s speech: the arc of the Bible’s story is long, but it bends toward justice. There is a reason why the historic Slave Bible, produced and distributed amongst slave populations in the early 19th century, only includes 232 out of the total 1189 chapters of the English Bible. Why? Because the whole Bible is dangerous to slave owners. You cannot read the entire Christian story as a spiritual curriculum for God’s people without recognising that the moral principles embedded at the beginning, lessons which develop in their complexity until their fullest expression in Jesus’ ministry, would one day set off a cultural depth charge that would end the slave trade forever.

The Bible starts with God creating all people equal in His image. Israel is born of a grand liberation from harsh enslavement, set apart as a light to the nations to reflect God’s deep compassion by loving their neighbour. The moral principles embedded in the first lessons of the Torah are worked out in the Hebrew prophets as Israel are repeatedly chastened for their failure to show God’s concern for the poor, widows, children, and foreigners. Jesus' ministry manifesto was essentially to set people free from slavery to sin inside, and from oppressive powers outside, stooping himself to serve us humbly by paying off our debts to justice. One day our full liberation will crescendo when Jesus returns to usher in the new creation, and until that time, the Church has sought whatever path seemed most helpful to getting Jesus’ story across to new cultures, sometimes permitting concessions to a hard-hearted culture by asking Christian slaves to obey their earthly masters, with the view that eventually modelling a new way to be one together, neither slave nor free, would spark a revolution that overthrew the structures of inhumanity.

We may wish it came sooner. That God had simply outlawed all forms of slavery right back in the Torah. But simply outlawing a practice does nothing to alleviate the complex cultural needs at the time that may have given rise to it, nor to develop the necessary moral fortitude of a people to sustain such principled opposition. Rather what God gave to Israel, and then to the Church, is a better story that has the power to not only liberate our own hearts from the darker impulses to exploit others, and to change our minds about slavery, but also to develop societies that are passionately committed to guarding the equal dignity of all people as they celebrate slavery’s abolition and work to set free all who are oppressed.