Does the Bible Approve of Slavery?

Does the Bible approve of slavery?

The law of Moses lets Israel buy servants and the apostles tell servants to obey, and for two centuries American Christians quoted those texts to defend owning people.

This page quotes past defences of slavery from Scripture, sets out the law's hardest texts on servants and captives, and describes how enslaved people were treated.

Leviticus lets Israel buy foreigners and keep them and their children as a possession for ever (S21). Exodus lets a man sell his daughter (S10), keeps a freed servant's wife and children with the master (S9), and lets a master who beats his servant go unpunished if the servant lives a day or two, "for he is his money" (S6). Israel's soldiers took women and girls captive (S11, S12). Peter tells slaves to submit even to cruel masters (S17), and Paul tells slaves of Christian masters to serve them all the more (S18). For two hundred years American preachers quoted these verses to defend owning people, and they were not wrong that the verses are there. How can a book like that be a moral guide, let alone the word of God?

I was taught that Christians led the fight against slavery. Then I read Leviticus 25 and Ephesians 6, and learned that whole churches defended slavery from the Bible. Were they reading it rightly? If not, how did so many get it so wrong, and how would I know if I were doing the same?

Did God say it was all right to own people? Why didn't He just say nobody can?

Every person is made in God's image, and every nation of one

God made man in His own image and made of one every nation of men; Scripture never sets one race apart to serve another.

Scripture begins with man and woman made in the image of God (S1). Paul told the philosophers at Athens that God "made of one every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth" (S2). Nothing in Scripture divides mankind into a race made to rule and a race made to serve. The verse most often used to say otherwise, Noah's curse, names Canaan, and it was spoken of Canaan's descendants, not of Africa (M1).

So whatever Scripture says about servants, it never says a servant is less than a man. Lemuel Haynes, a Black New Englander, put it plainly in 1776: no precept or practice in Scripture makes a Black man a slave any more than a white one (H5). The law of Moses did draw a line between Israelite and foreigner (M2); that line was by nation, not by race, but it was a real line, and the page does not hide it.

Stealing a man is a crime worthy of death

The law put to death anyone who stole a man, whether he had sold him or still held him; Paul lists menstealers among the lawless.

In the same chapter that regulates servants, the law says that "he that stealeth a man, and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death" (S3). The crime is complete whether the stolen man has been sold or is still held; the one who keeps him is as guilty as the one who took him. Paul sets "menstealers" in a list beside murderers of fathers and mothers (S4).

There is a tension here, and it should be admitted. The same law that forbids stealing a man lets Israel buy one from the nations around them (S21), and it does not say how the seller came by him. The law forbids the kidnapping; it does not require the buyer to ask. Deuteronomy's form of the law names the victim as one of "his brethren of the children of Israel" (Deuteronomy 24:7), though Exodus sets no such limit.

Joseph's brothers did this very thing: they sold their brother to traders for twenty pieces of silver (Genesis 37:28). The first written protest against slavery in the English colonies, by four Quakers in 1688, made the point that those who buy stolen men are no better than those who steal them (H1). John Wesley said it again in 1774: men-buyers are on a level with men-stealers (H4). That is an application of S3 to a trade that ran on kidnapping. It is a fair one, but it is an inference from the law, not a sentence the law contains.

The law of Moses limited servitude and protected the servant

Israel's law allowed servants, but it freed the Israelite, punished some abuse, freed the maimed servant and sheltered the runaway.

The law of Moses did not abolish servitude, and it is no use pretending it did. It let Israel buy servants from the nations around them and keep them for life (M2), and it has harder laws still (A4). These are hard texts, and they should be read as they stand.

But the law also bound what it allowed. An Israelite who sold himself through poverty was to be kept as a hired servant, not ruled with rigor, and released with his children at the jubilee, because God had brought Israel out of Egypt (S5). A servant who lost an eye or even a tooth to his master's hand went free (S7). And a servant who escaped to Israel was not to be handed back: he could live where he chose, and no one was to oppress him (S8).

The law on beating needs to be read whole (S6). A master whose servant died under his rod was to be punished. But if the servant lived a day or two, the master was not punished, "for he is his money". The usual reading is that a servant who lived on for a day or two shows the master had not meant to kill him, and that the master's own loss, of the servant's work or of the servant himself, was thought penalty enough; that is an inference from the reason the verse gives, not something it says. Read either way, the verse leaves a master who beat his servant with a rod unpunished if the servant did not die at once, and it calls the servant his money.

The law of the runaway (S8) is usually read of a servant escaping from a foreign master into Israel's land: he had "escaped from his master unto thee". It does not plainly give an Israelite's servant the right to leave. Setting it against America's laws that sent runaways back is an application of the text, though one that keeps its spirit.

Whether the law's servitude was God's will or something He bore with, as Jesus said Moses suffered divorce "for your hardness of heart" (Matthew 19:8), is the question on which Christians differ (D1). What the text does show is that the law never made one race the servants of another.

The hardest laws, read as they stand

The law let a master keep a freed servant's wife and children, let a father sell his daughter, and let Israel take women captive.

A Hebrew servant went free in the seventh year. But if his master had given him a wife and she had borne him children, "the wife and her children shall be her master’s, and he shall go out by himself" (S9). He could stay, and have his ear bored and serve for ever, if he said he loved his master, his wife and his children. The choice was his, but the price of freedom was leaving his family. The usual explanation is that the wife was herself a servant whose term had not ended; that is an inference, and it does not make the law gentle.

A man could sell his daughter to be a maid-servant (S10). The law speaks of her master having "espoused her to himself", so she was sold toward marriage, and it protects her: she may be redeemed but not sold to foreigners, must be treated as a daughter if given to his son, and goes free if denied food, clothing or marriage rights. It still lets a father sell her.

In war, the women and little ones of a far-off city that refused peace were taken as spoil (S11). After the war against Midian, Moses ordered the boys and the married women killed and the girls kept alive "for yourselves" (S12); the verse does not say for what. A skeptic reads it as taking girls for slaves or worse. The law that governs a captive woman (S13) gives her a month to mourn her father and mother, makes her a wife rather than a slave, and forbids selling her if her husband no longer wants her; that it governed the Midianite girls is a common reading, not something Numbers says. Even so, a captive married to the man who took her did not choose him.

These laws regulate what they do not commend. They set limits that the nations around Israel did not set, but they are limits on servitude and captivity, not their end. Whether they show what God approves or what He bore with in a hard people is the question of D1.

The apostles put servant and master under one Master

The apostles did not order servants freed, and told them to bear even harsh masters; but they bound masters to justice under one Lord.

The apostles wrote to churches inside the Roman world, where slavery was everywhere. They did not tell servants to rise up, and they did not tell the churches to expel masters. They told servants to serve as unto the Lord, and masters to render "that which is just and equal", because they too have a Master in heaven (S14).

Peter went further: servants were to be in subjection "not only to the good and gentle, but also to the froward" (S17). He does not call the cruel master right; he calls what the servant bears "suffering wrongfully", and points him to Christ, who suffered and did not threaten (1 Peter 2:21-23). It is counsel to the powerless on how to bear injustice, not approval of the injustice. But Peter does not tell such a servant to leave.

Paul told the servant not to be troubled by his state, yet "if thou canst become free, use it rather"; and he told all believers, bought with a price, not to become bondservants of men (S15). The words "use it rather" can be read two ways: most take them to mean take the freedom, but some, ancient and modern, take them to mean make use of your present state; the Greek leaves it open. In Christ there can be "neither bond nor free" (S16).

Brotherhood in Christ did not at once undo the relation. Paul told servants with believing masters not to despise them, "because they are brethren; but let them serve them the rather" (S18). Some, from Cotton Mather on, made this oneness only spiritual, so that a converted slave stays a slave and nothing else changes (H3). The apostles did more than that: they told masters to give what is just and equal (S14), to forbear threatening (S22), and to receive a servant as a brother (S23). Whether that, worked out, must end the relation is the point on which Christians differ (D1).

Whether Scripture's teaching rules out every possible form of slaveholding, or only slavery that is unjust.

Every form is wrong

Unjust slavery is wrong

The gospel works to end it

No verse says in one command that every form of servitude is sin, and the law of Moses permits some, including lifelong servitude of foreigners (S21). Yet the apostles prefer freedom (S15), make servant and master brothers (S16), and Jesus sums up the law in doing to others as we would be done by (S19). All three views accept those texts. They differ over whether the principles condemn every possible form, or only the forms that break them.

Slavery as America practiced it stood condemned

American slavery rested on stolen people, was defined by race, and denied every protection the law gave; Scripture condemns all three.

Measure American slavery by the texts above. It was supplied by the African trade, which took people by kidnapping on a vast scale, and the law counted the one who held a stolen man as guilty as the one who took him (S3); applying that law to the trade is an inference, but a fair one (A2). It marked out one race for bondage, against the one origin of every nation (S2). And it denied what the law of Moses gave: a servant maimed by his master did not go free (S7), runaways were hunted and returned by law where Deuteronomy forbade handing back a servant who had fled to Israel (S8), and masters were not made to give "that which is just and equal" (S14). Jesus said, "All things therefore whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, even so do ye also unto them" (S19). No master would have chosen to be bought, sold and parted from his children.

Yet the churches divided over it. In 1844 the Methodists split North and South over a bishop who held slaves, and the Baptists separated the next year (H8). The southern Presbyterians declared in 1861 that the church had no right to condemn slavery as a sin (H13). In 1995 the Southern Baptist Convention confessed the role slavery played in its founding (H14). The defenders of slavery quoted Scripture; but the texts they quoted (M1, M2, M3, M4) do not say what they used them to say.

As God's decree that the descendants of Ham, taken to be Africans, should be slaves, and as a sign of God's favor on those who held them (H7).

Noah curses Canaan, not Ham, three times over. Genesis 10 traces Canaan to the peoples of the land Israel later took, and Africa's peoples to Ham's other sons, Cush and Mizraim, whom Noah does not curse. It is a prophecy, not a command for anyone to carry out. Samuel Sewall made exactly this answer in 1700 (H2).

As proof that the right of holding slaves, American slaves included, is clearly established by God's law (H6).

The permission is real: Israel could buy foreigners, hold them for life, and leave them to their children. It drew its line by nation, not by race. A skeptic will answer that a line by nation is still a two-tier law: the Israelite went free at the jubilee (S5) while the foreigner could be held for ever, and the closing limit, not to rule "with rigor", is given for "your brethren the children of Israel". That is a fair reading of the verse. But the permission was given to Israel, under a law that also put the man-stealer to death (S3), freed the maimed servant (S7) and sheltered the runaway (S8), none of them limited to Israelites in their wording. It gives no ground for buying people stolen from Africa.

Preached to enslaved people as the whole of the gospel: serve your masters and do whatever they tell you (H12).

The passage speaks to masters as well as servants: masters are to "do the same things unto them" and forbear threatening, because their own Master is in heaven and there is "no respect of persons with him". Preaching the first verse without the last turned the passage upside down. Frederick Douglass drew the line between that preaching and the Christianity of Christ (H9).

History

• H12

As proof that Paul returned a runaway slave to his master, so that slavery is lawful and fugitives should be sent back (H11).

Paul did send Onesimus back: "whom I have sent back to thee", though he would have kept him, but not without Philemon's consent. The letter does not say Onesimus ran away; it says he "was parted from thee for a season". Many read him as a runaway, others as a servant who went to Paul to plead his cause. Nor does Paul ask in so many words that Onesimus be freed. What he asks is that Philemon receive him "no longer as a servant, but more than a servant, a brother beloved", "both in the flesh and in the Lord". Albert Barnes argued in 1846 that Philemon could not do that and still hold Onesimus as property (H10); that is Barnes's reading of the request, and others take it as a changed relation within servitude. Either way, the letter is a plea for the servant, not a rule for returning fugitives.

History

• H11
• H10

Protest against slavery, to the Quaker monthly meeting

There is a saying that we shall doe to all men licke as we will be done ourselves; macking no difference of what generation, descent or Colour they are. and those who steal or robb men, and those who buy or purchase them, are they not all alicke?

The first written protest of its kind in the English colonies argues from Jesus' rule (S19) and from man-stealing, and makes the buyer as guilty as the thief. The meetings it went to passed it on as "too great a weight", and the yearly meeting declined to comment either way.

The Selling of Joseph: A Memorial

For Canaan is the Person Cursed three times over, without the mentioning of Cham.

A Boston judge answers the curse argument from the text itself: the prophecy was fulfilled in the Canaanites, and Africans descend not from Canaan but from Cush. The same tract cites the man-stealing law of Exodus 21:16 (S3) and answers the claim that slavery brought Africans to the gospel: "Evil must not be done, that good may come of it."

Though they remain your servants, yet they are become the children of God.

Boston's leading minister, himself a slaveholder, urges masters to teach and baptize the people they enslave, and assures them that conversion does not set a slave free. Oneness in Christ (S16) is made spiritual only, the settled pattern of the colonial churches. (The linked page notes that the tract was published anonymously and is attributed to Mather, and that its edited excerpts modernize spelling, capitalization and punctuation.)

And this equally concerns every gentleman that has an estate in our American plantations; yea, all slave-holders, of whatever rank and degree; seeing men-buyers are exactly on a level with men-stealers.

The founder of Methodism puts the buyer beside the kidnapper (S3). (Excerpts only on the linked page; the page's title says 1743, but its heading dates the pamphlet 1774.)

Liberty Further Extended: Or Free Thoughts on the Illegality of Slave-keeping

there is Not the Least precept, or practise, in the Sacred Scriptures, that constitutes a Black man a Slave, any more than a white one.

A Black New England soldier, later a Congregational minister, argues from Acts 17:26 (S2): "It hath pleased god to make of one Blood all nations of men". The manuscript was not published in his lifetime. (Excerpts in Haynes's own spelling.)

Exposition of the Views of the Baptists, Relative to the Coloured Population

These sentiments, the Convention, on whose behalf I address your Excellency, cannot think just, or well founded; for the right of holding slaves is clearly established in the Holy Scriptures, both by precept and example.

Written to the governor after the Denmark Vesey conspiracy in Charleston. Furman goes straight to Leviticus 25 (S21): the Israelites "were directed to purchase their bond-men and bond-maids of the Heathen nations". He adds that the apostles, who "feared not the faces of men", would not have tolerated slaveholding "for a moment" had it been a moral evil. (Dated 24 December 1822 on the page; often cited as 1823, its year of publication.)

A Brief Examination of Scripture Testimony on the Institution of Slavery

Here language is used, showing the favor which God would exercise to the posterity of Shem and Japheth, while they were holding the posterity of Ham in a state of abject bondage.

A Virginia Baptist pastor opens his scriptural defense of slavery with Noah's words (S20), calls them "the inspired language of Noah", and reads them of Ham's posterity although the curse names Canaan. First published in the Religious Herald; the linked text is from the 1850 edition.

The case of Bishop James O. Andrew, as told in the New Georgia Encyclopedia

The resolution passed by a vote of 110 to 69. A Plan of Separation between northern and southern Methodist Episcopalians resulted, and the next year representatives of the Southern Annual Conferences met in Louisville, Kentucky, to organize their own church.

The first great split. Bishop Andrew of Georgia had come to hold slaves through his marriages, and the conference asked him to stop acting as bishop while he did. The Baptists divided the next year, when Southern Baptists formed their own convention at Augusta.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Appendix

for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference

Escaped from slavery in Maryland, Douglass makes clear that his attack is on "the slaveholding religion of this land", not on Christianity, and turns the word of 1 Timothy 1:10 (S4) against the churches: "We have men-stealers for ministers, women-whippers for missionaries, and cradle-plunderers for church members."

An Inquiry into the Scriptural Views of Slavery, on Philemon 16

It would be impossible for Philemon to comply with the wish expressed here, and yet retain Onesimus as a slave, and regard him as property

A Philadelphia Presbyterian pastor answers the argument from Philemon (S23) from the letter's own words, and argues more broadly that the Savior and His apostles taught "such views of man as amount to a prohibition of slavery, or as if acted on would abolish it." (The linked text is a scanned 1846 edition.)

Reply appended to his Scriptural defense of slavery

In my original essay, I said nothing of Paul's letter to Philemon, concerning Onesimus, a runaway slave, converted under Paul's preaching at Rome; and who was returned by the Apostle, with a most affectionate letter to his master, entreating the master to receive him again, and to forgive him.

Stringfellow sets Paul's conduct against "the conduct of our abolition brethren" and asks which is guided by the Spirit of God. Paul's request that Onesimus be received as a brother (S23) drops out of the argument. Date: the reply appears in the 1850 edition on the linked page; it was written after the 1841 essay (H7).

Recollection of the preaching on the plantation, quoted by Albert J. Raboteau in Christian History

The preacher came and . . . he’d just say, “Serve your masters. Don’t steal your master’s turkey. Don’t steal your master’s chickens. Don’t steal your master’s hawgs. . . . Do whatsomever your master tells you to do.” Same old thing all the time.

What enslaved people were taught from texts like Ephesians 6:5 (S22) by preachers their masters hired. Raboteau writes that slaves often held their own meetings "out of disgust for their masters’ corrupted gospel", meeting in secret and singing and praying in a whisper.

Address to All the Churches of Jesus Christ Throughout the Earth (drafted by J. H. Thornwell)

We have no right, as a Church, to enjoin it as a duty, or to condemn it as a sin.

Adopted unanimously at Augusta. The Address declares the church "neither the friends nor the foes of slavery" and leaves its policy to the state, while arguing at length that Scripture sanctions it.

Resolution on Racial Reconciliation on the 150th Anniversary of the Southern Baptist Convention

Our relationship to African-Americans has been hindered from the beginning by the role that slavery played in the formation of the Southern Baptist Convention

At its 150th anniversary the convention acknowledges that its forebears "defended the right to own slaves", cites Acts 17:26 (S2), and apologizes to African-Americans for condoning racism.

What Philemon did when Onesimus came home. Paul trusted him to do more than he asked, and Scripture leaves it there (S24).

You have read the verses rightly, and the page does not explain them away. The law of Moses let Israel buy foreigners and hold them and their children for ever (S21); it let a father sell his daughter (S10), kept a freed servant's family with the master (S9), took captives in war (S11, S12), and left a master unpunished if a beaten servant lived a day or two, "for he is his money" (S6). The apostles told servants to obey, even harsh masters (S17, S18). Scripture never says in one command that no one may own another.

What the page claims is narrower, and it is a claim on those same texts. The law that permitted servitude also limited it: it put the man-stealer to death (S3), freed the maimed servant (S7), made a captive woman a wife who could not be sold (S13), and sent the Israelite home at the jubilee (S5). The apostles bound masters to justice under their own Master (S14). Whether the permission was God's approval or a concession to a hard people, as Jesus said of divorce, Christians answer differently (D1); the page does not pretend the text settles it. Whether a God who gives law to a people as they are, limiting what He does not yet abolish, can be good is the real question you are asking, and it is a fair one. But none of these texts licenses the slavery Christians later defended from them, built on kidnapping and race (A6).

They read real verses and missed what the verses said: the curse names Canaan, not Africa (M1); the permission in Leviticus came inside a law that put man-stealers to death (M2); the household rules bind the master too (M3). Some Christians said so from the start (H1, H2, H5, H10). Many more did not, and the reasons were not in the text: money, custom, and the fear of dividing their churches (H8, H13). But do not answer them by pretending the hard texts are not there (A4, S18); the honest answer is harder and stronger. The guard against doing the same is to read every passage whole and in context, to let the plain commands (S3, S19) govern the hard texts, and to listen when others, especially those who suffer, point to what we are skipping (H9).

God made every person in His own image, and He made every nation from one family (S1, S2). In God's law, stealing a person was one of the worst crimes there is (S3). Long ago some people had servants, and God gave rules about them, some to protect them. Paul told a master named Philemon to welcome his servant home as a brother he loved (S23). In Jesus, nobody is worth less than anybody else (S16). Jesus said to treat others the way you want to be treated (S19).

Study

• Read Leviticus 25:39-46 as a whole. What was different for an Israelite who sold himself and for a foreigner who was bought? What reason does verse 42 give?
• Exodus 21:16 and Exodus 21:20-27 stand in the same chapter. What does one forbid and the others protect? Where did the Atlantic trade fall?
• Read Exodus 21:2-11 and Deuteronomy 21:10-14. What did these laws allow, and what did they forbid? Which would be hardest to explain to someone who doubts, and why?
• Read Philemon 1:12-21. How does Paul ask Philemon to receive Onesimus, and what would that do to the relation between them?
• Preachers hired by masters preached Ephesians 6:5 without 6:9. What other passages are easy to quote by halves?
• Christians who held the same Bible divided over slavery. What practices of our own time might we be reading into Scripture, as they read theirs?

Joseph — Character Study

Paul — Character Study

More illuminations · Harbinger's Lamp