Regulation, Not Endorsement: The Bible and the Question of Slavery
A scholarly defense with honest engagement of the counter-case
Abstract
The charge that the Bible "promotes slavery" collapses several distinct questions into one and imports the image of race-based, chattel slavery from the Atlantic trade onto texts that describe very different institutions. This article argues four theses: (1) the word "slavery" masks substantially different ancient institutions, including Israelite debt-service and the heritable foreign slavery permitted in Leviticus 25:44–46; (2) the Torah regulates and constrains existing institutions and condemns kidnapping, but does not abolish every form of slaveholding; (3) the New Testament plants principles—common creation, spiritual equality, condemnation of slave-trading—that are logically corrosive to the institution and that later fueled abolition; and (4) the internal logic of Scripture treats domination as a post-Fall accommodation, not a creational good. The article does not evade the hardest texts (Lev 25:44–46; Exod 21:20–21) and takes the strongest critical rebuttals seriously.
1. Framing the Charge
Critics such as Hector Avalos argue that the Bible not only tolerates but positively sanctions slavery, and that the apologetic "regulation, not endorsement" reply is special pleading (Avalos, Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Ethics of Biblical Scholarship, 2011). The objection has force precisely where it is precise, so the defense must be equally precise. Three preliminary distinctions do most of the work:
- Description vs. prescription. That a text narrates or permits a practice does not entail that it commends it. Scripture reports polygamy, deception, and monarchy while narrating their damage; permission is not endorsement.
- Regulation vs. institution. Law codes in every era govern practices they did not create and would not have chosen. Regulating a practice presupposes its prior existence, not its moral ideal.
- Chattel vs. debt-servitude. The Atlantic system was hereditary, race-based, and originated in kidnapping. Most biblical "slavery" was a fixed-term response to poverty and debt—closer to indentured labor (Chirichigno, Debt-Slavery in Israel and the Ancient Near East, 1993).
Collapsing these distinctions manufactures the very verdict the critic wants.
2. What "Slavery" Meant in the Ancient Near East
There was no wage economy and no bankruptcy court. When a family fell into unpayable debt, the labor of its members was the only collateral available. Ancient Near Eastern law codes (Hammurabi, Lipit-Ishtar, the Middle Assyrian Laws) treated bondservants largely as property with minimal recourse (Dandamayev, "Slavery [ANE]," Anchor Bible Dictionary). Against that backdrop the relevant question is not "did Israel have servitude?"—every society did—but "how did Israel's law move relative to its neighbors?" On that comparative axis, the Torah is consistently protective rather than exploitative (Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God, 2004; Baker, Tight Fists or Open Hands?, 2009).
3. The Torah's Constraints
3.1 Kidnapping is a capital crime
The single most decisive text for the Atlantic-slavery comparison: "Whoever steals a man and sells him, and anyone found in possession of him, shall be put to death" (Exod 21:16; cf. Deut 24:7). The entire trans-Atlantic trade—seizing free persons and selling them—is here a capital offense. A code that executes slave-catchers cannot coherently be read as the charter of race-based slavery.
3.2 Fugitive servants are protected, not returned
"You shall not give up to his master a slave who has escaped… he shall dwell with you… you shall not wrong him" (Deut 23:15–16). Compare Hammurabi §16, which imposed death for harboring a fugitive slave. Israel's law is the photographic negative of the antebellum Fugitive Slave Act—it shelters the runaway rather than returning him.
3.3 Time limits and provisioned release
Hebrew debt-servitude was capped at six years, with release in the seventh (Exod 21:2), and the freed servant was to be sent out provisioned, not empty-handed: "furnish him liberally" (Deut 15:12–15). The Jubilee reset extended the principle of periodic release into the wider economy (Lev 25:10, 39–41).
3.4 Bodily protection with teeth
A master who permanently injured a servant—even the loss of a single tooth—forfeited ownership and had to free them (Exod 21:26–27). No surrounding code granted freedom for so small an injury. The servant's body was legally protected against the master.
3.5 Common creation as bedrock
Job articulates the theological premise underneath the statutes: "Did not he who made me in the womb make him? Did not one fashion us in the womb?" (Job 31:13–15). The master and the servant share one Maker and one origin—an equality of being that the later abolitionists would mine directly (cf. Gen 1:27, the imago Dei).
4. The Hard Texts—Engaged, Not Evaded
A credible defense must confront the passages critics rightly press.
4.1 Exodus 21:20–21
"When a man strikes his slave… and the slave dies under his hand, he shall be avenged. But if the slave survives a day or two, he is not to be avenged, for the slave is his money."
The critic reads the closing clause as reducing the servant to property. Three points temper this. First, the passage establishes something unprecedented in the ANE: a master could be criminally liable for killing his own servant—elsewhere an unthinkable intrusion on ownership. Second, the "day or two" clause functions forensically, distinguishing intent-to-kill (immediate death under the rod) from disciplinary action whose fatal outcome was not evidently intended—the same intent-distinction the Torah draws for free persons. Third, "his money" most plausibly names the master's economic loss as itself the deterrent: he suffers by his own violence. This reading is contested, and honest scholarship concedes the verse remains uncomfortable (Copan, Is God a Moral Monster?, 2011). But "uncomfortable and limiting" is not "endorsing."
4.2 Leviticus 25:44–46
The hardest text. Foreign bondservants "may be bought," and "you may bequeath them to your sons after you… as a possession forever." This looks like heritable chattel slavery of non-Israelites, and Avalos is right that the "debt-servitude only" defense cannot fully absorb it.
The strongest honest response is layered rather than tidy:
- Permission, not command. The verb permits ("you may"); it does not mandate the practice as a good. Baker notes that the passage permits buying, not kidnapping, and forms part of a longer law whose main thrust is to prohibit the enslaving of Israelites (Baker, Tight Fists or Open Hands?, 2009).
- The universal protections still bind. The anti-kidnapping law (Exod 21:16), the fugitive-shelter law (Deut 23:15–16), the bodily-injury manumission provisions (Exod 21:26–27), and Sabbath rest for servants (Exod 20:10; Deut 5:14) impose real limits and protections. Their precise scope and their comparison with other ancient Near Eastern law codes remain debated; they should not be described as though they erase the permanent foreign-slavery provision in Leviticus 25.
- Trajectory, not terminus. On a redemptive-movement reading (below), Leviticus 25 is a floor raised above the surrounding culture, not the ceiling of biblical ethics. The floor is real; so is the fact that Scripture's own logic keeps rising past it.
One need not pretend Leviticus 25 says less than it does. The claim is narrower and defensible: even here the servant is a protected person within a covenant order, not a rightless thing—and the canon does not rest at this verse.
5. The New Testament: Principles That Dissolve the Institution
The New Testament rarely issues direct social legislation; a persecuted minority sect held no legislative power in Rome, where an estimated large fraction of the empire was enslaved (Harper, Slavery in the Late Roman World, 2011). What it plants instead are premises incompatible with slavery's survival.
- Philemon. Paul returns the runaway Onesimus to Philemon not as chattel but "no longer as a slave but more than a slave, as a beloved brother" (Philem 16), obligating the master to receive his slave as kin. The institution is hollowed out from inside the relationship.
- Galatians 3:28. "There is neither slave nor free… you are all one in Christ Jesus." An ontological equality that, once believed, cannot indefinitely coexist with ownership.
- 1 Timothy 1:9–10. The vice list condemns andrapodistai—slave-traders / men-stealers. The commerce that supplies slavery is named a sin, echoing Exodus 21:16.
- 1 Corinthians 7:21. "If you can gain your freedom, avail yourself of the opportunity." Freedom is preferred, not merely permitted.
- Ephesians 6:9; Colossians 4:1. Masters are commanded to treat slaves justly "knowing that he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and there is no partiality." The master is placed under the same authority as the slave—a leveling that the hierarchy cannot long survive.
The frank concession: the New Testament also tells slaves to obey masters (Eph 6:5), and antebellum defenders quoted it. But the same corpus criminalizes the trade and relativizes the master—materials the abolitionists found decisive, not the enslavers.
6. The Redemptive-Movement Hermeneutic
William Webb's framework (Slaves, Women & Homosexuals, 2001) names the pattern: biblical ethics should be read not as a static list but as a movement relative to its cultural starting point. Measured against Hammurabi, Torah slave-law moves protectively; measured against Torah, the New Testament moves further (brotherhood, condemnation of the trade, preference for freedom); the movement's vector points beyond the letter of any single verse to an ultimate ethic in which the institution has no place. On this reading, citing Leviticus 25 as the Bible's "position" on slavery is like citing the first mile of a road as its destination.
7. Domination as a Post-Fall Accommodation
Scripture's own creation theology supplies the deepest anti-slavery premise. Genesis presents humanity—male and female—as bearing God's image and commissioned to rule the earth, never one another (Gen 1:26–28). Human domination of humans first appears as a consequence of the Fall (Gen 3:16; 9:25), not as a creational design. Jesus applies exactly this logic elsewhere: on divorce he sets Mosaic permission against creational intent—"from the beginning it was not so"—treating the concession as an accommodation to hardened hearts (Matt 19:8; Mark 10:5–9). Scripture never records Jesus applying that formula to slavery in so many words, so this is an argument by structural analogy rather than an explicit dominical ruling; stated at its proper strength, the accommodation model is consonant with, not dictated by, the text. But the pattern is unmistakable: the Bible frames coercive human hierarchy as a symptom of the broken order Christ came to reverse, not the order he came to bless.
8. The Historical Verdict
Ideas have consequences, and the abolitionist consequence flowed from these texts, not around them. Gregory of Nyssa condemned slavery as such in the fourth century—among the earliest outright denunciations in antiquity (Homilies on Ecclesiastes 4). The organized abolition movements of Britain and America were overwhelmingly driven by Christians reasoning from Scripture—Quakers, the Clapham evangelicals, William Wilberforce—who grounded emancipation in the imago Dei, the kidnapping prohibition, and the brotherhood of Philemon (Stark, For the Glory of God, 2003). That slavery's defenders also quoted the Bible is true and must be owned; but the argument that won, and that the texts most naturally support, was the abolitionist one.
9. The Strongest Objections, Restated
Fairness requires putting the counter-case at full strength:
- Special pleading (Avalos). "Regulation not endorsement" can be stretched to excuse anything; Leviticus 25 plainly permits heritable foreign slavery. — Response: the defense is not that the text is unproblematic but that permission within a uniquely protective framework, on a rising trajectory, is categorically different from the endorsement of chattel slavery the charge requires.
- Argument from silence. The New Testament never commands abolition. — Response: true, but it condemns the trade, prefers freedom, and mandates brotherhood—doing to the institution what acid does to metal rather than what a decree does to a law.
- Accommodation proves too much. If God merely "met people where they were," any evil could be so excused. — Response: accommodation is disciplined by direction; the constraint is that the movement runs consistently toward liberation and dignity and never toward greater bondage.
These are serious; they narrow the claim rather than defeat it. The defensible thesis is not "the Bible is a modern abolitionist manifesto" but "the Bible constrains, humanizes, and ultimately undermines slavery, and does not promote it."
10. Conclusion
The charge that the Bible "promotes slavery" must be answered without flattening the texts in either direction. Biblical servitude is not a single institution, and the Old Testament regulates both Israelite debt-service and permanent foreign slavery. The New Testament does not issue a direct civil abolition decree. It does, however, condemn kidnapping and slave trading, prefer freedom where attainable, place masters and slaves under the same divine judgment, receive an enslaved man as a beloved brother in Christ, and ground every person in a common created humanity. Those principles created a moral trajectory later Christians could—and did—develop toward abolition, even as other Christians sinfully used biblical texts to defend slavery. The honest verdict is not that every passage is comfortable or already abolitionist, but that slavery is never a creational good and that the Gospel gives the Church no basis for treating another human being as a lesser kind of person.
Select Bibliography:
- Avalos, Hector. Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Ethics of Biblical Scholarship. Sheffield Phoenix, 2011. (Primary critical interlocutor.)
- Baker, David L. Tight Fists or Open Hands? Wealth and Poverty in Old Testament Law. Eerdmans, 2009.
- Chirichigno, Gregory C. Debt-Slavery in Israel and the Ancient Near East. JSOTSup 141. Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1993.
- Copan, Paul. Is God a Moral Monster? Making Sense of the Old Testament God. Baker, 2011.
- Copan, Paul, and Matthew Flannagan. Did God Really Command Genocide? Baker, 2014.
- Dandamayev, Muhammad A. "Slavery (Ancient Near East)." Anchor Bible Dictionary.
- Gregory of Nyssa. Homilies on Ecclesiastes, Homily 4.
- Harper, Kyle. Slavery in the Late Roman World, AD 275–425. Cambridge, 2011.
- Harris, Murray J. Slave of Christ. IVP, 1999.
- Stark, Rodney. For the Glory of God. Princeton, 2003.
- Webb, William J. Slaves, Women & Homosexuals: Exploring the Hermeneutics of Cultural Analysis. IVP, 2001.
- Wright, Christopher J. H. Old Testament Ethics for the People of God. IVP, 2004.
Scripture citations follow standard English renderings (ESV/NRSV).