Slavery in the Bible

The Bible knows slavery. It encounters it as a universal fact of its world, regulates it in its laws, and places within it a principle that ruins it from within: the equal dignity of every man before God. From this principle springs a movement that runs through the whole of Scripture, from the laws of Moses, which soften and limit servitude, to the Gospel, which makes master and slave two brothers.

What slavery the Bible speaks of

One entered biblical servitude through debt, through the poverty that forced a man to sell himself, or through war. The Hebrew word the Bible renders as “servant” or “slave,” ʻebed (עֶבֶד), and its Greek equivalent doulos (δοῦλος), cover a whole range, from the household servant to the captive of war. Nothing here of the modern slave trade, which made race a title of ownership and rested entirely on the stealing of men, which the Law punished with death: biblical servitude belongs to a law that limits and loosens it, even setting a term to that of the Hebrew servant.

The Law softens and limits

The Law of Moses frames servitude and limits it on every side. It limits it first by time: the Hebrew servant serves six years and recovers his freedom in the seventh. “When you buy a Hebrew slave, he is to serve for six years; in the seventh year he is to go free, without paying anything.” Exodus 21:2 He is not sent away empty-handed, but provided with what he needs to set out again on his feet. “And when you send him away free, you shall not send him away empty-handed: you shall provide him generously from your flock, your threshing floor, and your winepress.” Deuteronomy 15:13-14 Every fifty years, the year of jubilee restores each man to his family and his land. “proclaim liberty in the land for all its inhabitants. It shall be for you a jubilee: each of you shall return to his property and return to his family.” Leviticus 25:10 No Israelite, likewise, may be held as goods that one buys and sells. “For they are my servants, whom I brought out of the land of Egypt: they shall not be sold as slaves are sold.” Leviticus 25:42 The rest of the sabbath itself extends to the servant, equally with the master. “so that your male and female servants may rest as you do.” Deuteronomy 5:14 And violence turns against the one who inflicts it: the master who maims his servant must set him free. “When a man strikes the eye of his slave or his servant and destroys it, he is to let him go free in compensation for his eye.” Exodus 21:26

The master who goes too far

One text, harsher, is nonetheless raised, where the killing of a servant would seem to go unpunished: “When a man strikes his slave or his servant with a rod, and the slave dies under his hand, he is to be punished. But if the slave survives a day or two, he is not to be punished, for the slave is his own property.” Exodus 21:20-21 Read closely, this text protects the servant rather than abandoning him. Its first line lays down a principle no other code of the ancient Near East knew: the master who kills his slave under his blows is guilty, his life avenged like a man’s, not written off like the loss of property. Where elsewhere the master disposed of his slave even unto death without account, the Law of Moses makes that death a crime. The second line does not contradict the first: it distinguishes by intent. If the slave dies at once, the murderous fury is plain, and the master answers for the blood; if he survives several days before dying, nothing proves the master meant to kill him, and the death, uncertain in its cause, is no longer held a murder. “The slave is his own property” affirms his worth: the master, in losing the one in his charge, already bears the penalty of his excess. The same Law, as we have seen, grants the servant his freedom for an eye or a tooth: it watches over his body, it does not hand him over. The Law even foresees the opposite of coercion: the servant who, out of attachment, refuses to go free. “if the slave declares, ‘I love my master, my wife, and my children; I do not want to go free,’” Exodus 21:5-6, his master pierces his ear against the door, and he serves him for ever. Tradition has read there the Christ, who out of love took “the form of a slave” Philippians 2:7 and bound himself for ever to the service of his own.

The refuge of the fugitive

One commandment goes further than all, and the world of that time knew nothing like it: the slave who flees a harsh master must not be handed back. “You shall not hand back to his master a slave who has fled from him to take refuge with you. He shall dwell with you, in your midst, in the place he chooses, in one of your towns, wherever he is content; you shall not oppress him.” Deuteronomy 23:16-17 Elsewhere, to take in a fugitive was a crime punishable by death; in Israel, it is the handing back that is forbidden. The law takes the side of the weak against the one who owns him, which ruins in advance the idea of an absolute ownership over the person.

The stealing of a man, a capital crime

At the root of all slave trade lies the abduction: to seize a man in order to sell him. The Law strikes it with death. “Whoever kidnaps a man, whether he has sold him or the man is still found in his possession, is to be put to death.” Exodus 21:16 The New Testament takes up this condemnation and ranks the slave trader among the worst criminals: he appears in the list of acts that sound doctrine reproves. “the immoral, homosexuals, slave traders, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is opposed to sound doctrine.” 1 Timothy 1:10 The trade that deported entire peoples rested entirely on this stealing of men that Scripture already punished with death.

The foreign slave

The Law nonetheless permits a harsher servitude for the foreigner: he may be acquired permanently and passed on to heirs. “The slaves, male and female, that you may have, you shall take from the nations around you [...] You shall leave them as an inheritance to your children after you, as a permanent property.” Leviticus 25:44-46 This difference rests on the covenant. The Israelite belongs to God, who redeemed him from Egypt, and no man can own what belongs to God. “For it is to me that the sons of Israel are servants: they are my servants, whom I brought out of the land of Egypt.” Leviticus 25:55 The foreigner stands outside this covenant, and the Law leaves him to the common law of the nations of his time. Yet it extends its protections over him: the rest of the sabbath holds for every servant, the refuge protects every fugitive, the ban on abduction covers every man, and the commandment given to Israel embraces the foreigner himself. “You shall treat the resident alien who lives among you as one of your own; you shall love him as yourself, for you were resident aliens in the land of Egypt.” Leviticus 19:34 The asymmetry remains, and it rests entirely on the boundary between the brother of the covenant and the foreigner. It is this very boundary that the Gospel erases: when the covenant opens to all nations, every man becomes the brother, and perpetual servitude loses the ground on which it stood.

Israel, a people of redeemed slaves

Israel knows itself born of slavery. Its whole history begins with a deliverance: God sees the misery of an enslaved people and comes down to tear it from its masters. “I have seen, yes, I have seen the misery of my people in Egypt, and I have heard their cry against their oppressors; yes, I know their sufferings. I have come down to rescue them.” Exodus 3:7-8 God reveals himself thus as the one who sets free, and this memory becomes the measure of the whole Law. Each time it commands gentleness toward the servant, it gives the same reason: “Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt and that the Lord your God redeemed you.” Deuteronomy 15:15 A people that defines itself by its coming out of servitude carries within itself what condemns it. This liberty that the jubilee proclaimed every fiftieth year, Christ comes to fulfil. At Nazareth he applies to himself the oracle of Isaiah: “to set the oppressed free, and to proclaim a year of the Lord’s favor” Luke 4:18-19. The true jubilee opens in him, and the deliverance he brings reaches even the servitude of sin.

Christ makes master and slave two brothers

The Gospel delivers the decisive blow, not by changing the laws of the Empire, but by changing what founds every law: the regard for man. Before Christ, social condition fades away, for all receive the same dignity of sons of God. “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female: for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Galatians 3:28 A short letter of Paul shows its concrete effect. Onesimus, a runaway slave become a Christian, is sent back to his master Philemon, himself a Christian too. Paul asks him to receive him as a brother. “so that you might have him back forever, no longer as a slave, but as more than a slave: as a dear brother.” Philemon 1:15-16 The master remains master according to the law, and he now has for a brother the one he owns: this brotherhood makes ownership untenable. To this master, Paul recalls that he has one above him: “Masters, grant your servants what is just and fair, knowing that you too have a Master in heaven.” Colossians 4:1 And to the slave, he counsels seizing freedom as soon as he can, and he transforms the very word slave: before Christ, the slave is already free and the free man is Christ’s slave. “the slave who has been called in the Lord is a freedman of the Lord; likewise, the free man who has been called is a slave of Christ” 1 Corinthians 7:22 And all have a price: “You were bought at a great price: do not become slaves of men” 1 Corinthians 7:23: “if you can become free, make the most of your condition instead.” 1 Corinthians 7:21

“Slaves, obey your masters”

One last objection comes no longer from the Old Testament but from the Gospel: Paul himself writes “slaves, obey your masters,” as if he were sealing servitude. “Servants, obey your earthly masters with respect and reverence, with a sincere heart, as you would obey Christ.” Ephesians 6:5 But what immediately follows overturns the established order: Paul speaks not to the slave alone, he speaks to the master as well, and sets them both under one Master who shows no partiality. “And you, masters, act in the same way toward them; give up your threats, knowing that their Master and yours is in the heavens, and that he shows no partiality.” Ephesians 6:9 To tell the master to “do the same” toward his slave, to give up threats, and to remind him that he too has a master in heaven, is to undercut absolute power while ordering conduct within the world as it is. Paul does not call for a revolt, which would have been crushed at once and changed nothing for the slaves; he changes the way both look, until brotherhood makes the chain untenable.

The seed and its fruit

There remains the objection that always returns: Christ and the apostles did not abolish slavery with a word. God leads men by degrees and tolerates for a time imperfect states that he will later set right, as hearts become able to bear it. Christ says it himself of the repudiation that Moses had permitted: “It was because of the hardness of your hearts that Moses permitted you to divorce your wives; but in the beginning it was not so.” Matthew 19:8 It is with slavery as with divorce: Scripture begins with man as it finds him and leads him where he must go. To decree abolition in a world where slaves numbered in the millions would have been a word without grip; to sow brotherhood was to reach the root. With time, the seed bore its fruit: the Church held manumission to be a work of charity, ransomed captives, condemned the stealing and the trade of men, until it recognized that no one can be the property of another, because every man is the image of God and the brother of Christ. What the Gospel had laid down as a principle, history unfolded to the end. As early as the fourth century, Gregory of Nyssa drew the full consequence, denouncing as a theft the claim to own a man, who is free and made in the image of God; the Church took centuries to apply it everywhere, but the principle had been given.