FREE ESSAY ON SLAVERY IN THE BIBLE

SLAVERY IN THE BIBLE

Does the Bible Condone Slavery?
Slavery in the New World caused one of the greatest controversies of modern times. People
have used the Bible to argue for and against this extremely inhumane practice. Few
institutions in history have caused more suffering. A Slave is defined as "a human being
who is the property of another and subject to compulsory labor, beyond the limits of the
family" (Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics p.596). Slavery comes in different forms.
Women in some societies are called slaves because they have almost no rights. People
refer to whole nations of slaves living under totalitarian dictators or to the subjection
of tribes or an entire peoples or to various forms of serfdom as enslavement but true
slavery can only exist where there is freedom, where free men hold other men in bondage.
Slavery has existed throughout known history and is still carried on today in parts of
Africa and Asia. People have used the Bible to both support and condemn slavery. But what
does the Bible really say about slavery? Parts of the Bible condone slavery while others
show outright support for it; however these passages reflect the writings and customs of
people, not of God. A true Christian would see the evils of slavery and rally against it
instead of literally believing in the Bible as the absolute source of all truth.
The first mention of slavery in the Bible appears in Genesis, when Noah cursed his
grandson Canaan (and all of the descendants of Canaan) because Noah's son Ham had seen
Noah naked (Genesis 9:25-27). In these verses, Noah curses Canaan after Ham, his son,
sees him naked. These verses seem to send a highly immoral message. The curse does not
punish the person responsible. It instead punishes the son of the perpetrator, and the
son's descendants forever. In all probability, Canaan was nowhere in the vicinity of
Noah's tent when the event happened. This was one of the favorite passages of theologians
who tried to justify slavery on Biblical grounds. The descendants of Ham were assumed to
be Africans. According to this verse, they were to be slaves forever. Thus the Southern
slave owner was only carrying out God's wishes.
In the Bible it is often unclear whether the Greek word doulos is meant to mean slave or
servant. The King James Bible often uses ambiguous terms such as "servant" or "bondsman"
while modern, more accurate translations often use "slave". Some scholars believe this
was done on purpose to disguise the practice of slavery in the Bible. Because of this,
the entire issue of slavery in the Bible has become clouded. While no passage in the
Bible clearly condemns slavery, two passages have been used to try to show that the Bible
is against it. 
The first is Luke 4:18 which describes Jesus as quoting a passage from Isaiah 61:1-2
which says that The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach
the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance
to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are
bruised. The word "captives" is the crucial part of this quote. It is unknown whether it
refers to slaves or to prisoners. The second passage is 1 Timothy 1:10. In the OAB it
refers to a group of "fornicators, sodomites, slave traders, liars, perjurers..."
Different versions of the Bible translate the verse differently, with slave traders
usually translated as kidnappers or "men-stealers". In the original Greek, the word is
andrapodistes, which combines the words for man and foot. This apparently means to
control a person completely. In any case this passage is ambiguous.
The Bible's seemingly ambivalent stance on slavery has lead some people to question it as
a source of morals. The book of Exodus is an ironic place for the Bible to condone
slavery but in Exodus 21:1-6 guidelines are set forth for the buying, selling, and
treatment of slaves. This is similar to Deuteronomy 15:12-18. It differentiates between a
male Hebrew slave and Gentile slaves, saying that a Hebrew who sold himself into slavery
is to be freed after six years, but if he has married or had a family they are to stay
with the master. The Hebrew can choose to stay a slave to be with his family by
mutilating his ear (the organ of obedience) with an awl and remain a slave for life. In
the Ten Commandments, four and ten both mention slavery and say nothing about its' evils.
This may be because the accompanying explanations of each commandment were added by a
later editor.
An important time in Biblical history is the time of the Patriarchs. In about 2000 B.C.
God called to Abraham and and told him to leave his father's family and to travel to the
land we know today as Israel. He obeyed and took with him "his wife Sari and his
brother's son Lot, and all the possessions they had gathered, and the persons whom they
had acquired...". The "people they had acquired" were most likely slaves. Jefferson Davis
(President of the CSA) said that slavery was established by decree of Almighty God. We
now know, through archeological evidence, that slavery was common in the ancient Middle
East and that the custom was adopted from neighboring tribes and not an order from God.
Abraham's son, Issac and Issac's son Jacob, also possessed slaves, including concubines
that bore them sons. There is no legislation about slavery during the patriarchal times
in the book of Genesis, but we can guess what it was like from the Nuzi Tablets.
The Nuzi Tablets are ancient Middle East legal documents from Abraham's time that include
many laws and regulations concerning slaves. Slaves had (limited) protection from the law
when they were mistreated. The Genesis narrative portrays the slaves more as members of
the family. In Genesis 17:9-14, in order to keep the covenant, Abraham must circumcise
his male slaves as well as himself and his sons. This suggests the slaves were considered
more than just property because they too were recipients of the spiritual blessing of the
covenant. Mircea Eliade says that "among the Jews treatment of the slave was never
debasing or cruel." (619). Slavery seems to be more humane under the patriarchs then it
would become in ancient Greek or Rome or under the slave trade to the New World but it
still existed, even among Gods chosen people.
Supporters of slavery often quoted Ephesians 5:6 and Colossians 3:22, which say "Slaves,
obey your earthly masters". This is the most blatant passage in the Bible supporting
slavery. It was passages like these that lead Karl Marx to call religion the "opiate of
the masses". Ephesians 5:6-8 clearly tells slaves to be faithful to God so they can be
rewarded in the next life instead of this one. In Marx's time he was more concerned about
wage slavery when people sold themselves for their labor. Christianity message of
obedience and faithfulness as well as Judaism's strict emphasis on the Torah law has
caused many to believe that the Bible condones slavery. Why did Jesus not directly
address this evil institution? Herb Vander Lugt suggests three reasons, "Common sense,
futility and priority" (11).
The first reason is the "Common-sense factor". Lugt says that "slavery in the Roman
Empire was quite humane" (11). Slavery had become so common that even common people kept
slaves. Often a family slave would be treated almost as a member of a family. But slaves
were also used in the mines under appalling conditions and used to build public
buildings. One cannot generalize slavery and call it "humane"; anytime in which one human
"owns" another there is a tremendous potential for abuse. 
The second factor mentioned is that of futility. Mircea Eliade writes that the "immediate
abolition or attempted abolition of slavery in the Roman empire would probably have led
to the collapse of the fabric of society" (602). This is impossible to know of course,
but slavery was an integral, if horrible, part of Roman civilization. To attempt to
abolish it would have been a radical and dangerous action, to say the least. Still Jesus'
silence is disturbing.
The final reason offered is that of priority. Jesus came to "provide eternal salvation
through death" and to "reveal the father" (Lugt, 12). While Jesus' most important act was
proclaiming the good news of salvation,
surely He had enough time between performing miracles to put in one word about the
practice of slavery. Lugt echoes the argument of many Christian scholars when he asks
"Why should they (Jesus and his disciples) risk getting into trouble over what was then
such a minor issue?" (11). He points out that Jesus was never a political activist.
However Jesus is quite adamant about some other issues such as divorce. In Luke 16:18 He
says that "Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery, and whoever
marries a woman divorced from her husband commits adultery." There is no record of Jesus
or anyone else in the Bible ever says anything clearly against slavery.
Traditionally, Moses is thought to have had the entire Torah dictated to him by God.
Conservative Jews and Christians still believe this (some conservative Christians now
believe that Moses wrote it himself but that God preserved it from error). Almost any
Christian will fervently deny that God condones slavery. What then of the Torah or
Peter's letters? Before criticism of the Bible in the 18th century most everybody
accepted that slavery was meant to be because of the Bible. Paul returned a runaway slave
to his master but it should be remembered that the early church is not synonymous with
Jesus. Just because Paul did this does not mean that Jesus would have.
Personal slavery disappeared from the Christian world during the Middle ages to be
replaced by serfdom, a condition in which the rural poor were still unfree. It rose up
again in fifteenth century with the Transatlantic slave trade. It is ironic that slavery
resumed in Europe during the Renaissance, when Europe supposedly became less barbaric and
embraced classical ideals. The greatest debate over slavery occurred during the 18th
century. Christians were divided on the subject. Reverend Furman, a Baptist, said that
The right of holding slaves is clearly established in the Holy Scriptures, both by
precept and example. Rabbi M.J. Raphall (circa 1861) gave an extremely convincing speech
arguing that slavery is sanctioned by God. In it he asks, "How dare you, in the face of
the sanction and protection afforded to slave property in the Ten Commandments--how dare
you denounce slave holding as a sin? When you remember that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob,
Job--the men with whom the Almighty conversed, with whose names he emphatically connects
his own most holy name, and to whom He vouchsafed to give the character of 'perfect,
upright, fearing God and eschewing evil' (Job 1:8)--that all these men were slave
holders, does it not strike you that you are guilty of something very little short of
blasphemy? Still, black leaders and abolition spokesmen all used the Bible to help prove
slavery unjust and immoral.
Just because many passages in the Bible condone slavery and because Jesus never addresses
it, does not mean that God is in favor of it. The Bible was written by real people and
editors. The New Testament writers were largely writing for a Hellenistic audience to
which slavery was a "fact of life". Slavery was finally abolished in the U.S. in 1863 and
in most other Western European countries. Louis Cable writes that "It is the secular
state, not the Bible, which we have to thank for ending slavery" (1). Despite this and
the many passages in the Bible that appear to support slavery, Black abolitionist leaders
still used their Christianity and the Bible to prove that slavery is wrong. They were
inspired by the Exodus story and Jesus' teachings of love. Civil rights leaders in the
fifties and sixties, most notably Dr. Martin Luther King, often quoted from the Bible in
their struggle for equal rights. They appealed to Christians' higher sense of ethics, not
to a literal, fundamentalist understanding of the Bible.
Bibliography
Works Cited
Cable, Louis. Does the Bible Condon Slavery?. 1997.