Does the Bible Condone Slavery?

[siliconwafer]

Does the Bible condone slavery? I was just wondering because some non-Christians object to Christianity by saying that the Bible condones slavery.

[KingsGambit]

Glenn Miller has some required reading on this topic:

http://christianthinktank.com/qnoslave.html

[Soyeong]

In that time period, having daily bread was much less of a given than it is today, at least in the US. If everyone in a community didn't work, then was often not enough food for everyone to eat, hence the rule that if you don't work, you don't eat. If someone couldn't pay their debts, they could either sell themselves into slavery to pay them off, take up a life of begging, or starve, and if they tried begging while they were able to work, they'd probably starve anyway. Slavery was a necessary part of their culture, but unlike modern conceptions of it, if the slaves were mistreated, then they could freely leave.

[hedrick]

Yes it does. However the requirements Paul puts down for how you treat slaves turn out to be impossible in practice. After centuries of experiencing this, the Church (all branches, as far as I know) decided that it's unacceptable.

This is the kind of judgement that I believe Jesus empowered the Church to make.

[Soyeong]

However the requirements Paul puts down for how you treat slaves turn out to be impossible in practice.

Could you go into more detail?

[Little Shepherd]

Short answer: no, not at all.

Slightly longer answer: only if you'd consider the use of credit cards in an environment without bankruptcy laws to be slavery.

An even longer, but still not very long, answer: If you were in serious debt in OT times, and found yourself unable to pay, you were allowed to enter into your creditor's household. You worked for that household, and your creditor-now-employer had to feed you, clothe you, shelter you, and generally treat you decently. Also, at the end of your 7 years of service(less if you happen to hit a jubilee year), you were to be released with a portion of your creditor's wealth in order to make a start for yourself outside of his household. You were not simply turned out on the street with nothing. Mistreating your servants, including but not limited to serious physical injury(it was a case law system, so the same law could be applied more broadly than the text literally stated), required the debt be erased and the servant be released immediately.

There were other things in place, too. There was an optional ritual one could undergo in order to join their employer's house permanently, but it was optional and other than the duration of their work nothing else changed. It wasn't a free-for-all on people who wanted to beat their employees. And there were also "safe zones" of a sort set up for servants who left their employee early, in that they wouldn't be pursued, charged with a crime(accruing a debt and failing to pay it back is theft, after all), or returned to their household. The little things like that make it obvious that the arrangement was voluntary. Nobody was forced into debt, and nobody was forced into the employ of their creditor if they really didn't want to be. I can imagine that fleeing instead of paying one's debt, though, carried a high price in shame.

[RBerman]

It's a complex situation, because the Bible discusses a wide variety of master-servant cirumstances, only some of which parallel "slavery" as it was practiced in the American colonies.

Exodus 21:1-10

Now these are the rules that you shall set before them. When you buy a Hebrew slave, he shall serve six years, and in the seventh he shall go out free, for nothing. If he comes in single, he shall go out single; if he comes in married, then his wife shall go out with him. If his master gives him a wife and she bears him sons or daughters, the wife and her children shall be her master's, and he shall go out alone. But if the slave plainly says, ‘I love my master, my wife, and my children; I will not go out free,’ then his master shall bring him to God, and he shall bring him to the door or the doorpost. And his master shall bore his ear through with an awl, and he shall be his slave forever.

When a man sells his daughter as a slave, she shall not go out as the male slaves do. If she does not please her master, who has designated her[b] for himself, then he shall let her be redeemed. He shall have no right to sell her to a foreign people, since he has broken faith with her. If he designates her for his son, he shall deal with her as with a daughter. If he takes another wife to himself, he shall not diminish her food, her clothing, or her marital rights. And if he does not do these three things for her, she shall go out for nothing, without payment of money.

Exodus 21:16

Whoever steals a man and sells him, and anyone found in possession of him, shall be put to death.

Leviticus 25:39-46

If your brother becomes poor beside you and sells himself to you, you shall not make him serve as a slave: he shall be with you as a hired worker and as a sojourner. He shall serve with you until the year of the jubilee. Then he shall go out from you, he and his children with him, and go back to his own clan and return to the possession of his fathers. For they are my servants, whom I brought out of the land of Egypt; they shall not be sold as slaves. You shall not rule over him ruthlessly but shall fear your God. As for your male and female slaves whom you may have: you may buy male and female slaves from among the nations that are around you. You may also buy from among the strangers who sojourn with you and their clans that are with you, who have been born in your land, and they may be your property. You may bequeath them to your sons after you to inherit as a possession forever. You may make slaves of them, but over your brothers the people of Israel you shall not rule, one over another ruthlessly.

Deuteronomy 21:10-14

When you go out to war against your enemies, and the Lord your God gives them into your hand and you take them captive, and you see among the captives a beautiful woman, and you desire to take her to be your wife, and you bring her home to your house, she shall shave her head and pare her nails. And she shall take off the clothes in which she was captured and shall remain in your house and lament her father and her mother a full month. After that you may go in to her and be her husband, and she shall be your wife. But if you no longer delight in her, you shall let her go where she wants. But you shall not sell her for money, nor shall you treat her as a slave, since you have humiliated her.

Deuteronomy 23:15-16

You shall not give up to his master a slave[a] who has escaped from his master to you. He shall dwell with you, in your midst, in the place that he shall choose within one of your towns, wherever it suits him. You shall not wrong him.

Deuteronomy 24:7

If a man is found stealing one of his brothers of the people of Israel, and if he treats him as a slave or sells him, then that thief shall die. So you shall purge the evil from your midst.

The situation closest to the chattel slavery practiced in colonial days is that of Exodus 21:16, wherein slaves were kidnapped from their families by other tribes, sold to slave traders, and taken to other countries (e.g. America) where they remained slaves their whole lives, with no real prospect of freedom as a general rule, and their children were born into the same circumstance. As you can see from Exodus 21, those who perpetuated such a system would have been liable to the death penalty under the Mosaic law.

[gary cook]

• Edited by a Moderator •