Does the Bible approve of slavery?

What the Bible says

This question deserves care. The Bible has slaves and masters in it, and its words have been used to defend slavery. First, what it actually says.

The Hebrew eved (עֶבֶד), translated "servant" or "slave," is broad. It can mean a person who sold himself to work off a debt, a war captive, a king's official, or one who serves God. Moses' law did not invent these arrangements; it addressed practices already in place and set limits. A Hebrew servant was to go free in the seventh year.

If you buy a Hebrew servant, he is to serve you for six years. But in the seventh year, he shall go free without paying anything.

Exod 21:2

Deuteronomy goes further. A released servant is not to be sent away empty-handed but supplied liberally, and the reason is drawn from Israel's own memory.

Remember that you were slaves in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God redeemed you; that is why I am giving you this command today.

Deut 15:15

Leviticus 25 says that a fellow Israelite who sells himself through poverty is not to be worked as a slave but released with his children at the Jubilee (Lev 25:39-41). And stealing a person was a capital crime.

Whoever kidnaps another man must be put to death, whether he sells him or the man is found in his possession.

Exod 21:16

The rule on runaways stands out too.

Do not return a slave to his master if he has taken refuge with you. Let him live among you wherever he chooses, in the town of his pleasing. Do not oppress him.

Deut 23:15-16

Ancient law codes generally required runaways to be returned.

In the New Testament Paul lists "slave traders" among those the law condemns (1 Tim 1:10, andrapodistes (ἀνδραποδιστής)). Taking people by force was condemned from the start. Philemon is more concrete. Sending back Onesimus, traditionally understood as a runaway slave, Paul asks his master Philemon to receive him:

no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a beloved brother.

Phlm 1:16

And Galatians declares how things stand inside the church.

There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

Gal 3:28

The root of it all is Genesis 1:27: every person is made in God's image. Job measures his treatment of his servants by this truth.

If I have rejected the cause of my manservant or maidservant when they made a complaint against me … Did not He who made me in the womb also make them?

Job 31:13-15

The church's witness

What the church drew from these texts collided with slavery, quietly at first and plainly later. Matthew Henry, on Exodus 21:16, writes that "man-stealing," whose purpose is to force another into slavery, "is ranked in the New Testament with the greatest crimes" Matthew Henry. On Philemon he says, "Onesimus was a poor slave, yet Paul besought for him as if seeking some great thing for himself" Matthew Henry.

Among the Fathers, Gregory of Nyssa, preaching on Ecclesiastes in the fourth century, attacked the buying and selling of human beings, asking what price could be put on one made in God's image. His sermon is counted among the earliest principled criticisms of slavery. Augustine saw slavery as a result of sin, not God's original order. Yet the church did not abolish it at once, and many believers and churches owned slaves for a long time.

The Atlantic slave trade of the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries kidnapped Africans, sold them as lifelong property, and justified this on grounds of race. Many Christians defended it from the Bible, reading Noah's curse on Canaan in Genesis 9:25 as the fate of black people and appealing to Leviticus 25:44-46, Ephesians 6:5 and Onesimus's return. Other Christians read the same Bible and fought it: Wilberforce and his friends in Britain, the Quakers, John Newton, a former slave-ship captain, and Black Christians such as Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman. Douglass distinguished sharply between the religion of slaveholders and the Christianity of Christ.

In the original languages

The usual New Testament word for slave is doulos (δοῦλος). It can mean a slave in the strict sense or, more broadly, one who serves. When Paul introduces himself as a doulos of Christ Jesus, he borrows the idea of belonging to a master to say that his whole life is given to Christ. That does not mean he thinks slavery good. In the same letter he says, "You were bought at a price; do not become slaves of men" (1 Cor 7:23). One who belongs to Christ cannot belong to another person. Two verses earlier he tells slaves, "if you can gain your freedom, take the opportunity" (1 Cor 7:21).

Andrapodistes, "slave trader," means one who captures people and sells them, and in the law's list it stands beside murderers and perjurers.

Common objections

"Does the Bible not call slaves property and permit beating them?" There is truth in this. Leviticus 25:44-46 allows foreigners to be bought and left to one's sons as property, "slaves for life," and Exodus 21:20-21 says that if a slave who is struck survives a day or two the owner is not punished, "since the servant is his property." These verses cannot be softened. Yet the same law required a slave to be freed for a serious injury (Exod 21:26-27), and a master who killed a slave was punished. Many Christians understand this law not as a statement of the ideal order but as a restraint on an existing reality. They point to Jesus' words on Moses' divorce rule, permitted "because of your hardness of heart. But it was not this way from the beginning" (Matt 19:8). Not everyone finds this satisfying, and it must be admitted that the law does not command abolition. But to conclude that it teaches slavery as God's ideal goes against the whole of Scripture.

"If Christians defended slavery from the Bible, then the Bible supports it." The history is plain. But the argument had a decisive weakness. Atlantic slavery began in kidnapping and made people lifelong property by race, which is the very sin condemned in Exodus 21:16 and 1 Timothy 1:10. In Philemon, Paul does not tell the owner to punish the runaway but to receive him as a brother. Defenders of slavery picked verses that suited them, while abolitionists appealed to the main line of Scripture, that all are God's image and that the God of the exodus frees the enslaved (Exod 20:2).

"Paul sent a runaway back to his master, so he accepted slavery." This too is a serious question. Paul did send Onesimus back, and Philemon contains no direct command to abolish slavery. But Paul asks Philemon to receive him "as you would receive me" (Phlm 1:17) and calls him a brother. Many interpreters hear a hint that Paul wants Onesimus freed, but the text does not say so plainly. Either way, where master and slave become brothers in Christ, slavery begins to give way from within.

Going further

To ask how the Bible handles slavery is to ask how we should read the Bible. One can pull out a single verse to justify one's interests, or follow the whole current of Scripture: the image of God, the exodus, brotherhood in Christ.

Slavery is not only in the past: many today suffer trafficking and forced labour, and Paul's condemnation still stands. You might ask yourself: Is there a custom I take for granted that hides someone's dignity? Does my self-interest tilt how I read Scripture? If every person bears God's image, how should I treat those I meet today?

To read further, see What is a human being? and How should we read the Bible?