Slavery and the Bible

The Bible assumes slavery and regulates it, and at its center it tells the story of a God who frees slaves. It teaches that every human being is made in God’s image, and Paul wrote that in Christ “there is no longer slave or free” (Galatians 3:28). Over centuries those truths led Christians to see that slavery cannot be squared with the love of God and neighbor. Every major Christian church now teaches that slavery is a sin.

The slavery passages trouble many readers, whether they meet them through a skeptic’s challenge, through their own family’s history, or in reading the Bible straight through. You do not have to defend every verse to trust the God who heard the cry of slaves in Egypt.

What does the Old Testament say about slavery?

Israel’s faith began with a release from slavery. The Ten Commandments open with God’s words, “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage” (Exodus 20:2). Israel’s laws still permitted slavery, as every ancient society did.

For fellow Israelites, the law limited slavery. Many Israelite slaves were people who had sold themselves to pay a debt, and the law said that a Hebrew slave “shall serve six years, and in the seventh he shall go out free without paying anything” (Exodus 21:2). Leviticus goes further: a fellow Israelite in debt must never be made to serve as a slave, and is to be treated as a hired worker (Leviticus 25:39–40).

For foreigners, the same chapter allowed permanent slavery. Leviticus 25:44–46 lets Israelites buy male and female slaves from the surrounding nations and from foreigners living in the land, says of them, “they will be your property,” and lets owners leave them to their children as an inheritance.

Exodus says that an owner who beats a slave to death must be punished, but not if the slave survives a day or two, “for the servant is his property” (Exodus 21:20–21). The Hebrew word the World English Bible translates “servant” in these laws is eved, which here means a slave, a person another person owns. Christians should read those words without softening them.

The law also contained protections that were unusual in the ancient world. A slave whose owner destroyed an eye went free (Exodus 21:26). Kidnapping a person to sell was punishable by death (Exodus 21:16). Deuteronomy forbade returning runaway slaves:

You shall not return to their owners slaves who have escaped to you from their owners. They shall reside with you, in your midst, in any place they choose in any one of your towns, wherever they please; you shall not oppress them.

Deuteronomy 23:15–16, NRSVUE

Was slavery in the Bible like American slavery?

Not in every way. Slavery in ancient Israel was not based on race, and much of it was temporary debt service. The transatlantic slave trade, by contrast, was built on kidnapping, the crime that Exodus 21:16 punished with death. American law also required escaped slaves to be returned to their owners, the reverse of Deuteronomy 23:15–16.

The differences should not be used to make biblical slavery sound gentle. Leviticus 25 allowed foreigners to be held for life and passed down as inheritance, and Exodus 21 treated a slave’s death after a beating as a property matter. Defenders of American slavery pointed to those passages, and to the curse Noah laid on Canaan in Genesis 9:25, which they falsely applied to Africans.

What does the New Testament say about slavery?

The New Testament was written to small groups of Christians inside the Roman Empire, where perhaps millions of people were enslaved. Its letters tell Christian slaves to serve faithfully. Ephesians 6:5 tells them to obey their masters “with fear and trembling.” The Greek word for the people addressed, douloi, means slaves; the World English Bible translates it “servants.”

The same passage tells masters to “give up threatening, knowing that he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and there is no partiality with him” (Ephesians 6:9). Many scholars think Ephesians was written by a follower of Paul after his death. Paul himself told slaves, “if you get an opportunity to become free, use it” (1 Corinthians 7:21), and 1 Timothy lists “slave-traders” among the lawless (1 Timothy 1:10).

Paul’s shortest letter concerns a slave named Onesimus, whom Paul sends back to his owner, Philemon. Paul asks Philemon to receive him

no longer as a slave but more than a slave, a beloved brother—especially to me but how much more to you, both in the flesh and in the Lord.

Philemon 1:16, NRSVUE

The New Testament left Roman law in place. It also placed slave and master at the same table, under the same Lord, as brothers and sisters, and later Christians would turn that truth against slavery itself.

How did Christians come to oppose slavery?

Slowly, and against other Christians. In the late fourth century Gregory of Nyssa, a bishop in what is now Turkey, preached against slave-owning in his fourth homily on Ecclesiastes. Commenting on the boast of the Preacher, whom Gregory took to be King Solomon, “I got me slaves and slave-girls,” Gregory asked: “For what price, tell me? What did you find in existence worth as much as this human nature?” He went on: “How many obols did you reckon the equivalent of the likeness of God?” Gregory’s voice was rare in his time.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Quakers, evangelical Anglicans such as William Wilberforce, and John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, who published Thoughts upon Slavery in 1774, campaigned against the slave trade and slavery itself. Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807 and slavery in most of its colonies in 1833. In the United States, Christians stood on both sides: the Methodist Episcopal Church split in 1844 over slavery, and Southern churches defended it from the pulpit.

Frederick Douglass, who escaped slavery and became its most famous opponent, wrote in 1845 that “between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference.” Douglass loved what he called “the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ” and condemned the religion of the slaveholders.

What do the churches teach about slavery today?

Every major Christian church today teaches that owning, buying, selling, or trafficking human beings is a grave sin. Several American churches have gone further and repented of their own past. In 2006 the Episcopal Church’s General Convention declared that slavery “was and is a sin” and expressed “most profound regret” that the church had lent slavery “its support and justification based on Scripture” (Resolution A123). In 2019 the Church Council of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) adopted a “Declaration of the ELCA to People of African Descent,” apologizing for Lutherans’ complicity in slavery, and presented it to the church’s national assembly that August.

How should Christians read the slavery passages today?

Christians read the slavery laws the way the church learned to read them: in the light of the whole Bible and of Christ. Jesus summed up the Law and the Prophets in one rule: “whatever you desire for men to do to you, you shall also do to them; for this is the law and the prophets” (Matthew 7:12). No one who would refuse to be owned can keep that rule while owning another person.

Augustine taught that any reading of Scripture that does not build up love of God and neighbor has not yet understood Scripture. Defenders of slavery could quote real verses and still miss the love at the center of the whole Bible. For related questions, see What does the Bible say about racism?, Why is the Old Testament so violent?, and Should wives submit to their husbands?, which deals with the same household rules in Ephesians.

The God of the Bible is the God who said at the burning bush, “I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt, and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters, for I know their sorrows” (Exodus 3:7). Jesus began his ministry by announcing that he was sent “to proclaim release to the captives” and “to deliver those who are crushed” (Luke 4:18). Wherever people are still bought, sold, or held against their will, Christians are called to hear that same cry and to work and pray for their release.