Why trust a Bible that doesn't condemn all forms of slavery? The surprising ethics of scripture

Talk to an atheist about the moral wisdom in scripture, and seconds later, you’ll hear him make a statement about the Bible’s stance on slavery. The appeal to slavery is expected to end all arguments about the obviously bankrupt Iron Age morality of the Bible and to lift up modern moral sensibilities as clearly superior in every way.

As I’ve listened to so many responses to these concerns from Jews and Christians, none have resonated with me. Too many are an attempt to defend the Bible by appealing to an evolving morality that makes it sound like God is becoming increasingly moral throughout human history until he reaches the apex of morality that just so happens to align with the popular morality of our day.

The Bible is the most ethical book ever written.

Besides the self-congratulatory chronological snobbery of these kinds of arguments, I suspect that the opposite is more likely to be true. The Torah, also called “the Law” (the first five books of the Bible), contains some of the most ethically insightful writings in scripture. The rest of the Bible does not evolve past this part of the Bible. On the contrary, it is founded on the bedrock of the Torah.

This brings us back to the slavery question because there’s no way to argue that the Torah denounces all forms of slavery. How can modern Christians and Jews embrace the Torah as the revelation from God when we’ve all agreed that some of the things it accepts we see today as morally evil?

The answer is that the Torah has a more ethical and nuanced vision of slavery than any legal code in human history, including our own.

Far from being embarrassed by the Torah or promoting a movement of “unhitching from the Old Testament,” we need to be more confident than ever that the ethical elements of the Torah are trustworthy and their goodness and perfection point far past the Iron Age author to the inspiration of a transcendent, all-knowing, and perfectly ethical God.

The problem is that events in the recent past have demented our ability to discuss a topic like slavery.

There are three things virtually everyone having this conversation agrees on:

1. The recent, widespread kidnapping of slaves on an industrial scale based on racial characteristics and then making them property, thus giving their owners the freedom to abuse and work them to death without repercussions, is one of the worst human rights abuses in human history.
2. That slavery is best understood and defined by the above practice.
3. Thus, slavery is always evil and should be condemned everywhere and every time it was ever practiced, including in the distant past.

While it seems we’ve all agreed to these three propositions, I’d take serious issue with statement #2. That statement is why we can’t look at examples of slavery in the Bible and understand how it might be seen as ethical. Biblical slavery does not involve kidnapping, is not based on race, was not practiced on an industrial scale, and did not give slave owners the kind of rights they would have over other kinds of physical property.

There is nothing good or ethical about the kind of slavery practiced during the time of the transatlantic slave trade. It was pure evil and would have been condemned by any thoughtful reading of the Bible, both Old and New Testaments.

But it’s only one type of slavery.

What are the other types of slavery? Here are four examples of slavery the Bible would have allowed in ancient Israel. Some of these forms of slavery are unwise to practice today; others are being practiced but are not being categorized as slavery. But all are ethically permissible and perfectly understandable in their native context.

The following examples constitute the vast majority of instances of slavery as described in scripture:

1. The forced labor of prisoners of war: During World War 2, the allies engaged in wide-spread forced labor of German and Japanese prisoners of war. They were treated more humanely than any other prisoners of war, and this treatment inspired no popular outcry against this kind of slavery because it’s reasonable to insist prisoners contribute to the cost of their confinement. The majority of slavery in biblical times was this type and especially involved women and children of enemy forces after most of the men were killed when the choice was between extracting labor or starvation.

2. The forced labor of convicted felons: It takes a large-scale industrial economy to house, feed, and guard a huge population of prisoners. The United States, for example, incarcerates a larger percentage of its population than any country on Earth, and it’s also the world’s largest economy. These two facts are connected. Ancient societies did not have the wealth required for lengthy prison sentences. The death penalty or forced labor were the only two economically viable pathways to deal with felons. But these felons could refuse to work, and forcing labor in this way is why this can be categorized as slavery.

3. The forced labor of those in debt: Today, the U.S. government provides loans for college students in order to extract the value of their future labor. This forced labor and repayment is inescapable even in bankruptcy court and makes students into debt-slaves for decades. This was the second-most common practice in biblical times. However, this was not a practice aimed primarily at young adults but was more often debt created by a father of a family and was debt he would incur while attempting to acquire family assets.

4. Voluntary indentured servitude: In the early days of the colonial settlement of the United States, settlers earned their passage across the ocean by agreeing to a contract of many years of labor once they reached the new world. This kind of slavery is the type most written about in the Torah. It involves strict restrictions on the family holding these contracts where slaves were encouraged to get their freedom but could voluntarily pledge themselves for life to a family who would then be responsible for caring for them.

While these kinds of slavery were allowed in scripture, there were additional laws designed to prevent the unjust treatment of slaves:

1. Kidnapping in order to enslave was forbidden in both the Old and New Testaments (Exodus 21:16; 1 Timothy 1:10)
2. Mistreating slaves physically earned their freedom (Exodus 21:24-27)
3. Slaves set free were entitled to some property by their master (Deuteronomy 15:12-18)
4. Everyone was encouraged to avoid slavery and get out of enslavement (Deuteronomy 15:17; 1 Corinthians 7:21)

The Bible is the most ethical book ever written. Christians and Jews must not allow the thoughtless grandstanding of those who make straw-man arguments and rely on a biblically illiterate public and a simplistic understanding of slavery to take cheap shots at the wisdom of scripture.

Never be embarrassed by the Bible. The Bible would not be a better book if it condemned these four types of slavery. It would be a worse book condemning millions to greater mistreatment and the starvation that would inevitably result from making these options illegal.

This essay was adapted from an article originally published at Jeremy Pryor's Substack.