This is a thoughtful essay on slavery from a biblical perspective by Martin Turner, from Quora:
Why doesn't the Bible condemn slavery?
This is one of the most misunderstood questions. We need to examine it in four stages:
The Old Testament does not have a word for our concept of ‘slave’.
We do not have a word for a particular Old Testament concept.
There is a word which is contextually translated ‘slave’, but it means just a ‘worker’ or a subordinate. This word is ‘ebed’.
There is no English word which can be used to translate ‘ebed’ consistently and idiomatically.
For example, when Abram complains to God that Eleazar of Damascus will inherit his property, he describes him as ‘my ebed’.
In the Exodus, although the Israelites are described as ‘ebed’, so are Pharaoh’s officials.
This comes down to a fundamental difference between the structure of society in the ancient world and today.
In Near Eastern Bronze Age societies, everyone was the subject of someone, and everyone except the lowest tier had someone else as their subject. The ‘lord’ was the ‘adon’ (in Hebrew—other languages had the same system but different words). The ‘subject’ was the ‘ebed’.
Normally, the adon took on obligations in regard to the ebed, typically of protection and advancement, and the ebed took on obligations in regard to the adon, typically in regard to services rendered and honour due, though it might be taxes or profit-sharing.
High status was conferred by having a high-status adon, and by being given a high role in his entourage.
The ‘king’ might be the ebed of a higher king. However, even the highest king was the ebed of his god.
How you became someone’s ebed could be by a variety of routes:
Societies differed in specifics about the rights (if any) of the ebed and the limitations (if any) on the power of the adon.
For example, under Hammurabi’s code, if you harboured a fugitive subject, you became legally liable and might be enslaved yourself. Under Israelite law, you were specifically forbidden from returning a fugitive ebed to his adon if he did not wish to return.
Marriage was a special case in the adon relationship. Society was patriarchal. A woman marrying a man took him on as her adon. However, the rights she acquired were significantly greater than any other kind of subject. Equally, the obligations of the adon were extremely high. Nonetheless, this relationship was also variable across cultures.
The adon-ebed relationship was a societal one. It was mediated by families, extended families and social structures. For this reason, adons were not necessarily free to demote high-placed ebeds without good cause.
All of this was not set out in a constitution: it was the customary law, in an era where custom was preeminent. Adon-ebed was the basic structure of society. For this reason, we don’t see it defined in Hammurabi’s code, or in the Old Testament, or in any other early written legal code.
However, the various codes do delimit it.
The Old Testament is notable in this regard because it comes down heavily on the side of the ebed. We see the following:
There are, incidentally, a number of other regulations giving additional rights to wives.
Hard-core opponents of the Hebrew scriptures like to push the mantra that ‘the Bible condones slavery’, but this is rhetorical. There is no possible way to consistently translate ebed as ‘slave’. In fact, there is no single translation word because modern societies don’t have a concept which matches it.
There are some adon-ebed relationships with clearly fall into the modern concept of slavery. Most don’t.
The Hebrew scriptures go a long way to excluding what we think of as ‘slavery’ from what is a permissible in an adon-ebed relationship. This doesn’t mean that they permit everything not forbidden. In fact, many of the Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy regulations are case-law based on decisions on previous situations. For example, various actions taken by the patriarchs in Genesis are explicitly forbidden in the subsequent laws.
We know that cases not considered in the Torah came up later, as they are dealt with in Nehemiah. However, the argument ‘this is not forbidden so it is permitted’ is not used. Rather, attempts are made to make judgements in line with the wider law. Again, they come down on the side of the ebed, not the adon.
In short: the Old Testament does not have a concept which corresponds with our notion of slavery, but where there is overlap, our notion of slavery is forbidden.
‘Slaves’ had the right to leave their ‘masters’ if they so chose, ‘masters’ could not punish their ‘slaves’ in ways that caused lasting harm, slave-taking was a capital crime, and so on.
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The New Testament was written from within the Roman Empire. As such, the structure of society was entirely different. Every person was legally either a patrician, or a plebeian citizen, or a free non-citizen Roman subject, or a slave, or else a barbarian from outside the empire.
There was a system for slaves to become free, though they could not normally go from slave to citizen in a single lifetime. A citizen could not become a slave. However, a Roman subject could be sentenced to slavery as punishment for a crime. A barbarian could be captured in war (or, illegally but permissibly through piracy and kidnapping). The child of slaves was the property of the owner, and could be dealt with accordingly.
Slaves had vanishingly few legal rights, but this did not mean that slaves were necessarily treated barbarically. Slaves in the mines and galleys were treated purely as commodities. Administrative slaves could rise to high position, and be rewarded with freedman status.
The writers of the New Testament had no political power, nor did they have a programme for acquiring it. However, they regarded slaves and masters as of equal status within the Church. Masters were given specific instructions to treat slaves as brothers and sisters, not threatening them or mistreating them. Slaves were instructed to be good workers. If they had believing masters, they were not to take advantage of this in regard to their work.
Slave-trading was explicitly forbidden.
The Roman concept of slavery was relatively similar to our modern concept, though it was never based on race. Again, in common with the Old Testament writers, the New Testament writers explicitly forbade slave-owners from treating their slaves in the way we associate with the Atlantic slave trade or modern people trafficking.
In the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas wrote around 8 million words reconciling the teaching of the Western Catholic Church with the Greek philosopher Aristotle.
Unlike the Bible, Aristotle explicitly and specifically endorsed slavery. He argued that slavery (in the Greek and Roman sense) was necessary for society. What’s more, he argued that some people were ‘natural’ slaves, and could only live as slaves, and ought to be enslaved.
The Roman empire had previously abolished slavery, and none of the European states reintroduced it on their home territory, although the feudal system was extremely similar to the Bronze Age system of adon-ebed.
However, once the New World was discovered, Europeans took advantage of papal teaching on slavery based on Aristotle, including the arbitrary fiction that non-white people were intrinsically inferior (and, thus, according to Aristotle, deserved to be slaves).
In the sixteenth century, Protestantism rejected Aristotelean philosophy (or, at least, its authority compared with the Bible). However, since slavery was not present in Europe where the Reformation was happening. When Protestant nations (especially England) began to acquire their own colonies in the New World, they were permissive in regard to slavery, and essentially allowed privateers, traders and colonists to do all the things which were already sanctioned by the Pope in South America.
This led to the brutal horrors of the Atlantic slave trade.
However, although the people doing this styled themselves as ‘Christian’ (by which they typically meant they were not Muslim or pagan), they did not advance the case that the Bible supported them. This was, simply, because the English Bible in circulation, the King James Version, did not include the word ‘slave’ when referencing the adon-ebed relationship. Tyndale, on whose work the King James Version was based, used ‘bondsman’ or ‘manservant’.
When abolitionism became important in Britain, it was pioneered by Quakers (Society of Friends) and taken on by Methodists and Evangelicals. In fact, this is where the term ‘evangelical’ was first used in the modern sense, referencing William Wilberforce and the ‘Clapham Sect’ which campaigned successfully first for the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire, and then the abolition of slavery itself.
Since Britain was the preeminent naval power, this was enormously important.
The USA was much slower in abolishing slavery. However, the argument was made on secular principles, states’ rights. It was only when Biblical arguments were put forward for abolishing slavery that counter-arguments were put forward, also arguing from Scripture. Even so, they relied on the same King James Version which did not use the term ‘slave’ for the ebed.
Abolitionism was primarily driven by Christians, arguing from the Bible.
When it was argued from secular principles, for example by Thomas Paine and in the French Revolution, it was unsuccessful. France has the unique notoriety of being both the first modern society to abolish slavery, and the only modern society to reintroduce it just a few years later.
Talking about slavery as something in the past fits well with our self-image as morally more advanced than those of previous centuries.
However, the reality is that more people are held in a state of slavery than at any time in history. Since ‘slavery’, by that name, is outlawed in most (but not all) states, this is not promoted by that name.
Consensus estimates indicate that 50 million people are currently held in a state of forced labour or forced marriage.
Human trafficking is increasingly a staple of Hollywood films, but it is typically treated voyeuristically or as a theme in revenge movies, or, often, both. As such, the exposure the topic gets does not lead toward dealing with the issue.
Most states have laws forbidding human trafficking, but there are vanishingly few convictions for the crime.
It is something we need to tackle urgently.
Our failure to do so speaks to a moral blindspot and failing which exceeds even that of the Romans.
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