What Do We Do with “Slavery” in the Torah?

As we read through the Torah together, it’s natural to stumble on passages about “slavery” and feel a deep tension. We instinctively picture the racial slavery of early America—the buying and selling of human beings as property, defined by skin color and brutality. But what the Bible describes existed in a completely different world. As theologian Don Carson points out (drawing on historian Thomas Sowell), every ancient culture practiced some form of servitude, not as race-based ownership but as a rough kind of economic survival. In a world without bankruptcy courts or social safety nets, people could sell their labor (or sometimes even themselves) to pay off debt and avoid starvation. It wasn’t ideal, but it was often the only way to live. Carson reminds us that the Bible’s vision was always bending that broken reality toward mercy, justice, and ultimately, freedom through transformed hearts. This quote is pulled from Lee Strobel’s book “The Case for Christ” and I think it’s the best single summary of how we should interact with the Biblical reality of slavery. “In his book Race and Culture, African-American scholar Thomas Sowell points out that every major world culture until the modern period, without exception, has had slavery,”. While it could be tied to military conquests, usually slavery served an economic function. They didn’t have bankruptcy laws, so if you got yourself into terrible debt, you sold yourself and/or your family into slavery. As it was discharging a debt, slavery was also providing work. It wasn’t necessarily all bad; at least it was an option for survival. Please understand me: I’m not trying to romanticize slavery in any way. However, in Roman times there were menial laborers who were slaves, and there were also others who were the equivalent of distinguished Ph.D.’s, who were teaching families. And there was no association of a particular race with slavery.

In American slavery, though, all black people and only black people were slaves…. Now let’s look at the Bible. In Jewish society, under the Law everyone was to be freed every Jubilee. In other words, there was a slavery liberation every seventh year. Whether or not things actually worked out that way, this was nevertheless what God said, and this was the framework in which Jesus was brought up. But you have to keep your eye on Jesus’ mission. Essentially, he did not come to overturn the Roman economic system, which included slavery. He came to free men and women from their sins. And here’s my point: what his message does is transform people so they begin to love God with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength and to love their neighbor as themselves. Naturally, that has an impact on the idea of slavery.

Look at what the apostle Paul says in his letter to Philemon concerning a runaway slave named Onesimus. Paul doesn’t say to overthrow slavery, because all that would do would be to get him executed. Instead he tells Philemon he’d better treat Onesimus as a brother in Christ, just as he would treat Paul himself. And then, to make matters perfectly clear, Paul emphasizes, ‘Remember, you owe your whole life to me because of the gospel.’ The overthrowing of slavery, then, is through the transformation of men and women by the gospel rather than through merely changing an economic system. We’ve all seen what can happen when you merely overthrow an economic system and impose a new order. The whole communist dream was to have a ‘revolutionary man’ followed by the ‘new man.’ Trouble is, they never found the ‘new man.’ They got rid of the oppressors of the peasants, but that didn’t mean the peasants were suddenly free—they were just under a new regime of darkness. In the final analysis, if you want lasting change, you’ve got to transform the hearts of human beings. And that was Jesus’ mission. It’s also worth asking the question that Sowell poses: how did slavery stop? He points out that the driving impetus for the abolition of slavery was the evangelical awakening in

England. Christians rammed abolition through Parliament in the beginning of the nineteenth century and then eventually used British gunboats to stop the slave trade across the Atlantic. While there were about eleven million Africans who were shipped to America—and many didn’t make it—there were about thirteen million Africans shipped to become slaves in the Arab world. Again it was the Christian British, prompted by people whose hearts had been changed by Christ, who sent their gunboats to the Persian Gulf to oppose this.”

May it continue to be Christians who oppose it on every level.