Bible’s writings on slavery disturbing
American abolitionists who were determined to prove slavery was an evil to be eliminated faced a challenge when consulting the Bible. The Old and New Testaments had much to say about the proper treatment of slaves. But any condemnation of slavery was lost in translation.
Scholars argue some Bible verses are wrongly translated and refer to indentured servants rather than slaves. Spanish, Russian, French and German translations differentiate between slave and servant in their respective languages.
But the Old Testament offered extensive rules on treatment of the enslaved. In the New Testament, Jesus had an opportunity to condemn slavery when a Roman centurion risked ridicule by his superiors, coming to Jesus to plead for a deathly ill slave boy. Jesus recognized the compassion, concern and humility of the slave owner who said: “Lord, I am not worthy for you to come under my roof, but just say the word and my servant will be healed.” (Matthew 8:513).
Christ’s immediate response prioritizes healing as more important than condemning. The slave is instantly healed.
Historically, slaves were either prisoners of war, convict labor or collateral for bad debts. While slavery had been around for thousands of years before Jesus’ birth, human trafficking and hostage-taking continue to this day in sad and dark corners of the Earth. While trans-atlantic trading was banned in the U.S. in 1808, it took a Civil War and an 1865 constitutional amendment to begin to place a legal ban on American slavery. We are still paying the price for America’s “original sin.”
American slave owners conveniently ignored Old Testament regulations on fair treatment of slaves, male and female.
Exodus 21:16 seemed to outlaw trafficking or kidnapping free people and selling them as slaves: “Whoever steals a man and sells him, and anyone found in possession of him, shall be put to death.”
Deuteronomy 24:7 specified the death penalty for anyone who kidnapped and enslaved Israelites: “If a man is found stealing one of his brothers of the people of Israel, and if he treats him as a slave or sells him, then that thief shall die. You shall purge the evil from your midst.”
The Bible demanded at least that slave owners refrain from maiming the enslaved (Exodus 21:26-27): “When a man strikes the eye of his slave, male or female, and destroys it, he shall let the slave go free because of his eye.”
The following passage implies that if an abused slave fled a brutal master, God looked benignly on his flight to safety and believers were not supposed to send an escaped slave back to a slave owner. Deuteronomy 23:15 says: “You shall not give up to his master a slave who has escaped from his master to you.”
There’s no revolutionary approach to slavery in the New Testament although it recounts the lives of Jesus and his disciples, who included women, Samaritans, eunuchs and Black converts (see Acts for the story of Phillip befriending a top aide of Ethiopia's queen in the desert) who were regarded with respect.
In Titus 2:9-10, we get St. Paul’s claptrap: “Slaves are to be submissive to their own masters in everything; they are to be well-pleasing, not argumentative, not pilfering, but showing all good faith, so that in everything they may adorn the doctrine of God our Savior.”
So, the enslaved are welcome to be Christians but not free men and women. Neither Testament urges believers to aid escaped slaves.
Thomas Jefferson may be the most famous of the Founding Fathers to force an enslaved woman to bear his children. Deuteronomy 21:10-14 lays out rules for a man wanting to marry an enslaved woman. The enslaved female is required to prove her worthiness.
She must “shave her head, pare her nails… remain in your house and lament her father and mother a full month. After that you may go to her and be her husband ... If you no longer delight in her, you shall let her go where she wants. But you shall not sell her for money.”
There is a simpler way to enslave a prospective wife: Buy her from a cash-strapped father. Exodus 21:7-8 describes such transactions so matter of factly that they sound commonplace.
Slave owners had to be prodded by Deuteronomy 5:14 to give enslaved people the Sabbath as a day of rest. The verses bizarrely lump human workers in with oxen, cattle and asses.
“The seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, nor thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thine ox, nor thine ass, nor any of thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates; that thy manservant and thy maidservant may rest as well as thou.”
Exodus 34:22 mandates slaves be allowed to enjoy harvest festivals and seasonal feasts.
One imagines cruel slaveholders allowing enslaved people to participate only by toil: cooking, butchering, cleanup.
Maybe the lesson is that one doesn’t need the Bible to know that slavery and trafficking humans is evil. It’s possible to believe that the Testaments were divinely inspired but written by fallible men trying to afford intolerable, unjust conditions a measure of safety for people they knew in their hearts were their human equals.