Slavery in the Bible
If you buy a Hebrew servant, he shall serve six years and in the seventh he shall go out free without paying anything.Exodus 21:2 · World English Bible
Original Language & Text
The Hebrew Bible uses the word 'eved' for a very wide range of people: a household servant, a royal official (called 'eved ha-melekh,' meaning 'servant of the king'), or someone working off a debt. It does not match up neatly with the later idea of chattel slavery, where a person is treated purely as property to be bought and sold for life. The Law given through Moses treats Israelite 'evedim' differently from foreign ones. Israelite servants were to be released after six years, or during the Jubilee year (Exodus 21:2; Leviticus 25), while foreign servants could be held as property permanently (Leviticus 25:44-46). In the New Testament, the Greek word 'doulos' covers a similarly wide range, from harshly treated slaves to trusted household managers. Paul often calls himself a 'doulos of Christ,' meaning 'slave of Christ,' as a term of devoted service, not shame. Other Greek words, like 'oiketes' (household servant) and 'misthios' (hired worker), appear alongside 'doulos' too. Bible translators disagree on when to use the English word 'servant' versus 'slave' for these terms, and that choice itself shapes how readers feel about the practice being described.
Key Terms in the Original Language
“slave, bondservant” — a person owned by and legally bound to another
Modern English translations split between “slave,” “servant,” and “bondservant” for this same word depending on context and theological comfort; the choice affects how directly Paul's household codes and self-description, “a doulos of Christ” (Rom. 1:1), read to English audiences.
“slave, servant” — the Hebrew equivalent, covering everything from chattel slavery to court officials called “the king's eved”
The same breadth of meaning that makes eved hard to translate consistently also makes it hard to generalize about “slavery in the Bible” as a single institution; Israelite debt-servitude, war captives, and foreign chattel slaves were regulated under substantially different rules in the Torah.
History & Authorship
In the ancient Near East and the Greek and Roman world, slavery took many forms: working off debt, being captured in war, being born into servitude, or entering service voluntarily. Biblical law regulates these existing practices rather than inventing them. The Law given through Moses included protections, such as release years, rules against permanently injuring a servant, and cities where an escaped servant could find safety (Deuteronomy 23:15-16). These rules were often stricter than other ancient law codes, like the Code of Hammurabi, though they still allowed non-Israelites to be held in service for life. During the debates over slavery in the 1700s and 1800s in America and the Atlantic world, both sides used scripture to make their case. Clergy who defended slavery pointed to these permissive Bible texts and to a passage sometimes called the 'curse of Ham' (Genesis 9:25). Those against slavery pointed to the Exodus story of freedom, Galatians 3:28, and Paul's letter to Philemon, which hints at treating a runaway slave with dignity, along with what they saw as a larger movement in the text toward equality. This disagreement contributed to splits within churches, including the founding of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1845. Today, churches across the theological spectrum generally agree that owning people as property (chattel slavery) is morally wrong, though they still disagree about how to fit that agreement together with a Bible that regulates slavery rather than condemning it outright.
How This Debate Developed
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17th c.
Quaker abolitionism begins
Among the earliest organized Christian opposition to slavery, grounded in biblical arguments.
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18th–19th c.
Pro-slavery vs. abolitionist readings
Both sides of the Atlantic slave trade debate invoke scripture — pro-slavery apologists citing passages like the “curse of Ham,” abolitionists citing the Exodus and Golden Rule.
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1807 / 1833
British abolition
Britain abolishes the slave trade, then slavery itself, with Christian abolitionists like Wilberforce central to the campaign.
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1865
US 13th Amendment
Abolishes slavery in the United States after a civil war in which both sides had claimed biblical support.
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20th–21st c.
Modern consensus shift
Most scholars and denominations now read the Bible's slavery texts as culturally conditioned and progressively superseded, not a timeless endorsement.
The Popular / Mainstream View
Nearly all mainstream Christian and Jewish groups today firmly condemn slavery, both as it was practiced historically and wherever it still happens now, seeing it as incompatible with the belief that every person is made in God's image (Genesis 1:27) and deserves love as a neighbor. The common approach reads the Bible's slavery passages as accommodations to the social realities of the ancient world, not as timeless approval of the practice, similar to how most traditions no longer follow other ancient Old Testament civil laws. Many evangelical and mainline scholars alike point to a 'trajectory,' meaning a forward direction, within scripture itself: texts that limit and restrain the institution, protect basic rights for servants, and plant ideas (like Galatians 3:28 and the letter to Philemon) that later Christian conscience used to argue for ending slavery altogether.
Minority & Alternative Views
Scripture points beyond itself toward full freedom (the 'trajectory' view)
Associated with scholars like William Webb, this view argues that the Bible shows a forward-moving direction beyond its own ancient culture, pointing toward greater freedom and equality, even though the text itself never directly commands ending slavery. In this view, modern readers are meant to keep following that direction rather than treating the ancient rules as the final word on the subject.
Historic pro-slavery biblical defense
This is a now widely rejected position from the 1700s and 1800s, especially strong in the pre-Civil War American South. It read the Old and New Testaments as directly approving slaveholding, arguing that if slavery were truly wrong, the Bible would have condemned it outright instead of just regulating it. Almost no church today holds this view, though historians still study it to understand how the Bible was used to defend entrenched economic interests.
Strict literalist regulation-only reading
This minority view holds that, because the Bible never issues an outright ban on slaveholding, believers should not claim that scripture teaches the ending of slavery as a moral requirement. At the same time, people who hold this view still affirm that slavery as it was actually practiced, especially race-based slavery treating people as permanent property, went against the spirit of biblical laws against kidnapping (Exodus 21:16) and against the Bible's teaching on human worth.
What Scholars Say
Historians and language experts broadly agree that the Hebrew word 'eved' and the Greek word 'doulos' cover a wide range of dependent labor relationships that are structurally different from race-based chattel slavery. They also agree that Israelite law was comparatively protective compared to other ancient Near Eastern law codes, while still permitting permanent, hereditary servitude for non-Israelites (Leviticus 25:44-46), a point that is not softened by attempts to make the ancient practice sound gentler than it was. Scholars also agree that the New Testament never calls for slavery to be abolished, and that its household instructions (in Ephesians 6 and Colossians 3) assume the practice will continue while urging masters to treat servants with restraint. What remains genuinely disputed is a theological and ethical question: whether the Bible's overall direction logically points toward ending slavery, or whether that conclusion is a modern idea being read back into a text that was simply regulating a social structure it assumed would continue.
Sources & Further Reading
- William Webb, Slaves, Women and Homosexuals
- Hammurabi's Code (comparative Near Eastern law)
- Mark Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis
- Bernard Boxill and others on 19th-century slavery debates
- New Interpreter's Bible commentary on Exodus and Philemon
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- What is William Webb's "redemptive-movement" hermeneutic, and how does it argue that a text can permit slavery in its own context while pointing toward its eventual abolition?
- What arguments did 19th-century pro-slavery theologians actually make from specific biblical texts, and how did abolitionist Christians respond using the same Bible?
- How does Mark Noll's account of the Civil War as a "theological crisis" help explain why the same Scripture failed to produce theological consensus on slavery?
- What distinguishes a strict literalist "regulation-only" reading, in which the Bible merely regulates an existing institution without endorsing it, from readings that treat biblical slavery texts as either permission or command?
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