Apologetics — the objection deserves a real answer, and the real answer runs straight through one statute in Deuteronomy that no slaveholding nation in history has ever been willing to keep
It usually comes in the form of a closing argument rather than a question. Your book owns people. It has rules for buying them and rules for beating them. Spare me the sermon.
And the Christian across the table does one of two things. He gets defensive and starts explaining away texts he has never actually read. Or he goes quiet, because somewhere in the back of his mind he suspects the man might be right.
Neither is necessary. This objection has an answer. Not a dodge — an answer. But you have to be willing to do something most people on both sides of this argument refuse to do, which is read the laws themselves instead of the slogans about them.
First, Stop Hiding the Texts
The Bible does regulate servitude. It is not a smear invented by skeptics. Leviticus 25 permits Israel to take bondservants from the surrounding nations and treat them as an inheritance for their children. Exodus 21 sets terms for a Hebrew servant and his family. These texts are in the book and you should be able to turn to them from memory.
Any apologetic that begins by pretending otherwise has already lost, and deserves to. So let us put the uncomfortable material on the table first and then ask the question that actually matters: what kind of institution is being regulated, and what do the regulations do to it?
Two Different Things Wearing One English Word
When a modern reader sees the word slave, he sees an auction block in Charleston. A man seized in Africa, shipped in chains, owned for life, his children owned after him, his marriage void in law, his literacy a crime.
That is one institution. The Hebrew word ebed in the Law of Moses covers a wide range, and the most common case in Israel is a debtor working off what he owes — closer to indentured labor than to chattel ownership. Which is why the statutes read the way they do.
Six years, and he goes out free, and he does not go out empty-handed — Deuteronomy 15 commands the master to load him up from the flock and the floor and the winepress. Every fiftieth year, the jubilee, releases the rest. A master who knocks out a servant’s tooth loses the servant and the labor with him. A master who kills one answers for it with his life.
And then there is the law that ends the argument.
Thou shalt not deliver unto his master the servant which is escaped from his master unto thee: He shall dwell with thee, even among you, in that place which he shall choose in one of thy gates, where it liketh him best: thou shalt not oppress him. (Deuteronomy 23:15-16, KJV)
Read that twice.
Israel is commanded to harbor the runaway. Not to return him. Not to hold him pending the owner’s claim. He chooses his own town, he settles where it suits him, and nobody may lean on him. That single statute makes slavery as a property system legally unenforceable, because an institution that cannot recover its escapees cannot hold anyone.
Now compare history. Every slaveholding civilization that ever existed wrote the opposite law. Rome hunted fugitives. Babylon penalized anyone sheltering them. The United States passed a Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 that compelled free citizens in free states to assist in the capture. Men who called the Bible their authority built a legal machine that Deuteronomy 23 forbids in plain words.
And one more, from the same Law, aimed at the slave trade itself:
He that stealeth a man, and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death. (Exodus 21:16, KJV)
Man-stealing is a capital crime. The entire transatlantic trade — every ship, every raid, every auction — is a death-penalty offense under the law of Moses. The Apostle Paul carries that forward and names the offenders explicitly, listing menstealers among the lawless in 1 Timothy 1:10. That old word means exactly what it sounds like: kidnappers who traffic in people.
Regulation Is Not Endorsement
Here is the principle that does the heavy lifting. The Law of Moses regulates several things it does not approve, because it is given to a real nation in a brutal world rather than to a theoretical one.
Jesus says so outright. When they push him on divorce, he answers that Moses permitted it because of the hardness of your hearts, and then adds that from the beginning it was not so (Matthew 19:8, KJV). There is a difference between what God tolerates in a fallen society and what God wants. The Law restrains an evil while the prophets and the gospel dismantle it.
So ask what the rest of the book does with the question of human ownership.
It opens with every human being stamped with the image of God. It tells Israel’s founding story as God hearing the groan of slaves and breaking an empire to get them out, then grounds half the Law in the refrain remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt. Job, the oldest voice in the canon, reasons his way to the conclusion directly:
If I did despise the cause of my manservant or of my maidservant, when they contended with me; What then shall I do when God riseth up? and when he visiteth, what shall I answer him? Did not he that made me in the womb make him? and did not one fashion us in the womb? (Job 31:13-15, KJV)
One womb-maker, one accounting. That is the whole abolitionist argument, written millennia before anyone needed it.
Then the New Testament walks it into the room where it hurts. Paul writes to Philemon about Onesimus, a runaway who belonged to him, and the letter never once argues property law. It asks Philemon to receive the man not now as a servant, but above a servant, a brother beloved (Philemon 1:16, KJV), and to receive him as he would receive Paul himself. Then Paul offers to pay whatever Onesimus owes out of his own pocket. You cannot own a brother you have been told to welcome as an apostle. The institution does not survive that sentence; it just takes a while to finish dying.
The Part Christians Should Not Soften
Men with Bibles defended American slavery. That is history, and no amount of context-setting erases it. They quoted Genesis 9 and Ephesians 6 and preached a gospel with a clause carved out for the auction block.
But notice who opposed them, and with what. Wilberforce, the Clapham circle, the black preachers of the American South, Frederick Douglass, the Quakers, the Methodist circuit riders — they did not argue from Enlightenment theory. They argued from Exodus and Job and Galatians. One side had to ignore Deuteronomy 23 and Exodus 21:16 to keep its business. The other side read them out loud.
Both groups held the same book. Only one of them was reading it straight. And the skeptic who hands you the slaveholder’s exegesis as though it were the Bible’s position is doing the slaveholder a favor he does not deserve.
The Word the Gospel Chose
Now here is the thing I want you to sit with, whichever side of the table you came in on.
When God explains what he did at the cross, he reaches for the vocabulary of the slave market. Redemption. A purchase price paid to get a person out. Ye are bought with a price (1 Corinthians 6:20, KJV).
Which means the central act of the Christian faith is God buying people in order to set them free, at his own cost. And the one doing the buying arrived not as an owner but the other way round:
But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men. (Philippians 2:7, KJV)
The God accused of endorsing slavery took the servant’s place himself and died in it.
So answer the objection. Do not flinch from Leviticus 25 and do not misrepresent it either. Know the release laws, know the fugitive statute, know that man-stealing carried a death sentence, and know the difference between a law that restrains an evil and a law that blesses it.
Then tell him the part that is actually at stake. Every one of us is owned by something. The book he is swinging at is the only one offering a price already paid.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times.
— SmithForChrist