When it comes to challenges to Christianity or God or the Bible, few can be as difficult to deal with as slavery. It’s pretty hard to find anyone nowadays who thinks that slavery was ever an acceptable practice. This is one of those things that you can feel pretty confident we all agree on. It would be very surprising to run into someone today who would openly claim, “Yeah…about that whole slavery thing…too bad we had to do away with that. We should totally bring that back.”

If you do happen to run into someone who says something like that, it would be best to just end the conversation gracefully and walk away. And if they ever end up running for public office, don’t vote for them.

This one is going to be a bit longer than previous topics. So, I’d like to lay out how I’m going to approach this one before we really get started.

First, we’ll look at a couple of passages that are often used to try to discredit the morality of God and the Bible. Then, we can review some of the responses that have been offered from some Christian scholars. After that, we’ll take a look at a potential reason for why God might have allowed this sort of thing. Last, but certainly not least, we’ll look at a more contemporary thought experiment to help illustrate an important concern.

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Before we get into whether or not God is good, let’s take a peek at the passages that are most commonly used to argue that, if God exists, He is not good, or that the Bible shouldn’t be used as a moral authority. Here they are:

²⁰ “When a man strikes his slave, male or female, with a rod and the slave dies under his hand, he shall be avenged. ²¹ But if the slave survives a day or two, he is not to be avenged, for the slave is his money.
 – Exodus 21:20-21

 ⁴⁴As for your male and female slaves whom you may have: you may buy male and female slaves from among the nations that are around you. ⁴⁵ You may also buy from among the strangers who sojourn with you and their clans that are with you, who have been born in your land, and they may be your property. ⁴⁶ You may bequeath them to your sons after you to inherit as a possession forever. You may make slaves of them, but over your brothers the people of Israel you shall not rule, one over another ruthlessly.
 – Leviticus 25:44-46

If you’ve never read those passages before, or at least, never really focused on them but instead breezed through them the way we do with those genealogies like in 1 Chronicles 8, they might bother you. 

Admittedly, these passages can be disturbing. There have been a number of highly-credentialed, well-studied scholars who are far more intelligent and informed than I will ever be who have offered some form of rebuttal to this challenge.

The counter-argument that I most commonly hear is generally centered around the idea that the slavery referred to in the Bible is different from the slavery experienced in the early American colonies and continuing into the first 80-ish years of the United States of America until the Civil War.

We are often told this is not the kind of slavery that Moses was referring to. It is often pointed out that the Hebrew word for slave, ʿeḇeḏ, often means, simply, “servant.” In fact, this same word is used in many other passages, like these:

[Abraham] said, “My Lord, if now I have found favor in Your sight, please do not pass Your servant (ʿeḇeḏ) by.”
– Genesis 18:3

And David said to Saul, “May no one’s heart fail on account of him; your servant (ʿeḇeḏ) will go and fight this Philistine!”
 – 1 Samuel 17:32

“Indeed, all Israel has violated Your Law and turned aside, not obeying Your voice; so the curse has gushed forth on us, along with the oath which is written in the Law of Moses the servant (ʿeḇeḏ) of God, because we have sinned against Him.”
 – Daniel 9:11

Now, those don’t seem so bad. These passages certainly don’t seem to be talking about some horrible practice of owning another person as property. This almost seems akin to people in more recent times saying  “at your service” when they are introduced to someone.

The problem is, like many other words in ancient texts, the word ʿeḇeḏ is contextual. It can refer to the simple idea of a “servant.” But it can also refer to the concept of slavery and ownership of a person as property. 

The Exodus passage seems to indicate that a person can be owned as property, given the very end of the passage, referring to the “slave” as “his money” (or in other translations, actually says “his property”). This can be further supported by looking at the Leviticus 25 passage which explicitly references the practice of buying slaves and leaving them as an inheritance to future generations.

This makes it far more difficult to think of this form of slavery as being essentially different from what was done in the Antebellum South. Coupled with the idea of beating a slave, it does seem to raise some concerns.

Sometimes, another passage has been used to defend the honor of God and the authority of the Bible on this issue. This a few verses earlier in Exodus 21 and points out that Israelites were to free their slaves in the seventh year. 

“When you buy a Hebrew slave, he shall serve six years, and in the seventh he shall go out free, for nothing.”
 – Exodus 21:2

The problem with pointing to this verse is that this is only referring to a fellow Hebrew and not to foreigners. Again, look at Leviticus 25 to see the distinction as it mentions leaving them as an inheritance to one’s children to be property forever.

At this point, with all due respect to those who pose this defense, I think it’s clear that, while I’m sure there are some differences between the slavery of Old Testament times and the antebellum south, there is enough similarity to raise some concerns.

This brings us to our next big question…

Why would a good and loving God allow slavery? Is He, maybe, not quite so good and loving as Christians would like to believe? The answer is, yes He is. He is absolutely good and loving and just and righteous.

I certainly do not want to imply that I think slavery is good or righteous. I think the practice is an abomination. I think that men and women, all of whom have been made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27) should never be held as the property of another.

So, how could God be infinitely good and righteous if He doesn’t seem to have an issue with something like slavery? Well, I think He does have an issue with slavery. I think God sees it, like you and I do, as a horrible thing.

Then what’s the deal with Exodus 21 and Leviticus 25? That’s a fair question. 

To answer that question, I think we have to ask another. Do you think it is possible that God might allow behavior that He thinks is immoral? 

Let’s take a look at another social institution about which God has some very particular views.

³ Some Pharisees came to Jesus, testing Him and asking, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason at all?” ⁴ And He answered and said, “Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female, ⁵and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? ⁶So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, no person is to separate.” ⁷They *said to Him, “Why, then, did Moses command to give her a certificate of divorce and send her away?” ⁸He *said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses permitted you to divorce your wives; but from the beginning it has not been this way. ⁹ And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery.”
 – Matthew 19:3-9

Here, we see that God does not like the idea of divorce very much at all. However, He allows for it “because of [Israel’s] hardness of heart.” He knew that if He outright prohibited divorce, they would have rebelled and done it anyway. Except, their version would be even worse.

Sometimes, we have to remember that, when God deals with people, He knows how flawed we are. If you’re a parent, you know that you can’t hold your child accountable for the same things when they are 18 months old that you can when they’re 18 years old. You have to meet them where they are and gradually build a foundation of skills, abilities, values, morals, etc. 

We will allow our younger children to do things that we would never allow an older child to do. When you have a two-year-old sitting in a high chair with food on the tray and they throw it on the floor, you don’t punish them. You work with them, over time, and teach them that throwing food on the floor is not appropriate behavior.

Things are a bit different with teens. You wouldn’t allow a teenager to throw their food on the floor and just accept it. If they started doing that, there would be consequences.

In fact, teenagers give us a much better analogy to what God was doing with Israel. There are some times that parents know if they try to prohibit certain behaviors, their teenager will find a way to do them anyway. So, they try to get creative and figure out a way to allow it, but with some limitations. Ask any parent of a teenager who has tried to prevent them from listening to certain kinds of music.

To me, that is an excellent parallel to what God was doing when it came to both divorce and slavery. He knows that both of those things violate His standard. But He also knows that if He were to be too rigid with prohibiting these things, His people would do them regardless. Look in the book of Judges some time and count how many times the people did “what was right in their own eyes.”

Instead, what God does is start with the idea that we’re going to do those things whether He wants us to or not. So, he puts some guard-rails up in order to keep things from devolving into the same level of horror found in other nations. In the case of slavery, while He allowed it, He put some rules around it. Just keep reading in Exodus 21 a little further on:

²⁶“And if someone strikes the eye of his male or female slave and destroys it, he shall let the slave go free on account of the eye. ²⁷ And if he knocks out a tooth of his male or female slave, he shall let the slave go free on account of the tooth.”
 – Exodus 21:26-27

In other nations, these rules didn’t exist. A slave was your property in the same way that a farming tool was your property. You could do whatever you wanted and there were no boundaries and no repercussions. But in Israel, there were some limitations to improve the situation for those in slavery, as well as to distinguish slavery in Israel from how things worked in other nations.

Hopefully at this point, you’re willing to admit that, “Ok…maybe God just allowed it because His people were so terrible they would have done it anyway. Maybe God doesn’t really condone slavery as much as He begrudgingly allows for it. But that still doesn’t get Him off the hook for the idea that you can beat a slave to within an inch of their life and, as long as they survive a couple days, you’re in the clear!”

That is a valid challenge. Even if we recognize that God does not want slavery, but that He allowed it, plugging His nose as it were, we still have to address the concern with verse 21.

To address that, let’s do a thought experiment with a more contemporary situation and see if we can find some parity.

Let’s imagine there are two men, Billy and Ike (Ok…I just watched Tombstone recently, so just cut me some slack). Billy and Ike are at a local bar playing a game of pool. At some point during the game, the boys start to let their egos get the best of them and they decide to start wagering some real money on the outcome of the game. 

With money now on the line, tensions get a little higher. Eventually, Billy accuses Ike of cheating and the two of them get into a brawl right there in the bar. Fists are flying, lips are bleeding and both Billy and Ike are going to have more than a few bruises when they wake up in the morning. 

If the situation doesn’t escalate beyond some bumps and bruises, all that really happens is the barkeep (and maybe a few other patrons) end up breaking up the fight, and Billy and Ike are both sent home to cool off. 

There were no charges. The Law didn’t get involved. Nobody was arrested. This is essentially what it means when it says “he is not to be avenged.” All it means is that there is no legal/civil action being taken against him.

Now, if either Billy or Ike had actually broken a pool queue in half and stabbed the other with the sharp end and someone got killed, or even ended up in the hospital, this would turn out very differently. In that case, arrests and trials and sentencing would likely follow. The offended party would be due some sort of retribution (“he shall be avenged”).

In our story of Billy and Ike, the fight was wrong. Somebody did something that was “immoral.” But, if everyone was able to walk away with nothing more than some bruises, there would be nobody pressing charges. Nobody would be getting arrested. No punishment by the authorities would be given.

This is similar to the situation in verse 21. If a man beats a slave to death, there will be legal action as he has taken the life of a person who was created in the Image of God. Remember, before God put these rules in place, there were no repercussions if a slave was killed. 

If the slave isn’t killed, the passage doesn’t say “it’s all good and everything is OK.” All it says is that there will be no legal action brought against the slave owner. Couple that with the fact that, a few verses later, we see that if you so much as knock out a tooth, your slave goes free, and we have another guard-rail in place that didn’t exist in the rest of the world at that time.

You may argue that there was still an issue with the power dynamic involved. That’s a completely different issue and I don’t want to go down that rabbit trail. Maybe some time in the future.

For now, I just want to point out that, while God may despise the practice of slavery, He allowed for it, but with some rules around it to provide at least some level of protection to slaves in Israel that did not exist anywhere else. It wasn’t perfect, but it was at least a step in the right direction, even if there was still a long way yet to go.

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To wrap things up, let’s just summarize what we’ve gone over, here.

Many of the defenses of biblical concepts of slavery argue that it is not like that of pre-Civil War southern slavery. However, by looking at passages in Exodus 21 and Leviticus 25, we see that any differences do not seem to refute the challenge with respect to whether or not biblical slavery was just as immoral as the slavery we think about today.

Then, we looked to see if God could have had any justification for how He handled slavery in the Old Testament. For this, we looked at the fact that, when it came to divorce, that was not what God wanted, but He relented to the degree that He allowed it due to the hard-heartedness of Israel.

Finally, when it came to a concern about physical violence against slaves, we saw that God put some limitations in place that did not exist in other nations. He put rules in place to prevent slaves from being killed without consequence. He also put rules in place to ensure that, if a slave were even physically injured (like getting a tooth knocked out) they were to go free.

So, we can see, with all this, that what God allowed was not at all His ideal situation, but that He put some limitations on Israel so that this institution could at least be an improvement over other nations. He met them where they were and brought them at least a step closer to where He ultimately wanted them to be.

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