What does the Bible say about slavery? The hard verses, the slave traders it condemns, and the reparations row

The Old Testament laws

First, a word about words. The Hebrew ‘eved runs from a royal official to a chattel slave, and the Greek doulos means a slave or bondservant, so English Bibles switch between “servant” and “slave.” Do not let the softer word do too much work. Some of these laws describe people who were owned.

Israelites. A Hebrew who fell into debt could be sold, usually for a term: “in the seventh year, he shall go free without paying anything” (Exodus 21:2), though he could choose to stay for life (21:5–6), and a daughter sold as a servant did not go free in the same way (21:7). Leviticus goes further and says a destitute countryman must be treated “as a hired worker” (Leviticus 25:40). This is closer to debt service than to the plantation.

Foreigners. This is the passage that cannot be softened:

⁴⁴ Your menservants and maidservants shall come from the nations around you, from whom you may purchase them. ⁴⁵ You may also purchase them from the foreigners residing among you or their clans living among you who are born in your land. These may become your property. ⁴⁶ You may leave them to your sons after you to inherit as property; you can make them slaves for life. But as for your brothers, the Israelites, no man may rule harshly over his brother.

“Property,” “inherit,” “slaves for life.” The law plainly allows it, and it draws the line at nationality. Anyone who tells you the Bible only ever knew a kindly form of employment has not read this far.

There is worse. If a beaten slave dies, the owner “shall surely be punished,” but if the slave survives a day or two, “the owner shall not be punished, since the servant is his property” (Exodus 21:20–21). A few verses later, the law frees any slave whose master knocks out an eye or a tooth, “as compensation” (21:26–27). That was a limit on owners, and it still assumes the owner has the rod. The law also told Israel that the people of a distant city that surrendered would become forced labourers, and let it take a conquered city’s women and children as plunder (Deuteronomy 20:11, 20:14). Pro-slavery writers leaned on this.

The limits that matter. Three verses press hard against the Atlantic trade, though its defenders had answers. “Whoever kidnaps another man must be put to death, whether he sells him or the man is found in his possession” (Exodus 21:16). Deuteronomy 24:7 applies the same law to “one of his Israelite brothers,” and pro-slavery writers such as Stringfellow leaned on the line the law draws between Hebrews and foreigners; we read Exodus as the wider rule. “Do not return a slave to his master if he has taken refuge with you” (Deuteronomy 23:15), which, if it covers every runaway, would have made a fugitive slave law unthinkable, though older commentators such as Barnes limit it to slaves fleeing foreign masters. And Israel is told why it must treat the released well: “Remember that you were slaves in the land of Egypt” (Deuteronomy 15:15). The prophets also judge whole nations for trafficking: Amos condemns Gaza and Tyre for delivering up populations of captives to Edom (Amos 1:6, 1:9).

The New Testament

Nothing in the New Testament tells Christians to overthrow slavery. Paul’s churches had slaves and masters in the same room, and he writes to both. “Slaves, obey your earthly masters” (Ephesians 6:5) is the line slaveholders preached. It is usually quoted without verse 9: “masters, do the same for your slaves. Give up your use of threats,” because their Master “and yours is in heaven, and there is no favoritism with Him.” Paul also says that slaves should “regard their masters as fully worthy of honor” (1 Timothy 6:1).

Then come the verses that loosen it. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free” (Galatians 3:28) is a statement about standing in Christ, not a law of the Roman Empire, but it is a hard thing to say in a room and then go home to your slaves. “If you can gain your freedom, take the opportunity,” Paul tells them, as the BSB reads it, and “do not become slaves of men” (1 Corinthians 7:21, 7:23). In the same letter that tells slaves to honour their masters, his list of the lawless includes “slave traders” (1 Timothy 1:10). Revelation ends its list of Babylon’s cargo with “bodies and souls of slaves” (18:13).

Paul’s shortest letter may be the sharpest. Paul sends Onesimus, usually taken to be a runaway, back to his master Philemon with this:

¹⁵ For perhaps this is why he was separated from you for a while, so that you might have him back for good — ¹⁶ no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a beloved brother. He is especially beloved to me, but even more so to you, both in person and in the Lord.

Paul does not order Philemon to free him, and scholars argue over how much he is hinting. But “no longer as a slave” is a strange thing to say to an owner about his property.

What the Bible does not say

It does not say that any race was made for slavery. The verse used for that was the “curse of Ham,” and it does not say it: Noah curses Canaan, not Ham (Genesis 9:25), and no skin colour or African people is mentioned. It does not command Israel to buy slaves, and for the most part it legislates for a practice already there, though Deuteronomy 20 does direct that a distant city that surrenders be put to forced labour. It does not say “slavery is abolished,” and abolitionists had to argue from principle. Nor does it say what a modern nation owes. Those are arguments built from the text, on both sides.

How Christians have answered

The early Church. Most early Christian writers accepted slavery as part of the world, while urging masters to be humane. The great exception is Gregory of Nyssa in the fourth century, whose fourth homily on Ecclesiastes attacks the owning of human beings as a claim over what belongs to God. Scholars disagree on whether that amounts to a call for abolition.

Catholic. The record is divided. Fifteenth-century papal bulls were used to justify conquest and enslavement; Sublimis Deus (1537) said Indigenous peoples must not be enslaved; and the Vatican in 2023 repudiated the concepts behind the “Doctrine of Discovery.” Gregory XVI in 1839 reproved the trade as “absolutely unworthy of the Christian name” and forbade anyone “from presuming to defend as permissible this traffic in Blacks.” The Catechism (no. 2414) now says the seventh commandment forbids acts that “lead to the enslavement of human beings, to their being bought, sold and exchanged like merchandise.” Yet Catholic owners held slaves too: the Jesuits sold 272 people in 1838 to keep Georgetown afloat, apologised in 2017 and in 2021 pledged to raise $100 million for descendants and reconciliation work.

Anglican. The missionary Society for the Propagation of the Gospel owned the Codrington plantations in Barbados, and some people enslaved there were at first branded with the word “Society.” The General Synod apologised for the Church’s part in 2006. Since then the Commissioners have pledged their £100 million, and the society’s successor, USPG, has committed £7 million to a reparations project in Barbados. Not everyone agrees: Justin Welby, then Archbishop of Canterbury, acknowledged in 2024 that “the debate in England remains very vigorous,” with many who challenge “whether or to what degree the Church profited.”

Baptist and American evangelical. Before the Civil War many Southern pastors argued that the Bible was on their side. Thornton Stringfellow’s pamphlet of 1841 is the classic case, working through Abraham, the law of Moses and the apostles. The Southern Baptist Convention itself formed in 1845 after a split over slaveholding missionaries, and in 1995 it repudiated “historic acts of evil such as slavery” and asked forgiveness.

Abolitionists. They read the same Bible. Quakers and evangelicals led the campaign in Britain, and John Wesley’s Thoughts Upon Slavery (1774) attacked the trade head-on. The most searching reply came from a man who had been enslaved. Frederick Douglass, in the appendix to his 1845 Narrative, separated “the Christianity of this land” from “the Christianity of Christ,” and said he recognised “the widest possible difference.”

These are summaries in general terms, and this page reports no church’s response to the speech the King is due to give.

Apology, repair and the Bible

The reparations argument has real biblical material on both sides.

For repair. The law expects a wrongdoer to confess and to pay: he “must make full restitution, add a fifth to its value, and give all this to the one he has wronged” (Numbers 5:7). Zacchaeus does not stop at sorrow: “if I have cheated anyone, I will repay it fourfold” (Luke 19:8). Even a slave who had served his term was not to leave “empty-handed” (Deuteronomy 15:13). And Nehemiah’s generation “confessed their sins and the iniquities of their fathers” (Nehemiah 9:2), so there is precedent for owning what came before you.

Against. “A son will not bear the iniquity of his father” (Ezekiel 18:20). Numbers and Zacchaeus concern a living offender and a known victim, not a nation paying two centuries later. Those who oppose the Church of England’s fund add a practical objection: DPA reports that the 27 parliamentarians say the endowment exists for parish ministry, church buildings and historic records. The Bible says nothing about the size of a Commonwealth settlement or the charity law of England, and neither do we. Those are matters for governments, lawyers and the people concerned.

Our take

This is our opinion, not a report. The pro-slavery preachers quoted real verses and were still wrong, and a Christian institution that can show it kept the proceeds of a sin should pay back, not just say sorry.

Start with the honesty both sides avoid. Christians who say “the Bible was always against slavery” are not reading Leviticus 25. Critics who say “the Bible endorses slavery, end of discussion” are not reading Exodus 21:16. We would rather admit that a law can permit what God does not delight in. Jesus says exactly that about divorce: Moses allowed it “because of your hardness of heart,” but “it was not this way from the beginning” (Matthew 19:8). Slavery in the law looks to us like that kind of concession, and we think the movement of Scripture, from Egypt to the Jubilee to Philemon’s “beloved brother,” runs toward freedom. Not everyone will accept that reading, and it is an inference, not a verse. But Stringfellow’s reading needs the Bible to stand still, and it does not.

The Atlantic trade does not even need that argument. We think it was kidnapping on an industrial scale, whatever the traders called it, and Exodus names the penalty. Its defenders had to explain that verse away. Stringfellow answered it by saying slave states have such laws too, and answered the charge of theft by saying slaves were bought from those who took them captive in war. And its defenders had to walk past “slave traders” in 1 Timothy 1 to reach “worthy of honor” in 1 Timothy 6. The people who turned Paul’s letters into a charter for the plantation were not being faithful to the whole text. They were choosing the verses that paid them. Douglass saw it, and he had more right to say so than anyone.

On repair, we draw a line that we think is biblical. Guilt does not pass from parent to child; Ezekiel 18 is our answer, though Exodus 20:5 is the verse quoted against it, and nobody alive in Britain took part in the Atlantic trade. But a gain can pass down. If an institution still holds an endowment that grew from a wrong, then it is not being asked to feel guilty for its founders. It is being asked what it means to keep the money. Zacchaeus did not stop at an apology, and we doubt a church should either. So we think the Church of England is right in principle, provided the evidence stands up, and its critics are right to demand that it does. Whether a government owes the same is a harder political question, and we leave it to those who must answer it. But any Christian who says “the past is the past” should read Numbers 5 first.

Over to you

Which verse here is hardest for you to square with your faith, or with your doubts about it, and how have you dealt with it? Tell us below.

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