What the Bible Is (and Isn’t) Doing with Slavery
Why context matters more than we often realise
Today’s reflection moves through one of the more difficult tensions in Scripture. Not to settle it, but to read it a little more slowly, and see what might come into view when we do.
I’ve had this conversation more times than I can count now.
It usually begins the same way. Someone raises it tentatively, or sometimes quite bluntly: the Bible condones slavery. Once it’s said out loud, it can feel final, as though the conversation is already over.
After all, the texts are there. Laws about slaves in the Old Testament and Instructions in the New Testament telling slaves to obey their masters.
It doesn’t take much to line those pieces up and draw a conclusion.
And for a long time, I wasn’t quite sure what to do with that either.
— • —
I think part of the difficulty is how we approach the Bible. We tend to read it as though it arrived untouched by the world it speaks into. As though it arrived clean, detached, and above the mess of human societies.
But when you read it more slowly, that becomes impossible to sustain.
What you actually find is something that feels far more embedded. The Bible doesn’t hover above history; it moves through it. It speaks into cultures that are already complicated, already unjust, beginning to challenge assumptions that no one at the time would have thought to question.
And that raises a deeper question.
When the Bible talks about something like slavery, is it endorsing it… or addressing a world in which it already exists?
Those two things can look similar at first glance, but they’re not quite the same.
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I sometimes think about the way we write laws today. We regulate things precisely because they can go wrong. Health and safety rules, labour protections, all the small, often unnoticed boundaries we put in place. They don’t exist because we celebrate those risks, but because we recognise them.
In that sense, regulation can be a kind of restraint rather than an approval. I wonder if some of what we’re reading in these texts is closer to that.
Not a clean system, and not an ideal one. But an attempt to place limits within something that already exists.
— • —
It also helps, I think, to notice that the word slavery sounds different to us in our own context.
When we hear it, we instinctively think of the transatlantic slave trade. Race-based, lifelong, brutal in ways that are difficult to fully absorb. That’s the image that sits in the background of our reading, whether we realise it or not.
But the world of the Old Testament looked different.
Many of those described as “slaves” were what we might now call debt servants. In a society without banks or accessible credit, survival sometimes meant attaching yourself to a household for a period of time. You worked, you were provided for, and eventually, you were released.
That doesn’t make it ideal or remove the potential for harm.
But it does change the picture slightly.
What’s striking, if you stay with the text long enough, is how often the laws lean in a particular direction.
Rest is extended to everyone, including servants. Abuse isn’t ignored; it’s limited, sometimes strongly. There are moments where the law steps in on behalf of the vulnerable in ways that feel unexpected for the time.
Even small details begin to accumulate. A slave sharing in a festival meal. A runaway not being forcibly returned. Provisions that, while far from perfect, seem to press against something rather than simply accepting it.
It doesn’t read like a system being celebrated.
It reads more like something being constrained.
— • —
By the time you reach the New Testament, things have changed again.
Now it’s the Roman world, where slavery is more entrenched and absolute. People are property in a very literal sense, and the space to challenge that system openly is limited.
So instead of a direct confrontation, something more subtle seems to be happening.
Paul writes to communities living inside that system, and what he says doesn’t immediately dismantle it from the outside. But it begins to change how people are seen within it.
He speaks of shared identity, of belonging to the same Lord, of a kind of equality that sits uneasily alongside the structures of his time.
You get moments, like his letter to Philemon, where the language changes in a way that feels almost subversive. A slave is spoken of as a brother. Not metaphorically, but relationally.
It isn’t a political manifesto.
But it isn’t neutral either.
It’s as if something is being planted that doesn’t quite fit the world it’s in.
— • —
I sometimes wonder if part of the frustration we feel comes from wanting the Bible to move faster than it does.
To say things more directly. To resolve tensions immediately and give us the kind of clarity that removes all discomfort.
But the pattern you see, if you trace it across the whole story, is slower than that.
Less like a decree, and more like a direction.
You can see it in hindsight, perhaps more clearly than those living within it ever could. There is a gradual shift. A widening sense of who counts, who belongs and who is seen.
Eventually, those ideas begin to take shape in a more visible way.
Centuries later, they resurface in movements that do explicitly challenge slavery. Not as something new being introduced, but as something being drawn out. Voices like William Wilberforce didn’t discard the Bible to argue for abolition. They leaned into it.
The same text that is often accused of condoning slavery also became one of the sources people drew from to oppose it.
— • —
I realise that none of this tidies things up neatly.
There are still difficult passages in the Bible and moments that don’t sit comfortably. We can still ask legitimate questions about why the change didn’t come sooner, or more clearly. We can also ask why slavery is still so prevalent today, albeit better hidden.
Those are the questions that are worth keeping.
But I find myself leaning toward the sense that the Bible is not simply endorsing what it describes. It feels more like it’s moving through something. Working within it. Sometimes limiting, sometimes unsettling, often pointing beyond it.
Not a finished picture, but a trajectory.
And if that’s the case, then the question changes slightly.
It’s not only about what the Bible says about slavery.
It’s about where that story is heading, and whether we recognise it when we see it. Because if that direction is real, it doesn’t just belong to the past.
It carries forward into the present, into the forms of injustice that are easier to overlook in our times because we live within it.
And ultimately, perhaps the more uncomfortable question is not what the text permits, but what it invites.
What might it be asking of us now?
Sacred & Secular is a space for slowing down.
Each day, I share short reflections that sit somewhere between faith and ordinary life. The kinds of thoughts that don’t always make it into sermons, but often stay with us longer.
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Paul