Slavery

Slavery is an issue that's often mentioned when discussing changing interpretations of the Bible. The subject raises interesting questions about how ancient texts are to be understood and applied in the modern world. However, it's important to consider the issue without equating the transatlantic slave trade with the slavery mentioned in the Bible.

The ‘slavery' described in the Old Testament was actually bonded labour, rather than chattel slavery (which is where someone ‘owns' another). This means that for the most part, it was voluntary and people weren't owned by a master. People freely bonded themselves to an employer for a set period of six years, usually as a way of paying off their debts. This ‘golden handcuffs' arrangement was a bit like modern-day military service (where once people have freely enlisted, they cannot just go AWOL).

Unlike the transatlantic slave trade, freedom was guaranteed after six years under what was called the ‘jubilee law'. That's not to say that there were still aspects of the bonded labour system that most people now would have moral problems with. Employers were still allowed to physically punish their bonded labourers, for example. And many are are convinced that bonded labour itself is exploitative and inhuman. However, the simplistic idea that ‘the Old Testament endorses slavery' does need to be rethought.

When it comes to the New Testament, the context is different. Chattel slavery was legal and widely practised throughout the Roman Empire. Jesus referred matter of-factly to its existence (Matthew 10.24-25; Luke 12.35-48). Yet he also said that part of his mission was to set captives free (Luke 4.18).

What the apostles made of this is a matter of debate. Some scholars argue that they seem to just accept and even endorse the existence of slavery. They highlight how the apostles insisted that slaves obey their masters - whether Christian or not (Ephesians 6.5-9; Colossians 3.22-25; 1 Timothy 6.1-2; 1 Peter 2.18-20).

On the other hand, Roman law made it extremely difficult for slave-owners to free any slave under the age of 30. Since few slaves lived beyond the age of 30 (as shown by studies of their tombstones), this made releasing them a real problem. So others argue that faced with such legal constraints, the apostles took a more practical solution. They demanded that Christian owners revolutionise the way they treated their slaves. They were forbidden to threaten them or to treat them unfairly (Ephesians 6.9; Colossians 4.1).

Scholars disagree about other New Testament texts that mention slavery. There was debate as far back as the fourth century CE about whether 1 Corinthians 7.21 encouraged or discouraged slaves to seize freedom (it depends on how the verse is translated). There is similar discussion about the letter to Philemon. Was Paul sending the runaway slave Onesimus back to slavery under his master Philemon? Or was he heavily hinting that Philemon should free Onesimus? Not everyone agrees.

As Britain colonised the world, however, many quoted biblical references to slavery (both from the Old and New Testaments) to justify the transatlantic slave trade. Genesis 9.24-27 in particular was pressed into service to justify shipping millions of black Africans abroad and forcing them to work as slaves.

For their part, abolitionists such as William Wilberforce during the nineteenth century pointed out that both 1 Timothy 1.10 and Revelation 18.13 appear to condemn the slave trade. Whether the Bible is read for or against slavery depends very much on an interpreter's starting point and how far they are prepared to take the cultural context of individual texts into consideration.