Sometimes people say: How can you see the old testament law as God-inspired when it tolerates slavery?
Well, the first thing to say is that the new testament makes clear that slavery is evil; look at 1 Timothy 1:10. But what about the earlier phase of God’s revelation, and Exodus 21 that we’ve been focusing on?
It’s good to be aware that the old testament word sometimes translated `slave` (though the NIV tends to use `servant`) doesn’t mean what we might expect. When God called Israel, they were a nation of runaway slaves escaping from serious bondage; so it’s not surprising that, although they did inherit the near-eastern system of labour, it became transformed. In the old testament law a slave has legal rights, and can appeal to court against their boss, and the boss can even be executed if he maltreats the slave. Most importantly, Exodus 21:16 says very clearly that kidnapping and slave-trafficking are crimes that are to be punished by death. (And if no trafficking was allowed, then the labour-system described elsewhere in Exodus 21 has to have been something voluntary.) Deuteronomy 23:15-16 has the command, unparalleled in any surrounding culture, that a runaway slave should not be handed over – which would obviously have undermined the entire system if that had been equivalent to what we call slavery. In fact Exodus 21 ordains a ceremony for the slave, or servant (NIV), who prefers the arrangement they have and doesn’t want to leave it. So this was not what we call slavery.
And neither, in fact, was the Roman system in new testament times, although it could be much worse than the Hebrew system for which the same English word is sometimes used in our Bibles. Roman `slavery` was not permanent; there was not a big separation between `slave` and free; indeed it might even be entered into voluntarily as a means to a special job or to climbing the social ladder. It was a system that could certainly go very wrong (just like marriage!); but again, it was not what we call slavery. Nevertheless the Roman system was very seriously flawed indeed; and therefore we find Paul telling Philemon to treat his fellow-Christian Onesimus `no longer as a slave but … as a dear brother… both as a man and as a brother in the Lord` (Philemon 16). This teaching must have transformed the whole system within the Bible-obeying church at that time; and indeed it might have ended slavery altogether.
Tragically, however, the institutional Catholic church then allowed itself to lose the Bible, until the Reformation. But we still need to ask, who eventually broke slavery, and why?
Melvyn Bragg, author of The Book of Books (but not apparently a Christian as we understand it), writes this: `In every recorded civilisation we have the acceptance of slavery. The Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs, African kings, Indian princes, Chinese war lords… for millennia it seemed a natural and inevitable part of the human condition. But here it was abolished: perhaps the greatest humanising act in history.` Why? (It was immensely costly: when Britain abolished slavery, compensating the planters for the freed slaves cost a sum up to half the government’s annual budget!) Bragg says: `The abolition of slavery was driven by the King James Bible… People like William Wilberforce, who had a revelation after reading the Bible and saw it was his mission to have the slave trade abolished, and embarked on a passionate Christian mission fuelled by a daily reading of the King James Bible. He finally succeeded, at the cost of his health and his fortune.` Once the church really rediscovered the Bible, slavery was doomed.
Bragg notes also the massive influence of the Bible on slaves themselves. American slaves in their millions educated themselves through it (taken to them first by preachers like George Whitefield). Many preached it, and became leaders. They read it, read Exodus, saw how Moses had said to the king about the enslaved Jews `Let my people go`, and this became their rallying cry. Bragg notes that this pattern reaches all the way through to Martin Luther King: the people who really moved the non-violent civil rights movement forward in America, he says, were the African-American, Protestant Bible-lovers saying ‘Set my people free’ and quoting from Isaiah. `When Martin Luther King was shot he was alluding to the King James Bible.` (For more on this see also ch.4 of Tim Keller’s brilliant apologetics book The Reason for God.)
The old testament law is clear: any slave trader is to be executed, it demands. But: perhaps there is also something else thought-provoking in the Exodus 21 verses on this topic. Might they actually be saying something to us about Jesus?
Some people think so! More next post…
