Yeshua Explored
20th February 2023
Slavery
Why has the Bible been used to condone slavery?
We start our investigation by posing the uncomfortable question that isn’t the Bible OK with slavery? It seems to accept it as a norm, a part of the culture of the day:
If any of your people—Hebrew men or women—sell themselves to you and serve you six years, in the seventh year you must let them go free.And when you release them, do not send them away empty-handed.Supply them liberally from your flock, your threshing floor and your winepress. Give to them as the Lord your God has blessed you.Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you. That is why I give you this command today. (Deuteronomy 15:12-15)
And masters, treat your slaves in the same way. Do not threaten them, since you know that he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and there is no favoritism with him. (Ephesians 6:9)
Slavery in those days was a consequence of war or economic downturns, rather than a proactive activity. Conquered people tended to be enslaved and destitute people often sold themselves into slavery. Of course there are grey areas and it wasn’t exactly a blueprint for a fair society, but we must remember that People of God have always been ‘strangers in a strange land’ rather than architects of society. What the Bible does talk about, as we saw in the above passages, is how slaves were treated.
This is a far cry from the awful history of the enslavement of populations on racial grounds and for economic gain, whether it was the third of the population of Western Africa enslaved and deported, or the Arab slave trade in Eastern Africa, or the Aztecs and Incas of Central America, or the hundreds of thousands of Christian boys seized by the Ottoman Turks in order to help run their Empire. This still hasn’t gone away in our modern ‘progressive’ times, slavery is very much alive and kicking. Human trafficking is a scourge of our times. Here is the Wikipedia description:
Human trafficking is the trade of humans for the purpose of forced labour, sexual slavery, or commercial sexual exploitation for the trafficker or others. This may encompass providing a spouse in the context of forced marriage, or the extraction of organs or tissues, including for surrogacy and ova removal. Human trafficking can occur within a country or trans-nationally. Human trafficking is a crime against the person because of the violation of the victim’s rights of movement through coercion and because of their commercial exploitation. Human trafficking is the trade in people, especially women and children, and does not necessarily involve the movement of the person from one place to another.
This is now a huge multi-national enterprise with huge profits for the perpetrators. In 2014 it was estimated that forced labour alone accounted for around $150 billion in profits! In 2019 it was even discovered that some of the UK’s best-known supermarkets had been selling goods produced by unpaid slave labour in the West Midlands, comprised of vulnerable people trafficked over here from Poland.
This is an extract from the book, Sinner’s Charter: Are the ten commandments for today?, available for £10 at https://www.sppublishing.com/the-sinners-charter-260-p.asp
