The Bible Endorses Slavery

Endorses is the key word in title of this blog post. The Bible doesn't merely condone slavery. It actively endorses and promotes it. Slavery is the second essential word in the title, because the Bible doesn't simply endorse indentured servitude as many Christian apologists argue. When the Bible discusses slavery, it isn't talking about people who owed a debt working to pay it off in lieu of settling with currency, as sources such as Answers in Genesis will attempt to have you believe. We're talking full blown slavery every bit as immoral and wicked as it was for 18th-19th century North America.

After reading this post, there'll be no uncertainty about truth claim I've made in the title, as the text within the Bible is perfectly clear. Unless stated otherwise, the text quoted below will be the New International Version (NIV) of the Bible.

Leviticus 25:44 says "Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you. From them, you may buy slaves." In context, there is no way to spin the meaning of slaves in this verse to mean indentured servant without abandoning every ounce of honesty in your body. Macmillan dictionary defines an indentured servant as "a worker who agreed to work for no salary for a specific number of years because their employer had paid for their travel..." Encyclopedia Britannica says "A person became an indentured servant by borrowing money and then voluntarily agreeing to work off the debt during a specified term. In some societies indentured servants probably differed little from debt slaves (i.e., persons who initially were unable to pay off obligations and thus were forced to work…"

In the Leviticus passage, it's tough to believe that a resident of another country would or could owe an Israelite money in those days, but even if that were the case, the word "buy" makes it clear that God is instructing the people of Isreal to purchase people as property--why would you buy a person who owes you money and what does that even mean? How could that transaction possibly work? It doesn't make any sense to pay a price to somebody to force labor upon somebody else who owes you a debt. The passage only makes sense if this is the type of slavery we read about in 5th grade social studies classes, whereby American colonists kidnapped African people and sold them into forced labor. This becomes even more clear in other passages, but let's move on, for now.

In the preceding passages, Leviticus 25:39-43, God says

If any of your fellow Israelites become poor and sell themselves to you, do not make them work as slaves. They are to be treated as hired workers or temporary residents among you; they are to work for you until the Year of Jubilee. Then they and their children are to be released, and they will go back to their own clans and to the property of their ancestors. Because the Israelites are my servants, whom I brought out of Egypt, they must not be sold as slaves. Do not rule over them ruthlessly, but fear your God.

 The context makes it quite clear that God's instructions are for one to treat their own fellow countrymen very differently from foreigners. It specifically notes that people born in Israel must eventually be set free, but if we read the next few passages, verses 45-46, we see that the rules are different for slaves purchased from other nations: "You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property. You can bequeath them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life, but you must not rule over your fellow Israelites ruthlessly." [bold emphasis added by me]

Let's unpack what we just read here. The alleged omnibenevolent creator of the universe just told his minions it is okay to own other human beings as property and make them slaves for life! Leviticus 25:39-46 purportedly contains a direct quote from God himself and is unambiguously wicked. This isn't indentured servitude--this is humans being sold and treated as property (like cattle or horses), forced into labor, and kept as slaves for their entire lifetime.

If an indentured servant were to have children while working to pay off debt, would it make any sense to a moral society that those children would be turned over to the master and subsequently bequeathed to his children for life? A Christian who is blindly convinced that slavery in the Bible means indentured servitude should still shiver at these passages. Defending them would be akin to a public attorney defending the world's most brutal serial killer--it's uncomfortable because there is no rational defense for it. If they were indentured servants, how can one defend keeping children as servants? And the text makes it clear that foreign slaves can be kept permanently--which rules out the possibility of freedom even if this so-called "indentured servant" pays off his or her debt. It's patently ridiculous to even entertain the possibility that Leviticus 25:39-46 is somehow morally justified.

God doesn't mind if the people of Israel, his chosen people, make slaves of foreigners because he judges them for being a different race than Israelite people. Throughout the Bible, and especially in the Old Testament, God routinely demonstrates that he only cares about Israel, commanding genocide of neighboring tribes of people multiple dozens of times. In Deuteronomy 7:6, he says to them "For you are a people holy to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be his people, his treasured possession." Dan Barker, in his book "God: The Most Unpleasant Character in all Fiction" notes that God "denigrates all ethic groups except the people he considers his 'treasured possession,'" because he was prejudiced against the diverse tribes of Canaanites living within the "holy land." He points out that in the preceding passages of Deut 7 (1-6),  God commands that Israel "utterly destroy" the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and the Jebusites. God furthermore tells Israel to never intermarry with any of these tribes and he further calls interracial marriage a "great evil" in Nehemiah 13. In Judges 12, God aids Jepthah in his war against another tribe, the Ephraimites, and Jepthah kills 42,000 tribespeople because of their accent. Make no mistake about it: The God of the Old Testament is a racist, xenophobic, ethnic cleanser. It's no wonder he was cool with owning the people as slaves.

In Numbers 31, Moses, God's chosen army general, receiver of God's crucial Ten Commandments, and one of the patriarchs of  Judeo-Christian legacy, addresses his troops who have returned from battling the Middianites: "“Have you allowed all the women to live?” he asked them. “They were the ones who followed Balaam’s advice and enticed the Israelites to be unfaithful to the Lord in the Peor incident, so that a plague struck the Lord’s people. Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man." (Num 31:15-18) [bold emphasis added by me]

It is inferred here that Moses has instructed God's army to keep young virgin girls as sex slaves. Christian apologists, of course, argue this verse has a softer interpretation, but given the context, how could it mean anything else? He's directed them to kill every living human in the entire city (even children), unless they are a female virgins, in which case, you may "save [them] for yourself." If Moses intended to instruct his army to rescue the women from the city without raping them, then the prepositional phrase "for yourselves" would be unnecessary and confusing. If rape and slavery were not part of the equation, then they would have rescued all the innocent people, not just the virgin girls.

The same implication can safely be made in Exodus 21:7-9:

If a man sells his daughter as a servant, she is not to go free as male servants do. If she does not please the master who has selected her for himself, he must let her be redeemed. He has no right to sell her to foreigners, because he has broken faith with her.

Who sells their daughter as an indentured servant? The context of the passage only makes sense if this is ordained human trafficking and slavery. And yes, "please the master" in this case means that God ordained not only forced labor, but forced sex, too.

Exodus 21:4 gives us this gem: "If his master gives [his Hebrew servant] a wife and she bears him sons or daughters, the woman and her children shall belong to her master, and only the man shall go free [on the seventh year]." For the moment, I'll relent on my insistence that this is full-blown slavery and allow the Christian apologist to pretend this is only indentured servitude. Imagine thinking that God is good after he rules a servant, who was just "given a wife," to surrender his wife and children to the master upon being set free. And the wife and kids are now prisoners for life.  It sounds like a loophole whereby a master who wants a lifetime of free labor can "give a wife" to his servant, thereby keeping their kids forever after his servant has paid off the debt. This is still treating human beings as property, even if it were indentured servitude! And the misogynistic arrogance of this rule giver to legislate that women can be given away to marriage should make even the stoutest Christian wince disapprovingly. Women have the capacity to make their own marital decisions, and should under no circumstances ever be given away as property or kept as servants for life. I would think that a morally just and fair god would know this and legislate accordingly.

This is a good time to break for a footnote. Christian apologists often times insist that objective morality exists and use that claim as a premise to prove their god exists too. Most Christians believe in objective morality. But morality, if it is truly "objective" cannot change and would apply to all cultures at all times. If it was considered okay to have servants and slaves for a certain culture at a certain point in history, but it's not okay in 2019, then that definitely allows for morality to be totally subjective. If slavery is objectively wrong, and it obviously is, then it was every bit as wrong in 1400 BCE (approximately the time Exodus was written) as it is nowadays, and if it was wrong back then, then our all-knowing "giver of morality" would have known it. If that omniscient god knew slavery was objectively wrong, and permitted it, no, endorsed it anyway, then that makes him evil.

A few passages later, in Exodus 21:20-21, God says "Anyone who beats their male or female slave with a rod must be punished if the slave dies as a direct result, but they are not to be punished if the slave recovers after a day or two, since the slave is their property." [bold emphasis added by me]

Again, we see that God, who is alleged to have created moral goodness, allows human beings to be owned and treated as property. But I buried the lede. He literally permits battery, and even murder, under certain circumstances! According to Exodus, one can literally beat a slave's head so hard that he falls unconscious, and as long as the slave is back on his or her feet within a day or two, there is no punishment. It is implied here that if an Israelite were to beat a slave who subsequently died four days later as a direct result of the beating, that there would be no punishment. There's no law against destroying your own property, after all. Even if this were indentured servitude (there is abundant evidence to conclude it's not), why would God allow Israel to beat their indentured servants? Beating humans is treating them as slaves, not as a servant working off a debt.

The New Testament is friendly to slavery, too. I am often by willfully ignorant Christians that God didn't endorse slavery (a stance contradicted by the text at every corner), but that he knew it was going on so he gave rules on how to treat one's slaves with dignity (such as, ya know, how to beat them nearly to death without getting punished). 1 Timothy 6:1-2  gives some great advice to slaves for how to treat their Masters:

All who are under the yoke of slavery should consider their masters worthy of full respect, so that God’s name and our teaching may not be slandered. Those who have believing masters should not show them disrespect just because they are fellow believers. Instead, they should serve them even better because their masters are dear to them as fellow believers and are devoted to the welfare of their slaves.

Now, these are the words of Paul, not God, but 2 Timothy says that all Scripture is God-breathed so we are to assume this edict is endorsed by God himself. Think about this for a second. Slaves are told that if they don't respect their Masters then it would give God a bad rap, which would harm the reputation of Christianity. So, if you're a slave, put that ball bag in and take it like a champ, else people would blame God for your suffering.

In Ephesians 6:9, it does tell Masters to not threaten slaves. But let me be clear: When it comes to rules and guidelines for slavery, there is only one rule or guideline that is morally acceptable.

DON'T FUCKING OWN ANOTHER HUMAN BEING AS PROPERTY.

Period. Any other rule or guideline is complete dog shit, and any god with a conscious and a backbone who allowed an apostle to write in his name would have corrected this. 

I have a cousin who posted a picture of his new tattoo on Twitter. It's a Bible Verse. It says "Colossians 3:23-24"

I googled the verse. It says:

Whatever you do, work at it with your whole being, for the Lord and not for men, because you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as your reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving

My cousin played D1 college football. How cute. He thinks if he trains really hard then God will reward him, presumably with success on the gridiron in the form of touchdowns and wins.

But I wonder if he knows what Verse 22, the one immediately preceding that inspirational quote, says? Colossians 22 reads: 

Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything, not only to please them while they are watching, but with sincerity of heart and fear of the Lord.

My cousin got a tattoo on his arm that endorses slavery. In permanent ink. As an atheist, I am constantly accused of taking the Bible out of context. Here, my Christian family member took a passage telling slaves to work hard for their masters out of context to motivate him to be better at playing football.

How fucking embarrassing. Truly pathetic actually. And I'd bet he either has no clue or does not care.

The Ten Commandments are supposed to be the most important moral document ever written. Modern day Christian Nationalists believe (incorrectly) that the United States' Constitution is based on these laws. Some even contend that it would be impossible to write a better 10 laws on which to base a moral society. Arguing these claims would have to be a different post (or book), so I digress. God had a chance to illegitimize slavery in the Ten Commandments. Jesus had chances in the New Testament, too. There are 613 Levitical laws laid out by God. Among them are commandments not to eat grapes that have fallen on the ground (19:10), not to have sex with a menstruating woman (18:19), not to eat a worm found in fruit (11:41), and not to slaughter an animal and its young on the same day (22:28). The Lord pedantically told his followers not to do these things, but never once uttered the words "Thou shall not own other people as property or force them into labor." Notably, the Fourth and Tenth Commandments do mention slavery--but not in the way Christians would hope.

The Fourth (Exodus 20:9-10 NCV) says "Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work--you,  your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns." The Tenth (Exodus 20:17 NCV) says "You shall not covet your neighbor's house; you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor."

Barker quips "It's a sin to covet slaves. It's not a sin to own them."

So about making a better Ten Commandments, which many Christians insist is impossible, how about simply replacing any one of the first three, which have nothing to do with morality and everything to do with kissing God's ass, with something about outlawing slavery?

Judges 1 mentions numerous foreign tribes of people pressed into "forced labor." It makes no mention of any contract between a debtor and a payee. It unequivocally calls this transaction "forced labor" three separate times. Does God intervene to prevent this madness or punish the evildoers who commit these atrocities? Of course not.

Translators disagree on thousands of passages within the Bible, but one of the more peculiar ones I know of is in 1 Chronicles 20:30. The King James Version (KJV) describes King David, chosen by God because God liked what he saw in his heart (1 Samuel 16:7), returning from the land of the Ammonites after he "cut them with saws, and with harrows of iron, and with axes." But the NIV--I guess you can say "softens" it up a bit--says David spent his time in the towns "consigning them to labor with saws and with iron picks and axes." So God either hacked people to death if you like KJV, or he forced them into slavery if you like the NIV.

The ironic part of my writing this post is that between 1999 and 2001, when I first began to openly talk about being an atheist, I defended the Bible in arguments with friends. At the time, I had yet to actually read any part of the book for myself, but I had seen other atheists contend that the Bible let's things like slavery, rape, child abuse, animal cruelty, human sacrifice, and spousal abuse go unpunished--and I disbelieved them. I specifically remember telling one friend of mine, a Christian, that atheists were dishonestly exaggerating Biblical claims to push an agenda. Humorously, my reasons for believing atheists were lying was that there would be no way possible any Christian would believe the Bible is true if the book actually endorsed slavery because every human knows slavery is immoral. Upon reading "The Good Book" (speaking of exaggeration to push an agenda), no rational person can honestly conclude otherwise: The Bible endorses slavery.

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