Exodus 21:26-27 frees a slave whose master knocks out a tooth. Five verses earlier, Exodus 21:21 says of a slave that “he is his money.” Both verses sit in the same chapter, and any honest answer to whether the Bible endorses slavery has to account for both.
Dr. Esau McCaulley, who teaches at Northeastern Seminary and specializes in Paul and his letters, reads these passages as laws that regulate and restrain an institution the Bible did not design, inside a story that begins with every person made in God’s image and centers on God freeing slaves. This study asks you to test that reading against the texts yourself, and then to compare what you find with the slavery America practiced.
You can work through it alone in two or three sittings, or with a group in one long session or two shorter ones. Keep a Bible open, and read each passage aloud before anyone comments on it. In the King James wording, servant, maid and bondman in these passages usually mean a person held in bondage, not a hired worker, so read them that way.
Before you read a single verse
For many readers, “the Bible and slavery” arrives already carrying a family history, sermons that told enslaved people to obey, and a nation that wrote slavery into its laws. That history shapes how a verse sounds before anyone reads it.
Take two minutes and write down, privately, the first image or memory that comes to mind when you hear that phrase. You will return to it at the end. In a group, no one needs to share it. A leader can simply say that the room is allowed to find these passages hard, and that discomfort is not a sign of weak faith.
First passage: a question about divorce
McCaulley does not begin with the slavery texts. He begins with Matthew 19, where Jesus is asked about the divorce provision in the law of Moses. Read Matthew 19:3-9.
Jesus is asked to rule on a legal detail, and he goes behind the law to creation. Matthew 19:8 records his answer: “Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so.”
“Suffered” here means permitted. Jesus separates two things inside the law of Moses: what God intended from the beginning, and what the law allowed because of human sin. The divorce provision belongs to the second category. It managed damage without describing God’s design.
McCaulley argues that this distinction is the key for reading the slavery laws: “Just because there’s a passage that talks about something, it doesn’t mean that that’s commended as the way that God expected society to function.” That is a claim about method. A law can regulate a practice without approving of it, and Jesus himself reads at least one law that way.
Now apply Jesus’ move. Genesis 1:27 says, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” Ask the question Jesus asked: from the beginning, was it so? Does anything in the creation account assign some image-bearers to be owned by others?
Observation prompt: Write one sentence describing what Genesis 1:27 says about every human being. Then write one sentence about what that verse would make it impossible to claim about a person because of their ancestry.
Second passage: who the law was given to
Read Exodus 6:5-7 and then Deuteronomy 15:12-15. The people receiving these laws were former slaves. Deuteronomy 15 commands that a Hebrew servant who serves six years go free in the seventh, supplied from the flock, the threshing floor and the winepress. The reason given is that Israel was a bondman in Egypt and the LORD redeemed it (Deuteronomy 15:15).
McCaulley draws out that logic: “So their experience of slavery as a nation was supposed to prevent them from actually enslaving one another permanently.” The law grounds its command in memory, not economics.
The release applied to Hebrews, though. A foreigner could be held for life, and McCaulley does not hide that. Of foreign slavery in Israel he says, “I wouldn’t try to lessen it and call it indentured servitude”. The laws that follow are protections inside a system that was still slavery.
Third passage: the limits on a master
Read Exodus 21:20-27 slowly, listening for one thing: whose power is being restricted?
Exodus 21:26-27 reads: “And if a man smite the eye of his servant, or the eye of his maid, that it perish; he shall let him go free for his eye’s sake. And if he smite out his manservant’s tooth, or his maidservant’s tooth; he shall let him go free for his tooth’s sake.”
The penalty for injuring a slave is the slave’s freedom, and the cost falls on the master. McCaulley sets this beside American history: “There is no law on any book in, in, in any law book in American history that says if you, if you knock the tooth out of a slave, it goes free.”
Exodus 21:20 addresses killing: “And if a man smite his servant, or his maid, with a rod, and he die under his hand; he shall be surely punished.” McCaulley argues that the language behind “punished” is the language of vengeance used for taking a life, as in God’s warning about anyone who would kill Cain in Genesis 4, so the master faces death. Other interpreters read the verb more narrowly, as a serious penalty the verse leaves unspecified, perhaps decided by a court. Either way, the verse treats the slave’s death as a crime against a person.
Then read Deuteronomy 23:15-16: “Thou shalt not deliver unto his master the servant which is escaped from his master unto thee: He shall dwell with thee, even among you, in that place which he shall choose in one of thy gates, where it liketh him best: thou shalt not oppress him.”
McCaulley reads this as a law about slaves fleeing other nations into Israel: “It was supposed to be a safe haven for all the slaves of the world.” Notice who chooses in verse 16. The escaped person picks where to live. McCaulley adds his own caution: “Now, how they act now, whether or not that actually happened is a different question”. The law states an ideal. It does not prove Israel kept it.
The verse that resists
Do not skip this part. Exodus 21:21, between the protections you just studied, says: “Notwithstanding, if he continue a day or two, he shall not be punished: for he is his money.”
The law still counts the slave as property. A reader troubled by this verse is reading accurately. The distinction from Matthew 19 explains how a law can restrain a practice without endorsing it. It does not make the practice good, and it does not erase verse 21. McCaulley’s summary is careful on this point: “It doesn’t, in my opinion, ever say things like, slavery’s a great idea, here’s how you should do it.” He claims the law restrains. He does not claim the institution was gentle.
He also argues that Israel failed to keep even these limits. He says he searched the secondary literature and found no evidence that Jews in Jesus’ day were releasing Hebrew slaves on schedule, and none that Israel practiced the Jubilee. He invites others to find counterevidence, so treat this as his research claim. His conclusion: “Even this minimum that we consider not good enough, they fail to do.” If he is right, Israel’s practice indicts Israel, not the law that judged it.
Comparing the two systems
Read Exodus 21:16: “And he that stealeth a man, and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death.”
The transatlantic trade began with exactly what this verse names: people seized, sold and held. McCaulley notes that most slaves in the ancient Near East were prisoners of war, and that “Israel was never supposed to go out and capture slaves and bring them back.” He also states plainly that “There was no race based slavery in the Bible”. In America, by contrast, enslaved people were taken from their homelands and marked by skin color, and the system was defended with the claim that Black people were inferior.
Comparison prompt: On one side of a page, list how a person became enslaved under the laws you have read, and what could end that status. On the other, list how a person became enslaved in America, and what could end it. Which American practices does Exodus 21:16 or Genesis 1:27 condemn outright?
Fourth passage: Paul and a small church
Read 1 Corinthians 7:17-24, the whole letter to Philemon, and Ephesians 6:5-9.
1 Corinthians 7:21 says: “Art thou called being a servant? care not for it: but if thou mayest be made free, use it rather.” Compare it with the advice just before it about circumcision, where Paul tells Jews and Gentiles to stay as they are. McCaulley argues Paul says something different to slaves: “if you can get free, get free.” He reads “care not for it” as reassurance to enslaved believers, some sexually exploited, that what was done to them did not cut them off from God. Some interpreters read the end of the verse as advice to make use of one’s present condition. Weigh both against the contrast with the circumcision advice.
In Philemon, Paul asks that Onesimus be received “Not now as a servant, but above a servant, a brother beloved, specially to me, but how much more unto thee, both in the flesh, and in the Lord?” (Philemon 16). Onesimus is usually read as a runaway, but some scholars dispute that, suggesting he sought Paul out to mediate a quarrel with his owner or was sent to him. The letter never uses the word for running away, so look at verses 11-18 and decide what the text itself tells you. Then look at verse 2: the letter is addressed to the church that met in Philemon’s house, so its request was heard in public.
Ephesians 6 tells slaves to obey. Read Ephesians 6:9 with equal attention: “And, ye masters, do the same things unto them, forbearing threatening: knowing that your Master also is in heaven; neither is there respect of persons with him.” Paul forbids even threats and places the master under a Master who shows no favoritism.
McCaulley adds two observations. Paul wrote to tiny churches with no power to change Roman law, not to a Christian nation that could abolish slavery. And “Paul actually addresses the slaves as moral actors”. He argues that “the kind of submission passages have to be read in conjunction with” the passages urging freedom, and alongside Galatians 3:28: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”
A practice: restrain or extend
This is the main exercise. Do it on paper, alone first, then compare in pairs.
- List each passage: Deuteronomy 15:12-15, Deuteronomy 23:15-16, Exodus 21:16, Exodus 21:20, Exodus 21:21, Exodus 21:26-27, 1 Corinthians 7:21, Ephesians 6:5-9, Philemon 16.
- Beside each, write whose power the verse limits and who it protects. If it protects no one, write that.
- Mark each one: does it restrain the institution, extend it, or leave it as it was?
- Circle any verse you cannot honestly classify, and write one sentence about why.
- Write the strongest case that these texts endorse slavery, using only verses on your list. Then write how Matthew 19 and Genesis 1 answer that case, and where they do not fully answer it.
For leaders: the circled verses are the most useful part of the discussion. Resist resolving them quickly, and ask people to point to words in the text, not to their impressions.
Discussion questions
- Jesus distinguishes what the law permitted from what God intended “from the beginning.” What in a passage would tell you which category a particular law belongs to?
- Deuteronomy 15 grounds its release law in Israel’s memory of Egypt. Why might a law appeal to memory instead of simply giving a rule?
- Exodus 21:20 can be read as requiring death or as an unspecified penalty. Which reading fits the surrounding verses better, and how much does McCaulley’s larger argument depend on his?
- Using your comparison page, which difference between Israel’s law and American slavery seems most fundamental to you, and why?
- Enslavers preached Ephesians 6:5 to people they held captive, in a nation where professing Christians wrote the laws. How does the setting of Paul’s original churches change what that verse could and could not mean?
- Look back at what you wrote before reading. Did any passage confirm it, complicate it, or change it?
What to carry out of this study
McCaulley’s advice for anyone weighing the Bible on this question is to “read the whole thing.” He describes his own conclusions as coming from “taking each passage as they come and reading in context.” The exercise you just did is that advice in practice.
The question to carry is whether the enslaver’s reading survives contact with the whole text: creation, the Exodus, the law against stealing a man, the tooth law, the runaway law, and a letter asking an owner to receive a slave as a brother. This week, take one passage you circled and read the full chapter around it twice. Then decide whether your first reading still holds.