The charge usually arrives in one sentence: the Bible is the slave master’s book. Slaveholders quoted it to defend what they did to enslaved Africans, so the book must have approved of it. The charge gets the history of misuse right and the history of slavery wrong. The slavery Israel’s law regulated, the slavery Paul’s churches lived inside, and the chattel slavery of the American South were three different institutions. Only the third was built on the claim that one race was made to be owned. Scripture never makes that claim.
The charge has an awkward ally. Dr. Esau McCaulley, an Anglican priest and New Testament scholar who works on Paul’s letters, sees “a strange confluence between the slave master and the person who currently opposed to the Bible and they wanna point to the same passages.” The enslaver lifted a handful of verses out of the whole book and called them God’s blessing on his property. The modern critic lifts out the same verses and calls them proof the book is evil. One praises the reading and the other condemns it, but both accept it. McCaulley’s answer to both is blunt: “If you wanna be woke, read the Bible.”
Which slavery are we talking about?
The word “slavery” hides most of the problem. It names several historical systems, and the argument depends on telling them apart. McCaulley offers his own ranking: “Greco woman, slavery was evil too. It was just a different type of evil.” He reserves his strongest language for the American system: “The American form of chattel slavery was a unique evil in the history of humanity.”
That ranking excuses nothing. It is a historical claim, and it can be tested by asking three questions of each system. How did a person become enslaved? What could a master legally do to that person’s body? Was there a way out? On each question, Israel’s law, Roman practice and American law give different answers.
Israel: an existing institution, fenced in
Before reaching the slavery laws, McCaulley turns to a conversation about divorce. When Jesus is asked about Moses’ allowance, he reaches 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.” Jesus distinguishes God’s purpose at creation from laws that limit the damage sinful people were already causing.
Run the slavery laws through the same test. Genesis 1:27 reads: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” Nothing in that account plans for some image-bearers to own others. A law that regulates a practice is not the same as a law that commends it. In McCaulley’s words, “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.”
The laws themselves come from a people who had just been freed. Deuteronomy 15 required that a Hebrew slave go free in the seventh year and leave with provisions from the flock, the threshing floor and the winepress. The stated reason was Israel’s own bondage in Egypt (Deuteronomy 15:15). For an Israelite, enslavement was meant to have an end date, and leaving was meant to come with resources.
Foreigners could be held permanently, and the law did not hide that. It did limit what a master could do to them. 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.” In the KJV, “servant” here means a person in bondage, not a hired worker. A lost tooth bought freedom.
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 translated “punished” is the language of vengeance used in Genesis 4 for anyone who would kill Cain, and so points to the death penalty. Interpreters dispute how far that verb reaches. Either way, the verse treats an enslaved person’s death as a crime against a person and not just damage to property.
Then comes 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, so that Israel “was supposed to be a safe haven for all the slaves of the world.” The runaway, not the host, chooses where to live.
How people became enslaved matters too. On McCaulley’s account, most slaves in the ancient Near East were prisoners of war, and Israel was not supposed to wage offensive war to capture them. The law assumed a world where slavery already existed and put fences around it.
Rome: status without a color line
Paul’s churches lived inside a different system. In a Roman city, McCaulley points out, you often could not pick out the enslaved by their clothing or ethnicity. What counted most was whose slave you were. A slave in a wealthy household who was later freed could end up with more standing than a poor free person. The lows were brutal, but the institution was not organized around ancestry.
Christians in that world had no power over the law. In McCaulley’s estimate, a city might hold fifty to a hundred believers among thousands of residents, and in Corinth perhaps a third of the population was enslaved. Paul spoke to people trapped in a system they could not vote away. Even so, 1 Corinthians 7:21 leans toward the exit: “Art thou called being a servant? care not for it: but if thou mayest be made free, use it rather.” McCaulley reads the first half as pastoral reassurance. Enslaved believers, some of them sexually abused by their masters, had not become morally compromised before God because of what was done to them. He reads the second half as encouragement to take freedom when it was possible. Some interpreters read “use it rather” differently, as advice to make the most of one’s present state, so the verse is contested.
Philemon is more ambiguous than it is often presented. Paul asks Philemon to receive Onesimus “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). McCaulley hears pressure toward release, all the more because the letter would be read before the church that met in Philemon’s house. The letter never commands release, though, and readers have long disagreed about whether Paul was asking for it. What the letter does show is narrower and still significant. Paul declines to treat Onesimus as property to be returned and settled. He asks Philemon to receive Onesimus as a brother “in the flesh,” and that is not how an owner thinks about an asset.
America: race as the reason
American chattel slavery answered all three questions differently. People became enslaved by being taken from their homelands and stripped of their cultures, and then by being born to an enslaved mother. In McCaulley’s description, the enslaved were identifiable at a glance because they were Black. The justification he names is the idea that Black people were inferior and needed bondage to be raised to a moral standard. He says plainly that this was not how slavery was viewed in the Old Testament, and he insists, “There was no race based slavery in the Bible.”
The difference in law follows from the difference in reason. American law did not free the enslaved after a fixed term, did not free a person whose master broke a tooth, and did not shelter runaways. It protected the owner’s claim. McCaulley imagines American slavery governed by Israel’s tooth law and says, “We still have beef, but the beef will be totally different than what would happen to us.”
Here the enslaver’s appeal to Scripture fails on its own terms. He was defending a racial hierarchy among people that Genesis 1:27 denies. He held political power that Paul’s churches never had, and he wrote laws to keep the enslaved in bondage. Ancient Israel’s law, by contrast, was written to limit what masters could do. He took verses addressed to powerless minorities in a world without a color line and applied them to a system built on one.
Did Israel keep its own law?
The story does not flatter Israel. “You would think that the Israelites then would refuse to enslave people, but they don’t. And that shows you more about human sin than the nature of God,” McCaulley says. He reports that he has searched the secondary literature without finding evidence that Hebrew slaves were being released after seven years in Jesus’ day, or that the Jubilee release was ever practiced. That is his research claim, and he invites others to find counterevidence. If it holds, it cuts against the common complaint that God should simply have banned slavery. “Even this minimum that we consider not good enough, they fail to do.”
The failure belongs to the people who broke the law, not to the law that bound them. McCaulley sees the same pattern in slavery that still exists today, which no one defends from a Bible verse: “It’s about human greed and our desire to exploit.”
The objection that remains
The hard texts are still hard. Israel permitted lifelong bondage for foreigners. The verse right after the death penalty for killing a slave reads: “Notwithstanding, if he continue a day or two, he shall not be punished: for he is his money” (Exodus 21:21). A reader who stops cold at that verse is reading it accurately.
McCaulley refuses to soften it: “I wouldn’t try to lessen it and call it indentured servitude.” His case does not depend on ancient slavery being mild. It rests on two narrower claims. The first is that Israel’s laws limited an institution already present in the ancient world instead of creating one. The second is that the biblical story bends away from slavery. It moves from humanity made in God’s image, to God freeing slaves from Egypt, to a church in which Galatians 3:28 says “there is neither bond nor free.” Christians disagree about how far particular verses go. But the claim that Scripture authorized American chattel slavery needs a racial hierarchy and a law designed to protect owners from the enslaved. The text supplies neither.
Whose reading should Black Christians inherit?
The critic who calls the Bible the slave master’s book ends up granting the slave master’s reading. McCaulley presses this point. To side with the enslaver on what these passages mean is to set aside the whole stream of the Black church tradition, the Black Christians in America who read the same Bible and concluded that the enslaver was wrong. His charge to critics is to “be mad about the right stuff and be mad in a sophisticated way,” and to “make sure that criticism is informed by real significant wrestling with the entire witness instead of proof texting the same way that our slave masters did hundreds of years ago.”
He also widens the timeline. Black Christianity did not begin on the plantation. McCaulley points to Alexandria in Egypt, one of the early centers of Christian interpretation; to Augustine of North Africa; and to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church with its own history and moral reasoning. He notes that of the early centers of Christianity, only one was in Europe. Christianity was African long before the transatlantic trade, and the Bible belonged to Africans long before an enslaver claimed it.
That changes what the reader inherits. The question is no longer whether a book once used against Black people can be trusted. It is whose reading of that book to accept: the enslaver’s, who needed his listeners to know only a few verses, or the reading of those who knew the whole book and found in it a God who frees slaves.
