The Bible underneath it
Slavery, Genocide, and the Moral Problem
Not recorded atrocities. Direct commands, in God’s own voice.
The point in one sentence
The Bible does not merely record atrocities, it commands them: chattel slavery of foreigners, beating slaves, exterminating entire peoples including infants, and keeping virgin girls as war spoils.
Paraphrase does the work of softening these. Every one is linked; the verse itself reads differently than a summary of it.
Slavery
The Bible regulates slavery in detail and never once prohibits it.
Who may be bought, from where, for how long, what may be done to them, and what happens if they die. Every question except whether it should exist.
- Exodus 21:20-21: beating a servant to death is not punishable if the servant survives a day or two, "for he is his money."
- Leviticus 25:44-46: buy foreign slaves as permanent hereditary property, "ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them for a possession; they shall be your bondmen for ever." The same chapter gives Israelites far better terms. The distinction is deliberate.
- 1 Peter 2:18, New Testament: servants must "be subject to your masters with all fear; not only to the good and gentle, but also to the froward." No command to free anyone.
Genocide
- 1 Samuel 15:3: "slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass."
- Deuteronomy 20:16-17: "thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth."
- Numbers 31:17-18: kill the boys and every woman who has known a man, "but all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves."
- Psalm 137:9: "Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones."
Women
- Deuteronomy 22:28-29: a man who lays hold on an unbetrothed virgin pays her father fifty shekels, "and she shall be his wife... he may not put her away all his days." She is bound to him for life. The King James verb is milder than the modern renderings, and the dispute over it is real; the life sentence is not in dispute.
The historical proof this is not a modern misreading
American clergy used these exact texts to defend slavery, and they had the more literal reading. Roughly half of the 279 pro-slavery publications before the Civil War were written by clergy. The Old School Presbyterian General Assembly declared in 1861 that slavery rested on "some of the plainest declarations of the Word of God." PBS
Abolitionists generally had to appeal to broad themes, the Golden Rule and the image of God, against the plain sense of the specific texts. That is the tell.
The common rebuttals
"That is Old Covenant. Jesus superseded it." Two problems. It does not explain why a perfect, unchanging God commanded these things under any covenant. And 1 Peter is New Testament and still tells slaves to submit to cruel masters.
"Biblical slavery was indentured servitude." True for Hebrew on Hebrew servitude, which had a six year release. And Leviticus 25 draws that contrast on purpose in the same chapter, then says foreign slaves may be owned permanently and inherited. That is chattel slavery, distinguished from the temporary kind by the text itself.
"The conquest commands are ancient war rhetoric." A real scholarly position. Grant it entirely and the problem remains, because it only addresses scale. The stated rationale, kill these peoples including their infants, is still in the text regardless of the body count.