Why didn’t God forbid slavery? We cannot answer honestly by pretending that the Bible had already abolished it, or that every enslaved person in antiquity was simply an employee. The Torah condemns kidnapping and limits the servitude of some Israelites, yet it also permits the purchase and inheritance of foreign slaves. The New Testament proclaims the equal dignity of persons in Christ while instructing both slaves and masters without abolishing their legal relationship. In an Orthodox reading, the image of God, love of neighbor, and fellowship in the Church nevertheless give Christians sufficient reason to reject ownership of another human being. This moral judgment follows from the faith as a whole. It is not a sentence we can attribute literally to Jesus or Paul. It also requires us to acknowledge that Christians, including those in the Christian East, practiced or tolerated for centuries what their theology gave them reason to challenge. (Leviticus 25; Ephesians 6; For the Life of the World, §65)

Israel prohibited kidnapping but retained slavery

The claim that the Israelites had “already forbidden slavery” rests on genuine texts, some striking for their time. Exodus 21:16 prescribes death for someone who kidnaps a person, whether the victim has been sold or is still in the kidnapper’s possession. Deuteronomy 24:7 explicitly condemns kidnapping and selling a fellow Israelite. These prohibitions strike at a major source of enslavement: one cannot simply seize a neighbor and turn that person into merchandise. But the scope of each passage matters. Deuteronomy 24:7 speaks specifically of a compatriot, and neither verse, by itself, removes the other ways of acquiring slaves that the Law recognizes. Prohibiting kidnapping is not the same as abolishing ownership of human beings. (Exodus 21; Deuteronomy 24)

The protection of an indebted compatriot is substantial all the same. Exodus 21:2-6 provides for the release of a Hebrew man after six years of service. Deuteronomy 15:12-18 expressly extends this rule to a Hebrew woman and requires that the person released receive resources rather than leave empty-handed. Leviticus 25:39-43 describes an impoverished Israelite as a worker who must not be treated harshly or made to serve as an ordinary slave, and places release at the jubilee. These passages do not all have the same wording or timetable. Combining them into one universally applied “six-year contract” would be misleading. Their shared logic is clearer than any attempt to harmonize every detail: poverty must not give one Israelite unlimited power over another’s life, because Israel remembers its own liberation from Egypt. (Exodus 21; Deuteronomy 15; Leviticus 25)

Even this limited servitude was not free employment in the modern sense. Under Exodus 21:4-6, a wife given to a servant by his master, and the children of that union, remain with the master when the man leaves. His family may therefore become a reason to remain in lifelong service. In the same chapter, a daughter sold by her father does not leave under the rule applied to a man; her protections mainly concern marriage and her maintenance. Deuteronomy’s provisions concerning women also show that the legal collections do not speak with one voice on every detail. The Sabbath gives male and female slaves a rest explicitly shared with their master. That rest matters, but it does not make them free workers. (Exodus 21; Deuteronomy 15; Deuteronomy 5)

The decisive passage is Leviticus 25:44-46. Having ruled out treating an impoverished Israelite as a slave, it permits the purchase of men and women from neighboring nations or from certain foreign families living in the land. It permits their transmission to one’s children as a permanent inheritance. The legal distinction here rests on membership in the covenant people. One may seek a theological meaning in the limit placed on masters’ power over Israelites. One cannot turn that limit into universal abolition without erasing the verses that follow it. Historians of biblical law distinguish the debt servitude of compatriots from the hereditary slavery of foreigners for precisely this reason. (Leviticus 25; James W. Watts, Religions, 2021; David P. Wright on biblical slave laws)

Other passages forbid us to idealize the situation. Deuteronomy 20:10-14 prescribes forced labor for a foreign city that submits and allows women and children to be taken as spoils after a successful siege. Exodus 21:20-21 penalizes a master if a slave struck by him dies immediately, but withholds the penalty if the person survives a day or two, on the ground that the slave is the master’s property. Verses 26-27 require release for the loss of an eye or a tooth. Violence is therefore subject to limits, but an enslaved person does not receive the protection of a free person. Deuteronomy 23:15-16 protects a slave who has fled to Israel from being returned to a master. Its wording may suggest a fugitive arriving from abroad. It does not establish that every slave in an Israelite household could depart at will. (Deuteronomy 20; Exodus 21; Deuteronomy 23)

Finally, the existence of a law does not prove that a society obeyed it. Jeremiah 34:8-17 recounts the release of Hebrew slaves followed by their re-enslavement by the very people who had freed them. Nehemiah 5 describes families crushed by debt and forced to pledge their sons and daughters. The biblical narratives themselves expose the gap between the covenant Israel professed and the conduct of those with power. We have no evidence of general and regular observance of the jubilee. Nor, in the absence of evidence, should we assert that it was never observed. The accurate formulation is this: Israel prohibited kidnapping and restricted some forms of servitude among Israelites, but did not prohibit slavery as an institution. (Jeremiah 34; Nehemiah 5; Watts, 2021)

Ancient slavery differed from Atlantic slavery without becoming innocent

When we hear “slavery” today, we often think of the transatlantic trade and racial slavery in the Americas: the capture or purchase of Africans, inherited status, markets in human beings, forced plantation labor, and an ideology of racial superiority. In the American South, slavery was organized as permanent, hereditary property, accompanied by severe restrictions on movement, family life, and education. Virginia’s colonial law of 1705 already distinguished servants bound for a term from enslaved people partly according to origin and religion. These features matter. They prevent us from treating the American model as a complete description of every older system. (National Park Service on hereditary slavery; Virginia’s 1705 statute; Cambridge on the comparative history of slavery)

For Israelites in debt servitude, the legal texts at least provided forms of release and protection that racial slavery did not offer in the same way: prescribed emancipation, provisions on departure, Sabbath rest, and a ban on harsh treatment of a compatriot. Yet the difference cannot sustain the claim that “biblical slavery was only a labor contract.” A prisoner of war, a purchased foreigner, a child born to an enslaved person, and a daughter sold by her father cannot all be described in those terms. The Hebrew word ʿeḇeḏ can, depending on context, mean servant, subject, or slave. Its range of meanings does not make someone whom the law allows to be bought and bequeathed into a free employee. (Deuteronomy 15; Leviticus 25; Brown–Driver–Briggs, ʿeḇeḏ)

Ancient slavery was not built on the modern category of “race” in the same way as Atlantic slavery. It could arise from debt, war, purchase, birth, or kidnapping, though foreign origin and ethnic prejudice still played a part. In the Greco-Roman world, enslaved people could be beaten, sold, separated from their families, and sexually exploited. Historical comparison must therefore hold two propositions together: these institutions were not identical, and the absence of modern racial categories does nothing to remove the wrong of owning a person. Conversely, the existence of temporary servitude cannot erase permanent forms of ancient slavery. (Chance Bonar, Tufts University; Cambridge on comparative slavery; Leviticus 25)

This finding changes how we ask the theological question. If we ask why God did not prohibit a supposedly gentle institution based on contracts, we evade the problem rather than answer it. Biblical law contains partial protections, but it also contains coercion and the inheritance of human beings. Because both realities coexist, a Christian reading must seek the moral direction of revelation without presenting its historical limits as an eternal ideal. (Exodus 21; Deuteronomy 20; Leviticus 25)

The New Testament changes the relationship without abolishing the status

In the Gospels, Christ does not say the equivalent of “you shall no longer own slaves.” At Nazareth, he announces good news to the poor and release to captives and the oppressed. Luke 4:18-21, taken alone, is not a bill for abolition. Dismissing it on that ground, however, would narrow the concrete reach of his proclamation. Similarly, in John 8:31-36 Jesus is speaking primarily about liberation from sin. It would be inaccurate to claim that he explicitly prohibits legal slavery there. It would be equally inaccurate to claim that inward freedom makes material bondage insignificant. (Luke 4; John 8; the Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church in America on emancipation)

The heart of the Christian argument lies elsewhere. Together with love of God, the command to love one’s neighbor as oneself sums up the Law and the Prophets. Treating others as we wish to be treated gives that command a practical measure. Neither teaching explicitly mentions manumission. Yet their application is difficult to escape. Can I demand for myself the freedom to form a family, move about, refuse violence, and offer my labor freely, while claiming a property right that deprives another person of those very things? Condemning this contradiction is a Christian moral inference drawn from Christ’s words, not a quotation invented and put into his mouth. (Matthew 22; Matthew 7; For the Life of the World, §§1, 6, 65)

Paul gives this question an ecclesial depth. In Galatians 3:26-29, the distinction between slave and free no longer determines the standing of those baptized into Christ: they have put on Christ and share in the promise. Colossians 3 associates the renewed human being with the Creator’s image and calls for compassion, forgiveness, and love. This is a real spiritual and communal equality, but it does not automatically alter the Roman Empire’s property records. The tension is unmistakable: someone whom society classifies as my possession shares my baptismal dignity. A community can proclaim that equality while refusing its social consequences, and history shows that it has often done so. (Galatians 3; Colossians 3; For the Life of the World, §65)

The letter to Philemon makes this tension personal. Paul sends Onesimus, Philemon’s enslaved servant who has become a disciple, back to him and asks that he receive him as a beloved brother, in ordinary life as well as in the Lord. He prefers to appeal for a free act of love rather than compel a decision, and offers to settle any debt Onesimus owes. The appeal is powerful: receiving this brother as Paul himself makes the relationship of owner to property morally unstable. But the letter does not tell us that Philemon freed Onesimus, nor does Paul literally command emancipation in it. To say more would fill the text’s silence with our own conclusion. (Philemon; Orthodox Church in America on Paul’s letters)

The uncomfortable passages must not be banished to a footnote. Ephesians 6:5-9 tells slaves to obey their masters and masters to stop threatening them, because their heavenly Master shows no partiality. Colossians 3:22–4:1 requires masters to act justly and fairly, but leaves their position intact. First Timothy 6:1-2 even envisages believing masters whom slaves are instructed to respect. We therefore cannot claim that baptism brought immediate emancipation everywhere or that the apostolic Church refused to receive slaveholders. On the other hand, 1 Timothy 1:9-11 counts kidnappers and traffickers in persons among those whose conduct contradicts sound teaching. The condemnation of kidnapping is plain. By itself, it is not a prohibition of every form of servitude recognized in ancient law. (Ephesians 6; Colossians 3; Colossians 4; 1 Timothy 6; 1 Timothy 1)

In 1 Corinthians 7:20-24, Paul urges people to live out their calling in their present condition and raises the possibility of becoming free. Verse 21 has been translated in different ways, so an argument for abolition cannot rest entirely on that phrase. The following warning against becoming slaves of human beings nevertheless relativizes every human claim to permanent possession of a person redeemed by Christ. The coexistence of these texts with instructions to obey masters helps explain both how Christians could criticize slavery and how other Christians could maintain it. Equality in Christ supplies a principle; it is not the story of how that principle was put into practice. (1 Corinthians 7; NRSVUE rendering of verse 21)

The Fathers reveal a radical insight and a long inconsistency

Gregory of Nyssa’s fourth homily on Ecclesiastes, preached in the fourth century on the purchase of servants, is among the most radical surviving Christian critiques of human ownership from antiquity. His question is both simple and devastating: what price could be put on the image of God? God gave human beings authority over animals, not over other human beings of the same nature. Money and a contract cannot create an ontological superiority in the purchaser over the purchased. Gregory therefore attacks more than a cruel master’s behavior. He attacks the very claim to own another person. This does not make him, without qualification, the “first abolitionist” in the modern sense. His sermon is neither a proposal for imperial legislation nor an account of general emancipation. Its theological criticism remains unusually forceful. (Gregory of Nyssa, Homily IV on Ecclesiastes; Chris L. de Wet on the Cappadocian Fathers; Clifton Huffmaster on Gregory’s sermon)

John Chrysostom shows how far this insight could remain from completion. In a homily on First Corinthians, he argues that slavery did not belong to the original creation and associates it with sin. He criticizes the luxury of a household that collects servants and recommends teaching them a trade before freeing them. Yet he still accepts that a Christian might have one or two servants. In his commentary on Philemon, he insists on Onesimus’s brotherhood but can still imagine his return as a faithful slave. His reading of 1 Corinthians 7 can even favor inward freedom while leaving an enslaved person in that condition when emancipation is possible. We should read Chrysostom as a whole: neither caricature him as indifferent to domination nor turn his strongest statements into an abolitionism he did not carry through. (Chrysostom, Homily 40 on First Corinthians; Homily 2 on Philemon; Homily 19 on First Corinthians)

Basil of Caesarea rejects the notion of a slave “by nature” and recalls the roles of war and poverty in enslavement. His reflection does not become a general condemnation of the institution. His letters even record transfers of enslaved people within his family’s circle. Gregory of Nazianzus, another Cappadocian Father, provides for manumissions in his will but also leaves people in the Church’s service. Acknowledging such contradictions does not make the saints unworthy of reading. It removes the comforting fiction that Christian history spontaneously drew every consequence from its teaching about the image of God. (Basil, On the Holy Spirit 20.51; Basil, Letter 37; de Wet’s historical study)

The Byzantine Empire confirms how slowly the insight spread. Laws limited some abuses and opened more paths to manumission. The Church took part in ransoming captives and freeing slaves. None of this amounted to abolition. Enslaved people continued to work in homes, workshops, and other settings, and ecclesiastical institutions owned some of them. Historian Noel Lenski concludes that Christian claims that slavery offended the natural or divine order did not produce a general call for its abolition in Byzantine history. We cannot truthfully write that “the Church abolished slavery.” (Noel Lenski, The Cambridge World History of Slavery; Youval Rotman on Byzantine slavery)

The image of God is enough to judge ownership of a person

What, then, can an Orthodox Christian say in answer to the original question? I do not know why God did not give, in the Law or the Gospels, a universal legal formula expressly prohibiting all ownership of human beings. To claim that God had to wait for a more mature age, deliberately chose a slow strategy, or foresaw some particular disaster from immediate abolition would be to claim knowledge of his reasons without a text that establishes them. We can offer a theological reading of the history of revelation, but must identify it as an interpretation. It does not erase Leviticus 25:44-46 or the letters addressed to Christian masters. (Leviticus 25; Ephesians 6; For the Life of the World, §65)

One possible approach lies in the way Christ reads the Law. Asked about divorce permitted by Moses, he says that the permission was given because of the hardness of human hearts and directs his hearers back to the Creator’s purpose “from the beginning” (Matthew 19:3-8). Paul likewise describes the Law as a stage in the history of salvation oriented toward Christ (Galatians 3:19-25). These passages are not about slavery. By analogy, however, they caution us against treating everything an ancient law permits as God’s final will for human relationships. A permission within a society marked by sin may restrain some abuses without becoming the ideal to which a disciple of Christ must return. This helps explain how one can receive Scripture without defending a right to buy a foreigner today. The analogy does not make the difficulty disappear: in Leviticus 25, permission to own foreigners is explicit, and it was later used to justify slavery. It would be far too easy to call this mere divine silence. (Matthew 19; Galatians 3; Leviticus 25; Watts, 2021)

Orthodox tradition can speak with greater confidence about the human person. Made in God’s image, each person is called to free and conscious communion with him. A market transaction, a debt, or a military victory cannot turn a person into a thing. A difference in social rank cannot erase either the common nature defended by Gregory of Nyssa or the brotherhood Paul asks Philemon to recognize. If I claim to love God while appropriating the life of someone who bears his image, my conduct contradicts my profession. A Christian does not need an additional command framed as a legal prohibition to understand that owning a neighbor must end. This is a moral conclusion drawn from creation, the command to love, and life in Christ together. (Genesis 1; For the Life of the World, §§1, 6, 65; Gregory of Nyssa; Matthew 22; Philemon)

The Orthodox document For the Life of the World states this judgment plainly today: the idea that one human being can be the property of another is sinful. Its §65 also acknowledges that the early Church lacked the power or the social imagination needed to eliminate slavery and that Christian culture eventually accepted an evil it should have rejected. This is an important social text produced by a commission appointed by the Ecumenical Patriarch and blessed for publication by his Synod. It is not a dogmatic decree defined by every Orthodox Church. Part of its strength lies in the admission that professing human dignity does not guarantee that Christians will act faithfully to it. (For the Life of the World, §65; introduction to the document)

A letter from the Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church in America, written for the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, likewise acknowledges that Christians and churches supported slavery. It connects repentance and the transformation of the heart with actual social and economic change. That qualification matters: appealing to spiritual freedom while leaving another person under a master’s power would repeat the very inconsistency being confessed. Legal protection, emancipation, opposition to trafficking, and aid to victims do not replace conversion. They are among its concrete consequences. Contemporary Orthodox social teaching also supports civil guarantees of dignity and liberty and calls for resistance to present forms of enslavement. (Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church in America, pastoral letter; For the Life of the World, §§12, 65)

Conclusion

The most demanding Christian answer is not an attempt to win a case against the difficult texts. It is to read them without diminishing them, then allow the image of God, Christ’s words, and fellowship in Christ to judge the habits of believers as well. Ancient protections were partial; so was the Church’s historical response. Facing that truth makes repentance more serious and the condemnation of human ownership more firm.

If a Christian still demands the precise biblical sentence that forbids owning a person, that Christian should ask what one more sentence would accomplish after hearing the command to love one’s neighbor as oneself. The question is no longer only about what God did not say. It is also about what we refused to understand and the concrete freedoms we must defend today. (Matthew 22; For the Life of the World, §65)

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