Does the Bible endorse slavery? Leviticus 25:44–46

Few biblical texts provoke more outrage than Leviticus 25:44–46. Critics routinely present it as decisive proof that the Bible endorses slavery. Richard Dawkins, for example, famously describes the God of the Old Testament as “arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction,” citing laws like these as evidence of divine cruelty and moral primitivism. The implication is simple: the text says “slaves,” therefore the Bible approves of slavery, full stop.

That conclusion depends on a particular way of reading Scripture—a flat, literalist hermeneutic that treats every law as a timeless moral ideal and every English translation as self-explanatory. Ironically, this is the same method used by the most rigid biblical fundamentalists. It is also a method that collapses the moment the text is read with historical, linguistic, and cultural seriousness.

The Bible itself insists on complexity. It distinguishes between God’s ultimate moral will and laws given to regulate a fallen social order. Jesus explicitly says some commands were concessions to human hardness of heart, not expressions of divine ideal (Matthew 19:8). To read Israel’s law codes as though they were abstract moral philosophy is to misread their genre entirely.

Let us look carefully at the text.

Leviticus 25:44–46 reads:

“‘Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. [45] 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. [46] 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.

First, these texts are regulatory, not aspirational. This reshapes the way we view these laws. We are not the audience to which this verse was written. The audience was ancient Israel when slavery was the norm. Indeed, it had always been around - a common practice throughout the Near East and not unusual at all. Thats the context. Into that context the verse does not present slavery as something thats okay to be getting on with; it presents it as a practice that needs regulation. And it regulates slavery in far more humane ways than Israel its neighbours were used to. For example, Exodus 21:2–6 says that Hebrew slaves were to be freed after six years. How different is that to Israel’s neighbours whose slaves were in it for life? 

That reshaping becomes visible as soon as we stop reading English translations as if they were transparent. The Hebrew word ʿeved, usually translated “slave,” does not map neatly onto modern chattel slavery. It covers a range of social statuses: debt-servants, household dependents, bonded laborers, and, in some cases, coercive servitude. Flattening all of this into the modern category of race-based, lifelong chattel slavery — such as the type of slavery experiences in America’s antebellum South — is a category error.

When we compare what was expected of Israel compared to what happened in surrounding cultures (Assyria, Babylon, Egypt for instance) we see more clearly what Leviticus 25 was trying to do. The legal question being asked is what is to be done with non-Israelites living among Israel who fall into debt and poverty? In a world without income insurance or state-sponsored welfare that’s a compassionate consideration. A person who fell into poverty could bind themselves to a household as a servant, but only for a limited time—no more than six years. In the seventh year they had to be released (Exod 21:2), and in the Jubilee year (every fiftieth year), all debts were cancelled and families were restored to their ancestral land (Lev 25:10, 39–41), preventing permanent poverty.

Leviticus 25:44–46 addresses a related but distinct problem: what is to be done with non-Israelites living among Israel who fall into poverty but do not possess ancestral land. Where is their social safety net? The law specifies how such vulnerable people could attach themselves to Israelite households in the following ways.

1. It strictly limits who may be taken into long-term servitude: not fellow Israelites, who must never be reduced to permanent dependency, but only resident foreigners who have no land inheritance of their own. 

2. It explicitly rules out slave-raiding and kidnapping. The text speaks of acquiring servants from among resident foreigners (“from the nations around you” and “from the foreigners residing among you”), not from violent capture. This is reinforced by Exodus 21:16, which makes kidnapping a capital crime. 

3. The law preserves family integrity by allowing servants to be taken “together with their clans,” preventing the routine tearing apart of families. 

4. It states that such persons become “your property.” This is not license brutality. It functions to place them under Israel’s covenantal legal system rather than outside it; they are subject to the same moral constraints that forbid ruthless rule over Israelites (Lev 25:43). 

5. The passage allows these service arrangements to be inherited within a household, ensuring economic stability rather than repeatedly forcing families back into destitution.

6. Finally, the entire regulation is framed by Israel’s memory of being slaves themselves in Egypt. Rather than celebrating slavery, it frames this unavoidable ancient labor system by embedding it within a moral narrative shaped by liberation, dignity, and restraint. 

So Leviticus 25:44–46 is there to regulate how an unavoidable ancient labor system functions within Israel’s covenant economy. It is there to protect foreigners without a welfare system to fall back on. Scholars across Jewish and Christian traditions—people like Christopher Wright, John Goldingay, and Jacob Milgrom—have long emphasized that these laws are best understood as moral damage control in a brutal world, not divine blueprints for the ideal society. Importantly, they regulate inheritance status, labor obligations, and legal responsibility; they do not assign moral worth.

The irony is that the skeptical, literalist reading often mirrors the very fundamentalism it claims to reject. It assumes that unless a text meets modern moral expectations in explicit terms, it must be immoral. But Scripture does not claim to be a timeless ethics manual dropped from the sky. It claims to be a long, unfolding moral story—one that begins in accommodation and moves, slowly and often painfully, toward liberation.

Leviticus 25 does not teach that slavery is good. It teaches that even in an unjust system, injustice must be restrained, humanized, and remembered as incompatible with God’s ultimate purposes. To miss that is not to take the Bible seriously—it is to read it carelessly. And Scripture itself deserves better than that.