Recently I did a presentation on slavery in the Bible for my Reasonable Faith chapter, and I thought it would be a good idea to turn it into a three part series here. This is one of the most common objections to Christianity, and it gets used constantly to smear the Bible as a morally bankrupt book that endorsed one of history’s greatest evils.
When I was first reading through the Bible on my own and hit the slavery verses in Leviticus, I was genuinely disturbed. There were no good apologetics resources on the topic that I could find at the time. I’m sure I asked my dad about it and he gave me some kind of explanation, though I honestly don’t remember what he said anymore. For the most part, the nagging feeling that the Bible endorsed slavery just sat in the back of my mind for the next few years, uncomfortable and unresolved, until I ran into Frank Turek’s videos, which gave me some initial relief. It wasn’t until I read Paul Copan’s Is God a Moral Monster that I felt like I finally had good answers.
Around that same time I became an online apologist keyboard warrior, getting into long debates in comment sections and forums, probably wasting a lot of hours I should have spent doing something more productive. The one upside is that I heard just about every counter argument atheists throw out on this topic, more times than I can count.
In this series I want to walk through three broad topics. First, the two verses that I think completely take the wind out of the sails of the atheist argument on slavery. Second, a thorough look at the actual difference between what the Bible describes and the new world slavery most people picture the moment they hear the word. Third, a direct response to the most popular verses atheists cite to argue the Bible condones slavery. Let’s start with the two verses.
Exodus 21:16, the Death Penalty for Kidnapping
Exodus 21:16 (ESV): “Whoever steals a man and sells him, and anyone found in possession of him, shall be put to death.”
Exodus 21:16 says whoever kidnaps a person and sells them shall surely be put to death. Deuteronomy 24:7 repeats the same principle a few chapters later. Read that again. The law of Moses treats man stealing, the actual act of forcibly taking a free person and selling them into servitude, as a capital crime.Think about what that means for a second. The transatlantic slave trade, the thing most people are actually picturing when they hear “the Bible endorses slavery,” ran almost entirely on kidnapping. Raiding parties captured free men and women in West Africa and sold them into a system with no legal exit. That exact practice, the literal starting point of new world slavery, is the one thing the Mosaic law singles out for execution.I want to be careful here and not overstate the case. This verse does not mean there was zero servitude in ancient Israel. It means the entry point most people assume the Bible is fine with is the one entry point it explicitly forbids on pain of death.
Deuteronomy 23:15-16, No Extradition for Runaways
Deuteronomy 23:15–16: “You shall not give up to his master a slave who has escaped from his master to you. He shall dwell with you, in your midst, in the place that he shall choose within one of your towns, wherever it suits him. You shall not wrong him.”
The second verse is Deuteronomy 23:15-16, the fugitive sanctuary law. It says a slave who escapes in Israel shall not be handed back to his master. He shall live among the Israelites wherever he chooses, and he must not be mistreated.
To see how radical this is you have to know what every surrounding culture in the ancient Near East actually did. Treaties from this era, going back to Hammurabi’s Code and earlier, routinely mandated the return of runaway slaves, and some threatened death for anyone caught harboring a fugitive. Extradition of escaped slaves back to their owners was standard practice across the region. Israel’s law is the one documented exception.
Scholars such as Christopher J. H. Wright and Matthew Poole argue that Deuteronomy 23:15–16 applies broadly to all “slaves” who escape their masters, rather than distinguishing between Israelites and non-Israelites. The law itself gives no ethnic restriction: Israel was forbidden to surrender the fugitive, required to allow him to live wherever he chose within the land, and prohibited oppression. This reading coheres with the passage’s concern for the vulnerable and with the wider biblical condemnation of the powerful exploiting the weak; even J. G. McConville observes that the language of oppression in the passage commonly describes Israelites oppressing fellow Israelites. The command therefore protected both foreign and Israelite fugitives and placed meaningful pressure on Israel’s servitude practices to be just rather than rather than coercive.
Why These Two Verses Change the Whole Conversation
Put these two laws together and you get something atheists rarely account for. The entry point into servitude by force is a capital crime, and the exit through escape is legally protected. You cannot build a chattel slave system, the kind based on kidnapping and permanent forced bondage with no legal recourse, on top of a legal code that criminalizes the kidnapping and refuses to return the escapee.
This does not answer every hard verse. It does not by itself explain all the challenging passages we will get into later in this series. What it does is set the frame everything else has to be read inside of. Whatever kind of servitude the rest of the Torah is regulating, it cannot be the transatlantic, race based, permanent chattel system most people picture, because that system depends on exactly the two things these verses forbid.
In part two we will dig into what biblical servitude actually looked like, how different it was from new world slavery, and why conflating the two is the central mistake behind this whole objection. In part three we will go verse by verse through the five passages atheists cite most often against the Bible.
Expositing Reality 