In part one of this series I laid out the two verses, Exodus 21:16 and Deuteronomy 23:15-16, that I think undercut the entire “the Bible endorses slavery” objection before it even gets started. If you haven’t read that one yet, go read it first, because everything here builds on it.
Now I want to get into the actual substance of the objection. When someone says the Bible endorses slavery, what they usually mean, whether they realize it or not, is that the Bible endorses something like new world chattel slavery. That is a very specific institution, and it is worth defining clearly before comparing it to anything in the Torah.
What Chattel Slavery Actually Was
New world chattel slavery had a few defining features. It was hereditary, your children inherited your status. It was race based, an entire legal and social system built around treating one group of people as permanently subhuman based on ancestry. It reduced a person to property with essentially no legal personhood, meaning an owner could not be meaningfully punished for killing, maiming, or raping a person they owned. And it had no legal exit at all, no built in release date, no legal path to freedom the system itself provided.
What the Torah Actually Regulated
Compare that to what you find in Exodus and Leviticus:
Hebrew debt servants had a hard cap of six years, after which they went free (Exodus 21:2), and the Jubilee year provided a broader reset (Leviticus 25:39-43).
A master who permanently injured a servant, say knocking out an eye or a tooth, had to set them free immediately (Exodus 21:26-27). There is no parallel to this anywhere else in the ancient Near East. Under Hammurabi’s Code, killing someone else’s slave carried a fine, and killing your own slave carried no penalty at all. The law of Moses required the death penalty for killing any person, slave or free (Exodus 21:12, 20).
Servants rested on the Sabbath right alongside free citizens (Exodus 20:10, Deuteronomy 5:14), something Nahum Sarna and other Jewish commentators point out has no real precedent in the surrounding cultures.
Servants were included in Israel’s festivals as members of the community rather than excluded outsiders (Deuteronomy 12:12, 16:11, 14).
None of that describes chattel property. It describes a labor and debt system with real, enforceable limits on what a master could do, and a built in expiration date for most participants.
The Honest Part, Foreign Servants Had a Different Deal
I want to be straight with you here because I think a lot of apologists gloss over this and it ends up hurting our credibility more than it helps. The release guarantees I just listed, the six year release and the Jubilee, were tied specifically to Hebrew servants. Leviticus 25:44-46 draws an explicit line. Israelites get the guaranteed release, servants bought “from the nations around you” do not automatically get it, and Deuteronomy 15:3 limits automatic debt cancellation to “your brother.”
An honest critic can point that out and be right to. Critics like Thom Stark and Jeffrey Stackert have argued this two tier structure is exactly the kind of thing colonial slaveholders later pointed to when constructing a permanent, race based caste system. That history is real and I don’t think we should minimize it.
So how do we make sense of the distinction. A few things matter here. First, the Jubilee is fundamentally a land inheritance mechanism, every fifty years ancestral tribal land reverts to the original family line (Leviticus 25:10, 23-28). A foreign resident with no tribal allotment in Israel’s twelve tribe system does not have ancestral land to return to, so there is no event for that particular release calendar to trigger. That is a structural gap tied to Israel’s covenant land system, not a statement about the inherent worth of foreigners.
Second, and this is the part that matters most, the universal protections still applied across the board regardless of where a servant came from. The anti-kidnapping law in Exodus 21:16 does not say “unless the victim is a foreigner.” The injury protections in Exodus 21:20-21 and 26-27 use the plain phrase “male or female slave” with no ethnic qualifier attached. The principle stated twice in the Torah, “there shall be one law for the native and the stranger who sojourns among you” (Exodus 12:49, Leviticus 24:22), and the Sabbath command itself names “the foreigner who lives with you” in the very same breath as the servants resting.
So foreign servants missed out on the guaranteed exit ramp Hebrews had, and that is worth saying plainly instead of hiding it. But they were not chattel with zero legal standing either. They kept the anti-kidnapping protection, the anti-abuse protection, and the weekly rest, and the text elsewhere flatly rules out the idea that foreigners mattered less to God: “love the stranger as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 19:33-34).
There is also an irony worth pointing out. Building the later race based system required inventing a category the text itself never uses. “The nations around you” was a geopolitical and religious category, the actual peoples Israel bordered and warred with, not a category of skin color. It also required overriding the very protections this section is built around, permitting kidnapping and unlimited corporal punishment. Later slaveholders did not extend this text’s logic. They had to strip it out to make room for their own system, which is exactly what we will see in a minute.
Remember You Were Slaves in Egypt
Running through this whole system is Israel’s own memory of slavery in Egypt, invoked again and again as the reason for treating servants decently. “Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God redeemed you, for this reason I am giving you this commandment” (Deuteronomy 15:15). The same “remember that you were a slave in Egypt” line shows up again tied to including servants in the festivals (Deuteronomy 16:12), and again grounding the Sabbath command itself (Deuteronomy 5:15). This is not a system that forgot what it feels like to be owned by someone else. It was built by people who had just come out of actual chattel bondage in Egypt and were repeatedly told to legislate against doing that to anyone else.
The New Testament Puts Slave Traders on Its Sin ListSkip ahead a few hundred years and you find the same moral instinct in the New Testament. 1 Timothy 1:9-10 lists people the law is made for, murderers, the sexually immoral, liars, perjurers, and right in the middle of that list, andrapodistais, “slave traders” or “men-stealers.” Paul places the people who capture and traffic human beings in the same moral category as murderers. A document that puts enslavers on its list of the wicked is not a document endorsing the slave trade.
Why Did Slaveholders Have to Edit the Bible?
Here is the part of this argument I find most persuasive, and it comes from actual American history rather than ancient text criticism. In 1807 missionaries produced what is now known as the Slave Bible for use with enslaved Africans in the British West Indies. It removed roughly 90 percent of the Old Testament and half of the New Testament, a fact NPR covered in detail when a surviving copy went on public display.
What did they cut? Exodus 21:16, the anti-kidnapping law. The entire Exodus liberation narrative. Deuteronomy 23:15-16, the fugitive sanctuary law. Galatians 3:28, “neither bond nor free.” Jeremiah 22:13, which condemns unpaid labor. What did they keep? Ephesians 6:5, “servants, be obedient to your masters.” Joseph’s enslavement story, framed as a model of accepting your lot in life rather than a story about God overturning injustice.
Sit with that for a second. If the unedited Bible actually endorsed the system these men were running, they would not have needed an editor. The fact that they had to physically cut out the passages that undermine chattel slavery, and keep only the ones that could be twisted to support it, is about as strong a piece of evidence as you can ask for that the actual text does not support what they built.In part three we will go through the five specific verses atheists cite most often, quote them exactly the way you will see them pasted into a comment section, and respond to each one directly.
Expositing Reality 