Word Study: Slavery

B

WORD STUDY – SLAVERY – עבד

Leviticus 25:44: “‘Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves.”

I was listening to one of those talk shows where their guest was an atheist who was talking calls. Christians were calling in giving all the pat responses that this atheist has probably heard over and over and he had an answer for each one, sometimes really humiliating the poor Christians and making them sound like fools.

I fear I had to side with the atheist on many of these arguments. For instance some Christians tried to give history facts or statistics to prove the authenticity of the Bible. Heck we are not even sure Shakespeare wrote every play and poem ascribed to him. Nothing is certain in history. The bottom line for me is that I accept the Bible as the Word of God not by so called facts, statistics and testimonies of eyewitnesses, I accept the Bible as the Word of God because I chose to believe it and along those lines I am accepting the Bible, deity of Jesus, the cross and the resurrection purely by faith. I have a PhD in Archaeology for crying out loud, I know how historical facts can change with every new archaeological find. You cannot convince me with facts and figures. I could easily be an atheist myself but for the fact that I have chosen to live a life of faith. I figure if I am wrong and there is no life after death, I will never know it anyways. So I plan to just live my life according to the Bible and enjoy every subjective experience that God gives me believing it is from God.

So I listened to this atheist shoot down every one of the Christians arguments and I realized that most if not all his attacks taken from the Bible show a real lack of understanding of the culture, history and ancient language of the Bible. But worse the Christian’s response show just as much of a lack of understanding.

Leviticus 25:44 is one example of this. The atheist says: “So you say you are a Christian and believe the Bible and follow all its teachings, then you believe in slavery.” He then quotes Leviticus 25:44 from a modern translation which renders the Hebrew word ‘avad as slaves and the word amah as either bondswomen or female slave or maids.

Is it proper to assign the English word slave to ‘avad and amah? When we hear the English word slavery we think of owning a human being, making a human being just a form of property with no rights. No where do we find the Bible condoning such a thing. Pagan nations may have had such an understanding of slavery but for the Hebrews it was entirely different. They were more like indentured servants. An indentured servant is one who signs a contract where they agree to work for a number of years to pay for transportation to a new country or work off some other debt. In the case of Leviticus 25:44 the Hebrews were actually encouraged to buy slaves. But look at that word buy, it is the word tiqnu from the root word qanah which means to purchase, possess or redeem. I think it should be rendered redeemed in this passage.

If you read further in Leviticus you will find that there are a number of laws involving the humane treatment of these servants, so life was not at all bad being the servant of a Hebrew.
We need to also understand just how one ended up a slave in ancient times? The slavery of the 19th century in America were mainly Africans who were kidnapped, brought to the States in the most inhumane conditions and then sold as property where if they had an evil master went through many tortures.

In the Hebrew culture slaves fell into captivity in three different way. They were captured or the survivors of a war and were the losers and thus subjected to the rule of the victors. If the Hebrews were the victors they would use these captives to work their fields or doing other tasks for the primary purpose of keeping them from forming an army and attacking again. If the captors were smart like the Hebrews they would treat these captives quite well so they would not revolt. Even the slaves in Egypt were not like you see in these phony movies. They lived a fairly good life but did work very hard. Yet they were well fed, they were allowed to remain with their families and have some sort of home life. Even in American there were the occasional good masters who treated their slaves fairly and after the civil war the slaves returned to their former masters as employees with the freedom to leave when they wanted. Many really did not want to leave the service of their former masters and remained employed for the rest of their lives. In Biblical times you had bond servants. These were people who were slaves but were treated so well that when they were given their freedom they returned to their masters to live the rest of their lives doing what they always did. The only difference was that they were living as servants by their own choice.

Then you had those who were had debts and thus were put into service to pay back their debts, but the Hebrew law allowed them to be free again after seven years. During those seven years a family member could pay off the debt and the servant would be free.

Finally, you have the case of Leviticus 25:44 where the Hebrews could purchase slaves, but what they were really doing was buying a slaves freedom. In return they would be like an indentured servant where they would work off the cost of their redemption and/or be freed after seven years. During their time of servitude the Hebrew master followed some strict laws that guaranteed humane treatment.

We have a number of words here, servant, bond servant, bondsman, maids, and slaves. The modern English word slave does not fit the word for the Hebrews. Because our English word slave means the person is owned by another person. The Hebrews never owned a human being, what they owned was that servants debt or obligation that the person was supposed to pay off.

If we use the Hebrew word ‘avad that we attached the English word for slave, then practically everyone reading this study is a slave. We either owe money on a mortgage, car or credit cards. That makes us a slave to the banks or credit unions. However, like the Hebrews these bankers have many laws and regulations that keep them from abusing us so that we can live a fairly decent life in slavery.

So where is the lesson in all this? Why did God allow this in the Hebrew culture? Consider, we were once slaves to sin and Jesus purchased our redemption. But we don’t have to work off that payment, we are free automatically unless we, like the Apostle Paul, decide to become a bond servant of Jesus Christ. We serve not because we owe a debt but because we love our master who paid our debt.