How God Outlaws Slavery in a Single Verse at the Start of the Old Testament Law
Exodus 21: God's Emancipation Proclamation
Chapter 3: God’s One-Sentence Abolition of Slavery
The question comes hard and fast: if God is a loving God, why does He allow slavery?
The answer is just as swift: He doesn’t.
When God writes Israel’s law code, He tackles slavery at the start. God outlaws slavery in a single verse:
Whoever steals a person and sells them, and anyone found in possession of them, shall be put to death. (Exodus 21:16)
God leaves no wiggle room. This is not merely a prohibition of an idea. God destroys slavery by eliminating everything it needs to exist.
Slavery requires three actions:
Kidnapping a person, stealing them away from their freedom so that you can do what you want with them.
Selling people for money.
Possessing people, putting them in a class beneath you where you own them and they are your property.
Without these three actions, slavery cannot exist. If you cannot kidnap people, then you cannot make people slaves. If you cannot sell people, you cannot make money from slavery. If you cannot possess people as property, then you cannot own slaves at all.
Without kidnapping, selling, and possessing people, slavery cannot exist. God abolishes all three in a single verse.
Under God’s law, anyone who kidnaps people to make them slaves is put to death.
Under God’s law, anyone who sells people for money is put to death.
Under God’s law, anyone who possesses people as property is put to death.
God abolishes slavery at the very beginning of Israel’s law. God considers slavery a capitol offense, the same as murder, because slavery is murder. Both end a person’s life.
Yet some push back. In one debate, an opponent said this:
You quote a verse which forbids kidnap[ping], and use it to pretend that it forbids slavery, and then most of your narrative after that relies on that one verse. Kidnap[ping] and slavery are NOT the same.1
If this is true, it would be devastating to the argument that God abolishes slavery. If Exodus 21:16 only refers to kidnapping but allows slavery, then it would prohibit a lesser abuse but allow a greater one.
Thankfully, Genesis clarifies Exodus. It provides a clear example to show us exactly what Exodus 21:16 refers to.
When Jacob treated Joseph better than his other eleven sons, the eleven grew jealous. When chance came, they threw Joseph in a pit and faked his death. Slave traders passed by. They sold Joseph into slavery for 20 shekels of silver (Genesis 37:1-36).
Years later, when Joseph reflected back on this, he said:
“I was indeed stolen out of the land of the Hebrews” (Genesis 40:15 ESV).
The word Joseph uses for “stolen” — ganab — is the same word used in Exodus 21:16. Joseph’s story is unambiguous: he was stolen away from his family and sold into slavery. This is the behavior God condemns.
This is the same word, ganab, that appears in Exodus 20:15, as part of the 10 Commandments: “You shall not steal.”
Many translations render this word “kidnap” in Exodus 21:16, simply because the act of stealing a person is often called kidnapping. But whatever you call it, the emphasis is the loss of freedom. ganah is the act of depriving a person of their freedom.
Kidnapping is how slavery begins. As long as person has their freedom, they cannot be a slave. To make someone a slave, they must be stolen away from their freedom, stolen from their family, stolen from their life. Only when a person has been kidnapped can they be sold as a slave.
If kidnapping cannot exist, then slavery cannot exist.
Joseph and his brothers lived several hundred years before God gave the law to Israel. If they had lived under Israelite law, Joseph’s brothers would have been guilty of breaking the law. They would be punished with the death penalty for the capitol crime of kidnapping their brother and selling him as a slave, to be someone else’s possession.
The grounding for this goes back to Genesis. In Genesis 1, God grants humanity dominion. He clarifies what exactly we may exercise dominion over: plant life, living animals.
What’s missing from that list?
Other humans.
Each human retains their innate dominion. While some may occupy offices of authority over others, that does not remove the innate dominion of the people they govern. Each individual still makes their own choices about whether to tell the truth or lie, obey the law or break it, love or hate, nurture life or take it.
Slavery removes this innate dominion — or at least, tries to squash it as much as possible. Slavery attempts to deny the slave any sense of dominion. They live or die at the whim of their master. They can be punished or killed at will; their life is not their own. Their desires and beliefs don’t matter, only the master’s. They may not determine the course of their life. Only the master may.
Let’s take one last minute to drive this home.
Exodus 21:16 states its truth in plain language, using about eight words in its original Hebrew. Many English translations use far more, taking a fair bit of liberty in how they render this verse. Yet God’s abolition is so forceful that it shrines through even the most cloudy translations.
The New Living Translation renders it this way:
Kidnappers must be put to death, whether they are caught in possession of their victims or have already sold them as slaves (Exodus 21:16 NLT)
Kidnapping is the gateway to slavery. As such, God gives kidnapping the same punishment as murder: being put to death. Whether you find the kidnapper still in possession of his victims, or whether he has already sold them into slavery, that person loses their life for stealing away the life of another.
The New American Standard Bible avoids using the word “slave,” yet still condemns all the actions necessary to make someone a slave:
Now one who kidnaps someone, whether he sells him or he is found in his possession, shall certainly be put to death (Exodus 21:16 NASB)
Kidnapping creates slaves. As soon as someone is kidnapped, they lose their liberty. The kidnappers possess their victim as property. Property has no rights of its own. It exists only to do what its owner demands. Likewise, kidnappers steal their victim’s rights, treating the victim as if they exist only to do the kidnapper’s will. Whether the kidnapper possesses the person as their personal property or sells them others, they have denigrated a person to the level of property.
Possessing that person as property merits the death penalty.
Selling that person as property to another merits the death penalty.
Kidnapping of any kind therefore merits the death penalty. As soon as a person is stolen, they are possessed by another, which merits death.
The Contemporary English Version adds plenty of words to its translation, yet carries the message home as clear as any:
Death is the punishment for kidnapping. If you sell the person you kidnapped, or if you are caught with that person, the penalty is death (Exodus 21:16 CEV).
We could continue quoting translations for pages, yet the end point is the same. God abolishes slavery by outlawing everything it needs to exists.
If no one can be stolen, then everyone retains their personal rights and liberty.
If no one can be treated as property, then everyone must be treated as a human.
If no one can be sold, then no one can be bought, and no slave trade could ever exist.
God abolished slavery permanently. He did it in one verse.
But He didn’t stop there.
Ian Savage, https://www.quora.com/Does-the-Bible-support-slavery-and-encourage-owners-to-beat-slaves/answer/Kyle-Davison-Bair
“ Without kidnapping, selling, and possessing people, slavery cannot exist.” This, along with your reply to an earlier comment of mine, is indicative of a definition of slavery not in line with common or even biblical use. For example, when Egypt enslaved the Israelites, did it kidnap them? No. They initially came and settled in Goshen. When they left, they left from Goshen. They were enslaved and stayed in the place where they were already living.
Likewise, one could say that the Nazis enslaved prisoners that they took and kept in concentration camps. But nobody was selling these people to the Nazis. Similarly, the Egyptian authority imposed slavery on the Israelites, but did not buy them from anyone. The absence of kidnapping and commercialization does not slavery unmake.
“ Under God’s law, anyone who sells people for money is put to death.
Under God’s law, anyone who possesses people as property is put to death.” The referenced verse refers only to the selling and possession of the aforementioned kidnapping victim, not about someone who wasn’t abducted. There’s also some disagreement on how to translate it, with the ESV, Brenton, and one translation from Syriac Aramaic seemingly suggesting that the penalty also applies to any new person who comes into possession of the kidnapping victim (and are the only English translations on BibleHub with such an implication), while most others say it is just about the original kidnapper and whether they sold off or still have their victim.