Slave Master, Boss, or Lord? Untangling One Final Troublesome Word.

Exploring What the Bible REALLY Says About Slavery

We have one final troublesome word to address before we dig into the richness of Exodus 21. That word is “master.”

In modern English, it’s impossible to use the word “master” without it sounding like slavery. If we read a passage in the Bible that speaks of a master and his workers, our instant thought is slavery — a slave master and his slaves. Making matters difficult for us, many translations use the word “master” all throughout the Law of the Bible.

As we discovered in the last chapter, all it takes is one poorly-translated word to alter the meaning of a passage. One word can turn an innocent passage into a slave passage.

The word often translated “master” is the word adon, אָדוֹן , often appearing as adonai, “my lord,” אֲדֹנָי . If you’ve studied Hebrew (or you’ve sat under the teaching of a pastor who has), you may have heard this word before, as Adonai is often used as a name for God in the Scriptures.

If we think of adonai primarily as “master,” the word will always sound terrible, given that slave masters are terrible. A slave master, in our minds, is a person who deprives his slaves of their rights and dignity, treating them as less than human, abusing them at will. There is no “good” version of such a person.

If that’s what we think of when we read adonai, we’ll despise the word.

Yet the Scriptures reveal something quite different.

Adon/adonai contains a wealth of meaning, just as ebed and qanah do. In its usage, it is most often a positive term — conveying endearment, trust, kindness, and protection.

In Genesis 15:2, after God promises to protect Abram and richly reward his obedience, Abram refers to God as “Oh Adonai Yahweh,” often rendered in English as “Oh Lord God.” Far from using the term derogatorily, Abram speaks the name Adonai in reverence and worship, esteeming God highly even as he appeals to God.

In Genesis 18:3 (the same passage where Abraham calls himself ebed), Abraham refers to his guest as adon, “My lord.” Abraham uses it as a term of honor and respect, conveying his high regard for his visitor.

In Genesis 24, Abraham sends his beloved servant to find a wife for his son, Isaac. This is no mere hired hand, but a servant Abraham regards so highly he entrusts the future of his family to him. This servant trusts God, praying and following the Lord’s guidance to discover Rebekah, a woman of incredible character who eagerly follows him back to Isaac. Throughout this chapter, this servant refers to Abraham as his adonai, the man he loves and joyfully serves. This is no hint of abuse or denial of rights, but rather mutual esteem and respect between them all.

In Deuteronomy 10:17, the term appears not once, but twice, emphasizing the extreme greatness of God:

"For the LORD your God is the God of gods and the Lord of lords [Adonai of adonim], the great, the mighty, and the awesome God who does not show partiality nor take a bribe” (Deuteronomy 10:17 NAS).

In the 500 years before Jesus appeared, the Jewish people took care to avoid saying the personal name of God, Yahweh. They regarded it as holy, and avoided speaking it so as to avoid the risk of blasphemy — using it wrong.

Therefore, when they read the Scriptures aloud, instead of pronouncing Yahweh, they said Adonai.

The Masoretic scribes continued this practice when they standardized the text of the Hebrew Scriptures. In the earliest Hebrew texts, Yahweh was written without vowels, appearing as YHWH. Over this, the scribes wrote in the vowels for Adonai, which appeared to the untrained reader as Yahovah, or Jehovah.

All of this establishes the situation clearly: in the Scriptures, adon is most often a positive term, one conveying high regard and esteem.

The few times that adon refers to a slave situation are the exception, contrasting sharply with the rule.

As with the other words we’ve examined, we must take care to translate adon in a manner that does not turn an innocent passage into a slave-seeming passage.

Yet here we encounter a new problem.

Ebed and qanah find plenty of English words to convey their meaning: servant or worker, gain or acquire. We can easily avoid words like “slave” and “buy” when the passages don’t mean to convey such things.

But “master” doesn’t have that luxury.

In English, we don’t find many alternatives to “master” that avoid the negative sense. A word like “boss” or “employer” could work, but they sound so modern that they stick out like a sore thumb against the ancient culture.

Perhaps the closest we can approach in modern English is the term “lord,” in the sense of British landed aristocracy. If you’ve ever seen Downton Abbey, you’ll find this played out before your eyes. Lord and Lady Grantham, a husband and wife pair who run a large estate, are the adonai. They hire many servants to work for them: butlers and cooks and maids and footmen.

Yet this situation is not one of slavery or oppression. Every servant is free to leave the estate whenever they wish. If they find better employment elsewhere, they are free to go. They can notify Lord Grantham that they are leaving, but if he doesn’t want them to go, he cannot forcefully keep them. Even if they disappeared in the middle of the night, telling no one, Lord Grantham can’t send the police after them. They are free to leave whenever they wish.

This situation is a far better representation of biblical Israel than what most people assume.

In both ancient Israel and the British aristocracy, there were wealthy individuals who hired others to work for them. These servants possessed their rights and dignities; they could not be treated as slaves. As such, calling the wealth individuals “masters” distorts the entire situation.

In the remainder of this book, we will highlight when adonai appears in the text. When we translate it, we’ll use the term “lord,” conveying that the wealthy individual is hiring workers, but these workers are free to leave whenever they wish.

We’ll reserve the term “master” for when the text is clearly referring to a slave master, or at the very least, someone the worker wants to get away from. Adon appears in Deuteronomy 23:15-16, describing this exact situation:

“You shall not give up to his master [adon] an ebed who has escaped from his master [adon] 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. (Deuteronomy 23:15-16 ESV).

In this verse, the adon acts cruelly, treating the ebed so poorly that the ebed wants to escape. In such a situation, the English word “master” applies, as it conveys in our minds what the text is expressing: a cruel, powerful person treating people so horribly they want to run away.

With these words and translations established, we’ll now dig into Exodus 21 — the world’s first emancipation declaration.