To Buy or to Gain? Does the Bible Allow You to Buy People — or Hire Them?
Exploring What the Bible REALLY Says About Slavery
Throughout Exodus and the rest of the Law, many translations present passages like Exodus 21:2, “you may buy an ebed.”
This reveals another word often twisted in translation: qanah, קָנָה.
If you read “you may buy an ebed” in English, you assume the underlying Hebrew word means something like “to purchase someone as your property.” If a person is mere property, and can be bought and sold with no regard for their own rights and dignity, then that would be slavery, and that would be evil.
Thankfully, that’s not what the Hebrew word means.
The Hebrew word is qanah. If qanah resembled the English word “buy,” and carried a narrow meaning like “purchasing property to become its owner,” then we could see slavery working its way in. But qanah means far more broad than “buy.” Qanah refers to any kind of gain — building, creating, procuring, purchasing, owning, acquiring:
In Genesis 4, Eve uses qanah to refer to giving birth — she gained a son: “With the help of the Lord I have brought forth [qanah] a man” (Genesis 4:1, NIV).
In Genesis 14, Melchizedek uses qanah to describe God as Creator — He gained the universe by making it: “Blessed be Abram by God Most High, Creator [qanah] of Heaven and earth” (Genesis 14:19, NIV).
In the book of Ruth, Boaz “acquired [qanah] Ruth” to be his wife (Ruth 4:10 NIV). He didn’t pay money for her. Boaz is gaining her as a wife by marrying her — a situation that absolutely delights Ruth.
In Nehemiah 5, Nehemiah uses qanah when rescuing people out of slavery — they gained free brethren: “I said to them, ‘We according to our ability have redeemed [qanah] our Jewish brothers who were sold to the nations” (Nehemiah 5:8 NASB).
Again, we’re faced with the challenge of one word that can mean a multitude of things. If qanah is so expansive that it can refer to birthing a child, creating the universe, marrying a wife, and redeeming slaves into freedom, how should we understand it in Exodus 21?
How best to understand qanah
For a word with an expansive list of definitions, it only makes sense to us an expansive word to translate it: gain.
In modern English, “gain” far better reflects the meaning of qanah than “buy.”
Imagine applying for work at a large corporation. When they hire you, that corporation gains an employee. Qanah would fit perfectly well in describing the situation. They aren’t buying you; they are hiring you, and thereby gaining you as a worker.
You can quit whenever you want. They don’t own you. They have only gained you as a worker as long as you choose to work there.
Of course, qanah can refer to buying a slave. When Potiphar the Egyptian bought Joseph as a slave, he gained a slave. Qanah could be used to describe that situation.
Yet, because qanah has such a wide range of meaning, you could never look at the use of the word alone and conclude slavery. If all you knew was that one person qanah’d another, you’d have no way of knowing whether they hired someone, gave birth to someone, married someone, gained a new friend, drafted a soldier, recruited a new member, or bought a slave. Qanah can mean all of this and more. The word alone can’t tell you what’s happening.
But, if you were using English, and all you knew was that one person “bought” another, you’d have every reason to conclude slavery, from that word alone.
Given how stark the difference is between these words, we must be very cautious about using “buy” to translate qanah. Using it can bias the entire translation, making a passage that has nothing to do with slavery sound exactly like slavery.
How critical one word can be
Take Ruth and Boaz, from the example above. A few translations use the word “bought,” instead of “gained” or “acquired.” Imagine reading only Boaz’ words, with no sense of the wider story. (Which, incidentally, is what people do when they accuse the Bible of slavery: quote only a small portion of a passage, ignoring everything about where it came from).
If you heard a man say “I have bought Ruth,” it wouldn’t sound like a marriage of equals. It wouldn’t sound like marriage at all. It would sound like a rich man buying a slave girl to have his way with her.
Yet nothing could be further from the truth. In the story, Ruth is delighted by the situation. She is the one who proposed marriage to Boaz in the first place! There is no sense of her being purchased as a slave.
But what else would an uninformed reader conclude, hearing that Boaz “bought” her? One poorly translated word is enough to change the entire meaning of the passage.
This is the same problem we face in Exodus 21 and the rest of the Law. One poorly translated word is enough to make a passage sound like slavery, even when it has nothing to do with it.
Consider the Nehemiah example above, “I said to them, ‘We according to our ability have redeemed [qanah] our Jewish brothers who were sold to the nations” (Nehemiah 5:8 NASB). What if you translated qanah as “bought?” It would sound like slaves are staying in slavery and merely switching masters: “We have bought our Jewish brothers who were sold to the nations.”
The context is clear that these Jewish brothers are being redeemed out of slavery. They are becoming free. But if you translate qanah as “buy,” it makes the passage sound like they are staying enslaved.
One poorly translated word can change the entire meaning of a passage.
Therefore, we’ll do the same thing we do with ebed. In order to avoid the bias of a bad translation, we’ll indicate where qanah sits in the text. We’ll leave it untranslated at first, letting the context speak clearly, helping us see what the word was meant to say.