Slavery was acceptable, and even compelled by God.

Honesty requires conceding real difficulty here, particularly with Leviticus 25:44-46's permission of permanent, inheritable ownership of non-Israelite slaves — this text is harder to soften than the Hebrew debt-servitude provisions and should not be minimized or explained away with false confidence. That said, careful distinctions matter. The Bible actually describes (at least) two different institutions under 'slavery,' and conflating them distorts the picture. The dominant OT institution is Hebrew debt-servitude: a time-limited (six-year maximum, Exod 21:2), essentially voluntary arrangement functioning as a welfare mechanism in a subsistence economy without banking, bankruptcy law, or unemployment insurance — a person facing destitution sold their labor rather than starving, with mandated release, and further protections including capital punishment for an owner who kills a slave (Exod 21:20) and automatic manumission if an owner permanently injures a slave (Exod 21:26-27), provisions with no parallel in contemporary ANE law (Hammurabi, the Nuzi and Mari texts) — a genuine comparative-historical point (John Walton; James Hoffmeier). Separately, and this is the harder text, Leviticus 25:44-46 permits acquiring and inheriting foreign slaves in ways closer to chattel practice — a real and serious moral difficulty that should not be minimized by false analogies to modern employment. Applying the redemptive-movement hermeneutic (William Webb) to the whole picture: OT law simultaneously regulates and restrains a near-universal ANE institution while planting provisions that point beyond it — Exodus 21:16 imposes the death penalty for kidnapping and selling a person (directly criminalizing the exact model later used in the transatlantic slave trade), and Deuteronomy 23:15-16 forbids returning an escaped slave to their master, a startling protection with no ANE parallel. This trajectory continues into and culminates in the New Testament: Paul's letter to Philemon appeals for Onesimus, a runaway slave, to be received 'no longer as a slave but... a beloved brother' (Phlm 16), and Galatians 3:28 declares that in Christ there is 'neither slave nor free... one in Christ Jesus' — the theological principle that actual abolitionists explicitly and directly drew upon.

History confirms the trajectory: the modern abolitionist movement was led overwhelmingly by devout Christians arguing directly from Scripture — William Wilberforce, the Clapham Sect, and the Quakers foremost among them. Historian Tom Holland's *Dominion* documents that abolition was a historically contingent achievement of specifically Christian moral logic (the imago Dei, Gal 3:28), not a universal human default arrived at independently by secular reason — most civilizations across history practiced slavery without generating an internal abolitionist critique at all.