Slaves CANNOT consent. They are property. Your car does not consent to being driven.

The property language is real and should not be minimized: Leviticus 25:45-46 uses 'achuzah,' the same inheritance-property term used of land grants, and Exodus 21:21 treats a slave's economic value as legally relevant ('for the slave is his money'). Those texts are engaged directly and honestly in the companion record on Leviticus 25:44-46/Exodus 21:20-21 (id sex-slavery-003), where a real difficulty is conceded rather than explained away. But the specific claim in this row — that property-status entails a *total* absence of personhood, exactly like a car — commits a false analogy. A car is res: it has no will, no moral agency, no capacity for redress, and the law grants it none. The Torah's slave, by contrast, is simultaneously treated as an economic asset AND, in the very same law codes, as a rights-bearing person: included by name in Sabbath rest ('so that your male and female servant may rest as you do,' Deut 5:14, grounded explicitly in Israel's own slavery in Egypt, Deut 5:15; cf. Ex 20:10); incorporated into the covenant community by circumcision (Gen 17:12-13); protected by a capital-level standard against fatal beating (Ex 21:20); and granted immediate, unconditional manumission for any permanent injury, down to a lost tooth (Ex 21:26-27). None of that is coherent for a genuine 'thing.' The car analogy erases every disanalogy that is doing the moral work in the objection. The argument also trades on a false dichotomy: it assumes only two categories exist — fully autonomous free agent, or will-less object — with no third category. But bonded/indentured personhood, where labor and person are legally encumbered yet the person retains standing, protection, and (for Israelites) a mandatory horizon of release (Ex 21:2; Lev 25:39-43, Jubilee), is a real historical category distinct from both poles, and it is the category the text is actually working with, however imperfectly.

Human worth in Scripture is grounded in the imago Dei (Gen 1:27) — every human, free or slave, bears the image of God. That doctrine is precisely why the property category never fully swallows the person category in the text: it creates an internal theological pressure that produces the protections named above, and ultimately drives the canonical trajectory toward abolition traced in sex-slavery-003.