Slavery in Egypt: Reisner Papyrus (19th cent. BCE), El Lahun Papyri, Brooklyn Papyrus, Berlin Papyri.

The documents are real and the basic claim about ubiquity is correct, with one factual refinement worth making precisely: the 'Reisner Papyri' (from G.A. Reisner's excavations at Naga ed-Der) are Middle Kingdom labor-roster/work-journal accounts tied largely to state corvee labor and construction gangs, not strictly slave-sale contracts; they are still relevant evidence of coerced labor administration, just a distinct category from the Brooklyn Papyrus (35.1446), a Middle Kingdom household slave list with a striking number of Northwest Semitic names — direct evidence that Canaanite-region persons, plausibly kin to Israel's own ancestral stock, were being held as chattel in Egyptian households. The El-Lahun/Kahun and Berlin papyri add further administrative and legal texts referencing bonded servants. None of this is disputed. What does not follow is the inference from 'both cultures had slavery' to 'therefore the biblical law is morally unremarkable.' That is a genetic fallacy: it assesses the law by its cultural origin rather than its actual legal content, and the content is where the comparison has to be made. Gregory Chirichigno's full comparative study (Debt-Slavery in Israel and the Ancient Near East) documents that Israelite law imposes restrictions absent from every known contemporary Egyptian or Mesopotamian source: (1) a mandatory death penalty for kidnapping a person to sell into slavery (Ex 21:16) — directly criminalizing the supply mechanism that fed most ANE and, later, trans-Atlantic slave markets; (2) an explicit prohibition on returning an escaped slave to his master, with a command to let him live freely 'in the place he chooses' (Deut 23:15-16) — the exact reverse of Hammurabi's Code §16, which imposes death on anyone harboring a fugitive slave; (3) a hard six-year cap on Israelite debt-servitude (Ex 21:2) reinforced by the Jubilee reset (Lev 25:39-43), against the open-ended hereditary bondage the Egyptian household lists themselves attest. The papyri cited in this row, read comparatively rather than merely additively, strengthen the case for Torah's relative distinctiveness rather than undermining it.