Leviticus 25:44-46 permits Israelites to own foreign slaves as permanent, inheritable property; Ephesians 6:5 and 1 Peter 2:18-19 command slaves to obey masters (including harsh ones); Exodus 21:20-21 limits liability for beating a slave only if the slave dies within a day or two ('for the slave is his money'); and the moral exemplar Abraham owned slaves.

Honesty requires a real concession here, one shared more fully in this project's dedicated Sex and Slavery sheet: Exodus 21:20-21's 'for the slave is his money' clause, and the differential legal valuation it implies between a slave's life and a free person's, is a genuine moral difficulty that most serious Christian ethicists (Paul Copan, Christopher J. H. Wright) acknowledge falls short of full modern standards — the text regulates and mitigates an entrenched ANE institution rather than presenting an unqualified moral ideal. That conceded, several points matter for an accurate picture. Israelite debt-servitude among fellow Hebrews (Ex 21:2-11, Deut 15:12-18) was categorically different from chattel slavery: capped at six years, with mandatory manumission and a severance payment — and escaped foreign slaves were to be granted protection and asylum, not returned to their masters (Deut 23:15-16), nearly unique among ANE law codes, which typically mandated return and execution of escapees. Exodus 21:26-27 mandates that a slave be freed outright for the loss of an eye or a tooth from abuse — a bodily-integrity protection with no parallel in contemporaries like Hammurabi's Code. In the New Testament, the household codes (Eph 6:5-9, Col 3:22-4:1) address masters symmetrically — 'do the same to them... stop threatening... you also have a Master in heaven, and there is no favoritism with him' — subversive within the genre of Greco-Roman household codes, which normally addressed only the subordinate party. Most concretely, Paul's letter to Philemon is the New Testament's actual case study: Paul sends the runaway slave Onesimus back not demanding his legal rights be enforced but urging Philemon to receive him 'no longer as a slave but... a beloved brother' (Philemon 16) — a real, personal push toward abolition of the master-slave relationship within a specific case. Abraham's slaveholding, like other patriarchal customs in Genesis, is narrated as historical fact, not commanded or morally endorsed by the text.

The theological seed-principle 'there is neither slave nor free... all one in Christ Jesus' (Gal 3:28), combined with the consistent imago Dei anthropology (Gen 1:27) applied without exception to every human being, supplied the actual theological engine of the historical abolitionist movement — Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect in Britain, and in America figures like the Grimké sisters and Frederick Douglass, who explicitly appealed to biblical equality against slaveholder religion. Christianity contains internal resources for genuine moral development on this question that many purely secular philosophical systems of the same era lacked.