Genesis 9:25-27 has Noah — explicitly called a just and righteous man — pronouncing a divine curse condemning Canaan to be 'a servant of servants,' and the Torah then provides extensive regulations for Hebrew and foreign slavery without ever abolishing it. Against that, the 'love thy neighbor' command of Leviticus 19:18, quoted by Jesus in Mark 12:31 and Matthew 22:39, makes slavery ethically untenable. The Torah builds the institution; the prophetic and Jesus ethic undercuts it.
Proposed answers
People have answered this in several ways; GEBible presents them as equal peers.
Yes, God approves of slavery.
After the flood, the "just and righteous" Noah (Genesis 6:9, 7:1) got drunk, and lay around naked in his tent. When his son, Ham, saw his father in this condition, Noah cursed not Ham, but Ham's son, Canaan, and all of Canaan's descendants, saying, "A servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren." This is one of many Bible passages that have been used to justify slavery.
And he [Noah] said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren. And he said, Blessed be the LORD God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant. God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant. Genesis 9:25-27
25He said, “Canaan is cursed. He will be a servant of servants to his brothers.”26He said, “Blessed be Yahweh, the God of Shem. Let Canaan be his servant.27May God enlarge Japheth. Let him dwell in the tents of Shem. Let Canaan be his servant.”
What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement— a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.
How critical scholarship weighs this: Genuinely disputed among scholars
This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.
The entry sets Noah's curse of Canaan ("a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren," Gen 9:25-27) and the Torah's extensive slavery legislation against the love-of-neighbor command (Lev 19:18; Mark 12:31; Matt 22:39). The framing — does God approve of slavery? — is broad, but the textual data behind it are real: the Pentateuch institutionalizes slavery and never abolishes it, while the ethic Jesus singles out as the second-greatest commandment is taken to forbid it.
The strongest apologetic case draws a sharp distinction between ancient Israelite servitude and modern transatlantic chattel slavery. Paul Copan, in *Is God a Moral Monster?*, and John Walton, working from the ancient Near Eastern legal background, argue that Hebrew debt-servitude was closer to indentured labor: the six-year release of the Hebrew slave (Exod 21:2; Deut 15:12), the Jubilee restoration (Lev 25:10, 40-41), the Sabbath rest extended to slaves (Exod 20:10; Deut 5:14), the prohibition on extraditing a runaway slave (Deut 23:15-16), and the manumission penalty for an owner who maims a slave (Exod 21:26-27) are foregrounded as humane protections largely absent in surrounding codes such as Hammurabi. Christopher Wright develops a redemptive-trajectory version in *Old Testament Ethics for the People of God*: the law restrains and ameliorates an entrenched institution and seeds principles that later abolitionists rightly extended.
That steel-man has genuine textual support — but only for Hebrew debt-slaves. It collapses when applied to foreign chattel slaves, whom the same legislation treats categorically differently. Leviticus 25:44-46 is decisive: Israelites may buy *avadim* and *amahot* "of the heathen that are round about you," may bequeath them "for a possession" (Hebrew *achuzzah*, the term for inheritable property) to their children, and "they shall be your bondmen for ever" — explicitly permanent, heritable ownership, exempted from the Jubilee release that applies only to fellow Israelites. Exodus 21:20-21 permits an owner to beat a slave so long as the slave survives "a day or two," on the rationale "for he is his money" (Hebrew *kaspo*, "his silver/property") — the slave is reckoned as capital, with no penalty if death is not immediate. This is chattel slavery by any working definition. Catherine Hezser's *Jewish Slavery in Antiquity* documents the property status of slaves across the Israelite and later Jewish legal traditions; Hector Avalos's *Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Ethics of Biblical Scholarship* shows that antebellum pro-slavery theologians cited these texts accurately rather than as misreadings; Jennifer Glancy's *Slavery in Early Christianity* extends the analysis into the New Testament, where slavery is regulated (Eph 6:5; Col 3:22; 1 Pet 2:18) but never condemned. The New Testament's own engagement underscores the gap: Jesus' love command never names slavery as a violation, his parables freely use slaves and beatings as illustrations without critique (e.g., Luke 12:47-48), and Paul's letter to Philemon returns the runaway Onesimus to his master rather than declaring him free.
A further interpretive point sharpens the picture rather than dissolving it. The "neighbor" (*rea'*) of Leviticus 19:18 is, in the original Holiness-Code context, primarily the fellow Israelite or community member — the parallel cola speak of "the children of thy people." The verse as written did not announce universal abolition, and ancient readers did not take it to forbid slaveholding; the broadening of *rea'* to all humanity (and the abolitionist entailment drawn from it) is a later extension, dramatized in Jesus' redefinition of "neighbor" in the Good Samaritan parable (Luke 10:29-37). So the contradiction is not that Leviticus 19:18 in its plain original force outlaws slavery — it does not — but that the broadened neighbor-love ethic the canon ultimately elevates is logically incompatible with the heritable foreign-slave ownership the same canon sanctions, and no biblical text ever retracts the latter in light of the former.
The ANE-amelioration argument is therefore real for one class of slaves and irrelevant to the other. The Torah does more than tolerate slavery; it confers divine sanction on permanent, heritable ownership of foreigners and treats slaves as injurable property. The harmonization works only by selecting which verses are allowed to express "God's position": foregrounding the Hebrew-slave protections and the love command while bracketing Leviticus 25:44-46 and Exodus 21:20-21.
Where the critical reading lands: genuine moral-legal contradiction — the Torah sanctions heritable chattel slavery of foreigners, which the broadened neighbor-love ethic should forbid; the indentured-servitude harmonization holds only for Hebrew debt-slaves and leaves the foreign-slave laws untouched.
Sources for this reading
Paul Copan, Is God a Moral Monster? Making Sense of the Old Testament God (Baker, 2011) pp. 124-156on biblical servitude vs. chattel slavery
Hector Avalos, Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Ethics of Biblical Scholarship (Sheffield Phoenix, 2011) pp. 1-40on Lev 25:44-46 and pro-slavery exegesisLeviticus 25:44-46
Jennifer A. Glancy, Slavery in Early Christianity (Oxford University Press, 2002) pp. 9-38
Catherine Hezser, Jewish Slavery in Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 2005) pp. 55-90on slaves as property
Christopher J. H. Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God (IVP, 2004) pp. 333-337on the slavery legislation
Examining the tension
What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.
How critical scholarship weighs this: Genuinely disputed among scholars
This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.
The entry sets Noah's curse of Canaan ("a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren," Gen 9:25-27) and the Torah's extensive slavery legislation against the love-of-neighbor command (Lev 19:18; Mark 12:31; Matt 22:39). The framing — does God approve of slavery? — is broad, but the textual data behind it are real: the Pentateuch institutionalizes slavery and never abolishes it, while the ethic Jesus singles out as the second-greatest commandment is taken to forbid it.
The strongest apologetic case draws a sharp distinction between ancient Israelite servitude and modern transatlantic chattel slavery. Paul Copan, in *Is God a Moral Monster?*, and John Walton, working from the ancient Near Eastern legal background, argue that Hebrew debt-servitude was closer to indentured labor: the six-year release of the Hebrew slave (Exod 21:2; Deut 15:12), the Jubilee restoration (Lev 25:10, 40-41), the Sabbath rest extended to slaves (Exod 20:10; Deut 5:14), the prohibition on extraditing a runaway slave (Deut 23:15-16), and the manumission penalty for an owner who maims a slave (Exod 21:26-27) are foregrounded as humane protections largely absent in surrounding codes such as Hammurabi. Christopher Wright develops a redemptive-trajectory version in *Old Testament Ethics for the People of God*: the law restrains and ameliorates an entrenched institution and seeds principles that later abolitionists rightly extended.
That steel-man has genuine textual support — but only for Hebrew debt-slaves. It collapses when applied to foreign chattel slaves, whom the same legislation treats categorically differently. Leviticus 25:44-46 is decisive: Israelites may buy *avadim* and *amahot* "of the heathen that are round about you," may bequeath them "for a possession" (Hebrew *achuzzah*, the term for inheritable property) to their children, and "they shall be your bondmen for ever" — explicitly permanent, heritable ownership, exempted from the Jubilee release that applies only to fellow Israelites. Exodus 21:20-21 permits an owner to beat a slave so long as the slave survives "a day or two," on the rationale "for he is his money" (Hebrew *kaspo*, "his silver/property") — the slave is reckoned as capital, with no penalty if death is not immediate. This is chattel slavery by any working definition. Catherine Hezser's *Jewish Slavery in Antiquity* documents the property status of slaves across the Israelite and later Jewish legal traditions; Hector Avalos's *Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Ethics of Biblical Scholarship* shows that antebellum pro-slavery theologians cited these texts accurately rather than as misreadings; Jennifer Glancy's *Slavery in Early Christianity* extends the analysis into the New Testament, where slavery is regulated (Eph 6:5; Col 3:22; 1 Pet 2:18) but never condemned. The New Testament's own engagement underscores the gap: Jesus' love command never names slavery as a violation, his parables freely use slaves and beatings as illustrations without critique (e.g., Luke 12:47-48), and Paul's letter to Philemon returns the runaway Onesimus to his master rather than declaring him free.
A further interpretive point sharpens the picture rather than dissolving it. The "neighbor" (*rea'*) of Leviticus 19:18 is, in the original Holiness-Code context, primarily the fellow Israelite or community member — the parallel cola speak of "the children of thy people." The verse as written did not announce universal abolition, and ancient readers did not take it to forbid slaveholding; the broadening of *rea'* to all humanity (and the abolitionist entailment drawn from it) is a later extension, dramatized in Jesus' redefinition of "neighbor" in the Good Samaritan parable (Luke 10:29-37). So the contradiction is not that Leviticus 19:18 in its plain original force outlaws slavery — it does not — but that the broadened neighbor-love ethic the canon ultimately elevates is logically incompatible with the heritable foreign-slave ownership the same canon sanctions, and no biblical text ever retracts the latter in light of the former.
The ANE-amelioration argument is therefore real for one class of slaves and irrelevant to the other. The Torah does more than tolerate slavery; it confers divine sanction on permanent, heritable ownership of foreigners and treats slaves as injurable property. The harmonization works only by selecting which verses are allowed to express "God's position": foregrounding the Hebrew-slave protections and the love command while bracketing Leviticus 25:44-46 and Exodus 21:20-21.
Where the critical reading lands: genuine moral-legal contradiction — the Torah sanctions heritable chattel slavery of foreigners, which the broadened neighbor-love ethic should forbid; the indentured-servitude harmonization holds only for Hebrew debt-slaves and leaves the foreign-slave laws untouched.
Sources for this reading