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by Charlie Wolcott

What is slavery? What does it look like? How does it operate? Why do people engage in it? Why do people despise it? I will explore that today.

Most of our images of slavery come from the Civil War and Colonial days. We tend to think of putting black men in chains, sailing them across the Atlantic, and forcing them into manual labor on plantations in the southern United States. The historical account of The Amistad, and the movie that was made to showcase it, dealt with the Spanish ship of the story’s namesake, which was transporting illegally acquired slaves when the slaves escaped and had a revolution. The ship ended up in New England, and an intense trial took place as to what to do with them. This is the image we often have of slavery.

This was a great blight in American history, a blight that was paid for with the lives of 650,000 American men. The US Civil War was the price we paid for slavery. Many textbooks say the issue was about states’ rights, but in reality, the very right the states were arguing over was slavery. Why? In one word: cotton. It wasn’t just the selling and trading slaves that was the issue; it was the demand for slaves that kept calling for more slaves to be brought in. What created the demand? Cotton. The South didn’t merely want slaves; they were slaves themselves to cotton. The product was in high demand in England and the North, and it was the only thing the plantations owners knew how to grow. Yet cotton was sucking away the land’s nutrients making the crops weaker and weaker each year, thus requiring more cotton, more fields, and more labor.

When President Lincoln freed the slaves, it left some devastating side effects. The slaves couldn’t go anywhere because all they knew how to do was to grow cotton. The plantation owners now had to pay their former slaves wages to grow the only crop they knew how to grow: cotton. They had no other ideas, until George Washington Carver entered the scene and introduced the peanut, which wasn’t even in the almanac as a potential crop. He not only showed the south the crop but created well over 300 recipes and products from the peanut plant to produce an industry that was not cotton. The South was finally freed from slavery to slaves and ultimately slavery to cotton. (For further details and a spiritual application to this history, see Eric Ludy’s sermon “The Power of the Peanut.”) Keep this image in your mind during this series as I will keep referring to the issue of slavery to things throughout this series.

But this kind of slavery, in which people were stolen from their lands to produce a labor force, has only been around for about 1000 years when the Ottoman Turks found the blacks of Africa “available” to use as slave labor. I don’t have the details to cover this heavily, but prior to the Ottoman Turks, there was not much widespread kidnapping and selling of slaves across the nations. Sure, it happened, but it was not whole nations involved. The only time whole nations were involved was during a conquest.

In ancient times, slavery was a major part of the economic system, but it wasn’t the evil system that we tend to picture. In those days, the slave owner actually took care of his slaves. He provided clothing, housing, food, and education and gave them rights. There were many slaves that were actually better off than their masters and more educated than their masters. Look at Joseph. Joseph was a victim of kidnapping and trafficking by his own brothers. Yet when under Potiphar, Joseph thrived and ultimately ran Potiphar’s house as a slave. There were many slaves who could earn their own money and eventually buy their own freedom, though this never happened with Joseph. Some slaves were actually better off as a slave under their master than they would have been under their own, so of their own free will, they chose to stay under their master.

There is one big difference between the slavery of the ancient world and the slave trades beyond these things. Slavery was just a station, and it was independent of race, people group, or culture. The Ottoman Turks were the first to see that the Africans were valuable and expendable. Then the Portuguese and Spanish did the same. But prior to that, slavery was merely a station in life. The servants we see serving nobility in Europe were slaves in this regard. They just called them “servants” rather than slaves. And this is part of why the King James and New King James versions us the word “servant” instead of “slave” for the Greek word doulos. When John MacArthur and his team went to update the New American Standard Bible, to get even more accuracy to the original text and to get the original author’s intent, this term was one of the key points they made for doing The Legacy Standard Bible. The language that Jesus used for many of His parables involves a master/slave relationship, and Paul used the master/slave stations to showcase the Christian life as well. I’ll hit those points later in this series.

Now the key question everyone wants to ask: We abolished the illegal slave trading that plagued the US and Europe about 150 years ago. Based on how Scripture tells us how to treat other people and other races, we realized that this kind of slavery is an abomination. Yet, what about the slavery during Israel and Greece and Rome in the 1st century? Was that evil? Did the Bible miss it in not explicitly condemning slavery? It is interesting how the economic system is never challenged. How to work within it is addressed, but the system itself is never questioned. The Bible explicitly calls out kidnapping for slavery purposes as an abomination. But it does not question the institution in which “indentured servants” and other kinds of slaves were a key part of the system. It does tell masters how to treat them, and it tells servants how to serve. It even allows for man in his sinful heart some leash, much like how Moses allowed for divorce when it never should have been an option.

What I will say is slavery never went away. We abolished the station, but we never got rid of slavery. It just no longer has chains and whips attached to it. I can argue that God allowed slavery to remain intact through Israel’s history to teach us a lesson that is still here today and few of us realize it. Over the next few weeks, I’ll examine the slavery of Israel in Egypt and then examine the slavery systems of today. They are far more common and severe and rampant than chained slavery ever was.

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