Current Issues: Slavery and the Bible

<p>For additional notes and resources check out Douglas’ <a href="https://www.douglasjacoby.com/slaverymp3/"><strong>website</strong></a>.</p><p><strong>Introduction</strong></p><ul><li>North American slavery had precedents in the Arab slave trade, though slavery throughout human history was hardly limited to Africa.<ul><li>400 years' duration, 4 million dying in the middle passage.</li><li>"Enslavement is almost ubiquitous in human history. What made Atlantic slavery unique was its vast, industrial scale, its racial determinism, and its absolute nature, in which slaves' legal status was hardly distinct from that of animals" (Alex Ryrie, <i>Protestants: The Faith that Made the Modern World </i>[New York: Viking, 2016], 184).</li></ul></li><li>American Civil War.</li><li>Racism still an ugly issue in the United States.<ul><li>"Slavery was abolished in Great Britain in 1807 and in all the British Empire by 1833. In the revolutionary U.S. it would not happen until the 1860's, and at a cost of at least 618,000 lives and the destruction of much of the South. Staggering. Can we really argue for 'American Exceptionalism?'" (Tom Jones)</li><li>The Jim Crow laws persisted in the United States through 1968, in effect impeding the rights of citizenship for Black Americans, even after the Civil Rights Act and the legal right to vote.</li></ul></li><li>And slavery still exists globally (girls are abducted to become sex slaves [Asia], and boys to become child soldiers [Africa]).</li><li>Does the Bible support slavery, a thoroughly demeaning, dehumanizing institution? Slavers quoted the Scriptures to support their inhumane practices. Yet American chattel slavery was <i>very </i>different from slavery in the ancient world. As we shall soon see, Antebellum slavery provides a false analogy.</li></ul><p><strong>Slavery in the Ancient World</strong></p><ul><li>Became slaves because of poverty or war, often by personal choice. Usually they were not kidnapped; they entered servitude in other ways.</li><li>Not permanent.<ul><li>Hope of