Slavery: a regulated debt servitude moving toward abolition
Exodus 21:2-11 opens the Mosaic civil code regulating ʿeved — debt servitude, not Greco-Roman or Atlantic chattel slavery. The protections are striking when read against the surrounding ancient Near East. A Hebrew slave serves at most six years and goes out free in the seventh (Exodus 21:2). The Jubilee abolishes slavery every fiftieth year (Leviticus 25:39-43). Released slaves are sent away with provision (Deuteronomy 15:12-15). Kidnapping into slavery is a capital crime (Exodus 21:16) — directly contrary to the Atlantic slave trade. Fugitive slaves are not to be returned (Deuteronomy 23:15-16) — exactly opposite to the US Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.
William Webb's Slaves, Women, and Homosexuals calls this the redemptive-movement hermeneutic: the law moves significantly in a more humane direction than the surrounding ANE codes but does not yet reach the abolitionist endpoint. The trajectory of Scripture culminates in Galatians 3:28 — neither slave nor free — and is what produced the Wilberforce-and-Quaker abolitionist movement that ended slavery globally.
Ḥerem warfare: three complementary readings
The ḥerem command in Deuteronomy 7:1-6 and Deuteronomy 20:16-18 is geographically limited (the seven Canaanite peoples), morally framed as judgment for specific cultic depravity (Genesis 15:16 — the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete; Leviticus 18:21 — Canaanite child sacrifice), and time-bound to a single conquest era. Three serious Christian engagements complement each other.
- ANE rhetorical convention (Younger 1990, Walton & Walton 2017): total-destruction language was a literary convention across Egyptian, Hittite, and Assyrian conquest accounts, not a literal description. The actual conquest involved displacement, conversion (Rahab, the Gibeonites), and intermingling.
- Theological-trajectory (Christopher Wright, The God I Don't Understand): the Canaanite cult was the moral evil judged, and Israel was warned that the same iniquity in their land would bring the same judgment — historically fulfilled in the Babylonian exile.
- Strict scope and time-limit: the ḥerem command is not a charter for ongoing Christian violence. The New Testament unambiguously redirects the Christian to non-violence (Matthew 5:38-48, Romans 12:17-21).
Imprecatory psalms and the gospel as hermeneutical center
The imprecatory psalms — most famously Psalm 137:9 — are prayers of the oppressed handing vengeance over to God rather than calls to take it themselves. Psalm 137 is the cry of an exile whose own children have been killed by Babylonian invaders; it is anguish placed before God's justice, not a model for believers. Romans 12:19 — Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord — is the New Testament theological frame.
The Christian holds Scripture in trust and reads it through Christ (Luke 24:25-27). The fruit of these texts read through Christ has been the abolitionist movement, civil rights, and the most radical Christian movements of mercy in human history. The honest comparative position is also real: the Qurʼān has hard texts too (Q 9:5, Q 9:29, Q 4:24), but they function as legal commands within Sharīʿa rather than bounded historical narrative. Both traditions have hard texts; the question is which trajectory bends toward Christ.
Worked example
The moment
A Muslim friend says, Your Bible permits slavery and commands genocide. How can you call it the word of God?
What you might say
"You're right that those texts are in there. I don't want to dodge them. The slavery laws regulate debt servitude with a six-year limit, abolition every fifty years at Jubilee, the death penalty for kidnapping people into slavery, and a prohibition on returning fugitive slaves — and the Christians who read those texts through Christ are the ones who eventually abolished slavery globally. The conquest commands are bounded — seven peoples, one era, judgment for child sacrifice — and the New Testament explicitly redirects Christians to love enemies. I'll happily walk through Exodus 21 or Joshua 6 with you. Would you walk through Q 9:5 with me afterward?"
Why this works
The answer concedes the texts plainly, names the actual scholarship, points at the historical fruit, and invites a fair comparative conversation rather than a one-sided indictment.
Watch out for
- Pretending the hard texts aren't really there. Dawah speakers find them quickly; Christians who minimize lose credibility.
- Citing only Galatians 3:28 without the redemptive-movement framework. The trajectory matters as much as the destination.
- Reading Joshua as a charter for ongoing violence. The New Testament's redirect to non-violence is unambiguous.