31
SLAVES AND FREEMEN Both thy bondmen, and thy bondmaids, which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids. Moreover of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land: and they shall be your possession. And ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them for a possession; they shall be your bondmen for ever: but over your brethren the children of Israel, ye shall not rule one over another with rigour (Lev. 25:44-46).
The text must be taken literally. First, Israelites could buy slaves from other nations. These people were already slaves according to the laws of their own nations. The Israelites did not make them slaves; they merely changed the slaves' residence: new boundaries. Second, the Israelites could buy slaves from among strangers residing in the land. But there was no authorization to buy slaves from other Israelites. This means that slaves in one Israelite family could not be sold to another family. The laws of inheritance forbade such sales (v. 46). They became part of a family's permanent inheritance.
There is no question about it: Mosaic law legalized inter-generational slavery. If Leviticus 25:44-46 is still binding, then the enslavement of those who not part of the covenant by those who are is legal in God's eyes. Enslaved converts who make a profession of faith after their enslavement, or the descendants of slaves, would still remain permanently bound. But no Bible commentator today wants to conclude such things, unlike almost all commentators, Jews and Christians, up to the 1750's. The exegetical question facing every Bible commentator is this: Has this law been explicitly annulled by the New Covenant? If not, then on what explicitly biblical ethical basis is it no longer binding?
The theocentric principle undergirding this law is simple to state, but difficult for modern man to accept: God is the cosmic slavemaster, the holy one who employs the cosmic whip. Modern man rebels against this thought, just as he rebels against the thought of an eternal lake of fire: no exit from God's cosmic torture chamber. Even Christians are squeamish about this. They prefer not to think about its implications. They also do not like to think about the fact that God's Mosaic law authorized slavery, but it did. In fact, the decline of Western man's faith in the reality of eternal damnation loosely paralleled the decline of his faith in the moral legitimacy of slavery.
Prior to the 1750's, virtually the whole world believed in the moral legitimacy of slavery. The ideal of abolition came quite late to Western Civilization, in the era of the Enlightenment.(1) Yet it was not Enlightenment rationalists who proposed the idea. It was only with the decision of a handful of members of the Society of Friends (Quakers) that the ideal of abolition as morally obligatory began to be spread by an identifiable organized group. This began at the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in 1758. The group agreed to cease doing business with members who bought or sold black slaves. In 1761, the London Yearly Meeting ruled that Quaker slave dealers should be disowned.(2) Professor Davis comments: "As late as the 1770s, when the Quaker initiative finally led to a rash of militant antislavery publications on both sides of the Atlantic, no realistic leader could seriously contemplate the abolition of New World slavery -- except, on the analogy with European slavery and serfdom, over a span of centuries. Yet in 1807, only thirty-four years after a delegation of British Quakers had failed to persuade the Lord of Trade to allow Virginia to levy a prohibitive tax on further slave imports, Britain outlawed the African slave trade. Twenty-six years later, Britain emancipated some 780,000 colonial slaves, paying 20 million pounds compensation to their supposed owners. Only ninety years separated the first, cautious moves of the Philadelphia Quakers from the emancipation edicts of France and Denmark (1848), which left Brazil, Cuba, Surinam, and the southern United States as the only important slaveholding societies in the New World. It was barely a century after the founding of the London Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1787), sixty-one years after the final abolition of slavery in New York State (1827), that Brazil freed the last black slaves in the New World. . . . From any historical perspective, this was a stupendous transformation. . . . From the distance of the late twentieth century, however, the progress of emancipation from the 1780s to the 1880s is one of the most extraordinary events in history."(3)
In Tools of Dominion, I devoted over one hundred pages to a discussion of the biblical theology of slavery.(4) It would be unwise for me to reproduce that chapter here. It was appropriate to include such a discussion in a book dealing with the case laws of Exodus because the case laws begin with a consideration of the purchase of a slave (Ex. 21:2-6). Slaves on their way out of a generation of servitude and into freedom would have been interested in a law governing slavery. I here reprint part of that chapter, but with modifications noted by the brackets.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * The Economics of Israelite Slavery(5) The jubilee land tenure law, when enforced, made it impossible for any family to amass permanently large land holdings. It is usually assumed by commentators that the jubilee land law was never enforced, but this is debatable. The sabbatical year of rest for the land was clearly not enforced, which was the reason God gave for sending Israel into captivity (Jer. 50:34; I Chron. 36:21).(6) The jubilee land law was tied to the sabbatical year: it was to follow the seventh sabbatical year (Lev. 25:8-9). Nevertheless, the repeated unwillingness of Israelites to sell their land to those outside the family, most notably Naboth's refusal to sell his land to King Ahab (I Ki. 21), indicates that the State must have enforced some sort of prohibition against the permanent sale of a family's land.(7) What may have taken place was the continuing refusal of greedy owners to rest their land one year in seven, but also the insistence of heirs that the jubilee year be honored, at least with respect to the redistribution of family land. Both decisions are consistent with the assumption of land hunger in a predominantly agricultural economy.
A family could lease a neighboring piece of property for up to half a century, but then it reverted to the original family. We know that large families are a sign of God's covenantal blessing (Ps. 127:3-5). The larger that Israel's families grew in response to the nation's covenantal faithfulness to God, the smaller each family's inherited land holding would become. This made it economically impossible for any branch of a family to amass a large number of heathen slaves during periods of God's covenantal blessings, for it was illegal to amass permanently the large tracts of land that were necessary for the support of slaves.(8)
Thus, at the beginning of each jubilee year, when all land holdings reverted to the heirs of the original land-owners, most heathen slaves would have been released by their owners, whether or not the law allowed them to retain ownership of them indefinitely. Heathen were allowed to buy homes in walled cities, where the jubilee land laws did not apply (Lev. 25:29-33). Those heathen who remained in slavery would have been parceled out among inheriting Israelite children when the heirs returned to their share of the family's traditional lands, thereby reducing the possibility of large-scale slave gang labor. It would also have increased the likelihood of manumission: freedom for slaves whose economic productivity, without large land holdings, would have dropped sharply. In other words, by reducing Israel's per capita capital (land), the jubilee land tenure law was designed to reduce agricultural labor productivity in Israel.(9) This was the whole idea: to encourage covenantal dominion outside the land by encouraging Israelite emigration.
This economic link between the size of land holdings and the economic feasibility of large-scale gang slavery is the simplest explanation for God's inclusion of the heathen slave laws within the section of Leviticus that presents the jubilee land tenure laws. One possible reason why the Bible offers no example of the nation's honoring of the jubilee land distribution laws is that politically influential owners of large slave gangs recognized that the economic value of their slave holdings would be reduced drastically if they had to return their land to the original families. Thus, any significant increase in the inter-generational slavery of heathens would have testified to a refusal by the judges to enforce the original jubilee land distribution agreement that had been agreed to by all the tribes prior to the conquest. A growing population of permanent foreign slaves would therefore have been a visible warning to Israel that they were disobeying God's law. This was the same visible warning that God had given to Egypt (Ex. 1:12, 20).
Slavery very clearly was not supposed to become a major institution in Israel. The larger the population grew -- a promised blessing of God -- the more valuable the land would become: increased demand. The more expensive the land became, the less would be the return from economic rents produced by an investment in slaves. Free laborers and tenant farmers would compete to work at low wages and low returns. By lowering the economic return from slaves, this law was designed to reduce the demand for slaves.
[There was a way around this limitation: some form of cooperative agriculture. If family members pooled their rural inheritances operationally, allowing a common administrator to employ slaves, larger plots could have been maintained. But the gangs of slaves that were common to the American South prior to 1865 were employed only on large plantations, which could not exist in Israel when the jubilee was enforced.]
Without cheap land, or increasingly productive land, permanent agricultural slavery is unlikely to be maintained long term.(10) Under circumstances of increasing land scarcity, the reasons for holding slaves would then be more consumption-oriented than production-oriented: slaves as status symbols, i.e., consumer goods rather than producer goods.
(Because chattel slavery remained profitable in the American South prior to 1860, there is no need to resort to the thesis of slaves as merely status symbols. They were status symbols, surely, but they were also profitable. Where, then, was the South's cheap land, if this economic thesis is correct? There is evidence that it was the continuing development of the fertile lands in the West South Central region of the South -- Alabama to east Texas -- that kept slave prices high throughout the South, since slave owners who owned less fertile lands could profitably export slaves to the region with more fertile lands.(11) But if cheap land is basic to profitable slavery, did the slave owners in the British West Indies suffer losses when land became scarce? The tentative answer is yes, since it was only when new land could be brought under cultivation that the Caribbean economies grew.(12) The Genoveses write: "So long as land remained available at prices unthinkably low by European standards -- so long as colonial settlers faced empty spaces or spaces that could be emptied by a controlled dose of genocide -- resources would be shifted, and the grim wastefulness of the system as a whole would remain disguised."(13))
What we must recognize is that the whole economic thrust of the jubilee land tenure laws, when coupled with God's promise of population growth for national obedience, was to push the Israelites out of the Promised Land, and therefore outside the geographical boundaries where the jubilee land law, including its slave laws, operated. The jubilee law's goal was world missions and covenantal dominion, not the permanent enslavement of heathens inside tiny Israel.(14)
Neither the Roman Republic nor the Roman Empire, as a pagan society already in spiritual bondage, came under the terms of the jubilee land tenure law. That law applied to Israel because of the specific terms of the military spoils system of land distribution that families had agreed to prior to Israel's invasion of Canaan (Num. 36). Rome developed the latifundia, the huge family land holdings that apparently supported the slave gang system. The Roman land tenure system may not actually have produced slave gangs, if land holdings were divided into smaller units within the latifundia. Scholars still debate the issue. In any case, a legal order that permits the long-term amassing of inheritable land, and does so through such restrictions on inheritance as primogeniture (eldest son inherits) and entail (prohibition against the permanent sale of a family's land), makes economically possible the creation of huge plantations.(15) Such permanent, inheritable land holdings, if accompanied by a legal order that permits lifetime slavery, can lead to the creation of slave gangs whenever market conditions make gang labor profitable. On the other hand, whenever the legal principle of "all sons inherit" or "all children inherit" is enforced, it becomes nearly impossible to create an agricultural economy that is based on the widespread family ownership of large gangs of slaves. Such was to have been the case in ancient Israel, for the eldest son was limited to an inheritance of only a double portion of his father's assets (Deut. 21:17). . . .
Slavery and Hell(16) The doctrine of perpetual slavery is nothing special when compared to the doctrine of eternal damnation. In fact, perpetual slavery is an institutional testimony to the reality of eternal damnation. It should direct the slave's attention to the fate of his eternal soul. (It should also direct the master's attention to the same issue.) Slavery was designed by God to be a means of evangelism in the Old Testament. The question can therefore legitimately be raised: Is it a means of evangelism in New Testament times? For instance, why did Paul send the runaway slave Onesimus back to his master Philemon (the Epistle to Philemon)? But anyone who dares raise this obvious question today faces the verbal wrath of Christian pietists and antinomians everywhere, not to mention secular humanists.
Slavery embarrasses Christians, yet earthly slavery can sometimes offer hope. Eternal slavery is hopelessness incarnate. Eternal slavery -- without productivity, without hope of escape, and with perpetual pain -- is a good description of hell. Is it any wonder that the doctrine of eternal damnation is de-emphasized in preaching today? Is it any wonder that God is spoken of mostly as a God of love, and seldom as the God of indescribable eternal wrath? D. L. Moody, the turn-of-the-century American evangelist, set the pattern by generally refusing to preach about hell. He made the preposterous statement that "Terror never brought a man in yet."(17) That a major evangelist could make such a theologically unsupported statement and expect anyone to take him seriously testifies to the theologically debased state of modern evangelicalism. It has gotten no better since he said it.
Consider the theological implications of Moody's statement. God created the place of eternal terror. He revealed His plans concerning final judgment in the New Testament, unlike the Old, which is very nearly silent concerning the details of the afterlife. If God does not intend that the terror of final judgment bring people to repentance, then hell is exclusively a means of God's vengeance, for supposedly it in no way brings anyone to repentance this side of death. Moody was implicitly arguing that there is no grace attached in history to the doctrine of hell; therefore, hell must be exclusively a means of punishment. But nothing in the creation is exclusively a means of punishment for those still living. There is grace to living men in every act of God and in every biblical doctrine. There is grace attached to the doctrine of hell; people sometimes do get scared into repentance. Any warning of imminent judgment before God's final judgment can serve as a means of personal or institutional restoration. All judgments in history are simply testimonies to the coming final judgment, and therefore all of God's temporal judgments offer both cursing and blessing.(18)
God punishes deceased covenant-breakers forever, not in order to reform them, but because they refused to be reformed by God's saving grace in history. Hell is not a reform school; it is a place of eternal retribution.(19) God therefore holds ethical rebels in perpetual slavery. God is in this sense the Cosmic Slaveholder. They do not work in order to please this Cosmic Slaveholder; they are stripped of the power to work, for labor is an aspect of dominion. They serve Him exclusively as recipients of His incomparable wrath. We may not like the idea, but this is what He says He has done and will do. No one ever escapes God's eternal slave system if he departs from this life as a moral slave to Satan rather than a moral bondservant to God. There is no "underground railroad" out of slavery in hell. This is why Christians offer the gospel of salvation to rebels against God: to enable them to escape eternal punishment and eternal slavery to the Sovereign Master of the eternal fiery whip.
In history, we are either involuntary slaves to God or voluntary bondservants to God. Both conditions are permanent beyond the grave. We either serve Him willingly in this lifetime, openly acknowledging our status as unprofitable servants in His covenantal household,(20) or else beyond this life we will experience perpetual lashes from His judgmental whip as eternal slaves without hope. There is no middle ground. There is no alternative scenario. Being a bondservant to God is the essence of freedom. Being a slave to God is the essence of hell. Choose this day which condition of servitude you prefer. . . .
Jesus' Annulment of the Jubilee Land Laws(21) The fulfillment of the jubilee year by Jesus at the outset of His ministry (Luke 4:17-21) made plain the liberating aspects of the rule of Christ in history.(22) He announced His ministry with the reading of Isaiah 61, "to preach delivery of the captives" (Luke 4:18). His intention was clearly the spiritual liberation of His people, and this leads to progressive maturity in the faith, which in turn is supposed to lead to liberation out of chattel slavery, if offered by the owner (I Cor. 7:21b). We have our "ears pierced" (Deut. 15:17) spiritually by Christ; we become permanent adopted sons of His household. Yet even in the case of Leviticus 25, God's goal was always liberation. These pagans were being purchased out of their covenantal slavery to demonic religion. They were being redeemed (bought back). They were being given an opportunity to hear the gospel and see it in operation in households covenanted to God. They were being given an opportunity to renounce paganism and thereby escape eternal slavery in the lake of fire.
Obviously, if the legal provision that allowed Israelite families to retain the lifetime services of heathen slaves, as well as to transfer ownership of the heathens' children to the Israelites' children, is severed from the jubilee land tenure law, then the economic possibility of establishing slave gangs becomes a reality. The legal restriction against the permanent amassing of land disappears. Thus, to argue that the lifetime slave-holding provisions of Leviticus 25 were not an integral part of the jubilee land tenure system is to argue that the history of chattel slavery in the West was in principle sanctioned by the Bible. I am arguing the opposite: the lifetime slave-holding provisions of Leviticus 25 were an integral aspect of Israel's jubilee land tenure laws, and therefore when God annulled the latter, He also annulled the former. By transferring legal title to His kingdom to the gentile world (Matt. 21:43), and by visibly annulling Israel's legal title to the land of Palestine at the time of the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70,(23) God thereby also annulled the Israelite land tenure laws. What had been a God-approved spoils system for a unique historical situation -- the military conquest of Canaan by Israel -- became a dead letter of biblical law after the fall of Jerusalem.
Constantine announced in 315 that slaves who had been condemned to work in the mines or as gladiators were to be branded on the hands or legs, not on the face.(24) This act of comparative charity led the owners, who had formerly branded their slaves, to have metal collars put around their slaves' necks. Clearly, Constantine was no abolitionist. Later legislation under Christian rulers in Rome and Byzantium was not noted for any tendency toward abolitionism.
The Christian West did not honor God's abolition of permanent slavery through Christ's fulfillment of the jubilee year. The Renaissance revived the example of the Roman Empire: reinstituting slavery to farm sugar plantations -- a new agricultural development -- in the second half of the fourteenth century.(25) The Western hemisphere's plantations from the sixteenth century onward, and especially the American South in the nineteenth century, made slave gang agriculture profitable again. The church did not recognize that God no longer allows His people and those under His civil covenant the legal right to amass slaves and deed them to the next generation.
It was the creation of huge land grants in Virginia especially, but also in other southern colonies in the United States, from the late seventeenth century through the eighteenth, that initially made economically possible North American Negro slavery, with its extensive use of gang labor. The Virginia legislature repeatedly made land grants to politically favored families of many thousands of acres per family.(26) In New England, the towns did not make such huge land grants. They multiplied towns rather than allowing individual families to amass huge tracts of land.(27) Without large plantations, slave gang labor was not economically feasible. While New Englanders were involved in the slave trade, they were seldom owners of slaves.(28) In 1652, Rhode Island actually passed a law against Negro slavery, but there is no evidence that it was ever enforced. Newport, Rhode Island, became the center of the slave trade in the next century.(29)
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * The Ethics of Slavery An Anglo-American economic historian is tempted to dwell on the economics of Anglo-American slavery and Anglo-American abolitionism in relation to Anglo-American capitalism, topics whose scholarly literature seems to grow exponentially year by year.(30) But the far more important and more lasting question is the relationship between Christianity and slavery, which in the context of the post-medieval West, is related to the question of Christianity and racism. Here is a blot on the church of Jesus Christ that appears, in retrospect, to be the product of an incomparable moral blindness, yet for many centuries it was not recognized as such by Christianity. Of course, it was also not recognized to be a blot on Judaism, Islam, or any other major religion. Slavery throughout man's history was universal until the nineteenth century. But because the United States fought a civil war over the question of the constitutional legality of abolitionism (1861-65), and also because the United States was (and remains) the nation in which Protestant fundamentalism has had the largest representation, the issue of the close connection between Bible-affirming Protestantism and Negro slavery refuses to go away. Forrest G. Wood, a dedicated and self-conscious secular historian and the son of a conservative Protestant family, has described this Christian racist mentality well: the arrogance of faith.(31) What went wrong?
What went wrong, as I argued in Tools of Dominion and also argue here, was the refusal of Christians to take seriously the full implications of Jesus Christ's annulment of the jubilee laws (Luke 4). When the jubilee ceased, the only legitimate biblical justification for permanent servitude also ceased. But Christians have not taken seriously either the jubilee year or its New Covenant annulment. Those few who do take it seriously, if only as an ethical model, generally deny that it has been completely annulled forever. This blindness toward the Mosaic law, its context, and its functions led to the near-universal acceptance by the church of the moral legitimacy of slavery.
In 1856, less than a century after the decision of the Philadelphia Quakers to place negative economic sanctions on those members of their fellowship who owned slaves or trafficked in them, Rev. Thornton Stringfellow, a Baptist from Virginia, wrote a widely distributed essay, "A Scriptural View," in which he appealed to the Bible in defense of slavery. Rev. Stringfellow appealed to Abraham's ownership of servants, Joseph's enslavement of the Egyptians during the famine, and Job's ownership of servants. He also appealed to Leviticus 25:45-46. He noted that not one prophet arose in Israel to challenge the legitimacy of involuntary heathen slavery.(32) He went on to argue: "It is from God himself; it authorizes that people, to whom he had become king and law-giver, to purchase men and women as property; to hold them and their posterity in bondage; and to will them to their children as a possession forever; and more, it allows foreign slaveholders to settle and live among them; to breed slaves and sell them."(33)
This is correct but misleading. What Leviticus 25 did not authorize was the breeding of slaves for sale by citizens of the holy commonwealth. When an Israelite household bought a slave, that slave had to remain in the household of that family until he died, or was released voluntarily, or was disfigured through battery by the owner, or was adopted by another Israelite household. The same was true of the slave's children. Leviticus 25:44-45 is clear: Israelites could buy slaves only from foreigners, either outside the nation or resident aliens dwelling inside the nation's borders. Thus, even on the assumption that this law was still in force, no one in the American South who claimed to be a U.S. citizen could lawfully appeal to this text to justify breeding slaves for sale.
Stringfellow saw that the previous Levitical law prohibiting the Israelites from compelling fellow Israelites from serving as bondservants is proof that the heathen slave could be treated differently. The Israelite servant went out in the jubilee.(34) Having said this, he then went to the New Testament: "I affirm then, first, (and no man denies,) that Jesus Christ has not abolished slavery by a prohibitory command: and second, I affirm, he has introduced no new moral principle which can work its destruction, under the gospel dispensation; . . ."(35) He referred to several passages in Peter's and Paul's epistles that give rules to servants.(36) He ignored Luke 4:18-23.
A hundred and one years later, Professor John Murray of Westminster Theological Seminary wrote this Politically Incorrect statement: "But though slavery as the property of one man in the labour of another is not intrinsically wrong, it does not follow that we ought to seek to perpetuate slavery. Though the Scripture exercises an eloquent reserve in refraining from the proscription of the institution, and though it does not lay down principles which evince its intrinsic wrong, nevertheless the Scripture does encourage and require the promotion of those conditions which make slavery unnecessary."(37) Lest he be mistaken for a would-be confessor to Simon Legree, he wrote in a footnote: "The thesis that slavery is not intrinsically wrong does not in the least justify the `gigantic evils' frequently accompanying the institution." He praised William Wilberforce and his evangelical Clapham Sect of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.(38) But Murray's exposition is, theologically speaking, a mild-mannered, guarded, but nonetheless unmistakable condemnation of nineteenth-century abolitionism: the only abolitionism that any American remembers. On the question of slavery, Wilberforce was an absolutist; it was his moral absolutism that attracted his followers and steeled their will to do political battle in England for over four decades, despite seemingly impervious political resistance. The Clapham Sect would have rejected Murray's exposition as in principle on the side of the slave holders. Abolitionism's goal, after all, was abolition. It was not the reform of slavery that Wilberforce called for, but its permanent, universal abolition by civil law.
Murray did not refer to Leviticus 25. Had he done so, he would have raised a whole series of issues that he was not prepared to discuss in a short chapter on labor. The main issue he did not choose to raise was the question of judicial continuity. If slavery has not been judicially annulled by the New Testament, then by what judicial standard should civil judges evaluate the legitimacy or illegitimacy of any particular instance of permanent slavery? He stated plainly that the abolitionist impulse is not biblical. This question then becomes theologically inescapable: By what standard? By what standard are specific cases of slavery to be judged?
Murray was skirting the issue, just as several generations of Christian ethicists have skirted it. Prior to the American Civil War, the Calvinist scholar Moses Stuart of Andover Seminary in 1835 appealed to Leviticus 25:44-46 as the proof text that refuted the Christian abolitionists' claim that slavery is sinful in itself.(39) Yet Stuart personally regarded slavery as an institution that should and would gradually fade away without legislative pressure. His position was morally ambiguous.(40) During the Civil War, Bibliotheca Sacra, the Andover journal, published three essays by Elijah P. Barrows, whose exegetical strategy was to ignore the Old Testament texts on slavery and then claim that the New Testament's ethic was against it. He moved from the text to an alleged Gospel spirit.(41) This was close to the Christian abolitionists' pre-War view. Charles Hodge, the leading conservative Presbyterian theologian in America, 1825-1877, author of Systematic Theology (1871-72), took an even more neutral position than Stuart's prior to the War: slavery as not sinful in itself, but subject to legislative reforms to do away with certain evil aspects of slavery as then practiced.(42) When the Southern congregations seceded from the Presbyterian Church, both the Old School and the New School denominations, in 1861, matching the secession of the Southern states from the United States, Hodge wrote five Princeton Review essays critical of Southern slavery, calling for its abolition, but still he refused to say that the Bible condemns slavery. He appealed to nationalism instead.(43) This theological compromise led to the destruction of Old School Presbyterianism after its reunion of the pro-abolition New School wing in 1869.(44) In 1875, higher criticism began to invade the United States and its theological seminaries. Mullin writes of the Unitarians' response to the Calvinists' exegetical ambivalence on slavery: "Bound by their dogmatic presuppositions and their belief that the Bible contained a perfect moral law, they were unable to deal with the biblical ambivalence towards slavery. The obvious solution . . . was to abandon the belief in the infallibility of Scripture, and instead to acknowledge the historical relativity of the biblical record."(45)
Here is the exegetical problem: if there is judicial continuity between the Mosaic law and today, then there is no biblically legitimate justification for the compulsory abolition of chattel slavery. This conclusion would also involve pulling into the New Covenant era all the other laws governing slavery. The ethicists shudder at this prospect. Most of them remain prudently silent. Others search for a principle of judicial discontinuity, but they never find it. Why not? Because they do not analyze contextually the only law in the Bible that authorizes inter-generational chattel slavery. What is its context? The jubilee laws.
The Jubilee Context It is my contention that the laws governing permanent heathen slaves were an unbreakable part of the jubilee laws. If I am correct, then this means that the exegetical case in favor of the annulment of the heathen slave laws rests on the New Testament's annulment of all of the jubilee laws. It is also my contention that if the heathen slave laws are not subsumed under the jubilee laws, then there is no New Testament case for the abolition of chattel slavery. On the contrary, abolitionism itself would be anti-biblical, since the Mosaic law clearly authorized slavery. Abolitionism's universal condemnation of slavery would then go against the Bible's authorization of a certain type of inter-generational chattel slavery. Abolitionism would then be sinful -- something that John Murray refused to say in print but obviously believed.
There are Christian social analysts today, on the right and the left, who call for the reintroduction of the jubilee laws. The conservatives want the jubilee's law regarding debt repudiation, while the liberationists want its laws of land redistribution, which they think should be applied to all forms of privately owned (but never State-owned) property. No one, however, is publicly calling for the restoration of inter-generational chattel slavery. This is a typical example of smorgasbord Christianity: "A little of this, a little of that, but not that over there, certainly; I never touch the stuff."
The Purpose of the Law
To understand the law of inter-generational heathen slavery, we first must understand the purposes of the jubilee law. Its overriding purpose was judicial: to create an inter-generational link between the families and tribes of the conquest with their heirs, culminating in the advent of the promised Seed.
Citizenship was by covenant: by circumcision and by participation in the national feasts, especially Passover. But this was not sufficient; household slaves also were circumcised (Gen. 17:12-13) and participated in the Passover (Ex. 12:44). What identified a citizen in Israel was his eligibility for numbering in the army of Israel. This made him a free man, or as citizens are often called, a freeman. Who was eligible? Adult circumcised men who were: 1) members in good standing in the church, and 2) not under bondage. This would have included circumcised men who lived in walled cities, whether or not they owned real estate, and heirs of the original families that conquered Canaan. An inheritance in rural land was a covenant-keeper's guaranteed legal status as a freeman. He could permanently lose this civil status only through ecclesiastical excommunication, i.e., covenant-breaking, or through becoming a eunuch (Deut. 23:1).
The naturalized citizen was no less a citizen. He could not be enslaved even though he had no inheritance in the land. The inheritance proved that a man was a citizen, but it was not necessary that every citizen have an inheritance. The inheritance was proof of citizenship; it was not the only proof. Proof of adoption was equally valid.
What this points to is the centrality of the doctrine of adoption in Israel's civil order. The doctrine of adoption was placed by Ezekiel's revelation at the center of Israel's history. Israel had been adopted by God as His wife.
Now when I passed by thee, and looked upon thee, behold, thy time was the time of love; and I spread my skirt over thee, and covered thy nakedness: yea, I sware unto thee, and entered into a covenant with thee, saith the Lord GOD, and thou becamest mine. Then washed I thee with water; yea, I throughly washed away thy blood from thee, and I anointed thee with oil. I clothed thee also with broidered work, and shod thee with badgers' skin, and I girded thee about with fine linen, and I covered thee with silk. I decked thee also with ornaments, and I put bracelets upon thy hands, and a chain on thy neck. And I put a jewel on thy forehead, and earrings in thine ears, and a beautiful crown upon thine head. Thus wast thou decked with gold and silver; and thy raiment was of fine linen, and silk, and broidered work; thou didst eat fine flour, and honey, and oil: and thou wast exceeding beautiful, and thou didst prosper into a kingdom. And thy renown went forth among the heathen for thy beauty: for it was perfect through my comeliness, which I had put upon thee, saith the Lord GOD (Ezek. 16:8-14).
For the convert to Judaism, adoption was the only way into guaranteed legal status as a free man. This could be family adoption. An Israelite family could adopt him and give him a portion of the family's inheritance. This is why the Jews were furious with Jesus' gospel of redemption: it offered full legal status as free men to every any through adoption. They understood exactly what He was doing legally. Paul wrote of his brethren in the flesh: "For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh: Who are Israelites; to whom pertaineth the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises; Whose are the fathers, and of whom as concerning the flesh Christ came, who is over all, God blessed for ever. Amen" (Rom. 9:3-5). The Jews had been the adopted ones, and now the gentiles would be, too. All of this liberating judicial inheritance would come to the gentiles through adoption by Christ.(46) He was offering them liberation through His redemption. He was buying them out of slavery -- slavery to sin above all, but also slavery in the broadest sense.
Christians need to understand and frankly acknowledge this implication of the jubilee: Jesus Christ was the ultimate abolitionist. He paid the slaves' ultimate Owner the price required: the sacrifice even to death of a perfectly righteous man. But because those redeemed by Christ have been legally adopted, they can never again fall into the ultimate judicial status of servitude: sin and eternal death. "And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose. For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren" (Rom. 8:28-29). The issue is judicial immunity: "Who shall lay any thing to the charge of God's elect? It is God that justifieth. Who is he that condemneth? It is Christ that died, yea rather, that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us" (Rom. 8:33-34).
Slavery as a Model of Sin Heathen residents of Israel could be permanently enslaved to repay their debts. The presence of permanent slaves in Israelite households was a visible testimony of what it means to be outside the inheritance of God. Slave status was like a permanent sign in front of a person's eyes: "No Exit." This was the representative mark of eternal punishment. There is no exit for Adam's heirs apart from adoption into the family of God through Jesus Christ, the firstborn Son. The Seed -- the culmination of the Abrahamic promise -- lawfully inherited the land. Elect gentiles are heirs of this promise. But the focus of this promise is liberation from sin. Those who trust in the law for their inheritance are disinherited, replaced by those adopted by grace. This is why Jesus' message outraged the Jews. Paul spelled out the message in its judicial context: promise, inheritance, and seed. He began his discussion with the redeemed person's escape from the imputation of Adam's sin.
Blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not impute sin. Cometh this blessedness then upon the circumcision only, or upon the uncircumcision also? for we say that faith was reckoned to Abraham for righteousness. How was it then reckoned? when he was in circumcision, or in uncircumcision? Not in circumcision, but in uncircumcision. And he received the sign of circumcision, a seal of the righteousness of the faith which he had yet being uncircumcised: that he might be the father of all them that believe, though they be not circumcised; that righteousness might be imputed unto them also: And the father of circumcision to them who are not of the circumcision only, but who also walk in the steps of that faith of our father Abraham, which he had being yet uncircumcised. For the promise, that he should be the heir of the world, was not to Abraham, or to his seed, through the law, but through the righteousness of faith. For if they which are of the law be heirs, faith is made void, and the promise made of none effect: Because the law worketh wrath: for where no law is, there is no transgression. Therefore it is of faith, that it might be by grace; to the end the promise might be sure to all the seed; not to that only which is of the law, but to that also which is of the faith of Abraham; who is the father of us all, (As it is written, I have made thee a father of many nations,) before him whom he believed, even God, who quickeneth the dead, and calleth those things which be not as though they were. Who against hope believed in hope, that he might become the father of many nations; according to that which was spoken, So shall thy seed be (Rom. 4:8-18; emphasis added).
It was Jesus Christ who sacrificed His lawful inheritance in the Promised Land in order to bring His brethren through adoption into the family of God. The son of David abandoned His lawful inheritance for the sake of His elect. In doing this -- delivering to them the promised inheritance -- He gave them their irrevocable judicial status as freemen.
It is worth noting that the judicial precedent for this act was Joseph's decision to forfeit his status as the namesake of a tribe of Israel for the sake of his Egyptian sons, Ephraim and Manasseh (Gen. 48). His father Jacob acquiesced to this transfer of inheritance: the name. Jacob thereby adopted into his household the foreign-born sons of an Egyptian mother: gentiles. Thus, even prior to the announcement regarding the promised Seed, Shiloh (Gen. 49:10), there had been an adoption by the patriarch which disinherited his son for the sake of this beloved son's gentile sons. Joseph, the kinsman-redeemer of Israel/Jacob, was the primary redemptive model in the Old Covenant for Jesus, the Kinsman-Redeemer of the New Israel in the New Covenant.
Outraged Slave Owners This had always been the threat to slave owners in Israel: a man might adopt another man's slave as his own son, thereby providing him with a lawful inheritance. This legal status as an adopted son could not be taken away except through ecclesiastical excommunication, and even then, his sons would inherit.(47) At the sound of the trumpet in the jubilee year, the adopted slave would go free. It was the sound of the trumpet in the jubilee year that invoked every heir's legal status as a free man.
There was nothing that a slave owner could do to prevent this. If a lawful heir to the original conquest was willing to dilute his descendants' economic inheritance, he could share with anyone an undiluted legal inheritance. The point of the jubilee land law was not that it promised the heir a guarantee of some sort of economic future. Rather, it identified him and his descendants as free men. This was the ultimate form of civil liberation that any foreigner could hope for: to be an adopted son of a citizen of Israel. This grant of liberation could be offered to any slave. But there was no way that the slave could purchase this judicial grant of liberty. He had nothing of his own to give in exchange. His liberation was the result of an act of grace on the part of a head of an Israelite household.
The possibility of "formerly heathen" slave liberation always existed, but we have no record of any non-Levite who reduced his sons' economic inheritance for the sake of liberating his own slaves or other men's slaves through adoption. This indicates that God's covenant blessing of population growth was not granted for very long, and men clung to their few acres of land in the expectation that it was really worth more than the liberation of other men's slaves.
The slave, of course, could refuse this offer of liberation. He might prefer bondage to liberation, servitude to inheritance. If you regard this possibility of refusal as being so unlikely that it must be the speculation of a madman, consider the response of millions of sin-cursed slaves to the message of the gospel. They will not accept Christ's offer of liberation. They know that there are three conditions attached to this offer of freeman's status: acceptance of the adopting man's name; lifetime subordination to a priesthood; taking personal responsibility for one's actions. So it would have been in Mosaic Israel. First, the adopter would have a bad reputation among slave owners: the destroyer of the value of the lawful inheritance of slave-owning families. Second, the legal status of a freeman in Israel could be lost through excommunication. Third, his economic condition could sink quite low if he was incompetent.
But wouldn't a gentile slave have regarded these conditions as mild compared to lifetime servitude for himself and his heirs? Probably. Then what about an Israelite slave? But how could there have been any Israelite slaves? Didn't the jubilee law protect them from slavery? Not if they suffered excommunication and then fell into servitude through an economic crisis or some other negative sanction. This scenario is exactly what Jesus was threatening the Jews with if they rejected His offer of adoption: excommunication, negative sanctions, and slavery. He was the true High Priest who could lawfully excommunicate God's enemies, an authority that He demonstrated when He used whips against the money changers in the temple. Did the Jews heed His warning? Not many did. Did they assent to being adopted by Him? Not many did. But gentiles did.
Biblical Law: Death and Resurrection At this point, I ask myself: Could there be any Christian who has read this far and still not understand what the jubilee law was all about? Then I ask myself: Why do the commentators emphasize the jubilee law's economic inheritance and its supposed ramifications, applications, and implications? Why have expositors who are masters of Hebrew, with years of experience, failed to recognize what is so incredibly obvious that it screams at the reader? The moment anyone puts three obvious pieces together, he concludes that any predominantly economic interpretation of the jubilee is ridiculous. The three pieces are: 1) God's covenantal blessing of population growth; 2) a fixed supply of rural real estate; 3) an ever-shrinking economic inheritance in rural land under the conditions of covenantal blessing. I ask myself: Why has this not been obvious? Why (as far as I know) am I the first expositor who has seen all this?(48)
The most important factor in exegeting specific Old Testament laws is a presupposition: the Mosaic law is a coherent system that culminates in the work of Jesus Christ. Some Mosaic laws were buried with Him; others were resurrected with Him. Seed laws, food laws, and land laws stay buried. They are replaced, respectively, by the law of spiritual adoption, the Lord's Supper, and the worldwide kingdom of God. Once a person understands this simple preliminary set of hermeneutical rules, it takes only a little imagination and some attentive Bible reading to make sense of God's law.
This is not to say that making the real-world applications is easy. This may take a lifetime of study in just one field. But the judicial principles are easy to understand, and not very difficult to become familiar with.(49)
Conclusion My conclusion in Chapter 4 of Tools of Dominion is my conclusion here, which I reprint below. I must add here an observation regarding freemanship. A freeman was eligible to serve in God's holy army. A slave was not a freeman. The jubilee law identified freemen: heirs of the original conquest. But they were not the only freemen in Israel. Circumcised resident aliens could be adopted by the tribes governing walled cities.
Economically, the jubilee inheritance law, if enforced, would have tended toward the manumission of heathen slaves. The net cost of owning slaves would have grown high as the size of inherited agricultural parcels shrank in response to a growing population. The same would also have been true in walled cities. Thus, we must regard the judicial aspect of the heathen slave law as more important than the economic: the Mosaic law's identification of freeman status for land-owning heirs of the conquest, so long as they remained members of the ecclesiastical covenant.
When Jesus annulled the jubilee laws, He annulled the heathen slave law. He removed the judicial basis for inter-generational slavery. In this sense, Jesus was an abolitionist. While it took the church over 17 centuries to begin to preach abolition, this legal and moral position was nevertheless implied by the abolition of the jubilee law. When covenantal freemanship no longer tied in any way to landed inheritance within the boundaries of Israel, but came exclusively through spiritual adoption into God's family, there was no longer any covenantal purpose for inter-generational heathen slavery. There was also no longer any covenantal purpose for geographical Israel.
As for the economics of the heathen slave law, the Conclusion in Tools of Dominion suffices.(50)
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * Servitude exists because sin exists and because God's judgments in history and eternity also exist. This was Augustine's argument a millennium and a half ago, an argument that was old when he offered it: slavery is one of God's penal sanctions against sin.(51) Richard Baxter warned slave owners in 1673: "If their sin have enslaved them to you, yet Nature made them your equals."(52)
Covenant theology teaches that slavery is an inescapable concept. Slavery's positive model is the indentured servant who buys his way out of poverty, or who is released in the sabbatical year or jubilee year. He learns the skills and worldview of dominion. He becomes self-governed under God, a free man. Slavery becomes a means of liberation when coupled with biblical ethics. The fundamental issue, as always, is ethical rather than economic. His ability to buy his way out is indicative of a change in his ethical behavior.
Slavery's negative model is God's judgment of covenant-breakers throughout eternity. He consigns them first to hell and then, at the resurrection, to the lake of fire (Rev. 20:14-15). God places people on the whipping block, and then He flogs them forever. Of course, what they actually experience for eternity is far more horrifying than the comparatively minor inconvenience of an eternal whip. I am only speaking figuratively of whips; the reality of eternal torment is far, far worse than mere lashes. Thus, the legal right of some people to enslave others under the limits imposed by God's revealed law is based on the ultimate legal right of God to impose eternal torment on covenant-breakers. Biblical servitude is a warning to sinners as well as a means of liberation.
What I am arguing is simple: it is not chattel slavery as such that appalls most covenant-breakers and their Christian ideological accomplices; rather, it is the doctrine of eternal punishment. The denial of the New Testament doctrine of eternal punishment, above all other denials, is the touchstone of modern humanism. It is this doctrine, above all others, that humanists reject. They stand, clenched fists waving in the air, and shout their defiance to God, "You have no authority over us!" But He does. They proclaim, "There is no hell!" But there is. And the lake of fire will be even worse.
For all his protests, modern man nevertheless still accepts the legitimacy of slavery. Humanists understand implicitly that the right to enslave others is an attribute of God's sovereignty. They declare the State as the true God of humanity, and then they proclaim the right of the State to enslave men.(53) They have created the modern penal system, with its heavy reliance on imprisonment, yet have rejected the criminal's obligation to make restitution to the victim. They allow murderers to go free after a few years of imprisonment or incarceration in a mental institution, to murder again, for humanists are unwilling to allow the State to turn the murderer's soul over to God as rapidly as possible, so that God may deal with him eternally. They regard man as the sovereign judge, not God. They have invented the slave-master institution of the modern prison, while they have steadily rejected the legitimacy of capital punishment. Better to let murderers go free, humanists assert, than to acknowledge covenantally and symbolically that the State has a heavenly judge above it, and that God requires human judges to turn murderers over to Him for His immediate judgment, once the earthly courts have declared them guilty as charged.
The humanist abolitionist tries to put God in the dock. He tries to put the State on the judgment throne of God. What he hates is the Bible, not slavery as such. The question is never slavery vs. no slavery. The question is: Who will be the slave-master, and who will be the slave? Autonomous man wants to put God and His law in bondage. On judgment day, this strategy will be exposed for the covenant-breaking revolution that it has always been. The abolitionists will then learn what full-time slavery is all about. It is a lesson that will be taught to them for eternity.
The spiritual heirs of Pharaoh's Hebrew agents (Ex. 5:20-21) are with us still. Christians are in spiritual and cultural bondage to the theology of the power religion, and therefore to the State. They must prepare for another exodus, meaning they should be prepared to experience at least a share of the preliminary plagues, just as the Israelites of Moses' day went through the first three out of 10. It is nevertheless time to leave Egypt, leeks and onions notwithstanding.
We must be prepared for numerous objections from Pharaoh's authorized and subsidized representatives inside the camp of the faithful. They owe their positions of influence to Pharaoh and his taskmasters, and they will not give up their authority without a confrontation. They will complain that their potential liberators are at fault for the increased burdens that Christians suffer (Ex. 5:20-21). They will continue to sing the praises of the welfare State. They will continue to sing the praises of tax-supported "neutral" education. They will tell the faithful that humanist slavery is freedom, and biblical freedom is barbaric. They will attract many followers within the camp, for there will always be camp followers close by any army. Choose this day whom you will serve.
Summary Mosaic law authorized inter-generational slavery.
This case law has been annulled by the New Covenant.
The Society of Friends (Quakers) were the first to condemn slavery: the late eighteenth century.
The jubilee land law was designed to keep any family from permanently amassing large land holdings.
Very large-scale slave holdings were therefore economically impossible when this law was enforced, even with corporate management of family farms.
Most heathen slaves would have been released in the jubilee year.
The jubilee land law was designed to reduce per capita agricultural labor productivity in relation to the value of rural land.
This encouraged dominion outside the land: emigration.
The larger the population grew, the more valuable agricultural land in general would have become (though not necessarily tiny parcels).
This would have lowered the return on investments in slaves compared to investment capital to increase the output of land.
To maintain agricultural slavery, owners must have access to inexpensive, productive land.
This was true in the American South and the British West Indies.
One goal of the jubilee laws was to push Israelites off the land: into cities and abroad.
This heathen slave law was unique to Israel: part of spoils of the conquest.
Primogeniture (eldest son inherits) and entail (no sale of land) creates conditions favorable to agricultural slavery.
Slavery testified to the reality of eternal slavery.
Yet slavery also served as a means of evangelism to the heathen world.
God holds deceased covenant-breakers in eternal slavery.
God holds an eternal whip.
Jesus annulled the jubilee laws with His ministry of liberation.
Christians are adopted sons in God's household.
The inter-generational slave-holding provisions of Leviticus 25 were an aspect of the jubilee land laws.
When the land laws ceased to be covenantally mandatory, so did inter-generational slavery.
The transfer of God's kingdom out of Israel and into the whole world ended Mosaic Israel's unique covenantal status.
The church did not acknowledge that slavery is illegitimate until the nineteenth century. Neither did Judaism.
Christians in the American South still appealed to the Bible in defense of slavery in the 1850's.
Without the New Testament annulment of the jubilee laws, slavery is still authorized by the Bible.
Yet there are Christians today who still appeal to the jubilee laws as models for economic reform.
The eschatological purpose of the jubilee law was the creation of inter-generational family and tribal links from the conquest to the promised messiah: the Seed.
Citizenship was by military numbering.
Those with jubilee ownership in the land were irrevocably citizens unless subsequently excommunicated.
Slaves were never eligible for numbering without permission from their owners.
If a man had an inheritance in the conquest, only excommunication could threaten his citizenship.
Adoption could extend freemanship to all men.
Jesus offered gentiles liberation out of slavery through adoption.
Jesus Christ was the ultimate abolitionist.
Heathen slave status in Israel was analogous to condemnation in hell: no exit.
This is the curse of being outside God's inheritance.
Jesus sacrificed His earthly inheritance for the sake of the inheritance of those whom He would adopt.
Christians are judicial freemen: no more slavery to sin.
At any time in Mosaic Israel, a man could adopt the slaves belonging to others.
The economic burden was a dilution of the economic inheritance of his sons.
The heirs' judicial inheritance could not be diluted.
The slave could legally refuse this offer of adoption.
So can slaves of sin today.
Excommunication could result in slave status.
The Jews were excommunicated by Jesus, the true high priest.
The Mosaic law is a coherent system that culminates in the ministry of Jesus Christ.
Seed laws, food laws, and land laws were buried with Him in His crucifixion and were not resurrected.
They were replaced by spiritual adoption, the Lord's Supper, and the worldwide kingdom of God.
Modern man denies the reality of eternal punishment.
He still adopts the theology of slavery.
The State is seen as possessing the right to enslave others: to extract their wealth without their consent or God's authorization.
The prison system is another example: slavery to the State rather than restitution to victims.
Autonomous man wants to put God and His law in bondage.
We are seeing a replay of Pharaoh and the Israelites.
The welfare State is the new bondage of Egypt.
Footnotes:
1. In some cultures, most notably Islamic, the idea has yet to take deep root.
2. David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 107.
3. Ibid., p. 108.
4. Gary North, Tools of Dominion: The Case Laws of Exodus (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), ch. 4.
5. Ibid., pp. 140-44.
6. The sabbatical year was honored in the inter-testamental era. In 162 B.C., during his brief one-year reign, King Antiochus V (Eupator) "made peace with the people of Bethsura, who abandoned the town, having no more food there to withstand a siege, as it was a sabbatical year when the land was left fallow" (I Macc. 6:49, NEB).
7. Ahab stole Naboth's inheritance. Jezebel had him accused of blaspheming God and the king (I Ki. 21:13), but this would not have been sufficient to disinherit Naboth's children or at least his nearest kinsman. The king had to steal the land (vv. 15-16).
8. Patrick Fairbairn, The Revelation of Law in Scripture (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, [1868] 1957), p. 118.
9. The law of diminishing returns applied to labor: too much labor in relation to land.
10. Evsey D. Domar, "The Causes of Slavery or Serfdom: A Hypothesis," Journal of Economic History, XXX (1970), pp. 18-32.
11. This was an important aspect of the argument by Alfred H. Conrad and John R. Meyer in their classic 1958 article, "The Economics of Slavery in the Antebellum South," Part III, Journal of Economic History, reprinted many times. There is not much debate about this: Stanley L. Engerman, "The Effects of Slavery upon the Southern Economy: A Review of the Recent Debate," in Hugh G. J. Aitkin (ed.), Did Slavery Pay? (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), pp. 318-20. Both essays are reprinted here, as they are in Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman (eds.), The Reinterpretation of American Economic History (New York: Harper & Row, 1971).
12. "Thus, as early as the period 1670-90, overproduction plunged the sugar economies of Brazil and the Caribbean into crises that ruined both planters and their creditors. The pattern recurred many times. . . . When Caribbean sugar production ran afoul of market gluts, the ensuing crises led to a shift of resources to fresher land in newly developed colonies. Thus, one factor, `land,' alone accounted for the regional economy's ability to survive the periodic purges of the market generated by the tendency toward overproduction." Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 45-46.
13. Ibid., p. 44.
14. Gary North, Moses and Pharaoh: Dominion Religion vs. Power Religion (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1985), ch. 1.
15. So, for that matter, does corporate ownership of land, either by ecclesiastical or State agencies, or by a corporate distribution of share ownership.
16. North, Tools of Dominion, pp. 166-68.
17. Cited by Stanley N. Gundry, Love Them In: The Proclamation Theology of Dwight L. Moody (Chicago, 1976), p. 99.
18. Ray R. Sutton, That You May Prosper: Dominion By Covenant (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1992), ch. 4.
19. I have written in greater detail regarding the biblical doctrine of hell in my Publisher's Epilogue to David Chilton's book, The Great Tribulation (Ft. Worth: Dominion, 1987).
20. "So likewise ye, when ye shall have done all those things which are commanded you, say, We are unprofitable servants: we have done that which was our duty to do" (Luke 17:10). See Gary North, "Unprofitable Servants," Biblical Economics Today, VI (Feb./March 1983).
21. North, Tools of Dominion, pp. 144-47.
22. Gary North, Liberating Planet Earth: An Introduction to Biblical Blueprints (Ft. Worth, Texas: Dominion Press, 1987).
23. David Chilton, The Days of Vengeance: An Exposition of the Book of Revelation (Ft. Worth, Texas: Dominion Press, 1987), and The Great Tribulation.
24. Theodosian Code 9:40:2; cited in Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (New York: Viking, 1980), p. 127.
25. Davis, Slavery and Human Progress, pp. 59-66.
26. Leonard Woods Larabee, Conservatism in Early American History (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press Great Seal Books, [1948] 1962), pp. 32-36.
27. John W. Reps, Town Planning in Frontier America (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, [1965] 1969), ch. 5; Sumner Chilton Powell, Puritan Village: The Formation of a New England Town (Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor, [1963] 1965), chaps. 2, 8, 9; Kenneth A. Lockridge, A New England Town: The First Hundred Years (New York: Norton, 1970), pp. 10-13, 70-72.
28. Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), pp. 66-71.
29. Charles M. Andrews, The Colonial Period of American History, 4 vols. (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, [1936] 1964), II, p. 30.
30. Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Christine Bolt and Seymour Drescher (eds.), Anti-Slavery, Religion, and Reform (Hamden, Connecticut: Archon, 1980); David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Roger L. Ransom, Conflict and Compromise: The Political Economy of Slavery, Emancipation, and the American Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Barbara L. Solow (ed.), Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Robert William Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York: Norton, 1989). A week before I completed this chapter, Fogel was awarded half of the one million dollar 1993 Nobel Prize in economics, which he shared with economic historian Douglas North (no relation).
31. Forrest G. Wood, The Arrogance of Faith: Christianity and Race in America from the Colonial Era to the Twentieth Century (New York: Knopf, 1990). On his self-conscious secularism, see page xx.
32. Thornton Stringfellow, "A Scriptural View of Slavery" (1856), in Slavery Defended: The Views of the Old South, edited by Eric L. McKitrick (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1963), p. 92.
33. Ibid., pp. 92-93.
34. Ibid., p. 93.
35. Ibid., p. 94.
36. Ibid., pp. 95-97.
37. John Murray, Principles of Conduct: Aspects of Biblical Ethics (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, [1957] 1964), p. 100.
38. Ibid., p. 101n.
39. Robert Bruce Mullin, "Biblical Critics and the Battle Over Slavery," Journal of Presbyterian History, LXI (Summer 1983), p. 215. Cf. J. H. Giltner, "Moses Stuart and the Slavery Controversy: A Study in the Failure of Moderation," Journal of Religious Thought, XVIII (1961), p. 31.
40. Ibid., pp. 216-17.
41. Ibid., p. 220.
42. Ibid., pp. 218-19.
43. Ibid., pp. 221-22.
44. Gary North, Crossed Fingers: How the Liberals Captured the Presbyterian Church (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1995), ch. 1.
45. Mullin, p. 222.
46. This is the mystery referred to in Ephesians 3:1-6. For a development of this point, see Oswald T. Allis, Prophecy and the Church (Philadelphia: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1945), pp. 91-108.
47. To inherit, the sons of an excommunicated man would have had to renounce their father's act of rebellion. In the case of a man who became a eunuch while in slavery, the law is silent regarding his sons. It seems to me that their father's legal status at the time of their conception would have been legally determinative. They would have inherited at the jubilee.
48. If there have been others, their observations have not been picked up by the major commentators.
49. This is why God required that the Mosaic law be read to the assembled nation one year in seven (Deut. 31:10-13).
50. North, Tools of Dominion, pp. 203-6.
51. Augustine, City of God, Book 19, Chap. 15. Cf. R. W. Carlyle and A. J. Carlyle, A History of Mediaeval Political Theory in the West, 6 vols. (2nd ed.; London: Blackwood, [1927] 1962), I, p. 113.
52. Richard Baxter, A Christian Directory (London: Robert White for Nevil Simmons, 1678), Part II, Christian Oeconomicks, p. 71. The first edition appeared in 1673.
53. Libertarian anarchists are exceptions to this rule, since they do not acknowledge the legitimacy of the State.
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