Slavery in the English Bible

This Palgrave Pivot offers a groundbreaking reassessment of the concept of slavery in the Bible. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective, it interweaves historical semantics with an analysis of language to argue that slavery as it is primarily understood today – as a legal institution which reduced individuals involuntarily to the status of property - was not legitimized by biblical doctrine.

The book presents a concise, accessible argument, focused around the translation of the Bible into English and the use of the language of slavery. The term ‘slavery’, emerging in the sixteenth century, was at first used to identify a condition of dishonour, as well as a system of forced labour, and it was only in the seventeenth century that it came to be equated with the Roman institution of servitus , and in the eighteenth with the ownership of people as property. As a result, and uniquely among studies of slavery in the Bible, this book does not seek to engage in debates about whether or not the Bible supported slavery, claiming the premise itself is mistaken. The idea that slavery was an ancient legal institution that reduced individuals involuntarily to the status of property is a product of modernity.

This book has far-reaching implications for a range of disciplines including economic and legal history and biblical scholarship as well as slavery studies.

Judith M. Spicksley is an economic and social historian with an interest in language. She worked in the Department of Economics at the University of York and in the Wilberforce Institute at the University of Hull. She has written about the lending activities of never-married women in early modern England, and the role of debt in the transatlantic slave trade. She is currently preparing a long overview of ownership for publication,  Owning People: Survival, Life Debt and Slavery from the Ancient World to the Enlightenment.