What Does the Torah Say About Slavery? A Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Comparison

The Torah's treatment of slavery is complex and has been debated by Jewish scholars for centuries. Far from a simple endorsement, the text embeds slavery within a web of ethical obligations. Deuteronomy explicitly commands, "Thou shalt not oppress an hired servant that is poor and needy, whether he be of thy brethren, or of thy strangers that are in thy land within thy gates" Deuteronomy 24:14 — a verse the Talmudic rabbis extended to cover bonded laborers as well as wage workers.

Crucially, the Torah grounds its labor ethics in historical memory. Israelites are warned: "beware lest thou forget the LORD, which brought thee forth out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage" Deuteronomy 6:12. This memory of Egyptian slavery functions, in rabbinic interpretation (see Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Laws of Slaves, 12th century), as a moral brake on the mistreatment of any servant. The experience of oppression is meant to produce empathy, not repetition.

Modern Jewish scholarship — including the work of Nahum Sarna in Exploring Exodus (1986) — argues that the Torah's slave laws were among the most protective in the ancient Near East, setting limits on duration, mandating rest, and prohibiting abuse. That said, contemporary Jewish denominations uniformly condemn chattel slavery as incompatible with the Torah's deeper ethic of human dignity, pointing to verses like Psalms 10:18, which calls on God "to judge the fatherless and the oppressed" Psalms 10:18.

Christian engagement with the Torah's slavery texts has been deeply contested across history. Early church fathers largely accepted the institution as a social given, citing Torah regulations as evidence that God tolerated rather than ordained slavery. The Torah's command not to oppress the poor hired servant Deuteronomy 24:14 was read by theologians like John Chrysostom (4th–5th century) as a call to treat servants humanely within the existing system, not to abolish it.

The memory of Israel's bondage — "from the house of bondage" Deuteronomy 6:12 — was reinterpreted allegorically by many Christian commentators as referring to spiritual slavery to sin, rather than as a direct social critique of literal slavery. This spiritualization allowed the institution to persist in Christian societies for centuries, a fact that abolitionist theologians like William Wilberforce and Charles Spurgeon (19th century) later challenged forcefully.

Contemporary mainstream Christianity reads the Torah's protections for the poor and oppressed Deuteronomy 24:14 Psalms 10:18 as pointing toward a trajectory of liberation that culminates in full abolition. The Psalms' vision of God judging on behalf of "the fatherless and the oppressed, that the man of the earth may no more oppress" Psalms 10:18 is now widely cited as the scriptural endpoint of that arc.

Islam regards the Torah (Tawrat) as a divinely revealed scripture, albeit one Muslims believe has been partially altered over time. Classical Islamic scholars acknowledged that the Torah regulated slavery in ancient Israelite society, and they saw this as consistent with Islam's own approach: permitting certain forms of servitude while strongly encouraging manumission and embedding protections for enslaved people. The Quranic injunction to free slaves as an act of expiation mirrors the Torah's concern for the vulnerable Deuteronomy 24:14.

Islamic jurisprudence, like the Torah, prohibited the oppression of those in one's employ or under one's authority — a principle resonant with Deuteronomy's command not to oppress the poor and needy servant Deuteronomy 24:14. The reminder that Israel came "from the house of bondage" Deuteronomy 6:12 is seen by Muslim commentators such as Ibn Kathir (14th century) as a universal moral lesson about gratitude and justice, applicable across faith communities.

Contemporary Islamic scholars, including Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, argue that Islam's internal logic — like the Torah's — was always moving toward abolition, and that the protections embedded in both scriptures reflect a divine concern for human dignity that transcends the specific historical institution. There's genuine scholarly disagreement, however, about whether either text provides a basis for outright abolition or merely humane regulation.