A Day in the Life: A Servant

Was the servitude in the Bible the same as slavery we think of?

Not entirely, and the difference matters. In the wider Roman world, a slave was legally property, and treatment ranged from relatively decent to savagely cruel. But the law God gave Israel set servitude under real limits no surrounding nation had. A fellow Hebrew who fell into servitude, usually through debt or poverty, was to serve only six years and "in the seventh he shall go out free for nothing" (Exodus 21:2). When he went, the master was commanded not to send him away empty but to furnish him generously from the flock and the floor and the winepress (Deuteronomy 15:13–14). This was closer to bound labor with an expiration date than to lifelong ownership.

An honest note: the numbers often given for ancient slavery, such as a large fraction of the population of Roman Italy being enslaved, are estimates scholars reconstruct from limited data. That slavery was widespread is certain; the precise proportions are debated.

Did God's law really protect servants?

In striking ways for its time, yes. Kidnapping a person to sell him was not a lesser crime; it carried the death penalty: "he that stealeth a man, and selleth him... shall surely be put to death" (Exodus 21:16), a law the New Testament echoes when it condemns "menstealers" (1 Timothy 1:10). Servants shared in the weekly Sabbath rest (Exodus 20:10). A master who maimed a servant had to set him free (Exodus 21:26–27). And Israel was to remember its own bondage in Egypt as the reason to treat the bound with mercy (Deuteronomy 15:15). None of this describes a world of easy chains; it describes a law bending hard against the cruelty of its age.

What was the servant with the pierced ear?

One of the most moving pictures in all the law. When a Hebrew servant's six years were done and he was free to go, he could choose something else. If he had come to love his master and his household, he could say, "I love my master... I will not go out free" (Exodus 21:5). Then his master would bring him to the doorpost and "bore his ear through with an aul," and he would serve him for life (Exodus 21:6). Here was a man who was legally free, who chose willing, permanent service out of love, and wore the mark of it in his own body. Remember that image; it points straight to Christ.

Why didn't the New Testament simply abolish slavery?

It did something that would, in time, pull the whole institution up by the roots. The apostles wrote to people who had no political power to end an empire's economy overnight, so they planted truths that could not live alongside slavery forever. They told masters to give their servants "that which is just and equal," and reminded them "ye also have a Master in heaven; neither is there respect of persons with him" (Colossians 4:1; Ephesians 6:9). They declared that in Christ "there is neither bond nor free" (Galatians 3:28). And when a runaway slave named Onesimus was converted, Paul sent him back to his master Philemon, not as property to be punished, but to be received "not now as a servant, but above a servant, a brother beloved" (Philemon 16). Call a man your brother, and you cannot long hold him as a thing.

How was a servant supposed to live, and a master to act?

With their eyes on a higher Master. Servants were told to obey "not with eyeservice, as menpleasers; but as the servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart," serving as though working for the Lord Himself (Ephesians 6:5–7). And masters were sternly warned, "forbearing threatening," knowing they would answer to God, who shows no favoritism (Ephesians 6:9). The gospel did not leave either one where it found him. It put both under the same Lord and made the household a place where the last would be treated as brothers.

Could a servant be freed?

Yes. In Israel there were the release years and the pierced-ear provision. In the Roman world, the freeing of slaves, called manumission, was common, and the empire was full of freedmen, former slaves who had gained their liberty and sometimes real standing. Paul speaks to this directly: a believing servant is already "the Lord's freeman," and a believing free man is "Christ's servant"; and if you can gain your freedom, he says, use it (1 Corinthians 7:21–22). Earthly status was real, but it was no longer the deepest truth about a person in Christ.