Рабство в Библии: что говорит закон и как его читают христиане

Библия устанавливает правила для рабства и нигде не приказывает положить конец рабству как институту. Закон Израиля карает смертью человека за кражу другого человека с целью его продажи (Исход 21:16), освобождает еврейского слугу на седьмой год (Исход 21:2) и позволяет удерживать людей из соседних народов пожизненно (Левит 25:44–46). Новый Завет учит рабов и хозяев, как жить в одном доме, Павел отправляет Онисима обратно к его хозяину Филимону с письмом, и тот же Павел говорит, что во Христе «нет ни раба, ни свободного» (Галатам 3:28).

Христиане принимают эти главы как Писание, и их цитировали обе стороны. Гектор Авалос из Университета штата Айова, чья книга на эту тему является критикой идеи о том, что Библия должна быть основой современной этики, пишет: «Примерно 1900 из последних 2000 лет христианской истории именно самопровозглашенные христиане поддерживали рабство в той или иной форме как жизнеспособный институт». Другие в те же годы читали те же страницы как аргумент против него, от Григория Нисского в IV веке до Абсалома Джонса, настоятеля африканской церкви в Филадельфии, в 1808 году.

Бог начинает Десять заповедей с того, что говорит Израилю, что Он «вывел тебя из земли Египетской, из дома рабства» (Исход 20:2), а главой позже закона Моисеева начинает свои постановления со слуги: «Если купишь раба Еврея, пусть он работает шесть лет, а в седьмой пусть выйдет на волю даром» (Исход 21:2). Второзаконие добавляет, что его нельзя отпускать с пустыми руками, и приводит причину: «помни, что ты был рабом в земле Египетской и Господь, Бог твой, избавил тебя» (Второзаконие 15:13–15).

Исход также говорит о том, чего могла стоить эта свобода. Если хозяин дал ему жену, «жена и дети ее пусть останутся у господина ее, а он выйдет один» (Исход 21:4), так что человек мог дождаться конца своих шести лет и обнаружить, что дверь открыта только для него одного. Если он говорил: «люблю господина моего, жену мою и детей моих, не пойду на волю», хозяин приводил его к двери и протыкал «ухо его шилом; и он останется рабом его вечно» (Исход 21:5–6). Отец мог продать свою дочь, и она «не может выйти, как выходят рабы» (Исход 21:7). Закон обещал ей взамен, что «он не должен уменьшать пищи ее, одежды ее и супружеского сожития», а если он уменьшал их, она выходила «даром, без выкупа» (Исход 21:10–11).

Несколькими стихами позже закон обрушивается на похитителя: «Кто украдет человека и продаст его, или найдется он в руках у него, то должно предать его смерти» (Исход 21:16). Хозяин, который выбьет глаз или зуб своему слуге, должен «отпустить его на волю за глаз его» (Исход 21:26–27), а беглого раба, который достиг Израиля, следует оставить в покое: «Не выдавай раба господину его, когда он придет к тебе от господина своего: пусть он живет у тебя, среди вас, на месте, которое он выберет» (Второзаконие 23:15–16).

Через четыре стиха после похитителя упоминается розга: «Если кто ударит раба своего, или служанку свою палкою, и они умрут под рукою его, то он должен быть наказан. Но если они день или два дня переживут, то не должно наказывать его, ибо это его серебро» (Исход 21:20–21). Хозяин, чей слуга умер под розгой, должен был быть наказан. Хозяин, чей слуга прожил день или два после избиения, — нет, и стих дает свое собственное обоснование в последних пяти словах.

Американцы спорили об этих двух стихах в печати. Теодор Уэлд, писавший против рабства для Американского общества борьбы с рабством в 1837 году, обратился к еврейскому тексту и сказал, что слово, переведенное как «наказан», должно означать «отомщен», так что «смерть слуги должна быть отомщена смертью хозяина». Если слуга прожил день или два, Уэлд называл это непредумышленным убийством, потому что розга, задержка и финансовая заинтересованность хозяина в нем вместе создавали случай, по его словам, «показывающий, что хозяин не намеревался убивать». Четыре года спустя Торнтон Стрингфеллоу из округа Калпепер, штат Вирджиния, прочитал те же стихи в защиту рабства. В законе Моисея, писал он, «то поведение наказывается смертью, когда совершается по отношению к свободному человеку, которое вовсе не наказуемо, когда совершается хозяином по отношению к рабу».

Пол Копан, философ из Палм-Бич Атлантик Университета, который защищает закон Израиля в журнале Ассамблей Бога Обогащение , читает первый стих почти так же, как Уэлд. Хозяин, чье наказание привело к немедленной смерти, пишет он, должен был «быть предан смерти за убийство». В Encyclopaedia Judaica, в разделе о библейском законе, говорится: «Убийство раба наказуемо так же, как и убийство любого свободного человека, даже если деяние совершено хозяином». Гектор Авалос пишет об этих же двух стихах: «библейский закон гласит, что хозяин может избить раба почти до смерти (Исход 21:20-21), и раб остается в рабстве».

Левит проводит черту между Израилем и всеми остальными, и проводит ее именем Бога. Если израильтянин обеднел и был продан, его следовало держать «как наемника, как поселенца», и он должен был вернуться домой со своими детьми в юбилейный год (Левит 25:40–41), «потому что они — Мои рабы, которых Я вывел из земли Египетской: не должно продавать их, как продают рабов» (Левит 25:42). Двумя стихами позже та же глава обращается к людям, которые не были израильтянами:

А чтобы раб твой и рабыня твоя были у тебя, то покупай себе раба и рабыню у народов, которые вокруг вас. Также и из детей поселенцев, поселившихся у вас, можете покупать, и из племен их, которые у вас, которые они произвели в земле вашей, и они могут быть вашей собственностью. Можете передавать их в наследство и сынам вашим по себе, как имение; вечно владейте ими как рабами, а над братьями вашими, сынами Израилевыми, друг над другом не господствуйте с жестокостью.

Leviticus 25:44–46

Католическая церковь Encyclopaedia Judaica воспринимает это буквально: «Иностранные рабы служат вечно». Так же поступил и Стрингфеллоу, который сказал, что Бог велел Израилю «покупать рабов у окружающих их языческих народов и завещать их и их потомство как собственность своим детям навеки». Уэлд не мог с этим согласиться. Ранее в той же главе Бог повелевает Израилю «объявить свободу на земле всем жителям ее» (Левит 25:10), и Уэлд утверждал, что юбилейный год положил конец даже этому служению, потому что эти жители включали «слуг и пришельцев».

Освобождение, которое обещал закон, могло быть отменено, и во времена Иеремии так и случилось. Царь Седекия заключил завет, чтобы каждый отпустил своего еврейского раба и рабыню на волю, и народ послушался и отпустил их, «но после того они опять обратили их и рабов и рабынь, которых отпустили на волю, принудили их быть рабами» (Иеремия 34:11). Ответ Бога через Иеремию был таков: «Вы не послушались Меня в том, чтобы объявить свободу каждый брату своему и каждый ближнему своему: вот, Я объявляю вам свободу, говорит Господь, на меч, на моровую язву и на голод» (Иеремия 34:17).

The King James Bible calls most of these people servants. The Hebrew word is ebed, which Strong’s gives as “a servant”, and the Encyclopaedia Judaica says it comes from the verb “to work”, so that “the ‘slave’ is only a worker or servant.” Then it says how he differs from a hired man: “he receives no wages for his work,” he belongs to his master’s household, and his master “has proprietary rights in him.” In the New Testament, Strong’s gives doulos as “a slave (literal or figurative, involuntary or voluntary)”, and the King James renders it bondman or servant.

Copan quotes J. A. Motyer’s commentary on Exodus, “Hebrew has no vocabulary of slavery, only of servanthood,” and he compares Hebrew servitude to a debtor working off what he owes. Weld, writing long before him, gave a section of his book the heading “Masters, not owners.” Stringfellow went through the same law and wrote, “Here again servants are property,” and the Encyclopaedia Judaica says that “slaves are the master’s property,” adding that “they may acquire and hold property of their own.”

Stringfellow saw “two states of servitude” in Leviticus, and the law does hold two conditions under that one word. The Israelite who sold himself out of poverty served for a term and went free. The foreigner could be bought and handed down.

Copan names three things that set Israel’s law apart from the other law codes of the ancient Near East and from the American South before the Civil War. A servant injured by his master goes free (Exodus 21:26–27), a kidnapper is put to death (Exodus 21:16), and Israel was to “offer safe harbor to foreign runaway slaves” (Deuteronomy 23:15–16). “The Old Testament punished forced slavery by death,” he writes. The Encyclopaedia Judaica agrees about the runaway: “There was no similar rule prevailing in neighboring countries.”

Avalos took this up when a reader put Deuteronomy 23 to him in the discussion under his article. The passage “still assumes slavery is perfectly legitimate,” he wrote. He pointed to Greek cities where a slave could flee to a temple and go free if the priest did not hand him back, and he set that against the rod in Exodus 21: “By that standard, fugitives in some parts of ancient Greece were better off.”

In Rome, Seneca told his friend Lucilius he was glad to hear that he lived on friendly terms with his slaves. “They are slaves,” people declare, he wrote, and he answered them, “Nay, rather they are men.” He said that toward slaves “we Romans are excessively haughty, cruel, and insulting,” and his advice was, “Treat your inferiors as you would be treated by your betters.”

The rabbis kept working on these chapters for centuries, and the Encyclopaedia Judaica follows them through the Talmud and the later codes. What it records there is law on paper, and it says that “Opinions are divided among modern scholars whether and to what extent slavery was practiced in post-biblical times.”

Some of their rulings widened the way out. Exodus frees a servant for an eye or a tooth, and the rabbis turned those two injuries into “a long list of eligible injuries.” Others went the other way, as when Deuteronomy’s talk of double service was taken to mean that “slaves may be required to work also at night,” and there was “some early authority to the effect that a slave has no right to maintenance which can be enforced in law.”

The predominant view, the encyclopaedia says, is the one Maimonides set down. “It is permissible to work the slave hard,” he wrote, “but while this is the law, the ways of ethics and prudence are that the master should be just and merciful,” and he gave his reason: “the law destined them for service, not for humiliation.” In later centuries, it says, “Slavery became practically extinct in the Diaspora, and was prohibited except insofar as the secular laws allowed it.”

“Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ,” Paul wrote to the Ephesians, and then he turned to the other side of the house: “ye masters, do the same things unto them, forbearing threatening: knowing that your Master also is in heaven; neither is there respect of persons with him” (Ephesians 6:5–9). To the Colossians he wrote, “Masters, give unto your servants that which is just and equal; knowing that ye also have a Master in heaven” (Colossians 3:22–4:1), and he told Timothy that servants “under the yoke” should “count their own masters worthy of all honour,” and that those with believing masters should not despise them “because they are brethren” (1 Timothy 6:1–2). In these passages he does not tell a master to set anyone free.

Writing to Corinth he says, “Art thou called being a servant? care not for it: but if thou mayest be made free, use it rather” (1 Corinthians 7:21), and readers split over that last clause. The New International Version has “although if you can gain your freedom, do so.” The New Revised Standard Version has “make use of your present condition now more than ever.” Its Updated Edition adds a note, “Meaning of Gk uncertain.” Stringfellow took the verse to mean that “Christianity gave them no title to freedom,” and Avalos lists it among the passages his book disputes. Two verses on, Paul writes, “Ye are bought with a price; be not ye the servants of men” (1 Corinthians 7:23), and when he lists the people the law is made for, he sets “menstealers” among the murderers and liars (1 Timothy 1:9–10).

In the little letter to Philemon, Paul writes about “my son Onesimus, whom I have begotten in my bonds,” and of him he says, “Whom I have sent again” (Philemon 10, 12). He asks Philemon to take him back “Not now as a servant, but above a servant, a brother beloved,” and he offers to cover what is owed: “If he hath wronged thee, or oweth thee ought, put that on mine account” (Philemon 16, 18).

The Catechism of the Catholic Church reads that as Paul directing a Christian master to treat his slave “no longer as a slave but more than a slave, as a beloved brother.” Stringfellow, in a letter of June 1849, read it as proof that Paul returned a slave “with a most affectionate letter to his master,” enough by itself to teach “that slavery is not, in the sight of God, what it is in the sight of the abolitionists.” Avalos says Ben Witherington’s readings of Philemon and Colossians belong to an approach that is “clearly apologetic,” by which he means written to defend. The letter asks for a brother to be received and a debt to be put on Paul’s account, and it does not say whether Onesimus was set free.

Gregory of Nyssa, a bishop who died after 385 or 386, stopped at a boast in Ecclesiastes, “I got me slaves and slave-girls,” and went straight at the one who made it: “You condemn man to slavery, when his nature is free and possesses free will.” Then he asked him, “What price did you put on rationality? How many obols did you reckon the equivalent of the likeness of God?”

In 1688 four men in Germantown, Pennsylvania, Garret Henderich, Derick up de Graeff, Francis Daniell Pastorius and Abraham up Den Graef, wrote to their Quaker meeting and asked, “Is there any that would be done or handled at this manner? viz., to be sold or made a slave for all the time of his life?” They answered it with the Golden Rule, “There is a saying, that we shall doe to all men like as we will be done ourselves; making no difference of what generation, descent or colour they are,” and they said what slavery did to a household: “Pray, what thing in the world can be done worse towards us, than if men should rob or steal us away, and sell us for slaves to strange countries; separating housbands from their wives and children.” The Quarterly Meeting called their paper “a thing of too great a weight for this meeting to determine,” and the Yearly Meeting that year declined to give “a Positive Judgment in the Case.”

John Wesley published Thoughts Upon Slavery in 1774, abridging a 1771 book by the Quaker Anthony Benezet, and Albert Outler says that Wesley and his colleagues saw such borrowing “as a form of endorsement not plagiarism.” “Liberty is the right of every human creature, as soon as he breathes the vital air; and no human law can deprive him of that right which he derives from the law of nature,” the tract says. The trade he wrote against had its captains, and one of them, John Newton, wrote “Amazing Grace”.

On the first day of 1808, when an American law against the African slave trade took effect, Absalom Jones, rector of St. Thomas’s African Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, preached on God’s words to Moses, “I have surely seen the affliction of my people which are in Egypt” (Exodus 3:7). He told his congregation what God had seen in their own time: “He has seen them exposed for sale, like horses and cattle, upon the wharves,” and “the anguish which has taken place, when parents have been torn from their children, and children from their parents.” He said that God had, “as in the case of his ancient and chosen people the Jews, come down to deliver,” and he asked them to say openly “that an African slave, ready to perish, was our father or our grandfather.”

In America, Weld took the verse about the kidnapper and set it at the entrance to the whole law: “Over the gateway of that system, fearful words were written by the finger of God.” Of the Ten Commandments he wrote, “Two of these brand slavery as sin.” Stringfellow asked for the same authority, “Christians should produce a ‘thus saith the Lord,’” and he set out to show that slavery had “The sanction of the Almighty in the Patriarchal age.” He began with Noah’s words over Canaan (Genesis 9:25–27), which Weld had already taken on in his own pages and which lie behind том, что Хам сделал с Ноем, and he said what he meant by slavery, the condition “in which one human being is held without his consent by another, as property; to be bought, sold, and transferred.”

Frederick Douglass, who had been enslaved, ended his 1845 Narrative with an appendix so that no one would take him for an enemy of religion. “Between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference,” he wrote, and then, “I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ.”

Stringfellow came back to it in June 1849 with a challenge about the sins God charged against Israel through the prophets: “Let any man find involuntary slavery in any of God’s indictments against them, and I will retract all I have ever written.” The next May, at the dedication of a church built in Charleston for the religious instruction of enslaved people, James Henley Thornwell preached on Colossians 4:1, and he would not say that a master owns a man. “The right which the master has is a right, not to the man, but to his labour,” he said. He asked on what principle slaveholders could be put out of the church now, “when Paul received them as brethren, and sanctioned the bondage in which they held their servants.”

The Catholic Church says in its Catechism that the seventh commandment “forbids acts or enterprises that for any reason … lead to the enslavement of human beings, to their being bought, sold and exchanged like merchandise, in disregard for their personal dignity” (paragraph 2414). The Second Vatican Council, in Радость и надежда (1965), sets slavery among whatever “insults human dignity” and says that “all these things and others of their like are infamies indeed” (paragraph 27).

Two American churches have spoken about their own part in it. The Southern Baptist Convention, meeting in Atlanta in June 1995, resolved to “lament and repudiate historic acts of evil such as slavery,” and it said, “Many of our Southern Baptist forbears defended the right to own slaves.” It cited Galatians 3:28 “with respect to salvation through Christ.” The Episcopal Church, at its General Convention in 2006, declared that slavery, “based as it is on ‘ownership’ of some persons by other persons, was and is a sin,” and it expressed its “most profound regret” that it had “lent the institution of slavery its support and justification based on Scripture.”

Maimonides, telling masters not to shout at their slaves, quotes Job, and Copan cites the same verses. Job is answering for himself before God, and he says he never despised the cause of his manservant or his maidservant when they contended with him. The verses do not say he let them go. They end on a question: “Did not he that made me in the womb make him? and did not one fashion us in the womb?” (Job 31:15).

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