[Avodah] Why Did the Torah Permit Slavery?

[H Lampel via Avodah]

Beginning of the Holocaust (#172) by Rabbi Avigdor Miller

Q: Why Did the Torah Permit Slavery?

A: Now let’s understand that we’re living in a time when all the 
standards are measured by the fad of the day. Slavery is today 
considered as something to be abhorred, but you have to realize this 
wasn’t the case in ancient times among Jews.

First of all, among gentiles in ancient times, what should a person do 
who had no livelihood? He had no land. Land was passed on from father to 
son. Suppose you had no land, you had no family, you were a stranger, 
what should you do? You would die of starvation. So Eliezer eved 
(servant of) Avraham who wanted to become a loyal disciple of his great 
teacher, what did he do? He gladly became an eved (slave).

In those days to become a slave meant you joined the family in a certain 
status. Hagar gladly became a shifcha (slave-girl) to Sarah; it meant 
joining the family. She was a member of the family. In those ancient 
days, in cases where the woman, the ba’alas habayis (mistress of the 
house) was childless, she gave her handmaiden to her husband and he had 
children from her. That’s how it used to be way back before the Torah 
was given. Slavery had a different face in the ancient days.
​Among Jews slavery meant that a person became a member of the family. 
First of all a slave had to be circumcised. He had to go for tevilah 
(ritual immersion) and become a Jew in a certain sense. All slaves had 
to keep the Torah. A slave couldn’t be beaten, because he could have 
recourse to the dayanim (judges). And if a person was careless — even 
when he had to chastise a slave, even if he was hitting him for a reason 
— if he knocked out a tooth, or some other one of the twenty-four chief 
limbs, then the slave could march out a free man. If he killed a slave, 
the owner was put to death. Among Jews, slavery was an institution like 
the family.

You can judge [the Torah’s slavery] from the following. Suppose a Jew 
bought a slave who refused to circumcise, so the Jew could say to him, 
I’ll sell you back to the gentiles. That was considered a threat. And in 
almost every case the slave was willing to circumcise. Slavery was an 
institution that fit into the social structure of Jewish life and the 
Jewish slave, even the eved Canaani (Caananite slave), to some extent, 
lived a privileged life and he was protected by the Torah. Therefore 
there is no question that slavery should have been sanctioned, as it 
was, by the Torah.


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